skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are a lot of approaches. Yes there is software that takes two photos and let you reconstruct 3d. If you have a man-made object you probably don't want a generic point-cloud building approach (like say http://www.photosculpt.net/ ) - but rather something like Photomodeler that lets you select vertices and build up surfaces.

There is also software that builds models from silhouette methods, that usually require you printing out targets which you place the model, so of like a manual turntable approach. I can't remember the name of software that does this at the moment, but its out there.

Or you could work from video (just from a single camera) that you move around. That can be effective, not sure of the best software for doing this - it's called structure from motion, a quick google shows some source at this project site: http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/

There some code out there for a do it yourself laser scanner - this isn't what I was thinking of but it seems kind of cool: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK5eYhpBtQc

I've also seen some do it yourself structured light software (ie bring your own projector and camera), that seems to work ok.

It kind of depends on what size and type of objects you want to scan - things like the surface properties could be important - also how long you can keep it still.
I think your idea to limit the number of question that you could answer in a 24 hour period might be worth some thought.

Also, the stated reason for lowering the karma for asking questions was that there were some people who were earning massive karma gains by just asking tons of duplicate and "easy" questions (stuff like just going through the ruby docs and asking what each function was for).
Scratch seems to be a good starting place for programming. I started my 6yr old on it over christmas, and he was making som progress making the onscreen stuff do what he wanted. It was great to see the light go on that he could make the computer do what he wanted it to do.

(now, to get his ui better than click, and hit the keys z x c v in order)
Dropbox is one of the only services I pay for (last.fm is the other). I don't see why I would use this app, but that's just me.
Certain, eh? Hm. How would we settle that bet?
Lesson: when you talk about work related stuff on a personal blog, and you're an asshole, your employer will probably find out, and they won't be happy. No disclaimer can prevent that.
Most people don't use Ubuntu.

Come on, man, it's a Linux Distro – how many of our moms are installing those?

Plus there's the whole easy monetization thing for developers.

This is like saying Dropbox's functionality was a solved problem thanks to rsync.
With their concept of "free-standing services" for each endpoint, it sounds like they took the idea of CGI scripts and compile the logic against an HTTP wrapper. It -could- work if the build process spits out separate binaries from a single source base. I think I'll stick with using elastic computing to scale horizontally and spend resources on customer acquisition instead.
Why are 300 million Americans a more valuable advertising market than 300 million Europeans?
Desktop computers and Desktop-replacements are far from over. I sure the FCK won't ever write large documents, presentations, edit software, or anything else on small portable devices, even if you add an external keyboard or monitor, they are still nothing more than portable toys compared to a desktop. They will both co-exist and morons are the only ones that think otherwise. Sports cars kick-ass but I sure the fck can't use them to move large things, thus is why a person need a SUV or truck, same analogy of desktop vs tiny portable. Quit being a moron!
I remember watching, IIRC, pornucopia with Katie Morgan. In one of the scenes she's talking about how mainstream pornography came to a start. The black and white silent-film clip showed is of a man stealing three women's clothes as they skinny dip and blackmails them demanding sex. They agree on condition that it's through a glory hole. He agrees and goes to do his thing. The girls grab a stray donkey off the beach and back it up against the glory hole.

I saw women exploiting a man for his stupidity when he's horny. I saw glory hole sex from like the 1910's. I saw beastiality and the debasement of the man.

You can still see all these things today in porn. Given that the internet basically created the Clothed-Female-Naked-Male genre, I'd contend that the author of the article really has no clue about porn.

For all the violence against women, there's equal amounts of violent porn against men. For every one debasing a woman, there's on debasing a man. For one humiliating a woman, there's one humiliating a man (I mean there's actually porn videos where there's a guy tied up and blind folded naked and a group of women laugh at his junk).

The Internet has done for porn what the printing press did for the written word. You went from only the elitist males in society being able to write a book to virtually anyone from any background being able to become world famous. I mean look at J.K. Rowlings backstory for when she wrote Harry Potter and you can hardly say she had any of the elitist connections of early writers. Similarly we've gone from only big studios producing porn, to anyone with a half-decent video camera... or even just a cell phone.
Most people are not familiar with app stores, and barely more familiar with downloading software in general (rather than going to Best Buy to get a box or just having their son install it). It is not "normal" for them. Whether they'll lose the app if their computer crashes is a real question people have (and in fact some online stores do make it a real PITA to redownload). Apple is answering those people.

TL;DR: The world does not revolve around geeks.
True but I'm not mentioning earnings at all; simply based on revs seems like a LOFTY valuation.
Apparently you're not culturally elite unless you can find new ways to make fun of Dan Brown and Tim Ferriss. I would respect this if the snubbers wouldn't trade their soul for the success of either author.

