skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"get all the police to go to a specific location"

Maybe. But I think it would depend on the particular department obviously and geography as well. You don't need all the police. You are decreasing manpower and ability to respond to other calls which can vary greatly depending on what else is going on. And this system might be installed in smaller towns with less backup resources as well.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
I've updated the blog header a bit to have the logo take you to the home page and have a Blog link just for the blog.

Heh, it's not actually part of the "main site"; we're using Posterous for the blog, but I'm really happy you think it is part of it -- means my CSS hacks have worked. :)
I'm using this right now. It used to be 24, but Obamacare raised it to 26.
I wish you would have expanded a bit more. Consulting does indeed bring in some chashflow when its most needed (I do it, too (email on profile)). But what are your reasons for consulting, aside from money?

Also, consulting brings a host of other problems. Managing time is a tough one. Unless one is a circus juggler, switching between projects is almost impossible. Plus people tend to push back their MVP to keep a client happy.

Anyhow, just write a bit more.
Changed as per the feedback; logo now goes to our homepage, and Blog link now goes to our blog.
Yes, we have something for that but it's customized for our type system. But I think I could probably write.something up about Sphinx customization.
The price also included the splash screen, custom tab bar, table backgrounds, custom navbar. I could probably get better if I paid $800-1000 but I think that this is good enough.
Agreed. I use Sup[1] and it's wonderful. Threaded, extremely fast search (indexed), configurable, etc.

[1]: http://sup.rubyforge.org/
For the longest time, operating systems didn't really work in High DPI. At Apple, a lot of the designs relied on pixel art, and scaling it looked terrible. There are breadcrumbs for scaling in OS X that date back to Tiger or Leopard.

This is one of the reasons why the iPhone4 straight up doubled the resolution even though it made for kind of a wacky display resolution (as opposed to 1024x600 or something more standard like that)

Mountain Lion is supposed to finally get all that HighDPI stuff right though, according to the rumors.

I'm only really familiar with the Apple side of things though, maybe Metro has similar design considerations in mind.
"I don't see why shooting a UAV would be any more fun "

Doesn't have to be the thug shooting it down. Can be a pain in the ass bystander in the hood or someone with a baseball or rock. Have you ever seen kids who throw sneakers up over electrical pole wires in the inner city?

"they'd be less likely to shoot at something that shoots back."

Absolutely positively not going to happen.
Thanks for letting me pick your brain. Time to take a serious look at moving things over to dedicated mail provider.
So it immediately raises the question why isn't this released?

The reasons I can think of are:

* Performance isn't what they want yet.

* Implementation isn't what they want yet.

* There are security issues they still need to fix.

OR putting on my tin foil hat for a second:

* Apple sees WebGL as a possible threat to their app revenues as a soild WebGL implementation could allow developers to avoid entering their app market place and instead charge users directly. It would also allow developers to deploy to other platforms with the same code base.

Obviously the last point is a bit nutty but one can't help but wonder if it is a consideration.
Yes the subdomain is different, but they both share the same domain (that's what I meant by site) and both have to deal with the same thing--your company. Seems like they should as close to one another in look and feel (and navigation) as possible.
You're encouraging people to pay for this internal setting toggle, that Apple didn't default to 'On' for a reason (not being finished)? Where is the value in this? You are basically charging for Apples incomplete software.
This article helped me a bit when porting Shake to x86_64 (the first in the series is linked from the article):

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/01/14/58579...

The x86_64 calling convention can be a bit hairy. C.f. http://blog.nelhage.com/2010/10/amd64-and-va_arg/

The best thing about really large C++ applications with assembly glue deep in their core is that nothing works until you rewrite the glue for the new platform.

You can't debug the thing like a normal app when its hand-rolled threading and mutex library from 1997 doesn't work. So you tread forward; only suckers use debuggers. You can tell what it's supposed to do by reading the assembly and function names from the other platforms... (ppc, alpha (SGI), and i386 in this case).

Naturally, none of the assembly parts had any documentation. Honestly, it's probably good that they didn't (j/k). My guess as to what they were thinking: "if they don't understand it then they shouldn't be writing the asm for the next platform". I guess they were right.

Finally, you get the glue right and it's an "ah-ha" moment. Everything suddenly starts working.
Like how Apple has sabotaged the use of HTML5 Audio, I think it is unlikely they will enable WebGL. It provides developers an open platform for developing games, which conflicts with Apple's closed system agenda.
I don't even want to make the user drop general-purpose email clients; I just think that email, as a back-end distributed messaging protocol, is more understood and battle-tested than just about anything a startup is likely to invent.

Two possibilities that occurred to me:

1) Your service just uses email as a backend messaging protocol, and provides a new "user@myservice.com" mailbox to all users. Advantage is that you can put all your logic in the client, and just run a mail server.

