skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I saw this ad in SF a few days ago, and had similar thoughts.

The ad is specifically showing a point-and-shoot camera, not an SLR.

Point-And-Shoot cameras might be better than most cell phone cameras now, but I'm not convinced they are better enough to justify carrying around an extra device. For most people a cameraphone is good enough, and if you want better quality, the step up to a point-and-shoot isn't really worth it. If you want better quality, go for an SLR.

There's a saying among photographers that "The best camera is the one you have with you." I have an iPhone, a point-and-shoot, and an SLR. I can't remember the last time I took out the point-and-shoot. I use the SLR when I know I'm going to be taking a lot of photos. And I use the iPhone camera constantly.

I think panasonic is mistaken if they think cameraphones are a fad, or that this advertising will make people jump to using their point-and-shoots.

Instead, why don't they embrace the trend, and work with the phone manufacturers? Why not talk to Nokia, or HTC, and say "You guys concentrate on the phone part, leave the camera to us." Put in quality optics, and advertise the phone with "Camera by Panasonic"
Wow, that's a terrific article. Even if I don't agree with 100% of it, I really like his no-BS delivery.
Looking for an open-source web design
Long time listener, first time caller.<p>I'm looking for a simple, open source design for a small web project I'm doing as a hobby. So I wanted to ask if anyone knows of any good sites for this kind of thing. I've looked at www.opendesigns.org and a couple others, does anyone have any more?
The truly messed up thing about this - that we should be very angry about - is the U.S. Government is helping out in the cover up. Yes, companies are supposed to spin and do damage control. I guess getting the coast guard to give you hand is probably a pretty effective way to do that.

Also, it should be noted that print media has been in a downward spiral for the last four years and no longer has the reporters, photographers or resources they did five years ago, let alone 21 years ago.

New media to the rescue? Where's the bloggers an community journalists covering this?
In the last six months
-Knewton raised $12.5MM
-Eleutian Technology raised $10MM
-Orbis Education raised $8MM
-LiveMocha raised $8MM
-Kakai raised $7.5MM
-Moonshoot raised $6.6MM
-Cramster raised $6MM

That's about $100MM in the last six months alone and this is an industry where there are a number of fundings that never get announced. Again, I agree with your main premise, just not sure the data is as dire as you suggest.
even if you do manage to lie successfully, it still makes a tough situation. you might over-inflate your salary and discount yourself as a potential hire altogether.

i know a guy whose first job as a high school intern paid more than most people's career salaries do. and once he got out of that job, he could never get another job at any place that asked for previous pay rates. he earned too much previously, and not even retail work at the local mall would hire him. he kept getting told that his previous salary was too high and they couldn't afford to hire him. he eventually stopped reporting that job experience altogether.
> Having held an HTC Hero and an iPhone, I'm here to say that they're not wrong. Those cameras suck as cameras.

I disagree. There are two sayings about photography I've heard a few times. 1) The best camera is the one that you have with you. 2) The novice photographer wishes he/she had a better camera, but the experienced photograph wishes he/she had better lighting.

Re #1, I have a high end point and shoot that's really nice. But I almost never use it now because my iPhone 3GS is always with me. I find that some of the best photograph opportunities come when you least expect it.

Re: #2, most of photography is lighting and and composition. If you have crappy light (that includes using a flash) it doesn't matter if you have some $10,000 camera and lens. If you take photos with good light and have an eye for composition it won't matter to much which camera you use.

Now saying that, some phone cameras really do lack in resolution. My iPhone 3GS has decent resolution, but iPhones before that take washed out looking photos. Of course there's other limitations like no zoom, you can't print out a huge poster version of your photos, and it can't do more "advaced" things like long exposures. But I and many others have taken decent looking photos on iPhones. It's Good Enough.

Edit: One more thing. I like the challenge of taking photos on a simple camera. You don't get distracted by messing with features and have to kinda learn what makes a photo good.
Looking at the app in question (http://www.groundhog.com.au/myframe/), it is pretty easy to see what is so "widget"-y about this app, and the way in which it "creates its own desktop". There shouldn't be any mystery for the developer based on Apple's statements.
Israel Using Net To Protect Its Image In Wake Of Flotilla Disaster
I don't think anyone is arguing that cameraphones will replace SLRs though.

The ad was advertising point and shoot cameras. Most of which have tiny sensors. They might be good quality, but only marginally better than the best of the cameraphones right now.

Do you really think the quality of a point of shoot is so much better than a cameraphone that you would carry one around all the time?

Or would you rather carry a phone with a decent camera, and take out your DSLR when you need better photos?
Except for device and carrier restrictions, there seems, to me, no reason you couldn't come up with a bluetooth-or-similar-based standard protocol to piggyback onto your cellphone and do some pre-defined things with your photos on the web.
Perhaps not moral fiber - but there's a self-serving element to doing good. I imagine rich, successful people like this guy here care about how they will be remembered.

