skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks!

Yeah, I've come across Pricenomics but found their data inconsistent and the sample size too small with ebay results. They're doing good work nonetheless and their front end rapes mine haha. I ain't much of a designer.
A lot of these companies, like Beamr, with extraordinarily technological claims tend to be preparations for stock pump and dump schemes. Usually their parent company will eventually be listed on:

http://stockpromoters.com/

Tim Sykes talks a lot about this stuff on his website.
That's exactly what I said, if you, the sender, have smilies turned off, you will see the normal code (...:) for example. But if receiver (the person you are sending the message to) doesn't know to turn smilies off, they will receive a graphical picture where the ":)" is in your message, even if it is part of a code block. And there are so many smilies that I don't recognize (not just the ":)" ones), that I never know what the receiver is going to see. Hence, it is useless for sending code fragments (or anything else other than conversational text), since you never know if what is on your screen matches what the receiver will see.
The Surface Pro is a PC, for all intents and purposes. The only thing setting it aside from a laptop is the touchscreen and kickstand/cover instead of a hinge/keyboard. Functionally, it can do anything a desktop PC can.

While we're definitely moving in that direction, the workflow he used is still impossible on a normal tablet for the time right now. Sketchbook Pro exists on the iPad, but as far as I can tell there's no tablet version that works with real digitizers. For now, it remains in "Work you need a real OS for" category.
IIRC, most webmail packages now (SquirrelMail, RoundCube) are just web front-ends to IMAP. It stands to reason that something more integrated, is probably more difficult.
The title isn't "Why Detroit is the next Silicon Valley" it is the reverse -- a lamentation that the bubble will eventually burst with a certain finality and it will turn San Francisco into a barren and destitute wasteland (as Detroit comparatively is).

My description is a bit dramatic and I took some artistic license but such a bold statement requires some flair for the dramatic.
The decision Beamr Video makes are "smarter" than x264's CRF mode, since they are based on a perceptual quality measure we have developed. This quality measure is similar to the one used in JPEGmini, our image optimization technology, and has been proven (in standard ITU BT.500 testing) to have higher correlation with subjective results than other quality measures such as SSIM.
Ahh, thanks for the heads up. I'm using a URI Escape function on the search terms and that might be breaking something. Looking into it now.
Finding the optimum settings for a given video is a valuable product, and this makes the criticism of being just x264 irrelevant, but his quality comparison still seems valid. If Beamr is recompressing something to a lower quality at a given bitrate compared to standard techniques, this implies that you haven't actually solved the problem of finding the optimum settings. If the tool doesn't support this, it would probably be best to turn off the constant bitrate feature until it does support it well. If you make a feature available which is directly comparable to something else, you can't legitimately complain that people make the comparison.
They aren't used interchangeably in the linked article. In the article, Americans are singled out as being particularly "weird" even compared to other "Western" nations.
Or more like, fork android and fragment the ecosystem even further akin to Amazon and Kindle.
But what does that concretely mean, "lowest bitrate or file size possible"? What do you mean by "possible"?

You almost certainly mean choosing a lower bitrate whose numerical perceptual quality is similar to the video encoded at a higher bitrate. Of course, x264 can do that—that's what the CRF value is. It already has technology to choose the best bitrate per GOP given its perceptual model.

Even if I take everything you say at face value, your semantics, at minimum, are the snake oil. You make it sound like this perceptual compression technology doesn't exist, when it actually ships on by default in Handbrake.

I think what Daiz is talking about is snake oil of the technology, not semantic, variety.

So let's talk technology snake oil. Your special perceptual model might find situations where it could reduce the bitrate in a way that x264's model would disagree. But what about situations where x264's model is better? The end-user never gets to see where x264 makes a subjectively better image than your system does at a lower bitrate.

In other words, quality arbitrage: you can always claim to reduce bitrate by adjusting your model to be a bit more permissive than the competition. Knowing there is no rigorous numerical way to compare two perception-optimizing compressors, you can get away with "arbitrage" bitrate reductions.

Put another way, a lot of people are going to demand the wrong tests, because they don't understand the inherent contradiction of comparing two perception-optimizing compressors (like allegedly Beamr and x264's CRF model).

The way I'd know if your perceptual model were in fact better is if you could show me situations where it is wrong. In other words, convert your "lowest... possible" Beamr Perceptual Model parameter to a CRF parameter. You could do it subjectively. Find me situations where x264 chooses a lower bitrate than your model. At least if your model is falsifiable, it isn't snake oil.

Incidentally, Diaz did exactly this test. And your model calculate a worse bitrate than an equivalently-chosen CRF in all cases.

