skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've heard that Xfce is lighter and faster, but have you really checked whether it is still so? I performed some superficial testing when I needed to install a simple system that could run a browser on an old computer and I didn't find any noticeable advantage myself. And I have read that lightness is no more a focus of development.

I installed several Linux systems consequentially on a USB flash drive, booted my laptop and measured memory consumption at system startup and when running a single instance of Firefox browser pointed to a certain website. Here's what I measured:

OS | RAM | RAM (w/FF)

xubuntu 8.04.1 183 (didn't run FF on this)
xubuntu 10.04.-RC 157 187
ubuntu 10.04-RC desktop 160 228
ubuntu 10.04-RC netbook 162 219
Tiny Core Linux 2.10 43 (failed to permanently install FF here)

I wanted to try NetBSD and other systems, but I failed to install them on a USB stick.

Tiny Core is a special Linux distribution in a way that it doesn't have much of anything installed by default, but you can "mount" applications and drivers as you need. I very much appreciate the fact that you are getting "clean slate" each time you boot, but in my case I needed to install Firefox permanently, which is doable, but not a default way of doing things. I haven't figured out how to do it, or Tiny Core would be ideal for me.

As far as differences between Ubuntu and Xubuntu go, I didn't see any significant advantage of Xfce here. Both systems could run on a 256 MB system, hardly on 128 MB. On the other hand, I didn't see any disadvantage either. To my eyes, xubuntu system looked very much like ubuntu I use.
Georgia Tech has had an ongoing project for ASL recognition using gloves. They've since upgraded to a Kinect though. Seems to work pretty well. http://kinecthacks.net/american-sign-language-recognition-us...

There is one deaf researcher I know of that is working on ASL recognition. http://research.gallaudet.edu/~cvogler/research/

FWIW, my grad studies were in computer vision but I'm more interested in multimedia and protocols these days.
> speak at highschool classes maybe.

I encourage people in the tech industry to look into doing this. I think it's important to take the opportunity to show people in schools some of the exciting and fun things we get to do on a daily basis.

Teachers can appreciate people from industry coming and talking about their experience with students.
I've written about this before, and wrote a proof-of-concept plugin that I dogfood on my own blog:

http://www.blahedo.org/botblock/

Two core ideas: 1) the truly hard thing for the computer is the language understanding. It's the question, not the computation, that's the problem. 2) Any site that becomes popular will be worth it to the spammers to hard-code, so any successful widely-deployed system needs to let the users add their own additional question templates.
What do you mean? ARM is not a GPU.
Pretty awesome - puts my winter project(s) to shame :-)
Florida Relay is a text-relay service. The first time I dealt with a relay service, they took 30 seconds to explain how it worked. From my standpoint, it was pretty easy to remember to say, 'go ahead' at the end of a phrase, but, often times, we were in-sync enough that I would get halfway through and would be alerted that he was typing. Usually Relay was an exceptional case, i.e. I was driving somewhere and SMS or ICQ wasn't possible. It did mean that he couldn't handle incoming tech support calls, but, 95% of our support calls came in across tickets, livehelp or ICQ (at the time). I would agree, the people that handle the relay service are almost robotic and often female.

We did have clients that never knew he was deaf and were shocked to find out. I think one time he was working with a client, it was somewhat involved and they requested his number so they could talk with him direct to address an issue.

As far as employment goes, I believe some US employers write intentionally vacuous job requirements to exclude groups of people: Must be able to lift 150 pounds, front-line phone support, ability to distinguish colors, other tasks as assigned.

Many employers look for reasons not to hire someone... anything that makes you different can be an impediment. Regrettable, but, it happens frequently.

However, if you have the skills, I don't think most employers would be creeped out and would be willing to conduct a phone interview over an instant messaging platform. If you've got the skills, a decent employer won't have a problem with accommodating your circumstances.

Hopefully we'll be reading about your MVP soon.
New Cassandra can pack two billion columns into a row
One of the founders of Keen Guides - http://www.keenguides.com/ - is deaf. I got to hear their pitch as part of LaunchBox09 and it was spectacular: a large impetus for them to create their company was to enable the deaf and hearing impaired to participate in Museum tours, etc.
Hi, I'm a deaf wannabe entrepreneur like you. I use hearing aids. I cannot communicate well i.e. it is impossible for me to assert myself in groups or even in noisy environments like crowded restaurants with individuals or small groups of 2-3. I don't know ASL. I struggle with accents too as I was born and raised in Delhi and moved to USA just one and a half years back for graduate school. I cannot use a phone (use Relay which can be extremely frustrating for the non-deaf person on the other side of the line).

