skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
HN Request: How does address recognition work?
Does anyone know of a good article on how addresses are recognized on envelopes? This goes far beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) as everyone's handwriting is vastly different, and often unreadable.

Neural networks maybe?
So let me get this straight, just because Youtube did it...it's okay?

Youtube, like every other video upload service out there, had pirated videos. But Youtube became successful via original content. Anybody can download better versions of full movies than on Youtube, and remember when the videos were limited to like 15 minutes each?

I mean, definitely screw the government. But Kim Dotcom isn't a hero, or an anti-hero. He's just another idiot looking to make an easy buck, and he did. Kim Dotcom is no better than the indian on the phone who's trying to scam you into buying Anti-Virus software, but then again, neither is Romney in my opinion.
Started with statistics section. Doing it along with biostatistics bootcamp on coursera. Would like to cover calculus and linear algebra when I get time.
Several years ago I bought a used Sharp Zaurus. I got so used to using the touch screen that, even now, I reach for a stylus when I try to use my TI-89.

I now have an Asus Transformer, and I find that I now reach for the screen on laptops as well. However, when I plug my mouse into my Transformer, it annoys my that I cannot use the mouse as I've comes to expect it to be used; instead, the OS interprets everything the mouse does as gestures.

I hope to someday install Linux on my tablet, and then try to create an interface that treats touch as touch, and mouse as mouse. I also have ideas for touch I'd like to experiment with.
So rational, in fact, that I will do all I can to avoid flying this specific airline.
Of course if there were enough people like you VA wouldn't be failing. But it is so that must mean there aren't.
The regulations (domestic) are largely about planes not falling out of the sky. They do a pretty good job on that.

The international regulations are both about planes not falling out of the sky (which is good for basically all international airlines, bad for some national domestic airlines), and about political things like who gets how many gates, who is allowed to pick up passengers where, etc.

Some of it is about documenting price and standardizing other terms of carriage, but very little is about consumer comfort or anything like that.
Facebook seeks to offer alternative to Craigslist, utilizing user networks
Very cool, and something that probably will impress admissions officers, though I think it's generally not a good idea to publicly publish admissions essays until after the deadline.
EBook Japan to launch their own 7-inch tablet
To be fair (and for all I know you could be 100% correct), it has not yet been made clear how he plans to disburse this money.

Maybe he isn't going to do it in the wasteful ways you predict. Maybe he is.. time will tell.
It WILL indeed be the new standard resolution, very soon, especially considering the "push" the PC industry is getting from Apple's Retina Macbook Pros. The demand for high res panels is just to darn high and it has to be met. Like in Apple's situation, the cost can be taken care of by charging a premium and then using economies of scale to bring down production costs and making these kind of displays the new norm.

But exactly when this will happen? Well, it sort of already has: http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/31/samsung-Series%209-WQHD-U...

However, I believe we're going to see a huge blast in these super high-res panels right after Intel Haswell is released. It'll provide the Ultrabooks with graphic performance capabilities that'll be good enough for these high-res panels.
I'm not trying to dismiss this article per say. Usually I only chime in when something seems a bit off and I've found other info that might be useful to people reading said article.

For instance, this article seems to have been spawned by the recent Businessweek article re: financial forecasts for the airline industry and specifically what it may do to VA: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-10-17/virgin-america-t...

The tone of this particular write-up sounded very doom and gloom when in actuality VA seems to be following the annual trends of the airline industry while also pursuing an aggressive growth strategy. Not unlike many extremely popular startups (whether it works out or not, well, that's still quite a few years away).
One thing I learned from spam filtering is not to underestimate what a statistical filter can find.

