skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How far have you gotten on this? I didn't know that level of CV technology existed to tag arbitrary images. It sounds like a really cool project.
Thanks, I did not know that (nor the fact that it was SVG).

Still, it's one of the criteria for uploading images that Wikipedia uses (if it ever decided to feature the seal, it would use this criterion for doing so).

Edit: mattlanger here ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1571316 ) has a counterpoint for what I posted

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Logos

Relevant sections

"Logos uploaded to Wikipedia must be low resolution and no larger than necessary."

and

"U.S. law prohibits the reproduction of designated logos of U.S. government agencies without permission. Use restrictions of such logos must be followed and permission obtained before use, if required. However, this does not affect the copyright status, because as works of the federal government, they are automatically in the public domain. These should be tagged with {{insignia}}."
Great. That's a wonderful justification for paying the majority of their actual instructors less than minimum wage with no benefits at all - then they can attract that guy to raise more money than they pay him.

Sooner or later, America will have to start funding its research and its education as two separate services; the current model isn't working. It's just taking a very long time to be obvious.
As I said (in the neighboring comment):
I am not trying to measure who is (was) worse. The thing is that the USSR had their arguments to carry their propaganda on for several decades. And their people believed them more or less.
DHH: Appstore is a warehouse of shit
Fortunately it's not up to her to decide. That said, it seems that some papers go out of their way to hide what the paper is really about by looking at the title.
I ran a site called that crawled Gnutella/Limewire for student papers. That's something you could consider adding to your database and quite easy since the Limewire code and RFC are opensource. You could write your own client or modify Limewire.
I can't Comment, due to DISQUS (and I don't want some CSR jerk to butt in here, OK?). But this idea is way too expensive and seems not to be aware that Virgin offers prepay MiFi for much less than a whopping $100/week.
Not at all. That was someone being silly.
It's not that we want to make it hard to join the beta, it's that we want to reward the people who promote us to others. Everyone who gives us their e-mail address gets in early. Those who help us out get in earlier.

I promise to do a post-mortem, success or failure.
From a dean I spoke to: "We felt that, under the circumstances, we couldn't afford the luxury of a fair trial."
In Java, I would do this:

new Search().equal(Search.NAME,"Joe")
.between(Search.AGE,18,25)
.go();

Just as concise with less voodoo. And it's a single statement.

With the existing method, you can still ditch the empty parens by using public final fields. You just have to pre-populate them all with respective grammar objects.
Currently working on setting up a high-quality content providing company. The business plan is just about complete but this is really just a work of love and the result of my general hate of content farms (yes I have a day job).

Other than that I've been slowly putting together a site about bad dates for a friend of mine, maybe someone here will enjoy it enough to add a story ;)
http://www.runawayscreaming.com
This looks a lot better than wxWidgets. Is there a clear advantage?
+1 for SoftLayer for unmanaged dedicated servers. We've been using them for all of our dedicated servers since April 2007.
Now that I have these IDS events, what do I do with them?
This sounds a lot like the "Even Steven" schtick from Seinfeld.
Obviously not err my point was 1B in pretax money is generally worth significantly less than 900M in after tax money.

Clearly it's not free, but due to the tax break advertizing can have a lower ROI and still be a better investment.
The problem is, that pretty much all men want more.
Somewhere in here is a song for long bus rides.
I would like to know how much of this applies to universities in the UK. Here there is a lot of public funding, but we're moving towards paying more funding as time goes on.
Priceless.
That's what you guys get for chopping onions at work.
OS X won me over in 2005 (in a way that most Linux software never could, though I certainly gave them a generous chance) and it had a profound effect on how I design software. I hadn't realized just how entrenched I had become in Windows mono-culture. After using OS X I was surprised to learn that my ideas of what good software should be were completely stale and complacent.
+1 for http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/ . We've been using them for DNS since February 2007.

http://dyn.com/dynect is supposed to be pretty good too.
This is interesting. How do you do your conversion?
Alexis is pretty much my hero.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP

As of the end of June 2010, Windows XP is the most widely used operating system in the world with a 54.6% market share, having peaked at 76.1% in January 2007.
Can you automatically convert from org-mode to LaTeX?
A video about the CIA's covert wars in the 3rd world (six million dead):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6R8gKQGmoao
A quick tips when creating block DSLs in Ruby:

def search(&blk)
if blk.arity == 1
blk.call(self)
else
self.instance_eval(&blk)
end
end

# Then the user can decide what he want to use:
Foo.search { bar }
Foo.search { |s| s.bar }
"Who else is going to do it?"

