skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The recent release of PostGIS 2, the spatial extension of Postgres, has been a huge benefit to geo software. It has increased the ease and speed at which we can now work with large data sets and do spatial computation on them.

My favorite part of PostGIS 2, besides much of the cleaned up syntax, is the new Geography datatype. It has the spatial projection built in to it, so it automatically does great arc computations. Before we had to write more clunky SQL to achieve this. Was a significant barrier for my learning postgis, which has now been removed.
Does this affect performance in any way when the app is running?

Also, does it provide any benefit over Quartz2d other than familiarity that comes with CSS?
I like the example of Mother Theresa. Whatever you think of her work, she was tremendously devoted and dedicated to her religion. And yet, when her letters and diaries were published following her death, they revealed an immense uncertainty about her faith.

Confidence as a prerequisite to success is a chimera. Though persevering in the face of doubt may matter. False confidence is highly dangerous to yourself and others (and very common, particularly in management).

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1655720,00....
New Owners Take Digg Back To The Drawing Board, Relaunch Scheduled For August 1
Rich Hickey and Joe Pamer - Perspectives on Clojure and F#
Kaspersky Lab Defeats Patent Troll
I remember that reddit was very hard to set up. Is it any easier nowadays?
http://mojotech.github.com/stickymojo/

Edit: The sidebar containing (Intro, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Download, MOJO) "sticks" to the page as your scroll down
I thought it was interesting that the professor who commented on the attrition rate said that another way to look at the student numbers is that the number of students who completed the online course was many more than could be taught in person at MIT over years and years.
For the standard Haar-based Viola-Jones detector, all the parameters needed for it to say "yes" to a detection are known ahead of time if the detector is already trained.

They consist of adding and subtracting different rectangles within the image and comparing the sum to a pre-defined threshold (this is called a "weak classifier" in this context). This is done for ~30-50 different weak classifiers and if all of them pass, then a face is declared there.

Therefore, it should be relatively easy to find a set of rectangles that would satisfy these conditions.

My guess, from having worked with face detectors for quite a while, is that it wouldn't be nearly as cool as what painters do -- the false detections would be more mundanely like faces, or so completely off-the-wall if they happen to be a pathological case.
Inertia, I assume.
Ask HN: How do you assess creativity in dev interviews?
I've been thinking a lot about creativity in the last few weeks, and I was wondering if you have any strategies in discovering really creative programmers in interviews.

By creativity, I mean out-the-box thinkers. People who will try new things and approach problems in different ways than other programmers would ordinarily do it.
I'm the same. I have a motorolla razr from 2006 on an $11/month pay as you go. I've always got my laptop with me.
Tokyo, Seoul, and Paris get faster, cheaper broadband than US cities
The Start of a New Adventure
The Decline of Google (and the Internet's) Ad Business
Normally I would have agreed with you, but have you seen the latest Gmail native client for Android? It is hands-down the best mobile mail client I've ever used. Attractive and incredibly intuitive. Someone at Google has been taking their UX vitamins.
Won't mean anything without PUSH email enabled by Apple.
Agreed. Sparrow had finally evolved enough to be a really good, fast and practical email client. I was waiting eagerly to see what else they would add to the product to make it better.

This is really quite frustrating. At least spin off the product, or make some sort of deal to devote some devel time to it.

It has many uses that Gmail proper can't satisfactorily provide, such as offline usage and super-fast switching among multiple accounts.
From what I recall Sparrow was essentially a spin-off from R&D work done at Apple that Apple did not want to incorporate into their mail app... the dev went off and partnered with a designer to build a polished product from that work. An acquisition by Apple would be an interesting turnabout.

