skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sort of. You can take photos with a phone that look decent at small resolutions, but if you want to use them for anything else they're largely unusable.

I'm definitely not arguing that you need a high end DSLR, but even a relatively inexpensive Canon or Nikon will run circles around a camera phone.
"P.S. Can anyone think of a country that has gotten out of poverty based on aid? All the modern examples I can think of (Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapore, Latvia, Lithuania, etc.) haven't."

Does post-WW2 Germany count? A lot of people credit the Marshall Plan[0] for their tremendous recovery.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
Selling eBooks on Amazon
I'm sorry if I seem to be making a special case of the US - what I wanted to say is universal healthcare is not a good idea in general, and even more in the US which is like a worst case for trying to implement it.

Universal healthcare reduce individual costs, ie is "more efficient", but raise the demand. Even if it makes each act 50% less expansive, if the demand is 4x more, that'll still be 2x as much in total - it is less efficient on society as a whole, because it's not a productive use for money.

My point is not that resource acquisition is the highest goal of human beings, it is just that money spend of such thing can not be put to a better use. It's good to spend money on feeling good (healthcare), as long as the other way the money is spend provide growth.

I would favor universal system if I saw convincing evidence that people would not overclaim (ie seek treatment for minor ailments), and if they were respectful of the regulation system which has to exist if they can't self regulate with their own money. I see just the opposite, except maybe for the UK, but I don't have any experience with their system, and I don't know if they run a deficit. Anyway, if there is a special case, it certainly is the UK.

Even worse - I've noticed a troubling trend. Apparently "generosity" or "social spending" is correlated with group identification - i.e. people who self categorize as different groups (based on religion, ethnicity - anything) are less likely to favor social spending, maybe because it could favor the other group. I don't have evidence for this - it's just something I noticed when people are debating about social systems.

It is troubling, because most of the countries implementing universal healthcare are also running active immigration programs, which helps balance the cost of their social system. But if the trend is real, this countries will voluntary reduce their social spending after the initial period where immigrants footed the bill - leaving them resentful.

My hypothesis is that countries where diversity increases (such as countries in the western EU) will reduce their social systems, while countries where diversity plunge (don't know if there is any at the moment - but the province of Quebec in the 1970 is the closest example) will increase their social spending.

Please give some references for the US, but from quick calculations adding a trillion of deficit every 5 years looks like a bad idea (and I'm only talking about public healthcare in France- many people pay on top of that private insurance since the public system doesn't fully cover all the costs - money spent to purchase service from such for profit companies should certainly be added if you want to compare healthcare systems)
:) Love it.
:-)

I lived with the burnt stuff for a while too, but decided that the next one would be a 100% microwave to avoid any cleaning issues
Good promises libraries (like Q and my RSVP.js: https://github.com/tildeio/rsvp.js) absolutely do support this.

Check out https://github.com/domenic/promise-tests/blob/master/lib/tes... for the tests for this behavior, which most promises libraries (but not jQuery) pass.
At this point I'm not sure if I'm supposed to keep arguing, offer to have you over for beers, or both.
The submitted link is a redirect - I believe the guidelines imply that submitted links should not be redirects or tracking links.
It's legally fine, but ethically corrupt, and ultimately means the country you are doing business in will decline.

Pay your taxes. And governments - fix these issues, which are only going to increase as we shift to more and more virtual services.
Development is not that hard, really.
Airbnb Tech Talk: Jeremy Edberg of reddit and Netflix -- Building with Clouds
Your solution still doesn't in any way fit into the required space...for a random sequence there will be hardly any coalescing going on, and you'll blow way past 1MB with the method as described.
You are absolutely correct about everything. Two additional points:

1. While the brainwashing is there, and is very effective, the major carriers (AT&T, Verizon) will make you pay the same monthly charge whether you bought a "subsidized" phone from them or not. So instead of subsidized phone vs. unsubsidized phone (the way you have it in most of the world), what you have in the US is sucker-with-a-lower-price-tag ($200), vs. sucker-with-a-higher-price-tag (e.g. $650 if bought from Apple) - your service cost will be the same (with the exception that if you brought your own phone, you won't pay an ETF if you leave early).

