skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're basically arguing "it's the gear" whereas any musician over a certain age and skill level will tell you "hell no it isn't."

Instagram filters don't make people better photographers; AutoTune doesn't make people better singers. Hell, the Abbey Road mic collection didn't make John and Paul better singers.

By your logic you can flip anything around and make the author's argument: Shitty British industrial towns modified their users. Beer and the tiny stage at CBGB modified their users. Cheap Seattle heroin and terrible weather modified their users.

Is any artistic pursuit highly dependent on the mood of the performer and her implicit capacity to make you feel? Of course.

But the author did not say "playing a guitar through a stomp box changes the way you play it" or "the Edge's signature delay effect created a new sound that nobody had heard -- or felt -- before." He said "guitar effects have modified their users" and "new effects can change a guitarist's playing ability completely."

If you read the entire article you'll see the author suffers from an bad case of "word salad" and these are not meant as debatable nuances. He's suffering from dysgraphia, ignorance of the subject matter as a whole, and a really bad editor.

Which is why he defines "clipping" with a phrase lifted from the Wikipedia article for digital clipping, applies it to slicing a speaker with a razor blade, then claims rotating motors were picked up by speakers in a Leslie after being picked up by "coiled magnets" in a guitar pickup.
No it doesn't. There are certainly some weird coincidences that are worthy of further investigation. But in any dramatic news event that touches the lives of a lot of people, there tend to be some weird coincidences. Many of them turn out to mean nothing at all. While one shouldn't dismiss things on that basis - because the fact that something seems highly improbable may well mean it is worthy of further scrutiny - one shouldn't uncritically accept them as fact on the mere basis of their improbability.

Look at the Germanwings plane crash that happened recently. At first a lot of people were convinced that the action had been carried out by radical Islamists, because such people have a track record of that sort of activity and terrorism in general in recent years.When it turned out to be a white German guy, some people were sure that he was a recent convert to Islam or something - which was a possibility worthy of consideration but not of certitude. When it further turned out that he was a neurotic and depressed guy going through anxiety about his eyesight and the impact that it might have on his career, a few of the people who really really believed int he Islamic terrorist idea started talking about how it was a big cover-up. It's possible they're right, but it's much more likely that they're just imagining it.

I agree that it's possible that this is a false flag operation. The French security services have crossed the line into unethical behavior on previous occasions. There's also a high degree of xenophobia in French culture for various socioeconomic reasons, and in difficult economic times (like now) it's certainly more politically convenient to whip up anxiety about wicked foreigners than to take up the politically unpalatable task of structural reform. Thus, the motivation to carry out false flag operations certainly exist.

But motivation isn't evidence. Otherwise you could take my bank statements and say 'oh, you had a mediocre economic situation lately, I guess you had motivation to rob that bank last week, didn't you? Didn't you?!' And so on. It's good to be skeptical and examine inconsistencies or oddities in the way news stories are reported. But reasoning from the existence of such things to a firm conclusion about what happened can be just as misleading as unquestioning acceptance of claims by authority figures. For one thing, it depends on the false premise that people in authority never make stupid mistakes, so that if they say something which later turns out not to be true, it must be because they were lying. In fact, people in authority are just as prone to jumping to conclusions, making mistakes, forgetting things, and saying whatever bullshit they think people want to hear as everyone else. So while they sometimes do lie, you should at least consider the possibility of simple incompetence first.

Don't fall into the trap of swapping one kind of credulity for another.
I agree. There used to be this theory of "Near Earth sized in a similar orbit" but it's much more complicated.

One other example to support your point - Apparently life is protected on Earth by having a Jupiter around to suck up many of the asteroids.

http://www.space.com/17793-jupiter-giant-windy-gas-ball-prot...

This prevents extinction events from being much more common.

