skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I got 85% for the Coca Cola logo on the first try and only from memory. On this same first try at the end of the session my average score is 80% (I got the wrong blue (I thought it was darker than it actually is) for IBM and got 47% for it, lowering quite a bit the average). Also I'm not a designer or anything close to that, I'm a computer science student.

This to say I don't think it is an "impossible task".

EDIT: just got a friend (also not a designer, and with an (in my opinion) extremely bad taste in colors :-p) doing the test and he got 78% average, with 100% for Apple (he's not an Apple user) and Shell, 99% for Batman, 97% for Coca Cola, but 0% for Dropbox ^^.

So this confirms that it is far from impossible.
someone that nags me every so often. It might be a small group completing the course at the same time. You could join a group and it keeps track of individual progress. The group should have a leader with superior skills that mentors the group and nags everybody to do the homework on time, reply to questions, etc. The group could have an IRC channel or a Campfire open all the time and schedule official meeting times.
Get a weekly notification of my current progress and everybody's progress so I can help somebody else if they are behind.
The class should be based on mentoring, team work and deadlines.
"Just so you know we are not cherry picking this is the highest rank Google return for home affordability."

This is by definition cherry picking. The highest rank Google return doesn't say very much about the quality of the tool. It would be better (at least more honest) to simply show the best tools out there and compare your solution to theirs.
That's cool. By the way, I got mine as well. It's the Quantum bit service.

Link - http://random.irb.hr/signup.php
I think that when someone sees a comment that would otherwise not be agreeable on a personal level, when it has votes from many other members, it has a tendency to sway your personal convictions a bit, just enough to make you second guess your own opinions.

This seems like a benefit to me. If I'm skimming through a comments page on a topic I'm not fully familiar with, seeing an opinion I would otherwise disagree with voted up should make me update; it's evidence against my current opinion.
Stealing usually has the undertone that this is a zero-sum game. You have something, I steal it, you don't have it any more. The operative word is "take" and it implies the removal of a thing from the sphere of influence of its owner into the sphere of influence of the stealer.

The thing need not be directly physical. You can steal money from someone and spend it without ever seeing a paper dollar.

Your definition would have me stealing a wall of a public building when I drop trou to urinate on it. That's one way to make use of it.

We have different words with different meanings for a reason. That's why we object to adding "unauthorized copying" to the definition of stealing.

"Nothing of value was lost", only perhaps "potential value". If it couldn't be copied, it could potentially be worth $0 to the copier/market. That's what makes copying distinct from stealing and interesting from a moral point of view.
Socks for Fish exist. And in the mobile carrier world, people still believe that fish would need them - and while we're at it, gloves as well.

Funny that you mentioned iPhones. I remember from anecdotes of a former colleague, the discussions between Steve Jobs & the CEO of the biggest international mobile carrier group when negotiating the exclusive distribution rights for the 1st iPhone (the carrier did not get the iPhone at the end).

CEO: The iPhone lacks features. It can't send multi media messages (MMS).

Steve: Every thing MMS does, Email can do better. What's the delivery rate of an MMS between networks? 60% at best? Email has 100%. So why would you want MMS, a service that doesn't work?

CEO: But the iPhone also lacks IM (trying to push the carrier's internal IM solution).

Steve: Why do you need IM? You have the best IM service in the world; it's called SMS.

This conversation happened 2007.
This is well-executed, but I thought those were happy/sad little pieces of poo for a little while and I'm not exactly inattentive.
Patriotic pride? Unless I've missed something about your train of thought here, AC/DC is still an Australian band and not from the US.
Don't forget that you can pirate all the films on the internet. That'll have an effect.
A feature I'd love to see is should I refinance or not.

I've currently got a convoluted system of spreadsheets which I have to update every time I want to recheck against current rates. I'd basically like it to tell me in which scenarios it would make sense to refinance. I input things like amount of principle still outstanding, my current rate and term, how far I am into that loan, when I plan on selling, what the refi rate/term options are. The outputs I get are total cost (in fees and interest) by the prospective sale date, and total equity by the prospective sale date.