2. Yes, it is exclusively in the US that you pay for incoming - and that's for historical reasons. Unlike essentially everywhere else, there is no special area code for mobile, so you can't tell if you're calling a mobile phone, so -- back in the days when calls to mobile cost more everywhere -- there was no other way to handle this. But the US public has gotten used to it, so no company is thinking of changing that - people here think its normal to pay for a received text message (SMS) as well...

Mobile phone service in the US is a ripoff, but it will not change because the public is not aware that is the case, and congress is bought and paid for.
Not all do. There are a few who have opted out of the insurance-based system. They run cash practices, and from what I've heard are able to spend more time with patients and charge them less because of the breathtaking amount of overhead they've eliminated.
I Just Paid Facebook $7
I know I referred to myself in the third person, but it was easier than expecting people to look at the username. :)

Also, if you're attending or watching at home and there is something specific you're hoping I will cover, tell me here in the comments and I'll do my best to cover it!
Though the points made in this article are true, it is basically making the "frequentist vs. bayesianism" argument without mentioning Bayes' Theorem.

In other words, using the included XKCD picture as an example, the likelihood before any experiments were done that "green jelly beans, specifically, cause acne" is very very very small, because it's just a silly idea without an obvious causal mechanism. Therefore, even after the experiment is done, this likelihood is still vanishingly small (though larger than before.) The fact that it had "power" as per the p test is a red herring.
For me it was the lack of a resolution. We're put in an uneasy state as we the protagonist describes separating herself away from things she cared about, and then the story ends without knowing whether everything worked out.
Git 1.8.0 released
Hernan Cortez didn't burn his ships because it was prudent. He did it to give his crew no choice but to follow him.

Had Cortez and his men died in the jungle, that would not have been regarded as a bold act of leadership.
I have lived in both worlds: having lots of stuff and having next to nothing. The latter is better, IMHO. I do not really care about minimalism or environmentalism or anything like that, it's just that less stuff = less stress for me, and more freedom. Having accumulated a buttload of stuff (mostly thanks to my girlfriend! :D), it now costs me about $1000 and a solid two days of work to move (if movers are hired, which is almost required unless I can get external help for free). I used to own just some clothes and a computer, and moving was stupidly easy. I have moved over 20 times in the past 12 years or so, which means quickly learning how to not get attached to junk.
Fascinating. I have tried to find methods to recover text from digitally blurred images but ended up doing research and survey on similar topics while not finding any available tool for the task.

I still have several questions:

- How well does the state of the art deblurring work with digital blur of known algorithms for forensic purposes?

- How does blind deconvolution compete with some manual recovery processes done by experts, if there exist such manual methods?

- Can approaches in blind deconvolution extend to techniques of resolution enhancing from a sequence of photos taken with the same parameters?

- Are there researchers trying to integrate visual cognition frameworks into making deconvolution results more visually recognizable? I remember one somewhat related research was posted on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4241266 (and it happens to be coming from the same university as the paper you posted)
I'm curious, where is "share" (and please don't tell there is a "Send"). Android and iOS have pretty much standardized Share icons which are becoming global icons day by day.
Uh huh. http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mention...

Sometimes the things you want to do in life are things you can do with a significant other, where your mutual interests converge.

I hope you find someone who is as interested in smug one-upmanship as yourself.
I've gone through the same thing with photography and other hobbies, and for me, at least, that stage of acquiring lots of stuff is necessary. During that time I'll use all the new things -- I end up learning how it all works by making good use of it all. Later, after having more experience and perspective, I'm much better able to decide what's worth keeping and what's worth getting rid of.
That's not 100% true. At least Tmobile doesn't make you pay the full monthly cost if you didn't get a subsidized phone from them. So if you're using Verizon or AT&T you're indeed a sucker, but there're options..
You'd allow external media because you need the data off the device somehow. Unfortunately, if the monitor uses a COTS operating system (doesn't matter which), that's one way in for malware. Unlike their military applications, air gaps in health care settings aren't there to protect confidentiality, but availability.
I find pretty funny the current UK governments avowed surprise at the fact that companies are paying very little tax.

