skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Personally I don't get ORM's. May be it's because the only I have had to deal with was Hibernate, and seemed to me as an innecesary layer of complexity and bloat, and objects and relations sometimes doesn't map nicely. If you want to persist objects, use an object datastore in the first place, not a relational one.

And, what's wrong with SQL? It's simple, powerful, widely known and deployed, and cool(declarative programming, dude!).

I've read a some introductory examples about distinct ORM's and just don't get it. Where's the gain? Apart from database independence(which I don't think it's even desirable in most cases, may be Tom Kyte's books have brainwashed me irremediably), can't see one. How an ORM makes you more productive?
> then either the RIAA should pay their artists fair value, which would drive more users to pay for music, or they can't sue people for so much per song.

The former scares them much more than the latter.
statistics is a rock solid part of mathematics, as solid as any part of pure mathematics

The impression left by reading Jaynes (The Logic of Science) was that a huge part of conventional statistics was a hodge-podge of ad hoc methods. The One True Way out of the mess being, of course, Bayesian statistics. What's your take? Do most of the books you advocate follow Bayes?

Also, thanks for the great post. I'd love to know where these statistics have taken you.
Five things your startup can learn from David Plouffe
An API for a service that prints and snail mails documents cheaply and professionally in the Netherlands. That would let me build a cool online billing app.
In no way is it that simple.
The outlook gets quite a bit brighter when you limit the field to actual phones -- which is where the development is focused.

I understand that the promise of Android is compatibility across many different kinds of devices, but at this stage it's a bit of a strawman to pull out the Archos which is a: not a phone, b: a very early device and c: not Google sanctioned.

In other words, I'm with Tim Bray on this one.
W-T-F. Guy must've been all out of ideas and facing a deadline whilst staring out a NYC penthouse for this one.
Awesome - really great idea and great execution
.oO( a breadbox with speakers inside it to keep bread fresh )
There, done
I don't know if I would use it because I don't think that I run into the "problem" more than 2-3x a year. Maybe it's more often - I don't know - but it isn't a problem that I want solved.

If this was craigslist related, then I would be interested though. This is just my personal shopping habit but I find this problem more with auction-based sites like ebay/craigslist than other online system. If I could specify specifics - model, price - then it would be awesome!
Would the same effect occur if it were played frequently by one musician then tested by another?

Absolutely. Another point of interest: New violins act like not-recently-played violins (which, technically, they are) and violin makers will normally play (or get someone else to play) their instruments for several months before putting them up for sale.
Stolen e-mails reveal venomous feelings toward global warming skeptics
Some people have suggested putting speakers inside violin cases for exactly this reason -- but I doubt it would work. When a violin is played, the wood vibrates far more than the surrounding air (if it didn't, energy wouldn't be transferred from the violin to the air) so in order to get the same amount of vibration in the instrument, you'd need very loud speakers.
Dismissing things based purely on their source makes you pretty much as bad as they are.

If there's real evidence that proves this story is false, it'd be cool to see it.

I think it's in the spirit of HN to discuss content rather than source.
I calculated it out once... it turns out that planes consume a very similar amount of fuel per kilometre of travel to a person driving a car.

However, the distances involved in flying around are much greater than most would attempt to drive.
How about one of these:

http://l-mail.com
http://postful.com
http://earthclassmail.com
http://postalmethods.com
I don't like the same thing on every website. I enjoy the variety.
Compete/Quantcast/Alexa
I currently use Host Monster. Before that, I used Blue Host. They have very similar interfaces. I moved largely for a price break (but also partly to change domain names) and not having to adapt to a substantially different interface was appealing.
Why are you posting this here?
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' (in other words, if you can't hear it that is an indication you aren't trained) and so on.

Solution: Put a violin that has been recently played with a mechanically operated bow in a closed box with a microphone.

Sample the sound.

Let box sit for 6 months.

Operate it once again, and sample the sound.

Do a subtraction of the two sound patterns, any audible difference should show up clearly.
New development: Isildur loses most of the money he won on the previous four weeks.

http://www.highstakesdb.com/1343-isildur1-loses-over-3m-to-a...

Edit: See also http://www.pokertableratings.com/fulltilt-player-search/isil...
Ask HN: Has anyone used machine learning to trade?
I'm thinking of trading on either the FX or Stock markets using ML algorithms (primarily neural networks) on an intraday timescale. Does anyone have any experience in doing this? Any tips/stories/recommendations on brokers, data, etc? Is it a complete waste of time to try without being a big fish (I've only got about 10K to venture on this)?
I think he nailed it: more of a competition for developer support.
I was excited to find out how you would map Operating Systems until I found out that that wasn't what OS stood for.
No it doesn't. People who read Hacker News (and people in general) simply don't have the time to perform an in depth verification of the truth of any story they might read here, so it makes sense to link only to reputable sources. The Mail is not one of them; people who are not from the UK might not realise this.
CHARTS OF THE WEEK: Yahoo's Search Business Is Toast (YHOO, MSFT, GOOG)
Chinese imitatie
Good point, bonus that it was made humorously:

People ask me what it's like to work for myself. It's great! Only the boss is an asshole.