It is not necessarily in a lenders interest to give borrowers this information, since borrowers are trying to optimize based on paying the least amount possible.
thanks for that, confusopoly has a nice ring to it, and certainly fits.
Score! Posted mine. http://www.reddit.com/r/hwstartups/comments/x3axm/heres_my_s...
If X and Y cost the same but do not solve the same amount of pain, one of them is underpriced.
How 3D Printing Will Change Our World
I'm rather tired of all the sanctimonious, edgier-than-thou commenters and bloggers who keep saying CL has a "shitty UI." And that't not just because I like it (it's clean, simple, and easy to use). I totally agree that it could be improved, and maps do make it easier, but the CL interface never breaks or gets in the way the way an actual shitty UI does.

Also, I think a lot of complainers are not aware of what it takes to roll out UI design changes to hundreds of millions of users. Frankly, I'm not very knowlegeable myself, but I can stop and think about it for a second and imagine there are huge logistical issues (performance, browsers, etc.) and huge psychological issues (non-technical users, familiarity, etc.)

And then there's the whole question of whether CL's UI should be improved. There are clear benefits to having a simple UI that does not do everything for the user. When I used it to find housing near SF, I copy-pasted addresses to map them, and I did a little extra work, but I never found that CL was actually in my way. For neighborhoods and recommendations, I asked real people. When I looked for a car, I made a little spreadsheet to give weighted scores to the features I wanted--I did not go around whining that CL didn't do everything for me.

My impression is that CL wants to be a basic classified service. For whatever reason they don't want to morph into a specialized listing service, and I can understand and respect that. After all, the CL interface is not that much different from HN's.

PS: I've had this item open in my browser for maybe an hour or two--why does the Add Comment button turn into a "dead link" OMG such a shitty UI, if they won't fix it, I am justified in rehosting all the content on a better site.
I love it. It's always best to list all assumptions one is making and try to test them to narrow the liability. Great blog article!
The grant is not exclusive and the authority to decide what is an is not authorized is not claimed by CL. If it is unauthorized they claim rights and causes. You can't have a non-exclusive grant without this distinction.
> The notion that I am bound by whatever legalese someone happens to put on their publicly accessible website is absurd in the extreme.

Well, if nothing else, the submitting users' copyright applies. CL has a license to use it however they like, you don't.
I think they'll get around to that. A number of their UI nudges discourage people from taking a 'completist' view of reading their stream -- no mark-as-read, no persistent latest-read-indicator, endless encouragements to follow more than could be read. That plus control of the client would let them offer some kind of paid pinning as a service.
Can you enumerate a few examples, please?
Down 5% in after hours trading, although not sure if that is before or after results.
We don't have software patents (per se) [!!] in Europe.

But anyway ... if it's not useful it doesn't matter that it's patented and if it is then you've got full disclosure. So I'm not sure the percentage is really important. Perhaps the fees should increase at a greater rate to encourage early release of patented inventions that aren't high worth.

Personally I'd limit the term to about 8 years for all patents and dispense with US business method and pure software patents.
Tried it with Chrome on Windows. About half of the logos were not visible at all.
Most with desktop have a broadband and the ones with laptops have a 3g USB dongle. The tarrifs and limits on dongle are even more ridiculous. Some have 300 mb limit. Who the fuck would use 300mb per month on a 21 mbps connection? (HSPA+ has 21 mbps theoretical speed IIRC) An average speed is something around half to 1 mbps (but under limit). It is very difficult to find a true unlimited plan though. I am on one and i found it after two months of searching. it has half mbps unlimited. Others were unlimited too but their speed reduced from 2mbps to 256 kbps after 3/6/10 GB.
we're building out our refi functionality now. would be great to have you as a test user? we're going to have analysis and data not available anywhere else. info at smartasset dot com.
Why was Sourceforge so tough to displace, aside from no one having the will to do it?