I've come to the conclusion that I need a cofounder to pitch my ideas/MVP. It is a bit painful because I love presenting, I've been told I'm a natural. I have no problems pitching my idea, I can speak articulately. The problem comes whenever someone from the audience has a question. I can't hear the question. The workaround is to have them IM the question to me from their laptops but that can be as frustrating as Relay as the conversation isn't really very freeflowing.

I also hate groups. I hate socials and parties where I barely know the people there, I'm mostly standing in a group unable to follow the conversation and they end up being really boring. As you can imagine, meetups where I do not know _anybody_ are much worse. But the bottom line is, you need to adopt a different strategy. You need to build up contacts and use email/IM to pitch your idea instead of pitching on the spot. Collect visiting cards/emails.

Also remember being deaf, you have a big social network that you can tap in. I developed a MVP for delivering public announcements to phones in textual form (developed a webapp, Android app etc) and through the HLAA (Hearing Loss Association of Florida) I managed to get a meeting with executives from Continental Airlines. At the meeting, my professor at graduate school did the pitching and his pitch was incredible, I just couldn't have done it as well as he. About 80% of my communication with the professor was via email, I met with him face-to-face about just 8-10 times in the 7 month period the project was running (when I had to demo something). All the ideas and progress reports we did it through email. So it all comes down to finding the right cofounder (my professor would check his email every 15 minutes and preferred email to phone and face-to-face meetings with everyone).
Really like the UI/UX work. Hope this gets picked up by someone who can develop the site. Looking at the designs I would hazard a guess the designer responsible is the guy who does the dailybooth designs.
Write speed.
That's the approach I had in mind.
When would you read all your books if you bought ten times as many? I think that's a hard limitation of the book market - even devoted readers can only read so much.
Consider updating the "Do we have to be US citizens?" question in FAQ to include that teams would have to fly up for the interview in addition to the three months (if that is still the decision).
The #1 free App Store app? It’s made by a 14 year old
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Of course, you ignore them!
<embarrassed>I do, thank you. :)</embarrassed>
i'm assuming "why did you pick this project..." is all about the passion...

Actually the ideal answer would be "We needed this at the last company I worked for."
Forget about the memory usage - most computers have at least 1 GB of memory these days. What about things that matter, like load time on login, lag when interacting with the UI, etc.?
I was going to buy a Kindle this week but this article is making me think twice. I thought it'd definitely be cheaper to buy books. What about PDFs? There are thousands of PDFs on the internet which you can get for free, is the quality of PDFs worse than books in kindle format? Do you have to scroll sideways or something? Or is the font smaller?
Unless it's your wife... Then you say
'Yes, dear'
most boring read in a long time. i think the last jersey shore was more interesting.
Actually that was my reaction to the article. I don't know if he's right in his depiction of what China is doing, but if he is, it sounds like they are making all the mistakes the US is, with allowing too many patents - but much more so. So they'll end up screwing themselves.
For my alarm clock, I put my phone under the pillow with vibrate on. Works well.
> the truly hard thing for the computer is the language understanding.

This does not just apply to understanding language. It applies to understanding and interpreting audio, images, videos, etc. Words and phrases are just the easiest to create in CAPTCHA's, but they are also getting easier for computers to solve. Quite a few of the CAPTCHA's on your blog could be solved by Wolfram Alpha (or at least close to). If it was used in masses, it wouldn't take long for hackers to perfect the process of answering them.

> so any successful widely-deployed system needs to let the users add their own additional question templates

Couldn't hackers take advantage of entering their own question templates? And relying on user-generated CAPTCHA's is extremely risky. Quality and consistency would drop to a level where the system would became almost useless.
and Germany ?
We had that, too, but it wasn't really clear cut. We also had a bunch in the middle, who, while they really did need to go through most of the 101 material, they also did their share of intimidating the fresh starters - probably more so than those who really knew the material, who mostly just skipped class.

Since my university had large Korean and Chinese populations, it kind of struck me as parallel to the problems the Asian Studies department had weeding out native speakers looking for an easy A - it was hard to tell them from the kids who could speak but not write. Putting them in a separate section kept them from driving the class, and things went much smoother.
Sure, go ahead.
If you want to go even lighter and more MVP (esp. to revive an old ThinkPad or whatnot) there's always LXDE: http://lxde.org/
WebKit to get CSS variables, mixins, nesting?
You are arguing against bad design and lazy development, not against allowing users to control their data.
That's the thing, I didn't see any difference (granted, that was on my quite recent laptop, but that's what I had for testing). Memory constraint was real in my case: I was going to use this on a computer that had either 256 MB or less.