Of course market validation is a great equalizer.
I agree. Less words are better. Someone is looking for grammer to hire, may be he should move to publishing industry.
It sounds like the Sparrow guys ran out of money and were bailed out by Google. This is a sad outcome, but not unexpected: plenty of people make "good enough" mail clients and give them away for free. Just because you want a gold-plated email client doesn't mean many other people are willing to pay for it, and monetizing an email client is very difficult without massive scale, and advertising.
'Denver Resident Here. Reddit, I'm Doing My Best to Update This.'
As someone who loves Ubuntu, this would be a great laptop except for the resolution. Screens matter, especially for developers who will be using it day in day out. In my experience 1366x768 has been a rough resolution to work at, and the panels themselves are not very high quality. In comparison to the Thinkpad and Macbook lines, it is a hard sell.
Google, please realize Sparrow has a set of unique values the web app can't and likely won't ever provide, and continue its development.
Facebook Buys Acrylic Software
This.

Like everyone else I think the App Store lost a great app today. However, I also couldn't figure out how Sparrow would be able to grow on $10 one time purchases. Having been a big fan of Eudora back when it was sekrit hacker group at Qualcomm (well not so sekrit but certainly not part of Qualcomm's core business) I talked with their VP of product at some conference and he basically lamented that once you sold it to someone you were done. They didn't like selling bug fixes as 'upgrades' (that was just a paid support model) and once you had a working client there wasn't much reason to upgrade. The 'free' ad-supported version had a better revenue future than the purchased one.

By the same token these guys have to eat right? So its not like they can do the open source route. They really need to be part of a bigger stable of things in order to make it a business.

I did think it would be a good acquisition for Apple as the front end for their gmail killer.
I read the news in my Sparrow client, then immediately closed it, and uninstalled it.
One measly article does not a law constitute.

There ARE counter-examples of successful systems re-built from scratch.

The rewrite might have killed Netscape, for example, but without the rewrite from scratch not only would have Netscape died but there wouldn't be a Firefox or Mozilla Foundation now.

(And I'd argue that it wasn't the rewrite that killed Netscape: the rewrite was necessary. What killed Netscape, and would have killed it even without the rewrite, was that the then all-mighty Microsoft decided to get into the internet game for real and build a good-enough browser. It's ironic that this good enough browser was IE6, which we know view as the worst impediment to web progress).

Also, didn't Frederic Brooks say "prepare to throw one away"?
Would you care to elaborate on what, specifically, is flawed about meta analysis? I'd definitely be interested in a source on that 60% number and how that source arrived at a number that seems, on it's face, so incorrect.
Anyone knows if Dell is done selecting people for the Sputnick program? I'm waiting to buy a new laptop and I would hate to be selected a couple of days after I order one.
Shown HN: Non intrusive location sharing
Having had this idea before both Apple and Google released Find My Friends and Latitude, respectively, I thought it would still be an interesting experiment to release this simple location sharing app now to see if it catches any traction. While I feel totally comfortable using services such as Latitude to share my location, most of my friends find it far too intrusive. This app tries to bridge the gap by providing the same service but leaving the user 100% in control of who sees their locaiton. What do you think?
Can you give examples of what you didn't recommend for the reasons stated?
Agreed.

I don't even see how anyone could debate this.
I have this exact issue with my HTC Incredible (great phone!) occasionally. I always keep the phone in my pocket with the screen towards my leg.
Just discovered that this is available free of charge on Kindle [1].

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Elements-of-Style-ebook/dp/B005IT0...
> Personally I'd try to target groups that reddit alienates.

Who are these groups? I'm (re)starting development of my own social news site, and I'm looking for a userbase to cater to.
I did a double take, too. No the real question is who made the mistake... just the editor, or did it propagate all the way down from some hapless Dell spokesperson?
I'd rather bet on Mars. And I'd bet American.
Hey Laser Lips
Google invented the entire notion of email streams. Did you forget that?

People weren't used to seeing emails that followed like IM conversations.
Nice. Add the City/State/Country search functionality.
>The second thought was that ground-up rewrites are almost never a good idea to begin with.

For a complex system, like an OS or a browser.

This is a bloody social news site, as trivial an application as it gets.

