skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Completely crazy idea for an image classification system?
Image classification is a tough problem, and as far as I know nobody has ever really solved it in a way that you could rely on it.

So, if that's the case why not brute force it ?

Imagine a fingerprint of 40x30 pixels, 3/3/2 (r/g/b) for a given image, with an associated set of tags.

There are 2^9600 (40x30x8) possible prints like that, which is obviously an astronomical number, well over the number of atoms in the universe.

But because you can compute the distance from one print to another in a relatively simple way (the sum of the squares of the distances of the r, g and b components of every pixel) you could find the closest 'match' by comparing against a library of previously tagged content.

Is there anybody here that can take a stab at how big such a library should be to get a given level of confidence ?

My gut tells me that it is probably still a very large number but knowing roughly how large that number is would help a lot in judging if this is madness, hard or doable.

thanks!
lan and aa share flights - you can book a lan flight and fly on an aa plane, or vice-versa, so this isn't that surprising (in fact, i think i have been in the same situation, but the other person was on the wrong flight. perhaps it was you? :o)
If the picture is indeed not faked, a bear would make more sense; to my understanding, wolves generally avoid humans and are not curious in the way a bear cub might be. It's a better fit for the color and fluffiness, too.
1) same day

2) mailing list that I'd built up over years
True. In fact I have a partially complete firefox plugin that does almost exactly that. Problem is you need a bit of software installed which not very portable.

The technique in my post offers much better protection then most people are currently getting.
Easy: keep your day job. Work night and weekends on something you are passionate about.

Where to find cool stuff? As a programmer, the world is your oyster: there is a 100:1 ratio of people with ideas vs. people who can implement them. You probably don't know that I run a website to help people find such ideas: http://fairsoftware.net/publicProjects

If nothing else works, there got to be some open source project which you think could use some serious rewriting. In my case, I wish I had the time to design a better shell (bash just isn't smart enough for the way I work - if you ever used the Mac MPW in the late 90s, you know what I mean).

For others, it's a better, smarter GUI framework. I also think you could build something really cool to display Google search results: coverflow is just one starting point, but you can easily beat Google at the display part because of their fanaticism with providing simple page results. There is a better way for sure.
For more technical info, here's the link to presentation at CCC
http://lists.lists.reflextor.com/pipermail/a51/attachments/2...
So you're saying you don't think it's very effective as a deterrent, and you haven't seen it provided as an official rationale?
It's a fairly common phrase (I thought - maybe not) simply meaning: you or I or everyone may not like it, but the developers did it that way on purpose.

In many cases, a bug by design is a question of trade-offs. In this case, stricter rules for the parser might mean more syntax for the programmer.
I completely agree with you that the government enforcement of birth rates is immoral and should not be attempted. When speaking of birth control, I'm talking about mitigating the population explosion that's happening in the third world by providing, making accessible for little or no money, modern birth control methods. Providing free or low cost birth control is relatively inexpensive and would have significant increases on quality of life and on the overall state of humanity in the world. Of course it should be optional, and it doesn't need government involvement -- this an issue non profits can successfully attack.
Unofficial video torrents can be found at http://rnmshot.dvrdns.org/
The Sky’s the Limit for China’s DIY Aviators
is this kosher?

it starts out fine, explaining how complex systems are, well, complex. but then it starts to seem a bit odd because it ignores statistical properties (you can't predict the movement of every gas molecule in a box, but you can know the average temperature pretty damn accurately). and then suddenly it jumps to "constructal law":

> The Constructal Law applies to all flow systems which are far from equilibrium, like a river or the climate.

wtf? how can something as vague as "the climate" follow a law? and what's the constructal law? and so you go to wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructal_theory - and it all starts to look a bit flakey...

