skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why would they sell that little for that much effort of closing a round?

People apply to YC for $20k for their seed rounds. They could send out a press release on a pay-for-PR service like Business Wire claiming (accuately!) that they raised the same as Facebook's seed round, too.

For every Google/Facebook out of Google/Facebook-sized seed rounds, there're hordes of non-Googles.

> Look at his team of advisers and the technology.

I'm trying, and the website is miserable. More misleading, too - they say "CNBC announcement" to gain credibility on all their "news" items, but they paid to have those announcements placed there. The groundbreaking techs and visionaries they claim don't have much available on them outside of these paid PR pieces.
So what's failing then?
My (joke) proposal for building a web portal for lazy criminal justice types is an insane privacy violation? Only if you could actually get them to find it and actually use it. Maybe I'll put hot, naked chicks on the home page like Pud used to.

Something much better already exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
The majority of the comments seem to be negative, yet many of them reflect a misunderstanding of RAII. I've argued the exact argument the author does many times before and got similar responses, it seems to be hard to convey the power of RAII to people who haven't practiced it before. The meaning of RAII is that you can tie a resource to the lifetime of an object, in an environment where the object gets destroyed deterministically. There are two practical uses: 1) You can hide the fact an object is holding a resource from users of the object. 2) You can leverage the power of objects within the language and apply it to resources. The part regarding languages allowing something that might look similar with syntactic sugar didn't convey it's message very well. The syntactic sugar other languages are introducing is great on its own, but it's inferior to the object based approach since it doesn't allow (1) nor (2). It's annoying that languages with garbage collection support have gained a lot of attention solely due to the fact that you don't have to worry about freeing memory, while languages with RAII support in which you basically don't have to worry about freeing any resource, got none.
Will Google be the Next Yahooooo?
We're computer vision people ourselves, so it's not an immediate priority =) Also, there was a lot of computer vision work we had to do specifically for this project to get the recognition to work. See elsewhere for my description of that.
I think you are misinterpreting section 6. Section 6 is about the requirements for software that use the library. Specifically section 6 is about software that statically links to the library (section 5 is about dynamic linking). If you statically link to the library, the resulting binary contains the library and you are required to provide object files so that a user can relink with a different (and hopefully compatible) version of the library.

In the case of Apple, they have made modifications to the library itself. They are then using the library, with modification, in Safari. Safari can be released under any license as outlined in section 5/6 but not the modifications. Those need to be released.
Likewise for auto_ptr<T>, but he glosses over that.
Yes, had a manic hour, but things seem to be under control now. (I should have listened to patio11 the first 100 times he said to turn off KeepAlive.)

Also needed to cache a bit more aggressively.
Yes, but it's much easier to recognize ignored error codes than ignored exceptions:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2005/01/14/35294...

In Go, it's even easier to recognize ignored error codes because you tend to have fewer levels of indentation and sometimes an explicit "_" when you're discarding a return value.
patch to come next week, says a spokesperson.
Ha! Well, we'll still have a video, but point taken. We've got an interesting part of the app that we're going to integrate into the core of the website, which will also help.

Limited version coming as well...
Are the slides posted somewhere?
Again, for some reason no other form of transit seems to really care. Even if you tell them about it. What other businesses do this (really strange) practice? I can buy the entire Microsoft Office and only use Excel and Microsoft doesn't care.

Take a cruise somewhere, stop along the way and you think to stay there for good? They don't care.

Take a Greyhound bus somewhere and stay in the Arby's too long? They don't care if you want to stay in that random town.

Take a train somewhere, and they certainly won't care where you get off.

Buy a commuter rail pass that will get you to Worchester from Boston, tell the attendant that you're going to Worchester and then get off in Newton... they don't care.

