skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a knee-jerk reaction to a situation that the Texas legislature really can't stop. Cameras are becoming more and more ubiquitous with or without drones.

Even with the law there's nothing stopping someone from posting illegally captured photos anonymously. The hobbyists will be ones that feel the impact of the law and the more clandestine drone operators that they aim to prevent will continue unabated.

I'm sure that in the not so distant future when any police officer can launch a drone all of these privacy worries will go right out the window.

In the words of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman." The good news here is that thanks to technology, our future is definitely going to be a bright place for all of us whether we like it or not.
I am pleasantly surprised to see that current GCC seems to be able to generate code for a PDP-11 target. I think there may actually even be cycle-accurate PDP-11 simulators around, which would enable you to do the benchmarking. If you do get around to it, I'd love to hear your results!
yes. there are many techniques, mainly revolving around learning to see shapes.
Learning to draw has been on my todo list for quite some time. I've started reading "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" and I bought a Wacom tablet. I can just never seem to find the time.

I think I need to find a class (Manhattan anyone?) so I can dedicate the time. It's easy enough to Google any computer language or system and learn at least the basics in a few weeks. Unfortunately, learning to draw seems like a very slow process.
I've never been great at drawing (freehand, I can do mechanical stuff okay), but I realize it's mostly because I don't put the time into it that I could and so I'm much slower at it than someone who is an expert and does it all the time (so that eventually leads to frustration). I do try to use that as a reference point for explaining to people that think they cannot learn how to program though (or learn to be better programmers). If I took the time to do draw more often, I would improve and probably learn to be halfway decent at drawing.

It's mostly about dedicating the time and working through the frustration and embarrassment (either from imaginary judgment or real). I would imagine to be an expert in drawing/painting, one has to delve into theory and concepts, such as much as a programming requires as well (Computer Science, Mathematics, etc). Sure there are people that are naturally talented in both, but to understand the "whys" of a subject, it takes more than a superficial approach to the subject.
What websites do people here suggest if one did want to learn to draw?
> There aren't enough pins on a lightning connector to directly output HDMI and even if it could, you still need a transceiver somewhere (not particularly trivial in terms of space or power to stuff in the phone).

MicroUSB+MHL accomplishes the same thing quite well on the current crop of Android phones. Why Apple chose the method they did is still quite odd.
First off, I definitely think learning how to draw is very valuable.

However, the main premise of this article is off in two ways. For one, what it terms "systems" thinking is not going away; if anything, increased computing power increases demand for this sort of thinking! This is something like Jevons Paradox[1]--the more computing power we have, the more we use it. And by extension, the more programming we do!

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I've recently been working a bit on program synthesis. This is perhaps the most direct and obvious way to use technology to eliminate programmers: we literally use absurd amounts of CPU to generate programs. But not to worry: this particular approach is not nearly scalable enough to replace programmers in the near future. In fact, it does the opposite--the most successful uses of synthesis I've seen are very limited and enable non-programmers to program rather than replacing actual programmers.

So as people have access to more and more computing power, more and more of them are going to have more and more reasons to use it effectively. Combine this with more accessible tools and we see much more programming in the future. However, this is not really going to supplant actual, professional programmers: after all, somebody is going to have to develop tools and abstractions.

Moreover, as we get increased computing power, demand is also going to go up for non-programming uses of computers. People are going to want to do more and more with there increasingly capable machines and so they're going to need more and more programs--more and more programmers.

Really, that's the keyword in the whole field: more.

The second fault of the article is in contrasting "creative" and "systems" thinking. In practice, the very best programmers stand out not because of their technical prowess or even logic capability but because of their creativity. There is a reason the ultimate compliment in math and programming is not "complex" or even "capable" but "elegant".

Perhaps I am biased, and perhaps I am simply envious, but I believe that the field with the most creativity and the most beauty is abstract mathematics. The interesting proofs, theorems, abstractions, constructs in mathematics require immense creativity and carry immense beauty.

Yes, math is a field of rules. But, just like music, the real innovation often involves changing or going around the rules. Or just inventing new ones. It is really not that different from art.

Programming is also like this, to an extent. I don't think most programming is quite as beautiful as much of math. But it is beautiful. That sort of beauty is a testament to creativity.

Anyhow, I really do think you should learn to draw. And a bit about design. Typography. Writing. But not for the reasons outlined here. And certainly not at the expense of math, CS and programming!
I totally agree Larry. I am definitely taking the intiative. My plan of attack right now, unsure if this is the right idea, is to take a large sample to upcoming meetups for people to try my food, hit up companies via email, twitter, etc... past clients that are willing to go direct, and lastly hitting up nearby startups for sure. I am totally committed to doing whatever I can right now. My whole business is at stake. Going to spend all night tonight to strategize and make a list of companies to reach out actually. Appreciate the comments. This is incredibly hard for me to admit public. I will hustle.
The guy supposes that instead of learning how to code, one should learn how to draw, for it is a better way to become more creative.

