skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Provide both then, because typing a URL is a pain on most mobiles, especially urls more than 5 characters.

If people are already running up against 5000 SMS/month limits on their phones, I'd wager that they can spend 20 keypresses typing in a URL for something interesting. Frankly, it's probably the same cognitive load as finding the QR decoder app, lining up a good shot, waiting for the white balance and focus to settle, hitting the shutter button, ...

> What sense would it make? You have an existing brand and an existing site, why have to create a new brand and a new site just to link to that?

Don't understand your point. I'm talking about making a short URL redirecting to whatever the QR code points at, maybe even off the company's existing domain. E.g., http://acme.com/foo

I can't speak to QR code usage in Japan or Korea, I just remember seeing them used in CS course material at my college and none of my fellow students ever used them. Those were real geeks, and they weren't even interested enough to try.

> Wait that has no relevance whatsoever to the previous half of the paragraph, you said "normal people" would always ignore QRCodes, but anyone can recognize a barcode and knows (at least roughly) what it's about.

There's a distinction between recognition, and being able to use them. As far as recognition goes very few non-techy people know what a QR code even does, because there is no obvious indication that it contains a URL. My point was that barcodes usually have the numbers below them and that (IMO) facilitated both consumers and cashiers understanding that it just contains a product number, as opposed to being the Evil Mark of Satan that the red beam reads. It is a more transparent system. I know it seems weird, but for non-geeks, being able to see what is going on is an important step in not demonizing new technology.

> Google Goggles can attempt to do that with all the power of Google behind it.

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure all the OCR is done client-side. And what's your point? A QR code containing a URL requires a device with a network connection to provide anything of immediate value.
Oh interesting, great motto. They should definitely make that a mouseover or include it below it.
Diaspora is like an email server project. Diaspora can be hosted anywhere.
Can anyone explain this as if to a five year old? I'm not understanding it.
Time is ripe for an anonymous social platform worth billions of dollars. One with email, chat, voice, video, pics, blogs, circles, groups, followers and games. Preferable from the open source community. Two names come to mind as possible candidates for developing such worldwide platforms: Canonical and Mozilla.

I'd slit my wrists to have a name@firefox.com email.
> I suspect that, in true HP tradition, its products continue to be fairly expensive, culturally distinct, equipped with voluminous and sometimes mysterious documentation, occasionally quirky to the point of hysterical laughter, and utterly indispensable in their particular niches

There was an HP minicomputer in one of the EE labs at Caltech circa 1980. It had the software that ran the EEPROM programmer, and if I recall correctly it also had the 68k cross assembler you needed if you were building a 68k project.

The documentation was mysterious and the system was quirky, to the point that no one actually understood the thing. Everyone just knew the magic commands they had to type to burn ROMs and such.

The thing was nearly full, and it was getting hard to work with. You had to upload files, work with them, and then delete them, so there would be room for the next person.

One day, my lab partner and I figured out that a certain part of the file name/path was probably a drive name. Out of curiosity, we bumped it up and issued a command, just to see what the error message was when you tried to access a non-existent drive.

There was no error. The command worked. It turned out the damn thing had two drives, but no one had known (and so of course the second drive was all free space)!
I have eyed d3 eagerly for a while and now we enjoy using it for our node knockout entry (http://rapminder.com/).

This tutorial comes in handy - thanks!
There's a closed-form expression for the arc length of a quadratic Bezier segment. Maybe that's what he had in mind. The integrand is sqrt(x'(t)^2 + y'(t)) dt, where x(t) and y(t) are quadratic in t and hence x'(t) and y'(t) are linear, so it just works out to the square root of a quadratic polynomial. With the quadratic formula to the rescue and a clever substitution, you get this closed form:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=integrate+sqrt%28a+x^2+...

This page documents the derivation in more detail:

http://segfaultlabs.com/docs/quadratic-bezier-curve-length

But should you use this for reparameterization? One great thing about calculating arc length by numerical quadrature is that you get all the intermediate arc lengths for the initial segments of the curve for free as intermediate results. Those are exactly what you need for reparameterization, and it works for polynomial and rational curves of any degree whatsoever, not only quadratics.