So your model isn't snake oil—it's just bad. Perhaps we would randomize the subjective differences, but my suspicion is the default Handbrake CRF (20.0) will work better more than 50% of the time for randomized videos against a randomized audience.
Sure, in a few years.
Excuse my ignorance, but what do you mean by 'jailed'?
> A smarter population will lead to more peace and prosperity for the human race.

Or language wars fought with real weapons.
That's interesting. I went to a presentation last year where the presenter (I believe she was from paypal) was saying that the US was many years behind several other countries on payment methods, especially SMS.
Being generous - It sounds like beamr has a tool that can choose, for a given input video, which minimum crf option will provide a 'transparent' transcode.
This question _should_ be answered on the given site.

I know I could Google to find out, but what about the general Facebook user? They won't know what CSS is.
The Academy for Software Engineering is another effort in this area: http://afsenyc.org
Those are just preview files used for fast page load, but they are based on resized versions of the original and the JPEGmini version. You are welcome to download the original and JPEGmini full resolution files, and compare them at "Actual Size" (100% zoom).
You could compress something with Beamr first, see what bitrate it spit out, then compress with standard encoder at the same bitrate. This isn't perfect since it's clearly favoring Beamr, but it would be somewhat useful.
What's stopping them from forking android just like Amazon did?
There have been a couple of "setting up a mail server" howtos come through here. I recall one that was huge in the depth that it went into (the depth also made sure that I never got around to reading it).
Has anyone noticed that they are recommending W3Schools?

http://www.code.org/learn/codecademy
There are an incredible number of people who own trucks, and use them like cars. Even an significant number of people who have "work trucks" and "good trucks". The former for trucky things and the later for car things.
You seem to be begging the question.

The point is that if they influence other people's children into being atheists too, then the atheist section of the population grows.

If your argument is that an entirely atheist population would eventually die out altogether (having no other children to convert) then I misunderstood, but still that an equilibrium will be reached.
Thanks for the comments!

I actually originally intended this for the buyer! I wanted an iphone for myself, so I scraped the 'completed listings' page on ebay, and converted it to csv to build a histogram in excel.

The data is up to the minute. But I cache the queries in order the save computational resources. Each cache expires within 15 minutes.

Initially the data was scraped, but then I moved to the API which improved performance by 200 - 300%.
Just keep quiet about it.

I don't include 'education' on my resume, and I don't mention it to people. I can't recall the last time I was asked. Everyone seems to assume I have a degree because everyone else in the field has one.
My Visa Debit card was suspended because of Digital Ocean
Hi hackers,

Digital ocean now requires you add a credit card to activate your account and they make a test transaction ($1.23) to verify it. A day later, I got a call from my bank telling me that my cc is suspended to protect me against credit card fraud, and they wanted me to verify that transaction. I was not able to use my cc for 2 days.

I don't know what triggered their protection system, or which gateway they use to make these transactions, but just wanted to let you guys know.
How can this possibly be safe for bitcoiners? There are a lot of minecraft hacks out there.
GP most probably means that in mobile operating systems programs operate in their own environments and each process e.g. sees only its own separate file system and the means of interprocess communication are severely limited.

You cannot easily use data from one program in another, no scripting etc. That severely limits certain types of work.
Do rank and file Google engineers realize how atrociously bad Google customer service is and how much of a long-term problem this is creating for businesses?

We're not just talking about supporting "free" products here, we're talking about products you pay for. It's not just disrespectful, it's flat out evil and destructive.

Does Google realize what happens when you have a smaller business hanging on by a thread but can't find a way, after weeks of effort, to get in touch with anybody that will address their billing or approval issue in a human manner? People ultimately lose their jobs and businesses go under because Google's customer service is absolutely disgraceful shit.

This doesn't even have to be a cost center. I would flat out pay money for support if I can merely get an actual human to address stuff in a serious manner when there's an important issue that threatens my business.
Yea I was surprised to see this response. I totally sympathized with him.

I totally glossed over the part where he was boastful.

I think the response he got, and responded too, had more to do with the article being more popular than he's ever delt with before, then it did with anything he specifically said.

Its the internet, when you reach a wide audience, haters are indeed going to hate. You just have to ignore it.
Cool thanks. We're working on something where it's quite problematic getting zero byte files occasionally. It's nothing to do with the speed, because the file is always there milliseconds later. I imagine it's just that our callback is triggered by the filepicker.io api moments before the file is available on your read slaves?
The problem is that someone has to create that project as anything more than a shim in the first place. There is no reason a generic web framework should require a full-fledged compatibility effort to switch out what should be "just another library". Note that there are several incompatibilities with "true" Jinja2 at the bottom of that readme, and that support for built-in "Django tags" is necessary.

This is far less adaptable than Pyramid, which makes most internal functionality like that accessible via the request object, which can be accessed by your template language's typical variable evaluation syntax, and which can use Mako or the default Chameleon with just a one-line configuration change, or Jinja2 and others by installing a simple shim layer that is mostly boilerplate.