Why on earth programming should be considered less creative than drawing? In no way does drawing require less technique and training than programming. Also, in no way programming and visual arts are opposite; art can be, and for decades has been, created through programming.
Do you have some example queries to debug?
Just say when and where. I will email tonight. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much. I appreciate your words at this time.
It was more that Facebook et al have sophisticated gamification to keep one engaged, HN just has karma (and community) yet I react like one of Skinners rats. I suppose if I have learnt something it's get addicted to something that has positive effects
What are the fees charged for a purchase made with a bank card instead of a credit card.

(debit cards in Canada, not sure what you call them in the states)
Why is that far fetched? It's how roads and prisons are managed.
You try to make something perfect and don't succeed so you don't feel satisfied?

Welcome to the club of mere mortals!

Even Michaelangelo probably wasn't completely satisfied with some tiny spot on David or the Sistene Chapel that looked like an enormous blot to his trained eye and unmeetable standards, while virtually everyone else probably couldn't see it and considered the work a masterpiece.

If you set impossible standards for yourself you will get nothing but frustration and disappointment. Part of being an artist is learning to either set more realistic expectations or learn to work despite your own feelings of inadequacy.
It's like I'm sayin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cyJNOH8kX8
Just because my interest rate is 12% doesn't mean that this is the cost to the bank. The cost to the bank of floating this loan is the rate the bank pays for its money, which has been about 0.2% for the last four years. But you do raise a valid point: part of the problem is the conflation of payments and credit. I'll be writing about that in a future post.
Thank you. I am slowly trying to calm down. Definitely don't want to over react. It is incredibly insanely hard for me to open up like this as it leaves me super vulnerable and pretty much puts everything on the table. I wouldn't be doing this if I honestly didn't feel like things were extremely bad and I realize its never good to not be calm about a situation, or any situation. Just hearing some support here has helped more than I can say.
There are definitely not enough pins to do straight pin for pin HDMI through lightning. Of course, if you are going to go to the trouble to do what they did, you may as well bitstream it through the adapter, ...
Sorry, I was thinking of U.S. exchanges. You're correct that international ones are outside of the scope of U.S. law--though interestingly, California does take the view that the MTA can police other states.
> Law enforcement officers could only use drones while executing a search warrant or if they had probable cause to believe someone is committing a felony, and firefighters can only use drones for fighting fire or to rescue a person whose life is “in imminent danger.” Texas’ border-patrolling Predator drones are exempt within 25 miles of the Mexican border. There are additional penalties for possession, display or distribution of data captured by an illegally flown drone. Gooden said the goal is to protect Texans’ privacy.

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-02/privacy-and...
I also naively thought that by "killing" C-30, the online surveillance bill, the Canadian government was respecting the wishes of Canadians who vomited all over it. C-55, introduced on the exact same day, however, retains the ability to bypass warrants, at police discretion. Couple that with the ratification of ACTA (which the EU flat out said NO to), and escalating language over copyright, and C-30 is still on the Canadian government's agenda. All they did was boil it down to the crux: warrants come second.

Edit: I submitted to HN for discussion a relevant article by Openmedia.ca... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5308784
I am guessing the author pulled a Broder/Tesla situation on this story. Gist may be true, but the details were fuzzed for a better story/self aggrandizement. I particularly don't buy the whole "You were the only nice person to these poor 'deaf' children all day" angle. I have worked fairly often with people in the deaf and blind communities and if anything they complain that people treat them too kindly in general and not as a normal person.

As for a reason why the author would lie, a quick persual of his site makes it pretty clear he is trying to kickstart his career in the Apple blogger niche. Story like this may be a good way to get it started.
Nothing beats finding a good, respected teacher and taking a class with them.
I'm an artist.

Honestly I'm not gonna hold my breath for this GIANT SOCIAL CHANGE where ART IS IMPORTANT!!!! to happen. Right now pretty much all creative media that are digitizable are passed around online. Music, movies, comics, still art - if it's not painfully obscure, you can probably get it for free on the bittorrents.

Hell, if it's painfully obscure, you can also probably get it for free. Maybe you'll tell your friends about it, the thinking goes, and maybe eventually a friend of a friend will feel like buying a book or a t-shirt or pay for a download or otherwise put money in the artist's pocket and give us some faint hope of (a) making enough money to keep a roof over our heads while making the stuff we want to make and (b) actually having people beyond our immediate peers reading/watching/listening to/whatever our stuff.