Who knows how else we're unique?
Having been on CodeMentor for a few weeks now (as a mentor), I have some mixed feelings on the experience. I was hoping that I'd be talking with folks doing interesting things or helping fledging developers on a solid path. You do get that (and it is wonderful when it happens), however most of what it seems to be is `do my homework for me`, `fix my old jquery site`, and stackoverflow type questions answered in realtime. Overall, it has been a positive experience but just not exactly what I expected. I believe in what they are doing and expect things to improve over time if the brand can be grown.

Lastly, there does seem to be a mindset of `I want a stellar developer to talk with but don't truly value their time` (e.g. the $10 for 15 minutes of their time you mentioned). Not always the case, but it is definitely not common to see freelancing type rates. So, you end up donating your time, which isn't always possible to do from a fiscal standpoint.
I think you've hit on it.

Microsoft's ultimate goal is for every new business to buy a Microsoft subscription which includes Windows, Office, Sharepoint Online, Exchange Online, and now maybe a Salesforce product.

It is a one stop shop for all of a business's technology needs. All they need in addition to it is the physical hardware and they're good to go. Right now a lot of businesses only run on Windows+Office+online services+an accountant package. Now they won't even need the accountant package.
You might consider volunteering for Open Source Ecology: http://opensourceecology.org/

They're building open source farming tools -- or as they say, "blueprints for civilization". Perhaps they're open to volunteers?

Their TED talk is worth watching: http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski?language=en
Certainly useful in queries as well.
With the release of Roslyn wont writing things like these be a lot easier?
The OP doesn't really address the headline but I'll take a shot at it: learning about "deep learning", or any variation of machine/statistical learning, is a mandate for humans because it is necessary to understand the fundamentals and limitations of the machines and systems that increasingly govern our life. Understanding is a minimum; the ideal is that with this knowledge, we not only use machines appropriately in our lives, but to vastly improve our ability to consume and disseminate knowledge.

It's been a long time since humans posed a challenge to computers in chess, and yet freestyle chess competitions aren't dominated by supercomputers, but by (relatively novice) chess players assisted by computers. Why should we settle for a false dichotomy of human versus machine when we can do so much better with cooperation and augmentation?
Crazy! I'm from Tampa originally haha.
You're thinking of Burger King's "have it your way", not McD's. Regardless, I'm not sure it's an apt comparison. McD's is dying not because they offer lots of choice, but rather because the food is shit and unhealthy. In-N-Out is in a similar situation, but their food just happens to be of a higher quality.

When it comes to mass-customization, there's actually a lot of evidence that shows people do want more choice. You're seeing it with products like Moto X and NikeiD. Or even with what Apple is doing with the Watch. It's logistically more difficult to pull off, but it's doable online.
Castle != Fortress
What Happens After You Win TechCrunch Disrupt
Hi All,

I am one of the founders at Coding House. Let me provide some insight on the post from last year.

1) 50% of the the post is true and my fault

2) 50% is untrue and students fault

3) It was our very first cohort and we had a lot to learn about what worked and did not work

4) The student has been refunded

5) We wanted to make it like a real boot camp and that was to hard on some of the students

6) We have fantastic instructors you can find there bio's on our site

7) We have change our policies to insure it dose not happen again

8) Look up all the reviews of Coding House and you will find we have great outcomes and satisfied students
1) Vertical farming sounds great. It could help getting started a farm where land is expensive. I love the open sourcing idea.

2) I love this idea! It could be a way of providing additional income for the farm. Classic farms often offer vacations for families and kids, I guess this would be a similar idea, but for engineers.
As someone who's previous startup did something not unlike what you are going after.

