skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Awesome, I used this technique to find the dominant color in favicons so I could create a gradient in NewsBlur.

See the effect here: http://cl.ly/KElb

Here's the Python I use to do it: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/blob/master/utils/Ima...

from PIL import Image
import scipy
import scipy.cluster
from pprint import pprint

image = Image.open('logo.png')
NUM_CLUSTERS = 5

# Convert image into array of values for each point.
ar = scipy.misc.fromimage(image)
shape = ar.shape

# Reshape array of values to merge color bands.
if len(shape) > 2:
ar = ar.reshape(scipy.product(shape[:2]), shape[2])

# Get NUM_CLUSTERS worth of centroids.
codes, _ = scipy.cluster.vq.kmeans(ar, NUM_CLUSTERS)

# Pare centroids, removing blacks and whites and shades of really dark and really light.
original_codes = codes
for low, hi in [(60, 200), (35, 230), (10, 250)]:
codes = scipy.array([code for code in codes
if not ((code[0] < low and code[1] < low and code[2] < low) or
(code[0] > hi and code[1] > hi and code[2] > hi))])
if not len(codes): codes = original_codes
else: break

# Assign codes (vector quantization). Each vector is compared to the centroids
# and assigned the nearest one.
vecs, _ = scipy.cluster.vq.vq(ar, codes)

# Count occurences of each clustered vector.
counts, bins = scipy.histogram(vecs, len(codes))

# Show colors for each code in its hex value.
colors = [''.join(chr(c) for c in code).encode('hex') for code in codes]
total = scipy.sum(counts)
color_dist = dict(zip(colors, [count/float(total) for count in counts]))
pprint(color_dist)

# Find the most frequent color, based on the counts.
index_max = scipy.argmax(counts)
peak = codes[index_max]
color = ''.join(chr(c) for c in peak).encode('hex')
Haha I read the exact same thing. Damn kids... don't deserve to learn recursion.
I don't use promoted posts, and yet I still manage to get this: http://cl.ly/image/2t0b340Y3h2S

I only have 300,000 likes too. ;-) Basically, the trick is engagement. Give the audience what they want, when they want. Timing matters, pictures matter. Do it right, and you don't need to pay anything.

P.S. Making money from advertisements, pfft how ancient and boring! shamelessplug use Teespring instead.
> a SaaS service

A Software as a Service service?
A small (but glorious) world: The best microscope images of 2012
Apple's Defense: iPad Mini Priced Higher Because It's The Best
just wanted to say that your book is what got me interested in data science and python. I would be in a very different place today if it wasn't for your book! So, thank you!
That's the right answer: fully integrates in Visual Studio, produces quality code and has the features the article author misses:

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/c0x-features-suppor...
This seems like a space that is just waiting to get occupied by some entrepreneurial wizardry. There is a huge gap in terms of where to discover and buy relatively nascent technology; a hole somewhere between graduated Kickstarter projects and Best Buy. Where do these somewhat untested vendors go to hawk their novel products? Best Buy, Radio Shack, etc certainly wont be selling items that are just trying to break into the market yet show a great deal of promise.
Grand St seems like they're on to something here...
"- Cabs are incredibly cheap here."

Is that a joke? A 10 minute cab ride with light traffic can approach $20.
It is possible to wrap iocp api into a bsd-style socket interface compatible with epoll semantics. It ain't pretty, the socket int becomes an index into an internal map of per-socket support structs, there are ungodly edge cases and what not, but it's doable nonetheless.
if you spell Amphitheater in US English all is well.
Everyone who cares about C already knows Microsoft's position on C99, as well as the bullshit recommendation of compiling C code as C++. And even if they did a complete about-face I doubt many would forgive them for being single-handedly responsible for countless broken reimplementations of <stdint.h>.

