skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My experience with current LCD screens seems to indicate that they're next to useless in very bright situations, including bright sunny afternoons. I have a Nikon D90, which has a pretty amazing LCD, but on very bright days, I rely more on the histogram to gauge exposure because the LCD display is hard to see in bright light.

As for the rest of the article, I give it a big meh. To quote a truism I read on flickr all the time, "It's not the camera that takes the pictures, it's the photographer". Get out and take pics. If the small form factor of this camera floats your boat, use it! If you want a bigger sensor and a wider lens selection, keep using your dslr.
I've heard the distinction as "software engineering is a creative profession, requiring professionals to exercise a large degree of judgment in building working systems from ambiguous requirements. Programmers take an existing spec and then translate that into code."

I'm not sure how useful this distinction is, as every job I've held had highly ambiguous requirements and a lot of trade-offs involved in building a working system from them. It kinda makes me wonder though - a colleague who'd been a PM at both Google and Microsoft said the difference was "Microsoft expects PMs to produce a spec that's thrown over the wall to engineers, who throw it back if there's any ambiguity. Google expects their engineers to have opinions about the product and to resolve most of the details themselves, only consulting the PM if there's something big where they need additional data." I wonder if Microsoft hires programmers and Google hires software engineers?
It would be simple... except I have a patent on making that kind of legislation.
What is true is a correlation between competition and quality of internet. Areas with only one provider almost inevitably have terrible service.

Do countries like South Korea and Japan have lots of competition for high speed access (or infrastructure)?
He did say there were only two categories. They're just numbered 1 through 3 for some reason ;-)
U.S. Keeps Science Lead, But Other Countries Gain
Does this mean that if we're ever in a shooting war, the military's first priority will be to get all the geeks out of harm's way?
Human rights in China is similar to here in the United States... as long as you stay out of trouble you are largely ignored. Once you do something that brings negative attention to yourself you can find yourself in the "system". A person doesn't want to get to closely exposed to the justice system of the United States, it is not always just.
37 signals would be an obvious example that it can be done, wouldn't they?
This is true if you're looking to build a typical console/PC game, but flash games and social gaming open up new possibilities for game creation and distribution, and therefore for success.

Playfish sold their games and game ideas to the tune of $300MM. Their games are great, really a cut above their peers, but in no universe did they take millions of dollars or three years to make.

And yes, they weren't "game ideas," but they also weren't "scaled down prototypes." Restaurant City is not a scaled down version of some massive, multi-million dollar console game.

Get three or four quality people together -- flash developer, illustrator, and (game) designer -- and you can have a Restaurant City in a month if you hustle.

Anyhow, here on HN I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir, but social gaming offers a new model for distribution more than anything else, so the idea that a game takes eighty people, three years, and $20MM to be successful is precisely the idea that needs to (and will) die.
Example of function pointers in the linux kernel: http://lxr.linux.no/linux+v2.6.32/include/net/sock.h#L297

The cool thing about this is that, if you want to make your kernel socket 'event-driven', you can actually use this method to overwrite them and 'hijack' the callback. Then, when you're doing doing what you wanted to do, you can punt to the original callback (which you, hopefully, saved)

Example of this taking place: http://lxr.linux.no/linux+v2.6.32/drivers/scsi/iscsi_tcp.c#L...
I'm very interested in that sort of business model - selling real or virtual products within a free application. I remember reading an article last year (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/06/eas-new-motto-ple...) wherein the CEO of EA Games claimed not to mind piracy of certain games which had products for sale in-game. Many websites and applications seem to be using it to great success - IMVU and the social site Gaia Online come to mind. Somehow it seems strange to me that users who are so hesitant to buy something outright will pour their money into it when it is ostensibly free.
What conflict of interest does it create for your lawyer to own your stock? Why are accountants prohibited to own?
This is a very old concept. It works wonders for me, unfortunately I can't afford to nap when I want to anymore. And I thought working from home would afford me that luxury...
I wonder if Microsoft hires programmers and Google hires software engineers?

I don't think that's a fair assessment of the developers themselves. I would write it up to differences in product release mentality -- it takes a different mindset to put bits in a box vs a web server.
The author is a very competent Lisper; author of Postmodern:

http://common-lisp.net/project/postmodern/

:-)

Edit: Holly crap, he wrote a few other things as well:

http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/
Jules Verne Was (Almost) Right
Can Google Beat China?
I think the problem is "web applications" and not Python, Ruby, or Java. Mostly.

(If you were writing your web applications in C, you'd have to worry about memory corruption problems AND cross-site request forgeries.)
For the UK it depends whether the warrant was EU-wide or just Italian. If it was Italian, they can get anyone in mainland Europe very easily. However, IIRC, this is due to the Schengen area and the lack of borders. As the UK kind of has a border issue, being an island and all, it's hard to apply the Schengen laws.
I Have Talent
A useful article by Grant Ingersoll, of Mahoot fame.