"... In March 2011, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the British cabinet minister who is responsible for all economic and financial matters, announced in his budget statement three major changes to UK corporation tax."

"The first was that the rate for large companies in the UK was set to fall to 23%. The second was that the UK would move to a corporate tax system where only the profits of companies arising in the UK would be subject to UK corporation tax; this representing a compete reversal of the situation that existed prior to 2009 when UK companies were (albeit convolutedly) taxable on their worldwide income. And thirdly he announced that if in the future a UK company runs its internal banking arrangements through a tax haven subsidiary then that company will benefit from a special UK tax rate of just 5.75 per cent of the resulting profits. ..."

from "Tax havens, secrecy jurisdictions and the breakdown of corporation tax" - http://rwer.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/rwer-issue-57-richard-m...
> While switching from Symbian to WP7 may have been a good idea, to publicly announce that you're dumping the platform of your best selling phones seems like a pretty big blunder.

From what I understand, Nokia did this because of the "warring factions" and duplicated effort across the company. Killing it early was likely seen as a strategy for reducing cultural problems later.
I would even say there will never be cures for cancers. There will be treatments.
I rallied together and went with about 25 Michigan Hackers to PennApps this past year....what an amazing experience.

Many of the students had never built anything outside of class and almost all of them left the event feeling inspired beyond belief; one of the first-time teams won an award and has since turned their hack into a full-fledged startup here at the TechArb in Ann Arbor!

Great post - will definitely take this into account when planning the hackathons here at Michigan!
$80/month? AT&T has $40/month with 1gb/month for the iPhone. So with $199 for the phone, that ends up around $1160.

Concerning Australia: Last time I walked in to (I think Telstra, and the same at Optus and Vodafone), I asked about the cost of cancelling a 2/yr contract. They said I'd have to pay out the entire contract ($50+/month for 750mb/month). So $1200+ in any case. With who were you able to cancel and not have to pay out the full?

In any case, my initial question was basically: Why $149 and not the $199 like the other top-end phones?
"Heads up. Important change coming to HTML5 notifications. createHTMLNotification() is going away because it was removed from the spec."

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+GoogleChromeDevelopers/posts/8v...
Lippmann - C++ primer, 5th edition.
Can't comment on the Canadian system but I will echo those last two points, they are incredibly important. Great post!
Page seems to be down. Anyone have a mirror?
The last video of the bat slowing down exactly as it contacts the ball would make Isaac Newton proud.
"It is not a “Microsoft business” (Microsoft businesses generate $5B+ a year in PROFIT). The Windows business makes $11.4B in PROFIT every year."

Isn't Windows a subset of Microsoft's business? If so, how can a part of the business generate more profit than the whole business?
Not on the release candidate. Perhaps on the current release.
> Many people in child development would disagree with how far you seem to want to take this concept of abstracting away real-world objects.

I didn't suggest abstracting away toys. I made a prediction/observation that apps could "do away with many physical items [...]" and that it might be a positive thing if it reduces waste.

In my following responses, the implication was that touch interfaces are perhaps seen as mechanical by infants as they can touch something and it produces an immediate and repeatable result, mimicking how real world objects work. Again, I was making an observation (right or wrong), not a statement.

Lastly, with virtual toys being cheap and varied, it allows an infant to explore many different concepts that they normally wouldn't be exposed to because of economic factors (e.g. $20 toy vs free/99c app).

At no point have I suggested getting rid of toys - which would be both outlandish and impossible.
Diagram of differences between booting MBR and GPT with GRUB
The difference between your US and AU example are:

1) The initial retail cost of the phone is higher in Australia. $1399 - $650 would be less of a discount.

