skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Share your experience with selling to stock photo sites.
In the spirit of looking for assets I already have to monetize, I have been thinking about iStockPhoto as a possible way to add a few bucks of monthly income.

I have thousands and thousands of hi-res RAW images that just sit on my HD, mostly because I'm unsatisfied with 99% of them (what photographer isn't?).

After reading "Developer income report #6", I was struck by the fact that his non-negligible income from iStockPhoto is over a smallish portfolio of a bunch of cat5 and a decently framed picture of a plane being loaded.

Please tell HN about your experience of selling stock photography to iStockPhoto:

What's the relationship like? Does anyone have problems?
How much money do you make (ballpark) on what size portfolio? Are they photos that you are tremendously proud of or just whatever seems like it might sell?
Are there certain personal rules or guidelines that you keep to when deciding what to submit?
How much post-proc will you do with a photo before submitting it?
What else do you have to say about selling stock photography in general and wherever?
People who take on risk for reward are still entitled to be upset at people who have lied to them about the nature of the risk and reward. There's a difference between taking on risk in an informed manner and getting conned into taking the risk.

On occasion I think HN goes overboard on the reward side of entrepreneurship too, and that's not right when that happens either. Tell the truth, let people make up their minds. (And to be clear, I mean it just happens sometimes. On the whole there's too many people doing it for real for raw cheerleading to go unchallenged for long.)

People have been getting led on about the value of their degree for a while now. The economic situation is bringing things to a head but it's not new.

Also, I doubt this is a serious call for a refund, in the sense that he has even the remote expectation of one. This is a warning to others dressed up with a rhetorical flourish.
I hope that's not insensitive to kreci!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095979
Polymer membranes with molecular-sized channels that assemble themselves
Soo... What I get is: John McCarthy is the inventor of Lisp, the language we all tell ourselves we'll learn one day. Lisp is used in Emacs macro.

However, I honestly don't get what's going on here. Is that a subtle troll against Perl? Just a reminder that in Lisp, data and program are interchangeable?
Oh, alright. I tried it before making my original post, but didn't see the bieber. I do now, though. lol
My point is.... Yes, ship in four weeks, but ship to modern browsers with an elegant html5-only decision

Old browsers can have a single, basic file input.
You should specify the particular posting you want.

Remote Int'l or just Int'l perhaps.
looks fine to me in chrome.
As the article itself notes, the test itself has almost no value, but it is an interesting read anyway.
I'm not telling anyone what kind of movies to produce. The Shrek movies made about a zillion dollars even though I didn't buy any tickets to see them. It was good business for them to ignore my preference.
Aha - there is the secret: marry Gabe's wife!
> Sounds like an awesome place to work....

In terms of physical facilities, it is an awesome place to work. Especially by local standards. The only thing that really sucks about it by western standards is the pay and the hours. And that it's, you know, located in an industrial part of southern China. The weather is much nicer in Cupertino, and when you're at HOME (or in the communal dorms on-site) the air conditioning in Dongguan is going to suck because outside the factory there's no backup diesel generator for when you get a brownout or blackout. Which happens a couple times a day. (or did about ten years ago when I was there last)

Designers want to design; Cupertino might be the best place for that unless what you're designing is the production process. But if factory work there paid anything like a western wage it'd be a pretty attractive option for factory workers here. Although it might be hard if you don't speak Mandarin and Cantonese - I had a translator.
Flash is demonstrably, prima facie closed. There's no argument to be had about it. Similarly, I'm not interested in litigating exactly how literate Garret-Glaser is about video IP if it's the case that this guy has absolutely no background in video. I can read press releases myself.

