skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had an idea of something exactly like this a few years ago.

I wonder if it just calculates calories or if it can calculate carbs too? My brother is diabetic and I can see this being extremely helpful for anyone needing to calculate their insulin.
No. That's what's so interesting about it for me. The shift in power from investors to founders isn't just something that's been happening during the last 10 years. It's been happening throughout the history of VC.
That sums up the end of the Cold War. The US and the USSR were competing by devoting huge portions of their production to wasted[1] war materials. Finally the US out crazied the USSR under Reagan and Gorbachev conceded.

The benefit of using robot war to compare nations' will power is that you aren't one glitch away from Armageddon as when you use nukes, and you don't kill a generation of people like a human war.

[1] "wasted" in the sense that they were never actually used in combat. The deterrent aspect was part of the "cold".
You're correct, exclusivity is the main offer here. We wouldn't be helping you find what you are shopping for, but rather forging relationships with merchants who would be able to provide you an exclusive deal/benefit every time you shop with them.
UrbanDaddy is hiring two Senior LAMP Engineers in Union Square, NYC.

Here's a recent job description: https://gist.github.com/9d91abc30fdb07f7da45

UrbanDaddy is a leading, exclusive email magazine that covers the latest in restaurants, nightlife, fashion, experiences and products for hip, trend-seeking professionals. We are looking for a full-time Senior LAMP Engineer to help develop our products in web, email and mobile and channels.

Feel free to send an email with your resume and any introduction: hn-engineerjob@urbandaddy.com
Would absolutely expect an exception if my regex engine decided it couldn't handle an expression!

Just giving back a wrong result unless you tweak the php.ini file seems insane. Stuff like this is really what makes PHP deserve its bad rep...
It's easy enough to add generous whitespace and make a design instantly more elegant and viscerally appealing, but when you are trying to extract value from information there is something to be said for information density.

This is my beef with the new Sparrow Gmail client on OS X as well. When I open up Gmail in Chrome I can see 33 messages at once (40 once I scroll). By contrast Sparrow shows me 13 (always utilizing the full vertical of the screen). Now arguably it presents them in a better fashion (although the label display is lacking, but I digress), but is it worth sacrificing 2/3rds the visibility? Not with my email volume.

Granted, information density is less important for HN, but then so is aesthetic appeal (the last thing I want is more people joining HN because it has an elegant appearance).
Is it Zed Shaw week on HN or something?
Well, something that might be useful if anyone bothers to build, at least...
Agreed. Good post. I probably shouldn't have said "ideally", because that makes it look like I don't see value in dealmaking.

I should have said, "ideally (for you)"
> But I'm not sure that a negative result on a Google or TinEye search is indicative that copyrights are being violated.

Be sure. Since 1952 copyright has been assigned by default to the creator of the content, and unauthorized use is a violation of that right, except...

> If it is, there's a hell of a lot of material on the web (and Facebook) that needs to be removed.

...that it can be argued that much of the memeish usage of images falls within the "fair use" or "fair dealing" provisions of the laws. Using it in a commercial advertisement like you intended to does not and would be illegal.

EDIT: IANAL but I like to have some idea of the law before using other people's content.
It seems like the biggest risk with this company is that they're effectively skirting laws designed to limit the sort of service they're providing.

How long before cities up their rent-seeking and require all hired transportation to have a medallion?
If you're calling a sorting algorithm, you should still know about the efficiency of that sorting algorithm takes so you can make a choice between sorting an array or indexing using a data structure (which data structure).

Web is just a UI to layer software that _does something_, algorithms are a way to get that something done. Have you ever needed to understand why e.g., a SQL JOIN is taking too long? That's an example where algorithms matter (in selecting the index type, knowing whether to use a join between two tables or to denormalize etc...)

Knowing how to do your own memory management and knowing Objective C is great and valuable, but if mobile/Mac desktop application development were to become less valuable and more commodity (right now, I don't think it will happen-- but I can't predict the market), will you be able to apply these skills to (say) working on more complex C and C++ software such as a web browser?
That's true. The iPad and iPhone are the first of a new breed of computer.

