skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But they do not provide SSIM comparisons, they compare PSNR.

Here is "how to cheat with codec comparisons", http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=472 which exaplains (partially) why PSNR isn't that great when judging image quality.

SSIM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_similarity
re: "selected items", if you click through to the PDF there is a footnote attached:

>4 Budget calculations are based on budget allocations obtained from the Office of Management and Budget using historical tables from the FY2011 budget submission as well as the Congressional Budget Office website for such items as interest on the debt, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

My guess is that the real cause of "selected items" is that the number of things paid for by your taxes are obviously much larger than could fit on a short list, and has a long tail.
I am sure this is an elaborate joke.
One of the ad that shows up on the landing page is this:
Arrogant garage - Where customers are treated like friends.
Eat wholesome meal with glass of green tea.

Listen to music and breathe.

Take a bubble bath alone or with gf.

Watch science and nature documentaries.

Take a walk and talk with an old friend.
I hear you loud and clear.

I've worked at two startups: one small and untested that failed, and another that was more a very immature established company(they had products, customers, revenues, etc) but espoused the "work all the time, because there's too much to get done" philosophy.

I've also worked for a private company that did consulting for the US Government (mostly, but not all, for the DoD). The quality of life was great, but I was surrounded by people who were interested in punching the clock.

I started working as a game developer earlier this year, and have found its lows way lower than I imagined and its highs few and far in-between.

I don't think there is a panacea. I second the opinion that:
- work you find rewarding
- with people you enjoy doing it with
- for acceptable compensation

is about as good as it gets.
Awesome. Was an honest question, don't do a lot of mysql or postgres these days.
No need for separate ports for video/audio out is a pretty compelling reason.

http://pinouts.ru/PortableDevices/ipod_pinout.shtml
It seems like a nice idea on the face of it, but apart from the inevitable chaos which comes from having budgets of government departments fluctuate wildly from year to year, I think it would lead to a world where government departments spend about half their time and money begging taxpayers for money.

Every television ad for the first four months of the year would probably be some variation on:

"Remember, the FBI does good work! Be sure to remember to contribute to the FBI on your next tax return!"
This already made the front page a day or two ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1741319
Quora Adds Inline Images: Look out, Facebook
...or maybe "Is the US trying to force the Chinese to float the RMB using Japan as a proxy because, unlike the Japanese, the US themselves can't afford to buy the RMB."
I only get this on the link: "For free access to this article and more, you must be a registered member of NYTimes.com."
I've been suggesting this idea for a few years.

A few issues: It should also indicate how much money was actually spent on said item (in the event of deficit spending).
Take a look at those red and orange "things" in the center of the image in the PNG/WebP version. My bet is on a loss in quality.
Love this idea -

Would also like to see:

Return policy - don't like how much the government spent on Amtrak, get a refund (no questions asked).

Customer loyalty program - earn points towards postage stamps or a national park pass.

Discounts from partner programs - i.e., paying, loyal customers of the US government get discounts with China, GM, Goldman Sachs and other US 'partners'.
Nice to see the specific data.

Another data point: last year at FOSDEM we had more than just a couple of v6-connected hosts, here're some stats I kept for fun:

http://stdio.be/onsite.fosdem.net/

Needless to say, noone ran after the conference participants to upgrade the software on their devices.
Lossy compression for alpha channel isn't that good idea, I think. Brightness and color compression artefacts will be multiplied by alpha compression artefacts.
It's perfectly reasonable to require that every employee be able to get along with both the founders. That doesn't mean kissing ass or not arguing, but it does mean not being an asshole (as determined by each of the founders).

If you want him gone, and your co-founder can't convince you that you don't, there's only one right answer.

Your co-founder owes it to you to unconditionally support you on things like this. He should make it very clear to everyone that his loyalty is with you above all.
That may still be better than the status quo.
Not sure about we, but Google needs a shortener, because it's a great source of a web activity information. Compliments the data they collect through urchin.js and the ad network. Makes them track and profile you better.
Ask HN: What drove you away from Facebook?
A lot of articles are getting attention concerning Facebook's limitations and pettiness.

What made you go from loyal advocate to outspoken outcast in the span of a few years?

I am curious to know individual stories, they matter a lot more than technical breakdowns.
No it doesn't, Einstein died years before that author was even born. He will never hear Einstein bewailing anything.
404: Page not found

JS required! A new google-low and a big disappointment.
Say what you will about SQL databases and I'll probably agree with you. However, larger organizations have to think at a much larger scale than the typical startup does. Migrating from a SQL database to a NoSQL database is a much more difficult decision to make once you reach a few hundred thousand lines of code, much less millions.

