skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And drawing well really depends on your standards, the time you devote to the pursuit, and your dedication.

If you are past retirement age and want to achieve the technical proficiency of a DaVinci or Durer while painting on the weekends, then I'm sorry to tell you, but that's probably just not going to happen.

If you are young and incredibly dedicated, and devote a lot of time to it, maybe you can achieve something like that (on a purely technical level, though it arguably takes much more than this to achieve anywhere near as much on an artistic level above sheer technical skill).

For those of us with lesser ambitions, a lot can be achieved without becoming very technically proficient. There's a lot of satisfaction that can be had from emotionally stirring, but perhaps not technically perfect work.

This is a much more realistic goal. But it's still a difficult one because you have to get beyond completely cliched depictions (unless that's what you're aiming at), and achieve some sort of technical proficiency. This will likely take some time and effort, but should be achievable for most people who can devote sufficient time and effort to the pursuit, and not give in to discouragement.

And then there are the so-called "naive" and "art-brut" sort of artists, who may have no technical proficiency at all and yet make work that is satisfying to themselves and/or others. There, by definition, they have no training to speak of, but often make art through obsession, mental illness, or for a wide variety of other reasons.

Finally, there are the so-called "weekend painters", who work infrequently, at their leisure, and usually without extravagant aims or demands on themselves. They can also be quite pleased with their output, and often create just for the sheer joy of it, or with a very modest aim of achieving a little technical proficiency. This is quite doable and quite satisfying for many.
I see this a lot here and I feel that I should point it out; industrial design is an engineering discipline. It is similar to architecture in many respects.
How you can help two baby girls whose mother and brother were just murdered
As others have said, find a great teacher.

I thought I was completely unskilled at drawing. Heck, stick figures were beyond my grasp. And then, by chance, I ran into an awesome teacher at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum Of Art). I went to his class to humor my partner - she's an artist and wanted me to learn more.

In the first class, we started sketching the human figure (based on a statue) - and the guy was good enough to make me understand what to do and how to get a realistic depiction. Now, granted, that is still miles from what any decent artist could do, but he made things click for me.

Reading a book won't do that for you. Find somebody who can teach you in person what drawing feels like. Who can, if necessary, take your hand and draw with you. Who can relate the ideas behind painting in a way that makes sense to you.
I was actually part of the store opening crew. Worked there March '06 to May '08, but I'll bet you worked with some of my good friends.
I don't know what to take from this.

That search is very complex (I knew that, but not with this technical detail).

Or...that Google is trying very hard to maintain user interest with gimmicky shows of why it's cool and cutting edge and necessary.

Not that Google isn't those things...this just seems like an unnecessary expenditure of time. We know it's complex Google. Improve some other features and stop shutting others down instead of making these web 2.0 animations.
The weird rules of creativity
Thanks :D -- that's my hope!
Right now, we are not pivoting. We have a business model we believe in that was working (albeit some things have to change). I have no plans to be a catering agency or compete with those guys. I just want to cater to startups with the food we have to offer, that we know our customers love. Going direct in the long term makes the most sense for us but we would not rule out working with agencies at all. As a matter of fact, I appreciate everything they can do to help. Any and all mistakes relating to what happened is that of my own.
"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 have devoted a lot of my time to making art, and I can tell you that frustration is a fact of life for me. I'm virtually never as good as I want to be. My work rarely turns out the way I want; and this doesn't even begin to touch on issues of coming up with ideas and creativity/originality. Learning to deal with and live with failure is just something many ordinary artists have to do constantly.

"Fail early and often" is as much of a maxim to live by for artists as it is for entrepreneurs.

Perhaps 1 in 100, or 1 in 1000 works will be something you're pleased with, and then you can count that as a success. Or perhaps the journey can be counted as much or more of a success than the destination. A lot depends on your expectations.

William Staford was once asked how he was able to write a poem every day. He answered, "I lower my standards."
That was a Saturday Night Live sketch starring Jon Lovitz yelling, "I'm Picasso!" and trying to pay his tab with a scribble on a napkin. I think Kevin Nealon played the waiter.
That statement is easy to make from a position of privilege. His point is that a very different dance of the same name from black culture has now been replaced in the public consciousness by a parody of itself on YouTube.
He/she is referring to that this fake Harlem shake from youtube has nothing to do with the real Harlem shake, a dance that's been around for 30 years.

Also, the term "trap music" for that electronic music isn't the original trap music either, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfPjYdef1lg
Haswell will launch much sooner than you expect.
Mauthausen (not Auschwitz) is a trip everyone needs to make. The most moving experience of my life was visiting it when I was younger. There's just something about that camp. It's remote and ominous. It really gives you a chance to contemplate just how awful that whole episode of human history was.
16 of the best new ideas in UI
From FastCo.Design comes a list of the most exciting new ideas in UI.
Code lets you magnify your creativity more than any pencil or sketchpad. Its currently one of the greatest forms of leverage for the human mind and creative minds of the future will necessarily need to understand it to realize their true creative potential.
> There is no physical hemispheric dominance, there are just ways of thinking.

