skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've built OpenCV for use on HPC clusters, and while not a big facial coder, I have help those who do it. It's interesting to distinguish between the terms 'facial detection' and 'facial recognition'. The former basically judges whether or not a face is in a picture or video while the latter attempts to associate faces with names/identities. Two very different things. I just wanted to point that out. OpenCV is good at detection, but I'm told not so good at recognition.
Well, that wasn't what I expected from the URL and opening paragraphs. (Just re-read this comment, and it sounded sarcastic, to be clear: the article really takes a different turn from what I expected)
I agree with both you and the parent post. The article definitely asks for the suspension of disbelief and to be treated like a math puzzle.

However, I think it would be a valuable exercise to try and make a more formal statement of the situation so that the parts of the problem that don't line up squarely with the premise (i.e. eggs often crack when dropped from ~4ft high) were more explicit.

That way, the problem could be introduced both ways at the outset, so that you have the motivating image along with the actual constraints of the problem.
For those in the know: can you tell me/us how this is superior to working with just Raphael.js?
Open-source it. If they're really abandoning the product but actually care about improving the status of e-mail clients they won't send you a C&D.

If they don't care about that as much as they care about preventing unauthorized use of their code, then everyone loses. But you can't know what'll happen unless you take action.
not sure how many of these are real or were made up by the author but i'm facinf the lochness one daily.
Stopping to sell it should be enough: "Looks like you are from the US. Sorry, we cannot sell Minecraft to you. Want to know more?"
Heavy ion collisions reveal the earliest instants of our Universe
you're describing a totally different scenario, as a rapid prototyping tool I can totally see why you would choose Phonegap over native code. but as something to give to the end user? not so much.

Although with Interface Builder and some wiring you can quickly mock something up as well. But it probably would go faster in Phonegap to go from PSD to app.

I don't agree 100% with most people not noticing though. I do feel a smooth app adds to the overal experience.

I tested the first app they showed in the Phonegap gallery and it has that typical Phonegap feel to it: laggy response and glitchy transitions. It gives the app a sloppy feel.
Maybe people won't notice, but it's not a fun app to use.
Depends on the software, I know plenty of non techy people who use firefox and openoffice and I would bet that the majority of them have no idea at all that the source code is available online. They just think of it as "free beer" which is fine because they are not devs so having the code would be of limited use to them.

If open source software crashes on them they would just swear at it in the same way they would proprietary software, it wouldn't occur to them to take a stack trace and file a bug report (I guess this is why firefox offers to do this automatically).
I know someone who jailbroke his iPhone so he didn't have to pay for a $10 navigation app to use to navigate his $40,000 Mercedes.
Ah, so the baseline is in fact better than iPhone apps on iOS, but a further separate purchase that provides a further increase in tablet-ness isn't always available (yet), I guess that's more in line with what I would have expected.
1.49 is there to ensure no crappy apps. after all in case of MS trials are possible meaning you no longer need to buy crappy apps just because the description sounds good.
Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Jay Z are all pretty inspiring.

EM: http://www.bloomberg.com/video/73460184-elon-musk-profiled-b...

SJ: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vrM7AvmxTA

Jay Z: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_O7ra9LDis
It is not broken. It is old, and not being updated.

If they had bought a windows phone those 2 years ago, they would be saying the same thing about their windows phone.

But i agree that most android vendors suck at updates and should be avoided. But you should avoid their phones just as much when they are running windows.

Really, only Apple is doing this right: you get the full ecosystem experience for at least two years.

Those skinned android are often already six months behind and wont be updated.

But to compare a three year old android phone with a fresh new windows phone is unfair and illogial.
sound unlikely, a proper sparrow port would use the etpan lib (there are windows port apparently), instead of starting the email protocol almost from scratch as the author suggest.
Your attitude is refreshing.
Coding Contest Trick: Square Root
I'm not sure what you're talking about. I am happy to see svbtle links on the frontpage because I usually read HN on mobile and svbtle is really easy on the eyes to read.

