skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Disclaimer: Sean is a friend. He is also an amazing driver. He finished 1st and 2nd in his two races last week at IMS, and had some great shots of the car post races for sponsors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Rayhall

Most lean startups probably won't have the budget for something like this, but there maybe a few later stage ones that do.
> Surely the reproduction of an ancient hardware drum sequencer in today's software should be perfect.

Often it isn't. This can be for a number of reasons:

1. Ignoring the 'leaky' nature of components and just assuming that sticking a software oscillator, followed by a low-pass filter, followed by an envelope etc... will be the same as VCO, attached to a wire, attached to a PCB, ...

A lot of old gear needs to 'warm up', it often has inconsistent characteristics from machine to machine, so each one has its own character. Reproducing the effects of the components isn't trivial and can often fail at the extremes (for example: high resonance/low cut off on a TB-303; or the self-oscillation of a Moog filter).

2. When an emulation is running as a plugin (VST, RTAS, AAX), it has to share the host machine with other plugins. Plugins include: other virtual instruments as well as virtual effects plugins and mastering plugins. There's clearly a trade off when the plugin can't use all of the juice that the host has, and therefore their emulations may compromise on time-slicing, or component emulation to save processing time. I use the Universal Audio DSP which emulates a lot of old compressors, tape machines, EQs, reverbs, etc. Some things it's exceptional at emulating (like the Pultec EQ for example), others less so, like the tape emulations.

3. I can't prove this, so take this with a pinch of salt, but there's a 'certain something' that you get from analogue gear, and perhaps that's down to the 'infinite' resolution you get from real physics. Emulations which rely on time-slicing will always create artifacts. I have lost count of the amount of times either I or friends have responded very favourably to an analogue synth or something mixed on an analogue desk (like an SSL).

I personally use a combination of both. The UAD emulations are pretty close most of the time, and remove the need to manage a really difficult device, or spend multiple thousands on a machine that's hard to get. I have a Nord Lead A1, which I would describe as a 'clean analgoue' emulation. It's not trying too hard to repro the real analogue synths, it has its own character. I have the TR-8, which sounds pretty close to the 808 and 909, but I can't help feeling something isn't right. And then I have some real Waldorf analogue synths, and everytime I use them it's like being wrapped in warm marshmellows, it's fantastic and unique in a way that my digital equipment isn't.

It nearly always comes down to a feeling, rather than something quantifiable. But that is also what music is about.
Resource-Rich PhD-Level Self-Education
While acknowledging the fact that drones being operated by "morons" do not amount to safe. Could you fill me in on what safety features a 3k copter offers over one of these smaller and arguably less threatening drones. Googled a couple "high dollar" copters most seemed to be in range of ~4kg range with large fixed carbon fiber blades as opposed to (in this particular case) a 3 pound object with collapsible polycarbonate blades. Honestly seeing this trend of "automated" drones the only human controlled factor of idiocy would be removed in part due to the automated nature of this drone, this would seem to favor a trend towards safer operations.
Real estate transactions aren't subject to the same anti-money laundering and know your customer regulations that banks and securities firms are subject to. Because of this, high-end real estate is a preferred asset class for people with shady money.
Yeah, same thing. It's definitely hit or miss, but FWIW I am connected to one now (I guess a random person's router nearby) and it is very fast.
The first time I heard about this approach was Boxer: http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Boxer

Some more info here: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4695

Paper with some screenshots: http://www.soe.berkeley.edu/boxer/20reasons.pdf

And another more contemporary document: http://www.pyxisystems.com/file/BoxerStructures.pdf

It goes beyond framing a bit, making things like variables concrete (they are actual boxes that contain a value). But it doesn't do full Scratch-style pluggable programming, the statements are still text, as in "Frame-Based Editing".
Podcasting and the Selling of Public Radio
SELECT column_1
FROM Strings_1
UNION
SELECT column_1
FROM Strings_2

Is this set theory? A UNION of two sets? Oh I see your pedantic argument. They aren't sets because they are ordered, they are lists.

If I can't explain how UNIONS and INTERSECTS are relevant to SQL to you then I can't help you because you're simply being difficult. It has every practical application to SQL.
Here's my humble head-scratch: you pay for a comcast internet access, you might have bought or you're leasing the cable modem + wireless router, and perhaps there's an opportunity to opt-out (somewhere), but nonetheless my neighbor (who must at least have an xfinity account) is streaming their content through my connection. Somehow it seems like wireless usury.
> For me personally, I think that good pixel art is timeless (emphasis on "good")

Agreed about the timelessness. I find good pixel art more timeless than other forms of good videogame art. I thought about it and I think it's actually a case of abstractness, not pixelation. Pixel art is often more abstract. Another example of good non-pixelated game art that has this same quality is Another World's, which I find awesome.

