skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A curious result: Using four-wide SIMD instructions gives a mere 40% speed-up compared to the scaler case. I wonder if this is actually a net loss.

- CPU's are power limited today (high-confidence)

- Using the SIMD units vice scalar units increases power consumption (medium confidence - certainly some arithmetic-limited algorithms consume much more power with SSE)

Conclusion - the incremental impact on total system throughput is negative for this speed boost? I wonder how much of a raw throughput improvement is needed to justfiy using the SSE units' increased power consuption.
My impression, and it could be wrong, is that China does make the stainless steel spheres for most cheap pens, they just don't make the "high quality" high precision spherules made out of other more expensive alloys.

Evenso, I think this is like someone bashing Specialized, Bianchi, Gary Fisher, etc., for using Shimano derailleurs.
Due process has been dying a slow death on the other side of the pond for some time now. The UK has abolished the prohibition on double jeopardy, the right to remain silent, and, in most cases, the right to a jury trial. They also don't have an exclusionary rule, so the police are free to rely on illegally-obtained evidence in court. Lots of things that require judicial warrants, like communication intercepts, in the US can be done in the UK with only administrative approval.
Depending on many things, possibly yes.

However it depends on the solution, process, timing, temperature and skill of the operator.

Wet plate looks amazing, because the depth of field is much smaller, and the colours that the process is sensitive to is very tight. (I think its blue/UV but I could be wrong. I also suspect its very dependent on the process.)

Decent 35mm film is 8 mp (in movies at least) 70mm (IMAX) is about 32 mp (the 80mm panavision on hateful 8 is possibly more, depending on the film stock)

so scaling that up, nievely you can see its possibly much much more. But, modern film is light years removed from wet plate.
Don't forget Homeland, brought to you by the same folks.
Try mounting your piano frame on a drill press or a lathe :)

There are actually magnetic drill presses specifically for the purpose that you somehow stick to a piece of nearby cast iron. tricky to get them lined up exactly with the old bore.
Only if you have a rubbish washing machine that spits out very wet clothes. Mine is a front loading ASKO which spins the clothes to the point of being touch dry. I give each t-shirt a whip-shake and dry them in a cool tumble dryer.
> Never thought so many people are still running older android versions

Well just to chip in, the last stable Cyanogenmod version for my device is based on Android 4.4. There are some nightlies, but never having updated to those (expecting a stable at some point) and being quite happy with my current OS, I'd rather not update.
I am totally fascinated by SDFs. I can't help but wonder if we're not done with meshes, and everything will just be clouds of SDFs in the near future. Media Molecule's new engine has already gone there, and it looks incredible. It's a fascinating convergence of particles and polygons. And the approach jibes well with fast raytracing/raymarching... It just seems like a much richer primitive to start with than a triangle.

That said, I've only just started reading about it, so I am quite likely full of shit.
The title is wrong – it actually uses Tesseract to do the OCR.

Call me negative, but I don't see the big leap here, it's just a simple demo to recognize text in an almost perfect input picture. It uses the Emgu CV, self description: "Emgu CV is a cross platform .Net wrapper to the OpenCV image processing library.".
I know this was geared towards a woman's perspective. But living life on your terms own terms is everyone's right. So good advice for everyone
I thought this until I started using a good type system. Java-style type systems don't replace many tests, but have you worked in Haskell / Scala / similar?
30% of SpeedCurve customers use User Timing. We're lucky to have clients that are so focused on performance.
Nils are only a problem when you're dealing with unclean data. The only way to eradicate the issue is to only deal with clean data. Otherwise you have to code the system to be able to handle it, whether through the type system or in another way. A type system helps, but so does discipline. I'll trade the productivity gains of dynamic typing over a babysitter any day.

A type system is just OOP with added math. The benefits don't outweigh the hassle. I've tried Crystal. Did not like. It was the language that taught me that there's more to Ruby than nice syntax.
We had water anarchy; it looked like huge polluters dumping into rivers and waterways, and the rest of us suffering (and still suffering, like the communities of Appalachia whose land will remain poisoned from past pollution for generations more). Notice how rivers don't generally catch on fire anymore since the Clean Water Act?
As I was reading this I had a bleak vision of being in a meeting with a bunch of alpha types all trying to out "power pose" each other
تور ارزان کیش ورود ۱۰ بهمن در هتل سارا کیش
DDT. We were in sight of eliminating malaria when it was banned.
It can make debugging harder because "impossible" things happen - when a variable is annotated as a string you may not think to consider the possibility that it's actually an integer. But yes, optional typing is mostly just useless rather than actively harmful.
But the strategy is the hardest part...
Yes, this is the other side of it. Make the hours you do have as productive as possible. Efficient problem solving and creative design (not just marathon coding) are also about getting your mind and body right. Get on consistent sleep patterns, eat healthy, exercise. Also, don't underestimate the importance of downtime for problem solving and planning. Bouncing off of another post from today, if you get the planning and design part right first, you can save yourself a lot of time in the implementation stages (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10963229). It's also easier to know where your progress is toward a specific goal in concrete terms. That also makes it easier psychologically to take breaks and enjoy life a bit.