[edit: less flippant]
I don't disagree that there are a lot of hurdles to overcome. I also don't disagree that 99% of what the cloud offers is solved by a good laptop with regular backups. But that's kind of like saying 99% of what twitter offers can be solved with public mailing lists and a character limit. That doesn't mean twitter isn't worth using or creating. (OK maybe not the best example since I don't use twitter myself but you get the idea.)

And what about this scenario, which isn't too far fetched in my opinion: your ISP provides you with private cloud storage, a software stack, and your own dns name for you to host your own private web-accessible applications, each installable with one click.

There is still the problem of reliable internet access, but in time I think we all know internet access will be as ubiquitous as electric power and we will trust our ISP just like we trust our power company: we completely ignore them until the power goes out for a day, we get really mad, wait for them to fix it, and then forget it ever happened.
It's not even a replica of the layout since the scrollbars aren't the Wave-style scrollbars. Since they're a fairly prominent part of the UI you would think they'd be included in anything describing itself as a replica.

That said, I prefer the scrollbars in this demo to Wave's atrocious implementation.
True, but I think some people might need reminding.

Also, he tries to use his twitter account to promote good causes. Depending on his reaction to this episode, this might have been put at risk.
The reason why being an architecture astronaut is a bad thing is the tendency for building complex systems that solve all of the problems they thought about which then makes it virtually impossible to do some simple things that other people need to do which they didn't think about.

Oh, and the other problem I have encountered is the tendency for the astronaut to be unable to explain the complexities of their system in ways that people back on Earth can understand. (More than once I've been assigned such systems because I actually can figure them out. I don't enjoy it, but I can do it.)
If the suggestion of solving other people's problems or entrepreneuring doesn't (directly) interest you:

Find a second skill to cultivate that complements programming. (Prime examples would come from the arts and science.) Seek a novel interdisciplinary approach to using both the new skill and your current ones. You don't become passionate about hard work overnight, yet you've somehow reached that point with your programming abilities. So lifestyle changes notwithstanding, if you can do it once, you can do it again with a new skill.

Doing this will bring you out of the "meta" realm where it looks like everything in software is one of (hugely complex, painful to maintain, already built, a pointless hack). Instead, you will have the benefit of perspective and can start to apply your technical armaments to some other field where computer-oriented problems are obvious, commonplace, never-ending, and usually - at first - easy to solve.
I sent this to press@gsm.com, the email address of Claire Cranton, quoted in the article :

Dear Ms. Cranton,

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/technology/29hack.html?_r=...

“This is theoretically possible but practically unlikely,” said Claire Cranton, a GSM spokeswoman, noting that no one else had broken the code since its adoption. “What he is doing would be illegal in Britain and the United States. To do this while supposedly being concerned about privacy is beyond me.”

A set of incredible admissions.

* This is theoretically possible but practically unlikely

GSM 64bit encryption is broken. Not theoretically but actually. The likelihood of it happening to someone now depends on the value of the calls.

* no one else had broken the code since its adoption.

And now they have, that's the point

* would be illegal in Britain and the United States

I don't think criminals are deterred by such niceties and they are hardly likely to reveal their source while extorting money from me or making insider trades

* To do this while supposedly being concerned about privacy is beyond me

Knowing that my handset can be eavesdropped by people outside of the law is the ultimate privacy concern. That you don't understand this is beyond me.

> The association noted that hackers intent on illegal eavesdropping would need a radio receiver system and signal processing software to process raw radio data, much of which is copyrighted.

Again, copyright infringement would be very low on the list of criminal organisations.

Your response beggars belief, except it is perfectly reasonable viewed through the lens of PR.

Yours sincerely
Well, he did just say it was just the layout, not a functional Wave clone.

I'm assuming that all of the interface was written using Javascript, hence the 100 lines of Javascript. Little HTML was hand-written in the process. It's an example of being able to quickly write a complex interface. Wave was picked because it has a non-trivial interface and is familar to us. It's up to the programmer to add the logic he/she wants.

