skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How does Intercom and other web apps auto populate user images?
Many web apps these days have access to some external data feed where they can check an email address against the feed and see if they can find a headshot for that person. What API are they all using?

Examples I've seen so far include Intercom and AgileCRM.

EDIT:

I'm going to assume that they all just use the Gravatar API.
The article states that some of his fonts are highly legible at distances and thus used for some road signs. I'm curious, is there an objective way to determine whether one font is more legible than another, or is it purely subjective? Obviously some fonts are clearly more legible than others, but between the "legible fonts," can one say objectively that one is more legible than another? Can a computer create a font that is the "most" objectively legible?
" At least then you can reinstall it and be reasonably assured it does not have malware."

How so? Is there anywhere a list of hashes of software that multiple people independently from each other verified, compiled (and compared)? Because without that, "open source" adds 0 to security in the scenarios we are talking about here.

Additionally, how many packages/firmwares have you inspected the last, let's say, decade? If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on 'less than I can count on one hand' (well maybe you're in infosec and get paid for audits...)
Meta is for celebrating Stackoverflow, not for criticism.

Mention something that could be improved and you'll see what I mean.
Terrapin: Serving system for Hadoop generated data
> we don't care if the tech sector concentrates in California or Texas or wherever as long as it is in the US

Hmmm... I'm not sure that's true. For some definition of "we", it would be tautologically true, I guess. Many states complain about paying more in taxes than they get back in spending. California, Texas, and New York all pay more in taxes than they get back in spending, though Delaware takes the biggest hit, per capita:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_taxation_and_spending_...
Google Correlate does not imply Google Causation
In a way, the issue is that nobody is doing the herculean work of automating many of the repetitive and context sensitive things in our field (and don't care if we have an ugly meta-algorithm as a result).

I will mention two things that give some clarity about the potential of declarative and intelligent techniques:

1/ Z3[1] (satisfiability modulo theories solver) where you declare what you want and it contains many strategies and previous knowledge to achieve the goals.

2/ Gregory Chaitin[2] saying (can't find the source, probably was a lecture I attended) something like that artificial intelligence is an engineering problem, may be we need a lot of ugly pieces to make it work instead of elegant algorithms.

So I think nobody is working really hard at a higher level to look at the problems we have and find a declarative way to solve them. This solution probably will require a lot of field research and ugly disparate modules.

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/z3m/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Chaitin
It was changed. The title wasn't on the page.
That's a fascinating project and it would be wonderful if it succeeds... but it has been rumbling on for over 25 years.

Even with a reserve of goodwill for the project, reasonable people might choose not to take too much notice until further results are demonstrated.
Examining the Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration
XFS better than EXT4 because EXT4 needs fsync()? XFS needs fsync too or you'll end up with data files full of zeroes.

It happened to me.
Check out http://blockdiag.com/ and siblings (seqdiag, actdiag, nwdiag).

They have an interactive shell for it - experiment with http://interactive.blockdiag.com/nwdiag/.
In-flight refueling is a solved problem for military aircraft. It has never worked out for commercial airlines, though.
Yes and so the question is why does Europe not have anything like that. It does have some places liked London, Berlin and Stockholm but they are all missing a few things.

This is what I am trying to explore.
>If it was only a matter of investments then surely US investors or Asian investors could just come in with the money

Apparently US investors don't even like going out of Silicon Valley, why would they go all the way to Europe?
About a quarter of the world speaks reasonably fluent English, so SV's initial market is even bigger than that.

Having access to a similarly large initial market is also part of the reason China has a rapidly expanding and flourishing startup environment and culture.
Athletes are optimized to perform, but they can still be unhealthy in that many of them get injured, take unsafe risks, etc.

For example, bodybuilding is known to be relatively safe and healthy in terms of training injuries and average-case benefits of training, but top bodybuilders - and even marginal amateurs - are not healthy, they are pushing their body way out of balance for pageantry; just listen to this guy [0] go on for thirty minutes about his pre-contest drug program. Likewise, basketball optimizes for tall people who can move fast, but basketball injuries are an everyday event, because tall people who move fast overstress their joints and ligaments.

Where athletes are healthy, it's because health and performance happen to align together. There are plenty of people here who want to optimize their mental abilities, and will go to the same extremes as any athlete. Paul Erdős was known for running amphetamines[1] to aid his ability to concentrate. Today you hear about folks using prescription pharmaceuticals for the same reasons.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF4zL_BdePc
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s#Personality
I was joking a bit -- just pointing out that the core functionality is extraordinarily simple and that most of the value is in UI, UX, and network effects.
So I still need it in order to build it. People tend to forget that other people might want to build their software to package it for a distro, and would even like to run the test suite, and they use crazy amounts of build time dependencies that make it hard to do.
> Maybe someone can share his/her production level experience with it this time...