After all, nobody wants to get his grave pissed on after he's dead. Nobody wants his children to bear the burden of having their father remembered as a parasitic burden on society.

Even in a completely selfish frame of reference, once you've reached some limit of wealth higher-order goals like this should start kicking in.
I'm sure you recognize the scale of numbers, but as currently suggested the current surface area for the spill is:

157,168 square km

So if you think there's a way to rent a plane to avoid FAA regulations over this enormous area, or bribe fisherman to do this and potentially risk their lives, go ahead.
Startups Stay Inside to Find Location’s Next Big Opportunity
i understand the purpose, of course. but if i were job hunting, unless there were something special about a particular job, i wouldn't even bother to negotiate with them if they low-balled me. i'd just move on.

and thus, the employer loses out on talent unless they're providing something special on their own. its more lose-lose.

of course, unless you're not looking for talent, and you're looking for someone who would be okay with taking a job under market.
I think you made the same points as me, but put it much better.

The purchasing jump for consumers is going to be cameraphone -> dslr, not cameraphone -> point and shoot
"Credit amounts will be based on your account activity as of May 31, 2010. iTunes Store credit amounts will be rounded up to the nearest $1 for refunds under $10, or to the nearest $5 for refunds greater than $10."

Pardon my ignorance, I'm neither Lala or iTunes' user, is this rounding thing is common?
I figure, either you can be part of the problem, or part of the solution.

False dichotomy.

It's so easy to just sit back and complain about the way things are all the time, but it's much more interesting to actually try to change them.

It may be more interesting to try, but it may not be any more productive.

More specifically, the most significant problems I might sit back and complain about are ones that can't be solved with software[1], let alone custom software.

The notion of targetting municipal government is suspect to me, as it reeks of the enterprise software model. I may be misinterpretting what they're trying to do, but, if not, it will be threatened by the same dangers, which means that 7 months isn't nearly enough.

[1] ..or any technology by itself. I occasionally complain that programmers have a tendency to believe that all (technical) problems can be solved in software, but this goes well beyond that.
This does indeed sound a lot like the Broken Window Fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window): despite the money changing hands, having to pay to have a broken window fixed, is not good for the economy, because now people are forced to pay for costs that serve no benefit.
Sorry, I think Perl crept into my brain.
BSD for Linux Users (2005)
Good point over the last six months. Still, that's why I said averaging $100 mln per year over the last 5 years. For example, last year was an incredibly challenging year for everyone but the investment in education was really low and counts for that 5 year average. Regardless, you can look back over the years before and see that it hovered around $100 mln average per year.

Stepping back, your last 6 months point is why I wrote the article -- you can see that VC investments are accelerating, and it's only going to get better for guys like you and me with education startups.
Blowout: The Deepwater Horizon Disaster (cbsnews.com)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1393992
Based on my experience I think that's easily explained by population density, amount of space available per capita, etc. If anything I see hackeresque spirit as more pronounced in rural areas. They aren't forced by necessity into a shared space like those in the city though, and maybe they don't consider the benefits of a shared space being that important.

The Europe situation seems more interesting. Look at the numbers(per capita) for The Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, and then France. The first three have many hacker spaces per capita. France is much lower. I'd expect that(from past experience), but don't have any good ideas about why it is.
They are doing it: http://grassrootsmapping.org/gulf-oil-spill/
Problem is: soon the phone cameras will be good enough for most people. They don't need to get as good as real cameras to replace them.

The ad campaign targets average consumers and not the professionals.

Digital cameras replaced a lot of film cameras before the digital cameras were just as good. Geeks overestimate the required quality level: mp3 became popular at 128 kbs (didn't wait for 256 kbs). YouTube became popular while having worse quality than normal TV.
(and this is even without considering the quality of the "photographer")

So yeah, today it means it. But Dave talks about the future.
Great summary - I'm with you right up to the point where you think less monetary freedom is actually good because it will force the Eurozone to "tighten its belt". Miracles do happen, but just consider the political animosity already bubbling up in the richest and poorest countries.

Politicians will give the "belt tightening" bit a try; no one wants to be seen as acting in bad-faith towards European solidarity, but as soon as their electorate bubbles over it's peace out. Either the richest few or poorest few countries will drop out of the Euro; I'd be extremely surprised if it maintains the composition of today.
One more point: from that same Berkery Noyes presentation, there is a table that has VC investments by category. The smallest one that shows up as a category (for 2008, a fantastic year until the fall) is Healthcare Services at $191 million that year.

