skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The fact that the author references 600 dpi, then displays the image at 1:1 reveals that he really has no idea what he's dealing with. To further complicate matters, the author's source image is an already anti-aliased bitmap. Re-sizing this image in order to test appropriately on varying screen resolutions will result in anti-aliasing errors. The test images should be rendered at target resolutions from a vector based format like SVG.

This is what the test image looks at zoomed to 400% with no anti-aliasing and no additional processing. This is a pixel-by-pixel resolution of the mess at the center of that image:

http://i.imgur.com/WeoI4.png

When displayed 1:1 on a device, that mess will show up.

DPI is dots per inch. This is an indication of resolution density. When you scale the display of an image on a fixed size screen, you also scale the DPI. That is to say, you could use a 1 million DPI image, and still, when displayed at 1:1 on a smartphone, the DPI of the resulting image is the same (the extra pixels are clipped outside the boundaries of the screen).

Keep in mind that this test pattern should appear like a fractal. No matter how far you zoom in, the pattern will look the same. The points at the center should scale down to near infinite resolution. The resolution limitation is only that of the display device.

A more suitable test that gets closest to the hardware would work something like this:

* Start with an SVG test pattern

* Record the native resolution of each device in pixels

* Render the SVG test pattern with no anti-aliasing (or at least consistent anti-aliasing) at each target resolution

* Display the image on the device using a custom developed application that disables or avoids any internal scaling or image processing capabilities of the software

* Observe the results

If you wanted to test the rendering capabilities of the entire software stack, you should still start with an SVG and use whatever built-in components will render SVG.

Starting from a large bitmap tells us how well the bitmap scaling software works, but you shouldn't zoom to display at 1:1. You should allow the software to resize and see how well it scales.

Each of these is another step removed from the core question asked in the article: Does the pentile screen impact image quality? To answer this question, we must rule out other factors, such as software rendering capabilities.

The final error made is that of attempting to capture the results with a finite resolution capture device (a camera). At a pixel level, your capture would need to greatly exceed the resolution of the target display in order to examine the results at a pixel level or to reproduce the image in a way that objectively represents the perceived result to an audience not present at the time of testing.
Problem 1 is caused by temporary visas. If I know that I may have to go back to my origin country in a few years, I'm tempted to work a lot, save as much as possible, then go back to my country where this money is probably worth much more due to lower currency value, and use the money plus my international experience to jump-start a higher-level career or business (maybe starting a new offshoring company for extra irony). OTOH if I have a permanent visa, I will invest in a long-term career, form a family (or bring existing family from my country), buy a car, mortgage, burn a ton of money in America's ultra-expensive private healthcare and higher education, etc.
Nonsense. We've been hearing apple is screwed for 10 years now. That's idiotic. Apple doesn't have to own the market, and if you believe the Galaxy S is going to convert iPhone fans, you're nuts.
Search underdog Blekko gets serious, makes major improvements
Patrick, have you ever thought about re-designing? Im not sure a full re-design would have a huge effect, but I my work else where wants me to believe you could squeeze some additional income out of a better UI/UX.
...this isn't ideal. But with $500k/year, you can possibly consider a money-at-problem solution.

(Hiring a good ops manager is its own problem, however)
Spoiler - sales $100,000, profit $70k - give or take.
Wait, you'd get to teach Ruby to kids? I'll be honest, all of the things for the program sound really awesome, but this is by far the most appealing point for me. I remember hearing a saying/quote which went along the lines of "if you can't explain something to someone else, then you don't really know the material", and I tend to agree with this sentiment for the most part.

I think this is a great opportunity you guys are providing for the community, and I look forward to applying to the program.
More specifically, do you think that family is entitled to your income?

No. Nor am I entitled to a particular job.

I'm only advocating allowing the job to go to the person who will offer the best cost/benefit ratio. I'm not advocating we should make it illegal to give the job to one person or another, you are.

Anyway, it's artificially adjusted to keep 20% of the US population below the line, so it's not useful as an indication of actual poverty.

This is very true, but regardless - the bottom 95'th percentile of India is poorer than the bottom 5'th percentile of the US.

I didn't see anything in this discussion about programmers.

My arguments are not specific to programmers. I would also advocate bringing over Indian cooks and house cleaners, subject to various non-protectionist limitations.

(In short, I want to limit immigration to people who leave their cultural baggage at home and who won't vote away our freedom. I've discussed this in the past: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=619122 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=477733
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1144340 )
Stickers help you in getting the message delivered
"As a developer, I would prefer to do the opposite. Dismantle Leviathan, dismantle empires. As developers we have the power to change the society, to stop making (business) empires, and to demolish those that exist, such as all those based on copyright and patents. We must base our work on vlaues such as freedom and not on currency."