What do you want to know? I have written a few thousand lines each of production-quality Prolog in two distinct projects. It works well if you know what you're doing, the problem domain is a good match, and you don't need to rely on bindings to loads of external libraries. If you don't know what you're doing, it's easy to write slow and buggy code.
I like to bitch about this every chance I get, but I just don't understand why nobody puts money into making travel pleasant. I'm not talking about a few inches more legroom, I'm talking about my own armrest (and, okay, maybe a few inches more legroom).

I flew first class on a Virgin American domestic leg lately, and the legroom was absurd-- I couldn't even reach the seat in front of my with my legs outstretched. I don't need that much room, and in fact it makes it difficult to reach my underseat bag. (although it means I can escape to the aisle without disturbing my seatmate).

If a narrowbody jet went from a 3+3 coach config to a 2+2 that's 50% more cost per passenger. Throw in a couple more inches of legroom. Call it 100% more cost to be generous. How are there not plenty of folks like myself who would be happy to pay it, but can't even fathom the idea of paying 5x as much for today's business class?

Yes, I realize today's first and business class fares subsidize coach to some extent, but .. I just don't understand how a premium service can't catch on in this day and age. Talk about customer loyalty.
IMO Stack Exchange was more useful before it had moderators.

You could even ask questions like 'Do you know a useful library for this problem' without having it closed.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10221563
Seconded. I invest about 10 percent of my free time on civics.

Speak or be spoken for by those who do.
>entitlements

Such a weird word. By its very core, it is about things you are entitled to. Like SS, which you are entitled to because you paid into it.

But yet calling someone entitled, and the use of the word entitlements, is meant to describe someone thinking they are entitled to something they aren't. It is a word that in practice means the opposite of what it should mean in theory, especially when used in a political sense.
Turbofan or rocket.
Exhaustive search across all states and state transitions. There's a distributed version which helps with especially large state spaces. Combinatorial explosion is an issue. In some cases the best/only option is to formally prove correctness with the built-in proof language; the model checker works well in tandem, for quickly checking assertions before putting effort into a proof.

Generally the model checker alone works just fine, though.
Arctic sea ice reaches fourth lowest minimum
> I heard so many times bullshit like "I don't know if you'll be alive in a year or two, so I can't adopt your technology"

I'm not sure why you think this is bullshit. Most startups fail. It seems like good sense to be wary of taking a dependency on another business that might not be around in the near future instead of an alternative that has already proven itself in the market.
As it happens, on Sunday I posted a photo to my photography club's G+ page. Another member noted the location, and replied with another photo she'd taken months ago of the exact same subject, standing maybe 15 feet from where I'd taken my photo.

Although we know that the subject of both photos are the same, what's interesting is that to a first approximation, they appear to be pictures of entirely different things. We were commenting how radically different can be the interpretation of two different artists when seeing the same thing.

The error that the OP makes is that what makes the photo is what you're taking a picture of. At least in the art of photography, that's barely the beginning of it. A photograph is something that the artist creates, not something that he takes of a particular thing.
User: Google.com -> How do I ...?

Google: Take this link to Stack Overflow

* This discussion is closed, the moderator left the following message: 400 Bad Request. This is not the correct SO for this type of question.
List of technology centers (Wikipedia)
Actually, DIN looks pretty well IMO. Its unusual x-height means it's not suited for all uses (I don't think it would really work for body copy), but every now and then I see it used on some sites and it looks surprisingly good. I think genius.com uses it for song titles.
Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users
We have been making several changes that affect this, with more to come. Keep in mind that /news represents ranked stories, and that the ranking algorithm loses precision over time, so later pages become less meaningful. If you would like to see all recent story submissions, /newest currently displays at least 3000 (around 4 days).
The thing is, Xanadu was implemented -- twice, at autodesk, prior to 1990. (It wasn't released for political reasons until 1999.) Please check your facts before saying something clearly untrue like "Xanadu couldn't be implemented".

