skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is a near certainty that someday in the near future a start up will index all the faces in all the photos on the Internet. You'll be able to make queries like [pictures from last week with my husband in them]. You won't be able to lie about things that happen in public. You could still have privacy behind closed doors, but out and about would be part of the public record.

This might be more like gaining transparency than losing privacy. I'd personally rather have the right to index data than the right to pretend that no one can find my picture on the Internet. I won't give up my right to take pictures in exchange for a vague illusion of privacy.

This is very related to the problem of not wanting your boss to judge you by your facebook page and the like. This issue is a bit clearer I think because involves the facts of actual history in meat-space, not facebookery.
Knuth stopped writing real checks due to the possibility of check fraud: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news08.html.

For that matter, almost all recipients considered the bragging values of the checks to be worth more than the few dollars in reward money; very few (or none) have been cashed.
As a side note, this type of documentation of the physical world should get interesting when paired with projects like Microsoft Photosynth. (I'm sure there are other similar projects.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p16frKJLVi0
Something along these lines will make Google Streetview look quaint in a few years. (Although Google will probably be involved in mapping the world in 3D as well.)
> Lets say you have 20 threads. You improved performance 20 times, so the rate is now 4 request per second. Still, way too small. You can keep throwing threads at the problem, but threads are expensive in terms of memory usage and scheduling. I doubt you’ll ever reach hundreds of requests per second this way.

Let's say I'm using Java instead of Python. Lets say I use a lot more threads than 20. I will reach thousands of requests per second this way. There are real problems with that approach, and event-driven approaches have genuine advantages, but can people please stop straight-up lying and saying that you can't just throw a few thousand threads at a problem, because you can, and people do.
I would love to see the code that produces this bug.
It gives you separation of concerns between content structure and presentation. This allows you to adapt the presentation for different audiences. For example, on a phone with a small screen, you might not want a three-column layout, but just have everything in one column. You can do that with an alternative style-sheet.

Additionally, you don't have to confuse screen readers with a table which don't really contain tabular data. So it also more accessible.
I understand and appreciate your sentiments. America and Australia would have been a lot more "beautiful" without the European settlers ruining it.

But in a strange way mankind needs to move "forward" "whatever" that means. We need to colonize the Solar system, then the galaxy and then spread to the other galaxies.

Governments prefer to fight religious wars by spending orders of magnitude more than the NASA budget, because it is easier to garner votes with war. It appears as if free enterprise is the only force that will take man beyond the gravity well of this planet.

It is natural to dislike crass advertising. But we should remember that even Google is just an advertising company. Without Google we would have been worse off. Yes worse off even without SEO, SEM and so on.

The situation is not black and white. Formula 1 racers are covered in Ads. But we still watch the games and enjoy them too. The moon is our common heritage. We cannot let it turn into an eyesore. But it will some day be mined, some day, there will a number of ads, whether you or I or another person objects to it will hardly matter. What we can do is strike a balance between growth and beauty.

It will no longer be as beautiful as it was. But as a civilization we will be better off. If you consider we are better off today than in the stone age. That itself is subjective. But this world belongs to 6.5 billion people. It is for them to decide quality of life v/s beauty by abstaining from exploitation.

We have taken steps like having sanctuaries, of leaving Antarctica alone and so on... Maybe we will do something similar to the moon as well. Maybe no development will be permitted on the visible side of the moon at all. It does not matter. Maybe no structure larger than the limit of visual acuity will be permitted.

Free enterprise abiding by the laws we give to ourselves has to take us beyond the shackles of this planet. Let us be pragmatic. Every penny that the Space industry will make will take us off this planet... not in hundreds... not in millions... but in billions...
Still seems like a bit of a gyp. I hope that Knuth is willing to provide a real cheque for real money if you ask. He did, after all, promise real money.
We (the support organization) only do financial and moral support :-)

But Copenhagen Suborbitals is pretty software heavy - uplinks, sensors, communications, ballistics, etc. require a lot of software. They're extremely busy right now preparing for the June launch, but I'll try to talk to them whether this would be a good idea. It seems like it to me, although safety might be an issue if you have someone "unknown" developing mission critical stuff.

Thanks for the idea!
I'm british, but I have to say; this article is utter arse gravy of the highest order.
So now that it is 2011...do you guys think that facebook apps can be a financially viable project?
You don't need a lower bound, you just need wages to follow a log-normal distribution.
In an article where many, I am sure, see clear indication of a social bubble, I choose to see unbridled enthusiasm of a young tech community who were quick to see the potential of a growing social network and was equally quick to capitalize on its growth.

Sure, many of these apps have no actual depth to talk about, but they stand for "build quick and cheap, perfect later" which resonates with me and many others. Also, what good is a business or technology education that costs you a couple of hundred grand, unless it gives you an opportunity to recoup some of that before you graduate.