You don't need to worry if you respect the robots.txt and such.
Ink laced with HIV-positive blood used to print entire magazine
I rather assumed the tech transfer for this went in the opposite direction: that a reason Google, and Microsoft, and Apple were developing, and providing for free, voice recognition on consumer devices was that they wanted to get the technology to a point where they could sell, or license, it to the NSA.
Salesforce is extremely complicated and requires an expert to configure it properly. Even then, it may not be able to do everything they say it can do in a performant manner.
For big companies like MSFT, this needs to be quantified into future revenue and EPS. What CRM brings to the table right now doesn't contribute much to MSFT to revenue (5B more a year, with expect 20% increase next year) and negative to EPS. So all 50B+ has to be contributed to synergy and goodwill. That's a huge call, and I don't think Nadella would be able to make it.
Ask HN: What project management tool do you love?
What tools would you suggest for a small team of 5 or 6 devs and designers?
The main driver of Microsoft's net income growth over the last few years has been all enterprise software (Windows Server, SQL Server, Sharepoint). Their CRM (Dynamics) is the #2 player in the market.

Acquiring Salesforce would enable Microsoft to dominate this sector (approach 50% market share potentially). Salesforce has done a great job of fostering an ecosystem of apps that rely on their data platform.

Microsoft can add value to the existing SalesForce product by replacing their cloud infrastructure. While pioneering this concept in the enterprise SalesForce's infrastructure is outdated and aging. Plugging the existing customer base and app ecosystem into Azure (or Microsoft's cloud at large) could be a huge win for both companies.

Net-net this makes a ton of sense in theory, but big mergers destroy value more often than not as they are extremely challenging to execute effectively (it's basically a multi-billion dollar corporate refactoring exercise).
I've worked EMS in lots of urban and rural areas. Have never experienced conflict between EMS and LE. Would not want provide EMS without Police involvement - the two roles go hand-in-hand.
Do you have any arguments as to why that would be? Or are you just making a blanket "M$ is evil" statement? Azure's been getting better and better, you can run Linux VMs and "apps" in a multitude of languages, similar to Heroku. I don't see how it can be a bad thing.
Windows and Linux.

Scroll is broken due to author. Did not read content due to scroll-hijack.
Thank you for the link! OS development is very interesting, but I haven't seen this resource yet.
Ignoring/bypassing robots.txt is probably a bad idea unless you're going to never even look for it and are going to try to plead incompetence if someone comes after you.

In the early stages you probably won't be robots.txt'd because you're insignificant.

In later stages, you're hoping to not be robots.txt'd because you're providing a worthwhile service not just for users but for the site.

At neither stage should you force companies that want you not indexing their content to go beyond basic means (robots.txt) because the more serious measures are all going to cost them more money (tracking / blocking your IPs, C&D, DMCA requests to your provider requesting that the entire site be taken down because there are thousands of infringing items, lawsuits seeking (damages | court costs | costs for dealing with your circumvention of technical measures to keep you out of the site), finding of friendly prosecutors, etc.).

You don't want to go down that more expensive road.
The police officer is 100% at fault here. The paramedic has medical equipment. The cop has weapons.
Milton Keynes is probably the worst place I've ever been to in the UK.

No easy walking around town. All chain stores, very few independent shops. No hailable black cabs for some reason, everything involved calling a minicab and waiting. Just a terrible city to be in without a car and a designated driver.
Actually, Apple/Apple is a really good example because Apple Records sued Apple Computers when the latter got into music.
Did somebody get low SATs?
The Windows 95 startup sound, created by Brian Eno, was coded ADPCM. Seemed to work okay. A billion people heard it. (8 bit MS ADPCM also sounded horrible.)
There's also a complexity explosion to factor in, and saying that there was a time before Google and Stack Overflow seems a bit dismissive of that. Chances are, your app today is built on at least a dozen dependencies that require documentation and reference lookup several times throughout any given day.
With the tools this person claimed to have used, they very much would have handled all the nuts and bolts.
And who holds journalists accountable for vetting the source of the tip? Their editors and publishers, who have an opposing incentive in pushing pageviews?
I would guess that if Elon Musk is your brother, you probably get used to that shadow.
Yes - they can do. They can force you to use SharePoint.
They already chose to try to appeal to those developers by calling it "enum". And that doesn't sound like a good motivation to me: how hard is it to learn something like algebraic data types, compared to learning about lifetimes? It's like the choice to use angle brackets for generics - if the intent is to be easy for programmers with a certain background, that only lures them in with a false sense of familiarity. Because something like angle brackets over square brackets is, again, a superficial and easy thing to learn compared to any of the semantic stuff.
JavaScript Teacher (NYC)
Touch Pianist is one of the latest implementations of an idea that's been around for a long time: technologically-assisted musical performance; here's an historical overview on the subject: The Conductor Program — computer-mediated musical performance (http://www.musanim.com/tapper/). Aaron Andrew Hunt is about to release a professional-grade version of this which will let you use your own MIDI files.
When I was reading through it I was thinking way too much text.

