skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The Lytro camera captures all possible focus settings.

There's a reason photographers prefer certain lenses for sharpness, which can be measured in lp/mm and I wonder how the Lytro compares there. The f/2 glass is probably decent for portraits and exhibits high levels of diffraction when shooting landscape images at f/22. If light field photography solves these problems then that would be very interesting to me. For $399 and shooting at 3-4 megapixels now, it will be a few years before this reaches the 18+ megapixel pro-am level and deals with pro-am criticism.
It looks like the depth is due to the optics: https://www.lytro.com/science_inside
Awesome! I was just getting annoyed about this yesterday and wishing there was a solution.
I think you'll still learn much from osmosis, anyway.
It got extremely good reviews on engadget, of all places, so it can't be bad.
#4: LinkedSenior.com is similar (not quite what you're describing but solving the same problem I think)
With the content-based apps, development is often outsourced to an external company. BigContentCo then gives the developers a content feed that's optimized for web (big PNG images etc).

Yes, it would be nice to implement a caching and resizing service for the feed - but there's often not the budget nor time to implement one. And BigContentCo is not willing to pay the developers to host and supply bandwidth - especially when the app is free.

TL;DR development does not happen in a vacuum.
It's been a while since I read the paper, but IIRC, you are wrong about how the process works. First I'll define some terms:
Image pixel: pixel in the final image
Sensor pixel: actual pixel in the sensor

The microlens array bins several sensor pixels into single image pixels. Depending on the incident angle of the light on the microlens, the light will go to a different sensor pixel. This means you can adjust the aperture, as well as focus in post-processing, since a narrower aperture just means a pixel is illuminated by light from a narrower possible number of incident angles.

If I had a whiteboard, I'd draw you a diagram, but you sound like a knowledgeable photographer so you probably "get it" if not, just look at the ray-diagrams in the depth of field section of a photography book.
Clip-on-hair-extensions-reviews-
Jay-Z and Warren Buffet Team Up to Teach Kids Financial Literacy
Coiled Cable Testing
The following two paragraphs are from the article:

"Price and her colleagues used brain scans to confirm that these big fluctuations in performance were not random — or just a fluke. They evaluated the structure of the teens' brain in the early teen years and again in the late teenage years.

"We were able to see that the degree to which their IQ had changed was proportional to the degree to which different parts of their brain had changed," explains Price. For instance, an increase in verbal IQ score correlated with a structural change in the left motor cortex of the brain that is activated when we speak."

So, if there were structural changes in the brain that correlated with change in IQ score, then IQ likely tells us something other than "this person does this well or badly at IQ tests." Many people are very skeptical about IQ tests. As depressing as it is, the basic science behind psychometrics has been mostly stable for decades. Look up the work of Linda Gottfredson (sp?).

As for this particular study, psychometricians already knew that generalized intelligence (the so-called g-factor) crystallized in adolescence or early adulthood. The surprising thing about this study is how much change some of the subjects showed. Going from the fiftieth percentile to the ninety-something or, worse, going in reverse, is a big deal. The researchers behind this study should get more funding to continue their work.
Apple - Remembering Steve Jobs
I am getting way better battery performance that I was getting on my 2.5yo 3G with iOS4 that I upgraded from so I am yet have an issue with it.
I have to wonder if someone who can't determine order of execution should be an electrician or plumber either -- those aren't static systems!
> It does, however, take a trained professional several hours to administer - precisely because this is necessary to counter most of the criticisms levelled at "IQ tests are crap".