I really wish there are more "Facebook classes" or just classes where tutors challenge you to build ideas to fruition regardless of whether it makes one a millionaire or not. I am trying to do this in Richmond, Virginia with a couple of others, and trying to signup some patron saints from the business and technology community in the region to help out in this effort. For a region that has three Universities in a 50 mile radius (UR, VCU and UVA), we sure dont have a startup ecosystem here and it seems we have squandered that opportunity so far.
The competitive advantage in India in the long term is that their population will be significantly younger than China.

> India has more than 50% of its population below the age of 25 and more than 65% hovers below the age of 35. It is expected that, in 2020, the average age of an Indian will be 29 years, compared to 37 for China and 48 for Japan; and, by 2030, India's dependency ratio should be just over 0.4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India

In the other hand India is confronting other problems.
>Makes them really hard to interview because they are so good at interviewing!

Hmm. In my experience interviewing Oxbridge grads, I didn't find that. Being good at talking around gaps in knowledge works very well in free flowing conversations, but if an interviewer ask a specific question, and the interviewee cannot answer it, then the ability to talk round it does no good. E.g. I used to ask a question relating to the amortization of a loan, and I would ask the interviewee to draw a graph of time vs. loan balance. You can't talk your way out of not being able to do that.
IOS Media Query Previewer
Probably something like loading the 128 bytes into a byte array, then doing something to it that requires it to be \0 terminated and then the last byte is overwritten.

EDIT: The suggested workaround is to run it in binary mode. As binary doesn't have a concept of \0-terminated strings, this seems to back up my theory.
Just a head's up. If there are human lives involved and at risk based on software development, it is incredibly, incredibly important that the software go through the highest possible level of testing, including every possible codepath, every input partition, everything. If it crashes midflight due to a bug, there's about nothing you can do about it. And people will die.

Remember that when you're considering developing mission critical software. It is the most dangerous sort of software to write, and needs aggressively comprehensive testing.
Exactly. Don't get me wrong, this article is extremely inspirational. But I doubt if there are more than a couple dozen people in America talented enough to pull this off. And, similarly, the vast majority of people in the government aren't capable of recognizing who the people this talented are, or if they are then they are unable to act on it.
I guess it's a simply off-by-one error. Most likely they are reading the file data into buffers of size 128, but then only compare the first 127 characters of each buffer (e.g., because they use < instead of <= in their loop).
As the old joke (fact?) goes, Sir Winston Churchill was giving a speech in the House of Commons and someone nearby noticed that there was a handwritten comment in the margin of his notes: "Weak argument: talk loudly."
Do you consider the IBM PC something that pushed the envelope? Sometimes disrupting an industry by making its products available at a dramatically lower cost is just as much a push to the envelope in the real world as a new discovery. (Other examples include firms like 23andme etc)
Chinese Hackers Are Hungry for Information
It sounds like it compares blocks of 128 bytes, & there's an off-by-one error in the code.
My assumption as well.

It's funny how we can even produce pseudo bugs in our head when we look at how some other software misbehaves.
The Moon Treaty of 1979 specifically bans “altering the environment of celestial bodies”

But in a legal sense, how am I, a private individual, bound by the Moon Treaty of 1979?

If I did choose to go and carve my name into the Moon, who would punish me? Unless the United States (or whatever country I happen to be in) followed up the signing of the Moon Treaty by the passing of a law which prohibits citizens from carving their name into the moon, there's nothing they can charge me with, right?

edit: Actually now I come to look it up (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Treaty) the Moon Treaty wasn't even signed by the United States. In fact, it was signed by only thirteen countries, none of which has the capabilities of getting anywhere near the moon.
Well not that it fits exactly, but that is the order of magnitude of the expense. At least many videos of the glxp are saying so...

But hey only the winner gets to keep the cash. They are in it for the learning so that they can become part of the industry.
Granted, "free will" and "choice" are complex topics.

But it's confusing to use a word like "choose" and then immediately say "outside of their direct control".

On reflection, I think the point that you were trying to make was something like:

"Regardless of whether the cause is societal pressure, neurobiology, or personal choices, women are potentially suffering from lower pay."

I liked the article before the conclusion, however.
Praise for Python
Actually you can specify any pixel width or height. I'm not at my computer so can't give instructions on where to find it, but I know it's a little non-intuitive where it is. Just google it, but just wanted to let you know this is indeed possible.
For a bunch of smart, wealthy people, they really don't grok emergent phenomena. The Silicon Valley ecosystem, like so many things, is a product of human action, but not of human design.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2005/Robertsmarkets....
components that would reveal too much about how something works

It is a significant violation of the spirit of open source to try to keep others from understanding how things work. Mobile Safari may be a competitive advantage for Apple, but the advantages are in the UI, not JavaScriptCore. Google already has a pretty decent JS engine of its own, after all.
"SpaceX aren't pushing any envelopes. They're just doing what has already been done for decades, but for a lower price."