On the off chance that it's helpful, here's the author's bio:

My name is Thom Arvid Holwerda. I was born on the 1st of December in 1984, at the Medical Centre in Alkmaar, Noord-Holland, The Netherlands. Currently I live in Warmenhuizen, a small village a few miles north of Alkmaar (about 45 minutes by car north of Amsterdam). I've finished Latin/Greek school, and studied Psychology for two years at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam (birthplace of MINIX); however, Psychology was not my thing, so I switched to something else. I'm now studying Information & Communication Sciences; a study which, other than the name might suggest, focuses mainly on language. About 50% of the study consists of studying a modern (to me) foreign language (Spanish, French, German, Italian or, in my case, English). My master will be Journalism.

You're right, Garret-Glaser isn't a patent attorney. On the other hand, he's an x264 developer intimately familiar with the standard.
The page is fiction, but it documents fact at the bottom:

This be fiction based on a true story. George de Hevesy is credited with dissolving two Nobel Prizes in aqua regia and storing them during the second world war, where they remained unnoticed despite careful searching by the Nazis. The gold was later recovered and recoined, and presented back to the two owners. George de Hevesy won the 1943 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on radioactive isotopes.
PEP 3333 Accepted: WSGI standard for Python 3.x
It's strange everybody points to the same source, but it's not unusual there is only one source.

Break it down: How many codec developers do you know? How many of those people do open source implementation comparisons? How many of those write it up? How many of those write it up intelligently for public consumption?
It's been half a year, you would think there are independently arrived analyses by now.

I wouldn't think that. You can't swing a stick without hitting a run-of-the-mill CRUD application developer — and judging from the articles that come across the HN feed it looks like everybody and their dog has invented a programming language — but video codec developers don't grow on trees. Besides, 6 months isn't that long at the pace that field seems to move.
I doubt Consumer Reports or the tech media would have much to gripe about WebM hardware decoding support being added to new iDevices, since there is no compelling WebM-exclusive content to which current device owners would be deprived access, (we'll leave Greenpeace out of this, as it's often difficult to rationalize their behavior). There is little risk to Apple's reputation with their customers by hedging their bets and including WebM support; only potential increased component costs, less optimal power consumption and patent litigation.

On the latter, I'd estimate the risk that the MPEG LA would go after an MPEG 4 licensee (and member of the MPEG organization) for violating the patents they have already licensed to be fairly slim; one might expect them to focus more on non-MPEG-licensed vendors distributing WebM decoders and encoders. So if the power usage and component costs are reasonable, there should be little obstacle for Apple.
Can't other companies compete because the restrictions and regulations actually protect investors?

Don't investors lose stability by operating in unregulated markets?
No, you want "mis zapatos".
I've been using Bing as my primary and Google as my back up now for almost a year. I almost can feel when Google will be better than Bing and vice-versa.

If you look at marketshare,you'd think Google was years ahead. Really they're pretty much at parity, with different achilles heels.

If I were MS I'd push hard into nailing the mobile experience. I thik if they can make Bing an early player in mobile search... they have a good chance of evenly splitting mobile share with Google.
On Getting Traction, by Gabriel Weinberg
If Apple were to only include full support on new devices, it would feel the wrath of the entire tech press, not to mention organizations like Consumer Reports and Greenpeace.

Not really, no. For example, h264 is hardware-accelerated on newer Macs (nVidia 320M / 330M), but not on the "old" nVidia 8600M-based Macs. The technical requirements are met (a 8600M is more powerful than a 320M), but Apple just won't release codecs.
Here at Carnegie Mellon University, we're allocated routable IPv4 addresses (and real DNS entries) for each MAC address you connect to the campus network with.

As far as I can tell, I have zero support for IPv6. Autoconf doesn't work at all, and I'm unable to find any documentation about it. Sigh.
I absolutely hope so. Publishers in large have taken complete advantage in a lot of areas. It's absolutely insane when community college students end up paying nearly the same amount for books as then do for 6-10 hours of courses. I cannot wait to see more competition in the publishing world.
They have been promising the transition to GEGL for so long, it is practically vaporware. Yes, I realize that there are GEGL-based effects in the current builds - but I don't GEGL replacing the current core for a long time - and I have my doubts it ever will.
Goes to show how much we've come to embrace change in the last couple of decades. Software was coming on ~50 floppies before we ditched them for CDs. Nowadays, things never get that bad before a replacement is phased in.
Minecraft just passed one million copies sold
When to Use the HTML5 section Element
750 whp from 1 liter
11. Why are you quoting random conspiracy theory Slashdot comments to support your take on H.264 vs. WebM?