I would add to this too, a little life-hacking: Try to design your daily workflow (things that take time such as cooking, dishes, etc.) using the same strategies you use in programming. Modular food strategies so that you can cook once (on the weekend for example) and put together various meals by adding only little things here and there that round out the nutrition and quantity throughout the week with minimal dishes to clean after. Don't underestimate the efficiency of a good blender and protein shakes!

Get the right tools for the job too, maybe a standing desk to improve focus?

Lastly, I would add make sure you are picking projects that you find important and are passionate about. Thinking about them wakes you up. Aim for importance to you, not just # of commits. There will always be people who just work faster then you, or where money is not a problem for them, or where what seems like their hobbies are very tied into their actual work and the two overlap and they just seem more productive. That is where you have to focus on importance and not breadth but depth of where you spend you time.
Ask HN: Value proposition of a combo plan of online whiteboard with stylus
I'm doing some product research for an idea of an online whiteboard.

From what I've learned so far from talking to devs and other technical people is that using a mouse or touch is really undesirable. It's just not close enough to the physical experience of using a real marker and physical whiteboard to feel productive and effective.

There are some high end solutions out there like digital drawing tablets, but I'm thinking about a solution for people not willing to go that route because their usage does not warrant the cost.

The solution I'm thinking of involves a plan where you pay for an initial short term plan that gives you an excellent online whiteboard application AND throws in a stylus as part of it. That way you get as close to the experience of actually writing on a physical whiteboard.

Once the initial plan is up, you keep the stylus, and you can choose to keep using the application with less features without charge, or else, pay for a cheaper subscription for a fuller feature set.

Would that be something of interest to you tablet owners out there? I'd appreciate to hear your thoughts.

PS - It's also worth mentioning that there is software out there like Inklet, that can turn your mac trackpad into a pen tablet, so you could conceivably also use the application with the stylus on your laptop.
10 Concierge MVPs a Non-Coder Could Build Today
Age Gracefully with These Wonderful Tips to Help You
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwest#Refusal_of_NSA_surveilla...
No, I don't think so. Wealth is part of it, sure. But so is intelligence. So is looks. So is ambition. You're focusing on wealth because it's the easiest thing to measure, but wealth, especially wealth alone, isn't destiny.

Everybody knows people who grew up poor and "made it", and also people who had all the advantages but can't seem to make anything of themselves.
Different, not same. All computer languages must be Algol.
For the record, I've never really had a problem with GHC having long compilation times. If anything it's remarkably fast for what it does (IMO, it's the closest thing to a "sufficiently smart compiler" currently available).
Hi,

Actually, the input picture is anything but "perfect". For example the German letters ö,ä,ü and 'ß' are often hard to scan.

Of course it's a demo. That's the subtitle of the project. :)

Kind regards,
It feels intuitive that torture works.

Even I think that, even though with sufficient amount of torture, you can get a guy to say anything you want to hear.
I think most people who don't believe in climate change don't believe in it because of the amount of money and political power that is devoted to discrediting it. Let's be honest here, most people on _either_ side of the fence (full disclosure: including me) don't actually read climate research, they're only aware of what gets covered in the press, which tends to be the research that's more apocalyptic and less focused on model adjustment, etc.

This is only really an issue because of the way that climate change has been unnecessarily politicised, though. We see dramatic stories reported on from other areas of research ("Hey, we found planet X!"), and yet there hasn't been a huge amount of effort spent on discrediting astronomical research, so the public accepts that the peer review process has worked and there's no controversy ("Scientists are all just elitist liberals, where's the research from conservatives that says planet X doesn't exist?").
Ephemerons
"like food-to-code machines"

Great phrase - I'll be using that !
While "easy" probably is not the best word for this, I do think that it's important for founders to remember that strategy is important. It can be easy to think of "the struggle" as a badge of honor, but often if we take a step back and think about the strategy. We can be smarter with our time and get a better ROI on our time.

As a founder myself, I've struggled with getting caught up in too much execution. It's important to take time to lift your head up and see where you're steering the ship, and seeing if there's a path of less resistance :).
Googled:

http://openbci.com/forum/index.php?p=/discussion/155/compari...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_consumer_brain%E...

