skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A good illustration of the importance of lighting (even though it is in a virtual world) is "How to Train Your Dragon". One of the big reasons that looked so damned good was the lighting. They brought in Roger Deakins, cinematographer for most of the Coen brother's films and many other well known films, as a visual consultant.

On Deakins' forum on his web site, a puzzled reader posted asking what a cinematographer does on an animated film. Here was part of Deakins' answer:

---------

My role on 'How to Train Your Dragon' was as a consultant and very much as part of a team. It is, for sure, a less personal involvement if only because of the numbers of people involved in the process. However, from an early stage I was involved in discussions about the 'look' of the film with the directors, designer and effects super. This involved all aspects of the production from the choice of lens lengths to our approach to 3D. Following that we created a template of images to reflected the arc of the film. Next we created a number of animated reference shots, which depicted the characters in various lighting situations such as a candlelit room, a foggy day in a forest and in moonlight. For the next 12 months I was working with the layout artists (who set the camera) and the lighters (who light the rendered images) to follow through on the whole process. During part of that 12 months I was shooting a (live action) film but I was kept in touch with the production through a dedicated work station.

---------

Full thread here: http://www.rogerdeakins.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1...

See also this NYTimes article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/movies/21dragon.html?_r=0

The 12 months Deakins spent on this is a bigger fraction of the film's production time than you might expect. Normally animated movies can take 3 or 4 years, but after a couple of years production the producers of HTTYD decided that the story and characters they had would not work. They were doing a faithful reproduction of the book (in which dragons and humans have long been at peace...and the kids are 10), but that was aimed at a younger audience. They needed something that could also appeal to teens and adults, so they replaced the director with Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, and told them they needed to write a new story and new script, with older characters--AND they had stick to the release date, which was something like 16 months away. So, that 12 months Deakins was involved was effectively pretty much the entire development time of the film we actually got.

In one of those weird twists you'd expect to find in the movies, not real life, the reason Sanders was at Dreamworks is that when John Lasseter took over Disney animation, he suggested a bunch of changes to the movie Sanders was writing and directing for Disney, "American Dog". Sanders didn't like the changes, and ended up leaving. (Some reports say Lasseter fired him). "American Dog" got a new director and writer and story and a new name, "Bolt". What it did NOT get was a new release date.
This wouldn't hold at all where I am from. Also I don't get your point at all to be honest, it's completely disconnected from work. Even though it may feel like a personal betrayal I just don't see how this is work related.
You can't get that on credit cards, period. The issuing banks charge more than that; anyone offering that is losing money on every payment - way beyond what you could make up for with volume. Even by becoming an acquiring bank and eliminating every single middle-man possible you can't get CC rates that good.

We (WePay) offer 1%+50c for ACH, and we can probably knock it down if you have reasonable volume. Ping me if you want more info, or just check out the website.
> What if I decide I can't afford those employees because
> we aren't making enough money?

Then in various jurisdictions you have to prove that. In court. See item 1 of http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/28/world/europe/28iht-letter.... and this sort of thing is not limited to France.

The US setup of at-will employment looks just as weird on that side of the Atlantic, I'm told, as theirs does to us.

I can't tell you what the setup is with being able to close down a business. It wouldn't terribly surprise me if there are legal hurdles to that too.
People tend to forget that courts exist. Just because kids have their school ID cards doesn't mean that the police can (or will ever be allowed to) ask for them and check for the validity (sounds like a warrantless search).

Your nightmare scenario is blocked by the fact that just because something is technologically possible, it doesn't mean the police are allowed to do it.

This adult ID card you speak of? What will be the rationale for it existing? haven't national ID cards been pretty much decided to be unconstitutional?

Not an expert but doesn't RFID have a really small range too? All RFID-ish cards I have seem to require being around 50cm to the reader, so if the police drove down my street, they won't be able to get my arcade card info, much less my subway pass (granted they could just get that from the transport company).

On this situation, these cards seemed to be for attendance only. If the cards were replaced by people doing attendance at every door in the school, we'd probably be complaining about the fact that high-tech solutions to this problem exist.
Chasing Netflix, Intel, AT&T, Verizon & others lose their collective mind
In regards to the question of 'Is it legal to fire this person for this?' at least in California it's a slam dunk - the answer is yes. One of the questions on the harassment training I had to take was for a related scenario, where a boss cut off an affair with an employee and later on fired her because his wife found out and wanted him to, and the whole point of the question was that the firing was legal. If it's legal to fire under that circumstance, it's definitely legal to fire under this one.
Why do you care? I doesn’t sound like you would ever back anything.