Every snarky review I've ever read comes off as sour grapes and tends to devolve into a character assissination instead of a constructive criticism of the content. These guys write books that people evidently want to read. I fail to see the problem.
If you google "define:entrepreneur" then the first definition is:

"someone who organizes a business venture and assumes the risk for it"

so small businesses are run by entrepreneurs. Entrepreneur has to go down in history with "irony", "literally" and "physically" as being the most misused words in modern English.
J3L2404 is not downvoting you — other people are, presumably because they do not think your conversation is adding to the discussion as a whole (or maybe they're just vindictive Apple fans). HN does not allow you to downvote responses to your own comments, so it couldn't be J3L2404.
I edited the original comment to note that hentai manga (not so much video, though, for some very odd reason) is often of high plot quality, I would guess because in manga the scriptwriter often also is the one who draws it, and when you're putting in all that work to draw something line by line, you won't be able to avoid wanting to make it beautiful and wanting to add plot.

Then I noticed that people were no longer voting up the comment, and edited back out - I would guess that mentioning manga made it seem lower-prestige.

But (he quibbled) I'm not sure I'd classify F/SN as erotica in the first place, even if it's technically in the erogame genre; it's a novel with some sex scenes.
Or Alfred Lawson. From Wikipedia:

> In the 1920s, he promoted health practices including vegetarianism and claimed to have found the secret of living to 200. He also developed his own highly unusual theories of physics, according to which such concepts as "penetrability", "suction and pressure" and "zig-zag-and-swirl" were discoveries on par with Einstein's Theory of Relativity. He published numerous books on these concepts, all set in a distinctive typography. Lawson repeatedly predicted the worldwide adoption of Lawsonian principles by the year 2000.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Lawson
How would we use vim if there were no keyboards?
Why not just use something like FairGame to strip the DRM?
The irony is that he says that immediately after "Selling on Craigslist sucks, it’s time consuming and you have to deal with flaky people that just want a deal." He's recommending exactly the behavior that makes Craigslist suck.
Testing external services with bash and curl
If I'm meeting with you to sell you something, it's because we agreed on a price already. If you try to bargain with me after the fact, I'll just say "No," and leave. You've violated my trust and broken the deal.
how do they prevent renters from robbing the places?
Twitter was something new though, Quora's pretty late to the q&a party.
Dawn Metropolis
Great to hear, I'm in the middle of organizing something similar in Brooklyn (still trying to nail down the space).

Totally agree, too many business/marketing/networking centric events in NYC and not enough hacking.
Hah! Like I'm going to give my address out to people.

I meet people in a public place: Starbucks, a grocery store, McDonalds, etc.
From the sounds of it, this guy did not give up his life "easily". I consider it a testament to human self-preservation that he survived this misery for so long.
Here's an experiment we are running here for our technical documents.

We have an Etherpad server (http://etherpad.org/) we heavily use, and we've used it to write some of our technical docs in Markdown. We use other pads to define HTML templates. Then, we have simple web app which merges a chosen HTML template with the Markdown content, which lets the user preview the rendered results before saving the final HTML output.

Advantages: you get all Etherpad's realtime collaboration goodness, automatic version control and revision history, the HTML templates can be edited simply (and restricted to editing by certain users), it's pretty quick to pick up.
Disadvantages: Etherpad is primarily text based so you're SOL if you need diagrams etc, slight complexity of the parts (templates, content, web app) to make it run.
Man, it's 2011, not 1983. If a device can run TLS, it can run DNSSEC.
Wow is that WhatGuysWant thing way out of date. This is someone looking at the early days of a story site in the early days of the Internet and being horrified at the bad grammar, and from this she decides what guys really want? Give me a break. She's just looking at bad amateur writing, that's all. She didn't even find the Usenet erotica groups which had already developed to a far higher level of sophistication by that point. (Raise your hand if you remember the Celestial Reviews!)

Seriously, you sound like you're working on some really bad data here. I recall the data being that sex stories, as distinct from romance novels, are read by more men than women - though I don't know about the gender ratio of authors, certainly a lot of them have female pen names at least.
I don't really see the issue here. If an anti-leaking policy loses utility if published, than it's not really effective to begin with.
And by reading it you fulfill the drive to learn as well. All four are hit.
Facebook 'friends' mock 'suicide' of woman who posted goodbye message
He posts a math formula, a fancy graph, and even the Python script but barely mentions the end result.

I would have loved to know how many he actually bought, sold, and for what profit.
"Obviously Facebook isn't a mature company at the moment"

Mature in terms of what? They are a 7 year old company with 500 Million users and 3000 top tier workers.

"I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that Facebook will be earning more than Yahoo within a couple of years."