Just imagine showing someone from that time an iPad with Dropbox's magic. ;)
I'll probably write it up later, but I've been letting people sign up for my product before I've considered it MVP'ed. I find it helps a lot, I hold myself to a higher standard (downtime is not longer acceptable, I have dozens of users) and it helps you focus on the right features -- it's not easy enough to use yet, and I need to work on that before adding more cool features.
Sounds familiar. As a USMC fire team leader, my job was mostly to protect my Marines from all the shit that rolls downhill. It's generally a very difficult job to do well, because of the way the explicit incentives are set up, but somewhat easier for me as I was basically apolitical and had no career plans in the Corps.
> So, I'm pretty surprised to see the French government calling for more tracking of user data.

You clearly don't have much experience with govts.

> Consumer rights, or so I thought, tend to be pretty good in France in that regard.

Govts don't see themselves as businesses and don't see people as consumers.
TIL [](/troll)
Xerox Notetaker
Sony HDRTD10 3d hd Camcorder
The latest Camcorder from Sony is the HDR- TD10 Full HD 3D Camcorder. It is a very revolutionary device that brings a 3D effect to all your videos though they can be viewed in 2D too. The camcorder enables you to shoot even in low light. It has been released with a new set of features that have upgraded.
I'm actually going to support Wired's wording on this one.

While it's possible to come up with a perfect solution to any specific instance of the traveling salesman problem, it's the actual process of solving that instance, the algorithm, that's actually interesting.

Remember, solving the traveling salesman problem is easy/trivial, it's finding the shortest/optimal path that's hard. And for that you need a good algorithm.
Exactly. We want to commoditize this industry.
I'd like NodeJS to add a tls.createCTX() method that generates an OpenSSL CTX object that can be manipulated and passed as an optional parameter to the various other tls methods.

This would allow great flexibility in the TLS configuration - everything from CA paths to CRL checking to RFC 5077 support could be configured by the application once and the settings reused for all qualifying subsequent connections. Compare with, e.g., AnyEvent::TLS (http://search.cpan.org/~mlehmann/AnyEvent-5.31/lib/AnyEvent/...).
Background: I have a Master's in CS from Wisconsin-Madison, I'm a programmer as well as the founder of a software company. I've hired programmers with and without formal training in CS.

I think the self taught are both fine and justified in their worries that they are missing something. I'll try and explain as best I can.

Imagine that your mind is like a work shop, it's a place you go to create things. Let's consider two workshops: the neat and organized shop and the messy shop. I'm going to suggest that the neat shop is more like a programmer with formal training and the messy shop is more like the self taught. Some self taught folks will argue that their mind is well organized, which is fine, but my opinion from experience is that this view has some amount of validity in the real world. Your experience may vary.

The question here is "is it possible to produce really great work in either shop?" I think that's sort of what the original question was getting at, they talk about skills but the point is what you do with those skills, what you produce. And we all want to produce great work. So can both sorts of shops (minds) produce great work?

My view is that self taught people are typically sharp, sometimes very sharp, but their minds are a little "messy". Formal training in terms of learning basic skills is no better than self taught. But the farther you go the more useful the training becomes. The shop analogy, a bit stretched I'll grant you, is that the training organizes your mind. When you need a tool, you know where it is and you go get it and use it. For example, if you are doing a compiler, you already know that you need an AST (I had a smart guy, with compiler experience, waste quite a bit of time trying to do a compiler without an AST. In spite of another guy saying "Don't we need an AST?". First guy: no formal training, second guy, formal training.)

I think a question that might be more enlightening is "given two equally talented programmers, one with formal training and one without, which one can produce good results, over a broad domain of tasks, faster?"
There are some really good videos on there too--you can learn about so many things, and they tend to weed out the junk. This is a breathtaking one about Japan: http://www.viddler.com/explore/jiggymedia/videos/1/94.966/
Touche, sausagefeet. As evangineer mentions, I've upgraded the snark to a rationale: http://aspen.io/form-feed/

One idea would be to use an actual "^" "L", or at least give a warning somewhere if these are in a file.

