skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's called GPG and it surprises me how many people, even computer professionals, don't use GPG to encrypt their email.

Also encrypt your hard drive, preferably with hardware encryption that requires a physical key.

Not fool proof, but it is likely to deter the vast majority of invasive attempts.
Video processing in the cloud from your iPhone with Videomatic
I thought HN might be interested in my iPhone app, Videomatic. It lets you dub in sound effects, music, and add full-length video effects to videos on the iPhone 3GS. It's built entirely on the cloud using GAE and EC2 -- the system costs $0.00 to run when no users are using the app and scales up appropriately based upon usage. This "0 cost for 0 usage" dynamic makes it literally stress-free for me to run as a hobby.

I think this app showcases the potential for cloud-based processing from mobile phones. Often, cloud computing is thought of as a data-centric idea, giving remote access to data available universally. While it is, I think there are a class of apps such as Videomatic that see the cloud as a massive CPU. The philosophy of the app is to take advantage of the mobile phone (touch screen, mobile camera) where it shines, and use the cloud for the CPU-bound processing tasks.

Of course, simpler video effects could be done on the phone directly. But, for full length effects and audio mixing such as this, the cloud based approach seems more convenient and scalable. As I get fancier and add more effects, such as frame-level transformations and Photoshop-like filters, it would have been more and more tough for the 3GS CPU to process the video in a practial amount of time. Videomatic does it asynchronously on the cloud with push notifications, so you can use your phone while the video is being composed.

Would love to hear ideas and feedback on this, and any ideas for what cool things this approach could offer for future effects based upon the fact it is not processed on the phone. The app is free with 3 effects (slow motion, fast forward, and reverse) and there are currently 3 effects that can be purchased for $1 each from within the app. All of them let you dub in 100+ sound effects and a few dozen music loops. As the app grows, I'll be adding more fancier effects. Thanks!

http://www.vidmint.com/videomatic
I tend to agree, but I want to add that we do not really know if this is the decisive factor or just one of many.

Creativity is important, but perhaps political, or maybe "societal", advantages (freedom of expression etc), are no less important. For example, Russia, where I am from, has had plenty of creative people, but it is still behind in many ways. What I can see is that in different societies creative people apply their talents to achieving different goals.
Thanks, I felt it relevant in light of the interest in Flixel. The other classic article of the pair I submitted:

The Gorilla Guide to Game Coding

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20050414/rouwe_01.shtml
10K is too little. Statistically speaking, a small draw down can wipe out your acount. Most professionals have stop losses to limited their loss to 1-2% of their account. Google "trading money-management". You probably want to paper trade for a while before risking real money. If you are really interested in markets you can follow it as a hobby while working as a programmer. I used Interactive Brokers for trading futures, fx, options and stocks. They are low-cost and provides an API for automation. I write java code for my own personal "proprietary desk trading".
There is no branch of art so full of old wives tales as music is. Persistent rumours about the 'touch' of pianists, strange unmeasurable effects that are 'clearly audible to the trained ear'

Unfortunately, the best musicians manipulate time, pitch, and all sorts of nuances at time-scales which put them at the very fringes of human perception. Basically, musicians are operating on "magician sleight-of-hand" time.

I had a conflict with my landlord and downstairs neighbor last season, because his ceiling fan would create this constant low-frequency "WRANK-WRANK-WRANK" and intrude into my movie watching and interrupt my sleep.

I could not clearly record this noise! It was mostly low frequency, and annoying because of that, not because of its overall volume. The management was dismissive of what I was saying until I finally cajoled someone from the office to come into my apartment while that ceiling fan was on. Then it was, "Oh, Yeah!"

I have also been going to musician's workshops for a couple of decades now. Some small but significant fraction of the time, master musicians who are trying to describe what they are doing get it wrong! They are sometimes operating so close to the limits of their neuro-muscular capability, it's hard for them to be fully conscious of what they are doing.

That said, there is a LOT of bullshit going around in music for the very same reasons. Often empirical measurement clears this stuff up, and thank god. But it's not going to solve everything easily.
I don't believe that profit margins represent market efficiencies. In a perfect market, profit margins represent value perceived.

If your product will save me 10$ but costs you 2$ to produce, charging 5$ is beneficial to both of us.

Except that in a maximally competitive market, someone else would quickly come along and offer to sell you an equivalent product for $4, and then someone else comes along, etc. Competition always pushes prices towards the cost of production.

Of course, cost of production varies as well. In an idealized sense, the cost to produce a product is proportional to the amount produced (due to scarcity), whereas everyone in the market has some price limit below which they would want to buy the product. At a given price point, if the cost of producing an additional unit is below the highest price limit among people who wouldn't buy the product otherwise, it's a net gain for me to make the product and sell it to the person with that limit. Of course, at any price point, there's some people who want the product but not enough to pay that price, and some people who would happily pay more; but that's just the system working as intended.

