skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree. We keep having disagreements on the "nature of man" brutish v. noble savages. Maybe there is no single type.

Maybe its our population that has two natures and a static percentage of us are brutish (37%) and short and the rest are noble (63% or vice versa). I think the nature of man has probably been ill-defined since it was conceived so long before statistics and psychology. Surveys and statistics are already attacking the concept of us as rational humans. Can't we just test for range of altruism v. jerkiness in the general population?

So I'm getting philosophical on Hacker News... whatever.
Instead of 'echo "QUIT" | openssl ...', why not 'openssl ... < /dev/null'?
Even if this is a possibility, it's not a solution.
So, the person asking the question says there are no independent studies. The only answer cites two studies about XGA displays and one study that claims that "some tasks can be performed faster". The title of the post on hn is: more is better, studies show. With all due respect but this is ridiculous.

Edit: So the question on stackoverflow was asked by you.
there seems to be some problem with the lighting. Actually it is not a problem, just something that would add immensely to the realism. If you do per vertex normals, rather than face normals, then you will get smooth lighting across the face.

I suppose I should provide code rather than just suggestions.
Procrastinators: Escape Artists
I think that unless you have an overall vision and reasons for running a closed beta, you should open it up. Forcing users to invite their friends for earlier access only works if your website has the capability to go viral. It's worked for the few companies who initially did it, but too many companies are jumping on this method, in my opinion.

If possible, I think the "best of both worlds" solution is to have an open beta, but encourage users to invite friends by offering something other then early access. I do this with my startup and it has helped get the word out.
How does this SHA-1 hash come full circle? Everybody on the web will know that I hashed something. The vender knows that I hashed the findings I sent to them, but so what? Do I have to post the hash on my own domain, so the vender knows that the findings they received are from the same person who owns the domain where the hash was posted?

I don't see what this hash achieves.
I just signed up to upvote this comment :D

Loving this website
And yet another designer noticing the trend in increasing size of desktop monitors but missing simultaneous trend towards smaller devices, like netbooks and tablets.
Regarding the hard-coded IP piece, I've run into a similar scenario wherein the early versions of the distributed counters patch for Cassandra relied on vector-clocks which used IPs as part of those clocks. Certainly not a robust design in the case of machine failure, but I've seen smart people make awkward decisions, and if someone had gone into production with that patch and lost a machine, it would have been remarkably annoying to recover (it would have required rewriting all the SSTables to a new IP, which isn't impossible or anything, but kind of a pita).
Clicking on the "lens" button (the ubuntu symbol in the upper left hand corner) takes up ~25% of my 24" monitor to show me six icons. Six. That's great for a netbook or even a touch friendly device (easier to touch!), but on a desktop monitor, it's ridiculous. And there's no way to change it at the moment. So far, it's my biggest complain with 11.04
First Impression: Extremely simple and not very polished app compared to other WebGL demos such as the Quake 3 BSP app at http://media.tojicode.com/q3bsp/
Jeff himself has had three 19" monitors at home: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/06/multiple-monitors-a... I don't think he disagrees having a similar arrangement is superior over the alternative of a large monitor. It is not a "Joel vs Jeff" thing as it is made out to be, in the question.

Most of our standard apps, standard websites are designed to work at resolutions much smaller than what 30" monitor would display. It makes a lot more sense to have multiple monitors where you don't have to wrestle using Grid software to move things around. - It feels a lot more natural to have browser open in one monitor and the IDE/Text editor in other.
I feel like on Quora the same 10 people are writing the majority of the content (and it is getting boring). Maybe I'm not using it appropriately, but if so their interface isn't helping me improve my experience.
Have had that on my to-do list for a long time but it's one of those tasks that keeps getting overshadowed in favor of creating new experiments.

For now, you can fork some of my experiments here: http://jsdo.it/hakim
Markoff: The Asymmetrical Online War (Teens vs. Nation States)
Haha I'm sorry this is really cool, but I am just cracking up because the poor guy spends three minutes demoing something that ought to take 10 seconds. And then he never even shows the car moving! It's upside down the whole time!
It takes a few orders of magnitude less ore to power a nuclear plant for X time periods than it takes to power a coal plant. Even if they're equivalent in danger, you're still comparing whales and minnows.
I tried signing up a couple of times. Somehow i could not. Everytime i tried to click on signup it just kept selecting 'recent additions to our inventory'. I tried on both firefox 4.0 and chrome. Is there a bug?
Quora got a ton of press right around the end of the year - big articles in a lot of major press outlets. That likely accounts for at least some of the spike.
I'm definitely concerned about this problem. Comment threads have gotten meaner and stupider. And as you say, what makes it worse is that the mean and/or stupid comments often get massively upvoted.