Even if it wasn't -- being a first mover by sacrificing quality can get you greater adoption over superior competitors. Compare the Mac, released in 1984, with the Amiga 1000, released in 1985. By being delayed by a year, the Amiga was able to have all the features that the Mac team wanted but were told that they couldn't have -- color graphics, multitasking, and an actually usable amount of RAM, at about half the price of the Mac. The Mac, on the other hand, was the follow-up to the Lisa, which was technically superior feature-wise but too slow to be usable. Both the Amiga and the Lisa lie forgotten, and people come to believe that the Mac was the first consumer GUI machine or the best consumer GUI machine of its time -- or that its limitations were unavoidable. In reality, a combination of luck and good PR warped our sense of history.

The reality is that the web was not the first hypertext system, or the best, and the features that it lacked were implemented and functional in its competition. The web gained a following through a combination of being free (at a time when most hypertext systems, including Xanadu, were proprietary and commercial) and stupid enough that it could be reimplemented poorly by beginner programmers -- which, of course, was its aim.

The Web was designed as a model to teach non-programmers the concepts behind Enquire, Tim Berners-Lee's "real" hypertext system. The fact that the web escaped and Enquire didn't is a tragedy.

Lots of crappy things become the basis of culture, commerce, and communications. Quality doesn't particularly matter when it comes to being the basis of things, and nuance and complexity work against you if you want wide adoption. But, when something crappy becomes so widespread, its flaws become far more dangerous.

Lack of permanent stable addressing made possible the DMCA safe harbor provision (and thus systems like ContentID that delete your content at random on the off-chance that you were quoting somebody famous). Lack of bidirectional links caused the monetization system for the web to be based on advertising. Embedded markup created the need for complex javascript kludges to navigate deeply hierarchical DOM structures in order to perform simple transformation.

The web is a long series of poorly thought out decisions, all of which in the end led to both the grey hairs, premature heart attacks, and hefty wallets of people on this site. We're stuck with it now, because we've created a broken system and added structure on top of it to keep it from being fixed. And we, as an industry, profit from its brokenness. But, it would be intellectually dishonest to pretend that it isn't broken -- or that the ways in which it was broken were unavoidable. They were avoidable, and they were avoided; it's sheer bad luck that the web was adopted over its superior brethren.
Thats addressing the problem at the wrong end. I take many photos of the same subject often, but Im only ever going to show the best one or two to anyone. People need to learn to edit! There is a side benefit that you look like a much better photographer when people only see your best. They dont even think about all the rejects.
This is Varun from Pinterest.

We did look at a few options before building this. ElephantDB seemed a bit heavy handed, such as having to modify ring configuration every time we added/removed servers and also, modifying domain spec yaml files for newly added data sets. It did not allow us to easily change # of shards across different versions of the data - something that our developers do often to make their jobs run faster etc. Also, it does not GC out older versions and since our workflows write new versions every day, this was a problem.

We did look at Cassandra but we also did not want to operate another data store. However, we definitely wanted to get the data loaded fast i.e. through simple file copy operations. We found that for this option Cassandra had similar issues as HBase i.e. having to do major compactions to get rid of older data versions. Tweaking the number of reduce shards was also harder.

With Terrapin, we essentially tried to build serving system on top of HDFS given the recent improvements in HDFS performance when there is data locality. We felt that HDFS was rock solid and the best storage system (in terms of scalability & ease of operation) for immutable data sets. On top of that, we built versioning, cheap garbage collection, extensible serving formats etc. as mentioned in the blog

As for Apache Drill, it is more suited to running analyst queries with latencies ranging upto seconds or 100s of milliseconds. This is not acceptable for webscale work loads where the latencies must be < 10ms for lower level serving systems like terrapin.
There is one currency, there are no import taxes, VAT is per country. (assuming EEC) This ofcourse assume that you are operating in one country and providing goods to another. Employment is another issue.

Thats almost the same as in the US(excluding employment).

The issue of low taxes is frankly utter bollocks, yes the US's taxes might be lower but so is your life expectancy, and productivity.

The main issue with startups is that most of europe is based on trade. What can I sell to you for a profit, what can I invest in that will give a decent return with a balanced risk?

Most tech startups fail. Most tech startups are clones of another well established startup. Those startups do not make money.

Why would I invest in something with such a terrible likleyhood of return?
The whole conclusion of the article is there is no "predictive model". Why isn't this comment -4?
Show HN: A resource for drawing complex primitives in JavaScript
An evergreen. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4468057 (with wildly varying comment quality)
I think the point is to consciously acknowledge what you're doing needs a side effect. It's similar with mutable state. Both state and side effects are completely necessary but should be isolated and controlled through known constructs.
See newly released iOS and Android apps by country and category
"Production Prolog" by Michael Hendricks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_eYTctGZw8
Seems the quote gets turned into a single long line in Firefox, and subsequently making the page extra wide...
>The major two exceptions are New York and Texas in that order.