Don't the shortened IQ tests correlate pretty strongly with the longer ones? When I read psychology papers, even ones dealing with children, they pretty frequently use speeded or abbreviated ones without apparent qualms.
Show HN: Vanity URLs for G+
In case you wanted a vanity URL for google plus and it was taken on another site feel free: http://googplus.me/
For those who didn't find it right away: https://www.lytro.com/living-pictures

Fun times. Too bad the science requires a deep back... would be awesome to have this technology in your cellphone... hopefully we're just a few years away. Technology is amazing.
Apple Celebrates Steve Jobs at Memorial
Nice shoutout from PG there, and because of that I will probably even check it out, but seriously I hope a name change is in line for them ... it may seem simple but it is NOT memorable and certainly not something that is going to be easy to build a brand around IMHO
Viasat broadband 'super-satellite' launches. One of the most powerful ever.
http://googplus.me/ <---- clickable
My theory was and will be that Google knew they would have to eventually allow other name types. Meanwhile, everyone that was on the fence, relented and used their real name.

Then when they eventually allow people to do whatever, they look like the good guys.Google is a pro at suggesting data, before gmail everyone was cutelolgirl17263@hotmail.com. Google made a fake gold rush to secure your real name.

IMHO, if that's true, that's brilliant.
Free Bieber: Campaign against making streaming a felony (S. 978)
Late answer, but a good question (hope you notice the answer). Putting up a rails or django app would probably not be all that terribly difficult for you, I would look into the following broad areas (frequently headhunted for, and probably the path of least resistance would be F#):

1. Languages classified as FP: F#, clojure, scala, ocaml, haskell (I say classified as becuase the OO part is important in F# and scala).

2. Message exchanges/actor model languages: scala/akka, rabbitMQ/erlang, zeroMQ, F# MailboxProcessors

3. noSQL/doc store/KV store databases, or whatever you like to call them: riak, mongoDB, redis. And don't forget mySQL/postgres, they're eveywhere!

4. intermediate Solaris/linux/BSD admin skills

5. javascript is its own fast moving universe: coffeescript, Node.js, clojurescript etc

6. expertise with configuring Hadoop on amazon EC2

7. crawling/scraping, info extraction; fulltext indexing/search and "next steps" like named entity recognition, basically commercial applications of NLP

Oh, and signup for meetups/user groups that are engineering-related, even if you don't know anything about the topic. You'll get the pulse of emerging techs, and meet lots of VP Eng types who are hiring.
The SAT is not an IQ test, it goal is to measure the probability of someone finishing their freshman year of collage and when adjusted for the collage it's better at that than HS grades.
Good lsck!
The Son of Stuxnet? Methinks the Cart be Before Ye Horse
Anna Karenina would have you believe that there are more ways to fail than to succeed, but I would argue the opposite in most cases involving creative endeavors:

Bad programmers are all alike; every good programmer is good in his or her own way.
Very interesting; for me, the cool thing is not the variations (after all, we have long known from childhood IQ tests that there's a lot of variation along the way to one's adult IQ) but the nailing it down to the structural brain changes as opposed to more transient or environmental stuff like, say, having a bad day or test-retest effects or something.
The ends justify the means?
Yeah, and I really don't think most people even care. Once they walk out of the store, they stop paying attention to what else is coming, if they ever paid attention at all.

It's only nerds (like me) that even follow this stuff, and I personally find it exciting.
Patent Trolling Taught at UC Berkeley
Groupon’s deal of the day: its own IPO - Offering is slimmed down
I think calling it a "new" hiring strategy is deceptive - the more innovative companies in the valley have been hiring based on ability instead of status or education for quite a while.
By that reasoning, we should just code a whole site in a single PHP page that handles both the backend processing and the display layer and generation of HTML.

It's not about decreasing the number of files (to look into to find bugs), it's about organizing the code into logical pieces that are more manageable.
Or put a pistol grip on it. Something to hold on to. To orientate. To grip, balance, aim.
http://www.zoodles.com/ is designed for kids, but I think it could be converted or re-imagined for senior use. The video mail system is pretty slick. I bet my kid will have it figured out before he turns 3.

Key features for such an e-mail system:

- simple addressing. In this case, just click on the picture for who you want to mail.

- a big fat "I'm done, send this!" button.

- email whitelist. No spam, no scams, just people you personally know.