The end result (in theory) is that every product eventually settles at a price point reflecting optimal resource allocation to production, plus some small profit margin to make the time spent on the transaction worthwhile.

In practice, it's... a bit more complicated.
Yes (though I do have to tread carefully here).

Done right I support the idea of getting access to the correspondence of individuals - however so far I disagree with pretty much every practical implementation.

Interception leaves a particularly bad taste for me. I've seen it done once; as it happens for the right reasons and with a positive result. It still left me feeling a bit crap because of how it was done (with only the vague vestiges of a warrant).

On the other hand I would have no compunction about breaking into the email account of an individual if the need arose (i.e. requiring correspondence to prove or stop a crime).Ironically doing so is a) technically reasonably easy (especially if you have their computer) and b) legally next to impossible to do - usually you have to use RIPA and go to the ISP... (aka months, though I dont deal with that area of stuff so Im not sure). So it's where you draw the line morally and ethically.

Intercepting every mail is clearly a massive infringement of our privacy rights. Intercepting an individuals correspondence where there is a serious degree (not just a reasonable one) of suspicion to warrant the action I can agree with - but as yet there appears no realistic mechanism to do this without creating an easily subverted system which can be used wrongly.
agree 100%

FireGPG is a firefox plugin that makes it SUPER easy strong encryption and signing with gmail (or anything really).
The problem with GPG is the chicken-and-egg situation, along with user apathy. I literally don't know anyone I regularly email who uses it, so I can't use it either. Then there's the fact that virtually no email client supports it by default. If email providers like google actively supported and promoted it and provided public key management in the contact list along with a browser plugin for the private key management and actual encryption/decryption, we might even stand a chance of it happening, but google of all people will never directly support it as it'll prevent their full text search from working. (I'm aware of FireGPG - changes to GMail typically break it, so you can't rely on it)

I digitally signed all my outgoing email for a while, which did get some people asking why they couldn't read the attachment, (the signature is an ascii file but fairly useless to a human reader) but explaining email encryption and signing didn't cause any uptake ("nobody is interested in my email", "I have nothing to hide") so I gave up. I do still digitally sign important correspondance such as invoices and payment reminders.
I wouldn't bet a lot, but if I was forced to bet, I'd bet mental effect. (I'm not the person you replied too.) The simple truth is that the more subjective arts are just shot through with this sort of bullshit, and while some of it is true, the vast bulk is simply not true. Audio of all forms (music and playback) and wine tasting (see article on HN from a couple of days ago) are very firmly in this class.

Now, it's certainly possible I'd be wrong in this one particular instance, but on the whole I'd win a lot of money if someone were stupid enough to redo this bet on a whole lot of such issues ("bet my expensive HDMI cables beat your cheap HDMI cables?" "bet my expensive wines are better than your cheap wines in a blind taste test?") on 1:1 payout odds.
Off Topic - Take a look at this
1. do hackers all have smartphones now? i'm just curious to see the mobile device statistics. sometimes i feel like people are emotionally responding in the same way that folks confuse twitter's recent growth and hotness with facebook's sheer size.

2. hackers have always had access to terminals and remote servers. i would never want to code anything serious on a random machine. hackers take customized l33t setups seriously. even if i had access to my code (a quick repo checkout would solve that...no need to carry usb around) most random machines don't even have the necessary hacking tools (ff with sqlite manager? preffered .bash_profile and .emacs?)

are you instead suggestion that the entire dev environment is on the smart phone, and i simply dock into the keyboard, screen and mouse to start coding? that would be hot. it's exactly like connect to a remote server except that the server is not remote and is portable.

3. i've already forgotten why hackers is a reasonable market to care about.....aren't most people not hackers? i'm not even sure i consider myself a hacker [and all i want to do is make things. i'm just not the conventional hacker in that i don't want to waste time on IT and i don't have a non-collaborative ego problem].
In any case, as I understand it, you will need to add a third step, which is to extract the correct solution from the system's state, which is also non-trivial.

Good point, I didn't think about retrieving the answer.

Is that something can be done with gates or is there another method?

Edit:

People complain about concurrent programming, they have another thing coming if quantum computers become commonplace. I suspect it will be more like programming an FPGA than a CPU.

Seems like you might be right in the short term, but I wonder if it will be true in the long term. E.g. once you get methods for doing a bunch of standard stuff you can put them together. Not sure if that works for quantum computing but maybe some other way of abstracting out the details.
The worst part of this is that I can't have back the time I spent reading it.
That would be true if it weren't for the fact that the GPL requires distributors to publish source code as well as license their derivatives under the GPL. So it's not just a copyright-free zone, like Creative Commons Share Alike is.
Idea: The Outlet Wall
I like this idea a lot -- for high-density urban areas, especially those near campus, it could provide a way to do chores and socialize at the same time.