With that logic, I don't see why Yahoo can't earn more than Google within a couple of years. All they need to do is to 'focus on monetizing', just like Facebook can (if they only put their mind to it).

Anecdote: Google converts 15X more than Facebook in my circle of peers that have used both.
Er, DJB and I are both presuming endpoints will validate -- we're both end-to-end security people. And that's fine, it ain't 1983 anymore, and a device that can handle TLS can handle both DNSCurve and DNSSEC (remember, the crypto construct in Curve is only about 8x faster).

What I'm saying is that mass adoption of DNSCurve eliminates the caching layer in DNS, and that will cause a major increase in traffic to the authoritatives, especially TLDs and the root.
So they didn't bother to try here or on iOS. Honestly, not particularly surprising: any DRM will be broken eventually (even their own heavily-obfuscated iTunes FairPlay DRM).

(Edit: apparently this is the fault of Angry Birds. I bet it's going to be very simple to actually crack, though, so my point still stands.)

Without record labels forcing DRM, it's just a lot of effort for something that will be cracked, and only prevents the pirates who probably wouldn't pay anyway from using the apps.

However, with this weak DRM, and expressly disallowing additional DRM, they have shown that the Mac App Store is not about much of the existing Mac software. You're never going to get Microsoft, Autodesk, or Adobe in that kind environment, at least for their flagship products.
Lorenz and the Butterfly Effect
The financial structure of making a Hollywood movie is very strange. It's an accounting nightmare with thousands of moving parts built over decades of favors, trades, and union negotiations. The few blockbuster movies of the year sustain the whole system. It's a very difficult business to make money in. I don't understand it all myself, and neither does the screenwriter who tried to explain parts of it to me.

Everyone involved wants to make a good movie, and everyone most of all wants to make a movie that sells, but it's not always possible to tell what will turn out well and what people will like. So we get a lot of bad movies and a few good ones. A lot of flops and a few blockbusters.
the developers get paid
[Please be aware that I'm commenting on the reporting here not the ultimate result - starting at "Multiple discrepancies" section and the writing is far better looking simply at the evidence, indeed it makes you wonder how this wasn't pipped earlier, clearly no one compared the case studies to the paper???].

I'm surprised by the poor reporting in the start of the article, I expected careful balance and avoidance of sensationalism.

Three examples - reporting on the paper published in the Lancet 28 Feb 1998:

>“Onset of behavioural symptoms was associated by the parents with measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination in eight of the 12 children,” began the paper’s “findings.” Adopting these claims as fact,4 its “results” section added: “In these eight children the average interval from exposure to first behavioural symptoms was 6.3 days (range 1-14).”

I've not read the whole paper but there's nothing wrong with this is there? Adopting a claim that "parents associated [...]" as fact isn't wrong, or at least not provably by us. The association is apparently wrong but that doesn't speak to this result. The later result is not surprising as they would have been seeking incidences where there was a temporal association. I'm assuming that the paper didn't actually say there was an association (just a reported one) otherwise this article would have quoted that surely.

Two, the author questions how they would have had sight of the result before conducting the study. Fraud is possible, like Hubble's constant. But "knowing" the result is commonplace isn't it. One has a theory that one believes in enough to test, "this must be it, I think I'm really on to something".

Last is the questioning of the case histories, after talking to Mrs2:

>The next day, she complained to my editors. She said my methods “seemed more akin to the gutter press.” But I was perplexed by her story, since there was no case in the Lancet that matched her careful account.

Basically the author of the article is doing what has been so decried in comments here, they are trusting the (at least 5 year old) recollection of a layman vs the records of medical practitioners at the time. There is certainly more than one conclusion that fits including the possibility that Mrs2 gave a misreport to either the original study or Mr Deer. He also calls her account careful, but he describes her not remembering when the symptoms appeared being badgered into an answer.

Thankfully the article greatly improves as it goes on.

Parting shot:

>he and Barr explained in a confidential grant application to the UK government’s Legal Aid Board

Confidentiality isn't what it used to be!
Good point, I was just thinking about global monopolies. BT of course did a similar thing in the U.K.
Because those 300 million Americans shop at the same place, and, generally speaking, speak the same language. If I run a department store in England, advertising in France doesn't do me much good. Ukranian universities don't much care about advertising in Spain.

The US is the largest, richest single market in the world, with the possible exception of China/India. Those markets, however, are undeveloped.
"Some users of the site even taunted the 42-year-old over her final status update instead of trying to save her, calling her a “liar” and saying the fatal overdose was 'her choice'."

"Yesterday her mother, Jennifer Langridge, said she was shocked and upset that nobody did anything for her daughter despite being aware of her threats."

"Mental health charities said the case was a sad reflection on today’s society where friends made online are not necessarily friends in real life."