Do you have any suggestions for things that might fix the problem? I have all kinds of ideas I'm half considering, but I'm curious to hear what you think. We're on mostly uncharted territory here.

Maybe I'll ask HN generally...
Straight men, if they are white and under 40 years old, are not generally a protected class: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class
Very nice - after looking through the free PDF for 15 minutes, I ordered a print book to encourage and support the author. (I have done the same thing using Lulu: I get 200+ free PDF downloads a day for my Java AI book, and it is a good feeling when people occasionally order the print book).
The face recognition part was too good for not picking up the face of other people. Or was it detecting just the most similar face?

But facial recognition aside, the uses are endless. If it can be brought to the same level Kinect drivers are at, but with finger tracking and no custom hardware, this could change everything.
Also, I do not believe the knowledge of a specific need and the method of satisfying that need is what the startup sells. If that were the case, any big company could legally recreate what twitter or facebook does. Rather, I think the real value of startups is in the user affinity and traffic it experiences regularly. Google won't make twitter, because everyone already goes to twitter (this brings up an interesting point about making people feel like they have "things" on your site, which can help create a more secure user base, but that is a different point). Ad sales reflects traffic, sustainability reflects traffic, public influence reflects traffic. It all seems to break down to that, and that's what companies are betting on (or "mining") when they buy a start up. So, if a founder decides that he is interested in making a quick buck from the start, they won't work to establish a strong user affinity, or secure traffic levels, or significant public influence, and hence will be selling a low quality product. For an over rated opportunity-price, no less, because their pricing is based on the opportunity image created by older, successful, dedicated startups. This low quality atmosphere is what this writer warns against, for the benefit of buyers, sellers, and users. The markets have always secured demand for companies that create strong, stable foundations, and it was only a matter of time before the internet's companies started following the age old rules of capitalism too. So be warned, VCs and new founders alike. If you're not making a quality product, its only a matter of time before big companies figure out how to weed out the miners and it won't be as easy to make a quick buck with a low quality company.
Sure. The above post summarizes Hobbes's approach.

There are a lot of disagreements I think - I don't know of many governments that embrace Hobbes' ideas wholly. But in a way, it's the "Dictator For Life" approach taken for Python and the Linux kernel. No?
Very cool - inspires me to see what is really possible using WebGL
The Mad Men of Content Strategy
It's a rotating photo (you can drag and drop your own) with optional raindrops falling on it and causing a sort of splash distortion
They compare screens up to 24 monitors and 42". The studies mentioned are clearly more reputable than the NEC and Apple sponsored ones you find on other sites.

I don't think that a study by a monitor vendor that shows that you need more and larger screens is really valuable.
I hate to keep beating what appears to be a dead horse, but in my experience, it's still alive.

Firefox _still_ has performance issues, even with version 4. Not even 5 minutes ago, I had it start using up 100% CPU on 2 cores and had to killall it. No Flash, <5 extensions.

So hopefully Mozilla won't forget about performance in their rush to add all these "social" features. I don't know about other people, but I probably won't use them at all.
You don't seem to have scrolled to the left enough. We are 10^36 times that of a planks constant.
>This is massively ground breaking.

Sounds like you're used to bad algorithms. I think there is a serious disconnect between the state of the art in computer vision and what's used in industry.

The demo was cool, but the techniques are not that revolutionary. From a cursory glance through the papers, it is basically AdaBoost (for detection) and Lucas-Kanade (for tracking), with a few extensions.

Not to discount the guy's work at all, it's very cool and does a good job of pulling together existing algorithms. But not groundbreaking in the sense of, say, Viola-Jones was for object detection.
Windows 8 is 6.2. But I doubt it has any relation to the content.
Japan Earthquake and HAARP connection?
Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
I was just asking RiderofGiraffes if he had any suggestions for fixing the decreasing quality of comment threads on HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403449) and it occurred to me that I might as well ask everyone.

Anyone have any suggestions? We're on mostly uncharted territory here.

The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted.
While somewhat expensive, you can get ipod nano with a watch band and listen to music. It does not have many other functions though...
I've always been partial to the binary watch[1] and the Rosendahl Watch[2] (but not enough to actually buy either one for myself -- I wear a non-digital watch myself[3].) Also, I know a few people who are wearing iPod Nano's on their wrist as watches and seem to like it.