Logical fallacy. The fact that the differences in output are only quantitatively different doesn't mean that the differences in process aren't qualitatively different.
An American-style diet will bring that as well. However, China's system is well positioned to avoid the subsidies which caused the American obesity disaster.
I answered that this is memory allocator :) - you are allocating (inserting in a sense) element, and you are given random (well, random as in not related to the data) pointer or reference (or cons, whatever).

Later you use that same element by the said pointer, reference, etc.
He's correct that George W Bush is a war criminal. I think anyone who believes Bush's policies violated the Geneva convention believes that, but most are too scared to use the phrase "war criminal".
To whom do these photos do any good? Pure necrophilia.
Intel's dual core chips have a 10W power draw. If they moved it today to the 22nm Ivy Bridge. it would still use like 5W.

My point was that while ARM only has to double in performance every year and keep the same level of energy efficiency (which seems every ARM chip maker can do), Intel will have to double the performance of Atom every year, while also making the power draw of the chip much smaller than the previous generation. So Intel has to do twice as much in the same time as ARM chip makers.
As great as it is that she can learn so much online at such a young age, I try to picture what my life would be like if my entire college experience was through a computer screen. I did a lot of growing up and reflection at UT-Austin, and met my best friends at the dorm, my wife at a coop we both lived in, and my business partner when we were both student programmers at the university. I didn't finish until I was 24 and I constantly think about all of those memories. In one of my philosophy classes (Human Nature, 10 years ago), the professor brought up the "Experience Box" thought experiment pretty regularly. Essentially, if you could replace all of your experiences with a digital equivalent, would you?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_machine
The comments on HN have made me wiser. I have decided to abandon this idea altogether. Sorry for wasting ur time. Let me explore some more constructive ideas...
Yes, the Moon Treaty was never ratified by the US. I think it's worth noting to show both the historical precedent of respect for the preservation of the Moon's environment, and that such respect is widespread throughout the world.
The Chinese government is banking on having a smarter working population being more valuable than a larger working population. With more and more blue-collar work being automated it will get harder to find jobs for everyone.
Regarding the "education gap", there was one study (source unknown) that found on average students of liberal arts and other social sciences had higher GPAs, while students in math and other hard sciences had higher SAT scores. My point? GPAs are a terrible way to compare academic aptitude, because they are created from self-selected courses, and not evenly comparable. SAT scores on the other hand are standardized tests that attempt to make clean comparisons. Math and engineering are generally considered "harder" than English and art, so even if smarter people (as demonstrated by SAT scores) chose them, it's likely that they would under perform their social science peers in GPAs.

Another more insidious assertion is that GPAs are typically softly selected and subject to human bias, especially in a field like English. Given that more women choose to go in to teaching, could they be giving preference to their female students? (I doubt it, but it is something to consider.)

Note: I don't believe this study made any conclusions about gender, just education.
Learning how to speak and articulate what I am saying has been the most valuable skill I have ever learnt.

I am constantly blown away by how poorly grown adults converse.
Lol. Well, perhaps I'll reword the conclusion. I suppose it was a bit confusing. I was arguing that a woman's "choice" could be caused/influenced by societal pressure or neurobiology. And either way, to what extent is this a robust "choice"? Personally, I believe that neurobiology is the cause of all our behavior. However, I think it is still worth bringing up the implications of that line of thought. As I said before, there are neurobiological reasons for racism. Of course, these reasons do not JUSTIFY racism, they merely EXPLAIN it. And so, in my conclusion, I wanted to bring up the issue -- "Although we may be able to explain lower pay, either through neurobiology, societal pressure, or otherwise, this does not necessarily justify it."
Leaky seeks help with the interwebs (YC S2011)
I'll gift my Twin Blades of Azzinoth just to talk to you if you're a full stack engineer who likes Python, Django, jQuery, UX design, SEO/PPC, and product strategy.

We're being stealthy until we launch in two months and disrupt one of the biggest, stodgiest industries you've never thought of.

Send your hacker bragging rights to founders [at] leaky

.

Mountain View
It really shouldn't be surprising that after a few decades of one-child policy you're going to wind up with far more old people than young people. If they didn't see this one coming then I'd be very surprised.

Most Western countries are facing a similar problem with aging populations, though on a lesser scale demographically. On the other hand, the Chinese government is much happier to leave folks to fend for themselves, while Western governments run into problems as the old folks demand ever-increasing spending on pensions and health care.
One bathroom with a toilet, sink and bath/shower combo, one en-suite bathroom with toilet, sink and shower and one toilet + sink. I guess the technical term (as used by property people) is 2 1/2 bathrooms.