National labs?
Linux sucks because it works poorly with the cheapest, most throwaway hardware you could find? If you're an adult and willing to buy a computer that works out of the box, order a laptop from Zareason, or someone else who will pick working hardware and install Linux for you.
"We don't currently use any source code version control software so I would especially be interested in hearing how subversion git/etc can help."

Wow.

The funny thing is, I hear this quite a lot from self-described "Web developers". I don't quite get how anyone can do any sort of development for very long without using a version control tool, but it seems quite common among the "Designers who know just enough PHP" crowd.

My deployment process revolves around using git (and before that it was mercurial, and before that, svn). Rather than get into any details on it, you should first get acquainted with git and/or mercurial, learn why these kinds of tools are essential, and then get an understanding of deployment strategies.

These might be helpful:

http://people.canonical.com/~ianc/papers/dvcs-why-and-how.xh...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2704996/describe-your-wor...

http://pythonnewbie.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/distributed-ver...
Now, where are the people complaining that they can't install MacOSX properly on their cheapo laptop? Or that [important part from a nameless company in Taiwan] stopped being supported in MacOSX Hyena?

I mean, if Apple were not heavy-handedly preventing people from installing MacOSX on their run-off-the-mill non-Mac notebook, we'd hear similar horror stories, maybe also Vista-like disappointment when people try to install it on an underpowered machine.
Tangentially, this also seems to illustrate why Alexis/reddit have been successful -- perseverance and flexibility are crucial to startups!
Kindle 3G – it’s a trap
She didn't work fifteen hours a day. She taught fifteen credit hours.
Is PiCloud unattractive compared to Heroku?
As one of the said.fm culprits I would totally also recommend checking out http://blog.said.fm for some listening ideas, we've got tons there.

We love discovering new stuff to listen to and our theme of the day is a simple showcase of this, incidentally here's a very basic RSS feed I use for testing: http://rss.said.fm/v0.1/themes/theme_of_the_day.xml - this might disappear in the long term but for now feel free plug it into ur iTunes and go!

We're finally ready to rumble again after recently running out of cash. Our next priority is to make the app mobile and very developer friendly (and slightly more fun and social). Watch this space!
Alexis, thank you for sharing. It always helps to have a reminder that focusing on taking one step at a time is the way to get through anything.

Keep calm and carry on!
Python tip: instead of making the user contstruct a list literal, just use (star)args in the function definition. Python will automatically pack up any number of positional arguments into a list for you!

def search(*args) : ... # args is a sequence

search(this, that, the_other_thing)

Edit: found the HN FAQ entry on formatting comments, finally.
Check out www.otherocean.com.

Also my Dad just moved out to Charlottetown last year (from Toronto) for a job. I will post again when I remember the name of the company.
People are very strange in general, but on a site where most people are men, questions about the ways women behave that seem strange to men are going to get discussion.

Of course this is an interesting topic to hackers. Hackers are mostly men and typically (big generalization) tend to approach interpersonal relations in a relatively analytical mindset. Understanding half of all humanity (on average of course, let's be PC here) is important, especially given our innate drive toward behavior conducive to reproduction.