For example, the comment in question contains a url. I could easily imagine that turning out to be a valuable predictor. The defining quality of the middlebrow dismissal is that it's a cache dump of the writer's prejudices, and someone doing that doesn't even take the time to think, let alone look up urls; they're not even really writing to inform.
But clearly there is a large market for direct flights from the Bay Area to Chicago, NYC, etc. If people trying to book such a flight always chose to fly VA and pay extra to do so, there wouldn't be a problem. But they don't so there is.
A similar question was asked on Quora as well: http://www.quora.com/Elon-Musk/How-is-Elon-Musk-so-intellige...
Not teaching kids to read is even easier. Are we to judge the merits of something based on easiness?
Reminds me of Walmart - everyone hates on it but they absolutely rake in profits. On certain purchases, Americans love cheap prices above all else. Plane flights likely fall in this category for most.
Waitaminute, Supplement to the Common Application? Oh, Chicago, how you have strayed!
I see what you're getting at, and I agree that it feels quite clunky....now. But I wouldn't be so dismissive quite yet. What if in the future you could detach your screen and keep it on the table? Now, you have an actual "surface" (just like a tablet). You can play games with others on this surface . Maybe, divide the screens and then have everyone use part of their screen for their own work. (I'm just listing what I could think of doing with a really large tablet)

My point is simply that once we have touchscreens on every desktop, it might enable ways to interact with your computer that we might not even have thought of yet.

edit: added "similarity to tablet" part
Totally, BUT, it will trash an admittedly imperfect economic sector. I've been following this for a few months; and that the market hasn't moved is incredibly harmful. The laptop market has basically stagnated, meaning a lot of pent-up demand that people are not likely to commit to other personal productivity improvements. So, in my opinion, in order to preserve inventory values, these guys fight as hard as possible to hold back technical development. I.O.W. If this valuation structure were ever to break, the corporates involved could take huge hits. Someone with more knowledge will have to take it from there.
That blog is quoting from a Seattle newspaper article without linking to it, here's the link to the article:

http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/2012/10/31/who-is-seatt...

The newspaper article is quoting from the photography is not a crime blog:

http://www.photographyisnotacrime.com/2012/10/10/creepy-man-...

http://www.photographyisnotacrime.com/2012/10/30/creepy-came...

According to photographyisnotacrime, the original youtube Creepy Cameraman uploader was itsrighttherenow which has been deleted for copyright infringement.

Here's a google cache of his youtube page:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6OBvqhK...

That's as far down the rabbit hole as I could go to find the original source of this story.
A Look inside Verizon's Flooded Communications Hub
You're a sensing a market opportunity.
You should be asking the question of why nobody is disrupting it.
FYI, you made typo on "Boltzmann" in the essay.

Edit: looks like you already submitted the essay. Oh well. Good luck :)
> According to almost every other article it's because of aggressive expansion

According to the numbers, they lose a ton of money on their existing flights: http://crankyflier.com/2012/07/05/virgin-america-posts-terri...

So I think the gist of the article posted is about right, even if they didn't back it up with the relevant facts: VA's equilibrium fares don't meet their operating costs.
I applied early action before publishing, and the deadline will pass in a few minutes.
They're 37 Signals, creators of Ruby on Rails, Basecamp, and other fine things that may claim to solve a certain task 'easier' than other competitors.
Backbone Events vs. Ember Bindings vs Ak47 Bindings: A Benchmark
> Maybe is a monad, which means Maybe computations can be chained together with `>>=` (or using `do` notation) without checking for `Nothing`. You can easily produce a large composition of potentially-failing computations while completely ignoring the possibility of failure.

Like

val = foo.bar.blah.boo rescue nil

Or

try {
val = foo.bar().blah().boo()
} catch(NullPointerException ex) {
}

Or

try:
val = foo.bar().blah().boo()
except AttributeError:
pass

Yes, I know Maybe is a monad, but that doesn't make a difference to me. A series of computation where a step depends on the results of the previous step and the previous step can return null is hardly an issue in any language.

> The case analysis you give as an example is only required at the point when you want to extract the final result into a different monadic context, and even then you would typically use the `maybe` or `fromMaybe` functions to make it more concise.

The case analysis I give is an example where either there is a value or null and I need the value. I don't really care how Haskell defines monadic context.
Actually, most Satanism has nothing to do with that.
Bill gates speaks about windows 8 [video]
I like the ground experience at SFO (it, along with PDX, has my favorite food), but I hate the runways, specifically the two parallel runways which get converted by daily fog into one runway for most of the morning. Which causes predictable many-hour delays.