I will and enjoy it. No matter the outcome. Don’t tell me how I have to feel. That’s all.
Slightly off topic but I enjoyed this and it is a great example of self promotion, something a lot of people here are interested in:

The most recent video on Jia's site is of him asking to race someone. He walks up to a high schooler and his personal trainer explains himself and asks to race one of them. As soon as Jia mentions he is a blogger the trainer without making a direct reference to it casually unzips his jacket to reveal a sweatshirt with the name and logo of his company on it.

It tickled me and made me strangely proud that now because of this man's quick opportune thinking and the happenstance that someone decided to write an article about Jia, likely thousands more people than have ever before will click through and visit http://rwa-texas.com/ .
I think the OP is balancing the economic costs of firing with the psychological advantages to be had by chucking him and clearing his mind. If the guy wasnt "close to indispensible", he'd likely be gone by now. One way out could be to bring some other employees up to speed and then fire the guy.

Overall I agree with the top comment. Having the guy around for long would inflict a negative air at the top that might permeate the entire organization. Gotta go for sure.
Show HN: ThankBee, being thankful to your app buyers
Highlighting Is a Waste of Time (The Best and Worst Learning Techniques)
TSV to Fixed-Width Text Table
Which is actually an absurd thing for the rental companies to do, since they a) don't know the credit limit on the card and b) would immediately get a chargeback if they tried to recover anything beyond the actual rental rate. They would fight and have a not totally unreasonable chance of winning the chargeback, but the reality is they'd be far better off chasing you down with collections agencies.
I mean that I have seen the opposite of progress. Native people with formerly proud cultures. Not technologically advanced, sure, but long traditions and ones anyone should be proud to have (or had, past tense, in this case). And these groups appeared completely devastated and exploited.
Hey guys, any feedback is more than welcome, both regarding the landing page, the copy, and the idea itself.
Awesome. Learning Haskell has been on my list for a long time, and I really appreciate that both books are available for free online. Thanks!
How we use Intercom at Brightpod?
I am help you.
...And cffi is one of the better documented libraries, I have used it quite a bit and have had very little trouble working it out.
Any sysadmin worth his salt today is a devops. Go to Heroku or AWS and you'll find lots of job listings for system engineers.

It's true that we'll be able to get more done with fewer sysadmins, but that doesn't mean we'll have fewer sysadmins. The Jevons paradox suggests we might even have more sysadmins.
Bill Clinton at CES 2013: Don't Take Tech for Granted
schools have a legal obligation concerning where parent's children during the period in which they're supposed to be in class. What do you think all those permission slips were for?
Same thing is happening with the GPS... we are loosing our sense of orientation...
Read Paul Graham's article, "How to Get Startup Ideas". This is a must read for any aspiring entrepreneur (probably just "anyone" really).

http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
Why search for new land when you have no need to leave the land you're already on?
I'm foraying into the lisp land for the first time with SICP, and the one thing that bothers me the most is that Scheme is so hard to debug. As a Python programmer who is used to just used to print debugging, this becomes very frustrating very early on.
And the original image has a Lisp column, conveniently removed from this one ;-)

http://kuehnast.com/s9y/uploads/langs.jpg
This is by the way the startup he works on http://www.hooplus.com according to his site
Battle of the Androids: Google Android vs.  Samsung Android
okay - (forgive me). I have a very old project i'm trying to fix. I updated rails to 3.2.11

It's been like 4 years since i did this and haven't touched rails since.

What else do i need to do here to fix this? i Thought rails 3.2.11 was ok..
Nice presentation. Friendly notes:

1. Ctrl+Shift+K opens the web console in Firefox, not your secret notes.

2. Please don't present naive "quicksort" in Haskell as equivalent to a real quicksort unless you're also going to prove that the cute Haskell example is as efficient in all senses as the in-place C implementation. (Good luck with that, as my American friends say.)
You are certainly right. In it something is also I think, what is it excellent thought.
http://www.pfollowers.com/buy-instagram-followers
http://www.pfollowers.com/buy-pinterest-followers
http://www.pfollowers.com
I will 2nd his recommendation. It works amazingly.
Yes, I'm specifically talking about Caltrain, specifically to San Francisco. People live in SF for reasons other than cost, and work in MV/PA/MP.

And even at the level of individual stops with baby bullet service being prioritized -- University Ave is more expensive than California Ave, partially for this reason.

Rents go from $5-7 in downtown PA (University) and $3-5 in downtown MV (Castro) to $1-2 in the Hillview Ave/HP/etc. part of PA, or the weird ghettoey area where YC/old Hacker Dojo/etc. are (which is about 8-10 blocks from downtown MV).

There's really no great transit in the Bay Area. BART and Caltrain, if you're going on stops directly on the route, are the best. If you were going solely by transit accessibility at least cost, Millbrae would seem like the natural pick, but it kind of sucks.
I'm under the impression that these guys are in the pharma space because that is where the money is for a service provider. Pharma underwrites a lot of this stuff. Once you have a toehold in the larger health care space you can branch out and expand to other opportunities. If I were to approach healthcare on the whole I could think of worse places in the pipeline to start than big pharma.

