skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What surprises the most that he is able to distinguish sounds that are effectively all same for most non-Chinese people. Research says our ability to distinguish sounds in other languages ceases after first 8 months and that's why it's harder to understand someone talking in foreign language.

Did Zuck had any exposure to Chinese as a kid? Any info on how he learned Chinese? My guess is that he probably decided to talk with wife and relatives only Chinese for a long period of time. According to many this is the best way to learn new language (as opposed to passively watching videos and audio tapes). Another guess is that he may have some really top Chinese teacher giving few hours of tuition per week.
Well, FTDI is leaving their vendor ID intact, and given their behavior so far it wouldn't surprise anyone if they tried to interfere with third-party drivers that enabled using non-FTDI hardware identifying itself with FTDI's vendor ID.
To me, sitting in a blood bank, those photos are organized to reinforce the problem of just how many units you have to screen when someone with a rare blood type shows up.

What you do is take blood from one of about 10 small testing segments and mix it with the recipient's serum. If it clots or hemolyzes, that's bad. That's the most elementary method of crossmatching units, and it's often still done just before sending a unit out, because the blood's there to be tested, might as well.
Actually, I see inbox zero (or near zero - I try to keep it under 10) as a time saver. It means I can instantly look at my inbox and see what items I need to work on.

If you just keep everything in your inbox, it means you need to click on a button to sort by starred emails. Also you need to star any emails you need to work on. Most of my emails take a while to respond to - I like to think about them for a while before responding. With your method I wouldn't be able to do that - I have to either respond to all my emails after reading them, or else star all my emails as 'needing work' until I have time to respond.

Keeping only a few items in my inbox that I need to work on is the most efficient way of working, at least for me.
WhatsApp is not useless, it's pretty freaking huge.

One year ago WhatsApp had 400 million active users.

Skype has 663 million registered users, out of which 280 million are active monthly users.
FT232 is USB to serial port adapter chip. Typical application of these chips is anything that has to be connected to USB but does not warrant full-featured USB implementation. This includes various interface cables and converters, (low-cost or specialized) test and measurement equipment and large amounts of various (semi-)custom electronics (both hobbyist and industrial).

In essence, FTDI's chips are the go to solution for adding USB support when you don't want to spend too much time on it. I would argue that today there are better and cheaper alternatives, but FTDI was probably the first vendor of such chips with reasonable documentation and software support.
It's because he was learning Chinese as he was running Facebook. He just started just a few years ago http://www.news.com.au/technology/facebook-founder-mark-zuck...
Are you looking for people here or just what's going on in general?
Less niche than they were 10-20 years ago. Lots of really good stuff coming out of China that isn't at all spendy.
> There was no open source or free software movement and everybody seemed perfectly willing to let the business guys handle those difficult questions.

As I recall, fairly serious sharing of significant software as public domain, with people building on others public domain software, predates the Free Software movement, and the public domain software movement was, for some time, growing in parallel to the restrictive-license-based Free Software movement; in addition, non-GPL, non-PD permissively licensed software existed before the FSF and also was spreading, with various license variations, at the same time the Free Software movement is growing.
The Octocat in 3D
Talentia – We build your freelance talent through ML Algorithms
It would be great if there was as TV channel that only covered the weather. Then when I am getting dressed I could have the box on, get the report, and be ready for my day.

I don't want "news", I don't want Ice Road Truckers. I want weather. There's money to be made in that model, it seems to me.
Ask HN: What Kinds of Intellectual Property Can a Software Business Have?
I'm doing research on fund raising, and I keep running into comments about how investors like defensible IP -- for reasons that are obvious.

Nevertheless, software patents suck. Not only are they somewhat questionable from a legal and even ethical point of view, but they're very hard to enforce and license unless you're a NPE (troll)... and that recently got harder (yay).

What kinds of defensible IP can a software or SaaS business have that would be of any interest to investors?

Closed source software is the obvious answer, but I'm wondering if there might be other more clever ones. Software can be duplicated, especially if its techniques are not utter black magic. Trade marks and brand equity are also obvious.

Is there anything else? Are there patent, trade mark, or copyright strategies that people use that might not be obvious to someone not in on the tricks of the trade?
Big Data, Hype, the Media and Other Provocative Words to Put in a Title
Ohh sh!#$, now my mother-in-law is going to expect me to do the same!!
:)
Moral Panics and the Death of Fun (by former BI CTO fired over tweets)
I can't find it anywhere, but I remember reading about a software company that wrote an office suite for early computers (like DOS or possibly even pre-DOS), that would detect if it was a legal copy, and if it wasn't a legal copy, would delete your data. I seem to recall that they got slammed by the legal system pretty hard, which is one possible reason for why software companies don't do it nowadays. I personally see this as an action on par with, or worse then, the software company I mentioned's actions.
North Dakota? http://www.aei-ideas.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/walmart.... [1]

Don't know how the prices are there but doubtfully it's worse than in SF, and the pay seems to be about double of what the same pays in SF.