- new messages should either be read automatically, or you should get some sort of overlay every time you go into the app that says "you have new messages from [people]! [BIG read now button] [smaller wait until later button]" This way, grandma will always see her new messages.
Didn't see your email address in your profile. Mine is listed in the profile (drop me an email through there).
Nope, it's static only. But if you ask the reddit guys real nice, they might be willing to edit the file manually for you.
how ever you want to justify your opinion is good for you, but the fact is look at the cheapest phones offered to countries like africa and china, and they are Android phones. This allows people with probably no other way to access the internet to be able to have the same luxuries through there phone. However you want to try demonize it is fine, regardless Android/Google offers high quality services at the same cost to everyone.
Baltic property prices stable with Tallinn experiencing an unexpected surge
Nozomi Ishiguro Spring/Summer 2012, Tokyo
Buy Catwalk ghd Midnight Collection - Westfield
Concering #6: I worked on ReactOS, for some time, a long time ago. But they still have a long way to go. On the other hand, they also come a long way.
Hey guys, great post. I just wanted to let you know that you should add left padding to your post content. The text runs right at the edge of my screen on my phone.
Abstinence _education_ was the point of my comment. South Africa, the origin of this product, has been subjected to various abstinence-only education programs from outside sources and these are known to have negligible results[1]. Anything that instead acknowledges that people want to continue having sex and instead prepares them for the event - such as this product, and the accompanying video - is going to be far more useful in the long run.

[1] "...once people had established sexual patterns it was difficult to ask them to abstain. The condom message then had to be emphasised."
http://www.bhfglobal.com/bhf-news/abstinence-only-programmes

"At present there does not exist any strong evidence that any abstinence program delays the initiation of sex, hastens the return to abstinence or reduces the number of sexual partners"
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21670758/
Occupy Wall Street Hackathons
Ask HN: International software patent issues?
I'm wondering by what means are US based software patents enforceable to companies based outside of the US?

1. If say your company is based in New Zealand which doesn't enforce software patents are you able to be sued by a US software patent holder?
2. Does it make a difference where your servers/hosting is based?
3. If so which country would the court case be held?
The Perfect Business
I doubt it. This is somewhat speculation and somewhat observation, but Google seems to build produces with fairly independent teams. As the recent rant shows, this means that very often the projects don't have strong api's to interact with.

However, what the rant did not touch on is how integrating things into a large infrastructure can slow down development. It's much easier to iterate on a product when you don't have to maintain stable APIs or meet the numerous requirements needed to tightly integrate into a larger system.

My guess is that Google chooses the style of development it does precisely so that it can create and test products quickly and with independent teams. A downside to this is that is that they need to spend a lot of extra time when they finally do integrate a product into something like the Apps framework.
The Warning
ALSO: "Fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating on front and back" WHAATTTTT
3d is one of the claimed features of the Lytro:
http://blog.lytro.com/news/it-gets-better-lytro-3d-demo/
So, what's so great about something completely new and HTTP-specific like SPDY, as opposed to using something like the SSH2 protocol (with its multiple channels)?
Actually no, it doesn't. You can have a 50/2.8 on a crop frame camera or on a full frame or a medium format. The different sensor size may dictate different lens construction due to the larger image circle, but it does not dictate the focal length, the aperture, or the ratio between the two.

And the F-number is not the focal length. It's the ratio of focal length to absolute effective aperture size.
Find the perfect Tweet that defines your Startup
yeah. seriously.
One could argue the same thing about a traditional college degree. You spend a ton of money, take four years out of your life, and are forced to take a bunch of classes that don't even pertain to your major (breadth requirements).

At least with Khan, it is free, it can be done in your spare time, and you only focus on things that actually interest you.
Great ideas, Ed. Way to bring the thinky.

Though I have to ask...why haven't you made any of these things? Your #1, #4, and #5 seem like weekend projects. I can think out the basis of the technical solutions for all of them while just sitting here. Granted, there are much better ways to spend a weekend. But hooking up my cell phone to the house lights sounds like it might be kind of fun.