One man can write a half-decent one in a week.

And for ramping it up, even the scaling roadblocks and tricks are old news by now to the web building community in general.
> I'd point out that LaTeX does kerning independent of number of spaces after a period.

This is misleading. Yes, LaTeX ignores how many spaces you put after the period in the source; but it does lay out extra space after sentence-ending characters. To avoid the extra space (e.g. if you have a mid-sentence abbreviation) you have to backslash it!
Well the fact rests, the community generally believed that there was a ton of promoted stories because, you guys never told anyone otherwise or did a poor job communicating.

And im certain promoted stories did exist, I remember them clearly marked as that.
I just hope they open source wallet for the community to maintain/develop. I use it every day, and was looking forward using it on Mountain Lion
You run a single script which ends with "Congratulations! reddit is now installed"

Assuming everything works as planned.

https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/install-reddit....
Conflicted. I'm happy for the guys who worked hard and clearly got what they wanted out of this deal, but as a loyal Sparrow user, I feel some sense of betrayal that they're simply going to abandon their products beyond security updates.
Yes.

I wasn't willing to pay for Shadowgun just to test this, but I played Fruit Ninja THD for a good 10 minutes with no problems. I also watched a full Netflix show with no appreciable lag.
This sounds more like he applied for and got a job at Facebook, rather than a formal acquisition. As far as I know, Acrylic is a one person team.
True true, but as we can see, that doesn't mean it'll help them succeed.
200k is a lot. I can't see how you need so much money (unless you want to add another supercar to the video)?
Thanks, I know you need other information to process a number, and you made that very clear. I'm also not really sure how to word it better. I was mainly just thinking of the chance (probably extremely low) of someone seeing their real number on there and thinking, 'hey, they have my real number in there', and getting really angry/upset...
That's nice.

I wonder what the tax consequences were.
But Firebug is firebug. It's arguably the best tool available right now.
This is a consumer web application actwitty.com that shows the organized social aggregation. That whats the kind of content one shares in his/her public domain. Like I might be a techie, sport enthusiast, fan of Roger Fedrer through what I share on Tweet and Facebook. The content which can be seen on Actwitty pages is available through APIs.
I remember hearing in the commentary for The Incredibles that they basically used one basic face model as the basis for everything. I imagine they did this to avoid having to rig individual models for animation every time they made a new one, plus they could do random faces for the minor characters.
Come on. They could have held the sale for one week. If the deal goes sour, you run it as you'd planned, and essentially everyone who last week bought it for $4.99 would have bought it this week.

This was a dick move. Well within their legal rights, and it's not like they really have to worry about negative PR when they're dissolving the company, but ethically it looks pretty sleazy.
The whole "the root of all evil" comes from bad translation in the King James. Modern translations usually translate it as "the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil" (NIV) or "the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils" (ESV).

Here's a parallel comparison of the NIV, ESV, KJV, and the NKJV[1]. Note that the New King James even updated the phrase to be more accurate, and it now mirrors the other translations.

[1] http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Timothy%206:...
Equates to about $314, or a month's pay per employee by reported estimates.
I'm not sure I absorbed the message as it was supposed to be put across. The video showed a (seemingly) quite advanced prototype, and they expect to be able to ship before the end of the year. So what is the $200k for? Seemingly to "make it happen" but it appears to be happening already, so it's kickstarting a hefty salary?

If I did somehow miss the point and this seems like a cynical response then obviously I apologise in advance, but that's how it came across.

Edit, cancel the nicety... I just saw that it's retailing for $299. It all feels rather cynical. Perhaps I have too much of a rose-tinted view of the attraction of Kickstarter?
Sorry for the late reply. This system isn't designed to be used on a terminal over the net. From the original paper:

The proposed system is designed to be
used as a local password mechanism requiring physical
presence. That is, we consider authentication at the
entrance to a secure location where a guard can ensure
that a real person is taking the test without the aid of
any electronics.

