skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google Glass App recognizes people by their clothes
Much of this advice is applicable to any Unix. For instance 'man man' is good advice on a Mac, too.
Is it really better to have less and be emotionally attached to that than to have a lot of junk and not care about it?

As for the carbon footprint - it's just as much vanity as everything else in our lives. When you die, you won't be rewarded for having had a small carbon footprint, just like your wealth will be useless to you.
Bootstrap 3 is not launched yet and Foundation 4 is. That's what I meant by "slightly ahead".
RSA compromised via Flash embedded in Excel
Do both: long-form blog posts on cool topics, tweets on what piques your interest now. There's no mutual exclusion here.
Vinyl is inferior to good (not lossy) digital.

Using vinyl as a medium is daft.

I do miss album covers. I don't miss the noise, defects, expense, and fragility.

Good speakers are worth the money. Vinyl is not in any way worth any money nor is worth obsessing about (unless obsession is the goal).

I do have an un-played Mosaic MQ10-177 available for anyone daft enough to be interested in vinyl. I thought it a worthy specimen of obsolete technology.
Never mind endangered animals – it's the thinkers that we need to save
This rings true and people always seem to forget that it's much easier to innovate when the cost of living is lower.

I'm currently living in Auckland, New Zealand, which by NZ (and world standards I think, though can't cite anything off hand) is quite expensive, but myself and my girlfriend have been contemplating moving to Sydney, Australia, a city which is one of most expensive in the world but where we would both be paid more. The cost of living there makes it a complete non-starter if you're not just wanting to work full time - and then trying to eek out a pleasurable life at the weekends.

I currently contract 3 days a week to support myself while working on my startup and trying to fit in some time for music as well in the other 4 days (and try to get relaxation each week too). The money I make wouldn't last very long in Sydney or any world city for that matter, I guess that's where the VC is supposed to kick in, but if it doesn't then you're in trouble.

If it's one thing I've worked out recently, full time, 40 hour week style employment is the enemy of me being able to pursue any sort of interesting side project, I'm sure it's similar for others. It's a realisation that, now I've had it, I can't imagine ever working under those conditions on anything but my own projects. High costs of living such as those in SF and Sydney (and even Auckland) can necessitate such income just to live with a modicum of dignity however, and then trap you with dining out at weekends and such, resulting in not actually achieving any progress on the projects that matter most to you. Worst of all this is the debilitating feeling that socialising and being a functional human being is preventing you from achieving your goal.
Show HN - usernique.com: Generate usernames and check availability
> "Can they explode quickly enough...?"

Explosion? Starting a fire isn't enough?
Separate classes, then throw them together for breaks?
I don't like waiting for BIOS vendors to package cpu firmware updates and I don't like to update the BIOS unless I have to. If you are running debian just install (amd64|intel)-microcode[1]. The package provides the most recent microcode updates from the CPU vendor and updates the microcode on boot.

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2012/11/msg00193.html
SXSW Has Become The Bootcamp For Tech’s Soldiers
Albert Einstein notebook
I used to send an email (and still do sometimes) but sometimes it seems that there isn't a point. Usually I think I just give up hope and figure an email that they delete isn't going to make a difference in the end. When it's a job that I actually want (or with a company that can provide that job later) I go out of my way to make sure I send it and make it known I want to work there.

Occasionally I want to send the email but feel really awkward about asking for contact info in an interview (especially when there are more than one person at once). When they give a business card or I have their info beforehand I generally do even if it's just an awkward 'thanks for the time'. Somehow I feel like if they wanted me to contact them they would provide the info. I know I should make the effort to get the info but as you can see from my mindset above I generally feel like I bombed and it's pointless anyway.

Back on topic, I recall having to do interview stuff in classes (can't remember which...language arts maybe) in both high school and college and it was always brought up to send a thank you. Maybe people didn't pay much attention.
This can actually sometimes be a feature. It makes it far less likely to have your IP banned. Its also a far more polite way to crawl someones site.
Why do you see a positive incentive to female applicants as an implicit disincentive to male applicants?
You can buy glass, you can get knives from restaurants.

