skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People don't go to a search engine to look at ads, despite of what Google may say. Most everyone knows that half of these ads are scams, and the other half is of dubious precedence. People visit a search engine because they want to see organic results. For example, most people, as soon as they have enough technical ability, choose to install ad blockers to avoid losing their time with Google ads.
This post is a great example of how rights are eroded slowly. 20 years ago having cameras tracking your every move in a school would have been a strange proposition, and a system to precisely track and record your every move on campus would have been considered insane. Today cameras are accepted as normal, and a tracking system doesn't sound so bad anymore. Really scary stuff.

If you told a person 20 years ago that the government would be taking naked pictures of you before you got on an airplane, they wouldn't have believed you. Now our children will grow up thinking that's normal, and when their kids have to agree to have a government-owned tracking camera installed in their homes to verify their behavior one month prior to their flight, that will not seem so outrageous either.
Somebody help me out, because I don't get it. Is it supposed to be "awesome" at each particular size, by itself, without resizing? Because it looks pretty "normal" at each size. Would it be "awesome" if you didn't use the magic keyword "responsive" which let me know I should start dragging the window resizing handle to make things happen?

Because people don't go around resizing web pages. They open it in one size (namely: as big as possible), and pretty much leave it there. And if they do resize it, it's not to see it change.

I'm not trying to crap all over the design itself. It looks good. I can only assume it addresses their target audience. And I can appreciate the benefits of having a single set of HTML/CSS that scales to all sizes.
Not necessarily, because "van" is much more common in Dutch names than "von" is in German names. (One reason for this is that "von" used to be restricted to German nobility, while there was no such restriction for "van", and as a result "von" is still relatively rare in German names.)

Additionally, "van" and "von" are possessive pronouns in Dutch and German respectively, which might explain why they are used (e.g. "iPod van Mike" means "Mike's iPod" — the owner may still be Dutch but "van" is not part of his name). Again I think this is relatively less common in German, where the genitive case could be used instead.
The thing about "many good ideas and rules of thumb" is, I've got a few dozen of those of my own! Most of us do. It would be interesting if there were decisive evidence against any of them, but even when I read studies whose conclusions contradict my beliefs, the studies are so flimsy that I find it easy to keep my beliefs.

There does seem to be a recent wave of software engineering literature, exemplified by http://www.amazon.com/Making-Software-Really-Works-Believe/d... (which I haven't read). Are you familiar with this more recent stuff? Does it represent new research or merely new reporting on old research? If the former, are the standards higher?
Great post (and blog). I would love to see more discussions on this topic.
I've always found the selective paranoia of technophobes to be strange. I would bet that the kids who object to the RFIDs are probably carrying smartphones that can be tracked just as easily: http://www.pcworld.com/article/255802/this_smartphone_tracki... These RFIDs are even easier to disable than cell phones since they can just be kept in a metallic pouch when not needed, but it's much more difficult to keep a smartphone in airplane mode all the time.

These people remind of other technophobes who are afraid of radiation from WiFi and cell phones for "health reasons" but don't have a problem with sunbathing. The school should just invest in some science and technology classes rather than trying to argue with these people.
opticks.com, illbeinmybunk.com
+1, live streaming with hangouts on air would be amazing!

http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/hangouts/onair.html
Except we're not talking about any old library function here. We're talking about standard library functions such as memcpy, etc. Those functions are optimised specifically for different hardware platforms on every major operating system.

For example, Solaris, Linux, and Windows all feature versions of memcpy that are specifically optimised for different hardware platforms. Intel in particular supplies these optimisation for a number of operating systems directly to the OS vendors.

My advice only applies to the standard library (really, just libc). It's not intended to be nor applicable to anything else for the purpose of this discussion.

For example, in Solaris alone (older version of OpenSolaris actually, but it gets the point across), there are seven easily found versions of memcmp alone:

http://src.opensolaris.org/source/search?q=&project=onnv&defs=memcmp&refs=&path=libc&hist=

Six of those versions are written in assembler specifically for a particular hardware platform. One is a generic C version. Furthermore, as an example, the amd64 version of memcmp alone has optimisations for at least 14 different cases. Everything from 3DNow! optimisations to optimisations based on data size and alignment.

Also, as for your concerns that OS vendors don't update the standard library functions as often as you think -- you're wrong. I know for certain that Linux, Windows, and Solaris all receive continual updates for new hardware platforms for their standard library. There's a reason you hear these vendors constantly talking about their SPEC benchmark numbers or the like.

So again, as far as standard libraries are concerned -- don't do it; it's not worth it.
Stephen, great to meet you at Langton Labs a few months ago. Glad to see that you solved this problem.

