skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Completely random drop would fare really bad (street view is very rare compared to Earth's surface).

What I would do is a sort of "computer vision". Map has well defined colors for features, so you just need to check pixels with proper shading.

This should be quite easy as street view availability seems like a transparent overlay image, so you even wouldn't need to distinguish it from other map features.

And even if it's composited with the map image server-side, it should be still quite easy to extract it, just look for pixel diff compared to normal map image.
Don't miss this performance by Valentina Igoshina of Chopin Prelude Op. 28, No. 7:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_Pbbcfjw4c#t=1m20s
This really puts the amount of data Google had acquired for Streetview into perspective.

It took me from the Rhondda Valley in Wales, to Fresno, CA, to Virrat, Finland.

The breadth is amazing.
I would rather live in the mountains of California.

I can deal with the taxes and bureaucracy.
Reposting a comment from an earlier Hacker News thread on this issue:

The good news is that purchases made with a credit or debit card will be exempt from this requirement. However this requirement is still likely to be a huge pain for me at least because I use PayPal for a lot of vendors for totral purchases over $600 in a year.

The IRS is accepting comments on this requirement at http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=225029,00.html
Times were different back then. The market was nothing whatsoever like it is today. The context of this was for applications microsoft was writing for the mac, not for operating system development... and the fact that he had insider knowledge could have been used against him. And $100,000 was a decent amount of money at the time.
Right, and we know how well this worked...

- Wasabi Systems (which contributed back less and less, except for journaling support just before it went down).

- BSDi (contributed almost zero, until they merged with FreeBSD Mall).

- Apple, contributes non of their differentiating technology back to the BSDs.

- Practically any closed-source system used the BSD TCP/IP stack at some point, few contributed back.

I loved the BSD license. I still love the Apache 2 License (which is very BSD-like). I was a developer in the NetBSD project. But as much as I dislike(d) the GPL, the license is very well able to make users contribute back. The Linux kernel has a very healthy pool of enterprise contributors. *BSD development is very much driven by free-time contributors and very small consultant firms. And it shows. It is great that such such a small pool of contributors can build great systems. But Linux has outdone BSD in many areas.

I know, it sucks, but it is true. Few people want to give competitors a carte blanche to start with your work, and keep improvements to themselves.
More info doesn't matter. Add a "try it now" box or something.
It would open doors to opportunities, whether the start up succeeds or not, if you make enough contribution to that start up to get noticed by insiders and outsiders. Of course, you got to do your part to make sure that others notice your contribution too.

Also, how valuable you are percieved by later employers also depends on how much you learn from that expereince in that start up.

Two people who have gone through exactly the same experiences may end up coming out of it wiser at different levels.

How much you learn would depend on how much observant you are on what goes on in the start up, what works, what doesn't work, and in what circumstances something works or doesn't work.

All this is 'experience' you can leverage and it needn't be limited to just the engineering stuff.

I worked as a project engineer in a small company earlier, which wasn't a start up, but had lots of similar characteristics. I learnt a lot not just on the technical side, but the business side as well, dealing with suppliers, pricing, setting up a supply chain across two countries, training others, because we were expected to be jack of all trades.

All that cross functional experience helped me land a job in much larger company as well.

Good Luck.
As you mentioned, the core issue is one of the founders doesn't trust the other.

I think it sounds reasonable to plan work in cycles/sprints which cannot be interrupted midway.

I shall try to put this point across, and see if we all can reach an agreement.
Spoken Japanese has tone to disambiguate words, though. And "context" is overrated. It's not uncommon to have reasonably long conversations where you think you're communicating, only to find out that your conversations were entirely parallel.

___ ga? (Asking if they're talking about ___) is perhaps the most useful Japanese phrase I know, given that a Japanese sentence often contains neither subject nor topic.
In France if two prices appear somewhere, you'd pay the lowest on request I believe.

My gut feeling is that A/B pricing would be illegal because it's unfair: a part of the buyers have a discount the others don't even know about.

IANAL though :)
You guys need to seriously lighten up. The kind of thing that is happening here happens everywhere. People are more or less set in their ways and you, Tom and Jerry are no different. Each of you is trying to push the company in a direction that you're most comfortable with and each of you has different limitations and a pretty thick manual of operations attached to yourselves.

Work around each others limitations, reinforce each others strengths. You may want a company without Tom, but do realize you would have gone under long ago if he had not been there and such a situation is likely to recur.

Likewise, Tom may want everything to be nailed down but in the real world that is not always possible. So you catch him there.