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/01/12/slashdot-comment
Okay, so lets toss around some numbers:

Apple said 1 billion in payouts to developers

Apple said 300,000 apps in app store

Average $ per app = $3,333.33

Now if this were a bell curve half the developers would be getting less than that. But this is not a bell curve (it's one of them thar hockey stick things) so the large majority of apps will be earning less than that.

For the purposes of handwaving, lets say 90% of apps make less than the average.

Now lets say that the average app is pulling its income in mainly over the last twelve months... that equates to ~$250 per month.

So... if 90% of the apps on the app store are making less than $250 per month ... this means kreci is actually doing pretty good on Android compared to iPhone.

I think from looking at kreci's article that he is more than comfortable with 'showing a little leg' in order to get some ad impressions (4 of 5 sources of revenue are ads or referrals). Now my impression (from a great distance) of the Android market compared to the iPhone market is that the Android one is much more dominated by ads. Also, this aligns better with Google's corporate goals (to plaster advertising over everything in sight).

So, in conclusion, I would say that kreci is doing pretty good, and that he has a good match of business models to the environment he is in.

@kreci - thanks for sharing your data
The 2010 national champions, of course!
http://arborjs.org/reference seems pretty well documented (with examples even, creation & use links)
I just had my teeth cleaned today. The hygienist did an exemplary job and still my teeth and gums are sore. Perhaps there's no worry with healthy teeth, but someone who has brittle teeth or a somewhat-hidden cavity could definitely receive damage at the hands of a careless hygienist.

That's not to mention the general stench of some of that crap that gets picked out, the filthiness of some people's mouths, spending a half hour or more hunched over someone with bad breath, and the opportunity for someone (especially a child) to bite you while you're working. I'll take software engineer, please.
Transcendent Man Film To Be Released in February
Saying "We're the best" is qualitatively different than saying "We're the good guys".
Maybe the lack of devs? I cannot imagine which commercial company would be interested in supporting GIMP development. Let's face it, financial support for open-source software development is critical (KDE/Gnome may be the exception, but the financial investment into these two may be justified indirectly). ImageMagick fit the niche that the web needs server-side image processing library and made money from it. But GIMP is client-side, semi-professional image processing software, who have the incentive to financially support it? (Maybe some professional graphic design companies, but again, they may not have the top-dev for image processing software, that is a big investment for them). I may miss something here, please correct me if I do so.
DuckDuckGo FTW.
Here's a link to the Search Engine Land article that that the Yahoo article is referring to: http://searchengineland.com/google-vs-bing-the-fallacy-of-th...
Mozilla has said [0] that they could pay the $5M/year but they won't because 1) it means content producers have to pay money to obtain licenses and more importantly 2) other people cannot create mozilla forks without licensing h264 themselves.

[0] http://shaver.off.net/diary/2010/01/23/html5-video-and-codec...
I believe it was built by Dan Benjamin on Ruby.
I used one of those "close" regexes last time I needed to do this in C#. I believe I went with

^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.(?:[A-Z]{2,4}|museum)$
I ran into the same problem in Chrome. It seems like a font issue relating to the OrbitronMed font. I wonder if lots of computers have a messed up version of that font, or if something else is going on.
"one can compute with Lisp programs present in the
machine without parsing"

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't you still have to parse Lisp code? Granted, it may be a very simple and primitive type of parsing, but parsing nonetheless.
> You're right, Garret-Glaser isn't a patent attorney. On the other hand, he's an x264 developer intimately familiar with the standard.