If you don't have some protection, you will have no business and lose any power you would have had to change anything.

Copyrights and patents protect the little guy as much as they protect big corporations. I don't think you would want to be in a world without such protections.
gives me a 404
There is one in the works at the moment for AR, tentatively scheduled to launch in late January. I might have Keith do one for BCC eventually if we have a week free and are bored.
Agreed. The "largely irrelevant" point I think is key. Just about every PHP pitfall is avoidable when employing best practices (something that is encouraged for all languages anyway).

We see the same thing with JavaScript and C++ (to a lesser extent) because some developers are simply afraid that a less experienced programmer might commit the sin of using the "bad parts", as if Python and Ruby transform careless career programmers into artisans.
The Mayor of Munich didn't talk about the feature set available to public employees.

He did talk about making "public knowledge accessible in the future". Public institutions have a moral and legal obligation to preserve certain items for posterity.

The problem with a proprietary application like iWork is that it uses a closed file format that may or may not stand the test of time. I've worked with archivists in government institutions, and they are already struggling to preserve digital documents produced as late as the 1980s.

As a citizen, I have the ability to learn from the primary sources that are hundreds of years old. One of my college friends spent a semester examining the papers of colonial New York State governors and looking at maps and treaties produced with Indian nations.

Unfortunately, the chances are very high that our children will not be able to read many of the important papers produced from the 1980's through today. How accessible will WordStar documents be in 2060? Or Excel XP spreadsheets in 2100?

There are different approaches to improving the current situation. The State of Washington chose to convert everything from native format to TIFF or PDF images. South Africa and cities like Munich are choosing to mandate the use of free and open native formats. There are ups and downs to each approach.
It's called speculation. I am fully aware that they will prevent issues like this from happening. It's still interesting to consider them though. In the end, somebody has to take these issues into consideration.
Lend
Just added it to the posting. Thanks for pointing this out, but beyond the release itself, I feel like it's hard to make someone who's generally apathetic about news or politics understand why something like SOPA could be so damaging to the freedom of expression and information the Internet had engendered. There seems to be some sort of social/psychology need to tie things up in neat packaging to make it easy to consume, and "weaponized censorship" really galvanized me.
I guess I need to go back and review the whole presentation, I stopped about half way through. Thanks.
That's a question I haven't seen much on HN, essentially: Why are you running your own business when you could be an employee?
He's right. All computers should come with a fully functional word processor and spreadsheet and these should be free.

This is simply common-sense. Let Microsoft compete for a change.
Yeah, they dropped out because they knew Cornell was going to get it and they preferred to quit rather than lose.

From multiple accounts, Stanford didn't have the same passion/funding/flexibility as Cornell in getting the deal done. Stanford is more prestigious, but that's not the only factor obviously - or why even have an open competiton at all?
Congrats on your continued success Patrick! Meeting you at startup school was one of my highlights of this year.
Looks like the applicants can be non-american. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3377589
A Brick and Mortar Retail Store Launches in Beta
The TCP proxy use case, which has been my primary motivation for WebSocket since day one, points to another limitation of SSE. SSE cannot handle binary data without encoding the data into text. WebSocket can.
With iOS:

* there are no phone models available that allow to root your device without jailbreaking, a process that voids your warranty

* you cannot install software from third-party sources, unless you jailbreak it

* as a developer you cannot distribute software from your website, unless you want to limit yourself to nerds that have jailbroken their device

* you cannot build your own device with iOS on it

* certain classes of software, like phone number blacklists, are banned from the iTunes store, but are allowed on the Android Marketplace

* the source code for iOS is not available. This means no forks are possible (e.g. the Kindle Fire)

PS: don't confuse openness with convenience. Unlike Windows, if Google is doing such a poor job, you can always fork it, which is why Google has to play nice. Also, I love my Galaxy S and I only paid $100 for it. And I also own an iPhone 3GS which is gathering dust.
But the free market says that the private sector will save us!
I expect there will be many "technology switcher" applicants and am working to have diverse skill sets represented -- including those of us who've been developing for awhile.
This is related to the oft-heard saying, "No one told me it was impossible, so I did it."
That's a non-error:

http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/nonerrors.html#lend
I can guarantee you getting a job is twenty times easier than making money from an online venture. So yes, he could get a job that would net him twice as much. However scaling the business is easier than scaling himself at startupco.
j3 is right -- developing web apps, 95% of the time, is a trade and not something that requires a four year CS degree. I've taken several people from scratch and taught them enough to be useful to me over a 4-5 month period; years later some of them are holding down very highly paid web development jobs.
How long did it take you to get tolerant to your medication?

I went through a round of neurochemically-inspired regret for the things undone this year too. It's not true; it's just a figment of our mood-states. I've found it helpful to remind myself constantly that thoughts and feelings are transient; actions are what really count. So no matter what I feel like, I can still function in some capacity.