But there is a certain amount of schadenfreude from their refusal to implement even trivial C99 features for over a decade to "concentrate on C++0x", and yet have by far the most lagging C++11 implementation that likely won't implement many features for years to come.
iBooks 3′s new scrolling view, collections, sharing
Interesting - I wasn't aware that any other platform implemented IOCP. I wonder how that performs vs. traditional I/O with /dev/poll?
Solution: Get rid of voting. Order the comments randomly.

I've never understood the point behind anonymous voting.^1 What value does it add?

1. But some people, think of them what you will, have tried to use voting as a way to be more convincing when pandering to advertisers, e.g., Facebook "Likes".

Assuming we were the intelligent, high brow readers you would hope would be reading your forum, then wouldn't we be smart enough to see that voting adds nothing, except a source of amusement (as the silliest comments or those from random members with "high karma" rise to the top)? Intelligent people do not need a "karma system". They can take in all available information and separate the wheat from the chaf on their own. (No need for someone else, someone else's algorithm, to manipulate the order of comments.)
San Francisco HN Meetup
It was great meeting everyone at Start-up School and wanted to keep the ball rolling with a monthly meetup of bay area HNers.

Join our facebook group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/240709329389388/

and we'll post more details on event/time/location.
News.me Sick of Twitter
I know you are the resident curmudgeonly voice of security truthfulness on Hacker News, but it's really odd that you keep referring to anti-phishing measures as anti-spam, as if they have no relation whatsoever to security.

DKIM plays a key role in keeping phishing e-mails out of the inboxes of hundreds of millions of people who have no idea what PGP or an e-mail header is. It's a standard, not just a Google feature.

And if you'd read the story, you'd see that a number of companies fixed their weak crypto thanks to his efforts.

But, of course, far fewer people would upvote your comments if you didn't diss everything with a tone of condescension.
I'm going to love this game right up until someone creates a cheating app/site.
inspiring post, I see very similar things from the author’s perspective...
I was thinking along the same lines. I'd much rather 'pre pay' for tasks than have a monthly limit. Else i'll have to think if a task is worthwhile enough to use up one of my 5 tasks. And i would hate to run out of task slots some months but just not often enough to warrant an upgrade.
Sounds like a good weekend project to me!
Louisiana was purchased from France during the Napoleonic Wars. Napolean used the money to fund an army that he amassed on the north coast of France for a planned invasion of England.

But he never launched the invasion, and the money was wasted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon%27s_planned_invasion_o...
What Xcode version/compiller settings/C++ lib settings and OSX SDK version did you use on 10.6? I found there is no good combination. Also lambdas are supported since xcode 4.4 which was released in july...
...just noticed a nice surprise in the EDIS VPS management console: "Due to high demand the firewall is now managed by the tool 'vrs_iptables' directly on the VPS." -- So no more clicking around in the web interface to manage the firewall, sweet!
I'm Jeff Price. And I'm Ready to Talk About My TuneCore Departure...
From the site it seems like they are setup reasonably well for international customers but since all the staff is in the US some things like calling them or having them call people will be less than ideal. Also i can imagine that they have some partners and go-to solutions setup for requests in the US which they simply would not have for european customers.
> "Has that actually happened to you?"

It has. Yes, all of the relevant family connections are listed (my parents, my 7 siblings, and myself form a complete graph[0].) It's not just my mother, either -- a few wedding photos of a family member, posted today, didn't show up in my main news feed (which I always set to chronological rather than top stories, and which I check several times per day.) The photos should have been at the "n hours ago" point in the list, but I only discovered them because I was searching for examples for this thread. (I thought the missing post from my mom was a better example, though.)