An excerpt from the forum post seems to point out that openbci uses the most advanced amp:

Regarding data quality, I don't know of any other consumer
grade equipment that has the research / commercial grade amp
we are using, the TI ADS1299. 24 bit samples, programmable
gain and sample rate, delta-sigma ADC design, sensor location
flexibility, on-board programmability. Much of the consumer gear
has fixed 10-20 locations and only a few sensors, closed source approach, etc.
Typo in my post, too late to edit now. Meant to say "write this type of software". As a developer, not writing any code would put a serious dent in my paycheck. ;)
The Python PEP 0484 approach, unchecked type hints, is strange, and probably a bad idea. There are good arguments for entirely dynamic typing, or entirely static typing, or optional static typing. Those have all been used successfully in other languages. But optional static typing without checking is new. (It may have been tried in some forgotten language, but it never made it into a mainstream one.)
This is likely to create bugs, rather than fix them. The type you see looking at the code may not be the type being used there. This will confuse maintenance programmers. Worse, the compiler itself can't rely on the type info for optimization purposes. This limits optimizations in PyPy. Type checking is supposed to be performed by third party programs.

The syntax is backwards compatible, and this doesn't fit the language well. Forward references to types are handled via a really tacky kludge: "When a type hint contains names that have not been defined yet, that definition may be expressed as a string literal, to be resolved later." So, sometimes you write

def foo(item: 'Tree'):

instead of

def foo(item: Tree):

It's not stated in what scope 'Tree' is evaluated. So don't reuse type names.

Some type info is in comments:

with frobnicate() as foo: # type: int
# Here foo is an int

Also, Python is getting header files (called "stub" files), like C. In most modern languages, such as Go and Rust, that's all handled automatically by storing type info in the object files. But in future Python, that will be manual.

There's function overloading, sort of. There's "@overload", but it doesn't really do anything at run time yet.

This whole thing is a collection of hacks in search of an architecture. This is the messiest type system of any mainstream language. Well designed type systems are hard enough. This is not one of them.

If this hadn't come from Python's little tin god, it would have been laughed out of the Python community. Stop him before he kills again.
A module is already scoped in node.js. It would be nice to have scoped require in the browser too, instead of just global import.

Splitting up a program, or module, into (more) modules does not make it simpler, rather contrary, it makes it more complex! Unless it's a fully decoupled abstraction reusable in other projects.

An example of require-ing within individual functions: A function to send notifications to e-mail or SMS ... It makes more sense to require the SMTP or SMS module in those functions, then somewhere else.
It's perfect from an OCR point of view:
- Perfectly upright, no visible rotation
- Sharp, not remotely blurry
- No visible brightness/color gradient (as is often the case with pictures taken by mobile phones.)

It contains umlauts (and i'm not sure whether the tesseract training data for german includes those, but i'm quite certain it does), but that doesnt disqualify the image.

I was just saying hey, it's not using openCV but tesseract, so the title is wrong.. and i stand by that statement. I appreciate the work you do and i was exclusively referring to the title here. have a good day ;)
It's a really sad situation for developers IMO. Hopefully google will do something to fix this issue in the future.
This is just moving the goalposts. Google Docs doesn't prevent this and nobody considers it a bug. Heck, a single-user textarea box doesn't prevent you from making this sort of logic error yourself (I do it all the time) and nobody considers it a bug.

"Robust" and "self-healing" in this case are with respect to network faults and browser bugs that cause bizarre behavior that can confuse users.
You Don't Have a Productivity Problem. You Have a Priority Problem
A related quote you might also enjoy: "A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems" - Paul Erdos
This is a dangerous trend (especially since I've noticed other articles questioning a University education altogether).

I was first alerted to it by (of all places) The magic-the-gathering professor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcQ4KIOqNic

(bonus if you're looking for some great magic-the-gathering videos)
- Work only on what you want, when you want to (as a rule, exceptions have to be made)
- No TV, no (general) news
- No kids, no girlfriend
- Socialize mostly around projects (not neccesarily dayjob related)
There are some tradeoffs to the above, one could say. Staying healthy is also a challenge.

But don't worry about 'being one of those people', just try to do what like/love. And if you don't know what that is yet, find out!
Thanks for the feedback. The new version should be available now, could you try again? :)
That's actually a great point. Thinking back to all of the TV shows and movies about crime, it is a very common theme to have a character get off on a technicality or have the police complain "we know this guys guilty, but we just can't get the evidence".

This goes far beyond what the CIA is influencing. It's just a common theme in crime dramas.

What's the last major motion picture where the focus was on the importance of the rights of people accused of crimes? I can't think of many and the ones I can think of are the documentaries about actual cases of abuse.
The people who were arrested, as per the article in discussion?
Down http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:R2PmRfU...
But there are some simple tricks without much drawbacks. One of them is to write/publicize everything you do. Don't consider something done until you've released and documented it.
John Carmack brought along a workstation on his honeymoon so that he could keep coding. I can't find the exact quote, but I recall him saying that he spent so many years coding every day that he was worried he might suffer from withdrawl if he had a week away.