There is a difference between bioinformatics such as genetic sequencing and its better half, analysis, and medical /clinical/research informatics. Imho, the current ability to sequence vast amounts of dna far outstrips our ability to analyze it. Better, quicker analysis will come in the form of better algorithms and through machine learning/data mining.

Medical informatics, the practice of managing patient information is a separate problem. Here the problem is connecting different systems that were not meant to be connected when designed, and great tools for parsing and presenting that data by non-programmers. I'm working with tools like Amalga and RedCap right now which each play in their own space but do provide a service. They could both be... better. The field is wide open for disruption.

Programmer time is the limiting resource factor in making better things happen for a lot of different institutions. The other major limiting factor is simply institutional politics. No amount of silicon valley magic will make that go away.
It used to have an autopwn actually in which they took out a few years ago. It would essentially scan ports, see whats open and throw the entire kitchen sink at it.
If you're interested in electronics tinkering, there's always this very nice starter pack from adafruit: http://www.adafruit.com/products/1014
Facebook _doesn't_ run PHP. A large portion of it is coded in PHP, but it runs C++ through HipHop[1]. Facebook may as well be written in anything that compiles down to C++.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP
The green line showing the average is very helpful to see the distribution in each dimension. A box plot would provide even more information.

The bezier curves look beautiful on the quantized dimensions: ratings, keywords, price.

diziet's example is released under BSD if you want to adapt it to your data. If you're interested in adding parallel coordinates to an existing application or start from scratch, I'm working on a library here:

http://syntagmatic.github.com/parallel-coordinates/
Ah. I just know people with $10mm houses in Pac Heights who sold them (a few months after buying) for a combination of "ugh, SF weather is shit and I hate it" and "ugh, we'll have to pay $30-40k/yr for each of our kids to go to school" -- buying a house in Hillsborough or Palo Alto saves money overall.
Installing Prestashop Locally
Never memorize anything you can derive.
There is no shame in pursuing a career in literature, but whether it is wise or not to spend $200k to get there instead of 75 cents in late fees at the public library..that's another thing altogether.
Using IDE in programming makes you forget the class methods and type of arguments. Is that the same thing?
> Will the public fall in love with HFR enough for an industry shift in the way films are shot, despite the fact that many of the people in the film industry feel that the look of HFR cheapens the story?

I'm guessing they will. 24fps action scenes end up as a blurry numbing mess if there's too much motion. The 48fps action scenes were exciting and easy to follow. The landscape shots were also improved.
Unbelievable. Fifty or sixty years ago, such an act of betrayal would have been answered with a summary firing, at least, and possibly a good beating as a parting gift.

Today, in our namby pamby world, someone has to ask: should I fire him? Would that be insensitive of me? Will I be sued? How will my (ex)wife feel?

The answer, since you asked, is to fire his ass for unethical behavior. If he tries to take you to court, hire a good lawyer and fight back. File a civil suit against him. Make him famous. Make him sorry he ever walked in the door.

What goes around, comes around. Important employee, my ass. No one is worth that.
> I may not be applying to the easiest jobs to get but I'm finding it incredibly difficult to even get an interview. After graduating from a top 25 undergraduate business program in 2 years and then going on to earn my MA in econ in another 2 all the while playing Division 1 football I thought it might be easier than normal to get a job.

The single best source of job listings you're going to get at this stage are the ones from your school's career services. That is a list companies that are trying to hire a recent grad from your school, which gets you through a filter. When dealing with general-purpose résumé drops online, you end up in a pile of thousands of résumés, and unless you have certain words on your résumé ("Harvard", "Stanford", "Google", etc.), it's a pretty lost cause.

Another big thing is to network. Go to conferences and meetups and such, find people who have a background similar to you doing something you want to be doing and see if they have any suggestions to fill in the middle.

Finally, find some way to demonstrate that you can "do stuff". Take publicly available data and produce something out of it. Build a model with some data in a kaggle competition. Also...

> On a positive note, it's my opinion that energy prices are a better indicator of economic growth than interest rates and energy prices should continue to fall for the foreseeable future. The only problem is how quickly the economy will artificially inflate after years of QE.

Here's a possible place to start. You're an economist - give me numbers! Turn it into a blog post or three. Demonstrate that you can find data sets, build a model/visualization/whatever, and communicate your thesis clearly. Don't know how to do something along the way? Learn it. Do it. Advertise the fact that you can do it.

> Ideally I'd like to be at an audacious startup.

> Stepping away from the startup scene and simply looking at businesses in general, it's ridiculous to think that an employer would hire you and put you to work with no training. Also a hire should be a long term strategy, turnover is very expensive and destructive to company culture.