Actually, it would be nice if a member of the opposite sex who understood this mindset could help us out from time to time, but I'd imagine this must be a tiresome exercise, something like how tiresome it is to explain to businesspeople how programmers work.
Hmm, I bought mine in Portugal (Europe), it was a few years ago though. Last I've heard the price was around $7 too.
Great question, also it would be fun to hear about what "page" they ended up on. They have an incredible service that I love using, so what did they decide to actively NOT do?
They both use the same collection of GNU tools and open sourced programs like FireFox, Python, etc.

This is incorrect. BSD systems for the most part eschew GNU tools. You will find many annoying differences in programs you take for granted like find, xargs, ps, top, etc.
This is a great idea! I hope you succeed in helping people eat healthy.

About meal swapping, I would try to make as little emphasis on the "swapping" as possible. If people first need to think of the most delicious thing they could eat, and then get something else, they will probably be less happy than if
they just get a recommendation [1][2]. How about calling it "compare meal" instead?

[1] As seen in the book Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz

[2] So it is great that you have recommendations!
You don't always have the best alternatives available to you, even if you were clairvoyant enough to distinguish them.

Would you say the russians were fools to embrace communism when they lived in a feudal system? The communist resistance in Europe started even before the US entered the war. Maybe if the US hadn't taken so long, things might have turned out different for the eastern bloc. Then again they might have taken a bashing for not being prepared and you would be under nazi rule still today.
That is definitely doable. One of our partners describes us as a recipe database that is tethered to a personal health record.

The plus icons are the health scores. We tried to stay away from the user rating stars but in retrospect that seems to be causing more confusion that anything else.

Thanks for the good wishes.
Actually, I think that the Catholic church is the oldest existing bureaucracy.
Most modern 32-bit architectures support 64-bit compare-and-swap operations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compare_and_swap
Yes, from the article:

"If you've worked with the spineless, you know how frustrating it can be to deal with their poisonous helplessness -- something that's only heightened in a startup where the most important thing you can do is not give up. And you'd better fucking believe that when you come home to a mother battling brain cancer and a father spending every waking hour taking care of her and running his own business, you don't complain, you don't cower, and you most certainly don't quit."
I looked into teaching math at a California community college and the pay was just under $2000 per course. A course was either 3 or 4 credits. $8K for 15 credit-hours worth of teaching in Indiana sounds about right. When my sister was an adjunct faculty at a big state school she made $17K a year.
> too much meat is hard on your digestive tract

That's completely crazy. Meat and fat are the easiest things to digest. There is no such thing as an allergy to meat, whereas something like a quarter of people have various allergies to grains, or various nightshade related plants.

Pretty much all plants have various toxins to prevent digestion. That's why plants in general need so much heavy processing and cooking to eat safely. You can eat a freshly killed animal raw reasonably safely. Eating a lot of raw grains or sweet potatoes could kill you.
I guess it doesn't need to be said that people I disagree with are of low status and their opinions should be discounted for that reason.

(I realize that the third paragraph of dkarl's post has substance, just picking on the fallacious part.)
huh. the paravirt OpenBSD stuff is pretty old and dead (Theo, uh, is obviously not a fan of virtualization) I'd be interested to hear if anyone has gotten FreeBSD running on linode or another paravirt xen host, though.
Funny, I thought the same thing but with JavaScript instead.
I see you switched from racket to Go. Care to talk about your experiences?

I've been playing with making the implementation of arc more timeless (e.g. http://arclanguage.org/item?id=12057, http://arclanguage.org/item?id=11864)
It no doubt depends on the person, but for a community of startupfounders (or aspiring ones) I hope it resonates. There are surely examples of "big scary generic companies" handling this kind of ordeal (when it happens to their employees) well -- what's worth noting is that I didn't need an income to support either of my parents. None of us took any salary until reddit was acquired, so it'd have been much more difficult if my mother didn't have great health insurance (she worked at a hospital within the Johns Hopkins administration and had fortuitously recently signed up for the premium plan).

As an interesting comparison, my dad's a small business owner (travel agency, where he's had 1-2 employees) in a rather unsexy industry, but having a rockstar employee meant he could make every trip to the hospital with my mom.