Having said that, it also just occurred to me that this idea was the subject of a song a few years back by a group that did a lot of parody songs -- "Confederate Railroad" maybe?

(google, google) -- here's a link to a really corny video of the song, for anybody interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgrfVw2loEc

So at the least the idea has been parodied. That's probably a good sign it has legs.
These are quite common in college towns.
sounds awesome. just applied. thanks.
My understanding is this is a pretty huge field : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_finance and that if you try to roll your own, you are computing against a variety of math and CS phds that big trading firms hire to do analytics.
What is the experience like? I'd like to not marry a dive bar with a from-the-70s laundromat. Maybe something like a velvetty wine bar with little coasters that blipped out which cycle your wash was in. When your wash was done, you'd go through the airlock into the space-age laundromat (think sushi bar with automated conveyer belts that would help you move your wet clothes to an open dryer).
I agree, it is difficult, but my close friends and important correspondents do use email encryption (as per my request) for sensitive topics.

I won't put anything sensitive in an email unless it is encrypted; that is generally the way a I break my friend's apathy to using it. It doesn't necessarily work, however, for corporations &c...
In order to make a living, Hackers must write software that people want. So where ever hackers goes, their customers follow?

If hackers find the environment to be hostile and a pain, they probably will consider a different market that isn't so hostile to their entrepeneural effort. Given time, the inertia of the previous hostile platform will flip toward what hackers want.
There's also RSS, but all of these provide access to mail functionality, while Gmail is a lot more than that. The uses I have in mind are closer to Google Labs' "Unsend", or having web service-like access to moving stuff around in gmail, creating alternate UI etc.
Does this apply to country drop downs as well? Pretty much every checkout form uses a massive list of countries. What should we use instead?
They obviously don’t work in physical space that way; if you want to show off your books to people who visit your home, you’re going to have to get physical copies.

This is not true! I can imagine Apple adding something to FrontRow that acts as a "Virtual Bookshelf." Heck, it doesn't even have to be Apple. Microsoft with that "Project Natal" tech would be able to make an awesome version of this! Just have that up all the time as a sort of screen-saver. Don't limit yourself to just a simulated screenshot of the backs of books. I can imagine something with "cover-flow" and a sidebar of related works. Also, one would have the ability to "magically" re-arrange the books according to whatever indexing/ordering scheme they wanted.

A coffee table sized "Surface" would be ideal for this sort of thing. A "slate" form-factor computer to sit on top of a conventional coffee table would be dandy as well. (Just have it display a different "cover" every 3 seconds in "screen saver" mode.)
I would love to see auto-complete text entry used in country fields.

Provide the massive drop-down as usual, and then in JavaScript replace it with a nice auto-complete.
I think they'd run out of business cards, if I remember correctly. And we were getting kind of drunk by then so I don't remember their app either :) sorry!
That "varnish" theory of the Stradivarius isn't current, by the way, perhaps because of the very results you refer to.

The most recent research I've heard of is focused on the treatment that was applied to the wood:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090122141228.ht...
With just a little more effort, Seth Godin could fit his blog posts into a tweet:

"Use no more than 7 of anything in a form, because I believe that human brains can't handle more than 7 items at a time."
I think the second part of that post applies (as to avoiding alpha order and making it easiest for the user). I think it makes sense to look at where users come from and list them accordingly. Maybe there's a bit of bias here but I find the ones that list the US, Canada first to be more useful (though one of the problems is that it is perceived as arrogant by foreigners but then again I'm Canadian).

Another alternative is to default to the country from which the IP address originates - but I'm not a programmer and don't know how difficult that is.
let them, if they want to read all that spam, more power to them.
We've lost three video game stores in my town...it barely rated a "Shucks, that one was conveniently located next to my gym."

When Barnes and Noble starts including a Curves onsite, is it time to buy their stock, or is it a sign they're on their last gasp?
Skinner, Wickham. "The Focused Factory." Harvard Business Review 52 (1974): 113-121.
How many countries do you list first, though? I find those forms annoying - the US and Canada sit at the top of the list, but then to find the UK I have to go down and look near the United Arab Emirates or Uruguay or some such place.

But then, some forms have "Great Britain", others just "Britain" and some split us into England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It can take minutes just to find my country and I do wonder how many people just give up and never sign up or finish the check-out.
Gabarito Fuvest 2010
Confira o Gabarito da primeira fase da prova do vestibular da Fuvest referente ao...
There was "Sudsy Malone's" in Cincinnati. A terrible place to do laundry! A very dirty, smelly, bar. A very grungy music venue. It was very popular. Don't know if it's still around.
Next time you have this, try this:

Stick a needle in a table and glue a lightweight crystal microphone to the needle, attach the output of the microphone to a scope.