Part of the problem is startups don't often take a long term view out of necessity. When you're 20% of the workforce of a company, you need to be producing from day 1, or at the very least demonstrate that you're a quick enough self-taught learner that you don't need dedicated resources from the company to get you producing in a timely manner - otherwise, the company isn't going to last long enough to realize your potential.
bankruptcy tourism is a thing
Whatever else you are, you're not too stupid to see what's wrong with this argument. So the fact that you're forwarding it anyway means you can't make a real point, or you are trolling.
The marriage was clearly over...

That depends on perspective but regardless of that, you don't have any information to support this. The man calls the woman "his wife", because he is still married to her. He says "she has since left me" which indicates that they were together at the time of the affair.

As the boss I would wish them both the best and continue to judge the employee based on his merits at work.

Well isn't that fantastic. I would get rid of both of them as soon as possible. Once someone betrays you, they will do it again and again.
The only real differences from running PHP/CLI that come to mind are:

* PHP_SAPI is defined to 'cli' (as compared to 'fastcgi' or similar)

* $_GET/$_POST are empty, and $_SERVER is missing the HTTP_XXX variables (duh)

* By default, there's no max execution time

I dunno, it works perfectly fine for me. It's certainly easier to read and write than shell, and I genuinely can't think of a time that an ini directive had any effect on what I was doing - unless you count the presence or lack thereof of an extension, but everyone knows that PHP's extension handling is pretty crappy.

I guess it all depends on what you're trying to do. I agree that stream handling is a little rough, although that has little bearing on what I tend to do (YMMV).

At the end of a day, it's a tool, and I have tasks that need to be done. That tool either is or isn't capable of accomplishing those tasks, and based on my own abilities it may or may not be faster than using other tools (contrary to popular opinion, I find Ruby extremely painful to work with, and avoid it at all costs; if it works for other people, good for them!)

This could be a case of "when all you have is a hammer...", but maybe I just happen to have two nails: http://www.codinghorror.com/.a/6a0120a85dcdae970b017742d249d... ;)

/edit: typo
In retrospect YC would have taken over my life no matter what. It has pushed out essays too, mostly.

I don't consider Arc to have died, incidentally. You used it to say that, and I'm using it to reply. If I ever retired from YC I'd probably start working on it more actively again.
If there is one thing every black-hat attacker in the world is truly gifted at, it is pivoting from shell access on one server to shell access on every goddam server.

I'm not even a hacker, and I have done this before.
I really don't get generation-based hatred from the author. My grandfather (who raised me) worked long and hard for decades, first as a marine, later a railroad worker and then finally a manager at AT&T/Bell. He paid far, far more into the social system than he was ever able to take out. I've felt the pain of our increasingly stratified society first hand, but I have little respect for the practice of blaming a generation who have given so much and taken so little in return. Yes medical expenses are spiraling out of control, but that's a structural problem, not a sign of a generation as a whole "screwing young people".
At one of my old jobs, a co-worker who was also our bosses best friend had intimate relations with the bosses wife. Now, obviously it's inexcusable. But then it's complicated. My boss worked and traveled a lot, leaving his stay at home wife alone and lonely in a city where she didn't have many friends and was also pretty young. And my coworker had been friends with both of them for a long time and was also quite lonely. My coworker ended up leaving the company, while my boss separated from his wife for a few months before reconciling things and moving back into together. Trust is a hard thing to regain after its lost but they seemed to have worked it out. Prior to that incident I had a very black and white view of adultery and to some extent I still do. But now I understand circumstances can be very tough for some, and I can't judge them for the vulnerabilities that afflict humans.
They seem to qualify for number 3 as well.
You can't really expect yourself to deal with someone "fairly" when this happens. A person can reason about it all he wants, he's never going to not hate the guy who slept with his wife. Get it over with at any cost, it'll drag down the company much worse than losing any employee.
Where "modern PHP style" is defined by the kind of OO frameworkization excesses that the Java community introduced to the world over 10 years ago. It's not a specific need of the enterprise, it's just a historical coincidence.

PHP happened to be the language that websites were written in at a time when the old Java guard came into management positions, bringing with them their failed ideas of what "professional" software design means.

I don't see why you think it is more justified for PHP to become J2EE than Rails/Django. PHP as a language doesn't support one style any better than the other. The only thing that really sets PHP apart from other dynamic languages is that it is a page template engine by default.

So if you absolutely have to ask one of those "why turn PHP into xyz?" questions, why not ask "why turn PHP into anything other than a page template language?".

The answer to all these questions is, because programming languages are indeed languages. People use the languages they know to say the the things they need to say and they use them to experiment with new ideas. That's a good thing.
Oh those, thanks.
Sci0029 – The Short Term and Long Term Financial Plan
Disconnect now secures you on Wi-Fi networks.