And you know when the airline doesn't care? When you buy the ticket and don't show up at all. They'll happily take your cash, but it seems they don't want to take you halfwhere there.
In the US internet bandwidth is in the same category as health care -- it's a luxury you have to pay extra for.
Seems appropriate (although somewhat fractal) - http://humanstxt.org/humans.txt.
I haven't heard of any stability or reliability issues regarding Apple's choice of storage in Air's, MacBook Pro's (w/ SSD), iPads, iPhones or any Flash-storage based product. A single blog post with it's extremely limited scoped is a weak reason to write off an entire group of storage tech.
Designing overlay email subscribe forms that your visitors will love
I would rather expect to hear a no than waiting indefinitely.

Why can't journalists simply say no for a story? I understand they are flooded with emails, but a one word no would suffice.
Even at google we were debating how to structure a humans.txt.. and to make it machine readable, etc.

Personally I say fuck it.. While machine-parseable would be nice, that's not the point of this file.

More creativity without some sort of YAML constraint. In the HTML5 Boilerplate ours has effing stars, bro: https://github.com/paulirish/html5-boilerplate/blob/master/h...
You don't trust them. Either the technology you are using is anonymous or it is not. It shouldn't matter who is on the other end.
> by the insistence on one value, which may be good (economic equality, as in communism)

If nothing else, experience with said insistence suggests that economic equality may not be good.

But, even if we ignore that experience, is there reason to believe that economic equality is a good thing. Is it even an "all other things being equal" good thing?
Learning how the brain does its coding
Wow, I thought you were being ironic when you mentioned the spoiler...
As I could not find a good online javascript blackboard solution that was not developed with Flash or HTML5, I tried to create my own. I share with you my lines of thought and hope to get some feedback/ideas.
I think he was right - technical people apparently have a hard time explaining themselves.

I think the point of the article is that you need to be able to include actual benefit information, which isn't necessarily straight forward to gather or develop, rather than just short term stuff. Benefits are not just inverted consequences, in other words.

What it comes off as saying, is that who cares, just buy what ever you want, I mean, a developer might get upset that it takes more time to purchase equipment than to write some code.

I can't imagine there being anything remotely close to a catch-all rule for this kind of thing - buying new hardware at a Fortune 50 vs. buying hardware at Facebook/Google vs. buying hardware at small, agile, cash-rich web startup are all going to be radically different, as they should be.
I'm sure that's true, but I don't see why it would be unreasonable to use more inclusive language from the beginning.
Sure! There are 3 main pieces:

1. Segment the leaf from the background. Even though we require users to place the leaf on a white background, this is still a very tough problem because of lighting, shadows, viewpoint, blur, focus, etc. We've tried all published segmentation algorithms and nothing works. We wrote our own, using EM on the HSV colorspace as the basis for it (plus lots of heuristics for leaves). It works okay, but it definitely needs the most work.

2. Extract some features from the contour of the leaf. We use histograms of curvature over scale. The idea is that some leaves have the same rough shape, but differ at a fine scale (e.g., serrated vs. smooth leaves). Others are similar at a fine-scale but look quite different overall. To distinguish all of these cases, we estimate "curvature at a scale" at each point on the contour and build a histogram of curvature values. We then repeat this at coarser and coarser scales and concatenate all histograms together to get a large feature vector.

3. Recognition/matching: We use a simple nearest-neighbors classifier to match the feature vectors to our ground-truth database of labeled leaves. We return the top 20 ranked species or so.
I don't see how this PC works. How do I plug it to a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and outlet?

Even if the PC only costs $25, will schools have to buy extra equipment to allow use of the above accessories?
Why the downvotes? it didn't work for me with FF4/Linux nor FF4/Mac. It worked on Chrome, though.
This is exactly what we are doing. We're working with botanists at the Smithsonian Institution in DC who are very interested in this kind of data.
But that brings up the non-deterministic point the author makes. You can't know when the object will be garbage collected. It could be a long time from now, or never if you get an unexpected deadlock.
Don’t Be “That Annoying Acquaintance” to your customers
They block facebook in syria, but you can still access it through https. Luckily when I was there I connected through a VPN outside of syria :)
we have a way to detect if it's broken.