In general, why don't more hackers make stuff like this? It seems like coming up with the long list of ideas is the hard part. Is it that putting the things together is just too much work?
Ask HN: API for Print?
I was wondering if anybody knew of a Twilio/SendGrid for print?

I want to be able to do an API call and have a document printed out and then mailed to the recipient.

Any suggestions of anything even close would be very welcome.

Thanks!
Amazon's Jeff Bezos among largest landowners in U.S.
How do I know that list is a little off? Using it as a metric, I am mediocre-to-good, when I know for a fact I haven't yet reached mediocre.

For example, I grokk pointers, but I use them so infrequently I make foolish errors and have to stop and block everything out.
#1: There are a few devices out there that work like a Bluetooth headset merged with a cordless home phone. Here's one example: http://www.sigelectronics.com/SIG/Panasonic-KXTG7622-Link-to...
Hello, we’re Bing How can we help?
It was probably the less benign `frck`.
Yep, I've known about the file size issue when including live video, but it's something that I'm willing to continue experimenting with. One of my main reasons for including live video in my own screencasts is because I myself enjoy watching ones that have it. So, I guess you could say I'm doing it because it's something I enjoy. I'm hoping others will like it as well. :)
Third time for the challenge, nice going Waterloo!
I think one of the biggest errors a bad programmer makes is seeing 'bad' code everywhere. Sure, some code stinks but just because some code doesn't do something the way you would have done it doesn't make it bad.

If you do have to complain about some piece of code then do so in concrete terms:

- Presense of bugs

- Lack of error handling

- Preformance issues (real ones, that cause real problems)

- Security issues

- Poor robustness

- Redundancy
Cream Presentation
No it's the worst predictor of finishing freshman year. The claim is that SAT + high school GPA is stronger then GPA alone which is a pretty weak claim.

As for what it actually measures (as opposed to what it trys to measure), opinions differ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#Correlations_with_IQ

"Frey and Detterman (2003) analyzed the correlation of SAT scores with intelligence test scores.[20] They found SAT scores to be highly correlated with general mental ability, or g (r=.82 in their sample). The correlation between SAT scores and scores on the Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices was .483 (.72 corrected for restricted range). They concluded that the SAT is primarily a test of g. Beaujean and colleagues (2006) have reached similar conclusions.[21]"

"Certain high IQ societies, like Mensa, the Prometheus Society and the Triple Nine Society, use scores from certain years as one of their admission tests. For instance, the Triple Nine Society accepts scores of 1450 on tests taken before April 1995, and scores of at least 1520 on tests taken between April 1995 and February 2005."
it depends on what you're planning to do with the picture. For example, if you're a designer working with a stock photo, the ability to refocus based on the context where you plan to use the picture could be huge.
Nissan Extended Warranty
High Prescription Costs Prevent 1 in 5 from Taking Medication
That's a "good" point.
It still surprises me that people love Objective-C so much that they wanted to create an ObjC-to-JavaScript compiler. Not the direction I would have taken though.
I don't remember (this was 2002); I just remember it being a really cheap part on my friend's MicroMouse motor controller (I wrote the maze searching algorithm for them), and that the C compiler didn't actually work very well.
I would bet that the Australia/Sydney bit that he's so freaked out about is his time zone, not his "location" per se.
We are working on this at StartupThreads.com. Companies are always buying swag, so the opportunity is to provide the added services that a startup would want. Some people do pay for Startup merch (startupschwag.com had many subscribers when it shut down), its just not a huge market. If you have any specific needs/thoughts would love to hear it.
This is directed at Thomas Friedman, not you... He is the most uncritical cheerleader blowhard I've just about ever read. He spent the early 2000s raving about how outsourcing America's wealth-creation capacity was a great thing, and now he's taking the lead in lamenting it.

I don't know who feeds him his ideas, but he lacks experience, judgment, and wisdom to fully evaluate them himself, and is at best an unskilled popularizer of spurious memes. The few times he says something not totally sophomoric, it's almost certainly due to random chance alone. Broken clock is right twice a day.