If we DO actually manage to get to a place where enough people are well off enough in general to be able to spend a lot of their time making art instead of scrambling for enough to live on in a dark caricature of a capitalist nightmare, then it'll only get worse. Because then there will be a LOT more people vying for your attention with their creative work.

Meanwhile, right now? If you're an artist you pretty much have to engage in a constant scramble to look for work to do for other people unless you are at the very top of the food chain. If you're a halfway decent programmer you just have to announce that you're unemployed on LinkedIn and you get spammed by headhunters.

I dunno, maybe I'm just feeling especially valueless because I've just spent all day sitting in a lonely corner of a comics convention, watching maybe a couple hundred people wander by out of the several thousand who are attending the con, and having exactly one person buy something. (If you're in Seattle and doing ECCC this weekend, stop by booth 2503 and say hi!)
A lot of things that I don't want to happen occur when I click on a link. Cookies are sent to foreign servers without my knowledge or consent. Advertisements are displayed. Audio can be played without my consent. Powerful flash and javascript plugins can run without my consent that can hijack my browser and deny me the use of my computer until I restart it.

When I click on a link, I want a remote text and image viewer. Sometimes I'll allow certain sites like youtube to run flash, even automatically. This computer is my tool, not someone else's, and in 2013 clicking on a link shouldn't be a wildly uncontrolled and dangerous experience.
Hehe, the best scene in the movie.
What about both?
http://ellatoons.quora.com/
Not sure if the latter is a good example, since the prison industry is one of the most corrupt in the country.
Honestly, I don't fault the agency. Although I did not mention their name, if anything was wrong, it was probably my fault. I relayed as much and as honestly of the story from my point of view as I can. At this point, I'm putting everything on the table. It may not seem like it but this is an insanely difficult thing for me to even write or admit publicly with my name out there. I don't want to place blame on anyone. At the end of the day, the mistakes were mine and any big or small mistakes along the way (serious or not) does not change the situation. I can only learn and hope to move forward.
The interchange fees for debit transactions start around 0.8% for Visa. The exact fee varies by card type and by merchant category code. That's about half what Visa charges on low-end credit cards.
Yeah, maybe I will try it the next time around. Thanks so much for your advice. I am willing to try anything at this point, or rather just do my best moving forward.
"But in the next 50 years, those that excel in creativity-- big picture thinkers, artists, inventors,designers -- will rise to the top."

Let's ignore inventors (because unless you're inventing "the Snuggie", there's a very high chance you have an STEM background) and big picture thinkers (which is a meaningless term). The tone of the article suggests that the author is talking about art for arts sake (e.g. a band) and not design for a product i.e. industrial design or graphic design. If he is including products, who will actually create the products, now that all of the engineers are gone? If he is not including products, then for every million artists, only one will get meaningful recognition, as why would anyone consume less than the best content?

"The illiterates of the future will not be those who cannot read and write or code, but those who cannot connect the dots and imagine a constellation."

A constellation, and connecting dots? That's so uncreative! I hear the stars sing to me, and they tell me that I'm a big picture thinker.

"A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs from 60 countries and 33 industries identified creativity as the No.
1 “leadership competency” of the future (more than rigor, management discipline, integrity and even vision)."

Because of course, creativity in this context means ability to draw.

"Education and parenting should aim to provide the conventional skills (math, problem solving, and test taking skills) while also encouraging creative, out-of-the-box type thinking. Computers are no match for the average fourth-grader when it comes to creativity."

Again, is the author talking about creativity in the context of drawing, playing and instrument, etc, or "out-of-the-box" thinking? If it's the second, what does he think problem solving skills are? And what exactly does he think programming is?

"Instead of encouraging your child to major in engineering, you might encourage her to study philosophy, ask smart unsettling questions and practice making unusual and unexpected mental associations."

Yes, I've never heard of an scientist or engineer asking unsettling questions, or making mental associations.

"Albert Einstein said; I have no special gift. I am only passionately curious.”

Unfortunately, Einstein's background was in physics. So, while he was curious, he can't be considered to be creative. He should have studied philosophy instead.
No. Learn to code and draw and write and play an instrument. They are all the same thing really.
"If you’re not different then you’re boring."

This statement is completely true, if you aren't doing something to set yourself apart from the other 50 applicants for the job, then you are pretty much leaving yourself up to luck whether or not you get picked.

I do however disagree with their suggestions for the vast majority of jobs out there. I would only send a poster/video if I knew the person that is probably going to look at it will respond positively to it. This could be effective for a marketing or graphic designer type of position. I would never do something like that for an engineering position.