And . . .

We note that physical presence is necessary in
authentication systems designed to resist coercion
attacks. If the system supported remote authentication
then an attacker could coerce a trained user to
authenticate to a remote server and then hijack the
session.

If you're allowed remote attempts and multiple failures, the system is insecure in several ways. It's designed to work in a scenario where you get ONE attempt, and there's an armed guard who doesn't take kindly to it if you fail.
I'm interested in how animations work with Pixate. Would they also have to be in CSS, if not, then how smooth/seamless would transitions be? Looks good so far though, but 200k?
"One specific complaint I have is that there is no transaction control within pgsql stored procedures (functions). I had to kludge the db link module to get transactions to work."

Yes. Functions work within a transaction, which is usually a blessing. But there are cases where you want to do the transaction control in the procedure itself. This is a known request that is discussed as two different features: "stored procedures" (which is probably what you want) and "autonomous transactions".
Does anyone have a link to Chris Granger's talk?
Google's IPO was in 2004 at age 6-years and returned 100x on investment, and has had "regular" (on the high-end) big-cap growth since.
Sun - simple weather web app for iOS devices
You just registered an account to complain about a message of unequivocal world peace from the first human to set foot on an extraplanetary body.
I see where the OP is coming from but this is the kind of mindset that could ensure you miss out on brilliant technical hires. I have a co-worker who only started learning English 15 years ago ... he speaks very good English, but every now and then he'll make written grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Brilliant developer.

I'm a bit OCD about grammar myself and am definitely partial to people who are excellent writers and speakers of English, but I think making an allowance for non-native English speakers could

a. help increase the diversity of people and ideas in your workplace
b. make sure you don't miss out otherwise fantastic hires
"Big Boobs" is not a boys club. Women are welcome. And many woman are into big boobs (either their own or those of others). What is sexist is to grip a notion that only men are capable of being immature or into big boobs. Not to mention that thinking women can't be into big boobs kind of sounds homophobic. Hey look... two can play the lets overreact and haphazardly toss around labels game. :)
on the blog post Dustin mentions that FB is not buying the software, so its a pure hire
Wow! All the praises aside (which Mr. Yuanqing deserves), it's interesting to see because he has ensured the loyalty of his employees to himself and to the company. It's not just a good personal move but an awesome business move too.
Sure, I should rewrite that as: Great companies value QA.
At least Thunderbird is open source, so it doesn't have to die.
I guess I had really good English teachers, then, because I never worried about using unique arguments. I simply wrote the most obvious thoughts on the subject and called it a day. And I always got good grades.

However, I did follow a lot of advice from the post without knowing it, other than the 'don't be obvious' bit. For instance, I didn't use a lot of filler words. I simply wrote out my ideas, explained them, and then opened and closed it with a summary paragraph, as we were taught repeatedly. 5-3-5 and all that. It never failed to get a good grade.

If I was short of my 500 (or however many) words, I didn't start adding useless words. I added more content. Obviously it wasn't a good argument if I didn't say enough to meet that requirement yet. However, I think this only happened a few times. I was more likely to go over the maximum number instead, if there was one.

College's basic courses were simple if you knew the rules and followed them. I found out later that they were harder for others because they didn't know the rules, like the 5-3-5 pattern. Everyone that I have introduced that to has loved it and it helped them tremendously. Why isn't that taught everywhere? It seems awful obvious in retrospect.
That article is probably the most frequently cited piece of bad engineering advice in the world. Bad and unneeded advice, since most corporate environments are already extremely hostile to any kind of rewrites.

Heck, there are companies that still run DOS "servers". Engineering black holes. They suck developer time in and bend all infrastructure around themselves.
"STM" to me means "Scanning Tunneling Microscope", so I was a bit confused until I googled and realized "Ah! Software Transactional Memory!"