EDIT: Correction from boucher applied.
yup, the prequels are like the ultimate example of the second-system effect :)
Woah, Avatar makes way more sense now.
Excuse me, but do you know what _layout_ means ?
I just added my Twitter account to my profile.

http://www.twitter.com/jlgosse for those who are lazy!
I think that you are underestimating the ongoing cost of complexity in a product line.

Apple only works to support a limited amount of hardware. This simplifies:

- OS development
- Hardware development
- Hardware design
- Software support, hardware support
- Marketing
- Sales

Adding an extra product to the product line complicates all of the above, on top of whatever it costs you in engineering to build it.

It's certainly possible that Apple's just wrong, that they are better off making a killer cheapo Mini Macbook than sinking their resources into a tablet, or whatever it is they are concerned with. Every company has limited resources, though, and no company is served well by throwing those resources around indiscriminately.
Menopause Treatment Product
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Because the number of people who can work up to their standards are necessarily limited, and it obviously takes a long time to engineer the things they do make happen.

Ergo, Apple has limited engineering capacity -- for additional projects.

I also wouldn't call their engineering "not the 'hard expensive stuff'" -- think about what it took to create the unibody shell. They had to create the manufacturing process for it. They pretty much never make the cheap, easy choice. The plastic for the original iMacs had never been used before in that type of application/volume, etc., etc.
@tibbon
Yeah I was a little surprised too. It looks like the parser just defines foo for any parsable foo = .... before anything actually runs. Kind of a funky design choice, especially for such a dynamic language.
I'd say there's far more potential market for a sleek mini Macbook air, than there is for a tablet.

Not if Apple's tablet can do to the tablet market what the iPhone did to the smart phone market. There are huge strides in UI waiting to be made for tablets.
For future reference, if you were being bumped from the flight (due to overbooking), you would never have been allowed on the plane. They don't just assign two people the same seat and hope that you two will resolve it on board the aircraft.

It is strange that the agents were not following the correct boarding procedure, which is to scan the barcode on your boarding pass and to ensure that the computer's idea of your seat assigument agrees with what's printed on the pass. Usually, if they disagree, a new boarding pass is printed, and you board with that. (I like when they don't match, as the next words are usually, "oh, we had to upgrade you...")

Also, by not scanning the barcode, the gate agent ensured that you would not automatically be credited with frequent-flyer miles. Highly unusual.
Champlain Bridge demolition Controlled crash topples 80 second chronicle
That would likely be a bit claustrophobic should it ever be made. That's what I mean - big planes should be used between big hubs, for example leaving from the ocean beside England and landing in the ocean beside new york, then you take a bunch of trains to the various destinations.

Check-in, security checks and all that can then be distributed amongst all the small train stations. When you arrive at a plane hub, you just walk in with your hand luggage.

I used to think that smaller regional planes were the future, but nowadays I'm thinking perhaps the large titanicesque planes may be the way to go to solve this problem.
"does not mean that nobody understands what's going on."

What are all the inputs and outputs? Which are significant? Does anybody know the answer to either of these questions? You can build a model without knowing all the inputs and outputs, but it's called a guess.
Having personally worked with Guo while he was setting up his lab, I'm really pleased to see him linked on this website. The man is damned smart and it's very true what he said. For those wonder how it all works check out: http://www.optics.rochester.edu/workgroups/guo/team/guo.htm and some of his papers.
First day (hour?).

Adwords.

Consumer product if anyone wants to know.
Isn't this just a link to the om.nimp.org site? That's a joke site that's been around for a few years now I think. Popular with 4chan trolls - it's a hoax redirect like rickroll or goatse. Someone would say, "check out this site for the proof: obamafakedbirthcertificate.om.nimp.org", etc etc.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nimp.org
github source link: http://github.com/voloko/uki/blob/master/app/functional/wave...

Looks like they had to make some really dense code to meet that 100 line goal.