Personally, I've tried to use mako with django and found it unwieldy to pass the correct information across the controller-template barrier. This was some time in the past, however, so perhaps either the adapter or documentation has improved and the problem no longer exists. The real issue, however, is that a generic web framework would make it difficult to replace unrelated user-facing libraries in the first place.
Yeah, that's on the product backlog! But I'm a full time law student doing this as a side project in order to learn how to code.

NEED MOAR ENGINEERS
An interim solution for iOS ‘multitasking’
Downloading the ros-k sample and playing with it in GIMP, it looks like exactly the same kind of chicanery using a few simple steps:

1. The "original" image is saved at a very high JPEG quality setting, somewhere around 99% by GIMP's figuring

2. The "JPEGmini" version is saved with a slightly lower, but still high quality setting of about 85%.

3. The "comparison" on the website shows the images scaled down to 25% of their encoded resolution.

In other words, the JPEGmini version is nothing special. If you save a JPEG at 85% quality and look at 1/4 scale, it will look exactly the same as a JPEG saved at 99% quality at 1/4 scale. And it will look just as good as if you pass it through Beamr's software.
> We reduce each JPEG file to the minimum file size possible without affecting its original quality.

This is blatantly incorrect. In files encoded with JPEG mini, there is visible banding. They are smaller, yes, but there is certainly a perceptual difference in image quality. I tried it myself.
As someone who teaches people to code as a non-profit in an economically challenged environment, I'd invite you to stop in to one of your local non-profit-learn-to-code events and see the variety and interest of the people it attracts and the results. Not all of them will go on to become professional programmers but most of them will use code in their careers at some point in some capacity. More importantly, coding teaches self-learning, problem-solving and independence which can be applied to absolutely every way of life.
Programming Methodology by Mehran Sahami.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkMDCCdjyW8&feature=PlayL...

Main Link to the course is http://see.stanford.edu/see/courseinfo.aspx?coll=824a47e1-13...
Show HN: My winning entry to the YC Hardware Hackathon, a force feedback glove
My team designed and prototyped a haptic feedback glove.

Here is some of the technical information on this hack.

The fingers are actuated by a small hobby servo. I don't know the techincal details of this specific servo but it seemed to be a faily typical small servo. The servo arm is connected by twine through a series of braces to the fingertip. When this servo is actuated it pulls back on each finger opening the hand. All of this is hotglued to a work glove that can be worn.

For the demo at the hackathon we used a ping sensor to control the servo position. The closer the wearer moved their hand to the ping sensor, the more the hand was opened. But the idea is that any sort of sensor or data source could be used to drive the glove.

The servo and sensor were controlled by a Raspberry Pi running python. The control script can be found here:
https://gist.github.com/jminardi/5022297

And the servo control library is part of this package I wrote for Raspi hardware control:
https://github.com/jminardi/RobotBrain

TechCrunch interviewed me here, where you can see video of the glove in action:
http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/26/y-combinator-hardware-hackathon-winner/
Having 8 million people use your app I find pretty amazing, let alone classing >100M as super successful. I build SaaS web apps so for me, having > 100 paying customers I'd consider a project to be pretty successful.

The first commerical app I built myself was called Track My Ride, http://www.trackmyride.com.au. It earns me a fair slice of pie each month but nothing to retire on. Track My Ride was focused primarily on the local market that I could direct market to. My second app Rocket Mail Merge http://www.rocketmailmerge.com was actually born out of the need for easier invoice creation for my first business. It is targetted at the international market this time, primarily the US. I finished its coding at the end of last month. It's fully functional but I can't release it out of it's 'open beta' due to the abysmal lack of international credit card processing for Australian startups. It has taken so far 6 weeks to get approval from the bank, and that approval is still pending with no ETA in sight. I plan to write a topic on that in due course but not before getting my approval haha. Once I launch it I'll be writing a Show HN on it. It would be great if people found it as useful as I do.
Technology as an industry is different from verticals such as cars, books, etc. This quote by Mark Andreessen in an interview with Charlie rose sums it up well:

"The core idea we have, the core theory we have, is that the fundamental output of a technology company is innovation and that's very different than a lot of businesses, right? The fundamental output of a car company is cars. Or the fundamental output of a bank is loans. The fundamental output of a tech company is innovation, so, the value of what you've actually built so far, and are shipping today is a small percentage of the value of what you're going to ship in the future if you're good at innovation."
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-on-charlie-ro...

If you believe that Silicon Valley is good at innovation, and not just software, or hardware, or social networks, then by definition, it will continue to be the hotbed of economic activity as specific verticals die out or get disrupted.
It may be helpful to get you past the initial Catch-22, but if you can manage to get a few years of experience (let alone 20), I doubt the degree would matter much. Lots of job postings have "Or equivalent experience" after their degree requirements.
This is awesome.