If you're going to listen to any one person on this issue, Andy Grove is the one:

http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/bmag/sbsm1106/manufacturing...

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_28/b41860483...

I wish I could vote for Grove for President. I just might write him in.

/rant
Latest Sony's PlayStation 3D TV
Boyfriend Not Interested In Making Love Anymore
You mean like this one?

http://www.wuphf.com/
I like this. We hadn't thought of this for StartupThreads but at the core, startups can use merch as an agent of appreciation for the loyalty and support of their users. Finding creative ways to express this will help them retain some of these power users.
MC Hammer Launching Search Engine
Microsoft goes PHP:  Bing Booster's website
As a person who's used Cappuccino a bit, I'm really surprised that it hasn't gained more traction. The apps that you can create with it look stunning. It has a lot of functionality out of the box; it's really a cool framework.

I bought one to show my support for the community. Hopefully more people will get involved in Cappuccino development. Thanks for making this.
Swag can be pretty big. It is a difficult industry since margins are really thin, but I think people are willing to focus on a service that helps them to outsource some of their swag needs in order to focus on other aspects of their business.

Oh and we'll have women's sizing too :-)
ReceivablesExchange (mixergy interview) solves the problem of cashflow by securitizing invoices, and having institutions bid for them. It is an interesting practice because it is less labour intensive than traditional factorization, and is better at spreading risk.
You seem to have drunk the cool aid ... its pure artificial flavor and coloring.

Take Canonical for example. They have around 30-80 people working on Ubuntu. Do you really think that's NOT where 95% of the work gets done? Yet Ubuntu has this arora around it as it's some kind of a community built distro where everyone contributes a bit, and all those little bits add up to make the whole. Pure marketing bs.

I'm not saying you should not praise Linus for the early work he did. Just that there is more to it. He is still and was since the early days paid to develop Linux. But an entire industy now contributes to Linux who are paid to do so.

And your webapp suggestion just does not stand up at all. Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, phpBB, all have corps around them that are now the primary funders and drivers of the projects.
It always seemed inconsistent to me that they would require real names on Google+ but not on YouTube.
Be more specific. "help to develop our brand" could mean advertising, PR, online marketing etc.

I think a good way to communicate this would be to say what you are trying to get out of this service.
Yes, and likewise someone can be a very good web programmer while being a crappy embedded programmer. But there's common factors involved: likewise, a car that doesn't run probably isn't a good car regardless of your requirements. (OK, maybe you're a hobbyist that likes working on cars when they break down, or maybe you enjoy having broken down cars on your lawn for decoration. But by the same token, maybe you're a hobbyist who enjoys the IOCCC.)

Defining the word "good" is a philosophical rabbit hole for sure, but if someone comes out and says "a good programmer is someone who writes maintainable code", and someone else comes out and says "a good programmer is someone who writes fast code", and someone else comes along and says "a good programmer is someone who writes code that pleases the customer", you're still having a meaningful discussion about which "good" is better, so to speak.
Ensaladas para adelgazar
Pierde hasta 3 kilos en una semana con estas ricas recetas de ensaladas para adelgazar
True, the market isn't huge, but for good quality content some would be willing to pay. We have thought about this a good deal and creating merchandise that stands out, and offering good fulfillment services is an area that hasn't been fully tapped thus far.
Using Sweat Equity for FHA Mortgage Down Payments
This article stands out from many that point out common errors. This one also provides great* tips on how to improve -- even a "contrapositive" link: http://www.southsearepublic.org/article/2024/read/what_makes...

* Disclaimer: maybe I've seen so many "you're doing it wrong" posts that I see something in the opposite direction and get too excited.

But then, that's what makes something like PG's "Great Hackers" (http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html) rare. It takes a lot of things: education, some innate ability, good habits, work environment -- including a good team...

Innate ability isn't a huge factor, but writing wonderful code definitely isn't for everyone. So then, what is to be done with all the mediocre code being produced? I don't see the world overrun by it, long term: code is too expensive. But to get there, something definitely needs to be done.