FaceBook's algorithm seems to work for some people, particularly those with particular usage patterns. But its failure modes can be quite obnoxious. They provide some tools that allow some degree of fine-tuning, but even having manually set the "show me everything" options, certain content falls through the cracks.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_graph
Shares are different: they're like money, they represent value. A copy is a copy. Humans copy: that's how we made technological progress. Someone didn't invent agriculture while out on a hunt and then coast for the rest of his/her natural life on the "intellectual property" and then have his/her descendants coast on the proceeds. People copied what they saw that worked. Copying is how humans make progress, trying to stop or inhibit that is going to warp society beyond belief.
Groundbreaking experiment in virtual reality uses video game to treat pain
I haven't had to deal with this scenario, thankfully, but I seem to recall dimly that there is some mechanism to rescue GitHub users who accidentally publish passwords and access keys. Does the archive respect this same mechanism? (Or did I dream up the mechanism in the first place?)
This is nonsense, or at least misleading for this audience. The example, selling a company for $1.1million isn't even getting to the start line for most folks.

If you look at many made-it-from-nothing founders of the companies we know, they rarely start out broke, are often independently wealthy (it's a lot safer to drop out of an ivy-league school with a wealthy family as a backs-stop) or have made significant money from earlier stages in their careers.

Being broke is a huge distraction to most founders, having to focus on the distractions of family, sometimes a spouse and/or kids, and struggling to pay bills - none of that is a good thing for one's ability to focus on getting your startup to any kind of critical mass.

Motivation-by-commitment, as many sales organizations will put it, is more like what's being talked about in the article - that if desperate a smart person will figure out ways to make money and often stabilize some sort of business out of that. But even that is a stretch to claim being an advantage over not being broke.

This is the kind of advice that leads mediocre founders to romanticize ramen-noodles and cheapskate their talent - either getting second tier people or trying to cajole talented engineers into taking much-below-market rate wages.

Obviously it's better for founders to be capital efficient and keep costs low. Being hungry clearly is necessary to success. But if you can get yourself to some degree of financial stability it'll make you more able to focus on what matters building your startup, and if you pay people fairly you'll attract talent and loyalty.
Without me (and people like me), they don't have a site. So, yeah, I'm their customer. I'm what makes their site a viable business. I'm about as from "just a user" as you can get.

On a ranting note, this attitude is incredibly offensive to the users of social networks and SaaS providers; and I'm stunned to see it met with so much traction on a community of startup owners. If your startup is this cavalier towards customers, you're doing it wrong.
This is probably the most exciting part to me: Having copy-on-write without having to run REE.
Thanks! I'll pass the information on.
Gradle Flyway Plugin
A Crash Course in Online Piracy
Sounds like a perfectly Y-Combinatorish sort of thing.
Why rubidium? If I recall correctly, rubidium was also used in the first Bose-Einstein condensate experiments. Does it have properties that make it especially useful for low-temperature physics?
What'll be really cool is being able to walk parts of the earth 50 years from now when all of this stuff is historical.
ZFS was officially a non-beta, prime time product. In practice, apparently anyone who tested its robustness thoroughly before deploying it found that it tended to crash and burn at the first hint of trouble exactly like it did for them.
Eek. You can always install a newer compiler from MacPorts or whatever.
Is this linguistic scale available somewhere?
Interesting! I decided to do some detective work and find out why. I found this: http://imkevinxu.com/xkcd/parser.js, and thought that maybe if I knew how the strings were parsed, I could figure out why it was doing that.

$ string_eval("x*x1")
"x*x1"

I figured that the issue must be with the equation drawing or evaluated. Here's what I found as an inline script (note that i is points at which the function is evaluated):

current_expression = expression.split("-x").join(-i);
var result = eval(current_expression.split("x").join(i));

So it just splits up the equation and rejoins it. From here it was pretty easy to see what was happening:

$ expression = string_eval("x*x1");
"x*x1"
$ expression.split("x").join(12);
"12*121"
$ expression.split("x").join(3);
"3*31"
$ expression.split("x").join(0.3);
"0.3*0.31"
$ expression.split("x").join(-3);
"-3*-31"
New Fin-Tech Startup: Qmetrica Back-Testing Platform
> This does not take into account the Alaska boundary
> dispute... which, although officially resolved in
> 1903, is still disputed by many Canadians.