I just wish someone had edited Will.i.am's quote though... I think he thinks 'reading code' is like reading music or something...

“Here we are, 2013, we ALL depend on technology to communicate, to bank, and none of us know how to read and write code. It's important for these kids, right now, starting at 8 years old, to read and write code.“
I think what Dror is saying that if you take #3 and run it through their tool you'll get a smaller size with the same quality. So it's some sort of h.264 post-processor... I agree evidence would be nice.
Domain specific languages have a role to play there. You already mentioned Regex and SQL but things like R, MathLab or even Excel can be invaluable tools in some professions.
I don't think either the PC or tablets in their current forms will be the productivity tool of the future. The floor's open to new contenders that can help people deal with data and complexity.
My friends and I made our first Android app and released it on the app store
Ok,

1) Compress the original with x264, target around 2mbit

2) Compress the result of #1 with your algorithm.

3) Compress the original with x264, target the bitrate of the result of #2

Compare #2 and #3
That's a good idea. I'm planning to build a pricing filter slider on the results page because it seems most people have a rough idea how much an item is worth.

Your problem was the reason why I filtered out results below $100. There's just too much junk below that range like "Fender Bass HELLO KITTY STRAP". Eventually I'll have to think of a way to algorithmically exclude those results.

Thanks for the suggestion.
If you get two large images and resize them down to a small preview, they'll look the same. It's really complete bullshit showing those as "examples".
One more example of how Google's customer service sucks..
You don't like the charts?

I'm guess a stats nerd so I like to see that stuff haha.

I like your feature suggestion, just put it in my product backlog.
Most likely, this has nothing to do with Digital Ocean. Saying it's because of them is misleading and libelous. Credit card issuers all have risk management systems that flag transactions for review like this. It could be something like distance between you and the merchant, time of day you made the charge, or some other change in your buying patterns.

Having to call and verify a transaction to release the hold on the card takes just a minute and happens tens of thousands of times a day. I've never owned a credit card that I didn't have to do that with at least once, and it was never the merchant's fault or anything they had control over. It's also misleading to say your card was suspended when it was merely temporarily locked until you called.
You may be expected to get permits, provide insurance or something like that.

Doing psych studies properly does include this kind of crap - they'd be no strangers to beaurocracy, having had plenty of experience with ethics committees.

I did a little over one year's worth of a PhD in cognition and physiology and gave up for my own reasons. But even if I was raring and to go, I could never have actually started testing subjects, as the relevant ethics committee only met once a quarter and they kept blocking my tasks for truly trivial reasons, different each time and never mentioned in the previous judgement. If your supervisor was at the committee, they could say "we'll alter that minor point" and you'd be fine, but if not, it was "please reapply for consideration next time". Yeah, in three months. I do not miss the politics of academia one jot.

One example of a blocked task was 'Does not state is complying to electrical standard Foo'. Which is a very reasonable statement to make, as part of the task involved using EEG electrodes. But the task was set to be conducted in their own university, on a floor wholly wired to specifically meet standard Foo, and one of the supervisors at the committee was a bloke who used exactly these labs for a similar thing. No dice, fuck you, come back in three months.

So yeah, getting permits isn't something new :)
I don't even think the system would fall apart as is. We'd just see people looking more seriously at community colleges and other options that have better value for cost.

Or at least they'd be looking at different ways of financing college that didn't leave you with an incredible debt burden that prevents you from establishing a reasonable rate of savings.
Note that if you host on a shared machine or a VM, then law enforcement is still likely to see it as your host's box with your data on it, rather than your box with your data on it.

The most conservative approach would be a co-located machine that you own (i.e. your physical property, so they probably need a warrant) or on a machine in your home.
Exactly. My father (construction) complains all the time about how trucks are no longer made for guys like him. Last I heard "work trucks" account for about 10-15% of truck sales in the US.
The Python 2 v 3 conundrum seems to have been going on for an eternity. It must be putting off new adopters in their droves. For a start, you have to make an important decision about which flavor to install and how to get started right at the beginning, with no canonical right answer to the dilemma. Do the great and the good in the Python community realize how damaging this is, and how such a thing should never ever be allowed to happen again ?
White House Petition: Eliminate price floors on agricultural products.
I'm going to answer you in detail, but it's going to take a while since I'm going to do some additional test encodes for it.

Also, you should note that I am only talking about your Beamr Video product in my post - I haven't used or tested your JPEG tools, so bringing them up here is largely irrelevant. Also, even if you have developed something effective for JPEG, does not mean you could develop something equally effective for a much more complex format like H.264.