skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a Political Science degree and I work as a senior software engineer.

My Dad has a degree in history, wanted to be a dentist and spent 30 years doing environmental contracting work.

People can't really expect to work in exactly the area they get their undergrad degree in, can they?

The guy from the article just needs to get real and realize that big boys get up in the morning and go to work whether they like it or not. That's called being an adult.
He loses once he gives the data to a journalist. There was ZERO reason for him to do that.
The interesting part is after she first win Joan was able to find 3 other opportunities where the PV of playing was less than the cost of the ticket (assuming $1 tickets). 1 in 1,200,000 chance to win $10M? I'd take that.
Link: http://www.hackernewsletter.com/
Add to the failure list:

* Terrible performance - practically first rule for optimizing page rendering is "don't use CSS expressions"

http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/rendering.html
http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2007/07/high_perfor...

* Only work on IE natch.

So, you have Javascript which was better performance and worked everywhere.

I think it's a little misleading to say it's the best feature no one ever used. CSS expressions were re-born as hardware-accelerated CSS3 transitions - with a much better, more focused implementation, and are pretty popular these days - especially for mobile.
Another choice quote.
"Many hard-pressed millennials are falling back on their parents, as Scott Nicholson has. While he has no college debt (his grandparents paid all his tuition and board) many others do, and that helps force them back home."

I hope that NY Times readers do not just assume that Scott is typical of other members of my generation. Just about everyone I know has some form of student debt and are already starting behind the eight-ball. Scott apparently doesn't understand how fortunate he really is.

"Two-thirds (65.6%) of 4-year undergraduate students graduated with a Bachelor's degree and some debt in 2007-08, and the average student loan debt among graduating seniors was $23,186" -- http://www.finaid.org/loans
Announce something only if it's done. Don't announce if it's "coming soon".
Respect the client's reading preferences. Send as plain text not HTML. Brand == interface.
Limit yourself to 5 sentences. Brevity is the essence of wit.
When in doubt, edit.
Make sure it's personalized, e.g. "Dear John".
Leave out "Kind regards", "Best regards", "Yours sincerely", etc.
Sign off with your full name.
Ask yourself "what does everyone else do?" and make sure you don't do that.
Yeah, this is a perfect example of Bayesian inference in action, where you update the probabilities upon receiving more information.

What's the probability that this lady will win four lotteries?

Before the first lottery, insanely low, say 10^20 to one. (I haven't actually computed this, but you get the point.)

After the first one, it becomes a little more probable; say 10^15 to one.

After the second, 10^10 to one.

After the third, 10^5 to one.

After the fourth, 100%.
The "American dream" is basically the idea of open-ended opportunity, that is, that one can overcome barriers through hard work and resourcefulness to rise to financial success.

The generations of immigrants who came to America throughout the 1800s and early 1900s in particular did not expect to start at the top or to have some predefined path to success. They shined shoes, washed dishes, waited tables, worked on railroads, did whatever scut work was available, and stored up what little they got so that one day they might afford a home and be able to put their kids through college. That was not a universal experience, but it was a common one. Nothing glamorous about it. Yet, through hardship and sacrifice, they could advance - eventually escaping from the poverty that had marked their lives and those of so many of their compatriots back home. I experienced this first-hand in a family of Greek immigrants and we, as the kids in such a family, were never indulged but were expected as well to get delivery jobs, restaurant jobs, whatever, in order to help pay our way through school. We were all told to set our goals high but never to think of ourselves as being too good for the work we had to along the way, whatever it might be and however hard or unappealing it might be. That is how character is shaped to prepare you for the greater challenges ahead.

And so all I can say about your comment is "spot on." Thanks.
I understand it once explained, I just said you should watch yourself before calling it obvious in future, because as someone untrained in lifeguarding or swimming - it isn't.

Or more specifically, watch yourself before deciding not to mention it because it's "obvious".
You seem to be new to the topic since you are confusing face detection and face recognition. Face detection is a relatively simple affair, given an image determine a bounding box for each candidate face. OpenCV (http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/) is an excellent library with a lot of computer vision related functions. Out of the box it has an example program for face detection which performs quite well with the default Haar model files it comes with. Detection rates of higher than 95% are not uncommon for photos with clean faces. So, you can set up a fairly good face detector in a day or so.

Face recognition, on the other hand, is a totally different beast. The bounding boxes you detect in the detection step are fed into classifiers that you should train. If you are new to this field I don't recommend you do this training or develop your own algorithms, since it's a complicated problem. You say most photo software does this, but generally these are offerings from large companies, e.g. Picasa, that have years of face recognition expertise behind that product. My recommendation is (i) to abandon the recognition idea (gulp! this may be hard to stomach but the energy may be better spent somewhere else, as this is very hard to get right) or (ii) if you insist, use an online API (e.g. http://developers.face.com/docs/).
Awesome idea. I signed up.
"2+2 is 5" is a mathematical statement. Mathematics is different from the rest of science in that it is not an experimental science, so that a (theoretical) statement does not need an experimental confirmation, just a (theoretical) proof.
Looks like he's already reached his goal?
Even better:)
Content Syndication Council Forms to Thwart "Content Mills"
Ask HN: Any interest in a business plan, free of cost?
I work for a small digital branding agency and I had the idea of running a promotion for a free business plan.