I'm curious about your strategy of open-sourcing this. (In general, I'm curious about business models for ML.) Do you mind sharing your thoughts?
And just to show how significant a 20% price increase would be:

If he raised the price just $1k, that's $2k a month, or $24k a year. That would increase his take home income by almost 50%, as he claims his current income is around $50k.
UK scientists crack quantum computing
Yes. BTW, you don't need @s here.
Marky: The Markdown Previewer
"the attacker gained accesses to an unencrypted backup of the wallet keys"

<shakes head>

What is with these bitcoin exchanges and their pathetic records on security? How is the currency ever supposed to go mainstream with these continual security lapses?
Oh to be in school again when this type of technology is being introduced to day to day life. Am I the only one who, rather than being outraged, is thrilled at the potential hacking opportunities and other shenanigans this introduces? The fun that could be had...
MJ DeMarco: The Millionaire Fastlane

Regardless of what you read, you'll prove that you learned something if you do something with this stuff beyond reading.
I don't buy that for a second. Where is the asymmetry on Google's end? Google has to stop adblockers everywhere, meanwhile, adblockers only need to have a lucky strategy once, and social distribution spreads it everywhere. It's exactly the opposite of what you assert.

And at the end of the day, the web page is rendered on hardware (a display) owned by the user. In the very worst case, the final bitmap being displayed could be modified to remove ads; this crude approach could not be stopped short of a totalitarian state (Google isn't quite that strong) or mangling web pages into unreadability (in which case they wouldn't get traffic so ads would be pointless).

But it would never get that far, for the simple reason of accessibility (i.e. for people with disabilities). Accessible websites are machine comprehensible, to a greater or lesser degree. What the machine can comprehend (in form, if not meaning), it can edit.
Inkling has a team of people that work on content creation, custom tailoring each book for Inkling. Much of the original source material is reused, but much of the content is created from scratch… In fact, many times the content team discovers problems with the original content that they go in and fix.

I can't say for sure how the new programming books are created in their entirety, but I think it's safe to assume a similar process is used.

Source: I was an intern at Inkling about a year ago.
Static social media "share" buttons - for a bit more privacy
I started a little genetic algorithm project that I haven't gotten to work on too much yet, which could make for a cool tutorial. I've got a GA that solves the traveling salesman problem in the Go programming language. It actually solves it in N isolated populations, where you tell it to use N go routines. (Optimally I believe N would be 2x the number of cores your machine has).

Since Go is a systems language, I have it running as a http server that sends back the results to webpage that renders the JSON on a HTML5 Canvas.

What I really wanted to do is experiment with "migrating" solutions from one population to another, to see if I can get any speedup that way. Right now, the isolated populations sort of converge at the same speed, but some do better than others, because they converge to different local minima.

Anyway, if you want to fork it, its here: https://github.com/YesSql/GolangTspGa
Now we just need to get a parent link.
Bill & Melinda Gates played an important role in eradicating polio from India. Now they are working on sanitation solutions and helping AIDS patients.

-Ex-Volunteer for Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
The question is: can I find something equivalent for less cost.

My experience has been, with sufficient searching (and yes, there's a time cost to that), yes, I can.

The upsides: I can see, feel, and fit the garment before buying it. When committing to tailored items, particularly online, no such luck. Clothing's pretty personal, I've never much been a fan of the online or mail-order experience. Their only advantage is that the in-store experience is rapidly getting to be as bad or worse.
This seems like an interesting attempt on O'Reilly's part to justify an electronic price greater than the print price (as of today at Amazon). I will fully acknowledge that the potential utility of an electronic edition of this style of book is superior to that of the dead-tree version. But I can't really accept the price.

I see that Campbell's Biology is still outrageously expensive as well. Can I even resell my Inkling books? If the answer is "no" then students should just buy the used dead-tree version of texts on amazon and resell them. Especially Campbell.

Also, I want to middle-click the tiles to open the book in a new page. Shame on you Inkling for breaking that.
http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Marauders_Map
Make an app that costs $1000 dollars, ask someone to buy it... Profit!
Hmm, I don't doubt that the facade solution is working, but can't say that the slowness is necessary systemic.

I have two Gmail accounts - 1 work email on Google Apps at 10GB, 1 personal on normal Gmail at 3GB. Can't see any performance differences. Are others experiencing this?
Hey man, they're just doing lean MVPs.
"Oh yea, me! The guy with the $4000 suit! C'MON!!"
So the major issues I saw with this article were:

1) the left-hand column is counted as non-search, when the left-hand column is entirely about search. The left-hand column gives you ways to refine your search: you can limit the types of search results like news/images, slice/dice search results by date, limit search results to verbatim matches or to change the geographic weighting of search results, etc.