Well, those right-handed people who have had strokes in their left middle cerebral artery distribution might beg to differ on this point. However, I got this far because I found your first paragraph to be quite compelling writing.
Yahoo shutting down Message Boards and other services
That's not the way culture works, has worked, or should ever work. Cultural interchange and osmosis is the name of the game, without it we'd be stuck with isolated, provincial, outmoded cultures. In this case I don't see any aspect of the recent so-called "harlem shake" meme lessening the culture or the name of harlem.

A better argument would be that the "new" harlem shake isn't dancing, it's just spastic upper body movements.

P.S. If anything I'd say that more people are going to learn about the real harlem shake due to the popularity of the faux harlem shake than if the latter had never existed. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5m6sJCbZEk
I assume that someone is now trying to install Linux on one of these?
Hell yeah! That entire Mr. Show episode is a classic.
AN is such an exciting insight; intuition can be broken down in to many accumulating algorithms whereas we attribute intelligence to distinctly experience-based interpretation.
If you really want power, use NumPy:

from numpy import arange

def squares_numpy(n):
a = arange(n)
return a * a

$ python -m timeit -s "from squares import squares_append" "squares_append(1000)"
10000 loops, best of 3: 130 usec per loop
$ python -m timeit -s "from squares import squares_comprehension" "squares_comprehension(1000)"
10000 loops, best of 3: 95.4 usec per loop
$ python -m timeit -s "from squares import squares_numpy" "squares_numpy(1000)"
100000 loops, best of 3: 5.31 usec per loop
The voting machine tampering affected the popular vote count but he won by the electoral college so it was kind of a moot point.

The liberals here like to blame every conservative win on voting machine fraud and gerrymandering and the conservatives like to blame every liberal win on minorities and illegal immigrants. In reality, the country is split pretty evenly (not geographically uniformly) and we got a second term with Obama despite DieBold's management publicly endorsing Romney. So both sides have a tendency to inflate their claims.
Why thank you. As a mechanistic science robot, I find that flattering. I meant no hemispheric dominance with regards to how people think, not in terms of physical/motor skill. My bad
Neither are meant to be good examples. The outsourcing of prisons, in particular, should seem to be a far-fetched concept that nevertheless occurs regularly. I don't see the outsourcing of domestic surveillance to be any more far-fetched.
We had your catering a few months ago, I remember it being delicious, hope everything turns out for the best!
Apple Stock Just Crashed To A New Low
education discounts can be applied in store, as well as the other education offers they occasionally do, like the free iPod touch during the back to school season.
I agree - I am more concerned about telling kids to draw instead of learning to code, when it would be much more beneficial to do both. This is a glaring flaw in an otherwise prescient essay.
Sounds very similar to programming then :).

We typically think our code is never good enough and can always be improved. Learning when something is "good enough" or as you mentioned "lowering one's standards" can lead to a more productive and happier life.
Yes battery power and general speed.
On the other hand, it's hard to sacrifice more/better programs over speed; but IMO it does matter.
Let me ask you an honest question - why do you even feel the need to bring up Japanese internment in the context of and article on the Holocaust? Do you want to lessen the horror of the Holocaust, or do you really think the US behaved morally like Nazis in WWII?
Well Balanced also offers a service that some claim is illegal: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5299327

And has yet to offer a response other than "thanks!"

I'm also not sure how many customers Balanced has or what kind of volume they're doing, but I suspect that they're taking o a whole lot of risk with next day payouts that Stripe and Braintree refuse to take on. While some businesses may like this, I find it worrisome.
We're All Wired, For Better or Worse
I had a look your site and you seem to be a very enthusiastic team. I'm glad you took this step.

Over the last one year, I've seen many people being helped by HNers. One particular example being that of a founder in India being helped with a lawyer to take care of some legal nuisance.

Wish you good luck. And hope you grow big.
The publicity will help. In fact, go and open up a free blog and write about it. People tend to eat this off and it will be you sales. Realize that people love underdogs and want to be part of happy endings. By sharing the process with them they will become emotionally invested and then be obliged to root for you (which means more sales). All startups go through scramble mode. It's normal.
I don't think anyone who'd actually had this happen to them would've written it as a "happy story." This is inconsiderate bullshit. You would have to be a pretty awful teacher to put a class of immature children in the position of deceiving people as a social experiment.

If this person had actually been working retail during a massive launch and found out these kids had been messing with him on their teacher's orders, the reasonable reaction would have been -- at very least -- "you should be ashamed of yourselves." And being a retail employee during such a shitstorm would almost certainly have precluded that much tact.