I can't speak for US terminals but in many international ones. The glass you get isn't large enough to cause serious damage e.g. snowdomes and the knives in restaurants have deliberately dull blades. And cockpit doors whilst locked from the inside are routinely opened in order to provide food/drinks to the captain. So it's hardly a fool proof system.

But hey don't let me stop with your confused anti-TSA crusade.
Thanks for the book recommendation. Is that the one by Iljitsch van Beijnum?

Other than the added complexity, can you share any details about the cost? It seems like theoretically some managed hosting providers could offer this assuming they were in multiple datacenters, but I haven't seen any that do.
must have been 1999/2000. My boss made me, the ultimate noob, the "administrator" of a Solaris Box.

I didn't know SHIT! absolutely NOTHING. I was just a dumb Windows User. There was just this blinking cursor (that motherfucker) and me. i browsed the web and had to look up stuff like "cd" and "ls". Steep learning curve, i guess, but nothing teaches you better than "trial and error".

Funny sidenote: Not only was i totally overwhelmed with all the commands and quirks of the command line, but the web always mentioned vim as THE editor for Unix. So i also started messing around with the most obscure editor on this planet.

These were rough times for me, but i have learned so much, and i am thankful for that.
Yeah, chess is easy for computers but it's not the point here.

Jeff Atwood had probably a lot more traffic on his blog and still his whole protection was a fixed word "orange". The chess guys are still way ahead in terms of captcha hardness vs spammer benefit ratio.

I'm now going over all of the forums I know trying to come up with an algorithmic forum-themed captcha. Say, "what's wrong with this recipe?" for a cooking forum :)
The only problem I have with these things is it teaches me that I don't need to flush. I've stepped away from many flush toilets only to be reminded moments later that I need to depress the handle.

Outfitting flush toilets with automatic flush devices is a decent stopgap ... unless the one on the sit toilet is misaligned and causes flushing every time I lean a little - then my butt cheeks get wet :-(
This is a naive viewpoint. It still costs money to live while you're building an audience, which was why there was some merit to a record label's advance, even if the recoupment terms were unfair. Also, you assume (as do many) that there is a living to made playing live. Not all artists want to play live; not all can attract large live audiences (eg experimental musicans or people who make ambient soundscapes, for which there may be a large enough global market to sustain a living from record sales, but not enough in any single place to make bookings reliable); not all artists work in a medium conducive to live performance (composers and film actors spring to mind).
I agree, and for a 101 web scraping tutorial keeping it simple is nice.
hmmm, so would you suppose that children of African immigrants (the Obamas of the world) run into the negative stereotypes of our society and start to fall in socioeconomic standing towards the level of African Americans?
phrases from out-of-print books

Less secure now that there's massive book scanning going on.
Yes, yes, yes on everything you said. Thankfully we still do have the ability to move the rudder and change or correct direction. As you said, it can be slow but it does work.

Another thought that is interesting is the idea that all legislation ought to be passed with an expiration date. This ensures that laws --and the ideas they represent-- will be re-evaluated every n years. This approach would be one step towards preventing politicians from making decisions that will affect generations to come. Of course, some legislation needs to become the law of the land forever (civil rights stuff). Still, laws ought to be passed with fully justified and debated expiration dates. If something needs to be "forever" and it is justified, then the expiration date is "never". Most anything else might not pass the "forever" test.
So glad I saw this. Thanks for posting that. I would have been very sad if they went flat.
Plenty of women are interested in meeting strangers and some even in hookups, but only in a safe setting where there is no physical risk and they can leave anytime. It is hard for a hookup service to provide that.
Apart from the obvious trolling, there's no actual reason that the companies and patents in this new deal necessarily overlap with those in the H.264 pool is there? MPEG-LA do a bunch of patent pools for different tech.
Clickable: http://s-crit.com
For those who want to use a java based solution, I invite you to check out my open source block tolerant (IP Blocking) web scraper that runs on top of aws and rackspace, called Tales. Tales is designed to be easy to deploy, configure, and manage. With Tales you can scrape 10s or even 100s of domains concurrently.