I believe slightly more abstract game art -- slightly abstract, I'm not talking cubism here! -- is more appealing to me because of something related to Scott McCloud's concept of "closure", as explained in his book "Understanding Comics". This concept for me was the main takeaway of the book. When something is more abstract, having elided some aspects -- be it character details, animation frames, whatever -- your brain "fills in the gaps". And I think when my brain "fills in the gaps", the art itself ages better. The less my brain has to imagine the details not explicitly put there by the artist, the worse the art ages for me.

Not sure if this applies to other forms of art, but for me it definitely applies to videogame art, and is part of why I tend to like pixel art.
And the thing I found amazing about compuserve email addresses that they were from the DEC program,project tuples that DEC used to identify users, and that compuserve users just slotted email addresses into things like telephone numbers where you didn't expect any relationship between what you typed and the person you connected to, of course you needed a directory for that, just like the phone book :-)
Google does follow every link, and those people do notice, because their forums get deleted. Very few people do it this wrong for very long.

(Or they get fed up and patch the problem without understanding it, by using robots.txt to block all crawlers from their site.)
You're acting like the uber rich wouldn't be in New York anyways.
Excellent project. But note it's still "arriving-mid-May"

Previous HN discussion from their launch ~6months ago, are here:
* Launching in 2015: A Certificate Authority to Encrypt the Entire Web https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8624160
* Let's Encrypt: How It Works https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8640756
Deal Talks for Here Mapping Service Expose Reliance on Location Data
It doesn't even seem like an obvious solution to the problem. Take Maven for instance: a global dependency repository under which the dependencies are stored in the form <groupId>/<artifactId>/<version>. If X depends on Y.1 and Z depends on Y.2, so what? You have all the dependencies stored on your filesystem in a relatively flat structure.
The problem with useful/useless is how often you have to re-run the function with people you see more than once.

Run it only once, and perma-store the info? Their state could change and you miss out on opportunities.

Run it each time and behave accordingly? That doesn't work, either. People know when they're being used.

Honestly, being kind all the time sounds like a lot less work.
The title links to an overview of the project. Actual lecture list is here:
https://profhugodegaris.wordpress.com/mathphysics-lectures/
The astonishing thing is that this could make Newsweek if there were only 15k simultaneous users. But I guess a lot of people had tried getting online as a curiosity, but there wasn't a huge concurrent load.

At the time I had a university account and was safely ensconced in my free shell account irc'ing and mud'ing all night.
I was looking for a fitness tracker that leaves the user in control of their data and whose software was free and open source. There is almost nothing to choose from. There may not be anything to choose from.

I've just found this band that had a very successful crowdfunding:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/angel-the-first-open-sens...

The first batch are estimated to be released in June for pre-orders. Pre-orders are now open via their store.

Their blog has some nice videos of the manufacturing process and a demo of the app:
http://blog.angelsensor.com/
Well, the whole point of Crichton's thesis quoted by bdhe was (paraphrasing) "You can judge how much you can trust somebody, by first observing how much you can trust them on some topic you know about."

It's only fair that I get to apply his own point to himself. A fine novelist he may be, but climate expert he isn't.
Right, futureproofing. But this is not like when hard disks were 512mb, then 2gb, then 4, and kept hitting very shortsighted limits.

We're surviving now with only minor discomfort on a 32 bit address space, and 64 is billions of times more space.

128 is just showing off for no obvious reason that I can see, besides looking like guids. The number approaches the number of atoms in the universe I believe. I'm guessing a universe-wide addressing system can wait a few years, haha.
Brian Forde (MIT) calls out “four critical flaws” in proposed NY BitLicense
There's a difference between being in favour of something and being offended by anyone who disagrees.
Schoenberg, on writing four-voice chorales:

"Even in the limitations of the individual voices, in their relative incompleteness, there are advantages.* The necessity for utilizing them within the narrow range of their effectiveness demands characteristic usage and treatment consistent with the material. Thus the pupil learns by this simple example to heed an important principle of handicraft: to make characteristic use of the strengths and shortcomings of the material at hand.

"*I am taking such pains with these things ... to establish explicitly that these principles are not derived from aesthetics but from practical considerations. If what is known as aesthetics does in fact contain much that is merely practical handling of the material, and if what is known as symmetry is perhaps often not much more than an organization of the material that reveals a sensible regard for its properties, yet I consider it worthwhile to set down these observations. For the conditions of practicality can change, if we take a different view of the material and if the purpose changes."

--Arnold Schoenberg, Harmonielehre
http://www.uasamericafund.com/assets/micro-uav-safety-analys...
Yeah some of us in the audience were wondering the same thing, where's the ASCII pics?!
Media Source Extensions (MSE)[1] were added for YouTube HTML5 video, and is different from Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)[2], which is what allows DRMed videos.