True or false, this just is not something a decent person (the teacher) would choose to do, for any of several reasons.
Maine State Police purchases $300 ‘toy’ drone for tactical missions
Thanks for the clarification. I actually watched "objectified" - http://player.vimeo.com/video/50944978 today, a good documentary about industrial design.
BigDog four-legged robot arm-throw
In the age of online marketing, those who master the offline variant are kings. A sales message delivered by a real person outsells the same message delivered by a gadget.
"I voluntarily teach math at a school here in MN, so i get some insight into what's going on at the schools and the fact is, while the politicians and corporations are sounding off about STEM, at schools people are still talking more about funding "the arts"."

From what I understand, if you are a math teacher you virtually have a guaranteed job at many, many highschools across the nation. If you're an art teacher, good f'ing luck.

The cold, hard fact is that art, music, dance, and theater are not considered serious occupations by the overwhelming majority of people in the US (despite their worship of celebrity artists, musicians, and actors). If it's their kid, they want the kid to be a doctor, lawyer, or (more recently) dotcom billionaire.

Art/music/dance/drama class just does not fit in to this very narrow-minded view of the world, where profit and fame are king. Some kids are so driven that they might take an art class (usually their first semi-serious one is in high school.. and by then, how many math classes have they had?) or even study it at university. But if they do study it at university, it's either as one of many electives or (if as a major) against their parents' objections -- because most parents know how hard it is to "succeed" in this society as an artist, musician, dancer, writer, or actor.

If you are an engineer or programmer, nevermind doctor or lawyer, you're going to usually be taken much more seriously and get more respect from most people than any kind of non-celebrity artist. And funding in the schools generally reflects these sad but all too common views.

Unfortunately, scientists and teachers are often in the same boat as far as lack of respect as artists are. But even there, the amount of funding given to educating more scientists and teachers is far greater than that devoted to educating various artists.

The dollar is king in America, and the overwhelming majority of artists are near the bottom rung of the money ladder in this country. Odds are you'll make far more money working at McDonalds than you ever will as any kind of artist. And, a bit of philanthropy notwithstanding, the rest of society reflects this monetary bias.
For what it's worth, my office gets food catered from you guys and its fantastic. I always look forward to it. It's a huge bummer to hear things aren't working out for you guys. Wish there was a way I could help!
That's just another way to state my point. Depending on theatricality instead of actually EARNING trust is exactly the wrong way to approach such a goal.
Highlights from the Internet of Things World Forum Steering Committee meeting
Hey man, I'm not in the Bay Area so there's probably not a whole lot I have to offer you. But I'll be happy to at least tweet, G+, Facebook, etc., your link and try to help get the word out.
Already there; they are called aerostats.
I can only imagine BrainTree was different in 2008. I just integrated BrainTree into a two-platform system. It took the team a week, most of which was integrating with our order system and doing the UI. The API itself is very pleasant in my opinion.
if i were in SF i'd totally order (moved away a few years ago)

but if anyone is listening, west LA needs more startup-oriented catering. it's a pain in the ass to go to lunch as everyone drives and delivery is shitty because everyone drives (hence food is always cold, late, etc.)
Cristina from Stripe here.

There are a few major differences between Stripe Connect and Balanced. Amber from our team details them here: http://www.quora.com/Balanced/How-does-Balanced-compare-agai...
I wonder what the biggest application is that they have benchmarked or that runs on PyPy.

speed.pypy.org has benchmark info on Django, Twisted and some other large, non-trivial codebases.
> No, but neither did the author so he couldn't tell they were making signs up.

I'm sure a bunch of high school students' pretend sign language would be quite easy to spot for a decently intelligent adult, especially if you have to interact with them one by one.

> No, it just says they browsed other stores.

Explains a bit about why other stores were not as nice to them then, if they didn't actually buy anything...

> How hard is it to act deaf?

I'd say pretty damn hard if you were in high school, in a group, on a field trip.

> Speaking of unbelievable...this is Apple, right? Not known for their eagerness to cut a deal.

Apple does give bulk discounts, and if it's for a school I'm sure they should be in a program like that instead of paying retail.

> I don't understand why someone would lie about this.

People just do, for various reasons. Some you may understand, some you may not, but that doesn't change the fact that people do lie (especially for HN karma :P)
You haven't used software until you've used it in anger.
Cristina from Stripe here.

Stripe just launched in beta in the UK and is available in Canada as well, whereas I believe Balanced is only available to users in the U.S.

Many customers with international buyers and sellers have opted to use our Stripe Connect product for that reason: https://stripe.com/connect
I don't know what you are discussing. I am discussing the absolute fact that focusing on any real or imaginary gains that could be had by insisting on using any editor at all is ridiculous in the context of where the real problems are in developing software products.
The Gameification of Medicine: How Video Games Are Sharpening Surgical Skills
the public education promotions can, but when you purchase for a classroom you get additional discounts (and the stores are not authorized to give it)
This site is a rip off of the work that macrumors has been doing for several years.