OAK and SJC are far more reliable, although far less pleasant as airports.
Some quick corrections:

Southwest operates from Dallas Love Field (DAL) instead of DFW- almost all commercial flights at DAL are Southwest flights. Midland(MAF) is a city about 350 miles away that they also fly to.

Southwest merged with Airtran, not Frontier about 18 months ago- they are still in the process of integrating their routes and operations.
Because youtubes primary purpose for existing doesn't depend on copyright infringement. MU was raided because of their alleged blatant infringement and non DMCA good faith compliance.
> It is the fact that there aren't ENOUGH people willing to pay enough of a premium.

That's all I was trying to say. I think it's judgmental to say that the people who buy airplane tickets are "at fault" but their aggregate decisions are the reason VA is failing.
> But (hopefully) not all functions will return null, so you'll probably have at most a single-digit percentage of functions that do.

In a real world API, almost everything that returns an object can return null or throw an exception.

> The point is that by using Option, you are explicitly stating "This function can return null", making it impossible for the caller to ignore.

Throw an exception if impossible to ignore is the motive.

> If you write it somewhere into the docs, it is indeed easy to overlook.

It might be overlooked. But is it too much to assume that someone making a call will check the parameters and the return type?
Southwest Airlines grew out of Air Southwest, an intrastate carrier that Herb Kelleher started to provide air service solely within Texas. (Why? To avoid FAA regulations.) They traditionally fly into smaller airports because it avoids higher fees and because the traffic level is lower so there is less time spent on the ground. Recently, Southwest merged with AirTran Airways. For what it's worth, the limericks and gags came from Southwest, not ATA. It's part of their culture.

Southwest does fly into Dallas, but they do so into Love Field (DAL). That's where their ticker symbol comes from; Dallas Love Field was their primary airport for years and still serves as the airport where they have almost complete control and their corporate HQ. They still fly from Love because DFW is almost completely controlled by American Airlines. Southwest was even the direct target of a law (the Wright Amendment) that artificially hobbled service at DAL--and the law only recently started to phase out of existence--because Braniff-now-American didn't want the competition. Neither did Fort Worth, because Dallas and Fort Worth went in together on the construction costs of Love and both were supposed to close their city-owned regional airports to commercial traffic. Fort Worth closed Meacham Field, Dallas didn't close Love Field. Fort Worth sued and lost, so Fort Worth-based Braniff, followed by Fort Worth-based American, lobbied for the law.
Brian sounds like an angry google hater. If you read some of his other blog posts, you will see that he sensationalizes his headlines. He says that the cameraman wears google glasses, but then provides no evidence. He also has a post where he somehow twists a commercial [1] for google glass showing a mother, child, father, and friends all using glass to do a hangout into "Google Glasses commercial encourages taking video of womens[sic] tits and uploading it to Youtube", a title concerning a video that includes no nudity and no youtube uploading.

Privacy is a major concern with things like this, and I am worried that it will be violated with the glass product, but I'm really more worried that I'll be the one violating my own privacy on accident rather than some perv spying on me with it. If you think about it, the guy with the hidden camera on the train is far less conspicuous than a guy wearing "GOOGLE GLASSES (TM)" and staring at you.

1: http://www.brianshall.com/content/google-glasses-commercial-...
where does it say he is wearing google glasses?
i'm sure many enterprising young applicants used the same essay for both the common and (un)common apps.
There is no mention of Google Glass in any of those articles. This post is just anti-Google blogspam.
That's usually with a roommate... not someone for a family, in my opinion.
Best o luck. I tried something similar with Stanford, submitting some APL code and a detailed explanation... didn't work that well.