By contrast, there's no way you could find a closed-form expression for the _inverse_ of that arc length function for reparameterization, so you'd still need to do the same old iterative inversion thing of tabulating it at a bunch of points and then inverting the table and lerping between the gaps. The incremental evaluation required for that is a much better fit for numerical quadrature. If you have to do one, you might as well do both.
factions based on Race in India? I think you are getting carried away with your hyperbole!
You acknowledged limited and narrow cases. Taking even one example, there are a number of transgendered people holding conversations on online forums anonymously or pseudonymously because of potential IRL consequences if people they knew linked them to the posts. Giving these communities this sort of safe haven is worth all of the asshole anonymous posts we see across the web, and they're only one example.
Ask HN: How do you find the best web-services for your startup?
Say you are working on a webapp/startup; What is your process for determining the best fit for say:

- Payment Processing: (braintree, stripe, recurly, paypal)
- Analytics: (google, getclicky, mint, omniture)
- Event tracking: (mixpanel, kissmetrics, google)
- Customer Feedback: (uservoice, get-satisfaction, feedbackify)
- Customer Support:(zendesk, assistly, tenderapp)

Now extend this out to the lifetime of your project where you might need invoicing, dashboard integration, chat widgets, phone-answering service, recruiting software etc.

Are there any tools/sites that allow you to efficiently discover and compare web-services?
I'm starting my journey into collective intelligence and this will make the perfect side project for me.

P.S.
This is my personal process which tends to take more time than I'd like:
Search HN. Use google to get an idea of other options; find recommendations in blogs from prominent companies.
My decision is heavily influenced by finding recommendations from similar companies that I respect.

Thanks for your help, HN.
You are right that industrial designers should specify the manufacturing processes. That said, it is rare to see designers have SO much sway over how things get built.
Mobile Advertising to Reach $8.2 Billion by 2016 As Search Market Share Shrinks
I would love to agree with you as your arguments seem reasonable and it seems you know the subject well.

The only problem is that I have been hearing the very same claims for almost 20 years by now.
Google's shenanigans around G+ were the final straw for me. I'd been growing increasingly uneasy about the amount of personal information I'd placed in the hands one of company.

As it became clearer that G+ was an attempt to harvest still more monetizable information I decided to bow out. I've now unplugged myself entirely from all Google services and I don't intend to ever again rely so heavily on any one company.
The plugin has 2 quick updates:
a) It's now site restricted to mail.google.com
b) Will make use of chromes update feature in the future.

Please grab the new version from http://thinkst.com/tools/cr-gpg/
I <3 emacs, but there's not really a reasonable PHP mode for it that handles interspersed HTML well.
Awk has everything "real" languages have. The same math, flow control and data structures. It also has a subset of string mangling ops that give it the "illegible" appearance. But it is fine as a general purpose dynamic scripting language. As an example:

http://kmkeen.com/awk-music/

It could be clearer without the variable-name golfing and as a seperate .awk file (instead of a CLI one-liner) but it reads pretty much the same as C without any pesky type declarations.
AT&T is the most scandalous business in the world. Recently due to the shitty economy my family shut down our family owned and operated business and the only company still giving us a hard time about canceling a contract is AT&T.

They said we agreed to extend the contract over the phone. We asked if we called them or they called us. They said they called us. When we asked who the spoke to, they said they didnt have name, but the person claimed to be the owner. I asked the rep if my dog answered and barked would they extend the contract and the rep said, "If it was interpreted to be a yes then he was authorized to extend."
Vision Specialists Corp.-Balenciaga Sunglasses, Designer Eyewears
College students signed up, found nothing of interest and didn't bother to visit again.

Citation needed.
I'd say go where your motivation takes you. Let's say you are burning to do idea 1 - so do it! Then you may get burnt out for the weekend and not want to do idea 1, so start idea 2.

Mainly keep it very focused, don't over-engineer, use the customer-development framework and keep refining to the very simple core of the product.

I think these things take time so you will be glad that you flowed with your momentum. In a couple months I'm sure you will gain the experience to answer this question unequivocally.
An overflowing warchest is probably one of the most dangerous enablers of complacency. Screw ups and missed targets get glossed over as "There's money to cover it." Eventually, it becomes business as usual.
Ask HN: Why hasn't JVM become the defacto implementation for dynamic languages?
The JVM has been around for a while now. It's stable, mature, and fast. Lots of languages have started to get ported over to the JVM, and things like Scala exist to make the JVM a great computing platform.

With recent dynamic language implementations on the JVM meeting or surpassing performance of the "native" VMs, why hasn't there been a move to have the JVM become the default implementation?

Jython is a great example. It's fast -- faster than CPython in a lot of cases, and it doesn't have the GIL. And it gets access to the full Java environment if it wants it, presumably including things like Clojure, JRuby, Scala, etc. where appropriate.

This seems like a win/win to me, yet there is almost no traction in this direction. I can think of a couple of reasons why this might be:

1. I'm wrong and Jython isn't actually any faster.

Even if it isn't faster, the better environment should make up for this.

2. Integration with Java land isn't that much of a benefit.

Having access to all of this stuff -- but not being forced to use it -- seems great to me. There's no real downside and lots of potential upside, including increased market penetration in enterprise environments.

3. The JVM won't benefit from dozens to hundreds of programmers from python/ruby/etc applying what they've learned in their respective languages to it.