[1] http://www.aei-ideas.org/2014/10/north-dakota-sets-more-oil-...
That's quite impressive.
I'm sure you're aware, but ADSL2+ is only offered by ATT in their U-Verse portfolio. ADSL1 would be faster at that distance too.
Except for accents. Picking up a language as a child is virtually the only way to really nail the accent.
This is a common thought, but it can be awfully misleading.

First, anything that doesn't have a recurring charge -- like the suit and the iPod -- is something that may well have been bought when they had a higher income level.

Second, if you're looking for work today -- even outside of the tech sector -- not having a phone is very often not an option. Prospective employers need to be able to reach you and vice-versa, and if you're a temp worker or day laborer you need to be able to get that phone message very fast. If you're homeless a mobile phone may be your only realistic option.

Why not a cheaper phone than a smartphone? Even if you're poor, you may still want email and text messages and web browsing; email is close to a necessity in America today, web browsing is immensely useful, and that smartphone may also be your only source of entertainment. I think HN-ers may also tend to think of "smartphone" as implying "$200+ device and $100/mo bill," but it's pretty easy to get a $50 Android or Lumia phone and a $50-60/mo plan these days.

Last but not least, IIRC the article suggested the "suits and smartphones" types were people who weren't homeless yet, but whose rents had increased to a point where they were having trouble affording food. Someone making $20 an hour, way over minimum wage, would gross about $40K a year and net about $2500 a month -- they'd be lucky if "only" 75% of that was going to rent (assuming they'd started renting a few years ago when that was remotely possible). But they'd be making way too much to qualify for any government assistance like food stamps (SNAP).
See, you're wrong though. I attended Pokemon meetups at school while also being a member of a fraternity. I got shit for is but I just didn't really care. I gave people shit for other "weird" stuff they did all the time.

You're also wrong in saying someone who likes Pokemon is a specific kind of person. I know tons of "jocks" who played WoW and Pokemon with they're down time. In other words, your fleeting interests do not, and should not, define who you are.
you can if they release a patch that makes hitting the butt of the gun a firing mechanism without telling you... Also, can we agree that a gun metaphor is rather ridiculous?
It looks like there's a Firefox plugin in the works: https://github.com/jvenant/passff#readme
Now we just need a Chrome one.

This is what really pulls me to LastPass. The zero to two clicks it takes to fill in a password is just too good.
Just to be clear, your position is that Google should invest many millions into things that aren't business concerns at all for them. At a time when they get massive amounts of blowback for any attempt to be involved in local politics.

Is that right?
I went to a google IO event when wave was the next best thing to email clients. Like many things, it died off because of adoption rates and bloated UI trying to achieve world domination. On the flip side i loved the talk like a pirate channel bot ;p Lets hope Inbox does not go down the same path..
Helicopters and How to Kill It at Customer Support
I don't think MSRC is supposed to handle this kind of stuff.
Impressive, except that the times are listed in units of microseconds, so it's completely irrelevant to microwave use.
I use one of those, http://hughes-and-kettner.com/products/tubetools/ and it's pretty sweet!
Do All U.S. Presidents Look the Same?
A Class T amplifier[1] is the closest you can get to a tube. One of the amplifiers, the TA2020 (1998), was named one of the twenty-five chips that 'shook the world" by the IEEE Spectrum magazine.[2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_T_amplifier

[2] http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/processors/25-microc...
Which is why massive new rental buildings are coming up? NEMA, One Rincon Hill Tower Two, etc.
Related: No down voting (for 90%+?) on HN.
Exactly. With a couple exceptions, these are all companies that have been around for 5-15 years that fly under the radar. A few companies acquired in the last couple years (for 7-10 figure amounts), and their founding dates:

Apartments.com (1992)

Marketleader (1999)

Trulia (2004) - not complete, but likely

Hotpads (2005)

Mortech (1987)

Postlets (2006)

StreetEasy (2005)
Here comes the mammoths as well!

Strangely... I am much more excited about that.
Hopefully he means key passwords?...
Um, vacuum tube diodes?
Whether this is a good deal depends on many specifics, all of which revolve around how much risk the accelerator is taking.

Do you (and/or the team if there is one) have a track record? Prototype? Product? Customers? Traction? Brand recognition?

If you went through that and answered "yes" to more than one of those things, then 23% plus the other terms -- like investor lock-in -- seem onerous and excessive. I see people raise seed rounds for more money on the strength of team + idea with no product for less of a percentage than that.

So if you're not just at pure idea stage, run away screaming with arms flailing in the air like you're running away from the monster in a cheesy 80s horror flick.