Craigslist controls a two-sided market. If I build a new site, I can't get buyers without there already being sellers. And vice-versa. That's an incredibly difficult business problem.

Github seems to have had it easier. I can just host my new project on github and be done with it (my website links to it after all). I'm sure sourceforge had some value just by being the go-to place, but how strong was the network effect from a developer perspective?
Mountain Lion tomorrow eh?
In the past I've felt cynical about these sorts of issues. Recently I went to Hackers on Planet Earth, a hacktivist conference, and left it with a sense of optimism: there are very, very smart people working on protecting our privacy, and recently their efforts are starting to come to fruition.
Sounds great; just signed up. You should advertise the benefits on your Sign Up page (and/or homepage).
The argument is that the hapless patent infringer doesn't intend to use a technique without the required permissions. I tie my shoes without permission regularly, but I never intend to tie them without a required permission.
Mobile Is Not The Future
The amount of the first dividend in a while has been set.

"Apple's Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $2.65 per share of the Company's common stock. The dividend is payable on August 16, 2012, to stockholders of record as of the close of business on August 13, 2012."
I haven't cut off context. You just disagree with his idea so strongly that it upsets you for him to even have it.

I don't believe "openness" connotes "intent to enable piracy", but "piracy is far more rampant in the open Android ecosystem than the closed iOS ecosystem" isn't an unreasonable observation to make, and, having made it, "openness promotes piracy" isn't a totally unreasonable conclusion to draw from it.

Stop telling people to be embarrassed about their ideas. It's a very poor rhetorical strategy. The only benefit it accrues to you is that it riles your supporters up into similarly gnarly expressions of contempt. It certainly doesn't persuade anyone of anything.
Almost 43% gross margin, for a (mostly) hardware company !!
We will be adding sort/search by author/reviewer as we grow the db.
Ack. IIRC Microsoft Research has the policy that researchers may never look at patents at all.
Thanks criticsquid! Yeah the whole realm of color is an interesting space with color profiles and logos that have changed their tint slightly over the years. We tried to pick the most "official" color (usually from Wikipedia) but can look into it more as this was just a 24 hour hack.

As for the errors, thanks! May I ask what OS/Browser you're using? I fixed the width error but the GET request is still being sent so I don't know why it's saying that, hmm....
Yup, we're switching to multiple providers. The fact that there were already multiple geographically redundant IPs should have averted most issues, but someone made a highly-coordinated attack on the provider at all their IPs.

We learn and move on. I wonder how many other startups are going as far as using DNS from multiple providers? I still see many startups using Go Daddy for their DNS... :/
The drop came after the results were reported.
Apple stock drops 6% (after market), as iPhone sales miss estimates
Looks like after, due to being lower than the average analyst expectations... had been predicting $37b revenue, vs. actual report of $35b.
Yes, sometimes when it's a particularly large transfer I want a progress meter but I normally don't so it's in the way; perhaps when we all had modems. And from a script I'd still want to use -sS instead of -s because although the script is obviously checking curl's exit value the user wants to see curl's specific complaint before the script's own knock-on diagnostic.

$ curl -s does.not.exist; echo $?
6
$ curl -sS does.not.exist; echo $?
curl: (6) Couldn't resolve host 'does.not.exist'
6
$
Japanese Web Browser Pushing Links from PC to Smartphones
I didn't say that Clojure is for enlightened few or super hard to learn, I meant that Datomic/Clojure is currently targeted to people who already agree with Hickey and the other core developers. The 'vision' isn't some grand thing, just a strict adherence to simplicity and immutability as a way to improve program correctness.