I am using PostGIS for two current customer projects, but when I have time I'll work through Grant's example from this article.
Brian Williams: Why Jon Stewart Is Good For News
Challenges in Finding Your Partner
Finding the right life partner is not an easy job. It involves number of challenges that you might have to face in order to find that person who would be suitable for you and with whom you would comfortably be able to spend your time and life. It has become difficult as building relationships and maintaining the bond has become more complicated these days. However, it would still be manageable if the challenges involved were handled the best way.
I don't think it's purely fashion. In some ways the EVIL cameras are more functional. Just by being smaller and lighter they're much easier to carry around with you. As Gretzky said, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
Ask HN: How to become an escrow service provider?
How to become an escrow service provider?
Every single Facebook game uses this model.
Can I contact the admin to have my submissions deleted. I really need to.
At advertising school I learned in first grade: "every product has an economical value (to the buyer) as well as an psychological one".
Complaining is easy, but how do we fix it?

Um.. in this case fixing is also pretty easy.Just start with making a curriculum which is more inclined towards experimentation and research. Tell students to find things out by them selves instead of spoon feeding them. Tell them the syntax of the language and then keep lab open (open as in anyone can come in and do programming) so that they can work on interesting things. And above all, GRADE them on these experiments. Start off with keeping them as extra credit and graduate that to making it a part of curriculum.

PS:May be one day I would have money and will open up something like "South Harmon Institute of Technology" from the movie "Accepted". Where mind is allowed to stroll freely in the depths of thoughts not drown in books and formulas.
Also, just being a polyphasic sleeper is risky.
Accountants who own shares in the company would have a vested interest in making it appear better on paper, or more profitable than it actually was; or distorting the companies financial position to an outside party doing due diligence. With a lawyer it's much more complex, but it basically boils down to the question of whether your lawyer is advising you as an independent advisor, or as an interested party who wants a return or is afraid of losing their investment.
They hint that this style might catch on.

Now granted that this is brilliant. Looks horrible or different but brilliant. Lighter, easier to carry, more wind dynamic, covers you completely (xept feet if wind is blowing the rain at angle) protects head from wind (thus warmer) its great, but are we ready to be enclosed?
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It's almost like he's the Michael Jordan of math.
Homicide in Philadelphia as a Networked Process
I've been feeling quite despondent about the general language/framework fanboyism on Hacker News. This comment is a breath of fresh air. Thank you.

I've worked on heavily used programs in several languages (including Lisp) and frankly in my experience the quality of the programmer is way more important than the framework they start from.

Can you provide a source for the 30% figure?
The reviews in the app store for Flower Garden tell another side to this story. For example:

"It costs 2.99 just for the base app. It costs 99 cents for more pots. 99 cents for fertilizer (to get your flowers to grow faster, since some flowers take as long as a week) and now, for the new seeds of winter, you have to pay another 99 cents."

That seems like a legitimate complaint. But his numbers do suggest the IAP helped a lot. I wonder if he could have found an even better balance and eaked out a bit more money.
Ah, the JC.
Ask HN: Do darker pixels use less power?
I am asking because it seems to me that the closer a pixel on an LCD monitor is to off, the less power it should take to display it. If so, sites that are commonly used as homepages and/or just visited often (e.g. google, facebook), could reduce the energy usage of client machines by using a large percentage of darker pixels (e.g. black background, lighter text). Considering the amount of client monitors displaying those sites on a daily basis, couldn't this make a significant difference? background-color: #000; FTW?!
Buy Virtual Corn in Farmville and Donate Real Food to Haiti
A great way to join the cause
Seems to me this discussion is missing one of the main points of the original post: a massive plug for an unfairly under-appreciated book:

> "Let Over Lambda"
> (which is really quite scary to read - I can't say that I understand
> 100% of it - maybe 60% and I am very happy with that level of
> comprehension) -- you end up with an enormously powerful set of
> programming tools unlike anything else out there.

I really like this book too and recommend it.

http://letoverlambda.com/index.cl/toc
For the most part, white American women don't like nerds, which encourages a lot of men to turn into bullshitting, "rain-making" alpha males instead of interesting people who can actually do things.

It's a good thing that such women are obsolete if you live in any reasonably diverse place. Every decent relationship I've ever had has been international or interracial (or both).
I don't get it, though; Haskell appeals to the language geeks, and it's obviously used in industry. I use it in industry, anyway...

Meaningless terms are meaningless. This post is just someone wanting to bash Perl. The author came up with a clever term, and got himself lots of exposure.
To me it still feels like the polite thing to do to follow back if somebody follows me - it is like answering "hello" if somebody says "hello" to you.