https://github.com/calufa/tales-core
What's going on with his grandson?
Have you tried not having a CPU fan?
More iWatch Fun
I would change "human" to "biological entity"...we should not exclude extraterrestrials from the target audience...this is at the risk of offending non-biological (and probably also extra-terrestrial) entities, but they would presumably render all captchas obsolete anyway.
Cool. I love minimalism. That black background and that simple and polite sentence in white font looks good and loads fast!
Will google now follow through and remove H.264 support from chrome?(1)

(1) http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/01/google...
We Heart Wifi - Support the FCC in Keeping Spectrum Open for Innovation
GP says Google wants something "like" h264 without paying for it. Somehow paying $100M for the company that developed the codec, and employing its people to continue development for years now, doesn't count. rayiner: I think you made some good points but the unfortunate rant at the end, that's just anti-Google bias...
I definitely recommend this for people used to the jquery syntax. Requests + PyQuery took no time at all to learn and did everything I needed for some basic page crawling.
Sure, you're consistent. But that isn't saying much. You really should expand your understanding of the word racism, along with the history of racism in the US (assuming you're from the US). If you think a supposed WET is analogous to a BET then you are tragically under or misinformed regarding the issue of race.

Your rather narrow and closed minded misunderstanding of race likely mirrors your misunderstanding of issues regarding gender. This isn't the place for an in-depth discussion about these issues, nor am I the right person to offer it. So we can leave it at that if you prefer.
So we waste billions of dollars per year to "force terrorists to up their game."

So you would rather make it easier for them ?

TSA screeners are largely incompetent.

Evidence please.

they need only set off a bomb in the main terminal entrance

They could set off a bomb anywhere. A plane is unique in that you could fly into a large skyscraper and kill tens of thousands of people.

groped by imbeciles who think that patting down frightened five year olds

Equating someone doing their job with a paedophile is a much, no ?
SOA vs. API: The Humans Win
I've used Beautiful Soup (BS) and Scrapy BS is a _lot_ slower than Scrapy, although you can probably get up and running with BS first (it also more noob friendly imho since you don't have to learn yet another framework).

Learning Scrapy was made easier after some experience with BS.
Here are some awesome libraries I've used for HTML scraping:

1. Python - BeautifulSoup

2. Ruby - Nokogiri (use in conjunction with Watir if you're scraping a very client-heavy website).

3. C# - HtmlAgilityPack in conjunction with ScrapySharp (there's a nuget package for both) - I highly recommend ScrapySharp because it allows you to query elements using a very familiar Css selector type similar to how you query dom elements in jQuery. :)

Scraping online content is so simple these days, if a website doesn't offer an API you still have alternatives ;)
The fact that only Apple is allowed to use the JIT on iOS is a huge, huge limitation in my opinion.
I've heard this from countless people who have read the post. It's definitely made me want to look into Scrapy.
Hmm, weird. It definitely isn't deprecated now, according to the docs[1] and I haven't seen anyone complain about ipairs recently ever since I learned the language ^^. But anyway, the only real downside about ipairs is efficiency so even if they removed it I would probably just add it back myself as a regular function.

[1] http://www.lua.org/manual/5.2/manual.html#pdf-ipairs
I've been a jaws user for around 15 ears, and have very limited experience with VoiceOver on the mac. The advantage VoiceOver has over Jaws is the fact that VoiceOver has a comprehensive tutorial that can be brought up with one keystroke. If you are trying to teach your self how to use a screen reader the built in tutorial makes VoiceOver a lot easier to learn then Jaws.
If you are considering a new startup idea and you think "that sounds easy, I can build it in a month", then you are most likely entering a crowded market where your startup will not add much marginal value to the world. This is most consumer startups.