EDIT: But do take a look at the framework. It looks pretty awesome, especially the progressive rendering: http://github.com/voloko/uki
Meta level debugging
I notice you're using Googles DNS servers to do the lookups. This means it will "incorrectly" return NXDOMAINs for any spamhaus.org DNSBL lookup. For example:

http://dig.jsondns.org/IN/2.0.0.127.zen.spamhaus.org/A

Yet doing the lookup using my own DNS server:

root@haven:~# host -t a 2.0.0.127.zen.spamhaus.org
2.0.0.127.zen.spamhaus.org	A	127.0.0.2
2.0.0.127.zen.spamhaus.org	A	127.0.0.4
2.0.0.127.zen.spamhaus.org	A	127.0.0.10
root@haven:~#
OK, outsourcing does not equal slavery. That said, we all do stereotype all the time. For example, you probably thought from reading my comment that I'm a fat, lazy American teenager with a sense of entitlement :)

I lived in Russia in the 90s, and I saw exactly the opposite effect from the one you describe first-hand. There were people coming from English-speaking countries who could get management-level jobs mostly by virtue of coming from an English-speaking country. I knew some personally, and I don't hold it against them at all. They were seen as having an understanding of how the capitalist world works, and this was valued (whether or not this was true).

After a decade, the people were not seeing the quick returns from the switch to capitalism that they were hoping for. As a result, the general attitude towards the West in Russia has changed. You can read all about it in the news.

I also have friends back in Russia, who work for an outsourcing company. The majority of programming jobs there that pay a livable salary are outsource. There are few Russian companies that work on original products of their own (Parallels comes to mind).

I hold no illusions. As long as the US market remains the largest, that's where the money will be, and outsourcing will remain a viable strategy. Does the idealist in me wish that the people working outsourced positions could access this market directly, without effectively paying a middleman? Or better yet, have a thriving local market? Yes, but I realize this just won't happen.
Modern birth control methods cost money; someone's got to pay for them if the third-world people you want to stop making babies aren't going to. I believe that money can be better spent on improving the lives of those people. Better food, water, and housing will help make those people healthier, which will improve the infant mortality rate, which will naturally lead to a reduction in the birth rate. One reason poor people make a lot of babies is because many of the babies don't survive and a higher birthrate is necessary to ensure the survival of the next generation. With a lower infant mortality rate, it becomes an economic burden to have too many babies, so most families cut back to just one or two children. This is a trend that can take a couple of generations to become widespread, but large changes like this should be slow so they're not disruptive.
@ashyboy
Read HackADay www.hackaday.com and improve on one that sounds fun.
For the global temperature, the input is ~99.98% light and a tiny amount of heat from the earth’s core etc, and the output is light to space. The earth receives ~174 petawatts 24/7 365 and you can't really hide energy on that scale for very long. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earths_energy_budget) You can directly measure this stuff so it's not really a guess.

PS: He used "tera-watt scale" which is about as true as saying watt scale. Well he was only off by 1000x so it's not quite that bad.
Anyone else feel like Stephenson can only produce "nerd-bait"? Most of his literary work doesn't have strong characterization or meaningful plots, and everything he writes has this tired, "The geek shall inherit the Earth," undercurrent.
So blizzards have nothing to do with cold temperatures ? The week of December 15th - 815 new snowfall records, 304 new cold records, and 403 lowest maximum temperature records. Seems like they go together to me.
I didn't say anything about layout. In fact, I specifically said I was not judging the framework in that post.

I was responding to a comment claiming that the only thing missing was "AJAX." Not only do I think that comment doesn't make sense, I think the point it was trying to make is false, for all of the reasons I listed.

As an aside, the library itself is not limited to layout, as evidenced by its inclusion of buttons and sliders and resizable split panes. To me, without doing any research, that suggests that it probably doesn't implement many of the more complex behaviors from Wave, like automatic toolbar overflows or custom popup menus.
4 year-end predictions for government 2.0
If your dream job is "thousand of jobs on hundreds of boxes", why not start hacking on something like Hadoop/Hive (or any one of the other new/popular distributed data stores) and, after proving yourself to the community, try to get a job for one of the companies that sponsors/offers support for the project?