2) the actual search box is counted as non-search, as are the estimated results count and the time the search took.

3) the article treated whitespace as non-search, when shorter columns can actually make it easier and faster for users to scan the results.

That's still leaving aside facts like

- We actually think our ads can be as helpful as the search results in some cases. And no, that's not a new attitude. I found a quote from 2004 that said "In entering the advertising market, Google tested our belief that highly relevant advertising can be as useful as search results or other forms of content," and I'm sure I could find similar quotes with a bit more looking.

- And of course there are tons of searches where we don't show ads. A lot of people like to take a query that shows ads and say "Aha!" but they're forgetting all the queries that don't show ads.

Not to mention that our ads aren't just a straight auction; we try to take into account things like the quality of the destination page in deciding whether and where to show ads, just like we do with web search results.
I've been using lambda labs' face detect api for a few weeks now. The API calls essentially return the same structured JSON as face.com which has been a huge plus (considering I'm using this as a face.com replacement and I didn't have to change much code to get my old code up and running).

Stephen (sabalaba) was nice enough to give me a sneak-peak of some of his team's upcoming facial recognition features. I can't speak to how the underlying algos compare to face.com's but their APIs have been accurate enough for my needs and they have some really cool ideas in development.
> standard library functions as often as you think -- you're wrong. I know for certain that Linux, Windows, and Solaris all receive continual updates for new hardware platforms for their standard library.

Well I was actually speaking from experience here. I might be more willing to believe you for something like memcpy(), but as an example (and the one I was thinking of), the Windows CRT is generally in pretty poor shape. I've also seen some crufty things in libc trees from some of the *BSDs.
Women tend to be very underserviced compared to men in any case. Or at least that used to be so -- men have, for some inexplicable reason, come to accept a rather low level of basic service when buying clothing these days. Perhaps it is because casual attire is much more casual than it once was; dungarees were something one might have worn for rough or dirty work at one time.

I grew up in suits, or at least in jackets and ties. I've worn bespoke when I could afford it, including (then) casual tweeds. But in my youth, I was a more-or-less off the rack kind of guy. "Off the rack", in those days, meant that somebody would spend the better part of an hour with a marking chalk playing with the lay of the collar, the rotation of the shouders, the vent(s) and armholes (to the extent possible), and so on -- and that's in addition to the expected tweaks to the sleeve length, moving cuff buttons, hemming and cuffing trousers, altering the waist and stride to fit, and so on. That was part of the price of a $400 suit in the '80s, even at a chain men's wear store. Extra-cost alterations were things that went right down to the structure of the garment.

I was absolutely shocked to see what my wife had to put up with. Not only were the prices way out of line (at the same price level, things like seam finishing and so on are nowhere near as well-attended-to in women's wear as in men's wear, even if the garments themselves are comparable -- say something like a blazer). Then everything was extra, including the stuff that absolutely has to happen, like hemming a skirt or a pair of slacks. Ridiculous. You ought to throw yourselves a little revolution.
$6,000+ of app design ebook sales today
I'm guessing the author's problems might stem from his usage. something like waiting 20 seconds to see a sent message in the sent messages view is not something most users would notice. This might be happening to me every time i send a message, there is no way i will ever notice it, because i don't hop over to sent messages every time i send an email just to see how long it takes to show up.
I agree with you, higher prices are disappointing. However, given the example you used of Campbell's Biology, most of the time students never read a textbook in its entirety. In that case, Inkling actually lets you buy the specific chapters you need. I'd bet for most students, that model will be cheaper than buying used textbooks (of course, I don't have any hard numbers)… Plus you get all the 'bonus features' of an Inkling book.
Schools have always taken attendance, and not being able to locate a specific student at a random time is, well, bad.

If Principal Vernon didn't catch you, did you still break the rules?

The house camera thing sounds expensive.
I'm currently a sophomore in high school. Am I old enough to apply, and is it worth it for me (I live near NYC)?
The US federal government spent more on healthcare last year than the UK government did, despite the fact that federal programs in the US cover 27.8% of the population compared to 100% coverage by the NHS in the UK.
pg:
"Thanks for applying. We'll respond by email about a week after the application deadline.
Please make a note of your username and password. You'll need them later to confirm you're coming."

Er... what username and password?
Absolutely. I hate it when otherwise compelling articles fail to even raise a screamingly obvious question, much less answer it. The cynical me wonders if it is because the writers actually do know the answer, and it somehow weakens or distracts from their point. Or perhaps requires the telling of an impolite truth.
When you have enough vertical space, Google will screw your results with botched site crowding. See http://www.seroundtable.com/google-same-result-same-page-152...

I've had worse, because I wanted to have 100 results in a page.
I contributed to that $6k with a book purchase today. Nicely done Nathan!
I'm not sure we disagree that much.