But that's the way it has to be when working by yourself from your home office on your own business: if you don't put pressure on yourself nobody else is going to.
Zynga Says Offers Were Just 10% Of Revenues
Welcome at Poi Maps Europe
Is it a complete waste of time to try without being a big fish (I've only got about 10K to venture on this)?

Yes. The intraday movement of stocks is small enough that you'd need to be using a large fraction of your capital on every single trade in order to overcome trading costs; and based on the Kelly criterion you'd need to have unrealistically high odds of betting correctly in order to avoid going broke.
Prototyping, Mockup, and Wireframing Tools for iPhone App Development
It's far from being the definitive list, but it's definitely a good place to start if you are creating an iPhone app mockup.
does multiply.com have an API already?
As noted elsewhere in the thread, find the same story from other sources if you prefer.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping-p...

"The calculations of ship and car pollution are based on the world's largest 85,790KW ships' diesel engines which operate about 280 days a year generating roughly 5,200 tonnes of SOx a year, compared with diesel and petrol cars which drive 15,000km a year and emit approximately 101gm of SO2/SoX a year."
Hulu Gets Ripped Out Of Rippol
There's certainly a difference between a guitar that has been played regularly for a few years and one fresh off the shelf. I'm not particularly fond of Martins when they're new, but give them a few years to mature, and it's amazing. I've always assumed this had something to do with the wood fibers loosening up over time along with everything settling.

There's a lot of this stuff in music, though. People will drop crazy amounts of money on old guitars, amps, and equipment, even if the new stuff is a component for component recreation.
TechCrunch Interviews (The Very Happy) Skype CEO Josh Silverman
Let me clear up a few misconceptions here. Is that one million plays worldwide or one million plays in Sweden? The population of Sweden is about 10 million people, I really doubt that a single track accumulated as much as one million plays so quickly.

And if the number is worldwide, why do they expect STIM (Swedish Performing Rights society) to pay for it? Of course they won't, STIM only collects royalties for performances in Sweden! Every country in the world has its own performing rights collection society. For music played in the United Kingdom, she gets paid by PRS, in France it's SACEM etc.

Artists usually don't have the "performing rights" for a music. The person who gets the performing rights royalty payments after a music is the composer. Lady GaGa received that paycheck not as an artist/performer but as the composer of that track (along with Nadir Khayat). She is not the only composer of the track so she only gets her share of the payments. The article has huge factual mistakes.
Peter Carter, formerly first violin of the Allegri String Quartet, when playing as a guest in a quintet, was loaned a viola for some months to play before it was handed over to its new owner.
Are you sure the instrument isn't simply detuning? :)
Honestly, your theory would predict the exact opposite fact. If the wood got more tight when the instrument is left alone its brightness would increase, not decrease.
But what's the point of theorizing when musicians would rather rationalize their beliefs than doing a simple experiment?
I'd want an API to a physical world.

Preferably one which isn't limited to "laws of nature", but rather lets you add your own ones.

Also: Universe root console.
Question for someone who knows more about this:

Is this the right way to think about it? What we need to do to write a "program" to solve a problem is:

1) Find a set of gates to setup the atoms so that they have the right input.

2) Find a set of gates that uses this input to solve the problem.

I know very little about quantum computation so any help is appreciated...
You might find this produced a positive result. However, a negative result wouldn't necessarily disprove the theory because violins may appear simple, but they are acoustically very complex. Take for example the Chladni patterns for violin plates

http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/chladni.html

and remember that this is just one aspect of one component. Other people study directional tone colour

http://www.josephcurtinstudios.com/news/strad/apr00/Gabi_str...

and even the strings can be made from different composite materials for different strings. The strings alone can make a significant difference to the sound of a violin. Has your one microphone picked up all the sounds in all the frequencies and directions and has your mechanism tried all the different bowing techniques for all the notes etc.
This is posted in 2007 but it is still useful, at least a possible solution.

As of right now, I am still doing game entities like he is describing except it is divided up into three parts which are events, models, and controllers. It was largely the result of having the needs to easily doing unit test without doing extremely complicated of a setup and as well making it far easier to maintain my code.