I got so much of my independence because my dad was able to be the advocate & caretaker for my mom (not enough is said about how much these people go through - obviously it's not as awful as being the victim, but it's still incredibly trying). But I'm certain being his own boss (and having a fantastic team) made his awesomeness for my mom possible.
By any chance, do you know of the podcast The Totally Rad Show? One of the main aspects of the show is asking fans to submit fan artwork utilizing the TRS logo, with the "prize" being that they will use it in their opening segment's backdrop. Essentially, their "prize" is zero dollars plus fame and recognition.

Tell me the essential difference between what they do and what Guy Kawasaki has offered. No one is up in arms over what the guys at TRS are doing. They're in fact offering less than what Guy Kawasaki is offering. Much much less.

I'm not hurting financially by any means, though I have been wanting to create something for TRS just for fun and the possibility that they'll use it in their show. Likewise, I might actually submit something for Guy's book as well.

So I pose a simple question to you? Who are you to tell me that I shouldn't?
Reusable Apps: Fact or Fiction?
Depends where you are interviewing. Established companies don't have such a fetish for bleeding-edge technology.
If you haven't already, take a look into Zappos and Tony Hsieh for great insights into conveying company culture.
To export to LaTeX, see: http://orgmode.org/org.html#LaTeX-and-PDF-export
> eating a lot of ... meat is harmful

As one of the links explains, the data shows almost the opposite. More meat was weakly protective.
Seriously why is this downmodded and why is the parent popular, comparing a 200$ netbook not designed for linux to the enormously overpriced hardware in a macbook specifically designed for OS X is supposed to be some kind of valid comparison?
This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach
RIM launches BlackBerry 6 platform
M-x org-export or C-c C-e brings up a menu of options for export, including HTML, LaTeX, and Docbook. The org-mode manual has good information:

http://orgmode.org/manual/LaTeX_002fPDF-export-commands.html
What are the back-to-the-land and localism movements?
I really liked going into that site and testing it out. Unfortunately, this will not be true when there is no 'hacker' account. If the site is going to be free in the future, I would definitely try to get rid of the mandatory creation of an account. How about being able to use the site (using cookies for a temporary account) and make the registration something you can do after a while? (like stackoverflow.com)
I really enjoy reading these articles comparing different implementations in different languages. I wish we had more of that on HN.

Concerning the article, call me grumpy if you want, I like better when there is no mass overloading even thought it's more verbose. From my maintenance experience working on various project, I always cry when after 3 hours of searching I find that "+" is overloaded and that's where the bug was hidden.

Also, for this particular implementation, we could simply use a builder.

SearchBuilder sb;

sb.equal(Search.Name, "..");
sb.equals(Search.AGE, ..);

Search s = new Search(sb);

Even thought it's more verbose, we clearly see that we configure the builder as we want, and then, we create the search object. A good side effect of that is that we get an immutable Search object. Also, we could use the "fluent" interface on the builder.

Another verbose approach might be using lots of Objects..

Search s;
s.add_contraint(SearchEqual(Search.Name, "bob"));

This way, it make it easier to add constraint without modifying the Search class.
Once you're logged in, there's no way to get back to the homepage to figure out what the site is supposed to be about.

I can click through restaurants and menu items, but there's no indication as to what is actually going on. Tooltips pop up randomly, and if you can manage to keep one on the screen, they give you a paragraph that doesn't actually explain what's going on.

There seem to be star ratings that you can click on to rate things, but clicking them does nothing.

Eventually I clicked "Select" on something, and it popped up "Looks like you selected a combo" in a javascript alert box. Was that an error? Confirmation? What next?

If I could make it back to the homepage, or to some form of documentation, maybe I could find out. But I can't, so I left.
notahacker raised an interesting point about not being too harsh. Some people could benefit a lot if they cut down from a burger, fries, and a large soda to a chicken sandwich and a diet soda. If you rate the chicken sandwich 2/5, your site will just depress them. On the other hand, a knowledgeable person with aggressive goals wouldn't trust your site if you gave that chicken sandwich a higher rating. Have you thought about making the ratings relative to a person's current dietary standards?
China's '3D Fast Bus' Straddles the Road So Cars Can Drive Under
We Use BobX
I use rake-latex for my workflow, which is also pretty awesome: http://devel.softeng.ox.ac.uk/trac/softeng/wiki/Utilities/Ra...