And you're right, it's not immediately obvious that it needs to be a monad. Could you elaborate?
I've never been diagnosed with a disability, and now I am supposed to jump through hoops to try to prove to people that I should be given some sort of special exemption? As if I need more humiliation in my life than to notice after the fact that what I've written is riddled with unintended little mistakes?

As to people caring about what they write: The litmus test should be whether they can effectively communicate, not whether they have the same arbitrary bees in their bonnets that someone else has. I might not want to hire anyone who can't give me their opinion on whether or not Frege would have discovered Godel's Incompleteness Theorem decades before Godel, if Frege hadn't been so discouraged by Russel's Paradox as to give up his entire endeavor to derive math from logic. After all, someone who hasn't put in the effort to study even the basics of modern philosophy can't be trusted to really think deeply on any issue, can they?

This, no doubt, is true, but it would also be a morally indefensible hiring practice.

As for making tenuous and almost insulting relationships: I find your claim that there is any correlation between having issues with "its" vs "it's" and the like, and the care with which one puts into their code, to be a tenuous and insulting claim. You're insulting my code-writing ability, and you've provided no evidence for your claim. That's pretty tenuous. You've also confounded caring with performance. Although it may or may not be the case that caring is a general personality trait that spans across all one's skills, performance can be quite different between skills.

As to whether such grammatical distinctions are trivial, I assure you that they are. Having some linguistics background, I feel qualified to assert this. (MIT degree in cognitive science.) If we were to all agree today to just use "its" all the time, rather than using both "it's and "its", the world would be no worse off.

P.S. I do know how to use const in C++.
The aliens bit was continuing the GP's probability comparison, nothing more.

That's a fallacious comparison: E = mc^2, the discovery of the neutron, and the discovery of uranium's fissile nature told us very clearly how to get nuclear energy (getting nuclear energy _controllably_, however...). Special relativity told us exactly how much power was available. Solid physics.

With ZPE extraction, the physics doesn't give us any way of accessing the energy beyond the Casimir effect, which is pretty restricted. Actually powering anything is in the realms of perpetual motion machines; wikipedia discusses it better than I can here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy#Free-energy_...

(Edit: Rutherford did say the idea of nuclear energy was "hogwash", so you're right there...)
Money is not the root of all evil. The love of money is the root of all evil. This is something like being obsessed with money, or reifying the "symbol" of money.
Sparrow, acquired by Google
Agree with several other commenters. My priorities, most important first, are:

0. Everything must work with a free OS without requiring binary blobs.

1. A good full-sized keyboard with a sane layout, preferably mechanical with blue Cherry switches (hey, a guy can dream) even if this adds a few millimeters and a few ounces. If this is impossible, the bare minimum is the equivalent to last year's Thinkpad keyboard. I was all set to buy a Thinkpad this year, but they lost me when they dropped the traditional keyboard. I tried their new chicklet keyboard in a store and... well, it's a chicklet keyboard.

2. 15 inches Macbook-like quality screen with at least 1920x1200 resolution.

3. Fast SSD and at least 8GB ram, expandable of course.
But publication and aggregation no longer need to be performed together. That was a limitation of print publishing, since the cost of publication was high enough that you really needed to do your aggregation/filtering first.

Now the act of publishing is trivially cheap, so you can simply let everyone publish everything first, and apply aggregation and filtering second.

If you took all the attendees of those two conferences and gave them a collaborative website for rating and reviewing papers, you'd probably get something just as good as the old journals, and probably faster.
So far these responses don't convince me there is any advantage.

It makes more sense to me that the trouble ticket ticket should be written in the imperative and the commit message should be past tense.
Original post is here:
http://apostate.com/how-to-say-nothing-in-500-words

Looks like the URLs changed when they switched from Drupal to Wordpress.
Apparently it is not welcoming to the culture of nerdy developers that like big boobs. Which since most programmers are men, it sounds like you're letting the slowest sickest lamb in the herd get us all eaten by the lions of fun hating.
12 Killed in Shooting at Colorado Theater showing "The Dark Knight Rises"