Also, in business "unusual structure" always makes me skeptical, especially if it's complicated or has a bunch of restrictions hanging all over it like this one looks like it does. Outside the wonkier areas of finance, typically there is no value in the actual structure of a deal itself -- all the value is in what the deal is about. Complex deals usually mean someone feels screwed or you spend a lot of time wrangling the deal which takes away from the time you should be spending building something.

General sense: run.
What you know is false, sorry.
Use Ubuntu's “hostapd” to monitor your smartphone
The setup is super simple. I simply glue a small mirror to the the cone of a cheap speaker and bounce the laser off of the mirror.

There are a few things i've been planning on changing with my setup.

If I use two mirrors (one for each speaker) and restrict the mirror's movement to the x plane on one speaker and the y plane on the other speaker I should be able to be able to draw cool shapes and paterns on the wall by manipulating the tones on the left and right channel. Maybe something like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYYTtaW2FqM#t=83
They make it "cloudy" on purpose since that's what it's all about according to them, the cloud.
What's your favourite programming language?
> the typical developer taking basis points for their participation is eminently replaceable by other developers

Is this true for the startup that needs to compete with Google and Facebook on attracting top-level talent?

> * developers ... should start their own companies

> * developers ... should instead work for larger companies that can pay them better wages.

So startups are missing out on these developers, can they afford to continue doing so if other startups start scooping them up?
To the extent that there is a violation of law involved in the manufacture, sale, or use of the chips (and such violations are much more likely in the first two cateories), there are legal remedies available for those violations, which generally require proving that a violation occurred and that the person against whom remedy is sought is the appropriate person against whom to seek a remedy.

To the extent the violations are with manufacture and sale, the user is not generally the appropriate target, even if destruction of the device was an appropriate remedy.
The analog side. Being able to do the voltage regulation and oscillator operation without external components is actually non-trivial.
Even if it is, there is a difference between the police doing it and the company doing it.
What's going on in general. I bucket-listed a simple game dev project for myself and looking for inspiration to learn ASM :)
They are no longer sending the password with the sign-up email. Not going to try it out though given it still is likely some type of scam.
What surprises the most that he is able to distinguish sounds that are effectively all same for most non-Chinese people.

Learning a new language, especially Mandarin, in adulthood is certainly an accomplishment for anyone, but Zuckerberg is not exactly the first person to do it.
Pretty shocking but I imagine this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Currently living in Seattle and their numbers seem pretty spot on anecdotally for what people are paying now, though a few of my friends are looking and they have found nothing under $2500 for a 2 bedroom. Seattle I think is going to be a city to watch closely the next few years for similar types of housing strife we see in SF. Once all the Amazon construction is complete it's going to get awfully crowded awfully fast.
Device support. WhatsApp works on Nokia's dumb phones, which is what everyone has in Europe/Asia if they don't have a smartphone: http://www.whatsapp.com/faq/en/general/20951556
Ask HN: Where Django folks hang out online?
Where can I find the community?
CarbonScape carbon-refining company
Steve Ballmer Interview with Charlie Rose
FreedomBox – Danube Edition
I recently looked at SICP again after first reading it many years ago. I had retained the overall impression that SICP demonstrates how to build many of the celebrated creations of computer science - interpreters, compilers, databases, logic programming systems, circuit simulators - using a very simple programming language with just a few constructs.

But I had forgotten many of the details. Here is just one:
in 3.1.1, Local State Variables, SICP shows how to, in effect, define classes and create objects using only function definition with lambda and set! (that is, assignment) in the definition body. The function you define this way is a like a class, the functions it returns
are like instances. So you can do all this without any specifically object-oriented language features. This occupies just a few pages near the beginning of a long book - the whole book is dense with worked-out ideas like this.
Pimping your psql
In general, people experience an emotion first, take action based on the emotion, and then their brain covers up self-harmful reflections on the action by building a rationale for their action being appropriate. We can do this astonishingly quickly, enough so that other people will also believe that it was a reasoned action and not just an emotion.
Not supported is not broken.
Does anyone know how he did it?
I take offense to someone calling me a liar.

Try typing this into a JS Console:
var xx = [];
xx[30000000]=42;
var yy = xx.slice(0);

It took almost a week to track down this problem where FF was taking 13 seconds to startup. We've spent a lot of time working on this and it is always in the cards to support this on all the other browsers. We've fixed tons of bugs and have gotten closer to it working the way it should, and people have spent countless hours staying very late at the office to try and finish a polished FF release before the deadline, and we just didn't make it in time. I spent the past 5 years of my time working on open web stuff.