When I was young some friends of mine lived in a house where every bedroom (in a 6 bedroom house) had an en-suite bathroom, plus one additional bathroom. While I certainly don't expect every bedroom to have its own bathroom (or even close to it, really), I don't think its strange for a large house to have multiple bathrooms.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Launch of Indian karaoke singing website
From the linked page in your parent: "It turns out that only 9 of the first 275 checks that I've sent out since the beginning of 2006 have actually been cashed. The others have apparently been cached. So this change in policy will probably not affect too many people. On the other hand, I don't like to renege on promises, so I shall do my best to find a suitable way to send money to anyone who really prefers legal tender."
It mentions Susan Pinker, not Stephen Pinker.
For those in the know, MS has already established its online "track record". It has launched numerous "ground breaking" products, with strong initial promotion (well, marketing, at least), only to kill them off 1 - 3 years later when they weren't happy with adoption.

Not that Google and others haven't also done this, upon occasion. But, by contrast, MS has almost no track record of success (Hotmail, they bought -- and still almost/partially fucked up.)

At this point, I simply will not trust anything "online" from MS.

Likewise, anything they "share". When you get into trying to actually use it, inevitably you're sucked into a commercial relationship before it becomes useful. Or, you were. I guess some people are using the recent Express editions of their developer tools with some success. I'd already given up.

I don't mind their making a buck. I do mind what I perceive as their disingenuity.
and that such respect is widespread throughout the world.

By thirteen out of nearly two hundred countries?

Let's face it, nobody actually wants someone to burn a huge logo onto the moon. And that's okay, because nobody can afford to burn a huge logo onto the moon anyway. In terms of other uses, there's some reasonable disagreement -- for instance the Moon Treaty says that no private individual should be allowed to own any land on the Moon, whereas I think that granting land rights on the Moon to whoever can manage to set up a permanent settlement there is a great idea.
As someone who knows a lot of the people written about here, I think this article says a lot more about the reporter than the people in it. Every now and then the Times publishes a story that completely lacks the kind of level-headedness that one would expect from an editorial process, and this is one of those stories.

Most of the people mentioned in the article are smart individuals--I have a lot of respect for Joachim's programming talent especially--but back in 2007, the amazing growth in their respective applications was due to Facebook's poorly-thought-out policies regarding application spam (and these apps all sent an unthinkable amount of spam, much of it misleading), not the Stanford class, and not some formula. It's possible to know this because once Facebook changed those policies (because of apps like the ones mentioned in the article), the growth immediately stopped. Most of the apps haven't existed in any meaningful form, if at all, for years.

Where are the articles about startups that have made great advances in tackling the enormous problems that plague the country? Those are the stories I'd rather read.

By way of full disclosure, I was Ed's co-founder at a startup he was also running in 2007 called Qubescape--not the one mentioned in the article. A lot of that venture's code became part of FaceCash, which I am currently working on. Ed started new with an app called PhoneBook and then friend.ly.
It's mostly a performance improvement along Moore's Law. Are you saying that now with the tri-gate Intel's chips will double in power every 12 months or every 6 months?

And if this is just a one time only "big" jump in performance, then even if it's 100% increased performance over sandy bridge, it's still not that much. ARM chips double in performance every 12 months. That's my issue with this. Because most people seem to think Ivy Bridge puts Intel so much closer to ARM, but it doesn't.

Let's say that without 3D, the jump from 32nm to 22nm would give them 30% increased energy efficiency. Now with the 3D it gives them 50% increase, so an additional 20%. As I said,the jump in performance is nice but not a world changer.
We're talking about the modern landscape of native applications -- iOS, Android -- in which apps certainly have not "lost". The legacy desktop application distribution model you're referencing -- one in which a toolbar can spy on you -- is fading away.

The web has the distribution problem solved, but as an application technology platform, it's horrible. Now that we've got a route forward with distribution of native apps, the native app market is growing by leaps and bounds, and it's the web that needs to catch up.

What I'd like to see is a common application platform, PNaCL based, with consistent high-level APIs .. but that would NOT be the web as we know it. It would be another native application platform.
Temporal Awareness - Fixing Multitasking
WVIL, A Glimpse At The Future Of Photography After Cameras Die
America and Australia would have been a lot more "beautiful" without the European settlers ruining it.

If we're going to play that game, then Australia would have been a helluva lot more beautiful if the Aborigines hadn't got to it either. As soon as they showed up they killed off most of the awesomest wildlife (goodbye, Diprotodon) and burned a helluva lot of the forests down.
Google's 'new' design: More than meets the eye