If the interest levels are high enough, I can get the ball rolling ASAP.
If you're a university researcher in the UK it's impossible not to take public funds. All universities (bar one) are publically funded.
This is the curse of coming from a well-off family: you can't imagine struggling up. And your mommy probably agrees that you're better than that. Maybe his father disagreed temporarily with his son's rejection of that job, but I bet the message he's been giving his son the other 365 days a year is that he's so gifted, talented, and destined for great things.

That said, I'd love to have coffee with his grandfather. Sounds like an interesting guy.

There are a million opportunities out there for young people who are willing to work outside of school, on talents or skills or connections - but not for those who expect to get experience handed to them with their grades.
It's hard to really say what his intentions are.

He does (going on his online postings) regularly spout anti-semitic nonsense, but then he is a very troll like person. So it is hard to figure where his real beliefs lie - he often sounds serious, but then he may just be a serious troll.

(and, also, I suppose it is arguable his intentions [trolling or meaning it] are irrelevant because it still goes out there and communicates to people without being clearly ironic)
MINIX 3: a Modular, Self-Healing POSIX-compatible Operating System
Top Reasons the New Google News Sucks
Didn't they send an email that said "WakeMates are shipping!" months ago?

They're not open about their process, they're "open" - which means they call themselves open, while not actually telling us anything. Or, you know, telling us lies.
Agreed. If you give me a survey and mark all the questions "required", if I find anything I don't want to answer, you're out of luck on the whole survey because I will just click back.
I would be very skeptical of such claims.
http://data.worldbank.org/
Intel Working on Black Box for Your Car
How about weather - I have been looking around for an API to access historical weather data with no luck so far. Anyone familiar with the landscape of weather data options?
I personally find asking questions more nerve racking than giving a talk. With a talk I've probably practiced it 20 times and have pretty pictures to help illustrate my points. For questions you have to think rather quickly to make yourself not sound like an idiot in the 20 second window you have, possibly on a topic of mere interest, but little expertise.
50% of my load time was trying to pull the favicon and getting the 404. I wonder if there is a way to use the <LINK rel=icon ...> tag to tell a browser not to look for a favicon. It is eluding my googlabilty if there is.
Indeed. And I did exactly as this report suggests and carried out my own independent analysis, regardless of whether CRU did or didn't make their data/software available.

http://sluggish.homelinux.net/index.php?title=Tempgraph

The station data and temperature data were already out there in the public domain.
The lens through which parenting is viewed here is too narrow. Parenting isn't about being happier. It is about being a bigger and better person. Children make your life BIGGER. You feel moments of happiness like you've never felt before. You also feel moments of anger like you've never felt before.

It really is indescribable and not for the faint of heart or the selfish. The beautiful thing about parenting is that it shows you who you really are (not who you think you are), and gives you chances every day to grow.

It makes you see what really matters in life, assuming you actually come to this realization. I've seen plenty of people not realize this and fight to keep their identity, their original idea of what they wanted for themselves while also trying to be a parent. That doesn't work.

Part of parenting is a certain amount of ego destruction. You have to go through that if you want to genuinely care for another human being.

This is what makes the experience of parenting so great. It is a kind of Zen experience of making yourself better by destroying your concept of self (and putting another 'self' first more than your own self would like).
I was always taught to "Reach, Throw, Go":

First, try to reach them with a pole or something from outside the water

Second, if that doesn't work, throw something that floats like a vest or life preserver. Hope they grab on to it.

Only as a last resort, actually swim out to a drowning person. Your objective should be to put the thing you just threw at them in their hands, not to drag them back to safety.
Interesting. Have you got any screenshots of good examples handy?
How will this compare to http://hackermonthly.com ?
Drowning in Data: sometimes it's cheaper to recompute
I need to sit down with my credit card statements and start doing bookkeeping for 2010, but the burn rate for my business is about $1200~$1500 a month, with the lion's share of that going to AdWords ads and then freelancers. My personal burn rate in the typical month is also about $1800, with the largest expenses being food and then rent. Eating out is my biggest vice, and what an expensive vice it is.