Here is a screenshot http://cl.ly/image/2L3y3Y1K0k2W

What would you do to make it more readable?
Agreed! Maybe it can take a life on it's own. No use shedding tears over what's done, but open sourcing it would at least mean there is a net gain for the world from it all.
See also CVDazzle, a project mixing camuflage with fashion trends. http://cvdazzle.com/
I really like your way of approaching salary.

Often though people will start providing more value without an agreement up front that it will earn a raise. In those cases a great boss might go ahead and give it to you spontaneously, but if that doesn't happen you need to know how to apply firm but friendly pressure.
This is quite an amazing achievement.

There are a few other dimension to explore beside syntax. Like "are arrays 0 or 1 based?" etc

Apparently the author is now part of the opalang effort. They used to have a slightly weird syntax for their language and later changed that to have it look more like JavaScript. That's a strange move when concise syntaxes à la Ruby or CoffeeScript seem popular.
It's a trained pattern recognition. When you see a face from your race, you already saw many others like it, so to distinguish people you trained to see the details. You see a face from another race you are not accustomed to, your pattern matcher says "hey, it's that _race_" and then it stops, as it doesn't know to distinguish details for that race.

An interesting study about this[1] shows that children exposed to other races (adopted and moved to another region) lose their initial training.

[1] http://www.pallier.org/papers/SangrigoliPallier_finaldraft.p...
"SVG Primer for Today's Browsers" has more detailed introduction: http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/IG/resources/svgprimer.html, you can skip SMIL section as it's probably going to be deprecated.
Some incredibly valid points in here, but I think there's a middle ground.

While Matt is perfectly correct that when you pay for an app, you get the app you paid for. But there's a very well known unwritten suggestion that you'll get updates for 1-2 years. At which point probably they'll release a new version, and you'll pay the upgrade fee. It's how most software seems to work. So, people technically don't have the right to complain - there is a lot of sense in why people are upset. And there's no real explanation from the developers that buying their software wasn't going to lead down that route.

I think the biggest issue about the acquisition for me is the fact Sparrow bled the product dry a week ago by having a sale and then doing this. It seems underhanded.

And for the record, I also find it a shame that they've been acquired. I'm happy for them to be given big wads of cash, but in a selfish way I would have wished to seen them tackle more problems in their way - producing quality results. I have a bad feeling as we've seen again and again, we won't be seeing anything from Google with the calibre that they did with Sparrow.
I'm going to assume it was either someone young or from a developing country who assumed there was an off chance that they would plop $4.99 or whatever into his account.
Sorry if this is a considered a highjacking but I'm curious as to why this post is racing to the top and the post of an active HN member(cpercva) did not get enough attention to make the front page. Colin's post is also from the perspective of an independent developer.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4274016
I have to say: well done! I just tried @mkahlain new meta-search engine (yep, meta is back baby) http://www.gool.li/ and results are good!
Apple products are shipped the same day, unless they are Build-To-Order or in high demand.

Apple is a completely different business than DELL. Apple sells in its own retail stores, through big box retailers, through Apple Service Providers, and via its own web site.

http://store.apple.com/us
I don't think most people are outright antagonising Sparrow (except perhaps for the fire sale last weekend, which seems a bit scummy.)

Most of the posts regarding this issue seem more to bemoan the landscape of the software industry at this point, where even if you have a well-selling, consumer-facing, high-quality app with critical phrase, it's still a rational decision to take a buyout from a tech giant even if it means shuttering your app.
IOS 'in-app purchase' hack extended to include Mac App Store apps
I doubt this is the case since Flash hasn't been bundled with the stock browser in quite some time (if ever, I'm having trouble remembering.) The real world websites I've seen and even worked on just serve HTML5 to both Android and iOS since you can't count on Flash being there for the former, and of course the latter doesn't have it.
Overzealous litigation is preferable to underzealous litigation with the assumption that litigation always favors justice and truth.