I love the U of C, great school but not necessarily an easy place to go to school. The CS people are one of the few bastions of SML among CS depts.
OP is likely in high school, give him/her a break. Better than anything I produced at that age.
Prediction: Google will sell Android to Samsung
Taxes on flights in/out of LHR, at least, are among the highest I've seen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Passenger_Duty
Respect is free.
Nice to see; but obviously it is just a small step where a larger one is needed. They'll never scale it bigger to compete with their own 1080p hypnotoads.
Here's a longer article on using the same bcrypt-gem inside the Authlogic-gem, useful if you already deployed a system and want to switch from SHA512 or similar to bcrypt: http://www.binarylogic.com/2008/11/22/storing-nuclear-launch...
My wife has been 1k for the last several years. Before we met I had no concept of mileage programs but traveling with her has really opened my eyes.

The funny part is at some point it feels a bit like playing a Zynga game, including the occasional "screw it, I'm so close I'll pay a little cash to bump up to the next level"
"Everyone has Facebook open in one of the tabs in their browser. Say you have Facebook open in one tab and Kogan.com open in another. Facebook could tell us if you are male or female. We could then customize our site with..."

How would this happen though, technically? Would the sites need to share cookies? Or would kogan users need to explicitly indicate/link their FB id to kogan, or even login with their FB id.

Later, he states...
"Neither Facebook nor any of its advertising partners are interested in your personal data."

This is disingenuous - for the ads, he wants to know what model phone you use. Once you buy something, he then knows your address, phone number, email, c/c, and what model phone you use. He would then likely be keeping this additional factoid (your phone model) stored somewhere along with your personal data and purchase history.

It sounds to me like Ruslan is looking to do something that's a bit dodgy on the privacy front.
I just fear for Google Glasses. I am hopeful for them, primarily since I'd like to try them, but in recent news there have been a few cases of people against the idea of being recorded. People being recorded tend to find it a privacy risk. I myself might, but I think it'd depend on the person wearing the glasses/camera far more than the camera itself. There are of course inherit risks with concepts of hidden cameras and recording people without their permission. Poses risk to projects like Google Glasses.
Everyone has their own method of calculating how much they want to make before quitting a job. It depends on a few things, but they add up:

- How much debt do you have (baseline per month you want to pay)?
- How much is your cost of living?
- How much do you want for extra spending money?
- How much do you want to save?
- (Most important) How much will it cost to continue growing your company (or sustaining it 100%)?
It really isn't novel, and it's certainly not elegant. This is an admissions essay, not a masters thesis. I'm not asking for a degree; I'm asking to be recognized as having potential.
> In Java, the compiler won't tell you that a variable may be null. In Haskell (at least when you compile with -Wall, strange this particular warning isn't the default) you'll get an error if you've failed to handle all the variations of data that you've provided.

Connection con = DriverManager.getConnection(
"jdbc:myDriver:myDatabase",
username,
password);

Statement stmt = con.createStatement();
ResultSet rs = stmt.executeQuery("SELECT a, b, c FROM Table1");

while (rs.next()) {
int x = rs.getInt("a");
String s = rs.getString("b");
float f = rs.getFloat("c");
}

It's not that bad. In the above example, you either get an SQLException or a ResultSet. ResultSet is your option type here. It wont' be null - it might or might not contain values.

There might be a lot of good things about Haskell(I am not that familiar to make a call), but seriously, Maybe doesn't look that great.
It's not dismissive, it's skeptic, and rightfully so - there are many flaws in this article (as outlined above) that might not come from the scientists, but from dodgy reporting. Who describes that guy as "the happiest man"? Is it the scientists (doubtful) or is it journalists looking for a "sexy" headline?
$10 billion by 30? How old are you today? Is this just a ego-stroking joke?
FYI: your essay is giving me an access denied error:

<Error>
<Code>AccessDenied</Code>
<Message>Access Denied</Message>
<RequestId>A5B17F2AF38ADC02</RequestId>
<HostId>
3nvDN913QSL0zKSFhKcMZfhtVLAER4DU45ZNNP3K+cbtuNWze9IKOwDpovxl0Foz
</HostId>
</Error>
Apple breaks the news to Siri
And here goes your productivity - the real killer application for your link times.
The links are poorly styled and don't look like links. The "creepy cameraman" text links to the article. I actually followed it there before coming to the comments here.