MSE allows things like adaptive bitrate while streaming and programmable video buffering without a plugin.

[1] https://w3c.github.io/media-source/

[2] https://w3c.github.io/encrypted-media/
And yet it somehow gained huge popularity - http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studi...
It's strange they never directly tell you what "U Tr?" means.

The table they provide is backwards for decoding this, but it looks like it means:
"You there?" as in "Are you there?"
Regardless of who is right or wrong at the end of the day it's still broken for many people. If Microsoft and Joyent/the node & npm community care about people using node & npm on Windows then the issues needs to be resolved, period.
New state of matter found in crystal made from buckyballs
At least two times in the video, someone said, "Businesses think in rows and columns; but they need to think creatively." Then, the video showed Paper's rows, columns, boxes, tables--not creative stuff! If they were critiquing things-on-a-grid, they should have compared actual made-by-business diagrams with out-of-the-box Paper stuff.

Someone in the video mentioned using "advanced statistical algorithms" then the video showed her drawing a squiggly line graph. The video didn't show interop between her algorithms and the graph. Does it interop? I'd be happy if it did.
Unless you create file paths that are so long that they break the default tools of the OS. That’s the point where you went too far.
Just whip up a little Javascript function and drop it into your HTML between the relevant tags and refresh your cached page. Oh wait... I meant reprogram the color settings in your HTML.
The New York Times–Facebook Deal Is Here
Doctor shopping usually means going to multiple doctors and keeping them in the dark about each other.

Whether or not you agree this should be a crime (see UnoriginalGuy's comments), current laws do make this a crime.

And it's hard to imagine how the doctors could be implicated in that crime--essentially, they are the ones being duped.
It depends on how they are useless. If they put genuine effort into trying not to be useless, I will still be kind to them.
via Michael Crawford1[1]:

When I was asked to make this address I wondered what I had to say to you boys who are graduating. And I think I have one thing to say. If you wish to be useful, never take a course that will silence you. Refuse to learn anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerkship or a curacy, a legal fee or a post in a university. Retain the power of speech no matter what other power you may lose. If you can take this course, and in so far as you take it, you will bless this country. In so far as you depart from this course, you become dampers, mutes, and hooded executioners.

As a practical matter, a mere failure to speak out upon occassions where no statement is asked or expect from you, and when the utterance of an uncalled for suspicion is odious, will often hold you to a concurrence in palpable iniquity. Try to raise a voice that will be heard from here to Albany and watch what comes forward to shut off the sound. It is not a German sergeant, nor a Russian officer of the precinct. It is a note from a friend of your father's, offering you a place at his office. This is your warning from the secret police. Why, if you any of young gentleman have a mind to make himself heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire of your reputations, and a close enemy of most men who would wish you well.

I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. "In a few years," reasons one of them, "I shall have gained a standing, and then I shall use my powers for good." Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought, his ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time.

John J. Chapman,
Commencement Address to the Graduating Class of Hobart College, 1900

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=MichaelCrawford
I found writing in Lisp dialects enjoyable after having used mainly C and C++ for (too much) years partly because it was easier to reason about the syntax, of course also for the obvious paradigmatical reasons. Slurpage and barfage, splicing, enclosing and other functions that editors provide really mean you are no more editing code on a textual, but rather structural level, and what makes this effective is the beautifully simple way Lisp programs are expressed. Coupled with the concise recursive representation of algorithms, ordinary functional programming goodies (map, fold, etc.) and the powerful macros, it feels like it completely redefined 'coding' for me. I wouldn't go back if I had the luxury of having such a choice. So anyone who finds this frame-based concept attractive will probably like Lisp's s-expression syntax and paredit mode in your favorite editor.
In order for it to work, it has to be a place that billionaires would want to be at in the first place. Something like this isn't going to work in the middle of nowhere, for example.
Something I have always looked at was that, from a historical point of view, the fastest development in the industrial revolution occurred in more temperate areas, up to a pint where severe winters curtailed the effect. Thus Manchester developed more than Moscow.

A long time ago I came up with the half baked theory is that people in these climate zones had to work harder for food and shelter, and that the hard work for that had a motivating effect, or perhaps increased the reproductive success for those willing to put in the work. Whereas someone in a warmer climate could be half-assed with their shelter and food production and still get along fine.

It's possible that warmer temperatures just slow down brain function as well. People from warmer areas tend to have slower, drawn out speech patterns. Maybe there is something in it.
I never knew about STUN, this solves so many problems I've had. Thanks.
I rather liked that book and want to disagree with many of the points it tries to make, but find myself choosing not to.