2) The cost of the service is cheaper in Australia.

It would be interesting to compare and contrast what your $50/month plan gave you when compared against a $80/month US plan.
French Music Streaming Service Is Taking On the World, but Omitting America
How To Battle Your Online Addiction
Git 1.8
The people I know who are really into minimalism in a quasi-spiritual way are actually married or long-term partnered couples. It can take either a hippie-ish sort of form, or an upscale-but-minimalist, sleek modernism type of form.

I think of bachelor pads as really more defined by "stuff". Most single guys I know have huge piles of entertainment stuff especially: big-screen TVs, videogame systems, a wall of videogames and DVDs, miscellaneous electronic gadgets that seemed cool at the time, etc.
The makerspace co-op near Victoria, BC, Canada is pretty good. They have a 3D printer, laser engraver, welding, woodworking, electronics, and a blacksmith shop (with casting furnace)

[1] http://www.makerspace.ca/wp/
Always great to see the numbers, but I think the key thing about Amazon is if it's treated as merely a supplementary channel, you'll get supplementary results. Those I know who've done well on the Kindle have really had to work hard on building up Amazon as a channel.

It's a bit like if you have a video to promote. YouTube can drive crazy numbers of views, but if you focus on self hosting it on your blog, get a few HN and Reddit posts, etc, you'll have far more self hosted views than YouTube views if you upload it to YouTube as a secondary channel. I suspect so it goes with Amazon and the Kindle Store.

I guess what I'm getting at isn't that you can assume Amazon is a bad/small market for a particular book, but that you can't assume it'll work without putting in some dedicated effort to nurturing it.
Interesting article but kind of weird that it goes into such a level of technical detail while still attempting to explain basic concepts like garbage collection.
You Learn From People Who Mostly Agree With You
In the USA, universal care is seen as a silver bullet by many who have never dealt with the reality of what it would bring. To a lot of people who support it, it's a vague undefined concept onto which they are projecting a lot of things out of their own imaginations, hopes, and fears.

Depending on the implementation, "universal health care" could make some things better than they are under the present system. Some things would be worse. People will still get sick. People will still die. People will still avoid seeking treatment until their condition is untreatable, because people avoid doctors and hospitals for a lot of reasons besides monetary cost.
STRONGLY PREFER BEERS.
Depends strongly on the country. It's not too bad in some. At Baresso coffee shops in Denmark you just click through to the wifi with no signup/password. And Helsinki has free no-login wifi across the whole city center.
Thanks dude! I'll adjust as needed - but this is what I was looking for. Kicked you down a few bucks for a few beers.
Correct, that's why I said "manually". I'm assuming these plug-ins are not already available in the Chrome store. I'm saying that in addition to that, Google should implement some sort of blacklisting, so that it doesn't get installed manually either.
Lesson From Startup School: You can't 80/20 everything
They will probably name the next iPad "iPad Early 2013", similar to the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro.
Scientific cluster computing (such as for the LHC or Open Science Grid) uses them all the time for authentication, both in CLI tools and on web pages.
> Do you believe ghosts are topical at HN?

For the Hacker News Guidelines - "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity". That's probably the reason I thought it is OK to post this question on HN.
Oracle no longer publishing their test cases hardly constitutes "transforming MySQL into a 'free-open-sore, closed-outer-shell' RDBMS", moreover there is no evidence that folks are adopting PostgreSQL because they're afraid of MySQL vendor lock-in. If one feels they must pay from MySQL they can give their money to Oracle, Percona, or MariaDB, all of which whom will happily provide MySQL support for a fee.

PostgreSQL is quickly becoming the main go-to alternative for people who are obsessed with the hip-now shiny thing. These are some of the same folks who will mindlessly advocate zsh over bash, tmux over screen, htop over top, and ack over grep.
Did Reddit overcome its rather serious persistence-side issues?