No, what you're doing is more like inviting someone to your house for dinner because they said "hello" to you.

At any rate, I've found my life to be drastically simpler than many reports of social-media use, and I attribute it largely to the fact that I only follow/friend/whatever people I know and like.
I think mars is one of those places where if we ever want to get there we will have to come up with a first mission that doesn't pass current safety standards.

I think it's such a big undertaking that to plan for all circumstances wouldn't allow the mission to happen for a long time. Thing's like no rescue if something went wrong and only accounting for one launch window back to earth,
Remodeling Kitchen Ideas
I don't understand those complaints -- if it's too expensive, you won't play it!

It's the developer's responsibility to play around with pricing, etc. to see what maximizes long-term revenue.

(Also, AFAIK, you can't charge less than $0.99 for an in-app purchase, and each IAP has to be identified uniquely.)
haven't had it for long enough , but the bandwidth seems spotty (sometimes 500k, sometimes 2mbit, etc) and seemingly high ssh latency, maybe cpu load on my slice. but other'n that good so far
Research: Even obviously manipulative compliments are remarkably effective
Those two are not related, you could crawl all day long and never serve up a single query.

Also, bing being on a 'growth spurt' is something that I can't find any hard proof for from other sources,

They're pretty steady according to:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bing.com

and

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/bing.com/
The problem really is that every two bit search engine crawler (twiceler, yahoo, bing and so on) will use just as much bandwidth as google does (or more) but will only return a fraction of the number of users of google.

Search engine vendors ought to do something like 80 legs and do something about crawling the web as inefficient as they do today.
Another favorite is simple embedded languages where every statement or function has an entry in a table with a pointer to the function for execution.

That makes for a very simple parser.
I'm sorry, but I just had to:

http://dragvideo.co.cc/?tag=dragster-backhoe
Ask HN: Education Reform Movies?
I feel kinda funny asking this question to this community, but can you all suggest movies that depict educational reforms?

The story behind it is not very fascinating. We have a new robotics club at our college where we also put aside some time for non-technical things. The volunteers hit upon the happy idea that we should make a interesting report to be sent to our university (we are a private one so the office is in the area....somewhere). The title will be "What ideas for educational reforms can a student get by just watching movies". So now we are all looking for movies which we will show to the group and make notes on them and then forge a report on the feasibility and prospects of such reforms in college education. We have two movie lined up the recent hit in India 3 Idiots by Amir khan and one of my favorite Accepted.

I request you all to contribute more movies in this genre. The language must be english and hindi.Dubbed movies will also do...I think.
If there's a geek shortage, why are there so many unemployed and underemployed geeks?
Sleep cycles are already messed up -- so this is a good way to make the best of a bad situation.
I'd like to congratulate you on your C function pointer hello world.

Not how he avoided using & or deref in the first snippet.
> I think lots of people just like carrying around a big black camera with their long kit zoom lens on it.

You have no idea :) I got my first DSLR back in September of last year, and I've taken it with me to about a dozen holiday dinner meetups and vacation trips to touristy places like the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas since. If I try to use my iPhone or a P&S (as a backup camera), a lot of people end up walking through my picture or can be really rude about giving me a little space to move around and take pictures.

But....when you've got a comparatively huge DSLR (well, my D5000 isn't even huge, but it looks intimidating enough with even the 18-55mm kit lens, let alone my even-bigger-with-hoods 55-200 or 12-24), people around you tend to give you a little space and courtesy to let you take your pictures to your heart's content. I also don't get as many people asking me to take pictures for them, cause they assume big camera must equal pro photographer that should be left alone. Not that I mind doing that for others, but sometimes it's inconvenient.

So I did find it a bit odd the article went out of the way to mention that DSLR's scream "look at me", because that's practically a selling point to a lot of people. :P
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Ah, I was hoping that the link was about the joy of film photography.
non-modified humans in space is a waste of time and money. space science should all be poured into transhumanism.
This looked very interesting, so we coded up an app based on some of the comments - it's at findmycofounder.com, more details on Twitter (@FindMyCofounder). We figured we could launch this in 24 hours or so, do try it out in a couple of hours.
PSD to HTML Conversions Can Be Challenging
f you think designing the layout and designing the web pages are difficult tasks converting the designs from PSD format to HTML format can be highly challenging too. You need a lot of experience to convert the PSD files to HTML or XHTML format. If the PSD to HTML, PSD to XHTML,
I think he means he would like a boolean response to "Do you know what this is?" not, "please give me whatever information you have in your cache".