Maybe this is a case of too many cooks in the kitchen. Linux seems to do well with the "shittons of developers working simultaneously" method of doing things, why can't the JVM?

Even if the language developers don't work on the JVM at all, so what? See points 1 and 2.

4. Lagging behind by a few versions (Jython is at what, 2.5.x?) is a bigger deal than I'm imagining.

This could be made up for within a year or 2 if languages committed to the JVM as their default implementation.

5. Non-perfect compatibility breaking lots of stuff

This is a major concern, right? It's not like Python3 isn't doing the same thing right now, or seemingly every version of Ruby doing the same thing. Oh wait, they do.

Maybe the JVM isn't the right vm to standardize on; maybe LLVM would be more appropriate. I don't know. What I do know is that it seems silly for a bunch of language designers to all be having a big case of NIH and writing their own vms and bytecode interpreters.

Thoughts?
Why does it need to be a moral issue? It should be easy to believe that people will behave differently in an environment with "real" looking names than in one with arbitrary gibberish pseudonyms. They then simply need to believe that on aggregate a social network with the former environment will be more successful than one with the latter.

As for who cares, at least I do. I can't think of anyone whom I care about enough to follow on G+, but only know by a username or nick of some kind. In all but a handful of cases the real name is the primary identifier I have for those persons, the nick is just some added metadata. I find e.g. Twitter's handling of names to be rather repulsive, and it's probably one minor reason for why I repeatedly bounced off that platform.

Admittedly I'm nowhere near as passionate about this as people ranting about how evil the Google+ name policy is, and how as a result they're going to delete their Gmail account, switch to Bing, and block Googlebot. So maybe it would have been more pragmatic to give into those people and turn Google+ into a free for all wasteland. Depends totally on what the ratio of people who strongly hate the policy is compared to the people who mildly like it.

(How is this supposed to be an anti-hacker mindset anyway?)
> I'm not a doctor but he doesn't look good.

I'm not forensic analyst, but that photo is clearly 'shopped.
Congrats!

I'm not a Windows Phone user so I am a bit out of my element in terms of typical application design for the phone, but some sort feedback when a user is performing an action would make the app feel more responsive.

For example, when posting the picture to Facebook the application could show a spinner with the words "Posting to Facebook"
Not if Tim Cook continue to wear those jeans and turtle necks.
IRC feels much closer to a bar, if you want to use this metaphor. A bar does not record people's discussion and keep it forever for all to see..
D3 is getting a lot of love lately! I like this tutorial as it nicely explains how to use events and animation. If you missed it, I wrote a D3 tutorial two weeks ago that shows how to do basic charting: http://www.recursion.org/d3-for-mere-mortals/
1 million shares prepared for new Apple CEO
So is brainfuck...
What you describe is typically how I use R. It certainly has it limits performance wise, but it is hard to beat as a "stat toolbox". Even in cases where it wasn't up to performance needs, I've found it useful for investigating which methods to use prior to implementing a full-blown solution.

For example, I used the free R package "earth" to confirm that something like MARS(Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines) is a good approach to a particular analysis. For my client that initial test justified paying Salford Systems for their great, but expensive, CART/MARS software.
Well sure they make it harder for some to "get returns off products" but its not a bad thing. Google returns that value to users. Like Google Docs, its sucking the margins out of word processing like Microsoft Office and returning that consumer surplus back to consumers. Google making things free to use isn't bad for users its bad for competitors.

No one owes you the ability to extract consumer surplus.
There are different angles of thought regarding real names; moral/ethical, advertising, identity service/trust, and likely others that I haven't decoded yet.

I specifically said moral, because I want to consider the matter in isolation from the advertising and trust service question. It is unquestionable that different angles on the problem will result in different analysis with different final results.
Most discussions don't clearly set out what they are talking about, and conflate the different issues and angles.
The sections on perception are good, though I'd question the connection between wearing nerdy clothes and skills - always looks more like people desperately trying to belong.
> You don't think it cheapens the world 'evil' to be using it like that?

Google has used the world "evil" a lot, internally and externally, for years. Of course it isn't demonic or something, but it at least used to have meaning to that company in that they would never do things that they considered "evil" by their own standards.

I don't think forcing real names only is "evil," but it can lead towards some evil things.

Who has access to our information and communications is going to be a looming issue for a while. It was probably silly for us to think Google would act differently.
There's a recent blog post[1] by one of the CPython core devs. He talks about Pypy, not Jython, but I think it applies too:

Personally, I think the status quo in this space is in a pretty good place, with python-dev and CPython handling the evolution of the language specification itself, as well as providing an implementation that will work reasonably well on almost any platform with a C compiler (and preferably some level of POSIX compliance), while the PyPy crew focus on providing a fast, customisable implementation for the major platforms without getting distracted by arguments about possible new language features.