It seemed like the object-blob Postgres store was a disaster, then they brought in Cassandra which was initially used as a cache of sorts, but now is the primary point of contact for threads apparently?

Reverse-engineering the persistence strategy from the open sourced code is more tedious and potentially inaccurate than I am comfortable with, so could a Reddit employee or code contributor provide some insight as to how those problems were worked past?

There was Reddit downtime today (read-only mode), which is common. What's the usual cause of that sort of thing these days?
The best mirror I could find (nyud.net and Google let me down): http://substancedigital.com/2012/10/21/nokias-price-for-excl...
Depends on what you're doing. Saying "development is *" is way too broad. It's like saying "construction is easy," because you left off the qualifier, "I build sub-divisions for a living." Obviously building cookie-cutter houses in sub-divisions for a living is different than building suspension bridges or skyscrapers.
I still remember a magazine showing how you can make Windows 95 look more like 3.1 by putting folder shortcuts on the desktop :P
Learning Exploratory Data Analysis
- I want to learn that given any dataset what kind of questions I can ask and what kind of information I can retrieve
- Someone told me that Exploratory Data Analysis is what I need

- I am new to Statistics and Data Analysis

- Please share your advices on resources, books, videos, tutorials that I can learn from.
Thank you very much
Yeah, I'm not sure who the expected audience for this piece is. Programmers? IT people? Non-technical?

Seems caught in between them all.
If a user knowingly choses to install a plugin that includes Sambreel, it's not a scam. It's their browser to do with what they will. Having said that, I'm guessing that there are a lot of scummy plugins/extensions that don't alert the user to Sambreel being installed. That's what's the scam here.

Also, the target of the funding shouldn't enter into a discussion about legality/ethics of the method.
It helps to recognize that the iOS app store is only a distribution mechanism for most developers. Distribution is not a problem. The problem is marketing. But marketing is a problem for most developers anyway, doesn't matter if you are building iOS apps or web apps.

So market.
And here we are using 15MB gifs in 2012.

Great images nevertheless.
> ethically corrupt

There is nothing ethically corrupt over paying the taxes you legally owe. There is no ethical or moral duty to pay more than what you owe.

Do you hire somebody to do your taxes? I do. Am I ethically corrupt because I take measures to make sure I don't pay more than I have to?
Code Camp at Square
I can cover the rest in the talk, but I just want to comment that the Postgres object-blob store (as you describe it :) ) was not only NOT a disaster, but one of the strongest parts of the persistence layer.
For those working with Azure, you can take a lease on a blob to manage concurrency:

http://blog.smarx.com/posts/managing-concurrency-in-windows-...

It also has high availability, lease expiration timeouts etc.
I asked the same question of TorrentFreak a few years ago:

Ernesto ernesto@torrentfreak.com
2/16/08

to Christopher
Hi Christopher,

No, I never heard of something like that, but I like the idea
There is http://www.coralcdn.org/, but that's not a complete solution

Cheers, Ernesto

On Feb 16, 2008 9:56 PM, Christopher Froehlich <somecallmechief@the-shades.net> wrote:
Christopher Froehlich <somecallmechief@the-shades.net> wrote:
Question: do you know of anyone developing distributed website platforms? For
example, if I'm seeding and leeching a raw text file–as long as one other
person in the world is doing the same, that file can never be erased. If
someone were to share a PHP/MySQL website, with Apache perhaps integrated into
the BT client–the website could never be removed.</p>

I've been looking into places like Freenet, services like OpenAFS, and the
potential for extensible BT clients like uTorrent or Azureus; but nothing seems
to be available. A website cluster, shared P2P would be indestructible.</p>

Have you seen anything of the like?

Sadly, I haven't seen any substantive leaps since. Even TPB's recent cloud move is entirely predicated on moving a single, virtual instance about.

Edit: Personally, I see this as the most important problem to solve for a free Internet in the next 20 years. Distributed DNS against distributed content is going to be critical.