All of you contribute essential elements to your partnership, the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts.

You also need to understand that three is the hardest number and that you all need to kick down a notch or two when times are stressful. You deal with your problems when times are good, not while the shit is hitting the fan.

Best of luck!
Stu Halloway's Refactotum talk offers a good approach...

http://thinkrelevance.com/blog/2008/05/23/refactotum-overvie...
Disclaimer up-front: my day job is hacking on GCC and related GNU pieces of infrastructure, so that colors my opinions somewhat. I speak only for myself, not for my employer.

My level of experience in both: I hacked a specialized LLVM inlining pass in graduate school. I've written two middle-end passes for GCC and tweaked GCC's inliner in similar, though less invasive, ways. I found the level of difficulty to be similar between the two projects.

Other people may have different opinions. I remember reading a claim of a graduate school project that tried for four months to get started on a middle-end optimization pass in GCC and got nowhere; after switching to LLVM, they made progress in a month or so. Personally, I think that meant they weren't trying very hard with GCC.
Yeah.... the guy who made that rediculous statement failed miserably.... no idea how to run a software company at all.

I could tell when he came out of this superyacht moored out in the ocean and camped out next to us reading a book in the shade while we were grabbing some sun on a nice little tropical island.
(Didn't bother to bother him - as tempting as it was - I figured he should be able to enjoy the peace and quiet and beautify of the place just like everyone else without being hassled)
I think a larger issue lies in this:

Nowadays, any moron can take a mid-quality camera with good auto settings and do "photography", and the average customer is likely to not distinguish this person from a professional photographer with years of experience, or an established photographic artist.

Is this also true, to some degree, with programming? Can any moron who "learned java" in a first year college course compete with a good, experienced programmer because the customer doesn't know any better? (and thus will go for lower price) The answer, in my experience, is "yes".
I have added a demo account now. Visit cineight.com again. You will find the credentials of demo user there.

Thanks for pointing that out.
Did they have fax machines at the time?
You're right of course, but that last jump is quite a bit larger than the others.
I cannot understand your last sentence. Please help. "This kind of tempting?" "Eschewed?" Eclipsed? Eschewed in favor of?
An interesting thing about osx shortcuts is that you can change almost all of them with system prefs -> keyboard -> keyboard shortcuts. (for programs individually and for the whole system)
I agree that Huh's theory is misguided. I wouldn't apply for those lowball rates either and I strongly dislike people that seek candidates for minimum wage. Even if the posted wage is a fakeout, it's a horrible idea because there are actually a _lot_ of people who want professionals for basically nothing and have no respect for the profession they are trying to find, and it's not like you can distinguish the intent behind the posted wage, and there are lots of people out there who believe that collecting only $10/hr in pay, no matter what job, would be an unhappy situation.

Huh posits that lower wages make better candidates because they care more about the work and enjoyment than the money. Well, that only works if you can afford to work for minimum wage. An important part of being happy with a job -- probably one of the most important -- is receiving compensation adequate to supply the needs AND wants of you and your family. Even if you could make an argument that the needs of a person and his dependents could be met with $8.55/hr, which I think would be pretty difficult, there'd be no money left over for wants or leisure. And after a hard day slaving for minimum wage, I think that's important, anyway.
Actually I disagree with the news story notion. News programs in Japanese are always subtitled with text, quoting and sometimes paraphrasing what the reporter is talking about. There are ten tons of homonyms in Japanese, and inflected regional dialects.

I don't think the bastardized Katakana-ization of foreign words helps. What is encouraging is that new sounds are making their way slowly into the language, particularly the distinction between "b" and "v" that's beginning to emerge, at least for loan words.
How about gas stations? They routinely charge different prices for the same product from the same store?
Keep in mind what the market looked like at the time - it was nothing whatsoever like today. The field was so new there were no ground rules. It was the wild west.

Either party could have also paid him nothing, hired someone else to do it, and been done with it.
White background, very minimal, just a bunch of text and some links- none of that is bad of course, it's just that my brain has been condition to interpret these cues as a parked domain that I reached because of a typo.

Quick examples:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_61OWU2tC3nY/SbOgGfx01eI/AAAAAAAAAj...

http://blogoscoped.com/files/google-parked-domain-screenshot...

http://www.donmak.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/g...

http://www.apogee-web-consulting.com/images/rumcakes-ads.jpg

http://gopgle.com/
True enough, but it's from a co-founder of the company so it's potentially worth reading.
Most programmers definition of "highly skilled" is more like "proficient with a language", or framework, etc. A lot of people I know aim for "can use stuff" rather than "master this thing", which is mostly because, hey, it's technology, and there's always a new thing.