2) Better: include an email header along the lines of "Intended-For-Application: MyService", and encourage general-purpose email clients to auto-archive these messages out of the inbox.

But yeah, it's just the kernel of an idea, and there are tons of problems with it.
>You missed my point entirely. I said that you should not optimize for writing math, you should optimize for reading math.

My point is that these goals are nearly one in the same when you get to the high level. Many mathematical relationships are very complex, usually not the step-by-step procedures that is common in code. Thus being able to hold the entire relationship in your head at once is crucial. Single letter names for variables and functions are critical here (for the previously mentioned reason working-memory-decay).

I basically have a bachelors in math, and I could not imagine reading complex equations with full variable names. The hard part is understanding the whole, not remembering what x or i means. If you find an equation cryptic, that just means you don't have the requisite knowledge to really understand it.
I've spent a lot of time playing with this over the last two days, and it's absolutely the implementation not being where they want it yet. There are definite stability issues with more intensive scenes, though it generally works pretty nicely. I imagine that's why they allow it for iAds, where they can monitor the quality and test it across devices. Hopefully with iOS 6 my tweak won't be needed any longer.
Thanks for this post. I thought I was the only one getting a little upset about this.
Sure, this might work. But the extra pixels needed for the bezel will consume battery with current technology. Also, a new kind of proximity sensor have to be developed for these use cases. It will be really annoying to set the virtual bezel manually all the time.
My First Hackintosh
Fair. We're working through a redesign, but we'll be sure to take this into account. Thanks for the feedback. :)
Drug dealers and gangbangers aren't stupid. If they see the cops installing these things it's only a matter of time before they'll find out what they are and start vandalizing or destroying them.

From the sound of it, if there's enough crime for these things to be cost effective then there are enough criminals around for somebody to get rid of the shot detectors.

I don't think the comparison to telegraph lines really makes sense. If telegram lines were used solely for reporting crime it would be a better analogy.
Agreed. Context-dependent is an important distinction for this rule. Coming from a manufacturing-based business of mostly customized products, if all of our customers were always "right," then we would be loosing a losing a lot of money on replacing/refunding products to customers who ordered wrong, used the product incorrectly or are just trying to deceive us (which is rare). A good approach, in my opinion, is to not make the customer think they are wrong and find a way to amicably resolve the situation. My initial response is to gather more information and say "let's see what we can do to make this work for you." We find it is a good opportunity to show how accommodating we are, even when the customer is wrong, which can make a reoccurring customer out of them and educate them for future orders.

I am sure there are some types of business that would rather take the customer-is-right approach, which may be easier and less costly. And there are also probably times when letting certain customers take their business elsewhere may actually be best.
What's stopping people from doing the same via 911 right now?
I like the overall theme behind your design. Yet the site feels clumsy to navigate. The layout does not seem to follow some sort of grid. The links are far apart. The short about you have to the left of the site describing what you do looks like a wall of text. Dunno. It makes it look amateurish. Something not good when your product is security.

So much, in fact, that when I saw your pricing I had to do a double take. Eight hundred dollars a month for a service when the site looks amateurish?

I don't mean to humiliate you publicly. But you must look into that. It doesnt look right.
The value is that people want to use WebGL now, as seen by the almost 1000 people who have downloaded the software over the last few days. However, I have no idea how one can put a price on something of this sort, which is why you could pay $0 or $500 for it if you want. I tend to believe that saving people from a couple of hours of tinkering (writing the same tweak I have, basically) is worth at least $1, but people have thrown in anywhere from $0.10 to $5.
Alright, the site is out of maintenance mode again. Sorry about that, but we didn't expect such high traffic. Next step … upscaling!
Email is decentralized to us. We have the very specific skils, attitudes, and patience required to buy a domain name, rent a VPS or dedicated server and configure SSH public keys, Postfix/Courier, DNS, SPF, DKIM, and keep it up to date and patched, audit it to make sure it stays secure, and detect/respond to intrusions. And even then, unless you are going to roll your own emergency power, multiple redundant HVAC, and fire supression, as well as shell out hundreds of dollars a month for significant upload bandwidth to your house or apartment, your data and encryption keys are still in the physical possession of a corporate datacenter.

Email is most certainly not decentralized to anyone outside the IT world. They can, with extreme difficulty, move between providers, but they are still dependent on a provider.

Email decreases the volume of users that mediocre players can own (Google does email better than anyone else, so it gets a significant share of the market) but users are still going to be owned by someone.
Make here CMS
It's hardly a tin foil theory. Even if it isn't the primary reason WebGL isn't enabled at the moment, higher-end games moving out of the App Store and into the browser must weigh on their mind.
Every high-crime neighborhood in Chicago is studded with cameras with flashing blue lights. The enclosures are hardened. Destruction of CPD cameras has not been a major issue in the city. If the city can keep cameras operational, they can keep acoustic sensors (smaller, no line-of-sight requirements) secure as well.