It is not economically or socially beneficial for me to be as blunt as I am - but my personal morality triumphs over both of those. If someone is wrong, they are wrong and I will let them know they are wrong.

It won't win me any friends and it isn't beneficial for me to be as blunt as I am - but I don't treat life like an economist, trying to maximize use out of people and my relationships with them.
Calculated risks: Will algorithms make business boring?
Design and Redesign in Data Visualization
> Right now the immediate goal is to share either an image decoder or the URL parser between Servo and Firefox

Interesting, it seems like there would be an order of magnitude (or more) difference in effort to write these two things. The third link you gave links to mp4parse-rust, is that what you mean by image decoder?
Secret Splitting with Monotone Span Programs
I could talk about the analog nature of synthesizers, but one of the most important for me is direct and tactile control - basically the knobs. E.g., One of my favs is Moog Sub37 synth http://www.moogmusic.com/products/phattys/sub-37

Another benefit is that the machines get me away from my computer.
All I have are personal anecdotes, but I know I've had several Ruby scripts that have had to be scrapped/moved to other implementations and/or languages because MRI wasn't actually removing objects, even when the garbage collector was explicitly called, and thus became exponentially slower as the script ran, or because memory usage just gets out of control and the script gets killed by the OOM killer. I haven't had any Python scripts that have encountered these problems yet, despite doing the same or very similar things.
I agree totally with your point, but they do belong together in the context I wrote about.

Each of them have the goal of selling books.
It is low because that's a preorder price. They need the money so they can order in bulk from the factory.

In any case, I don't believe that's the entire cost of the unit, I think that's just 'put x dollars down to be put on the preorder list' and you just might have to pay the full amount later.
You still have to have at least a decent amount of that $100MM in cash to start with.
Which CRM solution do you use?
I work for a small firm and I've been given the task to choose a CRM solution. I've googled until my head hurts but I can't seem to find an honest comparison of what's the best out there. So I'm asking the community.

A key feature that I'm having trouble finding is the ability to automatically cross-reference entries. For example, if we input a new contact, the system will cross-reference that contact against all other data, showing connections and similarities.

Appreciate any thoughts on which solution you're using, for what type of company, and maybe why it works for you.

Thanks very much
Haggling is not war.
It's possible to dislike DRM but also understand that it is necessary for your business to function. I imagine the majority of their content comes from sources which demand DRM.

If I were Netflix, I would use my own content (such as House of Cards) to demonstrate that it's possible to go DRM-free.
When exactly is it launching?
CEO Armstrong: AOL Staying in Content Business and He Is'nt Selling TechCrunch
Reminds me of the Kino from Stargate.
Worked for me too. Thanks for the pointer.
Of course it costs nothing to address people in a way that they feel comfortable with, so you should do it. But, in a Postel's law sort of way, in terms of critiquing argument I don't think it's worth dwelling on the tone. Two plus two is four no matter how many times the person arguing it uses the word "fuck", to put it crudely. And often, addressing tone is a way of eliding real argumentation.
The 808 has such a dominant sound in a mix that it almost ends up dictating the rest of the mix and sets such a powerful mood - it's no wonder that it formed the backbone of so many different dance genres. I always preferred the sound of the 909 growing up, but as I get older the 808 continues to stay relevant as a sound even after the 909 has started to sound a little stale. To this day I mentally catalog drum machines as "808-ish" or "909-ish".

The definitive 808 track for me has always been Polygon Window by The Dice Man off of the still absolutely amazing first Artificial Intelligence compilation album, one of the defining electronic music albums ever put together.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVp6NH59d3M
Not disagreeing with you, but there are also leaders like Jobs, Gates, Ellison etc. How come they are able to get amazing results, while being really nasty to their people?
I'm a bit worried about that "throwing start".

What happens when the battery is low or when I give it a tad too much spin?

"Whoops, did I just lob my $500 gadget into solid concrete?"

Well, I suppose it probably has safer take-off modes, too. Can't wait until they shrink it down to tennis ball size.
5 Tips to Stay on Task This Summer
IT Paleontology: Digging for the Oldest Software in Your Shop
Absolutely, for the higher end. What scares me is these consumer drones with inexperienced pilots/autonomous tech without proper failsafes. I'm pretty sure they will be banned from ski slopes etc pretty quick.

Optical flow can hold pretty stable when GPS is unavailable, other types of CV like SLAM even better.
Where are you seeing mid may? the website mentions mid 2015.
> But if one wants to decreasing housing prices for locals by adding supply, one needs to ensure that the housing is actually used by locals. Which I don't think anyone knows how to do.

Building it is an excellent first step. Housing that is never built will with 100% certainty not actually be used by locals.
When I moved to NYC sixteen years ago I heard people say that same exact thing a lot.

I am pretty sure sixteen years before that people were also saying it.