Do you have any other ideas?
They mention both AppArmor and ModSecurity as replacing the Barracuda Web Application Firewall. Sounds like replacing it would use both. Hardly makes the like garbage.
SAMSUNG OMNIA 652 FEATURES AND SPECIFICATIONS
You're focusing too much on it being a 'birthday', traditionally a 1 day event. He spent a long weekend with his girlfriend, which is healthy and worthwhile to do so long as he isn't doing it every week!
I wish he gave an example of what sorts of things he and his daughter come up with (and her approx age or grade level)
> In the tech industry this isn't really an issue (management being overemphasized).

The thing is, in a lot of larger tech companies, I suspect it's the other way around: management is under-rated because the engineers have taken over the asylum.

It's easy to point to huge, successful companies with a very pro-engineering culture like Facebook and connect the culture with the success, but how do we know they succeeded because of the culture and not in spite of it? Certainly Google has produced a string of flops in recent years that would have killed most companies without the core search engine and arguably now mail and Android groups to prop them up. Facebook succeeds because they got a couple of basic things right in the early days and the networking effect is a massive barrier to entry for any potential competitor, not because all their engineers keep coming up with great ideas that lure people away from the competition.

I wonder how robust these companies really are, and how much their management structure (or relative lack thereof) will influence that robustness if in future they meet heavyweight competition or, more likely, disruptive competition that moves the market.
If there's no place like home for math education, why are they giving money to schools?
Angiography – The Medical Photography
Thats how you push the envelope. Airbnb has at various points run into headlines about similar issues but they have done an outstanding job delivering a product that people want in the real world. If a large number of people find value in the product then mostly governments and regulation come around (recreational drugs are an interesting but offtopic exception).
Apple's rules are restricted to subscriptions and in-app purchases of virtual goods. They currently have no stance on purchases of real goods. See the Amazon App, Pizza Hut app, etc. for examples.
Try the Hacker News UX extension for Chrome (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chngbdmhgakoomomnn...). It adds dual column support and works really well with Georgify.
The Goliath tracked mine wikipedia entry linked in the teletank entry was something interesting I've never heard of before (although I hadn't heard of the teletank either).
Predator Object Tracking explanation: http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/predator-takes-visual-obj...
This is great. I really, truly hope it's part of a broader effort to unsuck their customer service.
FCC.gov reboots as an open government platform
Photo Lapse: Make Time Lapse movies on iPhone
Verizon Net Neutrality Case Rejected
XBMC Gets a Dedicated Remote
They're not skirting the laws at all. The hiring of privates cars, limos, or buses is usually not restricted or regulated by cities.

The innovation here, and the reason the cab companies are up in arms about it, is that it's now on-demand hiring of private cars via phone. The cab companies used to have a lock on on-demand hiring via handwave or cabstanding.
Check out youtube for the "You suck at photoshop" tutorials. They are amusing and really informative.
WordPress 3.1.1 now available
I'm apparently the only one from Seattle.
I think you've completely missed the point of the exercise. This is not about optimization. It's about having a deep knowledge of how Perl-style regular expressions work.
Ordered it on Saturday and got it today. I'm pretty excited to try it out tonight!
Hacking the Economics of Bribes
One of the answers there specifically disparages big-oh analysis of algorithms.

This is actually sometimes important. A self-taught programmer, who really was a whiz at coding had some prototype code for data-analysis. It worked great on the sample data, but was O(n^3) (not just worst-case, average case) and we had a hell of a time convincing him that it wouldn't scale to the quantities of data we had.

Of course constant factors make a difference, but it is frustrating to waste time trying to convince someone that nlogn is going to beat n^3 on a large data-set.
I think this is a really clever idea and would be massively successful IF it worked well.