Do it by checksum. If the checksums don't match, then redownload the changed parts. This is also fully predictable, but it's also far faster.
“About a month ago I was chatting on skype to a colleague about a payload for one of our clients,” he wrote. “Completely by accident, my payload executed in my colleagues skype client.

That means this thing is either BS or it is an egregious bug by the Skype team. Remote code execution doesn't happen by chance.
> Thanks to node-canvas Nib can auto-generate a data URI representation of the gradient.

FWIW, Compass betas can do this, and have been doing so for a while now. Anyway, this tech is super useful because now you can change gradients all over the place just by changing one color variable somewhere.
Level Design Up (Game Design)
Picobit: A Compact Scheme System for Microcontrollers
I wish -- but it was actually a Guardian article and an intomobile article that knocked us out. We're back now!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2011/may/06/iphon...

http://www.intomobile.com/2011/05/06/leafsnap-iphone-app-let...
Obligatory link to my own visual programming language targeting home/building automation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p36xoBZVQ8c&feature=playe... (blog post: http://nitrogen.posterous.com/kinect-home-automation-goes-ht...).

P.S. Running the included Waterbear demo script seems to do nothing on Firefox 4 and Chrome 12 on Linux.
Came across these sorts of speeds when FTTP (Fibre To The Premises) was first released for domestic use in the UK last year, http://alicious.com/2010/400mbps-internet-via-fttp/.

For that blog post the writer compared the potential 400Mbps to the 40Mbps of a blu-ray disc.

This seems to be a precursor to widespread use of cloud based disc access for general computing with a relatively small SSD buffer?
Kinnarps Plus 8
A less tactile future
This is how you do a security alert. Notify the manufacturer of the software, notify the press so it is made public and thus people will install updates, and keep the details secret until it's fixed. Kudos to the discoverer.
Any word on whether this affects version 2 of Skype for Mac OS X (the old one), the current Skype 5.1, or both? Neither the article nor the linked blog post would say.

If the former, I don't imagine they'll update it, and this might finally force me to grab 5.1.
they want to make sure the people going know who NEA is and are not just going to go for free food.
I wonder which versions of Skype are affected? This might cause those trying to hang on to the previous version with multiple windows to have to update.
This is very cool. Get technology into as many hands as possible and the entire world benefits!
similar to already working scheme in the pathology - the hi-def microscope scans are send to India, analyzed by real professionals there, and the results are signed off by professional here

>I know of at least a few melanoma identification, using software, efforts which died due to regulation and the shocking resistance of doctors.

Just make sure that "For entertainment only" is clearly visible on the product label :)

>But I wonder how free apps, good at diagnosing all kind of things, would do? With cellphone CPUs and cameras getting better you could catch quite a few things...

and with portable ECG, EEG, ultrasound devices, DNA chips, etc easy available and connectable ...
So this uses exif data, which as people here have noted can be stripped, but can't you still ID digital cameras from things like sensor noise? I haven't looked at the statistical properties of it, it probably changes over time, only works on at high ISOs, and search would be way more intensive, but I know that my camera has a very predictable noise pattern.
Tangible vs. intangible, service vs. product, bandwidth is immediately available again as soon as you're done with it, etc.
Y SIN EMBARGO magazine » interactive colours in culture, zoho:lab
Ask HN: How to accept investment?
Hi HN,

I'm an undergrad with a startup idea. I have a possible individual investor who's interested in providing the seed funding I need.

However, I've never done a startup before, and the investor has never invested before. I did not know the individual before we talked about a deal.

Neither of us knows what to do. How do I responsibly accept the money while legally guaranteeing them their share?

Edit: should mention I'm based in the UK.

Thanks for any help!
> If they filed bugs and got impatient, I'd understand.

