skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is fairly speculative, but I have been thinking this paradox over for a while.

A high demand for scarce highly skilled workers must drive
salaries up in competition.

Unless the skills are not actually high skilled, but obscure skills. I predict that "high skilled manufacturing" is a morass of proprietary solutions to
highly specific process needs - that is, the metal fabrication plant alluded to at 10USD per hour has highly specific machinery doing a fixed task, and that the skill is mostly one of repairing the proprietary code.

From a software perspective, that mostly means the machinery is "legacy" - and impossible to refactor. So it can never be improved upon, only replaced.

I am not a 3d-printer fanboi - the advantages of additative manufacturing are hugely over hyped (at the moment), and likely to remain elusive for, lets say, a generation, before it becomes obvious to all we throw away factories and their jobs and build millions of thing-o-matics.

However in that generation there will be huge opportunity for semi-general manufacturing - robots with sufficient flexibility in parts and software that they can be re-purposed easily as part of a (virtual) conveyor belt.

This sounds truly skilled work - flexibly adapting as processes and customers change.

if providing semi-general manufacturing machines is uneconomic compared to proprietary simpler but "obscure skill" machines, then we cannot expect a productivity
premium for actual highly skilled workers and should expect
10USD phour jobs to limp along till Shanghai takes their lunch.

If however semi-general machines can be made to adapt to
different manufacturing requirements, then our whole manufacturing base may be in want of replacing.

Again something emerging economies will have an advantage in.

So, overall, the West should view itself as Great Britain was at the end of the 19th Century - a pioneer whose advantages had run out, and without wholesale massive investment will simply enter a managed decline.

Disruption opportunities - Development of semi-general robotic manufacturing solutions that can quickly be re-purposed. And proving that it is both ecomnomic for a greenfield site and an installed base.
Or maybe only sell ebooks. Offer good coffee and advice on books, get a referral fee for ebooks?

Browsing on Amazon sucks. If you know what you want it is OK, but for discovery there is still room for improvement.
Yes, sometimes there are emergencies where working long hours isn necessary, and if you're well rested before, you can still be productive, if not optimally so. But these are rare exceptions. If they occur regularly, it's a sign of shitty management and a shitty company you need to get out of ASAP. Especilally if you're told it's normal and something to be proud of

As for your examples

>ship or lose customer x.

shitty customer, will probably use low quality resulting from it as an excuse to withhold payment. Get a better customer.

>Promises are made that can't be kept by humane working hours.

Shitty management, no excuses

>Things break days before a huge demo.

Probaby because of bad code written by someone working late.

>Someone gets sick.

Nobody else can do their job? Shitty management

> You are in an arms race with a well-funded competitor.

You probably won't win it with code that breaks all the time.
Form binding in Apache Wicket
They use the search API. https://github.com/igrigorik/hackernews-button/blob/master/h...
LOL, why not blue jacket?
"Revolution is the final defense against tyranny. Power corrupts, and the people who started the USA were under no illusions that the government they created was perfect and would remain so forever."

And how exactly are a bunch of citizens with handguns and shotguns going to stand up against the US military? While the NRA crowd are all polishing their pistols and claiming they'll be able to start American Revolution 2.0 if necessary, the US military have nuclear bombs, bioweapons, tanks, more fighter jets than you can ever imagine, drones, and a few nuclear armed submarines they can have pootling up and down the Mississippi.
Why did you give out those 4 digits? Really, I would have never ever done that. If they want to confirm and they're calling you then they should authenticate themselves, not you!
I don't get it. It show a static image http://octodex.github.com/images/gangnamtocat.png and that is it. Tried with Chromium and Opera.
I agree this is very annoying, as are the conversations with the call-centre staff who can't believe you won't give out this information freely "I'm sorry sir, you have to, it's company policy". I generally challenge them to provide 3 half-pieces of non-critical information to verify who they are, but there must be a better way?

Surely this is ripe for disruption - can't the telcos provide a "Verified Caller" service is the same way as browsers now do to prevent phishing?

So let's say HSBC call me, their name will be in red on my iPhone with "verified caller" listed below, having confirmed their details with the telco beforehand. That would solve the problem, and provide a little extra revenue for telcos...
In the realm of thesis printing, you pay 10 to 22 cents per monochrome side, plus about $30 for perfect binding (plus shipping, and any surcharges for fast turnaround). So printing Strousup's 900 page "The C++ Programming Language" costs $130+ and printing something slimmer like "The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4 Fascile 4" costs $40+. New from Amazon those would cost $55 and $15 respectively.

If you can get your prices competitive, there might be an opportunity for you in thesis printing.