1. http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/watches/6a17/

2. http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/watches/7a91/

3. http://www.bulovaprecisionist.com/en/collections/claremont/9...
I used have a 2 monitor setup, until I found myself getting tired of looking left and right to click stuff all the time (monitors where 24" each). I switched to a single 32" and I was honestly able to focus more, in my case more screen is more productive but in a single monitor setup.
Probably because this is just 2D tracking rather than 3D mapping. But tracking can be applied to mapping, for example: http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~gk/PTAM/

So the question is, can predator be used to improve mapping? AFAIK, that would require a) automatically selecting trackable objects and b) tracking many of them simultaneously. That PTAM technique tracks thousands, but with tracking this reliable, you might get by with much less.

So, more work is required to apply it to mapping, but I have to imagine it could be done. And seeing how well predator adapts to changes in scale, orientation, and visibility, I suspect it could improve mapping considerably.
I think you're missing what's actually happening here. In these cases, the students are paying the university for a "registration credit," in order to legalize work without pay. The provider of the internship does not receive this money, and the amount is, more or less, arbitrarily decided by the academic institution. The amount the student pays is therefore cushioned and abstracted from the sort of market forces you describe.
A lot of people that like cars have been emotionally connected to the internal engine. These "car enthusiasts" enjoy everything about cars, albeit frequently do not analyze emerging technologies with a long-term vision. They like the sound the engine makes and the thrill of acceleration. That is nice and I can respect their decisions. That sentiment of connection to the internal engine has been challenged first by Tesla Roadster.

What I view as auto fans mistake in judgement is to portray electric cars through the lens of mistrust in the new design. Someone who has only driven IC cars will keep trying to find fault with a one that is not. Tesla is the new toy a boy can play with. Clarkson has been living with old habits and 'old' cars to question his own assumptions about car technology. This is what I had found when speaking with people in the automotive industry.

Yet, electric cars require a lot of future development to meet the high standards that they will be judged by.
I am running an alternate firmware, but I don't like that I have to do so much fiddling.
As this doesn't seem like an April fools joke (some of the papers were published last year :-)) its interesting to think about it in the context of what it might change. That being said I don't doubt for a minute that the university has locked up as much of the technology as possible in patents but that is another story. We can speculate about what it will be like in 20 years when people can do this without infringing :-)

Clearly it could be applied immediately to robotic manufacturing. Tracking parts, understanding their orientation, and manipulating them all get easier when its 'cheap' to add additional tracking sensors.

Three systems sharing data (front, side, top) would give some very good expressive options for motion based UIs or control.

Depending on how well the computational load can be reduced to hardware small systems could provide for head mounted tracking systems. (see CMUCam [1] for small)

The training aspect seems to be a weak link, in that some applications would need to have the camera 'discover' what to track and then track it.

A number of very expensive object tracking systems used by law enforcement and the military might get a bit cheaper.

Photographers might get a mode where they can specify 'take the picture when this thing is centered in the frame' for sports and other high speed activities.

Very nice piece of work.

[1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cmucam/
I've used YouTube for some video hosting on my website and don't believe it to be unprofessional. In fact, when requesting feedback on a landing page which showed the video, I never received a comment that would have implied YouTube hosting was anything other then acceptable.
A suggestion could well be to not have threads like this one (not trying to be disrespectful!) An interesting thought is the idea that punk music was dead the first time someone said punk's not dead.
email nboswell90@gmail.com i would like to discuss your idea with you, i think i can provide a few tips :)
Transformative Power of Personal Projects
A valuable bit of hands on experience working on a failed project considered too risky for a big-time entrepreneur to waste minimum wage on? Sign me up.
Unfortunately, your definition for "live comfortably" tends to change as you accumulate more money.
Actuators in phones include - playing sound, displaying images, connecting to networks and other appliances, vibrating... etc.
I prefer as many screens as I can have. I'm currently working with 2*24', in vertical (portrait) orientation. I have a 3rd 17' simply because I don't currently want to spend money on a 3rd or 4th 24'. However I plan to soon.

For me I find a problem much easier to handle if I can spread out all the supporting information - in my case HTML, CSS, JS, PY files + Chrome and documentation. The more screen real-estate I have, the better.

Considering how much my time is worth, even a 1% increase in performance from a new screen makes it a no-brainer over a year. The same is probably true for you the reader.

I don't need studies, I'm totally convinced. I'm also convinced that you need to get used to spreading your work out to get the full benefit.
It takes too long to move your mouse from one screen to another. Using several screens is overrated. I can agree with UI developers who need to overview big graphics and use two or more screens, but for people writing text or code it is surely distracting to use more than one screen (my own experience).
I don't think you really can. This site is a community and the users matter above all the features. If the user quality takes a nose dive all you can do is hold off the inevitable with new comment rankings. Every site has a point where it gets so big it declines in quality, reddit hit that and now those who want the old reddit back are coming here.