But there are skills past simply becoming proficient in new tools. You could "master the tool", like knowing the details of the JVM memory model, and very importantly, be capable of identifying very hard problems that you can solve that those "young guns" can't.

It is incredibly rare for me to find an experienced programmer that can sell anything but their past "obsolete proficiencies" to me. Most of them sell me on the fact that they've simply been good with X+Y number of tools, where Y of them are now no longer relevant. But they never focused on developing deeper skills that might have relevance (big data problems, etc).

It's the constant shift of tools that adds a lot of this tension. Yes, we need to be able to pick up new ones (languages, frameworks, etc) quickly, but if broad proficiency is how we define mastery, this has little relevance to businesses.

I'm not saying this is easy. How do you unambiguously describe a programmer's skillset past the languages and frameworks they say they know, especially in a way that might be "future-proof"? ("I optimized my system to display 30 frames a second!" "Wow, my phone does that now...") Ultimately, if we can't clearly describe why people's experience is better, it will be hard to justify paying them more, once you become proficient with that particular toolset. Thus, I don't sense real age discrimination as much as a simple inability to sell the value of our experience.

Of course, some programmers are WAY more valuable than others, so this is a problem that isn't just about age and experience. Hiring practices sure haven't matured at all during my 10 years on the job. But, until the finance guy can see why a guy with 25 years of experience but with 3 years with tool X is more valuable than the guy with only 5 years of experience but all 5 with tool X, well, you're not gonna see the money flow.
You have the Movies Watched / Movies to Watch labels mixed up.
The reason sales of new houses were so low in May is that an expiring tax credit caused a big spike in April. The fact that this article doesn't even mention that when describing the data makes it very suspect.
1 250mb internet download vs. 4-8mb for a couple hundred machines on the internet line is a big difference. Particularly since I can plan when the big download happens (and update) versus all the small downloads that happen in a lab at the same time because of a class starting. Students with the first class of the day don't feel terribly happy about being the designated updater of some company's software.
I've got a couple more months where I am, but intend to move to SFBay area by years end. Will certainly check if you're still hiring then.
I agree with you.

What you have stated is the other half of my belief regarding rapid personal improvement. I might have given the wrong picture by stating just one half of my belief. But then I did that, because its this part that most people hinder themselves at as they often find it distasteful or painful to accept the bitter truths about the way they do some things.

Its as important to recognise the enabling(the good) characteristics in oneself as it is to recognize the disabling(the bad) characteristics. We are like everybody else, a mix of both, good and bad, often in varying levels and levels that can change with time.

keep recognizing and repeating the good behaviors, keep recognizing and getting rid off the bad ones. Its a never ending process.

Cheers!
Especially in a small company, the founders are going to have a few "small pebbles" that can get stuck in the machinery. If you try to ignore/override the grinding noises, you're engine is going to blow up. As painful as it might feel now, I think your best option would be to back off and let Tom do whatever he feels is important (like the website).

The key is: DON'T make him feel like you're ignoring him or don't value his contribution (even if you don't). Just give him some time to cool off and don't pester him.

From your perspective, you might loose a couple of weeks, but at least you won't loose a valuable team member.

Database people can be especially finicky in this way (I would know, I'm a database person :) ). As far as I can tell, he just wants to feel like the company is also striving for the objectives he values. Let him work on those objectives for as long as he wants, but I'm relatively sure it won't be more than two or three weeks. He'll finish whatever is bothering him, and he'll want to get "more involved" again, which is when you start asking him with database help on your other projects.
Business runs on the numbers, not on the scenery.
"I explain that they are fresh out of college and need to be trained before we can trust them to handle a project and deliver it successfully."

This is a key statement right here. If you can't trust them to deliver projects relatively quickly you shouldn't have hired them (and probably need to get rid of them). I'm not saying that you should treat them like seasoned pros. But fresh out of college or not, your devs are still adults and you should treat them as such. A startup simply isn't the place for a long, hand-holding training period.

It may sound like I'm being harsh towards your devs, but I'm not. If I'm right (which I may not be), you're the one who's being harsh towards them albeit unintentionally. Most overworked CTOs I've seen are the result of simply not being able to just let go and trust others to make decisions. This is not only bad for you, but bad for the developers who work for you.
> 1 250mb internet download vs. 4-8mb

Make that a few kb. And last time I checked at my work, admin updates usually happen during work hours and affects people working in the "lab". Also, it's 1 250mb that is sometimes installed on each machine on the network, so way worse than a few kb.
> IE still has 60% market share, and it's holding steady.