Any insinuation that this is an attempt to sell Chrome over Firefox is just flat out wrong. This was a "mobile first" designed app, it's not designed to promote browsers of any stripe, it's designed to promote an experience for gmail users. If we really wanted to shit over a platform, why bother with iOS? Firefox has such a large user base, it can't be ignored, just like iOS can't.
I think he's referring to Chinese subtitles. Almost all television in China is subtitled with Chinese characters.
>> there is no mediating factors such as a massive need for human labor or a common cultural belief among the mega-wealthy in a moral duty towards philanthropy, or even just simple taxation

Are you saying earnings in SF aren't taxed at usual CA rates, being highest in the nation? How could I get on this wonderful deal?

Also, I recently been to some places featuring walls and booklets listing people donating tens and thousands of hundreds of dollars to construction and maintenance of said places. If what you're saying is true, either these people aren't rich (and I wonder what "rich" means in your book then) or they did it of of some sinister motive which I'd like to ask you to explain to me.

>> a lot of productivity gains come from deploying capital to automate things (software being a part of this)

Despite popular belief, software doesn't write itself automatically. There are still some meatbags around clicking on those keys. Of course, you can automate manufacturing - but there's no significant manufacturing in Bay Area to automate anyway, and automation of services is still largely a dream.

>> So the deck is stacked heavily in favor of people coming in and flipping SF property

Last time I remember people trying to come and make living exclusively by flipping property without doing anything else ended up in what is called now Great Recession. I'm not sure that event can be treated as "stacked heavily in favor" of most of those who participated in the flipping. Of course, on higher levels (national-level banks) there were other games, but those didn't do property flipping.

>>> only to find that rents quadrupled in a 5-year period

If you tolerated quadrupling rents for 5 years, you're part of the problem - you're the one allowing to charge quadruple rents by paying it. 5 years is enough time to find other options. In fact, in 5 years you can learn a new language and move to a new country, not just find a job in the next city.

>>> there aren't enough such jobs to maintain a middle class that way.

But from this article we see there's no such jobs in SF either, it's just in Modesto if you're out of a job, your savings last you 3 years of rent, in SF they last you 3 months.
To my understanding, the future of "enterprise support" for Android is that you'll be able to install multiple copies of the same app and one will be personal and the other work.
Our Daughter Isn’t a Selfish Brat; Your Son Just Hasn’t Read Atlas Shrugged
They have never been hard to find. Virtually every guitar store has carried a wide variety of tube amps since rock music went mainstream.
It's quite similar to businessmen in the '80s learning Japanese. If you do a lot of business within a country, you are somewhat disadvantaged if you have to rely on a translator.
That sounds suspiciously similar to the SERE course the military does: "Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape". "Resistance" entails resisting torture without divulging secrets to the enemy; in SERE training they will actually put you into stress positions and waterboard you, which is where they got the idea to do that kind of thing to prisoners.
not sure, but shouldn't you be able to use the ATMEGA32U4-AU as the microcontroller and get usb for free? Here's a good place to start for a bootloader that'll do your usb setup for you... http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=124459.15
Inbox changes nothing about how email works. It simply tries to make the UI/UX more useful. Gmail content is what powers Inbox.
> I wonder if it's easier to go from Chinese to English, they certainly have more sounds/tones an English speaker will have never spoken.

Tones, yes. Sounds, not as much. English has a staggering inventory of distinct sounds, including more distinct vowels than most languages and a fairly impressive array of consonants. Furthermore, aside from having many consonant sounds, it has many consonant clusters, both at the start and end of syllables, that are quite difficult for speakers of many languages (including Chinese) to learn.

Not impossible, obviously. But the sound system of English is definitely nontrivial for speakers of Mandarin to master.
First of all, let me be clear. I was answering YOUR pointed question I had no intention of trying to sway you. I don't at all care about what other people do. I especially do not make harsh judgements about people because of their interests. I am well aware you can socialize outside of a structured system, so there was no need to condescend there.

Second, holy moly...a 10 paragraph rant, with videos! Over something you supposedly don't care about.

Wow, again, I find it odd that the mere existence of fraternities yields such an overt emotional response from some people. You really flipped out and overanalyzed a group that you decided you didn't want to be a part of, and therefore, shouldn't care about.

> They think that because they belonged to a social club for four years and nailed lots of girls that they know how to navigate every kind of social exchange.

Who is this collective they you refer to? How could you possibly know all of their thoughts? Clubs are still made up of individuals, you know. You sound like you're still in college, you're projecting a lot.

> But for some frat guys they think it doesn't end. They never want to leave the parties, the easy nightly fucking, the parties, and all the rest -- and oh yeah, the parties.

This is categorically false. Everyone grows up, eventually. A lot of successful people have been in fraternities. No one said anyone outside of fraternities can't also be successful or social.

There are merits to joining all sorts of social clubs. However all these merits are easily available to individuals as well. There is no need to be so affected by the interests of others! Even if its gasp partying, like you so cleverly pointed out.