The only way to truly guarantee it would remain high quality would require credentials to use the site, or require invite/referrals, but then that has a whole host of its own problems.

I'm relatively new so I don't know what HN "used" to be like, but in the short time I've been here I've noticed it decline. It seems to me that more and more people who aren't knowledgable or have insights to offer are joining and people like jacquesm and riderofgiraffes are leaving. It was inevitable and has happened in every community I've ever used.
I don't have an accountant. I'll get one once I'm making money so consistently that it's not worth my time to do it myself. :-)

The minimum corporate tax in OR is $150. In 2009, they raised it from $50, and (I think) increased the tax rates across the board. The biggest change is that they now tax on gross receipts which means you can't deduct expenses.
Stop showing people other people's comment scores. They stimulate argumentative comments.
I could see that being the case with a trend/fashion, but it's not so much of a problem with other things.
I find the idea of optimizing for only two applications - browser and IDE somewhat limiting.

Right now I have two browser windows open side by side on the same 30" monitor - one with the stackexchange posting, and one with the HN page where I'm replying to you.

Often I'll have more than one XCode window open on the 30" display, but sometimes I need the whole display to have all the panels open and a reasonable view of Interface Builder. At that point, I'll use the 27" display of my iMac to display documentation.

It's also very helpful to be able to have my task list open on the other screen and not have to keep opening and closing it.

Summary: Multiple screens are good because you can use the whole of one of them to focus on something while still having something else available in the periphery. Giant screens are good because you can put more things on them together.

Cost and desk space are real reasons not to have more and larger screens, but I find it hard to understand how less display can possibly be better in absolute terms.
A hard ban on politics and current events, instead of the wiggly one we have in the site guidelines now.
Angry Birds Rio nets 10 million downloads in 10 days
At work I have two monitors plus my laptop's built in display which is smaller and doesn't match the "flow" of the other two. I ended up really liking this because less important things like Pandora, email, etc all live on the laptop monitor and the psychological barrier between that monitor and the other two helps me focus more.
I think that it has an online-training algo for their 2-bit binary pattern as well. Haven't checked out the paper yet though.
The comment flag button could be changed to really mean something; for instance: sufficiently flagged comments can stop collecting upvotes.
How a big US bank laundered billions from Mexico's murderous drug gangs
This is a separate issue, but one thing that is not perfectly clear to me is what an upvote/downvote is supposed to mean. Does it mean that I agree with the comment, or that it adds to the discussion?
Are you asserting that the US system spends more effort "assessing individual eligibility for treatment" than the U.K.'s?

Well, I suppose so, the UK's NICE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institute_for_Health_a...), much like our CMS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centers_for_Medicare_and_Medica...), establishes the impersonal guidelines, but in the US only those over 64 or on Medicaid are impersonally bound by them. In practice when our "parasitic insurance industry" addresses this it's about providing coverage beyond the CMS guidelines, since the latter are a floor which our legal system won't let the "parasitic insurance industry" go below.

That legal system and most especially its lack of the English "loser pays" Rule is probably a greater influence on costs, especially since the NHS has got to have some level of sovereign immunity.
I second this - the politics posts do get a lot of hits, but HN needs to decide if it wants to be "awesome" or "popular"
Balancing The Masculine &amp; Feminine For Increased Success
How about notifying people when their comments have been flagged and pointing them to the site guidelines?
I thought about doing this, but had some other projects. I disagree with the comments below. This is an excellent idea, if you can execute it well.

Existing websites that are open to the public (as opposed to answered by a medical practitioner) are full of spam. So you would need to monitor it carefully.

But I don't think that there is some added danger that people will not seek real medical assistance. To the contrary, they may find that something that they would normally wait to go away actually requires early medical assistance. Plus, most people already do ask around when it is something they can talk about. All you would do is to put that discussion online.
The process isn't clear to me. So the vendor communicates "fixed" to you? Or do I report to the vendor and to you simultaneously using this mechanism, and then I subsequently follow up with you? Does the vendor communicate with me? You? Both of us? How?

What happens in disputed cases? (eg I have reported unsafe calls in signal handlers to be told "no working exploit, no fix"). Now what? I still have to publicly disclose vulns in my own infrastructure to get traction? What have I gained by going to vulnarb? Even assuming consumers consult such a service what can they learn if the details (severity) of the issues is not available?

I don't think I can sell this to my CSO ("there's a guy on the 'net that says I should send him encrypted text of exploits that I've found in our infrastructure"). And for stuff that doesn't touch my day job: what's your sales pitch over ZDI?

I thought the shell script was neat but sorry, I'm not really compelled by your service proposition.

EDIT: your _current_ service proposition ;-)
That was a pleasure to read. Very refreshing.