And I haven't even gotten into the logistical issues yet. Do we have server capacity for the new database? Do we have people who know how to administer the new database? Can I install it in under a month on our server running <insert outdated version of RHEL here>? And these questions become doubly important if your clients are running your software on their own servers. Now not only are these logistical issues, they're excuses for your clients to drop you and go with someone else.

To make a long story short, if NoSQL databases are worth it, enterprises will get there. But it's going to take a while. Much as us engineers hate to admit it, that might even be a good thing.
Polaris pool parts
Proven and tested by so many users, polaris pool parts are intended to give an excellent performance. Check this out at Cheappoolproducts.com!
Seems like a happy medium would be that I get to choose where 10 or 5 percent of my taxes go. The politicians can expect a certain cut, with the rest we're empowered to fund what we believe in.

I also don't realistically believe this will ever happen.
OK, I felt compelled to check some of the source. Aside from references to tripod.com and every js library out there, here's what I saw where there were credits:

Auction: Professional Auction Script Software by PHP Pro Bid

Microblogging: scritter

Classifieds: not sure, source credits BearBones.us (which accepts barter: http://bearbones.us/index.php?p=1_14_Barter)

Social Network: partuza

Dating: not sure, but seems to be the same script running webtryst based on a quick google search

Jobs: scribble
My guess is that the real cause of "selected items" is that the number of things paid for by your taxes are obviously much larger than could fit on a short list, and has a long tail.

Well, of course that depends how you slice it. Break it down by department and it looks more like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fy2010_spending_by_categor...

The twenty-something listed departments account for 97% of the budget (of course there's other government spending which isn't listed explicitly in the budget, I suppose).

This doesn't, of course, include stuff like "Smithsonian Museum", which are included on this list to make people feel warm and fuzzy about paying their taxes.
Honestly, the receipts for MOST businesses are fairly predictable (within 10-20%, at least), so why would we think that the government would be any different?

Also, I'm not sure why making government departments beg for money and have to live in the free market is on the face of it a bad thing. Would it be any different than the current system, where politicians beg us for money while promising to allocate our taxes a particular way, but then usually fail to follow through completely on? Having the departments beg for money directly seems more efficient somehow.

Of course, I think what would really suffer is bold new infrastructure programs. People would be willing to allocate money to roads once a couple high profile bridges collapse, but would we ever see a space elevator?
If you feel strongly about it, why not donate five or ten percent of your income to the government department of your choice?
I'd much prefer that noone calls any piece of software a 'firewall' ever again. It's been over-applied to the point of meaninglessness.
webapps.stackexchange.com seems like it would be a better name to me. Not so sure why they'd want to not continue to use subdomains of stackexchange.com.
That depends on your definition of "street". They do, after all, have one of the most extreme highways on Earth:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo-South_Pole_highway

I would pay money to cruise down that in Street View. I wonder if you could stick the Street View photo module on top of one of those Snow Cats and hit record next time they do a run?
Not a bad idea. Although, I wouldn't be surprised if there were regulations against this.
http://www.out-law.com/page-11052

It is marginally more difficult than IP addresses.

So, unless you are truly using a multiuser machine from which the users use the Internet, it's just a convenient feeling of security. Which in itself does have some value, though, even if merely to save from some stress.
True, except in that Pentium is an English neologism, and thus is pluralized like an English noun. Don't get me started on the plurals of octopus or virus, please.
If there's a return policy then most people are going to be asking for a return on everything.
I always thought it would be a good idea to let people decide how part of their tax dollars were going to be spent. Set aside maybe 20-30% and let them choose which programs to give extra funding to. I imagine most of it would end up in education and social programs.
It doesn't need to be spammy. If it were me, I would just feel a little more incentive to post about it on Twitter/FB and other places than I would otherwise. Brilliant idea.
Ask HN: Why do you exist? What is your biggest goal?
I am curious to know why you choose to exist and where you want to ultimately go in life, in immaterial and material terms. You need both to live a fulfilling life. What made you choose this path? How do you keep moving forward?

I exist to understand the seen and unseen, to apply it to serve all organisms of Earth, and to one day have a beautiful family of my own. I am 20 right now. I have a long way to go but, I am literally having the time of my life trying to do the impossible and get the girl at the same time.
This is, after all, NPR...no surprise the war was prominent as they have a decidedly progressive news team. I won't call NPR liberal, but certainly left of center, and very critical (as they should be) of the wars.
It's interesting to see failed developments that have never gone anywhere. My first instinct is to say : start re-using these instead of building new ones. But then the reason they failed is because nobody wanted to live there, for whatever reason. Those reasons are probably still there, so any attempt to make them 'work' is doomed to failure. Best to just let it be. Eventually the two or three occupants will move on and then nature can reclaim the land.
Considering it basically is 1 frame of WebM it isn't exactly a surprise either.
I think the article was making the point that someone debugging a HTML page would do well to look at both "Inspect Element" and "View Source," as there might be errors only visible in the latter.