What you are perceiving is most likely the difference in frequencies between the fan and something else, that's why it is outside the range of your microphone. But by sticking the needle in the table you use the inertia of the microphone attached to it, and a crystal mike has a fairly rigid membrane (and is ridiculously sensitive this this kind of direct action on the crystal that makes the sensor).

So, when the table moves under the microphone because of the vibration the microphone will try to resist the movement because of inertia, the force will show up as a reading of a voltage on the scope.

Subsonics are very annoying.
That's pretty much what I was thinking while I was reading this.

Well, actually, I thought, "Seth, this is nice and all, but can you provide me either first-hand experimental results or published results to convince me that seven is the magic number?" That's close enough though.
smashingmagazine.com is NOT a "blogazine" as defined by the article. This one post is the exception.
Hacked climate emails: conspiracy or tempest in a teapot?
I know, but even though it has been disproven ages ago this stuff gets repeated ad nauseum.

Being able to hear sounds that can't be verified by instruments is not very scientific imo.

That said, there is a lot of stuff going on outside of the range of 'normal' recording and playback equipment, which is why a live performance of a church organ (for instance) is on a completely different level than the best recording of the same.

Violins however fall nicely in the range of modern recording equipment and if you can't record a sound from a violin it probably isn't there.
Again, not being a programmer, and obviously there's a bit of cost-benefit involved here, is it possible to put the default under the pre-set non-alpha list? Usually I can type in the first few letters to have it skip to the country I'm searching for if they're listed in alpha order. I tend to type the first few letters to see if this works first but then if I use the drop down I see the unordered select few countries above this default.

thaumaturgy also suggested a great alternative. Though in doing the autocomplete/alpha list, I would list each of Great Britain, Britain, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland so as to avoid the problem you describe.
I think that Bookstores could try to do some things that would be very difficult for most people to replicate in their own homes.

(Sports Bars show us that this can be a model for profitability.)

How about a "magic wall" using some teleconferencing technology? Make it seem like one side of the Cafe floor is in Austin, Texas, and the other side is in Boston, Massachusetts? How about a "Minority Report" touchscreen as a virtual bookshelf? More like a "Magical Bookshelf" where the shelves would magically re-order according to your whim, and bibliographies or works cited could appear as "flocks" of self-organizing covers flying around in space. Such tools could be made, such that they have real utility. These could result in superior interfaces for collaboration and research. (Of course, not everyone wants to do their research in public, but a lot of people don't mind at all! The former would rent such facilities at a co-working site. The latter might just want to show off some esoteric tidbit they know about the Twilight universe.)
Ask HN: Can someone refer me to a designer that doesn't suck?
I used to be a freelance web developer. (Before you ask: vim, Rails, MacBook Pro, and BSD servers - OpenBSD to store private data, and FreeBSD to scale; everything else is for failures)

The biggest pain about this, clients aside, is having to deal with the designers. I understand that they use a different part of the brain than I do, but some things are simply ridiculous.

From my experience in dealing with them, designers can either produce incredible work but be extremely difficult to work with, or produce eye pollution and be great to work with.

Does anyone know of a designer that produces good work without making you want to kill yourself? If you're a designer looking for work, send your portfolio to nick[at]whitepaperclip[dot]com

[edit] Web work; I don't want HTML/CSS coded.

My email is nick[at]whitepaperclip[dot]com
The only tip is: do it on paper first, with the exact setup, lag times, etc. that you're going to have when doing it live. Do it for a while.

And realize that this is a fanciful pursuit which is likely to lose you money, because the guys you're going up against have $ millions, ns-scale lag times, free or near-free transaction costs, and PhDs in theoretical physics.
because it's quite rude to be so condescending.

journalism has changed in the past 30 to 40 years with the rise of the 24/7 news cycle and consolidation of TV news organizations under corporate control.
One of Ray Kurzweil's companies, FatKat, does quant finance based on pattern recognition. http://www.fatkat.com/overview.html
Might I add that there are plenty of people on the production side who are thrilled to make overproduced pop music, and that type music would not vanish either.
Right but the ACM is the ultimate source of the data. They own the conference, the paper selection processes and hence the list of papers. It's hard to argue that this list was compiled without _ever_ looking at the ACM's list. It's a grey area for sure, and you could argue that if you go to the conference and simply observe the presenters and their paper titles, or even just ask the authors "Did you get a siggraph paper in? What was the title?" then that is your data, but by the same logic I can go to the World Series and live-blog a play-by-play account of the game, which would surely get me sued. (Maybe people do this I don't know I don't follow sports, but I know that the leagues claim copyright over accounts and descriptions, regardless of whether they actually have those rights.)