If you could get your prices so low that a professor with a ready-to-go textbook in PDF form could get it printed on demand cheaper than going through regular publishers and college bookstores, that would be a big opportunity right there. By all accounts college textbooks in America are very expensive, but neither authors nor publishers admit to making much profit, so presumably there's a lot of inefficiency there. Could be ripe for disruption.
http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2011/results/ (scores higher than the usa).

what about uruguay?
Is it supposed to do anything or is it just a picture?
I have this, but a 20 minute nap or a walk to 7/11 usually fixes it. What happens to anyone in this thread when they try that?

I will normally feel better and more awake after doing something like this.

That, of course, may well have no effect on how productive I am.

Optimising for 'feeling good while working longer hours' should not be the aim. Optimising for 'producing the most useful stuff in time period X' should be what we're after.

Earlier in my life I could happily sit in front of the keyboard for fifty hours a week and feel fine. However, when I started measuring what I produced I found that I was more productive if I spent about 30 hours in front the keyboard.

If I had a time machine that's what I'd tell my 20 year old self. You can do more by spending less time in front the keyboard, which has the happy side effect of giving you more time to do more away from the keyboard.
Restoring defocused and blurred images (part 2) - practical issues and solutions
We migrated from Exchange (50 accounts) to GApps 2 years ago and I don't want to go back to Exchange. Of course costs savings were one reason but main benefit came from the easiness and level of maintenance.
Please add an 'after-dark' feature that allows those concerned with battery usage , and those with already burned retinas from years of computer to view Hacker News in a darkened theme. Please keep fonts on the new theme as high contrast as the black on white.
LUCIFER is the name for The Vatican Observatory Research Group's new telescope
Canadian scientist uses math to green Japanese baseball
They had this on Android maps for the Barbican Centre in London last time I was there. Anyone who's ever been to the Barbican will know that this is essential. :P
I can't find a cite for this right now, but I've heard this phrased as "park facing downhill." Towards the end of the day, I actively try to get myself into a position where I've put together the beginning of an idea and gotten some failing test cases written, or at least some non-compiling pseudocode into a buffer somewhere. This sets me up for success at the beginning of the next day -- I work right into a state of flow while tying together the loose ends from the day before.

I have this pattern.

It's one of the (many) reasons I love TDD. Leave terminal with a failing test case. Come back the next day and I've got something obvious and trivial to code next. Bam. Straight back into that intermittent reward driven flow.
There is a company that does this. They were very successful in Japan and opened an office in San Jose a few years ago - http://1dollarscan.com - be sure to read the FAQ. They can also do OCR on the book content which makes it searchable and possible to do copy/paste. As far as I can tell what they do is the normal graphical scan of a page, and then underlay that with text. When you select over the page it picks up the text, but when you read you see the graphical original.

Note that they destroy the books in the process of scanning them (spine is cut off) and then they dispose of the books to avoid copyright and similar issues.
That's simple to get around - you just schedule in a regular cadence for stepping back.

For example we do a little regroup after lunch, and have a weekly short 20m retrospective on Friday afternoons before stopping for the weekend.
Faceshift mimics your facial movements in real time
I'm certain it has a lot more to do with the state of technology in the 1950s than with malice or incompetence.

The behavior certainly isn't replicated on mobile phones.
Let's not make another cult out of failure
New PandoDaily post glorifies failure in a way that I think is totally unhealthy and misses the point.

I disagree with it, and rather than point to my own life to start this post from Joe Kraus of Google Venture explains my perspective better than I ever could: http://joekraus.com/the-lies-we-tell-ourselves.

TL;DR
Let's not make a cult of failure for its own sake. The amazing part of this story is not the colossal fuck-up, but the fact that he succeeded once, make a massive mistake that tore down all his work, didn't get in his own way and give up, and then went on to succeed again. Had he not succeeded again, that initial mistake would have defined his entire life. That failure would have been the thing that he believed he was, not the success that he later became.

I had a mentor of mine suggest to me me over an early morning breakfast, "Austin, at some point you may ask yourself if it's possible to stop 'failing in exchange for knowledge,' and actually succeed while simultaneously enjoying your work and learning twice as much as when you fail."

That was a defining moment in my life and those words have rippled to where I sit now two years later. Until that moment, I thought that the only path to knowledge was called "failure." I simply think that's a lie we tell ourselves now. We learn more from success than we ever do from failure, and we shouldn't be in denial about that.

I'm still on the journey, but with a lot of progress behind me. I tell the story of my mentor not to point to position myself as the "model for success," but merely to share my own journey learning the difference in my own psychology between failing and succeeding. One is life-affirming, and I choose that one.

Coming full-circle, I don't intend to take away from the Pando article. It's an incredible story of resilience, and the marine deserves credit and respect. It's just not a story of failure.
A guide to Python's magic methods.
I think it is important to note that the fast-food jobs with comparable pay are low level managerial positions, not entry level ones. You can start working for minimum wage at a fast-food job without any previous experience and/or skills. These jobs require very little training, and allow employees to add value almost immediately (and well before promotion to the $15-$20 an hour positions).