Which "many Canadians" dispute this, exactly? The article you linked to doesn't even mention an ongoing dispute.
A very similar model to Outwitters's (https://itunes.apple.com/app/outwitters/id432969074?mt=8)
Startup Psychology: Why Awareness Is Awesome
On Being Martian: Mars is a place, but it is also an idea.
I do not understand this device.

As tablet it has big weight. As ultrabook - small screen and worse input. (And I don't like keyboard layout shown in pictures)

It's not contender for IPad/Android, it's not contender for ultrabooks.

Maybe if I had it in my hands - I had another opinion.
Now I just don't understand this middle "Microsoft way"
Just curious, why do some pages sort 189k db rows?
The NBA takes in ticket money and pays Lebron James a salary. Goldman Sachs takes in commissions and fees and pays their top partners a salary and bonuses. Justin Bieber's record company sells records and Justin Bieber gets a royalty check.

What is Facebook paying me for the content they are selling advertising against? Is the ability to access their service my compensation?
Simone Brunozzi - How I got hired by Amazon.com
Oh, would love to have had .present? added to ruby 2.0
12 DIY Projects to Add Old-House Charm
Untied Airlines
For now yes, but Twitter could do exactly the same thing at some point in the future; they need money too. Whatever rug you get comfy on can be pulled from under you at a moment's notice.

IPOs/monetization/capitalism has far more power than the user-base.

I'd love to see a bunch of not-for-profit[1] startups to come along to replace the likes of paypal/twitter/stripe/etc.

1. For example, supported by just enough injected advertising to break even, or fees set at a percentage that just covers costs rather than going after piles of profit.
Payphones are annoying. It might be broken, or have gum jammed in it, or someone might be using it, or you have to track one down, and you have to be sitting at it to receive a call.

Cellphones are in your pocket, come with your personal phone directory, are cheaper per minute, and you don't have to stand still to use them.

I'm really surprised that Rob thinks people would want to deal with a computer-as-payphone model. And wireless data networks suck ass in North America. His ideal world is probably at least 20 years away.

On the other hand, I love thin terminals. Screw local stateless networked computation. Give me a snappy remote interface to a beefy terminal server and i'm happy. That's an interface you literally can pick back up at any time with no performance cost due to being far away from the data.
I have to say, I have heard surprisingly little about C++11 since it was finalized. Is it well supported yet? Are people starting to use it in anger? Or did everyone move on to C# years ago I wonder...
I couldn't agree more in my experience (joint founder, bootstrapping a new business from personal small amount of savings).
Why I Quit Hacker News
Writing well at a 4th grade level != writing like a 4th grader, and I suspect it is equally difficult for science/eng majors and humanities majors. While it may not be necessary when writing for pg et al, remember that the average American reads at a 7th to 8th grade level[0] and that "for recreation, people read texts that are two grades below their actual reading level"[1]. In other words, you might be able to sell your startup idea to pg at a higher reading level, but you shouldn't count on selling it to consumers (and dare I say even investors/businesses?) that way.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readability
Zynga Reports Q3 Revenue Of $317M, Up 12.7% In After-Hours On Casino Push
Price and specs are very important. So are a good website, fast shipping, clear communication about order status, security (CC data), and warranty/customer support. Newegg has historically had a very good combination of these, as have many other successful hardware sellers.

Also important are what we don't want: spam, deceptive webpages that try to trick users, spammy emails, an unclear or difficult website, survey spam, byzantine RMA policies, limited shipping choices (USPS parcel vs UPS ground is not good enough), customer service people who can't speak/type local languages clearly.
Last 500 ADN Photos and Videos
Created a bit of a hack to display the last 500 photos and videos posted to App.net.

http://appeio.com/photos
http://appeio.com/videos

Moves much slower than Twitter or Reddit but it's not a bad thing.