Umm. Boston(MA)?
11 cool things Magic Leap says its device will do
It can, and is objectively measured and tested.

Here is a great article in the NY Times magazine about the creation of a new font, Clearview, for highway signage: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/magazine/12fonts-t.html?pa...
An Extensible HTTP Networking Library in Swift
While is is generally true, it does not include war spending. Afghanistan and Iraq were not paid out with just the regular military budget. The Iraq conflict alone cost $1.7T.

Also, social spending will always be more for any well run nation, so that shouldn't be a surprise. We have a social security system that we pay into that everyone is part of. Its a huge program and calling something I'm paying a lot into right now an entitlement is disingenious. Total military spending worldwide is probably a better metric. USA is first at 580b, China at 128b, SA at 80n, and Russia at 70b.

Personally, I have no problem with spending on this level. I believe the USA is the best nation to have this type of global policing power and maintaining it should be one of our top national goals. Especially in regards to helping and continuing to work with our NATO, Korean, and Japanese allies and to protect them from hostile foreign powers.
USCIS Announces Revised Procedures for Determining Visa Availability for AOS
thinking about it more, it would be far more useful if it gave you a counter of photos taken of current place at any given light level (this should give a rough time series). That way it would provide metadata instead of a binary shut off valve. still not sure how it would handle slightly different angles and zoom.
Nine of the World’s Biggest Banks Form Blockchain Partnership
I like the idea of a personal Mediawiki. I'm fine with doing my own hosting, and interlinking would be really useful for connecting ideas. Is there a nice way to edit on Android?
Take a look at http://www.thoriumenergyalliance.com/downloads/plutonium-238... for how it could be done
Why is everyone missing the point? Yea sure this doesn't accurately determine whether a picture is original. Of course it's not practical. Of course you would not buy this. That isn't the point. This project is itself art.
Oh I absolutely agree. That's why I meant to limit that to the national sense of 'we'. Of course internally we still have our debates about spending and certainly other states would prefer if Silicon Valley where part of their local economy. But ultimately California's success is still part of our national success and so ultimately the spending happens however much we would prefer it be spent differently. And the complaints you mention in our own country which does have such a strong national sense of identity makes it even less likely in the EU.

Is the sense of being 'European' so strong that member states are willing to spend billions of their own taxpayer euros to build up a tech sector largely centered in some other member state? I dont think so.
I had a Prolog class in university and also fiddled with it a bit extracurricularry. My biggest gripe was that (aside from being untyped and having poor support for higher-order programming, but that's probably remedied in more modern logic programming languages such as Mercury) for more complex use cases and computations the system degrades into functional programming with poor syntax: logical relations become deterministic functions with designated inputs and output, at which point I would be just better off with FP + backtracking (for example, the list monad in Haskell).
I personally avoid any website related to Stack Overflow unless the rest of relevant search results point to content farms.

After many years of dealing with the hostility of SO, I feel that the effort to dig a bit in blogs, forums or mailing lists is less than the effort you have to do with dealing with SO's redirect loop: Off-topic question, Wrong stack overflow site, Duplicate question, Screw you because I got the reputation, etc.

That redirect loop usually ends up in an old question because some short sighted moderator couldn't tell the difference between the question 5 years in the past, than the question today.
While large organizations all have waste, from my personal experience government organizations have extra waste. The biggest issue is in buying things, where there is a system set up in place to try to prevent corruption, but where the system has been so heavily gamed that it is worse than no system at all. For example I've personally seen 4 times the price paid for an inferior piece of tech compared to what was on the consumer market (and this is 4 times the price of the in store individual price of the tech, it would be cheaper in bulk) because the consumer product had not gone through the channels of being approved for use (I actually spoke with the one who purchased it to make sure I wasn't missing anything, and they told me that they did think the cheaper product was better but it wasn't on the approved list). You see quite a few 'value added resellers' whose only value is jumping through the hoops of the approval process.
I'm Joining Betable, to Disrupt Gambling
SLS is estimated to be 500m per launch, about half what the shuttle cost and 1/6th what the Saturn V cost per launch.

Real world costs aren't entirely here considering this thing isn't built, but 500m is the planned cost and should be doable. Worst case scenario it costs us what the shuttles cost, except we're no longer trapped in LEO.
Tech Tuesday: Engineering at Imgur