I think the lesson here is that some people put their craft at the center of their life and make it the focus of every single day.
Running very smoothly for me. Tested on Chrome 47, Win 10 with 970 strix card.
I love programming, really and since i was 6 and now i'm 38. I work as a freelance developer and i love it. My job is passion and then a job. But i know life is not just this so i won't give my life to computer programming: 8 full hours (really full ;) ) a day are enough to be a talented developer, work and create something really important in your job.

But life is not job or software development and you shouldn't sacrifice it to computer programming even if it is a passion and you love doing it.

One day you will leave this world: will you regret you should have worked more or will you regret you didn't live your life?
Thanks for asking this. I have always wondered the same and I look forward to the answers.

I am not as prolific as many of the people you are probably thinking of but I am slightly above average. Here are a few things that WORKED FOR ME:

- Learn & use GTD - life changing. I use omnifocus but you can do it with pen & paper

- Automate as much as you can - checkout keyboard maestro and many other tools

- Use your calendar efficiently - block time for reading, playing, OSS or whatever

- wake up early

- excercise (i don't do too much but the days I do, I feel great)

- keyboard shortcuts for everything

- look for productivity tips for whatever tools you are using.

- turn off facebook and distracting material

- monitor your time - I use rescue time

- outsource as much as you can. I use fancyhands.com to handle things like calling the phone company, cable company, making appointments and so on. It saved me tons of hours of BS tasks

- I have had some success with the pomodora technique as well, give it a shot.

- Don't work more than 8 hours a day

- Work from home as much as you can

- don't burn out

- for side projects, blogging, oss or whatever it is you want to do, i find it better to do 1 or 2 hours a day than try to crank 8 hours on sunday.

- spend time with friends and family - it's amazing how your productivit improves when you are refreshed

- take a power nap or naps

- sleep well

I am married with infant twins so I try to be as efficient as possible with the limited time I have infront of the computer. 1 hour of highly focused work yields more output than 4 hours of distracted, half-ass work.

forgive the self promotion but I think it is relevant. I put together a free ebook about mac productivity tips - might not be as helpful for techies like you but you might at least learn a trick or 2 or find an app that you never heard off - www.bestmactips.com
The Internet crowdsourced an entirely new kind of face wash
Indeed. Hope the government educates them at least on how to prevent pregnancy and also provides the resources.

In reality man should also be educated and provided with lots of condoms.
Marketers: Personalization will become a science this year
That movie and American Sniper were pretty blatant attempts.

I'm okay with say Die Hard as that's entertainment but these go far beyond with the veneer of "truth"
There was a retired physicist that refurbished an old aerial reconnaissance camera and painstakingly built a hybird film/digital workflow that resulted in claimed resolution equivalent to several gigapixels. I can't find his original site anywhere, but here's a Popular Mechanics write up of it:

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2005-10/sharpest-image

It's too bad because the original site had lots of technical detail and was a good lesson in understanding resolution limiting factors at each step of the image chain (e.g. effect of air density changes on sharpness of distant objects when shooting landscapes).

Update: hooray for archive.org. Check it out here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060218113103/http://www.gigapx...
You're correct in attacking the math the authors use. It's clear they are bending the math to fit the phenomena. However, that doesn't invalidate the hypothesis.

This paper appears heavily influenced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: systematic failure, bounded vs unbounded variance, (more data) => (more noise) => (more spurious relationships), natural vs artificial systems, and even the reference to the heuristics of ancient cultures.

It looks like the authors were trying to apply math to observed phenomena. They may not have the right math to make it work-so they fudged it a bit.

Nassim talks about similar phenomena here:

http://arxiv.org/a/taleb_n_1.html
In certain areas, but resistance to the chemical was observed even in early usage. It's highly unlikely malaria would've been eliminated by DDT use in the long run.
Providing quality water is a solved problem, but only if you can count on the humans involved.

Hell, seven people died in Canada when the local purification plant was run by a couple incompetent brothers [1].

"The Walkerton Public Utilities Commission operators engaged in a host of improper operating practices, including failing to use adequate doses of chlorine, failing to monitor chlorine residuals daily, making false entries about residuals in daily operating records, and misstating the locations at which microbiological samples were taken."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkerton_E._coli_outbreak
Attention grabbing headline aside, a very interesting read. A good reminder that there are viable treatment options for severe anxiety.
I was answering this

> Going to prison in Saudi Arabia for being an open atheist in Denmark?

So no, is not like going to prison in Saudi Arabia for being atheist in Denmark
'Citizen scientists' use drones to map El Nino flooding
Imagine people in computer science or mathematics held the same attitude, especially in artificial intelligence/machine learning.

"Hi, I'm a patent attorney. What's going on in this thread?"