[ Unless of course it was added in response to your comment, I guess. ]
Legality of this aside...

I assume the best in people. So I assume this is a person trying to call into focus the blurry spectrum between experiencing an event, documenting an event on paper, drawing, pictures, and video. And he's probably doing it because with the technology coming down the pipeline, these lines are going to get even more blurred. Perhaps he's even an advocate of legislation to prevent things like this and just figures you have to poke someone (the public; the legislature) in the eye to get them to respond.

But even so, this is a pretty jerk-ish way to do that for animalistic reasons. He's not just recording people, he's staring at strangers.

Several times he made the plea of "I'm not being threatening." That's patently false. We're mammals. Staring at a stranger for prolonged periods of time is a direct, unambiguous threat. If a stranger stared at me like that, blank faced and unmoving, I would call the police with or without a video camera. And if I saw you doing it to someone I cared about, I'd probably consider attacking you, or at least putting on a good show of it.

So he's missing the whole point, and the headline reads "creepy cameraman.." instead of "Man draws focus on ubiquitous surveillance." His creepiness is confounded with the recording such that it's impossible to ply apart what part of the reaction is because of him and what part is because of his camera.

Hopefully it'll draw out the public discussion I assume he wants drawn out.
I find SJC quite nice when it's convenient to my destination. I suppose it's not nearly as luxurious-feeling, but it's so much more relaxed. I went through OAK just once, and was surprised how much of a dump it was. Reminded me of Midway before it was renovated/rebuilt. But I'd still choose it over SFO.
Global Services >>> 1K.
SF author David Brin has some unusual suggestions for philanthropic billionaires looking to immortalize themselves with a significant legacy. For example, build a third-world university system ($5B), fund a manned Mars mission ($25B), or create an annual prize for whisteblowers ($1M annually plus witness relocation).

http://www.davidbrin.com/eon.html
Ugh. It is not unreasonable to take the Drake equation seriously. You just have to correctly understand what purpose it was supposed to serve.
The equation is not about calculating the probability of intelligent life. It was about identifying what information needs to be gathered do that you can calculated the probability of intelligent life arising.

In other words, the equation was created to help guide research, not to answer the question itself directly. As a guide to research, I think the equation remains highly relevant.
> whereas in languages with less strict type systems, almost everything is a 'Maybe'

I don't know Haskell(I do know F#), so help me with this: How is everything not a Maybe in Haskell? In the languages I know, when you return an object from a method, (it can throw an Exception or return null) or return a valid val. When it throws an Exception, there is no Maybe, or else it's a Maybe. How is it any different in Haskell.
Good job! Wish I'd thought of this when I was applying for college
I suggest you read the evidence in Viacom vs YouTube, their founders admitted as much in internal emails that most of the early traffic was copyright material.

http://www.fastcompany.com/1588353/steal-it-and-other-intern...

The real answer to my hypothetical question is that there is no difference. One just happens to be run by a German hacker while the other by upstanding citizens of Silicon Valley.

One beat a civil lawsuit while the other has the full force of the US government trying to lock him up for life with a criminal conspiracy case (a bullshit law used to catch mafia figures).
Not fixed for me. And presumably for anyone else, either.
Show HN: A Thing I Made For NaNoWriMo
Oh wow. Had no idea. Thanks.
PHP Bug #63281
I came across an interesting "quirk" the other day, while using PHP. If bugs are considered complicated, is it commonplace to just mark them as "WONTFIX"? Shouldn't it, at least, be documented as something to be fixed in the future?
OAK will be a lot better once the airport connector (to BART) opens in 2014, I think. That will lure a lot more ex-SF traffic, which will probably cause the traffic to increase, which will improve retail, which might cause the terminal itself to be improved.

There are already some great direct flights out of OAK -- Alaska and Hawaiian direct flights to Honolulu and the Neighbor Islands, etc.
Napolitano: US financial institutions 'actively under attack' by hackers