I would argue that:

1. There is a demand curve, or at least we can plot demand. I would agree it can be wacky.

2. It is very likely that even if we get the exact demand curve wrong, it is probably a net win for him to raise his prices given that he is turning down work.
The whole point of paying twice as much is that you spend a fraction of the time defining product specs, and don't have to wait.

Raising the price stops you competing in the whole "I need a new suit" market. Now you are in the custom luxury good market, and there the time to buy isn't an inconvenience, it is a feature.

The whole pay-to-pick-my-Ferrari-up-in-Maranello takes a lot longer than the normal Ferrari ordering process (and is hugely inconvenient) and yet still is used by a reasonable number of orders.

You don't buy a Ferrari for transport, nor do you buy a luxury suit to cover your nakedness.

If people can sell $500,000 watches[1], then a $20,000 suit seems reasonable, especially when it comes with custom consultations etc..

[1] http://www.luxist.com/2010/04/10/richard-mille-rm027-rafael-...
tim at (the entrepreneurs domain in my profile)
I hit send then neurotically hit Inbox. Often, I'll get the abandon message warning, which is kind of annoying.
This is hardly a new idea, so I wonder why we just end up using AddThis, or one of the other services. Sure, they provide stats, but it's not too difficult to hook up Google Analytics, or setup a pass through page.

Perhaps it's the fact that they tend to provide access to most networks, if not all, despite the lack of value (participation) for most of them?
Do keep us posted. Your startup is one I actively track, due to its origins and niche.
I agree, and that was the first thought I had. However, I have found that when people act in bizarre ways, it is sometimes because they are crazy, unintelligent, or ignorant. But much more often it is because they know something you don't know.
I know it may not seem that way sometimes, but NoCal is not the entire world - nor does the entire world take their cultural cues from NoCal.

The suit is very much alive in NY, in London, the entire legal world, and in many other places. That's just during the day.

For formal events / outings it is SF that is the extreme outlier. In the rest of the country if you are going to a fancy restaurant, a wedding, an awards dinner or the like you wear a suit. The original rational for the suit actually still holds for these occasions - it removes the need to constantly chase the latest fashions, as many woman and all hipsters must.
Ultima IV is back
Most indie developers would not be able to make an app that earn $1k, especially on Blackberry. Come on, be realistic.
I have about 3G of mail that I sync with offlineimap; seems to work OK. How much mail do you have and what client are you using to download it?
Since the only function of a suit is status signaling

Jack Dorsey has whole articles written about the suits he wears. I think he is high status however you measure it.

Anyway, it is also function signalling. Suited people are those people who talk to other suited people.

Don't know about other places, but at least in NoCal high status people don't wear suits.

Yes, I understand that.

I even said "In my experience location and field of work makes a bigger difference to suit wearing than anything else."

Somewhat surprisingly for those of us in technology, the Silicon Valley look hasn't proved very influential in the fashion world.
I would assume it's your HN information.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4471726 for a much better discussion on this.
Well, at least the FBI is not going to share your personal information with advertisers, or (opt-in) spam you to death trying to sell you something.

The FBI's mission is reasonably clear; it's a government-regulated organization; it's non-commercial. They have a certain amount of accountability. Alas, we can't say the same for "popular iOS developers". We've seen how sneaky some iOS app developers can be with respect to privacy, and with little remorse after they get caught.
If this really is "open source," as the TechCrunch article says, where's the source code for their face recognizer? As a computer vision researcher, I'm interested in seeing how it works.

The only thing that's open source here is the client libraries.

EDIT: I misread, looks like the lack of source code is a temporary issue:

Lambda Labs co-founder Stephen Balaban ... explained to me that the
company wanted to go the open source route, but planned to eventually
monetize by charging larger customers for support, as is a standard
practice for open source-based companies.
How to Convert WMV to DV on Mac at ease
http://www.league-soft.com/how-to/convert-wmv-to-dv-mac.html
A problem with an untraceable currency is that it's also very easy for an exchange to collaborate with a hacker and vanish (or declare banckrupcy). Not saying that is what happened here, but that would be my fear.
That's an interesting idea. I'll have to think more about what negatives might be involved (simple example: someone badgers you with an expensive to refute claim but uses a cheap lawyer to file the claim, though I guess this is just as possible in the status quo).

The best solution is if free access representation was high quality.

A simple way of doing that might be to give parties the option of their choice of n randomly selected representatives drawn from any practicing lawyer, funded via a fraction of punitive damages redirected to a fund locked to that purpose.
Thanks Rob! I always appreciate the support.
Surely a coincidence, but with a variety of titles shown, not a single Ruby or Rails title.