See: http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/

At the very least they should provide a credits link somewhere on their page.
A combination of both. I think the vast majority (if not all) of the questions in Steve's book are on our list, and then there are some more we added.

Shoot me an email at prhodes (at) fogbeam (dot) com and I'll be happy to share our list of questions with you.
The current design prevents users from accessing the actual 1080p video stream from the device, too.

The cynic in me says this is an end-run around any DRM issues giving access to that 1080p bitstream could introduce: instead let's just output a degraded, upscaled stream and call it HD.
This just made my day, great job.
That's already part of the soc and also most likely part of the Apple AX SOCs of the iOS devices as Apple uses PowerVR for graphics.
If you're mobile or have the potential to be, my suggestion would be to consider heading for Seattle or Minneapolis. Both have great startup cultures without as much of the pretense or ridiculously insular "culture" of California. There are also plenty of other places that could present similar opportunities if you actually feel you've shot yourself in the foot in your area.

Several people have pointed out that you may be overreacting, and I agree. If that turns out not to be the case, definitely keep in mind that the west coast is absolutely not the be-all, end-all of startup culture, and startup culture absolutely is not the be-all, end-all of your potential clientele.

You clearly do your work well. Instead of freaking out over a knee-jerk reaction from one of your middlemen, look for more stable resources. Collect references from your happy clients and publish them. Unless you're seriously misrepresenting yourself, there's no reason you can't succeed in spite of this mishap.
Interesting... For some reason, the hacker news home page does not shake!
> or even the swimmer (did I mention I'm learning to swim?

I wholeheartedly recommend Terry Laughlin's Total Immersion technique. It emphasizes swimming like a fish, stroke length, low stroke count, zen-like being in the moment. The beginning drills emphasize basic buoyancy and balance techniques - and the arm propeller-based swimmers will look at you strange when you practice them in a public pool - but keep with it, you will lower your stroke count and eventually enjoy swimming for fitness.

http://www.totalimmersion.net/
Those who don't know about computers have two choices. Accept that it is a lack in their knowledge. Or fight fiercely that their ignorance is somehow justified.
Was the teacher smoking hot good looking?
Cristina from Stripe here. Thanks for the comment.

Many marketplaces want to avoid the liability for transactions that take place on their platform. This is specifically why we built Stripe Connect (https://stripe.com/connect). It allows the marketplace to provide a way to accept payments to their sellers. The buyers and sellers can the transact with each other and the marketplace avoids liability.

Balanced provides the ability to pass disputes onto the seller, but the marketplace ultimately has full liability for chargebacks, fraud, and so on.

With Stripe Connect, each seller is responsible for charges run through their own Stripe account. This removes any liability from the marketplace, and is really useful if you want to purely be a platform of facilitating payments and don’t actually want to be involved in the risk and complexity of handling any of the money.
Don't be pedantic. It's clear from the context that he meant in terms of "right-brained = creative, left-brained = analytical".
ping and ARP ... ping can be turned off for instance.
If you feel bad about that, have a look here: http://www.apple.com/legal/trademark/appletmlist.html

Apple copyrighted words like: quartz, logic, cocoa...
I usually trust a developer to absolutely ruin the UX of a product any day

The level of contempt of some developers is amazing, too bad they don't know UX 101
The Boy Genius Report: Apple’s iMac takes desktop crown
Political parties in this country would never stoop to criminal activity to gain strategic information. Why, if such a thing were to happen, and to involve high-ranking government officials, I bet it would be a major national scandal and maybe even lead to some unprecedented resignations!
New 27" imac
I purchased one of these fancy new IMACS with all the added stuff like Fusion Drive all the memory etc. Cost me nearly $4,000 I have had years of experience with Windows operating Systems But the sleek looks got me so I bought it at my kids goading to switch to apple. I must say that Apple does have the best and fastest customer service/support around. Its the operating system that sucks. Windows has them beat hands down. I have a hard time getting the fonts large enough to see because of the ultra high resolution, Graphics and Pictures are stunning to say the least. I called to see about make the print larger and it can't be done in the highest resolution mode. I talked to a nice tech about it and he in speaking said the #1 complaint that he has seen over the past 12 years is the awkward operating system. Pushing a button and a letter for a command went out the window years ago in my book. After saying all of this would I buy another IMAC and the answer is HELL NO!! Plus they have no easy solution for installing windows 7.0 on the big 3TB fusion hard drive without a lot of extra steps. The hard ware is the best and maybe even the fastest non-custom computer on the market. Its like buying a Corvette with a V6 Motor.. Ask yourself if you would do that???
Thanks
Drew
Seeking Work - http://codetheory.in/resume/