My main TeX annoyance is tables, but I don't think anyone has come up with a decent way of expressing them in a textual manner.
Your syntax is definitely simpler. One reason we did it the way we did was to get compiler checking for operators. We've tried to follow idioms in different client libraries, and for the statically compiled languages, we've tried to make it so if it compiles, it will work.

Since the field comes first (orderId().startsWith()), if you try to call an operator on a field that does not support it, it will not compile.
Why would there by any copying? The kernel can directly read userspace memory.
He's saying she's being paid eight thousand for teaching fifteen credits of classes in a single semester. Presumably she'd make another eight the next semester and a couple extra thousand in the summer. So probably $22,000 a year.
> But then MongoDB does not seem to support online/hot backups without setting the whole system to read only.

mongodump -> http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Import+Export+Tools#Impo...
In the Ruby code, you include

search.status.in(
Braintree::Transaction::Status::Authorized,
Braintree::Transaction::Status::Settled
)

, but wouldn’t it be better to allow just

search.status.in(:authorized, :settled)

? (And I agree with judofyr’s comment that “search.” shouldn’t be necessary on every line.)
I find this one to be most unsettling: http://pics.livejournal.com/sergey_larenkov/pic/0002922z/
It's not a "justification": the pay of instructors and the pay of university presidents are just two very different things. I don't really see what the point of comparing the two is.

Sooner or later, America will have to start funding its research and its education as two separate services

Well, this is at least partly the case today: NSF, NIH, and similar funding bodies support research. At most top research schools, very little (if any) of the money from undergrad tuition goes to support research.

BTW, what about this is specific to the American education system? As far as I know, non-tenured instructors teach classes in many countries, and are usually poorly paid.
The Fed, with all of the T-bills out there, will never allow deflation. It's not in the government's interests.
Ya, that's the "N+epsilon" or "open set" theory
with the stigma placed on smoking in many societies smoking could in fact inhibit ones ability to breed (or at least influence it).
Yeah, I found it jarring that he took time out here to call someone he was working with at the time spineless.
When moving to a new city: reach out to locals or find newcomers like yourself?
I am thinking about moving to a new city, yet I would not know anybody there. For those who have moved in recently, how have you coped with being to use Robert A. Heinlein's/Book of Exodus phrase "Stranger in a Strange Land?"

Is it better to reach out to locals or to find others in your same circumstance? Meaning they are also recent arrivals--so that at least you have something in common to share. If the latter I am not saying you'd necessarily become friends with your fellow travelers, but it would give you some support while you get used to your new place.
The original VC investment thesis and evolution of Reveal Imaging
Related: The (La)TeX Stack Exchange site just opened up to public beta:

http://tex.stackexchange.com/
You pay either way: Either the Apple Tax, or in your time to configure it right. Linux is only free if your time is worthless.
I experimented with existing text classification algorithms for an author identification project I was doing for fun. What I'm currently using is somewhere between KNN and SVM, but I'm not done tweaking it yet. I'm also working on boosting results using different feature sets.
Tell HN: I'm doing a project (cheap teleconferencing) and need some pressure
Until University starts I have nothing to do and thus decided start a small project to teach me some real world skills. Unfortunately I lack project management skills and self motivation. Which is why I'm announcing my project here.

Anyway, I've decided to built a small teleconferencing webapp with very low prices in 7 to 10 days. I'm probably going to use Clojure, Asterisk and EC2. I'm targeting a price of about 2.5 ¢ per person and minute.

So, does anybody here need something like that or would be interested in using it? I you want to notified when it is ready, there is a standard give-me-your-email-address form at http://con-fon.com/ .