This setup migrates the game codebase from total disaster to something that is much cleaner. Now that this article has come into views, I fear that the codebase I have will slip back into oblivion as models, their corresponding rendering code, and the controllers gathers into blobs.
Typically, payment agreements such as this are blanket agreements. Spofiy agrees to give X% of its revenues to the musicians (indirectly) and in exchange it can use their music. This is not a fixed fee as it varies with Spotify's revenues. If Spotify can't get any revenue for a year, the musicians won't get paid at all for that year. RIAA is a recording industry association (dealing with mechanical rights) while the article is about paying composers (which is performing rights) so it's not like "RIAA members" valued these tracks to anything. Also RIAA is American where Spotify is not present at the moment.
Maybe it's because I'm up late - but I read sarcasm in that post.. RMS talks a lot (similar perhaps to the latest Nobel prize winner* (nominated 8 days into office)), whereas Linus gets stuff done.
The problem he's attacking is very real, especially in game development - your objects don't obey a tree hierarchy, and diamond multiple inheritance is definitely not the answer either. I'm not 100% sure I understand how he's implemented this, however. I'd be useful to see some more specific examples than the extremely abstract high-level diagram.

My approach was to introduce it in a stealth manner. I first discussed the idea with a couple of programmers individually, and eventually convinced them it was a good idea. I then implemented the basic framework for generic components, and implemented one small aspect of game object functionality as a component.

I then presented this to the rest of the programmers. There was some confusion and resistance, but since it was implemented and working there was not much argument.

This bit sounds familiar...
Смотреть фильм онлайн Носители / Carriers (2009) CAMRip film online
Sounds very much like some of the social 'science' that was done in the 19th and early 20th century.
Having been through this sort of headache a couple of times, I'm convinced that the coupling of functionality must be as loose as possible. It sounds like OP's solution follows that approach, although he's a bit thin on specifics. Another useful concept in this context that is usually unknown (and often partially reinvented) by C++ programmers is protoypal inheritance. C++ makes this anything but simple, and you essentially have to reinvent your object system. It can be done, but it's not pleasant. I'll need to try these things in more expressive languages sometime.
Have you seen the Top User List?
http://twitterholic.com/
Ashton, Britney, Ellen, etc. The top "tech" figure I saw on that was about #33 (Pete Cashmore/Mashable) Guys like Kevin Rose are down at #148.

Twitter has come a long way from Kevin/Leo Laporte aiming to hit 100,000 followers.
As a teacher in China I can tell you this(the linked article) means nothing. The USA is not successful because it's got the highest IQ but in a large part because of the creativity of it's people. Something China lack's, a VERY large part as a result of it's institutions (i.e. the Chinese education system, political system, and Dang'an).

The other major part being a collectivist, conformist culture isn't something that breeds creativity. China's most creative people either leave for the USA or rot in China.
Comparatively, if the same song were to be played in a radio show with a million listeners, she'd have earned not even half of what she got from Spotify.

Comparisons with the CD model are misguided, because the CD business model was an exception, made possible only because of technical limitations.
Here is another excellent one and I think a big part of why he is defining "sociopath" in amoral terms (because no matter your traits, they can be used for good or evil):

If the clueless often go “evil” in the “we were only following orders” mode, losers often go “evil” in bystander mode,
re:their numbers, Spotify's valuation is closer to $1bn. But wired implies the labels got ownership in exchange for advances on future royalties: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/ka-shing-spotify-inve...

And I can't find a primary source, but the consensus seems to be that Sony paid 30,000 kroner in cash for their share of Spotify, which jibes with the figures in the OP: http://www.p2pnet.net/story/26736
Do you really think professional musicians wouldn't retune an instrument before trying it out?

I'm not sure my theory would predict that the instrument would get brighter. Violin dynamics are very, very complicated, and just because the wood is tighter, it doesn't always make it "brighter." There may, for example, be higher frequencies, but they may not be excited by as much, and hence might not have the same volume.

I've now spoken with several professional and near professional musicians who all say pretty much exactly the same thing. My wife, who was once a competent amateur, says it's completely obvious.

Finally, the experiment is absolutely not simple, as has been commented on in several other comments.
That's because native SQL apis in programming languages are horrible (JDBC, you are horrible).

So you want something to wrap your SQL with.

And then, you only have objects in your program, that's why it's called object oriented. So you often need to make objects from the result of your query, and manual bean fill-up is tedious. Therefore, ORMs.

On other hand, DBI is okay, so most Perl project don't use ORMs.
Also a GNU screen implementation would be nice. ^A-D during certain interminable lectures, particularly.
Right. The SO2 goes into the ocean and makes them more acidic. The trouble is that CO2 is already doing the same thing, and we don't need oceans with lower pH.
And that's where you make a mistake: sure, the founder can be a competent sysadmin, but the founder simply cannot replace a team of sysadmins. You need to be available 24/7 -- there's always that pressure on your social live that you need to remain available, etc etc etc.