You must market yourself effectively to get interest. Applying for a job is just selling a product (you) to a company and unless you stand out they aren't going to have any interest in you.
A quote from the article: "The next big [issue] is dimming. Many fluorescents that are available do not dim well. Incandescent lamps dim very nicely. They dim all the way from 100 percent light all the way to 0 percent light. They do it very smoothly and very predictably. Consumers are used to that kind of smooth dimming.

Typically when you dim a compact fluorescent it can flicker, it can buzz, it can create all kinds of what I call “unintended consequences” that disturb the consumer. So the consumer is left with a less-than-satisfied level with this kind of technology."

That's really annoying and surprising to hear. I designed dimmable flourescent power sources for the Space Shuttle in the early 1970s, those dimmers worked very well, so it's not as though the technology doesn't exist.

This may not matter very much, because it seems high-efficiency LED-based lights will likely replace compact flourescents before the latter become truly acceptable replacements for incandescents. The linked article doesn't mention this, even though the change has already begun.
The "probable cause" exemption is bullshit. If you have probable cause, get a warrant.

No patrols, no police drone leaves the ground without a warrant targeting a specific person or group.
Social Work in the Tenderloin is Not Hopeless
“Did we just rip off Marco Arment and The Magazine?”
Please cc me (siqi@herelabs.com) as well. Thanks!
Disclaimer: By writing the following I do not wish to discount the value of art (in its classic visual, musical, etc. forms) as an encouragement of creativity, or in general.

That said, it is a mistake to say that technical ("systems") capability is in any way contrary to creativity. In every art form, there is a technical prerequisite before expressing creativity. When a person learns how to draw or play an instrument (not to mention architecture, woodworking, product design, or programming), they grapple much more with the technical challenges in creating the image or sound that they imagine much more than with creativity. What facilitates creativity most is a mastery of techniques (craftsmanship) to the point that the technical is mainly subconscious. This is true of all of the above mentioned activities. Or another way to think about it is that technical incompetence can crush creativity and make people abandon projects that they would like to create.

(As a side note, I've actually been encouraged about the state of creativity in our culture by seeing that a lot of the people who are excited about programming have come to it in order to create, not in order to find technical solutions to technical problems.)
Doesn't make sense to me (19 years old) or any of my friends either. The point is that it's ridiculous. I think largely in part to the internet, absurdism may now be part of our youth culture. It may always have been, but it's pretty easy for weird things done by close friends (original Harlem Shake video) to become hugely popular over the internet.
At work today we were discussing ideas for a hack-a-thon we're having next month and I suggested a website that would take a URL and make any website do the harlem shake. Looks like I got beat to the punch.
As in thanks for linking it to hacker news, because I didnt after finding the article last night.
Yeah...my bad, I didn't see the first post until just now.
Understanding Bayes Theorem With Ratios
The bank's costs also include bad debt and fraud, which are high for credit cards; are you including those in your figures? At any rate, the opportunity cost to the bank of giving free credit to the consumer (by structuring the billing cycle this way) is the retail cost of the money (what you would have paid them) not the wholesale cost.

Debit cards are a whole different story, of course, because no credit is extended.
We've got the Conservative Party of Canada on the right, and the Liberals, the NDP, the Greens, and the Bloc on the left. The left is too busy competing with itself to win against the right.
Thunderbolt definitely is designed as a replacement for Firewire, USB, 10 Gbit Ethernet, HDMI, and all other current wired connections. It's been advertised as such for a while.

I first heard about Lightning just 2 days ago. I'm now confused between Thunderbolt and Lightning, and frustrated that I'll have to go learn about their differences.
What does BSD vs GPL have to do with my stove or microwave?
The funny thing is he would have been much richer if he got fired much sooner. That would have given him an excuse to sell his stake before it tanked. Being the CEO meant he couldn't dump his stock.
Canada: Is online spying dead? New threats and the case for vigilance
Drawing realistic fine art is a rare skill, which like many skills can learned with sufficient devotion. 10000 hours, I think.

That said, contempory artists like Kelvin Okafor whose renditions of Heath Ledger, Rihanna, Princess Diana still amaze me.

Do enjoy - http://www.flickr.com/photos/kelvinokaforart

His blog also contains tutorials of sorts - http://kelvinokaforart.blogspot.com
Next up camera on a balloon!
As long as he sells soon and realises his gains, otherwise he might end up with nothing. The money isn't real till the shares are sold.
oh wow. I was watching the video and thought, "oh whatever, it's just like a visualization of some vim style editing". Then I realized that you really did something amazing. "oh daaaaaamn, he just made a visual editor that could become the next vim."
I've participated in the political process in Texas and I'm not sure that this is true. Take for example HB 80: http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/tlodocs/83R/billtext/pdf/HB00...
AAaa! the ant solution!