That drives part of the "around $100 mln a year over the last 5 years" point too, since it's safe to assume that Education is somewhere under that amount. Though to be fair, disagreeing about whether it's an average of $150 mln or $100 mln over the past 5 years does get away from the larger point, which I think we agree on.
Please fix this headline, which currently reads (in its entirety) "tl;dr. Anyone?". The first 5-or-so submission guidelines (see link below) are about how to title articles here.
First off BP has an overriding obligation to its stockholders. Second, BP has a PR playbook for this scenario that is based upon decades of experience. For the moment BP's money is making the rules.
I liked it. It was much better than "Cats". I'm going to read it again and again.
Pixel Qi: transforms tablets & portables into a Kindle
Here's the most graphic images I've seen, but they're over a week old and pretty tame compared to Valdez.

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/05/oil_reaches_louisia...
It's somewhat burried in the article but it is at least claimed they weren't so much eavesdropping as they were "re-stealing" documents which had already been stolen (by Chinese hackers).

It's still questionable but in a more muddy category...
The Best Money Sites on the Web
Notifo Forwarder: Growl for Windows
growl:forwarder*http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3109213/Notifo-Forwarder.xml

HN won't let me submit the growl:forwarder link here. Copy/paste it and it'll install itself if you have GfW installed. Enjoy! Feedback is appreciated. :)
True, unless you can't pay your bills. I took my job before last in that situation. It was for a C# job maintaining a legacy app for $45k/yr. We were literally selling stuff to pay our bills at that point, so I had to take it. It turned out to be a great job with a great employer. I left to join a startup but then back a year later when they offered me a 50% salary increase to come back.
The 'sell my stuff to pay bills' phase was during the height of the meltdown; I was literally applying for janitorial jobs we were so desperate at that point.
same here. looks like it'll be uploaded on friday
Cyan text on gray background?
Are you kidding?

Edit: The content looks good, though, when read through http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
Some people are not meant to work for others. That doesn't say much about the company. I bet most HN-er would love to have the experience to work at Google or Apple.
it's too complicated / how do you use it?, let me know what it does within 5 seconds or fewer....
Twitter Announces "Snowflake" for Unique Tweet IDs
You're asking how to meet geek friends (with the help of internet - in a forum full of geeks...)

Doesn't the answer lie in the question?
Seriously, whats your deal man?
Who's funding these entrepreneurial journalists?

"The truth" is worth a lot of gratitude and 0 actual dollars.
What stops you from using Rhapsody, then?
Coder.io
How Sociaholic.com created their intro video {Video Interview}
Among many other tips that Greg (Sociaholic's founder) gives us.
Someone start TLDR News?
Take back delicious if you can and make it better. pls.
It really, really bothers me when people use "tl;dr" on HN. I see it more and more each day as people cross-over from Reddit (or worse, Digg) to this site. I feel like every time I see it I have to train them to not. I would be tickled pink if there was a filter that would auto-remove such comments and submissions from this site. It encourages and enables laziness, which is something this community does not need.

Edit: This was about the previous title to this submission. The submitter fixed it.
They can threaten journalists with arrest pretty easily. Tresspassing. They've got lawyers and you don't.
This is not exactly what you're after, but it's interesting: http://code.google.com/p/bwapi/ . There's also a SC bot competition, which you can read about at http://eis.ucsc.edu/StarCraftAICompetition
You're right in your final concession, but this is where the weakening of mainstream media is most obvious. My guess is there are fewer reporters per publication on the ground with smaller expense accounts and fewer overall resources than what was available to their brethren covering Valdez in 1989.

As a result they have to write whiny stories about how they can't get access when the story they wanted to have falls through. Newsweek should have left those pages blank with the words "oil spill photo spread here" instead.
Education is just a vast market. Based on his audience, Patrick's Bingo software is essentially in the Education market. My small company that tries to predict college admissions can also be seen as part of the Education market. The landscape of things that qualify as "Education" is quite broad and, at places (e.g., U of Phoenix; Kaplan), quite deep.
When Will I Be Mayor?
Oh god. I totally should.

I can't think of anything to do with it that doesn't turn into Delicious or Reddit or something. Any ideas?
Here are some lecture slides from a neat course at MIT:

http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/sp09/6.815/courseMaterial/...

http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/sp09/6.815/courseMaterial/...

My main point is that it’s quite possible that we’ll have cameras in 50 years which are the size of today’s compacts, at the quality (or better) than today’s full-frame DSLRs. Indeed, I’d be surprised if we didn’t.
I was wondering how the audience would take this. I'm so excited to see such a project on top of HN. I'm building a _geeky_ game too (not similar to this).