Really well designed but they really neglected to talk about their business model.

I mean I would have loved to have known how much their 'OneWatt' breadboard cost to manufacture and what they were planning on selling it for.

That being said I loved their slide on 'HOW BIG IS THE MARKET?'.
It depends of your definition of MVP. I believe MVP is just enough to show you have a working concept that could have the potential for revenue. Since I'm a data guy I'm always going to say more data is better.
That strategy worked because Apple was dying and Jobs needed to focus their efforts. But that all changed once they found their footing. Consider the iPod and all the sizes and colours they offered, or what Apple is now doing with the Watch. There are many many customization options, and I suspect these options are only going to grow.
Beers/coffee on me if you're ever back in town :)
There a systemic problem with police officers in America. This isn't a "few bad apples" problem. The fact that you could even say that clearly shows you can only view the situation from a privileged perspective that is warped and skewed.

Police act like they are in a war zone and pretend they are soldiers. They treat regular citizens as criminals by default and will always take the side of another police officer.

Your comment and attitude makes me sick, and the only thing that brings a smile to my face is that people like dorner existed in attempt to bring balance to this fucked up situation. I'm not thankful for your service when people like you can't see the forest for the trees. I can only hope someday you feel the wrath of the thin blue line and are made to pay, then maybe your opinion might change.

Seeing as how indoctrinated you are, I can imagine someone like you doubling down on their beliefs that cops are great people except a few "bad apples" and you just happened to get unlucky.
> How can I become one of these anonymous "people with knowledge on the matter"?

What I'd like to know is how I can get a job where writing the tautology "The […] company’s options could include rebuffing any buyer, or working out a sale" passes as insight.
Depends on what type of work you do... but I really like:

Asana --> https://asana.com/

Also note worthy is Evernote.
I was once stopped as a kid (age 12). I was going birdwatching that morning, and was up around 5am because the walk to the lagoon was a good 45 minutes from where I lived, and early morning is great for birding. I had a pair of binoculars, a field guide, and a lunch in my backpack.

Two obviously bored deputies stopped me, talked to me for about 60 minutes, checked my backpack and generally couldn't believe a kid would be out on his own free will at that early a time.

No probable cause, I wasn't trespassing (walked the entire way on the sidewalk), but stopped because I was out of the ordinary. This was in a sleepy coastal California town in the late '70s, no real crime to speak of, but no, these guys had to be dicks.

If they had been cool, they would have called my parents to see if I was a runaway, or at least given me a ride to the lagoon, but no, they just wanted to be dicks.
> di- or tri- continental root

Is that a transcription error? Surely "consonantal root", right?
I knew Sharepoint and Salesforce didn't get much love, but has Wordpress really slipped that low? Is it because it's PHP?
On your side? Against who?!
I read the concern to be with the reliability of their testimony. I'm fine with the idea that simply smelling marijuana should not be probable cause. I'm not fine with the idea that it should not be probable cause because it creates an avenue for abuse of power.