Contrast this to the skilled manufacturing jobs which require up front experience. Though many blue collar fields offer entry-level positions with on the job training, apprenticeships, and opportunity for advancement, this doesn't appear to be common practice in manufacturing. Why not? I think the main reason is that it is very hard for a low skill worker to add value to a manufacturing company. There aren't any comparable entry-level positions that allow the employee to learn while still being productive.

Because of this, hiring an unskilled employee for the purpose of training them is a huge risk, since it requires a significant investment. And since this industry is already very unstable with razor-thin margins, it's not something many employers seem willing to do, which is unfortunate.

So maybe the solution is coming up with better training programs, so that manufacturers can hire new employees without taking on such large risks?
Modern scanners will produce a 'searchable PDF' comprised of two layers - OCRed text below, scanned image on top. So you get the search and copy ability of OCRed text, but not the loss of presentation and formatting that comes with using OCR alone. As with any OCR, you do get occasional mis-transcribed words.

Google Books doesn't let you download an entire DRM free book to your Kindle, does it?
Yeah, that's exactly the same as the scenario outlined in the OP. How do you know that whoever called you is in fact your credit union?
Same here.. I waited for a while expecting some sort of animation.. but nothing. Nice illustration but a bit disappointing. I expected more.
That's the problem with inventing everything - you end up with 'v1' of everything. And v1 is always awful. :p

See also: London Underground.
oh HN managed a DDoS again

608 points should be around 60.000 visitors. Thats something any site should be able to handle, but ...

http://dreamhost.com/servers/vps/ <- All VPS plans come with UNLIMITED Bandwidth and Storage.

UNLIMITED ... till they pull the plug lol

But it might also just be that the site is overloaded. I sometimes get an "Error establishing a database connection" and sometimes "Problem loading page". So there is still a server who desperately tries to answer requests.

What kind of server do you have at dreamhost? A VPS? Is that VPS some Viruozzo/OpenVZ crap, or a Xen instance?
What comes after that? An sort of Airbnb for self storage?
Could the submitter enlighten us as to the information content of the picture? It seems the only responses it can invite are along the lines of "LOL awesome A+++"
If there are any plans to expand to Asia, I would be happy to bounce ideas. I think this is a fantastic idea. I have been involved in healthcare startups (co-founded one) for the last 2 years in Singapore, so this is extremely interesting to me.
For tourists, yes, it usually works. For locals, people who suffer most from the system, it does not.
I felt the same and I've lived, worked and travelled in Colombia for 4 months. I never had to bribe anybody and didn't have any problem with the police or criminals. I enjoyed every single minute of it.

The only thing I did differently than in Europe was I would talk to locals before going for a walk in a random neighborhood at night and use taxis (which are so cheap anyway) instead of walking at night.
from hackernews.responses import pious_indignation_that_funny_picture_does_not_have_substantive_content
Reusing intermediate work? I don't think this is a good intuition. Using several levels of abstraction is more like it.

For example, in face recognition, first level - could be pixels. Second level - edges and corners: http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~yann/research/deep/images/ff1.gif Third - parts of the face: http://people.cs.umass.edu/~elm/images/face_feature.jpg
Being a generally excellent article aside, there are really very few articles on HN that deal with women, and even fewer that have a feminist bent, such as this one could be easily argued to have.

There is also a noticeable lack of women in tech, so an article for and about women is more notable and interesting than articles about dudes wanting to be or being entrepreneurs. Those are being written roughly the same way twenty times per day.

Now if you're curious about how big your hypothetical penis article gets, the best way to find out is probably not by posting thinly veiled sexist comments. Instead I suggest finding out how to hack your penis (literally, if you want) and then writing an article as well as this woman has.
Hi guys, thanks for the feedback and for sharing your experiences - really appreciate it. I've got a few plans for how to make Recon more useful for larger brands and it'll be interesting to see what the uptake is like (and the size of brands that start using the app). I like the market intelligence idea, definitely something I'll be thinking about. Thanks again.
Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI): EU to spend $900M building super laser
As a renter, I've usually already bought my return tickets and have to be at work the next day, so there's no chance that I'm going to extend my trip, unless I get stuck somewhere. The company should have provisions for giving a loaner to a car owner whose car isn't returned on time, but I doubt that would be a problem very often.
Airport car rentals tend to be pretty cheap (<$200/wk), available, and high quality. This poses a problem for any company attempting to "disrupt" the industry.

AirBNB is competing with high priced hotels that often are booked and an existing inefficient P2P subleasing business.

Uber is competing with taxi services notorious for poor responsiveness and frequent gaps in availability.