Obviously, that latter is not true, and that's the issue here.
I don't have any particular problems with the 1.49 price point (and I kind of wish the iOS app store hadn't set a standard where a $2 or $3 app is considered "expensive"), but how does an extra $.50 prevent crappy apps?
Sad to see it fold. I hope it will spread its genes.
Writing code is a straightforward task. What takes days or weeks is scanning and deciphering someone else's buggy digital hairball (and those programmers also thought they were "getting things done" when they "finished" their unmaintainable messes).

I'm not a huge fan of IDEs or complex processes, but many tools do help. A debugger, static analyzer, and heck even 'grep', go a long way; really, anything that looks at the code is going to do some good. On the other hand, I find it useless to have processes that distort reality (e.g. pretty UML documents about what the code might do, if only someone had written the code that way).
No code was reused. Just Jean-Marc's artwork. Plan was to port LibEtPan in Windows and replace current email engine during Beta, but.. you know.. dead.
Maybe just boycott sales to Eastern Texas where most of these patent lawsuits get filed ...
I was probably overstating the author's position when I mentioned interviewing every single applicant. But, I think I'm correctly interpreting him as interviewing a lot of people who don't meet some predefined "requirement" list.

The strict requirements filter doesn't work great... You may be the perfect example of where it's missing a great potential employee.

But the problem remains: if you receive 500 resumes, and you don't have time to interview even 100 of them... how do you whittle down the pool?
I could get completely behind that, or at the minimum, the specific patents used in the lawsuit are invalidated.
Perform mysql online schema changes without any significant downtime
Study suggests people are happier when they focus on what they're doing
Assembling the first draft of the human genome
Blogspam. Flagged.

And the Coding Horror blog post it takes those phrases from was posted here less than 24 hours ago and is currently link number 25 on the front page.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4273034 (102 comments)
EmitKnowledge - the new knowledge based social network
What do you think guys of http://www.emitknowledge.com, the new knowledge based social network ?
Since hearing that Thunderbird is going to start collecting dust, I've been looking for a decent Windows client and was wishing Sparrow worked on Windows. So this makes me even more sad. I wish Google would do the right thing and open-source it like they did with Etherpad.
To be fair in 2007 leopard's spotlight implemented the 20% of quicksilver's features that most users used 80% of the time.

You probably were a quicksilver poweruser, but I don't think there were many of you.
I'm a reasonably successful software developer in my thirties, successful founder of a well-known company in a certain industry. (And a 4-digit karma on HN.) I'm also an opiate addict; I've been using for over 5 years. Not IV, just OxyContin (time release oxycodone). I've also been diagnosed bipolar I[1].

Opiates allow me to conquer depression and major stress. Working at a company, with massive investment, several employees, and need to keep coding, keep morale up, lead a development team? Opiates turn what would be crushing stress and keep me positive so I can focus on getting stuff done. But could I tell our board about how I cope? Hell no.

There are many more folks in my position. Junkies give us opiate users a bad name, just like meth-heads make stimulant users look bad[2]. So, it's just not acceptable to mention usage, even when it's OK to say how "I'll really need a drink tonight" or even take smoke breaks during work. Which is funny, as opiates have very little heath side-effects (obviously overdose, but after that, constipation is the only real issue).

And yes, I've opted out several times. Once, like Paul Erdos, I decided to prove to someone that I could, and took a whole month off. Despite being on the equivalent of ~100-200mg of morphine a day, it was not very hard. (Sure, if you start IV'ing heroin, things might be different.) Overall, I decided I do better with opiates than without.

Any excuses that remove stigma and get society closer to rational discussion on drugs is an overall win.

1: Opiates are one thing that really work for depression. Mood stabilisers that all doctors want to prescribe leave me content to do nothing - literally. On them, staring at a wall all day is "just fine". Zombification.