(you don't [do not] need an ADN account to look)
The [free] Coursera HCI course is going on right now, too.
Agreed. I realize I should have thought about it MORE like how I write on a landing page and less about how I write just generally.
"As for a complex language ... what programming language isn't complex, while still having full power?"

...C. Of course some complexity is inherent to any programming language, but let's be real; C++ goes off the deep end in this department.
Not Speaking the Lingo - How Language Shapes Perspective
I'm surprised nobody has done this, actually. I live in Alaska and have a friend who is a dentist. He works exclusively in remote villages with a portable kit of equipment he flies around with on small chartered aircraft. It would definitely fit in a van.
ok, I know this will be downvoted to oblivion, but I have to say it:

"If you want to quit, quit, don't post"

but seriously, I suffer from the same addiction
Things To Stop Doing In Your 20s
Bait and switch is absolutely still accurate, IMHO, but it doesn't matter what you call it, the effect is real.

First, let's unpack your justification a little – you actually offer two claims: 1) You aren't Facebook's customer. You're just a user. and 2) You agreed to let them change their services without your consent when you signed up for your account.

To the first: most of us may not be their customers, but there's clearly an exchange of value going in both directions. I give them my attention, demographic information, etc. which is valuable to them as it then allows them to charge their customers for access to me and my info, in all the various ways. In return, I get access to FB and all that goes with it... but I'm not just a user I'm a supplier. As such, there's still an agreement, both formal and informal, going on here.

The formal agreement is the one you allude to in your second claim – the TOS that most of us don't remember even agreeing to. That matters a lot from a legal standpoint. They're clear to do whatever they want, legally, within reason. (I'm not trying to go deep on this sub-point).

But much more important is the informal agreement between FB and their suppliers (err "users"). That's the stuff that brand equity is made up of – and the brand promise, the value to users is the ability to keep up with their friends and know that their friends can keep up with them.

FB has begun to renege on that promise – and as such, they'll lose brand equity and the value in the eyes of their users.

Call it a bait and switch or don't, but the effect is still the same.
It's always smart to assign a password to your account. Github was down just the other day. Keep a password assigned to your account just in case. By the way, I think github is a great single sign on for hacker related services. People who use parse are usually already logged in on GitHub... Right?
After digging about a bit, I find I was mistaken - the court granted immunity but exercised its power to compel testimony by subpoena. Still, the court is not exceeding its authority in that area. Subpoenas do not viol;ate the constitution.
What algorithms compute directions from point A to point B on a map
Yeah, the BBC News article at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20032882 has what were apparently the actual final moments of Ceefax (top video on the page) - they're a lot more impresssive.
I cringed when reading the HN comments to this article. Seriously folks, this article isn't about how to get to the fountain of youth. It's also not about quick fixes, so unfortunately if you want to get to the good stuff, you're actually going to have to read the entire 7 pages. Trust me, if you have an open mind, its worth the read.

It's enlightening for me to read accounts about how others live their lives and derive happiness from simple pleasures. Breathing fresh air, enjoying the company of others, eating food that you've grown. This is such a stark contrast to the lifestyle I have lived for the past 28 years. I've worked at software companies for the past 5 years and have spent most of my waking life in front of a computer screen. Even though I am happy, I do admit that I wonder if life is supposed to be more than this. And here we have incredible proof of someone who had broken out of their Comfort Zone, possibly had to give up many of their "luxuries", and changed their life completely.

The point of this story isn't that this man beat cancer and lived to be a centenarian, its that by changing his life he dramatically improved his happiness and began to take advantage of all the things we take for granted.
My major annoyance is that I'm not seeing the majority of Pages I Liked posts, but yet I see every individual friends' "Likes and Comments". I really don't want to see that my friend Liked a picture of a dead baby that 100,000 other idiots Liked because the text told them if they don't another kid will die.

Best part is, the only way to change this is to shut it off for each individual friend - not exactly convenient.
What I really look for in a startup
Source?

AZs were supposed to be independent; they aren't. Fool me one...