For example, a few weeks ago, I was testing a website. It worked fine in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, but broke horribly in Internet Explorer. A look at the source made me realize that a syntax error in my templates was causing the first few lines of the source (including <html><head>, etc.) to render. The other browsers all ignored this.
It was the highest voted domain name by the community http://meta.nothingtoinstall.com/questions/108/what-should-o...
Your comment would have been much better without injecting your own political opinions on the matter via the parenthetical "as they should be".
(VIDEO) Overnight at TechCrunch Hackathon
Both of those queries are very easy to perform in MongoDB.

For examples of how to easily model and query trees (CONNECT BY PRIOR in SQL) see:
http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Trees+in+MongoDB

SUM(CASE IF col IN ('a','b','c') THEN 1 ELSE 0) can be implemented as a group or mapreduce query.

I would say that you have a lot more power and flexibility in MongoDB compared to an average SQL database when it comes to ad-hoc querying.
The counter to that would be that you can only ask for one return per year.

The counter to THAT is that people would just ask for the largest amount to be returned to them (Take that, Social Security!)
Nice viral night's project would be building a simple yourtaxreceipt.com website, reverse engineering those numbers and making a calculator.
As an aside, I was looking at the pricing page you linked to, and noticed that highlighting text (in Chrome, at least) on notifo.com results in blurry text. Just FYI.
I think both cater to a different set of people/photos. I upload only those photos to Facebook which have a 'social' element - Birthdays, weekend trips with friends etc. But Flickr is more for photos which I click as a hobby and as a photo backup service.
Does this apply when using the Export options in Fireworks, is it just for saving as a Fireworks PNG?
I'll be there -- if any HN'ers didn't sign up for the 2v2 tourney but want to enter with a Plat/Diamond Terran, let me know :) They're expecting some cancellations so maybe we could sneak in.

More on topic: I'm looking forward to Michael's talk; his testimony before congress a while back was well-prepared and professional. I can only assume a presentation in front of startup guys and gals would be easier than that.
Would you leave a 6 figure job to start a company?
I've seen some very good articles and interviews on this topic, one recently by a Y Combinator alumni Jessica Mah http://jessicamah.com/blog/?p=1181&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+jessicamah/nksB+(Jessica+Mah+Meets+World)

would you?
I can't think of a situation where punishing someone for a mistake as though they were a misbehaving child is a remotely good idea.

If it's an honest mistake — that is, the employee honestly tried to make something work but it just wasn't happening — the employee requires help in achieving his goals, not abuse.

If the mistake shows gross incompetence or negligence, the employee should be fired.

Keeping someone around but killing their morale is a poor choice in both scenarios (unless we're making the assumption that you are only capable of hiring morons).
Ugly and Funny Scarecrows
But not only birds are afraid of these scarecrows, people also.
I'd rather see ads for the FBI than for political parties!
Not only that, but one of Node's big selling points has been the supposed flat response time distribution it achieves with a simple 'helllo world' example.
Clearly thats not the case once each Node/V8 need to do a real-world amount of work per request.
Well he does say "past a certain age".

On the other hand, Einstein did most of his greatest work by the age of 25, and all of his great work by the age of 35, so perhaps we should be following the example of the younger Einstein rather than the advice of the older Einstein.
You'll get those too. Government departments from November to April, political parties from April to November.

(The rest of the time it'll still be ads for medications for diseases you never knew you had.)
Or invest it in a company which is doing something that you want to support.
Women In Tech Make More Money And Land Better Jobs Than Men
One nice thing is that goo.gl is pretty fast. See the link at http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/17/url-shorteners-speed/ for a graph from a few months ago, for example. We're also shooting for great uptime and we have a bunch of malware checks when shortening urls.
You're not understanding the scales involved. You're complaining that the smallest package of salt at the store is a .5 kilo when all you need is a dash. That's crazy. There are oceans full of salt. Humanity will never want for salt.
I think we can do a push for that. Check back in a day or so.
Pain Treatment Is the Best Yet
Except that if you've already gotten your money back, you haven't actually bought it. No security for you if you lose your job!
From the report:

"At best, motivated taxpayers can locate a pie chart on a government website that gives percentage allocations about how large categories of spending are distributed.

But these are difficult to find and difficult to understand."

This is disingenuous puffery. It's in every copy of the 1040 instructions and is simple to understand.