Although I can see it the latter way, as well, and it's reasonable to ask for an ebay clone if you can poop one out for $200. There's a lot of stuff I'd buy for $200 if it could be had. But just because I'd buy it at $200 doesn't imply that I'm willing to pay several times that to have one hand crafted, which appears to have been the outcome with the billable time.
I've always hated this attempted separating of the roles of programmer and software engineer. You are taking people best suited to programming and giving them the job of creating a specification which is then given to lower paid code monkeys proficient in Java to churn it out.

I'd kind of cheapens the craft when people look at it in this way, my AI lecturer last year was describing the different roles in creating an AI system and saying that that the job you want is a knowledge engineer is the position you want and the programmer is just a nobody who translates it all into code.
I highly recommend everyone, who's interested in music influence on humans read "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain" http://www.amazon.com/Musicophilia-Tales-Music-Revised-Expan... It's full of great examples of medical cases, explanations and interesting theories.
What do you compile your haXe to?
"This is one of the reasons why the average processing time for a patent is roughly three years." [emphasis added]

For an average patent, what percentage of those 3 years is spent on printing, scanning and entering? If it's one day, then that's the maximum time that could be saved. Profile twice, optimize once.
One of the commenters makes an interesting point: is Jon Stewart doing what he does because he believes in journalistic integrity, or because he's an entertainer and this is just an act?

I hope for the former, I really do. Maybe I'm not cynical enough.
I think that you don't often find both software engineers and programmers in the same organization, if that organization subscribes to this distinction. Either you have only software engineers, or you have programmers + software architects.
Isn't that what Causes is for?
I almost said as stupid as trying to drag race a backhoe, I decided to change it when I realized it would probably be cool. I'm glad I changed it, and dragster backhoe is as cool as I thought.
This idea has come up a while ago and has been shot down. Research suggests that it would not reduce energy consumption. Here is Google's take on it: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/is-black-new-green.ht...

If you feel strongly about it you can always use: http://www.blackle.com/
The dangers of a high-information diet
I find a flaw in your reasoning sir, you are making a rather large assumption that in pair programming both the participants must have same set of skills. Its rather the opposite I think, they must actually have mutually exclusive skill sets. Like one should have a problem solving mind(navigator) and the other should have a solution implementing mind (driver). Thus if they both work parallel they would actually take more time in solving the same problem rather than if they work in series. For an example if I want to make bio informatics program I would rather be a driver and code and have a navigator who has skills in the other parts of the program.
Because there's a difference between a geek and an employable geek.

There, I said it, it's not going to be a popular opinion, especially since I'm a Canadian expat in the USA "stealing your jerbs". I know many others like me, who are being well above average rates to work in this country, whose very employment carries steep legal and bureaucratic overhead for our employers. Yet Canadians, Indians, Europeans, etc etc, are still being imported by the planeloads. I know for a fact that our HR department scours American schools for qualified graduates constantly, yet we can't fill spaces quick enough.

I've thought about this some, and my conclusion is that a lot of American geeks just don't work very hard - you have the people who hang out on Digg/Reddit all day. Yeah, they're geeks, but how many languages do they know? Can they build a site from back to front? Do they know their algorithms? People on HN need to realize that they're a vanishingly small minority of the set of all geeks, and that as a crew are in general much more ambitious and capable than most. There's a long way between "I like computers" and "I'm willing to pour ungodly amounts of time into learning computers". For every geek who takes the time to learn all the toolkits and languages to get employed, there are 500 others who couldn't be bothered, and will complain endlessly about undeserving foreigners stealing jobs rightfully theirs.

In other words, for every geek who knows Python inside and out, is up to date on all the latest web technologies, has experience building large scalable systems, etc etc... there are 500 others who can only write VB, and will endlessly complain that they're not employed, or that they're not being paid enough. Unfortunately no "geek employment" number will ever be able to separate the two.
I don't understand your retort about plug differences being a "North American problem." Just as an American needs adapters in Europe, a European needs adapters in the U.S. Not to mention that everyone is still potentially screwed across most of South America and Africa, and, indeed, most of Asia.
How trivial are the placement of the payload and its subsequent retrieval?
"But reusing the old label of "Communist China" misses the mark. I don't know what a better label would be."

They've created something new, and it seems to be very powerful. By allowing some small-scale free-market enterprise at the local level, but keeping iron-fisted control at the top, they seem to be maximizing their competitiveness wrt the rest of the world, in a no-holds-barred fashion.

Our Western system is in some ways inherently too fair to compete effectively with this new scenario. Not sure what that means but I suspect it isn't great if you're a big fan of western ideals, most particularly the idea that the rights of individuals should be paramount.

I sometimes wonder if Asian cultures simply don't believe that the way we do. They seem to have a bit more of a 'hive mind' thing going on. Europe and USA have had to deal with a crazy mix of cultures and ethnicities; not so much in Asia.