I think it's acceptable to look at bugs others have filed to determine whether to file bugs.

> I will try to do an update soon.

Great, thanks! (I know you won't like this, but it sort of validates Google's approach. By making a big splash about this, they accomplish far more than they would have by filing bugs and waiting, or contacting you directly.)

> FYI, if you want a patch approved, you should flag it for review

Funnily enough, we're dealing with problems like this at Mozilla too - a contribution comes in, but is missed because the review flag isn't set, or it needs work, or whatever. We're adding dashboards and metrics and things to avoid this happening at Mozilla - and it happens a lot.

I'll mark them for review now.
Hey a designer here. I was thinking of putting together some basic steps which a developer can follow to get a decent design. I am not sure how to present it. There is so much to tell "How to" and "Why" and then other things come-up.

Would you be interested in something like that? How would you like it to be presented?
RAID checksums computation looks like an obvious possibility. We'd need a battery backup for the VRAM, too :)
Microsoft does not recognize the disruption?

You obviously haven't heard of Office 365: http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/office365/small-business/abou...

I don't work for Microsoft but they have a lot of open positions for the Office 365 team which typically means they're investing heavily into it.

They most definitely recognize that they need to catch up. And very likely will.
Reports (I blogged about it) had the first FTTP Plusnet customer connected in July 2010 at "between 67.2Mbps and 92.37Mbps".
You know there's a bubble going on when expensive chairs are being discussed and voted on.
So I have to upgrade to the shitty skype now? I've been actively avoiding v5...
The amount of junk mail will go down. Since nobody is willing to go and pick it up and then will actually discard junk immediately at the pickup location, the value derived from sending junk mail will go down. Thus there will be less of it sent out.
I'm been studiously avoiding the update since inadvertently installing it a while ago and backtracking furiously shortly afterwards. I hope we get some details on the versions affected and if the problem is present in v2 that we also get a patch for that. If Skype uses this as an excuse to force the v5 upgrade they will have a lot of very unhappy people on their hands.
Well if you are looking for decentralized publishing but at the same time not anonymous, then that's what we're building!

http://myownstream.com
Russian/Soviet movie studio Mosfilm posts classic Soviet movies to Youtube
I think this is the first time a major film studio posted full-length films (with subtitles, no less) online for free non-commercial use.

Check it out at http://www.youtube.com/user/mosfilm.

What do you think about this? I doubt any American studios would do anything like it, even for their ancient catalogue - they prefer to wring some few pennies more from it by licensing it to Netflix (while withholding new releases because of cable companies' pressure).
Clickable: http://www.youtube.com/user/mosfilm
i guess partly doesn't, partly does, but prefer funny things be at the last pages of newspaper
The concept the airlines are employing is called market segmentation. It's legal and they have the right to do it. The concept you seem to be referencing is some generic measure of product utilization.

The office analogy is wrong. A better one would be the person who tells MS they are a student but uses Excel in their business.

The train analogy is backward, would you intentionally buy a ticket to a more expensive destination if your intention were to get off early?
Not quite. A lot of the core components of government are subject to well-known areas of market failure, examples include a well-regulated militia and the justice system.

Gov't is a tool that can be used for good or for evil. I'm also with Lord Acton in my belief that power corrupts. Therefore I tend to think that the responsible role of government is very limited in scope. I'm of the opinion that the budgets of gov't in G8 states could be slashed by 75% to 90% whilst providing a major boost to the economy.

To cut beyond that would involve cutting services that are subject to market failure in which we'd end up destroying a lot of the value in our governing institutions.

One of the most effective things we could do to bring about these changes in a realistic manner is to setup Special Economic Zones or something like that where the normal rules of society do not apply and instead we'd use a more liberal set of rules. Perhaps we could find a smaller city with overwhelming popular support for these rules. Or an uninhabited area that capital could flow into to build the infrastructure from the ground up. Basically use a scientific approach to government where we run experiments to see what the effect of various rules are.