They're actually suggesting a far more complex and entirely non-visual spending report. That's useful, but the existing report is neither hard to find nor understand.
Most complete beer 'proteome' finding could lead to engineered brews
I'm actually not one of those antiwar protesters that crawls in ditches. I didn't say "they should be against" the wars. I just said they should be critical of it; as a publication-of-record it's their job to critique major national issues.
Having spent most of this week trying to get my head round the terms of the National Bank of Greece rights offer I'm pretty sure Greece are cooking their books too.
Thanks for the link to that article. Very interesting. But I disagree with the language of this sentence; it contradicts the rest of the article:

"we can distinguish a world which can be explained by science from one that cannot."

"The sentence, to me, should be "we can distinguish a world which can be explained by [mathematics] from one that cannot."

"Mathematics" and "science" are not synonyms. But I agree with Leibnitz that, to paraphrase, "line explains the dots."

And also, I would like to note that; physicists use "theory of everything" to mean two things; and they exploit this meanings anarchy that they created: Even in the same sentence; by "theory of everything" a physicist may mean "a theory that will conform three famously incompatible physics theories" and "a theory that will explain the entire reality." These two definition are not the same.
Here's another nice visualization of US government spending:

http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/
Museo logotype FTW
Birth control pills appear to remodel brain structure
A small market’s perils
Also on flickr there are a lot of pros using it to maintain their portfolios, but definitely I think Facebook photos are one of the reasons of its success.
Inside IE 9: The Chrome Effect
The late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan supported sending people statements of what was in their social security. His idea was that if people never saw what was in there, they'd never miss it when it was gone.

I think this is a logical extension of that idea, and its great. I'd also like to see the flip side of the receipt contain a guess for how the same tax amount would break down the following year based on current budget trends. That way you could see how the coming year is different from the current year. Complaining about NASA funding is one thing -- seeing that they only get 20 bucks while Social Security gets over a thousand? Puts the situation in much sharper contrast.

It's strange that the government works in such an arcane fashion. A simple thing like a receipt for your taxes is probably very hard or impossible to accomplish. It took many years for Moynihan to get his SS statements. I have doubts that this would ever fly.

But it is certainly a simple and profound idea.
Competition is just parallelization.
API stability is a problem.

An engineering culture that breaks APIs is bullshit. Taking 48+ hours to fix show-stopper platform errors is bullshit. Their 'innovative approach' is not working and the proof is in the pudding. They have not reached 500 million users solely on the success of this engineering approach, and I would vehemently argue they have reached 500 million users in spite of it.

The price will become too high to pay, if the future they envision involves third party developers at all. 500 million users is a hell of a lot of momentum, but it won't carry them as far as they want to go.
I thought Greenland had some kind of relationship with Denmark.
Differences between VPN & DirectAccess [ Discussion and Explanation ] | ICA
Then provide baseline support for an uncompressed alpha channel. Not being able to store one at all in an image limits the usefulness of the format.

Artifacts for lossy alpha compression are already, to some extent, well understood and dealt with, since compressing video game textures that contain an alpha channel is already done lossily using the DXTC compression formats.
The biggest issue I have with this paper is that it doesn't seem to properly consider the possibility that this behaviour isn't an evolutionary adaptation at all.

I mean, this same behaviour is also exhibited in humans, where it is apparently not an evolutionary adaptation, but rather an unintended consequence of the twin evolutionary benefits of high sex drive and manual dexterity. Why should squirrels be any different?

I suppose the thing to do would be to get a large population of squirrels and somehow prevent some of them from masturbating, and then see whether the rate of STIs was lower in one group than the other. Not sure how you could stop them, though, without attaching some kind of device that might impact negatively (or positively) upon their mating opportunities (nobody wants to mate with a squirrel with its arms taped up, or do they?)
No, you put in your email and then get the link.
But then wouldn't you just get any potential STIs in your mouth?
Are you happy with your current job? If not, do you think moving to another 6-figure job would keep you happy for an extended period of time?

If the money isn't making you happy anymore, then consider pushing on to something more challenging as that is likely what you need in your life.

Of course, only you can introspect to find the answers you need.

I left a reasonable 5-figure job to work for myself and still consider the startup route as well.
Going Nowhere Really Fast, or How Computers Only Come in Two Speeds.
IOS: Communicating With Game Players
I am not a MongoDB expert by any stretch, so please correct me where I am wrong.

The way I read your link it sounds like I need to store the data in a particular way in order to run a parent/child query. That is great if I know that I need that query at design time. What happens if I have tens of millions of records and need to run that report on an ad-hoc basis? Where the relationship may or may not be important?

What if I want to sum the "cost of goods sold" one day and the "items per transaction" the next? Does that not require someone to write code more complex than SQL? Because on Oracle a business analyst can open up Toad and run that query.

If I am wrong then it very well may be that the problem is one of the enterprise not being aware.