In other words, he's definitely qualified to comment how similar VP8 might be, which few people deny, and not very well qualified to comment how infringing VP8 might be.
Douglas Adams was mostly right. It's just not a fish.
http://libyanspider.com/
The proposed "trade" is so mind-numbingly unbalanced that I am fully convinced this is just a joke and commentary on the job market for law students.
I'd like to know if this was a case of being stretched too thin, or the model just not working. I'm not a wine guy, but I found myself visiting because of the design and because of Gary. It seems like with the right person at the helm, this could've gone further than it did.
Salaries for Law School graduates are bimodal. Most people will over-estimate the rewards:

http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/legal_profession/2009/06/th...
Is A Degree Really Worth It Anymore? Part One
"The test wasn't scientific, and the sample size was small. And Google did much better on some searches."

Sounds convincing!
Ask HN: Convertible debt terms?
I've got a small non-tech company that's raising a small amount of money (<$100K) for immediate expansion into a new market. One of the potential investors has expressed interest in doing it as convertible debt. I understand the concepts of convertible pretty well, but don't have a sense of where the market is. Assuming a medium-risk existing business, what are typical terms as far as interest paid and degree of discount should it be converted?

Also, I've seen mention that YCombinator would eventually be releasing some standardized term sheets for convertible. Are these available somewhere? Are there others that could be used as a template in the meantime? Right now my goal isn't to come up with the best possible terms, only to figure out where the center of 'fair' is to evaluate whether this is something we should consider.
I don't think "it probably infringes software patents in the US" is a reasonable argument against using a specific piece of software. Aside from the arguments against the legitimacy of software patents, it's practically tautological to say that non-trivial software infringes on patents, somewhere.
Drew Curtis does not run Fark.com alone. He has had several employees for years now.
Presuming he has shareholders other than himself, he would be obligated to salvage that value over some theoretical effect on his legacy based on customers not understanding a sale. I certainly wouldn't work with or invest someone that shut a site down that had value for those reasons and without coming to some agreement with shareholders (and perhaps he has).
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3333/
That's a fair point, but GEGL is actually a thing now, and you can actually use a cut-down, GEGL only GIMP. I think we're beyond the `vaporware' stage.
On the B-Frame question, he actually missed the fact that VP8 has an analogue to the still patented B-Frame technique on the first go round. But he's since updated it after being corrected, so it seems a strange thing for you to pick up on.

Plus I think it was adaptive quantization that gave the greatest single improvement.
Yeah, I know, interest rate used to be good. I used to get 5% on my emigrant direct savings account. Now it's 1%, and I don't know of anything higher (for a money market account anywys)
"it was in support of the notion popularly supported by anti-vaxers that parents should make medical decisions after "educating" themselves, instead of heeding the advice of trained medical professionals."

I, for one, entirely believe that parents should make medical decisions after educating themselves, instead of blindly heeding the advice of trained medical professionals.

I am also very, very strongly pro vaccinations.

I also refused to give my children specific vaccinations when they were very young, preferring instead to wait until their systems were more developed.

The responsibility for the health of my children belongs to me, and I take that responsibility very seriously.
They are indeed lacking devs.
Most DuckDuckGo results are actually served by Bing though Yahoo.
Same could be said re previous ownership who are now associated with an abandoned project by those who missed this memo?
Digital Needle - Playing phonograph records with a scanner
Nah. It's just a rails site. Some interesting stuff but most of it pretty straight forward.
Microsoft to disable Windows Phone 7 unlocking in first update
I interpreted his quote differently. The difference is not in abstract vs concrete but in open vs closed.