I think we're in violent agreement.
Oh... also buried in the release - Mountain Lion is released tomorrow:

"We've also just updated the entire MacBook line, will release Mountain Lion tomorrow and will be launching iOS 6 this Fall. We are also really looking forward to the amazing new products we've got in the pipeline."
How to market an API portal
The truly amazing number from this Q3 results, is not that it has missed most analyst estimates (and that's what the tech press will focus on), but that it has generated $41.7bn of accumulated cash flow during the first 9 months. That's +54% jump from the previous year's 9 months accumulated cash flow ($27.1bn).

That is record breaking, whatever the benchmark.
It's alway sad when there is "libertarians" wanting to preserve nothing more than corporate rights over people's rights using skewed interpretation of the (US) constitution.

And yes, I'm using libertarians with quote because a real libertarian would have thought a bit more than just "The constitution is the supreme rule!!!" and more about every right involved and how to maximize everyone liberty.
Craigslist is a business. What makes it right for another company to profit from the contents they generated through the platform that they build?

Yes, they got an early advantage into the market and has the critical mass that many company can seem to compete with but why take that away from them because they refuse to update/add new features.

Instead of piggybacking on them and relying on their data to earn money, shouldn't Padmapper focus on building their own content. Isn't that where innovation comes from? Beating an existing company by creating a better platform?
Seems like moving the brightness slider up and down should also change the color wheel. As it is, you have to pick a full intensity color then adjust it to a lighter one that may not be very similar at all.
Or perhaps c) there's one of many reasons why the site wasn't reachable at the time from the university campus where the person reported in from.

They went home, it works from their home ISP. We're not seeing any other reports of downtime or unavailability across any of our monitoring. No one else here is reporting "down for me too".

The fact that our site was unavilable for them on their university campus, while still concerning, hardly equates to "we don't know much about WordPress" or "our service is bad".

And "terrifying"... really?
"Yay I have job security" most likely.
So: I used your thingy as soon as I saw the TC announcement, and while I believe you when you say that there's substantial modeling happening behind the scenes, I didn't perceive any of that. My end-user experience with your offering was of a very, very usable... financial calculator.

One thing that might have sold me on what you're doing behind-the-scenes: if there was a "dumb calculator" result you could have compared your numbers to in the results screen.

(Apologies if I missed you doing exactly that).
How do people not see this for exactly what it is: The same situation as we are finding with cable providers not wanting to be dumb pipes. The only difference is people don't pay money to CL. They just give CL all their information, and CL decides what to do with it.

Craigslist has no divine right to its users' information; it just happens to be the only viable option. If Craigslist didn't exist, someone else would, and would probably do it better.

If Craigslist wants to continue existing, they should take advantage of the fact that they are the go-to for online classifieds, create a modest subscription-based API and let the information flow.
Also, Amazon links would be great. You got me interested in a few books, and I'm ready to buy them. The site should definitely get an affiliate fee for that.
Amazon is experiencing tons of growth right now, the last thing they want to
do is keep having to rehire associate workers. If you are good, there is no
reason why they should fire you.

Kindly educate yourself before writing [1]. Because despite your hypotheticals, it's well documented that amazon is doing precisely that: hiring tons of workers, firing them very quickly, and intimidating injured ones into signing papers saying it wasn't from the job. Amazon even stage ambulances outside their unconditioned warehouses in order to be prepared when employees get sick and have to be taken to hospital because of heat.

From the article:

Temporary employees interviewed said few people in their working groups
actually made it to a permanent Amazon position. Instead, they said they
were pushed harder and harder to work faster and faster until they were
terminated, they quit or they got injured. Those interviewed say turnover at
the warehouse is high and many hires don't last more than a few months.

This whole program is a bullshit ruse to deflect criticism. Because guess what: the first thing a student needs is a reliable schedule. Mandatory overtime kills taking classes, because your butt often needs to be in the seat at a fixed time, particularly for tests.

[1] http://www.mcall.com/news/local/mc-allentown-amazon-complain...

[2] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-f...
Oops, I was wrong. It looks like AC/DC went digital back in 2007 with an exclusive with Verizon.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/08/02/us-acdc-idUSN01367...