E.g. cloudera, engineyard, something like that.

That way you're programming on a project that is technically challenging, more mainstream, and also a core part of the company employing you (instead of just being an enterprise IT cost center), all while leaving the business stuff to the company's sales/execs/etc.

My hunch is that those types of companies are more open to telecommuting as well, which might be nice given you mentioned having a family.
There's a name for that: "science fiction."
Is there a benefit to the horrible Outlook-inspired layout I'm not aware of (besides trying to convince people it's Outlook)? It always seems to be the most inefficient way to use screen space for message viewing.
I second that. I have a policy to have customers lined up before launch. For my current product, I have a contract signed by a client based on a very rough beta. Now I get to develop the actual product knowing a customer's waiting.
I could similarly ask, "When will people learn that null bytes are a terrible way to terminate data?"

But that ship sailed eons ago.
Nothing was put on risk. The person/group who did this not only removed the fake tweet in question but also showed enough respect (if you actually read the whole article).

> "P.S. I deleted that post from his micro-blog a few minutes later, cause my delicate mental organization didn’t allow me to injure a huge army of Stephen Fry fans."

Assuming the "hack" was real (no way to prove it IMO), I rather be hacked by this person than someone else with malicious intent. No harm done, as a matter of fact this will probably help to secure whatever hole was in the system. Do you think we would give a flying-frack if the twitter account in question didn't belong to Stephen Fry or anyone famous?

I doubt it.
A polymer coating would indeed help. In the jargon, we call that stuff "paint". :)
Amen. This is a long opinion piece, with no evidence cited that the Constructal Law is a better predictor of the climate's response to increased CO2 than existing techniques. The one relevant paper linked to is an intriguing but underdeveloped model:

http://homepage.mac.com/williseschenbach/.Public/Constructal...

The paper doesn't back up the author's claim that "there is no physics-based reason to assume that increasing CO2 will make any difference to the global temperature". It includes an assumed factor y=0.4 for the infrared reflectance 'greenhouse factor', and any increase in that value will affect the expected results.

If anything applying the Constructal Law would be more worrying than current models, since there's potentially a more chaotic response to increased CO2 levels, increasing the risk of dramatic climate changes.
This is an excellent response. Diversification can do nothing but assist you, even if you deviate only by a small degree. Example: I used to have a similar issue with "idea paralysis" and it wasn't until I created a focus by recognizing my desire to write (but not replace programming, mind you) that I was able to come up with a solid idea and follow through with it (a decentralized content API is the app I've built and that atleast two of my sites run their content off of).

Follow the advice of above, it is very good.
you might want to take a look at the Shazam song classification system, which essentially does a 'brute force' search like the one you sketched out, except with a lot of cleverness to make it run super-fast

research paper:
http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf

blog entry summarizing paper:
http://laplacian.wordpress.com/2009/01/10/how-shazam-works/
If GSM was not already broken, how do all of these products work?

http://www.google.com/search?q=gsm+passive+intercept

The point of the presentation is not that GSM has been broken; it's to make it so blatantly, obviously, publicly broken that the public (i.e., corporate IT departments) will have to pay attention.
I tend to agree. This line looks like a prime example:

menuButton('Inbox', '-176px 0', '166 24'), menuButton('All', '-160px 0', '0 2 166 24'), menuButton('By me', '-192px 0', '0 0 166 24'), menuButton('Requests', '-240px 0', '0 0 166 24'), menuButton('Spam', '-208px 0', '0 0 166 24'), menuButton('Settings', '-240px 0', '0 0 166 24'), menuButton('Trash', '-223px 0', '0 0 166 24')

The 100 line number also does not include the theme, which is a 250 line file full of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.