Presumably, the researchers building open-source EMR systems do talk to patients and hospitals rather than building abstract software in a void. They don't, however, need to worry about profitability and would be more free to integrate with other systems and not try to create lock-in.
The guy could still go pass the bar and practice law. So maybe he shouldn't get a full refund... that education is worth something.
Ask.com Brings Q&A and Personalization to Web Search
Man, I didn't even START programming until I was 27, and my career is going great. You aren't old until you stop learning.
Aren't you paying for your professor's time? It's like saying, "thanks for making that website for me, but I don't think I'm going to make any money, so I want my money back". Uh, too bad.

Just default on the loans and move to a deserted island if you don't want to pay them.
i thought this was going to be about a bike motor. 750whp per liter would be a more accurate description.
Here's a start-up idea: an IPv4 address market/exchange (unless something like this already exists)
In fact, once the 486 hit, 0x90 was an explicit NOP (1 cycle instead of the 3 that an XCHG usually takes, won't stall the pipeline even if other stuff touches AX, etc.).

Similarly, on x64 0x90 is a true no-op, while stuff like XCHG EBX, EBX clears the upper 32 bits of the register.
I don't think that downside is unavoidable. In the same way that you can't expect somebody to create some or all of a web page without at least a basic understanding of some form of markup, you can't expect a linguist to handle various differing cases without an understanding of conditionals.

This is a classic case of "make things as simple as possible... but no simpler". You've achieved the first bit. To go any simpler would lose vital granularity.
"you've got to give the guy credit for his translating telephones..."

Was it really so hard to predict in 1990 we'd eventually have automatic translation?

First off, Kurtzweil had a company doing (primitive) speech recognition since the 80s; he was a domain expert.

http://www.kurzweiltech.com/kai.html
"I also started Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, Inc. in 1982 with the goal of creating a voice activated word processor."

Given that there was speech recognition tech around, and with simple, poor, machine translation since much earlier, was it really so hard to extrapolate that one day we'd have machine voice translation? Especially if your prediction didn't specify any benchmark accuracy?

What was hard to estimate was when it would happen.

"He predicted, when it was _not_ obvious - that we would have phones that would be able to translate our conversations, right around now."

But what is now? Assessing the accuracy of the prediction, there's a big difference between 'early 2000s', and 2011, especially on an exponential curve.

However, if you make a prediction without any sort of an objective or verifiable benchmark, the timing gets real easy, because its not clear whether you meant

* that the technology could be implemented, or

* had been implemented in a lab, or

* was commonly available.

Nor is it clear, in this specific example, what levels of translation accuracy you are requiring for the prediction to be met.

This provides huge wiggle room. He must realise that, but continues not to provide precisely verifiable predictions.

It is, of course, very hard to assess the obviousness of a prediction, retrospectively, and this is something I'm conscious of - its easy to say its obvious, after the fact.

However, if he was serious about tracking accuracy, he would make clearly defined predictions, and in order to establish their value at the time, would make something like a real money prediction market - or a series of bets with other domain experts - which would enable a retrospective evaluation of how outspoken the prediction was.

As it stands, this hasn't been done in the past, so when one of his predicted technologies suddenly shows up, I remain sceptical about his overall accuracy.

I agree with you that the core thesis - that exponential growth has large consequences, which are as yet poorly understood - is a very interesting and important one.
I am cautious though; inferring continued exponential growth, purely from looking at the past, is inductive reasoning; its not something we should take for granted, either.
10 Things Smart People's Bosses Don't Want Them To Know
The author seems to want to frame Google's WebM move as a question of Good vs. Evil (as does Gruber btw.), which is not very helpful. As with most everything, there are both costs and benefits.

The main benefit is that Google's move may reduce the risk that the MPEG consortium goes crazy in the future, and starts to charge every possible user, causing havoc in the process.

The main cost is more certain: a huge inconvenience for content producers that were hoping to get away with going H.264 only, causing havoc in the process.

The interesting question is the usual one: is the benefit worth the cost?
As a gag, years ago, I started a 'union' at a small software vendor/consultancy I worked at. Our first demand? Lower salaries.
Oh, it sounds like the javascript font rendering isn't working for you. Do you have JavaScript disabled?