Then there are occasional costs like international plane tickets, conferences, etc that I don't bother counting on a monthly basis. (Paid for by consulting, mostly. It is a convenient way to get back to the US to visit family.)
My guess is he'll be completely silent about it, UNTIL there's some future iOS update the lets iOS score higher in the same benchmark. Then it'll be an example of Apple's attention to detail and planning, and how Google doesn't care about their user experience. :-)
To be fair, hunting a job while in another job is much trickier. It actually takes quite some time to write applications and so on (that's how I remember it anyway). Not saying it is impossible, but I can imagine that "just take any job" could be counter productive.
If only that logic worked on the DHS...
Change Crowdfunding Law
Exactly. The oddest things can lead in the oddest places. I got my current awesome job because I dabbled in Erlang a bit, a language I would only have heard of via various Internet sites. That one hit alone is worth a lot of misses. (And I got that job because of other things I found on the Internet, and, well, actually all the way back to my very first real job.)

With no offense intended to pg, it's not really anybody's place to decide what is good or not good for me when I can't even tell until years later.
Agreed. It doesn't get more pathetic than this.
Try signing up to a few services and get some ideas from what they send out - I've been doing this of late.

I think Huddle.net sends clean emails where it is clear to see their point etc, and they don't email that often which I think is important with b2b type apps. I'd recommend taking a look at how they structure their communications.

Good Data is another I signed up to, at times they send too frequently (if you launch 5 things over 2 weeks please don't send me 5 emails) and their emails are too wordy etc - but really good to have those emails as a case of what not to do.
I disliked this article the first time and I still dislike. Tears from crying don't solve problems, busting your ass and coming up with innovatives solution do. I agree advertising sucks... a lot, but we can fix it. If there is discussion here, I hope it's on how to fix the problem, not cry about it.
If the point is to independently verify the results, you should write your own code to grind it and compare it to CRU's results.

anthonyb already quoted the relevant section: Writing computer code to process the data "took less than two days and produced results similar to other independent analyses. No information from CRU was needed to do this".

If a qualified researcher can reproduce the results in two days, I'd suggest that anyone who can't is not sufficiently qualified to be evaluating the research's efficacy in the first place.
Of course, this should not be a surprise. If you are no longer fretting about spending too little time with your children after they’re born (because you have a year of paid maternity leave), if you’re no longer anxious about finding affordable child care once you go back to work (because the state subsidizes it), if you’re no longer wondering how to pay for your children’s education and health care (because they’re free)—well, it stands to reason that your own mental health would improve. When Kahneman and his colleagues did another version of his survey of working women, this time comparing those in Columbus, Ohio, to those in Rennes, France, the French sample enjoyed child care a good deal more than its American counterpart. “We’ve put all this energy into being perfect parents,” says Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, “instead of political change that would make family life better.”

This is an important note. Despite the "family values" posturing of the American right wing, the "socialist" Europeans are actually far more pro-family than the conservatives who dominate (even now, having a sizeable minority of the Democratic party) in American politics.
http://www.travelatlas.org/

Based on the terribly original idea of writing about your travel experiences. A couple good features (imo):

- Inherent credibility. I figured if you ask someone you meet on the street where's a good place to eat or stay - being a complete stranger - the chance of them giving you good information is about the same as flipping a coin: 50-50. So everyone starts with 50% credibility. As you write reviews and people are in agreement (via like/don't like or comments) your credibility goes up (influenced of course by the credibility of the commentor).

- Built in messaging and chat. Added some "bots" to make it look like there were actually more users at one point. The idea was to implement a parser so that you could ask someone in chat: "where's a cheap place to stay in guam?" the app would parse the query and a bot could answer with the highest rated hostel in that location for example.

- Parse search terms with ability to search by category. So if you search for "a bed to crash on" while you're in manhattan, the app prompts if you'd like to search the "lodging" category.

Reason for failure:

- Other people did it better (tripadvisor, virtual tourist, etc)

- SHOCKWAVE (although this was 2005)
I think it was, too. I was suggesting that he might no longer need to wear a protective helmet upon experiencing Werkzeug.
Super Mario Bros Crossover - Flash Game
What are the three main points a VC wants to get out of a first meeting (part 1)
I think both ideas help us consume the best items on HN and complement each other. My newsletter won't contain the actual article, but it will be more timely in some cases and cover more items (both since it is weekly).
Hate on PayPal all you like, but next time, try opening a merchant account to charge credit cards directly. You'll need...

1. to incorporate and file an LLC agreement

2. to go in person to open a corporate bank account

3. display photo ID, in person

4. show proof of residency

5. show proof of business address

6. get checks for that biz acct

7. fax/paper mail all sorts of notarized stuff to ANOTHER company to open a merchant bank account

8. rinse and repeat to open a credit card processing account, fax/paper mail

9. talk with reps on the phone because something inevitably goes wrong

10. Pay a total of about $1200 for all the above services,

11. not to mention at least 2-3 hours of traveling around, even if you live in a city where it's all available nearby.

You will also likely be subject to a personal credit check since your business is brand-spankin-new.