The checks on abuse of power should happen at a higher level in the system than making rules about what an officer can reliably testify about.
Does North Korea fit into your model? Why, or why not?
I travel to Europe often, and yes, it is a mentality. I think also the opposite is true, however: Criminals will not commit crime if they have the mindset that a police presence is particularly heavy in an area. Europeans don't need guns to keep them safe, but in America, we "need" our guns to keep us safe. It's absolutely a mindset, you're right. But that doesn't mean it doesn't work.
In your opinion, how much of that situation's complexity is eliminated simply by scraping the Google cache of a site?

I also wonder how possible it is to hide behind proxies, especially if they are owned by entities in other countries. If a site I'm scraping is unable to identify who does the scraping, it seems difficult for them to prove "this guy uses our data and must be scraping us".
Before reading, I did ctrl+f for the keywords in the title and straight away realized it will be misleading. Wasn't proven wrong and hence not disappointed. For some reason, I was hoping to find some hack on learning better
I plan on sort of following the path of the OP, but in an automated way.

Longer comment on Reddit[1], but the goal is to make a climate controlled greenhouse that houses a heavily automated aquaponics setup along with backyard chickens for eggs and eventually meat. I may take on a couple goats for milk but that would follow later. As part of this I also want to setup solar and vertical axis wind along with evacuated tubing for heating to cut down on energy dependence at the same time.

Once you realize how much of your working time is going to just provide food, shelter, and energy, it makes you question if you could manage to provide those basics in another way than money. With the tech we have now and the rising costs of food taking a bigger cut of your paid time I think we very soon could find that the cost/time investment to DIY will become less than the time investment to purchase from someone else.

This is all of course ignoring the upfront capital requirements but the idea is that if I can reduce the portion of my pay going to those things, I could either a) have more money left over for other things, or b) reduce the amount of time I work equal to the reduced expenses and have more time available for other things. Either way, less external dependencies = more degrees of freedom.

1 - http://www.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/2yovsq/canada_risks_...
Having used Salesforce as a support ticketing system (because it integrated with what sales used), it really is painful to use.

It's like a webapp from the 90s, every action triggers a complete page reload; complete with an occasionally buggy UI, limited searchability, restrictive UI, and occasionally misrouted tickets that were impossible to find. But mostly, it was just really slow.

I've talked to a few other folks who had similar experiences at other companies. In every case, I got the impression that using Salesforce was a mandate made by management without consulting the folks who'd actually have to use it every day.

Maybe it's a bit better on the CRM side, or if your company pays the extra money for Desk.com... but I really wouldn't recommend using Salesforce for handling support tickets.
But an understandable mistake. There was no web in 1991 and few people outside of academia would have been familiar with the internet. consumers were using the MiniTel system. Likewise very few people had cellphones. I remember that era quite well as I was spending a good bit of my time trying to explain the concept of email to people in suits and writing reviews of 2400 baud modems for computer magazines.
And often, they don't get removed because the "good" police protect them with a thin blue line of silence. Those "good" police aren't really good the very instant they protect the bad.
> 50% is untrue and students fault

This statement does little to make me feel any better about Coding House.
No.

Matthew Dillon doesn't need to work but keeps working on DragonFlyBSD.

Also it is possible to live and work as in retirement http://www.noogenesis.com/pineapple/fisherman.html
This is no joke. It feels like something out of the MS-DOS era.
I wonder if somewhere a Dropbox engineer is crying over that comment!?
Most immigrants came from French colonies so they speak French to begin with. If your friends are journalists in Fox news, you should have noticed they are not very bright by now. History and geography is not their forte. :)
Thanks for sharing, I knew that posting to HN would make some amazing projects pop up :)
It detracts from pain. That's all.
Few tools for you -

https://import.io/ - totally free and scraps data very quickly

http://espion.io/ - automated headless browser for scraping data

https://www.kimonolabs.com/ - turns websites into data APIs

Note - You can't embed images into your site and expect them to be loaded from another site. Site owners can block this type of behavior to avoid overuse of bandwidth.