The ability to be more connected seems to have commoditized friendships.

The article admits of claims by some friends who lived far away trying to obtain help, and a claim that this woman had basically "cried wolf" before.

But the trend does seem to be a cheapening of what friendship means.
There is already a daily reputation cap. You can still keep answering questions, but beyond 200 points or something around there, you stop earning points until the next day.
Most indie Mac developers will tell you they don't really concern themselves with app piracy. This is the same thing; someone still has to upload the dmg to some shady website, the pirate has to find it and remove the DRM files, and then do it all over again when there's an update and hope it keeps working. Or, just pay $3 and never worry about it again.
How exactly is that different from the usual publishers' practice of sending early copies of the book to a ton of reviewers and ask them to, well, review it in newspapers and magazines?
Ask HN: Sleeping Hacks
I have a major sleeping problem - I'm so excited about the ideas I'm working on throughout the day that I can't actually fall asleep without working myself to exhaustion, and the issue is that it's nearly impossible for me to get out of bed in the morning the following day. I'd like to break the habit of staying up late and sleeping in.

What are some hacks that other entrepreneurs and engineers use to maintain some sanity in their work routines?
So this article seems to treat startups and small businesses completely different, but I always assumed they were very similar. What's the difference between a startup and a small business?

(in the context of the article)
But most people will not deploy a local dns{sec|curve} cache daemon, and use their ISP/OpenDNS/Google DNS instead, and caching is possible at this level instead, isn't it?

If each client endpoint were using a dns cache for classic DNS, the increase in traffic would also be a "concern", no?
Reminds me of PT Barnum's line: "I don't care what they write about me as long as they spell my name right."
Consider that JABS directed people to a medical professional researching a link between vaccinations and behavioural changes and that this is what the parents were seeking. More over that had the case studies been properly examined that a causal link would have been demonstrated to be unlikely. How then is JABS culpable?

Or did I miss something?

Even if JABS commissioned the research unless they instructed that fraud should be carried out I don't see the harm they did?
I hadn't actually looked at Scratch in detail before...it reminds me strongly of iShell (multimedia authoring platform), which grew out of some Apple tech.
why do I need to register to vote? Why can't I just upvote. (At least provide facebbok/ twitter login. There is tremendous inertia before I go through any new sign ups)
>Raising good adults does not preclude raising good kids, so I do find your response to be a bit combative.

It's the "not to raise good kids" part that turns me off. Surely it should be "to raise good kids _and_ good adults"?
Google Maps (a different beast, of course) handles feedback exceptionally well. You're first thanked and promised a response, then a couple of days later you usually get a "you were right, we'll fix that and let you know when it's fixed", and then within a few months another "we fixed it, here's a link to what you reported (shown on Google Maps), please let us know if we still didn't get it right".

As a result, I enjoy reporting issues to Google Maps, because I know they will be addressed. Maps are dealing with a lot more tangible and unchanging dataset than Search, though.
Mac app store hacked, how developers can better protect themselves
personally I think that the 50 billion valuation is just a negotiation tactic. They start off at 50 billion, so that when they actually IPO at 25 billion, everyone will think they are getting an awesome deal that will double their money in no time.
Yes, this is very true. See http://myownstream.com/blog#2010-05-21 ;-)
This is a bug in Angry Birds, not the DRM. You're supposed to check the receipt's bundle ID actually matches that of your app, and they didn't. If you try this with other paid-for apps it will fail.
A warning to hackers: be careful building on Twitter's API
the word is "bargain" not "barter".
Why Quora Is Better Than Others
I lost 15 pounds in 4 hours after buying the book. This was uk currency though.

- it's an entertaining read.
It is easy to class out what could have an effect when it is something easily as monitored and controlled like vaccinations. Changes in vaccination rates have had no influence over autism diagnosis rates. So while common sense tells you therefore the two aren't linked due to the lack of correlation there have also been comprehensive statistical studies to back the hypothesis that there is no link.

Why we don't have a solid answer to a cause of autism is because it is likely to be a combination of factors, both genetic and environmental (and likely not a single combination of those). There are plenty of other modern environmental factors that are suspects and but the alt-medicine lobby seems to be leveraging this disproven hypothesis for they own ends. Alt-medicine is big business, for example I know a couple of people making "fuck you" money doing it.

I agree that the human element is always a factor in studies which is why scientists go to great lengths to remove them such as double blind studies for example where both the tester and subject don't know which group the subject belongs to (test or control).
Just submitted the following link on how devs can protect themselves: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2078103
Surprisingly unsatisfying. Bummer. :-(
Diagnosing Lung and Breathing Problems
I can guarantee you 100% hair-loss in 4 minutes:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000VVT94G?ie=UTF8&link...
Opportunity in an Artificial Age