If instead, your idea makes you say "That sounds hard. I'm going to have to overcome technical challenges/ accumulate domain expertise/ leap regulatory hurdles" then you are most likely breaking new ground, adding significant value to society, and creating something hard to copy.

As much as I am happy for the success of the snapchats of the world (and the army of snapchat clones), I don't think the world would miss them very much if they were gone.
I'd encourage anyone interested in this topic to also check out the cover story from Technology Review a few months back: "Why we can't solve big problems."
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/429690/why-we-...

It touches on issues with the VC investment model but brings in a lot more as well.
Earlier this week the TSA announced a loosening of restrictions on carry-on items, which seems to have earned them absolutely no kudos at all with the people who are in the habit of calling for more sensible policies, but which is garnering opposition from airlines, since the burden of elevated risk falls disproportionately on airline cabin crew. EDIT: here's a link that I forgot to include http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/delta-joins-protest-ove...
Just out of interest, how are your opinions on the
superiority of NoSQL systems received by

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/johannes/

and

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/annual_report/99-00/Demers.htm

?
I think another relatively recent development - last 20 years or so - hindering innovation is the proliferation of "Wall street analysts" and their quarterly projections which focus comapnies on the very short-term. . .at least publicly-traded companies. They can do well, but if they don't do as well as "the analysts" projected then they are deemed failures who must do some soul-searching, cost-cutting, etc.
Why your maturing start-up should formalize day-to-day processes
Thank you! I know what you mean about the fan :)

For learning, you can try game development sites, graphics programming books, online Geomipmapping tutorials (for terrain stuff), forum discussions when facing problems... However, the most important thing is general programming experience, I guess.

I remember though that Learning WebGL (http://learningwebgl.com/blog/) was very useful when I began learning things specifically for the web!
If you are interested in learning to build scrapers, I highly recommend this book: http://www.webbotsspidersscreenscrapers.com/ , the code is all PHP so it is very approachable.
Donkey Kong: Pauline Edition (hack)
Given that the TSA allows common lighters and matches to be taken on board, apparently not. I think aircraft cabins are designed to be "fire resistant" (for obvious reasons) though I'd be surprised if they were fireproof.
Minimalist JavaScript ToC generator for markdown generated HTML documents
I've been blind since birth and have been programming for the last 12 years, with the last three being professional programming. I use Windows with Jaws as my screen reading software. I've found Linux accessibility to be a hassle to get set up and the web browsing experience on Linux as a blind individual was very poor the last time I checked. Instead of dealing with Linux I use Cygwin for most of my terminal work. While it's not perfect it does at least 90% of what I want. If you have any questions feel free to email me at
stofflet (at) gmail dot com
Yes, but I still think that the tidal deformation of the earth under the gravitational influence of the steel nut will vastly dominate general relativistic effects like gravitational waves. You usually use neutron stars orbiting black holes to produce the latter.
You need a better slogan. "Welcome to S-crit.com" doesn't tell me anything. I don't want to read a paragraph to try to figure out what it is.

I might not even ask people to signup first thing. Give them some value first. Take some cues from ratemyprofessors.com.

Almost every major college has a subreddit. Post to some of those to get some targeted traffic.
Yes, and in my experience women like to be wooed to some extent even for a "casual encounter" whereas guys just want to get on with it.

"What is the minimum number of metres I need to walk to get laid" is a solution looking for a problem here.
somehow the most technologically-advanced nations are also those with healthier, longer-lived populations

Maybe the other nations are worse off because the "advanced" have been busy destroying them?
Ok, so here's a fun question: where do I find a list of the Big Problems? Because when I look at the world, it seems to me as if most of the really Big Problems are not technological but social. In the end, the conversion to solar energy won't be a single man's heroic effort, it'll be the combined efforts of an entire society that finally decided to go solar.