My guess (just a guess) is that the "criminals will destroy the sensors" concern is totally overblown.
Tim Cook meets w/ top lawmakers to strengthen Apple's relationship with Congress
I like the look. I don't like the way the horizontal scrollbars appear on mouseover; it's a distraction when I'm moving my mouse over the page.
I'll wait this one out to see if the issue snowballs. Either way, this could turn out to be a positive PR tactic. God luck to the flattr team.
The experience probably varies quite significantly from person to person. I remember appreciating the decrease in size when I upgraded from my 4" Nexus S to a 3.5" iPhone 4S.

I think you've got a point about a larger screen allows for more info, and apps could probably be designed around the size issues. Facebook pioneer the idea of a side menu that could be swiped open with a gesture, and that technique should allow for easy one-finger usage on even the largest screens.
You might also note that they did not give any sort of false positive rate - they mentioned how often it correctly identified gunfire, but not how often other sounds were incorrectly labeled as gunfire. Since gunfire is uncommon, even with a fairly high accuracy rate, it is still likely to wrongly identify other sounds as gunfire more often than making accurate identifications.
Outside a work environment we already have e-mail killer — it is called facebook.
How to inspire intellectual curiosity
Apart from the fact that the devices are apparently designed not to be capable of recording conversations, and can clearly be improved to make it even more difficult to record conversations, "not deploying gunshot detection" isn't the only privacy control that cities can employ; cities can just make it illegal to collect raw audio.
Heh, it takes a lot more than that to humiliate me, and we appreciate the feedback. I assure you we aren't amateurs; certainly not in the security space.

We're working on a redesign, but I'm sure if you asked any of our customers about our internal design (which does follow a grid and was sort of a v2 of our external design) they'd say they were pretty happy with it thus far. Doesn't mean it can't improve, of course. Design is incredibly important to us and we're always working on making it better.

But I assure you we're looking into the external design and making it even cleaner than it already is.
It is a tiny fraction of the cost of police patrols in probably any mid-sized metro area in the US, and an even tinier fraction of that cost in major metros.
Nerd dreams
What are the most famous nerd dreams? Space elevator comes to mind. Do you guys know more?
The Razr Maxx has incredible battery life, not quite a week of uptime but a good 3 days of normal use.
WebGL Enabler won't work well with all existing WebGL demos, but there's a cache of them to tryout at http://www.webgl.com and http://www.chromeexperiments.com
Apple has helped keep OpenGL alive. Microsoft is the company that simply refuses to support it. Think we'll be seeing WebGL on IE anytime soon? Microsoft could have gone with OpenGL but they invented DirectX instead on the desktop. Apple does support OpenGL on their phone, it's just not in the browser, so I would think writing games for Android and iOS should be doable, right? Windows Phone 8? Probably not.
No Email please, we’re collaborating
Swagger WADL & API 'Scriptions - live Q&A tomorrow 9am PDT
Not on AMOLED. Remember that AMOLED does not use any power to display blacks.
What a bit of drivel, as long as there are systems to be managed there will be sysadmins, I work at a hosting shop and you roughly need one sysadmin for every ten or so servers regardless of what they are, things just need to be taken care of.

Mail queues need to be monitored and cleared, kernels patched, customer issues need to be escalated. When you start getting into the size of a company with over 100 non-technical staff you will find you need at least one or two admins just to keep up with issues that come up.
We'll I'm still a teenager just about - so maybe it's a phase. I hope you enjoy it!
It's not about putting in the minimum effort. It's about getting something usable out quickly and gathering feedback from actual users not only to validate the idea, but to ensure that the next steps we take are in the right direction. There's nothing to be gained by building in a vacuum, or polishing a product or feature for months or years, only to find out at last that you built the wrong thing, or that somebody else beat you to the market with something that was "good enough" while you finished your magnum opus.
Emotional response cards: a simple user research tool
This sounds like a case where the problem of collective action would actually work in society's favor: a single vandal would bear the full cost of destroying the sensor (e.g., the risk of getting caught), but the "benefits" of the destroyed sensor would be diffuse, spread out to all would-be shooters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action
How to detect language of short text?
That's probably a single police officer's salary, and it's probably more effective than adding a single officer to patrol a high-crime area.
Well I bought it used, so didn't put any additional money into their pockets but I wasn't putting myself out.
Maybe, if you mean Celsius. Salt melts at 1474F (801C), so it'd have to be kept above that or it'd crystallize.

I've always wondered what they do if the conditions don't provide a high enough temperature... seems they'd have to drain it entirely of it's salt before it solidifies, or they'd never be able to get it restarted. That is, unless they have some form of heater all the way through the plumbing to melt the salt so it'll flow.