My questions is: How accurate could this ever possibly be? The ranges in the screenshot are far too wide to be very helpful (150-614 calories). For the people I know who count calories, that's not going to cut it.

Still, love the idea.
Martin here. That is true. Polling the yammer API for retrieving all members is quite slow, also polling Googles geolocation API for getting lat/lng coordinates from address strings is slow and the rate limit would be exceeded in no time if I did it in real-time.

Therefore I scheduled a cronjob to update the database every hour. The yammer API gives 50 users per request, with our 500 members (and still growing rapidly) I need 10 requests already, each taking around a second or two. Polling the Google geolocation API is even slower, but since I save all results and since everyone seems to live in New York (*g), I rarely have to poll it any more.

Oh. This is my first post on HN. Being a daily reader since about 2 years I think. Awesome site with awesome content! Definetly changed my life :)
McClure -> http://ontwik.com/startup/start-up-metrics-that-matter-by-da...
This is great not because Python is my language of choice but because this shows how to generalize it to other cases and not stay in node land. I wish more articles would take this approach.
how does factual make their money?
An ad platform with good support and a simple interface would make a lot of money.

I'm new to internet ads, just launched my first psuedo-product as an experiment. Anyway, while waiting for Google to approve an AdWords campaign, I went to check out Bing advertising. Popup says: browser unsupported. Chrome. Promptly closed the window. The only reason I'm even using Google is that they gave me free ads. This whole system sort of sucks. Maybe I'll go check out Project Wonderful now. At least they have a memorable name.
"It seems like the biggest risk with this company is that they're effectively skirting laws designed to limit the sort of service they're providing."

Personally I'd call that innovation. Clearly they're providing a service where there is demand. The law seems to be inadequate, so at the very least they're highlighting a problem for lawmakers to pay attention to.
India Graduates Millions, But Too Few Are Fit to Hire
It would be cool if HN showed who made each vote.
Can this eventually carry people into orbit, I wonder?
There's a bit of irony in there that these are mostly people created distractions and the org throws more people at it in the hope of solving it!

I think there will still be need for excellent managers to get a diverse group of people to do stuff together, to keep the vision coherent and to motivate people to deliver their best. It's just that it's a lot to ask of one single person and the position is vulnerable to Engineers grasping those skills and having a huge advantage in actually understanding the low level stuff much better.
Startup Quote: David Cohen, co-founder, TechStars
I did something somewhat similar to this and have been iterating it for several years http://sqlsiphon.codeplex.com/

I find it interesting that they support text SQL queries, as that was a feature I explicitly left out. My library is about minimizing the amount of repetition in code while supporting calls to stored procedures.
Bank of America does this for free. It is called Add It Up. You can earn up to 20% cash back from your favorite vendors in the form of cash deposited back to your account.
Microsoft has done this all along. Managers are programmers, they divide their time between programming and managing. The feeling within Microsoft, was how can someone who is not a programmer, manage programmers?
Love what you do and who you do it for. The rest will come naturally.

- David Cohen (@davidcohen)

http://startupquote.com/post/4368057532
anyone know of posts about their architecture of scaling adventures? I'd love to see how they're handling all of that.
The ranges are way to wide for this to be anything but a toy. 150-614 calories for a handful of cashews? That's a difference of nearly 25% of a 2000 calorie diet, that's very significant, to the point of it being useless.
My take away from this: wear and love every hat in the company (janitor, investor, engineer, CFO etc), and stay healthy and focused.
9 in 10 combatants in Afghanistan is a grenade.

At least for the moment, robots don't kill people, people kill people using a variety of weapons including robots.
MLA Style Term Paper Should Follow Latest Regulations
The writing of the MLA style term paper is a common task. Students, who are using this format for their term papers, need to be clear about one aspect. The MLA style term paper needs to follow the latest regulations in order for students to be graded well.
On Firefox, the console.time and console.profile functions provided by Firebug do this. On Chrome, you can use the chrome.interval object for the same purpose.

http://getfirebug.com/wiki/index.php/Console_API

https://github.com/eligrey/timer.js
Yes.

https://twitter.com/spacexer/status/55291286919454720

> Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are designed to meet all published NASA standards to carry crew.