Besides, you're on HN, you must be doing something right.
Hopefully, Congress will pay attention. Convicting a single citizen for non-violent crimes in general are clogging up our jail system. Jury nullification is a clever workaround until the sentencing laws change. This keeps the ultimate power in the hands of the people.
I don't think they're common, at least not in the dev world. One of my training clients runs a six month "get familiar with the company" program where new hires do different jobs -- it's the same spirit but totally different intensity. Theirs is like "hey, it's better than an intership" and ours is like "this is more valuable than college. Work hard, learn hard."
I've been waiting for PHP to use traits my whole professional career as a PHP dev. Super excited they're here now.
The problem with threads
I'm always surprised to hear just how much money you make off this for a website that is not to my taste to put it nicely!

This isn't a negative criticism, but it's a point of interest to me to keep reminding myself that what I want and expect when I go online and buy something can often be different to what the customer actually wants or responds to.

You give frequent detailed and excellent information, thanks for keeping it up with no obvious benefit to yourself!
Or, restated: Why are you working roughly half the year for $100k when you could be working full time for $100k?

Seems like it answers itself, eh?

Further, by the time you get a little software empire like the one the author describes ticking along into the six figure range, you can be confident that it'll continue to make you more money each year, proportional to how much effort you put into it. Check back 3 years from now and it'll be $500k/year. Silicon valley dev jobs hardly ever do that.
I think he meant http://www.google.com/ads/preferences
I actually think fb needs to own up to how they do it. If it's geolocation with a correlated timestamp I'd like to know.

If it's just album name suggestions, I still don't like it, but I suppose I'll live with it.

This is creepy.
There's a bigger problem than usability - I say this because each of the places that adopts any kind of workplace software usually has IT/helpdesks/consultants to handhold this kind of stuff.

The biggest problem is really the spreadsheet - people can live with even Google Docs for documents and even presentations. But Excel has managed to be irreplaceable.

When billion dollar termsheets (and all its macros) come bundled in the XLS format, there is no way we can get away with anything less than 100% Excel compatibility.
I speak of this from experience in a failed attempt to port an accounting office to Linux - Excel was the only roadblock ... and I tried everything including Softmaker.

I am willing to wager real money that if LibreOffice Calc becomes 100% compatible with XLS 2000 and XLSX formats, we would see the adoption of Linux just explode.
Word and Powerpoint dont matter as much - web based offerings like Prezi are increasingly compelling alternatives.
We see them at the application stage too, because the application includes a video. The video tells us a lot more than their race and sex. So if half the people reading applications didn't see the video, we'd do a lot worse at reading applications.
For anyone doing web work in something besides PHP/Python/Ruby, what do you use?
EDIT: ...OR node.js. Forgot to add that to the title.

Also, if you're using it in combination with a framework of some sort, please post that as well. I'm just looking for another language to learn that could still be pragmatic for me, as a web developer.
"Most peoples perception of Ireland is the stereotypical, bumbling, backward "

I think with Intel, Pfizer, ADI etc here for so long, as well as cutting-edge research from our universities, that image has come and gone. The new perception is of a yet another financially incompetent nation needing German handouts. ;)

"yet the one thing our nation tends to respond well to is technology"

I have to disagree. I think it is a miracle that we have have any hi-tech industry at all. Our telecommunications infrastructure is a joke and we are only now catching up to where we should have been 10+ years ago. The privatisation of Telecom Eireann was a huge mistake and the lack of investment in broadband for over a decade shows that sucessive governments hadn't a clue when it came to technology. And don't even get me started on our education system....
Looooong story, but I checked myself in for evaluation.
> In your opinion, how would Facebook know your location if you never logged in from a GPS-enabled smart phone? (and never approved an HTML5 geo permission request on your laptop).

No real trick to that; if the user signs in from an IP leased to a Christchurch, NZ ISP on March 5th, 2007, then it's a safe bet that any photos taken that day were taken near Christchurch (and you get date taken from the EXIF data of virtually every camera on the planet).
I was an iPhone fan until I got my Galaxy S. Don't I count? Do you want pictures of me holding both phones?

Apple doesn't have to own the market

Are you sure you're replying to the right comment? Are you talking to me? What I find truly idiotic is the myopia (some) Apple fans are capable of.
How Dropbox Became The Startup Steve Jobs Wished To Own – with Drew Houston
Neither approach would allow one to mix the two versions. Consider the following use case: program P uses two third party libraries L and M, so it uses:

#include "L.h"
#include "M.h"

Program P gets updated by downloading improved versions of L and M. The new version of L.h does a

#include <stdnoreturn.h>

or

#define _C_SOURCE 20110101

Now, program P accidentally gets processed while noreturn is a keyword.