Ultimately I could be wrong and a gov't that allocates 50% of the resources in an economy provides better allocation than the market could achieve but I tend to doubt it.
college students that eat lots of ramen are already valuing money more than their own health

Speaking as a college student, college students eat ramen today so they can eat ramen tomorrow instead of eating steak today and not eating tomorrow.

And when I say "tomorrow", I really mean the whole week.
http://www.bing.com/humans.txt should be there in about 2 weeks
UPS provides this: http://www.theupsstore.com/products/pages/maiandpos.aspx

You just have to pay for both storage and forwarding.
Susan Wojcicki Defends Google’s "Social DNA"
Oracle wants 21 (not 3) patent claims against Google to go on trial
How do you know when you use a style the first time that you'll never use it elsewhere? If you've got many one-off style declarations, you probably don't have a very consistent graphical style.

Besides that, it's nice to know where all your styles live instead of having to grep your whole project. And inline styles take precedence over everything else, so mixing them with stylesheets can create havoc.
What do you mean? Opera had Opera's 2011 adoption rates way back in 2009.
Because they deliver a letter for 44 cents anywhere in the country, in a few days.

Do any of the private companies get within a factor of 10 of that price?
The root problem is a lack of competition.

Ideas like government forcing service competition over the physical lines along easements granted by the a government should be explored.
I’m picturing this being something everyone can do, not a very niche offering. Interesting, though.

★ Edit in response: Only some of the same problems are being solved. If the USPS let everyone choose an ID, it wouldn’t be long before websites let (US) customers enter “tcollins12” instead of “Tom Collins, 145 Main St., Somewhere, ST 12345” during checkout… it wouldn’t be long before your public wishlist said “ship it to USPS address ‘alanh’” without giving away your residence… it’s not just an alias, it’s a paradigm shift. (With the UPS offering you linked, your address still takes the form of an address.)
I think the article was referring to "do-not-track" features such as "Keep My Opt-Outs", https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hhnjdplhmcnkiecamp...
They're not fonts
FCC can't even enforce net-neutrality, they certainly will not be able to do a darn thing about caps (if they even really care).

250 GB cap seems huge to me though, unless maybe you have a multi-user household. I have a 50 GB cap but it doesn't seem to be enforced (yet).
How many ISPs actually enforce their caps? Genuine question- my ISP, Cox, technically has about a 100GB limit, but I know I've downloaded close to 1TB in a month with no overages, throttling, or anything.
Which reminds me of Google Code Jam ... which starts in 2hrs. I'm not really expecting anything but i'll try the problems.
I understand the complaint completely, but be sure to look at it from a cost/benefit viewpoint as well. People with JS off are likely significantly less than 1% of their users. They would likely benefit more from supporting IE6, and maybe IE5, than supporting JS-off.
Talk to a lawyer, preferably one that specializes in working with startups or small businesses.
http://strangeloop2010.com/system/talks/presentations/000/01...
The USPS is obligated to deliver to any address in America for the same fee. If we had private carriers serve first class mail, it could cost pennies to deliver a letter to New York but hundreds of dollars to deliver to someone living in the middle of nowhere.
I've done this. 8K is a bit of money unless you're going for a relatively high end experience, especially in Cali. Keep it light, cheap and clean. Spend money on getting to places to meet people, a good internet connection/cell, and maybe a light mode of transport to move around (like a motorcycle or cheap small car). Definitely Cali is the place to start out, the people seem to be friendlier and more social. Go to the Termales, San Andres Island, Andre Carne De Res, Coffee Region (stay at a local hacienda/farm), etc.
Mini-Django: Single file django project for instant gratification.
Smalltalk is not statically typed, which I guess makes hotswapping a lot easier.

It's also a miniscule part of the market.
Site is down due to harddisk problems, but the actually referenced Sweble Wikipedia Parser project site is at http://www.sweble.org.
Whom & What to Know