(disclaimer: you must weigh less than 53 metric tons)
A submission like this is exactly what HN is about.
Thanks! Makes perfect sense.. I wonder why those other web app companies all decide to do the three step funnel? Even when some of them (seems like) could easily incorporate the Sign Up Form into the Pricing page.
I'd like to see a number like this derived from manufacturing. Seems to me much innovation is going on there, albeit quietly.
Thankfully kids are nowhere in the new future, startup or not. I agree though, kids complicate matters.
I am the same way. My iPad never leaves my sight. I even surf on it while I am sitting in front of computer compiling code.
Interestingly, the greatest modem ever was an Apple II product and could be used as (among other things) a bluebox:

http://www.jammed.com/~jwa/Machines/cat/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novation_CAT
But in a world where people ..., have their own management and economics 101 abilities, are smart enough to not work against their own interests (and look after the org's interests) - what's the role of the future manager?

I don't know if there's as many people who have these abilities as you think there are.
I would be, at least for ad networks based in the United States or Europe. The rhetoric around online privacy has gotten rather heated lately, and they're trying to avoid government regulation by being on their best behavior and trying to self-regulate. Evercookies are the opposite of that - it'd be like holding up a sign saying 'make me a target'.

Back when things were a little less heated (aka a couple of years ago), some companies did use a combination of cookies and Local Shared Objects in order to provide redundancy - information deleted from one was later restored by the other. Those companies have almost certainly stopped.

Not that it indicates any wrongdoing, because there's a class-action lawsuit for everything remotely advertising-related, but there's been a ton of class-action lawsuits in the Flash cookie space. I believe the ones involving actively rewriting deleted information have largely been settled, and now it's mostly lawyers trolling companies for the use of Flash cookies to store any type of information more complicated than a volume setting.

For a recent example, search for Del Vecchio vs Amazon.
This is a story about Tory and the leaky canoe. Tory loves rowing her canoe in the pond (while wearing a certified floatation device and carrying the proper safety whistle, of course), and she rows at least 2 hours a day. Unfortunately, today Tory found 2 large holes in the bottom of her 200 gallon, 60 pound canoe, and she's afraid she won't be able to row for the day. Assuming the two holes in the canoe are approximately 2 inches in diameter, and Tory weighs 75 pounds, how long will Tory be able to row before she has to utilize her safety whistle and flotation device?

Tory is paddling in fresh water, and her force is distributed equally between the two holes.

You know, just a run-of-the-mill math question for a 3rd grader...
I thought he wasn't releasing this... why is Henrik Abelsson releasing this and not Zdeneki Kalai?
Lloyd, I wish you guys the best of luck. Quick question: Why'd you change your name to something that's just a few letters different from your main competitor? I think OwnLocal is a better name than Seeing Interactive, but it's awfully close to ReachLocal.
New data on The Daily suggests a social media decline and a tough road ahead
Management is great at extracting maximum value from a problem whose structure is known. For new problem spaces where the product is ill defined, management might just slow things down. It might be worth noting that as the world is moving into more uncharted territory (of shorter product cycles) industry is beginning to resemble academia to a greater extent.
This guy has a history of "starting" things and never finishing him. You'd be better off finding someone with a more stable history of finishing what they started. And when I say history, I mean he's into the double digits of "startups" he's initiated.
Both the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy are planned to carry humans to orbit. In fact, the 2nd ever test of the Falcon 9 used the Dragon spacecraft, SpaceX's in house developed capsule spacecraft capable of being manned, as a payload.
As a New Yorker, I'd have to agree. There already seems to be a glut of taxis for most times of the day (in addition to the higher-end sedans that very few people use).
Wozniak: Tablet is the PC for 'Normal People'