What do you people think about such games being made commercially? (indie ofcourse)
It is possible to do that but the discovery mechanism and billing that you get through the app store is much better. To install software from another source on my g1 it was a pain. I cannot imagine anyone willing to risk any mony with a business if that is the only way I can deliver the software.
I can see them putting some restrictions on the area due the the massive amount of press that will want access to the airspace (i.e. to prevent aerial traffic jams over the hardest hit areas or the areas with the most damning photos). But the idea that BP is pulling the strings and that only BP-charter flights can get clearance is getting too close to the realm of Big Brother (well, closer to the Neal Stephenson vision of the future in Snow Crash where corporations rule everything) for me.
you could make it more like techmeme or kottke.
A 3G modem for backup would be pretty useful: I'd feel more secure while traveling to know that all my photos were wirelessly synced with my desktop PC or the cloud, so that if I lost or damaged a memory card I wouldn't lose anything. And as you say, avoiding the need for a cable to sync photos would be very useful.

But I agree, this isn't a huge deal.
Ask HN: Best Mea Culpa When You Really Screw Up? 
We had an incident (long story) which resulted in the loss of some customer data (files/data gone but no sensitive data compromised).

I'm wondering what is the best way to explain and make things right with our affected clients? Direct email, blog post, and/or something else? Who has done this right/wrong in the past?

TIA
Hey Dan,

Thanks for the feedback. We're aware that many universities already use software like Blackboard and Moodle. They are, however, a pain to use. The systems are also disconnected from the student's normal activities. If you're friends with students on Facebook you'll see that they often try to collaborate using their own status updates.

So to answer your question: students would do this on Facebook because they already are. It's not that our service does anything better or more efficiently (though I believe it does) --- but we're deployed on platforms that give us tremendous leverage (Facebook, iPhone (coming), etc.).
I worked for a couple of years as a freelance web developer and the only tip I think is really valuable here is "Bonus tip: Make friends with small design shops."

As a freelancer, I think it is very difficult to try and attract work via your web presence. There is too much competition online. In fact, when I was freelancing, I didn't have a professional website of my own at all, I just had my own personal blog, which brought me zero clients.

For me, being an effective freelance web developer was all about making and cultivating personal connections. As a freelancer you must be reasonably good at all aspects of business, including business development and sales. I think most salespeople would tell you that the key to sales is meeting people, telling them what you do, and finding out if they need your services or if they know anyone else who does.

The great thing about being employed in web development work is that it is a skill with a lot of demand, so it is not difficult to find people who need it. What is more difficult is finding people who will pay at a level that makes the pain of freelancing worthwhile (for me, the pain of freelancing was mainly being solely responsible for absolutely everything, including the parts I detest, which are primarily billing and collections.)
There will still be authors, its just that their income will come from speaking gigs and merchandising.
Bilski Sets the Patent Pondering Record
http://berkerynoyes.com/news/pr_VCED_SUMMIT_2010_update%20.a...

100+ VCs in this event.
How many clients were impacted? If it was under 100, call each of them and explain. If it was over 100 but under 1000, send an email and include your direct telephone number or cell phone number. Be prepared to eat some crow on the phone.

Over 1000... hire a PR expert because you're gonna have some real problems either way. (edit: Actually, I don't know if that's the right response here. It's outside of my experiences so maybe someone could weigh in on what to do on a problem of that scale)

The important thing is to identify the impacted clients, assess the severity of the problem, and tell them how you're going to prevent this from happening again (I assume you've figured out how to stop this from happening again).

Good luck.
Thanks a million for your summary.

I completely agree with you that it's better for the economies in the long run to implement austerity programs than just inflate the money base (I guess Germany is a pretty good example). At the same time, the current situation with 16 euro zone countries with very different economic needs doesn't seem optimal.

For once, the price mechanism that maintains efficiency is now basically broken. If Greece had it's own currency, market forces would have pushed the value of Greek currency down, thus making exports cheaper. Now, of course, independent Greece central bank would likely try to inflate the currency if it had the chance, but this is now happening anyway with the ECB lending to banks at artificially low rates.

So as I see it, it would be best to have an own currency which is allowed to float AND a strong independent central bank that won't succumb to political pressure and that will force the politician to implement austerity programs. Welcome to Utopia.
If that's your concern then going for a HTML sanitizer is the better route. The language/framework you're using probably already has one.
This old thing again? Is it still accurate?
Mostly to meet friends and eat good food. Plus, i heard so much about the mission district. I just have to check it myself. I ll be staying for couple of days.

In portland, there are plenty of bar w/ wireless, perfect for hacking w/ friends. I'm hoping for similar experience in mission/soma area.
Yes, that is an excellent idea. The user interface is much better that way. The only problem I see is communicating this to the users. What would be a good way to indicate that the user can edit the content inline? I foresee a lot of "how can I edit my site" emails ;)