I first read about using salt this way back in (Popular Science? in) the early/mid-'80s with a parabolic reflector heating the salt to be pumped to a Stirling engine. They didn't address that question then either.
The first one looks like nose with coverage, and the second like pinocchio with coverage. There are various ways to get those running with Django, but yes, a blog post would be nice.

Just don't get all caught up in 100% test coverage, it's not very useful. You should test edge cases that run the same code more than obvious cases that run new code.
I see the problem in theory, but in reality, the time of a couple of hash functions compared to network latency and application server routing would be quite small. Can timing attacks actually work in such situations?
Two things to note about testing existing demos/games: 1) It supports 0 vertex shader texture units, which breaks some of the more interesting demos (I think this is an implementation thing, rather than a hardware limitation, at least on the higher end devices; the iPad 3 has to support this stuff), 2) Most demos and games use onmousedown/move/up rather than ontouch*, which causes them to break. I'm trying to come up with a decent solution to run these existing demos.
There will always be those few customers you are better of losing. But I don't think you want to dismiss a rude customer too quickly. I notice that many customers will initially approach a complaint or support need with rudeness/hostility, as they think it is more likely to get attention or to emphasize how much they have been put out. I often find that they can be quickly disarmed and be very nice to work with if you take the "kill 'em with kindness" approach. Don't go as far as to always say "you are right," but let them know you want to help them, even if they are not a delight to work with. These customers can become your biggest advocates.
The Earth's core: the enigma 1,800 miles below us
How have they sabotaged HTML Audio?
Scrollbars really need work. Seems like a clunky way to navigate

Basically you are showing just the pure output of data, which is great, but you need to incorporate a way for users to choose to filter this data. Usecase: I'm trying to decide between two shoes, one is on the top of the page, the other is near the bottom and there is a huge mess of noise between those two items of interest. Maybe put in an area to drag shoes of interest into, not necessarily a shopping cart. This way you can weed through the data and compare the most interesting items before making a purchase.
This is my biggest pet peeve on the entire internet. It seems no matter how intelligent and creative some people are, they always screw this up.

It's like when someone has bad breath, but online. You really don't want to mention it...
For 11 hours of high quality, skilled technical work every day, 7 days a week, and the minimal job security of an unproven business? €32k is not going to buy you that person. You have to find someone who believes in you and your project, shares your passion (and equity), and can afford to have basically no family & social life until things work out.
How? With multiple shots it's easy as hell. But from one it's quite hard?

You could hear the firing pin hitting the cartridge (harder to hear than engine running) then you should hear the gasses exiting barrel somewhere around 0,001 second later. Then calculate doppler... Sounds kinda hard.
There's a secondary reason for this: SEO. If your blog gets links from other blogs, you'll want that link juice to flow back to your main site for Google rankings.
What people seem to be commenting on is that there's a difference between reducing churn through econometrics, and an attempt to do so. The title asserts the former, that the post contains an answer.
> Teach it like music.

I remember my elementary school music classes with deep chagrin. The teacher had a deck of cards with photographs of musical instruments.

"This is an oboe. It has a double reed."

And so on, for fifteen minutes or so.
Are we sure that "=" and not "==" is the correct operator?

If "==" was appropriate then there would be no problem of ambiguity. And there would be no need for the clarification.
Because meanings could never change with context. There could be no "misinterpretation". Only the truth table result of "false".

Which is more important in human communication: case-sensitivity or context-sensitivity?

Human communication is not a computer program.
But they're not "using" WebGL other than seeing a demo of it. There's absolutely no interaction. I bet at least half of your downloads expect they'll magically be able to have fully compatible WebGL games. Now that would be software worth paying for, provided it wasn't a settings toggle.
It's not like Apple forgot about this feature. It just isn't ready which is why it's not enabled. It will be released when it's ready.
It's not that hard to put a few timers on few automatic arms.
I'd like to find myself in a city where Gibsonesque situations are the default entertainment. And the job of an entertainer might then become close to a calling.
Err, what? You do have full compatibility with WebGL with this. Any failings there are on the part of games are due to a lack of proper event handling (specifically, not using ontouch* events).

And again, "worth paying for" is up to the customers. I very much encourage people to download it and then pay for it if they see value in it. So far people have seen value in it.
- OLED screens (flexible, printable -- this is already kind of a reality).
- Space Tourism (to Mars) - also becoming a reality.
- A Snow Crash-esque virtual world (sorry, most MMOs are not even close).
- Jetpacks (They exist, but are unwieldy and expensive)
- Dinosaurs (a la Jurassic Park)
- Flying Cars (they exist, but not yet cheap)
- Holograms (they exist, kind of)
- Hoverskate[board]s
- Futuristic Sports (like Speedball)
Someone else more eloquent than I advocated that we stop using curved drop shadows... I concur: http://delvarworld.github.com/blog/2012/05/14/stop-using-cur...
Tips for the first VC Meeting