On the other hand, technological approaches to social problems seem like an excellent idea to me.
Yes, that book! Thank you!
Income disparity in Silcone Valley
INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER

http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question
Why is he using lxml as the parser and not just the one built into BS?
I think I get the idea of the product, but with the information you have provided - I can never be 100% sure.

First, I would suggest adding a demo video on the front page. If you like your page to have as little content as possible - that's fine, but unless you add something small that tells a lot (like a video), I suggest many people will just give up very early on.

Second, the "used by" section. I think that if you manage to get testimonials from individuals, it will look better and feel more personal.

"SYNCED
PRESENTATIONS TO
ALL DEVICES" - I don't get why this is formatted this way? I'd put it in the center with another smaller sentence underneath that briefly summarises the product.

I think what you offer is pretty neat (if I have managed to understand it correctly) but I feel you should do a bit more work re: selling it better.
Bill Gates' classroom of the future
Retina MBP with 16GB of RAM. All system updates, Chrome Dev Channel.
I have many past workplaces <_<.
> even I can hear how crappy 48kHz sounds next to 192kHz

:-) No you can't. All raising the sampling rate does is raise the Nyquist frequency and unless you have super human ears that can hear up to 96KHz (you don't), then all you're doing is wasting disk space.
lxml is superior to BS. Most of the elementtree API is implemented by lxml too so it's compatible with BS - not sure why he's using BS when everything is built into lxml though and things like PyQuery and/or XPath parsing are available.
It's true. But also somewhat reminiscent of the "What is a startup?" discussion a few months back which was inconclusive. It seems "everyone knows what it is but no one can explain it" But to take a stab at it I'd say the level of innovation is directly tied to the amount of economic improvement and/or life improvement that results. Internet = huge change in economic efficiencies and life improvement. ("Life improvement" would have to be related to time free'ed up to spend on other goals) Mobile the same.
BeautifulSoup, has received a lot of positive press on HN over the years so when I needed to do some heavy scraping I gave it a spin. It was a total disappointment. It's fine if you are scraping a small set of similar pages from a single site but if you are scraping a large number of pages across many sites and esp pages with text encoding other than ascii / utf-8 it choaks so frequently as to be useless. BeautifulSoup is fine for small jobs but if you were making a web-crawler for example look elsewhere it is totally inadequate.
That's funny, because the last time I went to an international airport I saw a duty-free shop with big glass bottles full of liquor. Hey, I must be confused about how much glass is needed to make a useful weapon. I have seen plenty of glass that a clever terrorist might steal from restaurants at small regional airports as well. As for knives, any knife that is sharp enough to cut a steak is sharp enough to be used as a weapon.

The thing is, I am not a terrorist. What I see as potential weapons are probably just the tip of the iceberg of things that can be turned into a weapon. Prisoners manage to make weapons out of all sorts of seemingly innocuous objects. What makes you think that the things I can identify as possible weapons are an evenly remotely exhaustive list? What makes you think that a terrorist could not find more weapons on the other side of security?
I think we're almost done with this, finally: with a laptop, an Apogee Quartet and some $1000 ribbon mics (all easily resellable) you can make recordings as good as any studio, magic mixing board or no. And with Spotify, Rdio etc catching fire distribution will soon be no problem for the little guys. No need for big labels and dummy contracts.

But we have to make sure Spotify, Rdio etc are transparent about their payouts. The big labels are probably making deals to ensure they live on as gatekeepers to these services and right now they have the leverage. We have to demand openness so we don't see a situation where Warner gets 5 cents and smaller labels get 1 cent per play.
Firstly there are sniffer dogs as well as bomb detection equipment around every airport I've been to. They are just deployed randomly which should be fine as a deterrence.

Secondly the reason commercial airlines are different from smaller planes and other bombing targets is because you can use one to kill tens of thousands of people (fly into large skyscrapers). You can't do that with a car bomb or crashing a small plane into a large one.

And the fact you have these incidents at all should tell you that airline security is important.