2: Except most folks seem to think "meth" is some crazy other drug, not related to what they give hyperactive kids. No one seems to know meth is a legal prescription medication in the US. But then again, most folks don't know Heroin was a trademark of Bayer (name goes with Aspirin).
>Sparrow worked, in part, because it wasn’t open source. No, Firefox isn’t a counterexample - it’s funded by a huge corporation.

Google? Isn't that more of a mutually beneficial business relationship than funding? It was my understanding that Google pays Firefox to be its default search engine, which drives traffic to Google.

Similar business models might be possible for other open source projects. For example, I've contemplated open source forum software which would display ads benefiting the person running the forum 80% of the time, and ads benefiting the author of the software 20% of the time (or whatever).
Rupert Murdoch steps down from NI boards
While I agree that there is a problem of getting paid for writing open source software, it is not quite that they all make zero revenue. There are several possible revenue models for open source.

Also, there is the other option I mentioned, that they commit to open sourcing it if they cease development on it. That kind of commitment can make people buying the software safe from having the product discontinued.
dude. kickstarter. go.

Sparrow is one of the few reasons I stick with using a mac, and am somewhat fearful of taking another job using windows again. I even tried having outlook configured in a mode to look more sparrow-ish to realize it didn't work without a real "sparrow" experience.
For the ratio not reflecting the actual screen area, IMO, manufacturers should reference screen sizes with four numbers: resolution (e.g. 1920x1080), aspect ratio (e.g. 16:9), and area (e.g. 22 in^2). I would drop the diagonal measurement, as it is completely misleading. I'd be willing to drop the actual resolution in favor of DPI.

As a consumer, you generally want a high DPI screen, with a specific aspect ratio, and a certain amount of screen area. The current spec reporting is not helping people out in this regard.
Beading Workshop (Leisure Arts #4818)
Receitas de microondas salgadas - Camarão com requeijão
Who owns this code ? Where you paid to develop this code ? If the OP was paid, his code belongs to google. In anycase a copyright will most likely apply to the user interface if it is a copycat of the Mac sparrow app.

If the OP manage to change it and eventually simplify it to make it significntly different, than the copyright won't hold and you own it as the author. The OP may then create his own brand. He should create his own app if the code doesn't belong to goggle.

I would suggest to make it a payed app, twice the price than Sparrow, and use the earned money to develop android, iOS and iMac version. If google offer to hire him, then request that the code is open source. Maybe Microsoft will have an offer to make too.

Of course Panos could also provide the app for free but he needs to earn a fair money for his work and for a living if we want him to continue and sustain the brand. Maybe another company could make an offer like Canonical for instance.
My Summer at Microsoft
I think the gradients of differing cultural treatment fall along at least 3 axes:

• Can the person help it?

If you're 'born with' a certain neural style, that argues for greater acceptance (if not 'pride'). Addictiveness might be closer to autism spectrum in this regard than the 'choice' to use performance-enhancing drugs.

• Is the benefit conferred something that is relative/private/zero-sum, or absolute/public/positive-sum?

In athletic competitions, a steroid-user only gains (the victory or the all-time record) when someone else loses. If everyone responds by also taking steroids, we've just created a new altered variant of the original game -- spending more, having more health effects, creating an 'incompatible' record book -- without any net gain (unless there is some absolute improvement in, say, the spectacle value of the activity). So the culture is more likely to disfavor steroid use, especially if used for secret advantage, or likely to set off a 'red queen race'. But when someone creates a lasting research result or piece of art -- that is not primarily understood as having displaced someone else's achievement, but rather setting some new absolute peak. When an addict/enhancement-user leaves the world a hit song, a great book, a new scientific breakthrough -- a non-zero-sum result -- it's easier to accept the precursor activities, even if usually illegal/taboo. And that goes doubly when we also consider the third axis...

• Do usage benefits also impose clear offsetting costs?