I do not see how to fix this (you could #undef every macro that the new C standard introduces before including M.h, but M.h might have a noreturn macro of its own that is not the ISO C version). It is just as if 'old C' and 'new C' are two different languages that happen to look similar, and that can be compiled by a single compiler.
Increase Your Lab Efficiency (and Make Henry Ford Proud)
I'm in a similar situation, but I live in the D.C. area. Even though things would probably be tough, I plan to apply as soon as I get back home to my computer.
Do developers with 5+ years of professional experience really need a program like this to become proficient with RoR?

This is a genuine question and not a snide remark.
> They are becoming the center of the information universe to their customers. This is not a good thing.

Why isn't it?
They're intended to be printed at high-resolution, then captured (photographed) at a distance where the fine lines at the center of the image greatly exceed the resolution capabilities of the capture device (usually a camera).

With a film camera, you could test the limits of the lens and film. With a digital camera, you test the limits of the lens and sensor.

The regularity of a pixel array in a camera sensor or display results in the Moire pattern you see in these test images.
Irish privacy watchdog calls for Facebook changes ~ Daily World News
Introduction to Information Retrieval (pdf/html)
We developers are getting evermore control and power on the internet, which can be both a good thing and bad thing.

Do we trust ourselves? Will we make the world a better place as a result of this power? I'm hesitant to answer this question. I know developers that I would trust my life with, however, it just takes a few bad apples to mess everything up.
LTO Cleaning Tapes 20183804 Maxell LTO Cleaning 20183804 LTO Cleaning Tapes
google.com/ads/preferences
"The agreement gives Seagate select elements of Samsung’s hard drive business, including Samsung’s high-capacity M8 hard drives and semiconductors used to make solid-state drives"
While people like to think that it's more or less anonymized clusters and demographics that are being passed to advertisers to target ads better - not a terribly scary thought, just more relevant ads - I think we need to be far more cautious.

How do you go about convincing the "I have nothing to hide" majority of the population that giving away such vast quantities of information is not in their best interests? I'm thinking of friends, family members, etc. who honestly don't care whether the TSA sees them naked at the airport, or how much the other agencies know about them. Where does such extreme deference to authority come from in the first place?
Just curious: what was it for? Link to public commit etc would also be ok. Thx. I was the impression that all the asm code was abstracted away in rarely-changing header file macros?
It needs to hit mainstream media, not just the ones who read hacker news, reddit. You need to be able to explain to your aunt (the one who still uses Windows XP) what this bill does and why they should care succinctly.

One of the best ways might be to call up journalists/news bureaus for the local papers/tv stations and discuss it with them and what impact the bill will have locally. Will it mean that a popular startup will close? Will it mean that people won't be able to read Reddit/Twitter/Facebook because their ips will be blocked? Will it mean that the cool startup that uses cloud hosting might end up shutting down if the cloud carrier is blocked? Tell them!

If you go to church ask the pastor if you could say a few words about the bill (same applies for other religions). Virtually nobody outside of the tech industry has heard of this bill.

And please, when you see your family for the holidays, bring it up.
If you have to borrow at 36%, you are doing it wrong. You must consider your exit strategies or simply look for a job.
So true:
1. Some of the greatest inventions were found out by mistake.
2. If you don't take risks, you will never know what is possible.
3. If you always follow the rules, you constrain your domain to what is already discovered and understood.
Best known and wrong: Dreyfus and Dreyfus
I completely agree. I have documents I wrote in the late 1990s I can no longer open easily. As an example of how quickly technology can change this is a perfect example of digital obsolence (storage medium, not software): https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/BBC_Domesday_...
And if anyone's interested - "majority" is ~65%* in _eight_ years into the project:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

* 9000 of 14000 as of December 2011. However, "LiMux is a project by the city council of Munich to migrate their software systems, including 14,000", so, probably the total count is actually more than 14000, which makes the percentage even less.
Thank you jkira

Also found the following games:

- Yahtzee
- Parcheesi
And of course when you do discuss it make sure to mention the term "weaponized censorship" at least 3 times while talking. Repetition will keep the phrase in a person's mind so that when they discuss it with someone else or write a blog post they will use the same term
Yeah I don't quite buy the bipolar argument in this context, so I agree with you that its questionable advice regarding the medication. Thankfully I'm not bipolar, so N/A to me but its good that you pointed it out nonetheless.
It's not the emphasis on STEM immigration that's keeping young Americans from these jobs, it's the piss-poor state of math education in the average US K-12. I was a calculus TA in college and was amazed at the proportion of prospective science majors who couldn't deal with variables and fractions; need I add they had all been educated here? Until that gets fixed (and it will take at least one generation, if it happens), you've got to fill the jobs somehow, you know.