I guess as a rule of thumb if you don't care about memory usage, you don't need to care about 2D graphics performance either.
Right, but of course that's the beauty of it, right? Communal editing (helps) ensures that most errors are short lived. I actually took the effort to edit an article once. It was on hearsay. There were some complicated nuances as between certain hearsay exceptions that the article was trying to clarify. I noticed some errors and confusing explanations, and set about spending a few hours figuring out how best to rewrite that section. Making the changes of course also helped me to learn it once and for all.

As they say, no better way to learn than to teach.
> This made me fear that even seeking employment is difficult since I can't do phone interviews or followup calls without creeping them out.

When I have a phone interview, I tell them I'm deaf and people are usually happy to do it over IM.

Text relay is iffy, especially if it's the interviewer's first time using it. I would never use video relay for a technical interview since the interpreter won't be familiar with the terminology.
Can you clarify why you think parents not giving a damn about what their daughters do with their careers is worse?
We are equal, but we are also different. These things are often conflated, but they are not the same.
This is a great idea. The point is merely to provide an alternative to an explicit CAPTCHA that requires interaction like reCAPTCHA that doesn't cost less to try and break. That way, it's strictly more convenient to the user, if they use autofill or whatever, they'll just be subject to the ordinary reCAPTCHA that they would be anyway.

I'm imagining listening to mousemove on the document and doing something lightweight like appending the coordinates to an array onmousemove. Then a function that's setInterval'd every 2 seconds or something would flush the array to the server via XHR. A server-side script would, transparently to the user, analyze the mousetrail and if the user appeared to move their mouse realistically and took at least like a minute to fill out the form and took realistic amounts to type in text inputs and so on, the server will let them skip the reCAPTCHA.
Ask HN: Interviewing at a Startup - Should I Lie About My Salary?
First off, I just want to say that I would never advocate lying in an interview ever however I have heard from multiple sources that inflating your salary anywhere from 5-10% has now become the norm, as most companies will not investigate a potential employee's previous salary as long as it is within a reasonable range. I'd love to hear what the community has to say on this. How great is the risk here and if you could be potentially making an additional (say) $10,000+ a year isn't taking the risk justified?
Isn't that what caused all those business critical excel spreadsheets ;)
Why Startups Shouldn't Use Technical Recruiters
CloudFlare (https://www.cloudflare.com/) does something similar to this. It will present a CAPTCHA challenge page to users who have had suspicious activity within a certain period of time, according to Project Honeypot. If you want to be really stringent (at the cost of some false positives), it will also challenge people based on HTTP header analysis, and with a paid account they will also protect against XSS and SQL injection in POST requests.

They've done a fantastic job of cutting down the number of fake profiles on my client Set For Marriage (a dating site where it was a huge problem before), and the rest of their features are pretty good too (the asset caching has resulted in about 60% faster page load times).
Martin Fowler has a good article on the maturity levels of a REST API: http://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.htm...

That article provides useful ideas and targets for developing a REST API. Recommended.
All the problems in the first answer are people problems. If you work in a software firm that doesn't treat its employees like code monkeys, or better yet, work for yourself, then programming isn't demanding. It's fun, relaxing, and awesome.

Sales is demanding. :S
Is risk of discovery really the only thing you're concerned about?

Lying to your employer about anything seems like a compromise of ethics that isn't be justified by you getting more money.
You're basically arguing that the convenience of software developers trumps the privacy concerns / ease of use issues with the end-users. As a user, if I want to play Farmville, but I don't want Zygna to have access to my address and phone number I'm 'screwed' because it would be too difficult for Zygna to handle multiple levels of permissions? This would be akin to saying that 'forcing' all e-commerce sites to operate over SSL connections is a 'backwards and conservative move' that 'limits innovation' because developers now need to worry about SSL handshakes and purchasing certificates.

The fact is that Farmville doesn't need my phone number or address to allow me to play the game, so why should I (as a user) be presented with an all-or-nothing decision? Your answer seems to be that the reason the user is presented with an all-or-nothing decision is because it would be too difficult for a developer to write some more unit tests. Writing unit tests takes away from time building new features, therefore unit tests stifle innovation (though by this logic bugfixes also stifle innovation).

Implementing a permissions system and allowing your program to not need an 'exponential' amount of unit tests is easy+. Just treat everything like a file. Seriously. Treat every piece of data like a file with an ACL allowing certain groups/users to have read/write/no access to the file. It's that easy. Return a standard error when an app tries to perform an operation on a piece of user-data that it doesn't have permissions for. The apps/frameworks should be able to easily handle this.