So, yes, PayPal didn't treat you all that nicely... they treated you exactly like you'd be treated if you set up to open your own CC processing.

FTR, we've had no problems selling tickets to all our events, but we didn't open a brand new PayPal account to do it - we used our longstanding one. Sounds like you opened a brand new PayPal account, right? I assume that since you mentioned that you had another, longstanding account. That's like saying "I have good credit, but my friend Joe doesn't, so we applied for the credit in Joe's name." It doesn't transfer.

Also, just in case you think you should use Google Checkout instead - if you think PayPal is bad, brace yourself, since Checkout is 100x worse:

http://slash7.com/2009/03/26/google-is-evil-worse-than-paypa...
More like "Humans can see 4 colors, but "[t]he performance of the human system at very short wavelengths is blocked by the absorption of its own optics" so unless your lens is removed by surgery we only see 3.

"Therefore it can be more properly described as a blocked tetrachromat instead of a trichromat. The difference is significant in research."
http://www.youtube.com/user/greenman3610#p/a/029130BFDC78FA3...

direct link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WvasALL-hw
Then don't be a university researcher.

In fact, if you don't want to reveal your top secret source code/data, don't publish in science journals. It's utterly ridiculous that journals still exist which don't require source/data to be released.
Nothing replaces the ability to use historical data to research something. Acquired data is historical information and the cost to re-acquire it (which is a falsity anyways) increases each time you throw it away.

It would be better to focus on forward looking data storage systems rather than re-acquisition.
In theory, yes. In practice, people are only human, and tend to not react well when faced with a vitriolic "tone".

The police may be required to protect and serve, but try berating a police officer and see how well he serves you when your house gets robbed. He shouldn't treat you any differently, but he probably will.
It seems to me this is a generational thing. I live in Europe, coming from a not-so-rich family, and my 30 years old sister is exactly like that guy - if the job is so-called boring or "inferior", she would not even consider it...she prefers to keep sending resumes.

But on the other hand, I am not willing to criticize him too quickly. I think there is some truth to it - if you settle for the unsuitable job, it might be difficult to move from there. In other words, I am not a strong proponent of the "better any job than no job" mentality. Sometimes it is better to continue searching.
India's Tata Planning 'Nano' Wind Turbine
Man, I wish something existed that did the opposite.

Only show me Tweets that don't include:

Photos
URLs
RTs
Hash Tags
I am Canadian and I incorporated (C Corp) in Delaware with Delaware Intercorp. The process was super easy, cheap and everything worked out for the best. I hired a lawyer for my bylaws and stuff, however. I didn't want to rely on their defaults. I guess I did everything the right way since this has never been an issue when a public company incorporated in DE acquired us.

I opened a bank account with RBC in Virginia (they also have branches in Florida). It was easy for Canadians, not sure about Europeans.
I have seen scratch-off tickets cost as much as $20 a pop. I think it is safe to assume that the lottery commission is smart enough not to give away free money.
OTOH, now with larger and larger monitors, how many people really browse full-screen? If you aren't full-screen, Fitts law doesn't help.
The data was available.

If you want to independently verify it, the best way is to write your own code and see if it spits out the same/similar results.
$10 Cellphone Microscope Wins 3 Awards, Heading To Africa for Tests
AFAIK there is not.

I've just touched a favicon.ico. Zero byte, but at least it's not 404. I might do the same for robots.txt. Thanks.
Ask HN: Is 2 Mbs upload enough for hosting?
Was just curious, is 2 Mbps/upload fast enough to host a web site for a start-up? Each page would average about 60kbs, page views a day would average about 10,000.
You did a great job in putting together the site. Props to ya.
This is contradicted elsewhere in the article by the observation that families who could afford more childcare were _not_ necessarily happier.
I didn't say "rich," I said "well-off." The middle class fear poverty more than the truly rich, in my experience.

You can quit a job at any point, and nothing bad happens. That's easy to explain, too. I quit my first real job after 3 months because it was too aggravating, and I got a better offer. Never posed me any problems, and meanwhile I paid off a lot of my debt.

People who make excuses will always find some new excuse to make.
I would agree that this seems to have been more about ego and status than an example of journalistic integrity and responsible security research.

That said, does the irresponsible disclosure of names attached to e-mail addresses justify what he's gone through, assuming a modicum of truth to his assertions of being denied a legal defense, gag orders, FBI raids, etc? In my personal opinion, his point that URL scraping is not in and of itself a crime is substantially true, and renders the subsequent raid unjustified. Whether that would render the drugs inadmissible or provide him any legal cover from that charge I certainly am not qualified to say.

On that note - could anyone point me towards literature on 'gag orders' in the course of U.S. justice? I'd be curious to read on the history and justification for these.
iRacing does not have anonymity.

I has worked very well so far.