That is, does the user suffer for the advantages conferred? Otherwise, the use is more threatening: our old taboos and norms are wrong! Late adopters are screwed! What should the rules be, what should I do? Conversely, if the drugs include clear punishment with reward, people can fit outlier users into a comforting moral framework. "The addiction inspired his work but also drove him crazy." "She did brilliant work while addicted but died young of an overdose." Because the use seems to include its own punishment, the social shunning doesn't have to be as strong, and individuals can make the decision "that path is not for me" without resorting to moralizing absolutes.
I agree here. My first thought was that you optimize for the two floors and forget about most of them. One of the best skills you can have when solving real world problems is to recognize when they're specifically not general case math problems and take the appropriate short cuts. If it weren't an egg, it would be a different story. But the problem specifically says it's an egg. Not a bowling ball or a chair or any other semi-resilient object that could survive an arbitrary fall. Details like that matter.
tokenadult, I found your comment extremely helpful. Thank you for spending the time to write it!
I'd imagine that most phone cameras would beat whatever Asus would most likely have used in this. Given I always have my phone on my I'm happy they left it out and hit the $200 price point.
Definitely some odd responses to this acquisition.

1. The sparrow developers decided to accept a buyout offer. That's their business (literally). Should they accept less money to keep their users happy?

2. Yes, Google bought them and is killing off their product because of strategic reasons. That's how huge corporations work, if Google/Microsoft/Facebook/etc. didn't do that they would be at higher risk.
Just an FYI, the stack ranking has the managers split their employees up in 10 bins and then compare them against parallel teams in the same org (against employees of the same level). This is internally referred to as "calibration".
Personally, I don't think it is. For most use cases, Raphael is a better choice for its browser compatibility (namely IE up to 8) and approachable syntax.

Having said that, there are times when pure SVG is preferred, such as when JavaScript is not available (although SVG files can contain JS) or when you don't want the processing overhead of a library. For example, SVG is often used to render the UI graphics for navigation menus in TVs which until recently were very low powered.

Of course, it's also beneficial (IMO) to have a grasp of how the underlying language works even if you use it through a layer of abstraction. Overall, though, I'd use Raphael unless you have a reason not to.

EDIT: I forgot to add that knowledge of SVG is useful for editing images in a text editor, such as when you want fine-grained control or you want to manually remove some of the cruft that graphics software tends to add to files.
They were bought by Google, why would Google do that..?
YouTube makes it very difficult to use a different account to your main. I know other Google services are reasonable in this regard, though, but I don't really care about them.
Anything you want: http://www.teach12.com

If you want to be entertained, pick a lecture by Rufus Fears.
We could define a "friends and family" database as a device-local database limited to recognizing up to n people. Any database that can recognize > n people, or is made accessible over a network, would be prohibited. This would allow for your devices to be trained to recognize you, but prevent this information from being stored in aggregate within "the cloud".

You seem to assume that companies would be determined to circumvent the law. I am not convinced this is the case. For instance, I'm pretty sure Google and some other companies have actually held back certain face-based technologies simply because it's creepy, even in the absence of regulation. If US and EU law both prohibited massive-scale face recognition databases, I don't think Facebook and the like would be rushing to circumvent it. Are they really going to set up a server in Sealand or search for some elaborate loophole?

Finally, I just want to add that we won't be able to work out all the details within a single HN comment thread. Legislation in general is tricky and fraught with imperfections and tradeoffs. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing, or that it wouldn't be effective. If I had just proposed the idea that freedom of speech could be protected by law, it would be easy to find problems with that. But at the end of the day, the first amendment and so on is valuable and effective... in spite of any imperfections. So on the same note, I feel that privacy legislation, even though it's kind of a new thing with some issues, could be made to work.
I don't know but it wouldn't be unprecedented. For example, Google open-sourced etherpad when they bought the company (mainly for the talent rather than the product).