You don't see desktop apps with billions of unit tests just to cover file access. You don't see webapps with billions of unit tests to cover database access (databases also have permission systems). Why would it be so hard for Facebook apps to do the same thing? Why would it require an exponential number of unit tests?

As a final note, keeping the barriers to entry low when it comes to (apparently not-so) private user-data is a bad thing. Just look at what the 'ease of use' of PHP's database access did for SQL injection attacks on the web. All developers needed to do was to use bind params, but many of them didn't even know what bind params were. Keeping the barriers low to getting access to users' private data will only result in disaster.

+ For various levels of easy.
I loved the author's discussion of "the deep friendship of intimate conversation" as a form of solitude and introspection. I've experienced increased self-acquaintance through such conversation a few times in life, and can't imagine ever forgetting a single one.
1) With many permission requests, there will be far more than just two items on the screen. Look at other dialog boxes for FB permission - just one or two options is not the norm, it's just the example...
Yes, and the problem is not JavaScript performance per se. The problem is slowness in the canvas implementation in several browsers.

In my game 90%+ is spend drawing to canvas.

In some cases its better to use the DOM to render the game, especially if the platform has accelerated CSS3 transform and translate3d (like iOS).

What I did was to abstract the drawing so the game can render either to canvas or DOM depending on what is faster for the platform the code runs on.
I wonder how designers fit into this development process. Most open source projects lack UI polish, yet GitHub looks like it's crafted by a professional.
This got me all thinking about how far we (the team) have come since we applied in Winter (and got rejected).

Does that count? How far you have progressed in mindset and development of the product? I wish there was a field for that in the application. I'd be interesting to see that progress, IMO.
What if you did some exploratory work on the solution at the last company you worked for ... are there potential IP issues that could crop up?
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But I think it's full of prickly complications that won't get magicaly solved by being able to throw up a sexy Rails website or by having an electronic widget in the vehicle.

This is absolutely true, which is one thing that makes (working at) this company so interesting/challenging.

On one front, without technology development, you can't scale without a lot of capital investment -- even the custom technology used by zipcar is cost prohibitive (around the $1000 price-point, and requires several hours of professional installation). While we support swapping keys with the renter, we don't want to open both parties up to the inconvenience and liability of handing your keys over to a total stranger. The carkit provides greater choice to the owner as to how they want to rent out their car (allowing them use a smartphone instead of the physical key), and empowers them to keep better track of how it is used when rented out.

On the other, as you put it, technology doesn't solve all these prickly complications -- there are serious operations, customer support and business development problems that must be met in order to make this work. Insurance is a critical piece in the puzzle, and one that our team has been working on for a year and a half now. We are confident in our insurance partner and the custom policy we have worked together to create at this point -- and we will continue to work with our provider to ensure that we can continue to provide coverage as our company grows.
I'm the OP. I almost mentioned CSP in the article but decided I was pushing the limits of the post already and many of the ideas were already covered in actors or data flow. At the level I was talking, I have a hard time seeing the differences between actors and CSP, but I know a lot less about CSP.
Who owns your online identity is a completely different thing than letting this sort of contact information leak through the carelessness of your friends. Other profile information of yours, if you don't correct FB's settings, can be given to third-parties by way of your friend saying okay.

That is, thankfully your friend can't decide they want to share there contact information with some app and vicariously share yours too.

Big difference.
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This is awesome! It's sort of like a less precise large-scale 3D printer or MineCraft. I'm sure I'm not the only person who thinks this is certainly the beginning of automated construction. It works for assembly lines. We may finally be getting to the point where the same process will work in more mobile volatile environments.
Well, it is a good thing that it is possible to repost links at HN. Otherwise I'd have missed this lecture.
The Password Manifesto
The biggest risk is that someone would lie to me during an interview, I would hire them on good faith, and would later find out that they have questionable ethics. Please don't lie in interviews, it's hard enough to find good people as it is.
If you send references to actors inside messages between actors, then I think you're pretty close to the same idea. The main constraint that actors add is that an actor has one incoming mailbox. In CSP you have more flexibility to have multiple input channels or other arrangements. I have no idea whether that really gives you a more interesting level of power or not.

Channels are good stuff.
You are correct. I write for ReadWriteWeb, wrote the article and I think that the URL has that code in it because I clicked on the Hacker News button on the article to share it.

:)
Inductive charger landing pads, a must have. Let them build forever. Just make sure the pads are plugged into a neighbors outlet ... or their Chevy Volt.

http://translogic.aolautos.com/2011/01/06/ces-2011-gm-brings...