I'm sure everyone who shelled out $12/album with Verizon's DRM is still rocking out to Hells Bells.
Bit scary how well I actually did for brands that I don't know that well (in my case, Starbucks and Batman). Surprisingly internet companies like Yahoo and Dropbox got me worst scores, although I don't use either which may explain that as they don't do as much advertising.
I haven't seen a GUI written in Go yet, but the basic idea is that you don't customize via inheritance; you do it in a different way. For example, in many UI libraries, you can create a function and ask a widget to call you when you receive an event; the widget will have methods like:

addClickHandler(myFunction)

Any customization you could do with inheritance could be done with a callback function instead, provided that the object has the hook you want.

In Go, there is also an "interface" which is basically a set of methods.
Are you allowed to use these logos for this purpose?
It's not just the prospect that FB or Twitter figure out a new wildly-profitable promotional model themselves, but the prospect that someone else figures it out, and FB or Twitter's large audience/social-net/technology defensible asset is still the best way to deploy it.

Compare: Goto.com (Overture) pioneered pay-per-click auctions, and were already a profitable public company even before Google adopted a similar model. But only combined with Google's natural-search advantages did that model become a profit supervolcano.
Telegr.am CMS: like WordPress, but trough Dropbox or GitHub
The source files: https://github.com/telegr-am/howto
At my school, "full time" meant 4 or 5 courses per term. "Part time" was 3, 2 or 1.Also there were three terms per year.

So if a credit hour is an hour of class per week. Our classes all had 3 hours per week, so 4 classes is 12 credit hours and 5 classes is 15 credit hours. That fits the bill.

I think I understand now. I just hadn't been thinking of it in terms of "credit hours".
The column layout is confusing because there's no real separation between the columns. My natural instinct is to read from left to right.

Love the aesthetics.
Graduating college in 2 years
For the record, I did receive an email from WePay in response to this comment: "I realize that there's nothing to be done now, but wanted you to know that we do take customer service seriously and apologize for the lack of follow up."
Similar service: Telegr.am (trough GitHub or Dropbox)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4287923
As impressive as this is, it is below analyst consensus, and the stock is down 5% afterhours :-(
I think all that is needed is a link that says... want to tip more? then donate directly to programmer by mailing him. This will remind the donor that he probably could give more... see how many people opt for this and figure out the nature of the donations.

That way, the service remains simple and manageable and won't end up being a money laundering operation for some terrorist.
Didn't think you could get more granular than SFF. We tried to group genres together for simplicity. But some users don't seem to be liking that. All genres/categories are currently listed in the dropdown in the header.
Useful Idiots:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
To me, this was the big surprise, and the big revelation:

"This led to Decision Two. Because the data set is small, we can “bake in” the entire content database into a version of our software. Yep, you read that right. We build our software with an embedded instance of Solr and we take the normalized, cleansed, non-relational database of hotel inventory, and jam that in as well, when we package up the application for deployment.
Egads, Colin! That’s wrong! Data is data and code is code!
We earn several benefits from this unorthodox choice. First, we eliminate a significant point of failure - a mismatch between code and data. Any version of software is absolutely, positively known to work, even fetched off of disk years later, regardless of what godawful changes have been made to our content database in the meantime. Deployment and configuration management for differing environments becomes trivial.
Second, we achieve horizontal shared-nothing scalabilty in our user-facing layer. That’s kinda huge. Really huge."
Unfortunately PhoneGap sucked to get started on the last time I tried it. Trigger, I had an app running about 2 minutes after getting to their website. PhoneGaps cool as it's opensource, Trigger is cool as it just works, has support and great docs.

I'd suggest you give it a try. p.s. I do not work for trigger.
If we are lucky, they will settle for PadMapper's assets - and use them.
Very cool idea and well implemented! While I'm sure people will criticize the matching logic and such, it was definitely fun.