You mean: "has been dropping steadily".

> IE9 is going to be one of the most important products Microsoft ever ships.

I've heard that about '95, '98, 2000, XP, Vista and windows 7 as well as a whole bunch of products. They can't all be 'one of the most important products Microsoft ever ships'.

> It will be compatible enough with web standards, and offer enough performance, that it should allow developers to build more sophisticated apps based on open standards. Html5, css3 and fast Javascript will soon be a given.

They already are, just not in the IE world. That's the reason for line one above, Microsoft has been playing catch-up.
Rule #1 of negotiation - once you accept, you don't have regrets. For all he knew at the time, either company could have disappeared at any time. You make your decisions based on your willingness to accept something in exchange for your product, and you don't scream "Unfair" later. At most, you analyze how you could have analyzed the situation, at the time, better, so your next negotiation works out better for you.

Go try bargaining for carpets in Morocco... it's great fun. They'll start at like $2000. You'll walk away with a carpet for $200. Some other guy will walk away with the same (well, they're all unique, but let's same the same in terms of craftsmanship and materials) for $2000. Both are happy, because they feel they paid a fair price for what they wanted.

The salesman gave me some advice - I don't recall the exact words, but it was basically "Friends, please, there is no reason now to be nervous - negotiation is negotiation, and if we agree on a price, we agree fully and with no regrets. If we do not agree, then we do not agree, with no regrets."

I need not feel guilty for paying such a small fee (from my point of view) for such a beautiful carpet - he would not have agreed to the sale if it was not to his benefit in some fashion. I also do not need to mock those who paid 10x what I did for the same carpet - as both us feel we paid a fair price for something we enjoy (and for all I know, the actual cost of buying those things from the source is $20, I have no idea, nor does it matter, unless I feel like flying into the mountains of morocco to go to the source - which I don't)

The home computer market was still very young and unproven.
Godel, Escher, Bach at age 14 or so made me realise that I wanted to program more than anything else.
Exactly. There's a price point always where people will stop and say to themselves; "maybe I should shop around" in which case they'll find a competitor of yours and complicate things.
The question is, for how long is the collapse going to continue, and how 'total' is that 'total'.

Economic cycles have been going on forever, This is just another cycle, yep, probably steeper and longer at the bottom than others.

When at the bottom of the trough, especially a steep one, its often difficult to see the next peak.
To me Tom sounds like the person with the 'long view', the other two are 'firemen'. That's about as complimentary as it gets and you really need both. Without either they're dead in the water.
"It's clear that'd tom works differently than you two, so if you can, you should offer to buy him out."

I'm not saying that Tom shouldn't be let go, but he shouldn't be let go because he works differently. The thing that people have difficulty understanding is that these differences are good things. Everyone has blind spots. If you hire a bunch of people who work the same way, you all have the same blind spots and you're setting yourself up for a disaster. If you hire people who do work differently from you, you have fewer blind spots if you are willing to put work into it.
"so few Chinese are immersed in technology to the point they forget how to write, in fact the majority of Chinese are peasants and don't even have an email."

Yes, but the ones forgetting are the elites and the trendsetters. If enough of them decide to start using the phonetic alphabets, the rest of the country will follow. Even a country farmer can't sell his produce to a city dweller who can no longer produce the word "rice", except phonetically.

This doesn't even have to be centralized, in fact it almost can't be. It'll be something that just happens or doesn't, and from the sounds of it, the initial phases are indeed already happening. It strikes me as far more likely that the encroachment of phonetic alphabets previously discussed on HN is the vanguard of major change than a short-term anomaly; the trends and forces are clear and strong. Human brains are extraordinarily good at optimizing away useless data and skills, it has (for the most part) a brutally rational approach to the question of "what is useful" based on a simple metric of "is this ever used?", and while it is possible to appeal the decision it takes a lot of effort for an individual to do so.
Anyone who does custom proposal/sales work has had those moments. The moment after they say yes when you suddenly realize you charged drastically too little. Live and learn.
i'am not able to solve t=log(u).not even a single step sorry

i'am assuming this would end up in some number called 'e' which i came accross somewhere in the past.please help..i'am not sure what that number means and how to get it
That's the total projected pension cost for each year from now until the last currently retired employee dies, which may be 30+ years from now. So it's not debt, per se, since that cost is amortized over the same 30+ years. It's a projection of the total cost over that time period.