[1]: http://www.boredomandlaziness.org/2011/08/of-python-and-road...
Don't be sad for the downvotes; they just don't get it.
Poll:  What javascript library do you use?
I'm pretty sure jQuery will have the most usage, but what about the others?
> "Floating University
subscriptions will also be available to the general public with full course packs and video lectures via the Internet."

Any idea what this is going to cost?
It's true that most CEOs don't provide vision and direction, and instead do things like play golf.

But that doesn't change that great leaders do in fact provide vision and direction - like to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Or "to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."

A far cry from golf in my book!
Facebook shuts down Deals
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How to stay connected in a hurricane
jQuery, Prototype, and MooTools. Pretty much standard in everything I design.
You might be thinking of IntelliJ. It only works on the sun-java6 packages. Or at least that was the case last time I set it up.
As long as it is hosted in the US or in Europe, the government can ask you to give them your hard drives.
Perl, and for very simple tasks grep and sed.
People (including Ubuntu/Debian) seem to think that openJDK is just a bit slower and "less polished" but a fine drop in replacement. It has been my experience there is lot's of stuff it still just doesn't support.
The saddest and most obvious was last time I was helping a first year comp sci student they couldn't even do lab #1 in it since openjdk didn't have the fancy new output writers.
Sure you "don't need" them, and a bunch of other things it's missing, but those missing things quickly add up and start spelling lots of software that openJDK cannot run. And also first year comp sci students can't even use it for school.

It is not a drop in replacement that is a bit slower, it is incomplete and I'm tired of people not understanding this. There are things it cannot do and software it cannot run.
Do you prefer one of them for certain tasks?
I talked about opening a private blog, a private forum would be fine too for people who need to remain anonymous.
I know that it definitely does not play nice with ClojureScript. Not sure where the error is on that one, whether with CljS or OpenJDK.
The actual situation seems to be that they're throwing an absurd amount of this guy because they want it to look good.

Look, I'm not an Apple investor and I haven't bought any apple products in the last couple years or so, I really don't care and it's not my business. But with my read on human nature, the guy would do the same exact job for 10 mil a year as he would for 58 mil a year.
Alsip Chiropractors
I was using a double negative, so I never meant to or did say that OpenJDK isn't suitable for production. Apologies for the confusing phrasing if you misunderstood me, but I was stating the opposite of what you seem to have assumed.
Thanks, I enjoyed that.
I suppose the one issue with the dialogue is that as the mugger increases the payoff, it would only make sense to decrease the likelihood that he delivers on the promise.

Put differently, the expected value would be P(Keeps promise|Amount of promise)*(Amount of promise). However, both of the multiplicands in that are inversely proportional.
Maybe, but most of my physical-life friends friends won't come to IRC. As I said, there might be better bars, but FB is a good enough to socialize with people you want to see. And IRC can be downright nasty for uninitiated, it's like this awesome watering hole on outskirts of the town that reveals it's beauty only after repeated use.
People would work longer than they do now because they would live healthier longer, possibly mitigating our current SS problems. It would also be in the best interest of the government to subsidize proven rejuvenation technologies because caring for the old is much more expensive than caring for the young.
Polynomial splines are pretty shitty compared to rational splines for animation and modeling, but they both have the problem of non-constant speed. It gets much worse with higher degree curves. You fix that by letting the animator separately specify a scalar speed curve so he can control where things speed up and down. To make this curve be natural to manipulate, it must be specified relative to an arc length parameterization. You can sometimes profitably combine the arc length reparameterization curve and the pre-integrated user-specified speed remapping into a single remapping curve that's baked out to disk, so the run-time curve evaluator only has to deal with a single level of parameter remapping on top of the raw spline.

This is just a fact of life with splines. They have non-uniform speed in their raw form and you have to deal with it. It's also why quaternion slerping being constant angular speed isn't a real advantage over lerp-and-normalize because they both trace out the same path and often you'll want to overlay a speed curve anyway (and lerp-and-normalize's speed is only barely non-uniform). Evaluate-and-normalize is the way to go for quaternions. It works great for multi-way skeletal animation blending and higher-order rotation interpolation (just do the spline evaluation in R^4 and project back onto the unit sphere). Casey has an old email that goes into some of this: http://mollyrocket.com/911.txt
It should be a common thing for his phrase to make sense...
There are two problems with this:

1) The mugger is obviously lying. 100% chance. The "you must admit there's a small probability, because anything is possible" is irrelevant because there is an equally small probability the opposite of what he says would happen.

2) There's no such thing as a 4 trillion trillion positive outcome, much less 3^^^^3. Just because you can say the number doesn't mean it's meaningful.

That said, this seems more like the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox which already has many explanations.
FPGA ARCADE