I don't see the same room for disruption in the airport car rental market, but there is likely some room for innovation. Don't count on Hertz and Payless quaking in their boots any time son.
Startups fail at acquiring customers, not building products
Specific skills weren't the issue in my interviews. I was remarking more on the pettiness of the founders I talked to.

That aside, both of my interviews at YC companies (two, although I've talked to a lot of YC'ers besides), had profitability so the typical runway concerns weren't predominating their conccerns I would think.
And yet you like having a computer on your desk, a laptop on your lap etc. Sold by these "MBA idiots".

Instead of, you know, going all Woz and building one from scratch --which you couldn't even do with modern components, the best you could do would be assembling ready made parts.

Also, Jobs an "MBA idiot"? He never had an MBA to begin with, and as for the idiot part, well, I for one beg to differ.
I agree on the second point, but then again, I'd never rent my house out with Airbnb either, and apparently they've done well. Different people have different tolerances for risk.
I dunno this seems like a solution in search of a problem. The rental car industry is highly competitive which results in high quality service at low prices. I don't remember the last time someone I know complained about a rental car company.
Most people that work at Facebook completely misunderstood the question:

"Job at FB or GOOG, which would you take?"

He's not asking employees who are already wearing the t-shirt of the company. He's asking everyone else. It's not a very difficult question to understand, isn't Facebook?
yes, this is exactly what I'm thinking about. But I concern about security problem, are there any notices that I should know when I develop app this way ?
> You can't just be 'double insured', insurance is usually on the license, not on the driver.

In the US, that's not the case - I'm not perfectly sure how it works, but you can often use your own car insurance when you're driving a rental. And of course double insurance is possible, it's entirely up to the insurance company. Insurance is obviously one of the things FlightCar would need to deal with.

All in all, the issues facing FlightCar are not much different from those facing AirBnB which despite similar objections is doing fine.
I think about this too, but this gonna be produce more work to back end developer since they have to produce front end code to backend template.
Also note the output of %a can be used in C99 source code.
I don't know if you want a hint, but... If you do it the right way, no tweaking is needed at all. (The puzzle can be viewed as a very nice illustration of ergodic trajectories.)
I love this, thanks.. but is it only me that wants a set of non cuddly icons for once? I.e. easy on the rounded corners.
I think he meant that, from the perspective of the law, corporations are meant to be temporary entities--not that they are generally run with the intent of being temporary.
Markerless motion capture
The biggest problem with car rental is the paper work - for some reason it can take five-ten minutes per customer to deal with, if nothing goes wrong. I've waited 20+ minutes on multiple occasions. There is literally no reason it can't be handled online well in advance (and it typically is, but for some reason it's repeated in person). Car rental needs something like airline self-service check-in kiosks more than FlightCar, IMO.
The Android Wifi Analyzer app shows what access points are detected and their signal strengths, channel usage, encryption etc. It is not a traffic sniffer - some screenshots at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.farproc.wi... I couldn't find anything similar in the app store. I did find several apps that scan your local network (eg Fing).

No one mentions 5GHz in their specs. You can't tell from Google's Nexus pages which devices support it. Apple's older pages (eg Mac Mini) similarly don't say anything but newer pages (eg iPhone 5 and iPad) do. For any vendor about the only clue is they sometimes mention 802.11a support.
the issue here is that they are human beings whom no one has the right to reduce as being mere eye-candy (which is particularly freaking sexist)

I'm sure women all around the world are extremely interested in Ryan Gosling's personality.
Just to clarify, I was talking about the video there.
Misses direct messages?

The ones that start with "d @username" or "dm @username"
that was what i expected from the rest of this discussion, but it's nice to have it confirmed. in the us, whoever was lucky enough to notice where the new line was going to open first would rush there and be the new first person in line.
So from his whole rant about HR incompetency and almost calling them organisational cancer, the thing you took offence at was the only positive trait he attributed to them? The fact that you interpreted it as "reducing" says more about you than him.
There is a huge difference between AirBnB and FlightCar: It's hard to steal a house, and it's hard to crash into someone else's house using your house.

AirBnB pushes a lot of the verification responsibilities onto the renter, I can't see how that would work in this case. Anybody that can't afford a regular rental is certainly not going to be able to afford the value I place on my time for the extra hassle that comes with the use of my car. And I care a lot more for my car than Hertz or Avis cares about theirs.

All this adds up to me probably not being in their target demographic on the supply side. And on the demand side I'd rather deal with Hertz, Avis or Budget (but never again with Sixt, what a bunch of scammers) when it comes to making sure damage is noted properly before pickup, having staff on site to deal with any issues with the car (not unknown to happen) and to know that there is a full operational support service behind the product in case I need assistance once underway. I've had an Avis car break down on me in the US, and the speed and professionalism with which this was dealt with left me very impressed.

And that for a price for which I as a private individual would be loathe to let another person unknown to me drive my car.