You think you can do it, as a founder, especially when you've got some sysadmin skills, but you simply cannot do as good a job as a team of operations people who are stand-by 24/7. And you simply cannot afford such a team for yourself when you're starting out.
Always use "$@" (including the quotes) instead of $* when passing on command-line arguments.

If your directory name contains a space, the above function won’t work. Note that putting $* in quotes would be interpreted as one argument, so that wouldn’t work if you specified an option along with a directory name.
Take a look at Shor's algorithm[1] for factoring integers on a quantum computer. It's definitely not for the faint of heart, but it should show you what goes into creating an algorithm for a quantum computer. 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.

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.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shors_algorithm
Something I don't see mentioned: Health issues. I used to have thousands of books. I eventually got rid of them all for health reasons. I currently keep as little paper and cardboard as possible in my home. So I do the majority of my reading online now, which is part of why I belong to HN.

Closely linked (at least in my mind): Environmental issues. If a single ereader can replace thousands of books, this is more sustainable for a planet with a human population in the billions.
Readability: I've yet to see a computer device that allows to read in a bright sun/poor lighting and has comparable DPI to dead-tree books.
Ok, so please design an experiment that would satisfy you if it came out negative.

I'm well willing to accept any such experiment if it comes out positive.
Chromium OS adds support for HDD, not just SSD
FTA: "...the gap between software engineers and birthday clowns is almost negligible."

True.
There is, though, also the 'crap filter' at work. That is, that yes, you can measure and prove that a 'vintage '59 les paul' will sound better than a new off the shelf '59 recreation. It has nothing to do with the production techniques being better (or worse) in '59 though.

Basically, both time periods ('year X' and 'now') had a reasonable amount of 'crap' and a reasonable amount of 'excellent instruments'. When you take a 'now' instrument off the shelf, you're taking a gamble as to which it will be, whereas as a 'year X' instrument has had a large amount of the 'crap' removed from the pool (destroyed, treated less fairly, etc) whereas the 'excellent' instruments have been treated better and preserved because they're 'excellent' instruments.

50 years from now, they'll be saying that 2009 instruments were made better, and people will be paying a huge amount for genuine '09 vintage instruments. This phenomenon is actually easy to see - in the 70s fender had a reputation that post-CBS (ie 'now') instruments were junk, and 50s vintage instruments were worth spending a fortune for. Here in 2009 though, there is the same '70s fender instruments are pretty damned good' approach that there was then to 50s instruments, people will pay silly money for a genuine 60s or 70s jazzmaster, tornado, mustang or even teles or strats - though obviously the 50s vintags for those are still preferred generally over the 60s and 70s. Again, the 'crap' that was considered common then, has been filtered out of the available pool, leaving a 'vintage = well made' mindset.
Ah, I forgot Blindsight. That does qualify, I think.
ACMQ Site - ACM Queue
You can't take 50m modern cars with pollution control systems then say worldwide car pollution = ~#of cars in the world / that number. The worst cars running on the worst fuel create several times more pollution than a new modern car. And world wide there are a lot of old cars.

So, in this case yes, they are saying something that's wrong.
For SNGs you should get SNGwizard to review your push/shove decisions at the end of each session and Holdem Manager to track your results, record your hands, and track your opponents statistics.
How do we know this is better than Quantcast? Does anyone know where the data comes from? Also, it seems to be missing some of the features.

For instance, it looks like the demographic data is absolute, instead of the percentages being relative to the totals for their data set, so it's hard to tell if my site is popular among people who earn over $100K, because they only make up about 1% of the audience.

Compare http://www.quantcast.com/yahoo.com

and https://www.google.com/adplanner/#siteDetails?identifier=yah...
Do you think that interday would be more suitable then?
SQL was designed to make data accessible to non-programmers. That's why it lacks more advanced/obscure syntax.

And the reason why it's stuck is the same story that you can tell over and over about standards.
Who said GM is going to disappear? Part of the govt. assistance was a restructuring of the company to be a viable business. Regarding executive compensation, GM CEO Rich Wagoner (who was ousted by the way) earned 1.5M in 2007, and will receive over 20M in pension by leaving GM. You don't call that wealthy?

Regarding the GM shareholders I agree with you; they took the risk of investment, but the rest of my statement stands, which is that the collapse would have punished many people not responsible for the mismanagement of GM.
The field of neuromorphic engineering is rather big. Started off with Carver Mead's book "Analog VLSI and Neural Systems" (Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1989), and a very cool paper titled "A Silicon Neuron" by Mahowald and Douglas (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v354/n6354/abs/354515a0... , Nature 354, 515 - 518 (26 December 1991)). The field has grown to amazing devices currently becoming standard engineering practice like silicon retinas and cochleas ( http://siliconretina.ini.uzh.ch ).
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