skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
shamelessplug: Actually MODIS scans Earth using different wave lengths. The near infrared channel can be used to detect clouds and even to distinguish them from ice. Using a little recursive AviSynth Script I was able to produce an animation of daily changes in the European part of the Arctic with last year's data. It starts with all the clouds and then adds each day's cloud free pixels. The goal was to visualize how Kara Sea melted out within a few days. Enjoy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-EDFs8f_78
/shamelessplug
The new business.Twitter.com: Learn to tweet your way to #success
1) If sexual preferences can be genetically predisposed or even predetermined, then sexual preferences can be selected for through evolution as well. This means that if giant butt feathers are destructive towards actual survival, then all the female peacocks sexually selecting for this otherwise useless trait are disadvantaging their offspring and every peacock in on this giant butt feather thing will be disadvantaged.

For example, let's introduce a new predator that's also attracted to giant butt feathers. It doesn't matter how sexually attractive those giant butt feathers are, the offspring of giant butt feather peacocks will be at a survival disadvantage and will be selected out of the gene pool. The ones remaining are the female peacocks who don't like giant butt feathers, and their offspring (since they're more likely to not produce giant butt feathers).
And yet here he is, selling an actual product to actual customers, and you're sitting at your desk with your presumed 'advanced math knowledge' bitching about others not knowing how to do math...
Mail us at Syed@letslunch.com
looks pretty cool. great work. I especially loved the fact that your mehod does not blur the edges significantly and the color profiles are pretty good.

I have a few questions you haven't mentioned in your blog and would appreciate it if you can answer them here.

is there some sort of public ftp server you can log in and get say the last 2 days' maps of any given coordinate ? and if so can you share the address ?

additionally, are the image coordinates that come with the images really that accurate that you can do pixel comparisons over time without doing any sort of registration ?
Would you use it? Forget about the pricing, would you use it?
Nothing that you've listed is an asynchronous course. Currently, the choice is synchronous course or asynchronous video playlist. Coursera can likely fill that gap with a single database flag. It makes plenty of sense to suggest that they consider doing so.

You're mistaken, actually - in most cases, coursera does not offer taking classes off schedule for no certificate. That's exactly what everyone is asking for.
Historically (such short as it has been), it has dropped substantially ($33 to under $2 in a short period of time). Probably not going to see it get that bad again, but current rise is based on market sentiment, not anything magical due to crypto or tech.

Even so, a 20% gain probably isn't that big of a deal. A random growth fund can do that.
I didn't necessarily mean millions of years of evolution for humans (have we even been around for that long?). I meant evolution (the concept) as evidence that only those who deserve to live, live. Merit is a fundamental rule of the universe and that you have to be meritocratic. Anything but meritocracy is foolish and will ensure your demise and irrelevance. It's not one of many strategies you can use, it's the only strategy. It is a practice fundamental to survival just like breathing or procreating or being fit.

Because it's fundamental, meritocracy should call for both minimizing false positives and negatives, as both work towards increasing survivability.
I do about the same work as you do, with the same degree and 10+ years of experience, but make less than half of what you're making. Here in Western Europe, my wage is above the median for this line of work, and the cost of living here is (very much) higher than in the SF bay area. You have absolutely no reason to complain.
This is pretty cool. I've been playing around with a variety of JS frameworks recently and code sharing is probably my 2nd favorite thing about meteor. Anybody know if these guys are hiring? My school's big interview day is on Thursday and airbnb's front-end stack looks appealing.
Trust me, I'm a Programmer
Very fair. I guess more maths isn't always better after all.
I don't think that's an "HN employers" thing as much as an industry thing.

I've been unemployed for nine months, though I've only been seriously applying for jobs in the past three. (I consider the first six months a well-deserved vacation. Employers apparently consider it the mark of the unemployable. C'est la vie.) I've received exactly zero (0) replies to job applications that weren't automated "we got your application" e-mails. Even at a company where my CV was handed directly to a manager by a friend who worked there, the manager stopped communicating with me after his initial "we'd like to set up a time to talk to you" e-mail.

I completely understand that employers get bombarded with applications for every single position they post. (When our department posted a [low paying] Linux sysadmin position, we received over 100 applications, of which maybe 25 had anything to indicate that the applicant had ever used a computer, let alone Linux.) But a simple "thanks but we're not interested" e-mail would certainly be nice when you've been eliminated as a candidate for a job...or were never actually a candidate to begin with.

The silence of the job search quickly becomes deafening.
LinkBench: A database benchmark for the social graph by Facebook Engineering
Reminds me of the work of Alain de Botton, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtSE4rglxbY#t=5m53s
Em Baseline Generator
... and "blackhole" is not a word, it's two.
Costa Rica isn't so cheap anymore, BTW.
The range of potential CEO productivity effect is much greater than that of most employees and I suspect is a multiplier effect on the whole company rather than a simple addition. The worst case is a negative effect on a scale that bankrupts the company. On the positive side if a great CEO gets 1% more productivity out of their staff than a good one that difference in a company employing thousands is worth paying upto 1% of the total salary budget for a great rather than good CEO (if that is what they cost in the market and you can identify them).

There are big issues about how you identify great CEO's but there are real reasons to pay massively for the best.

The other factor is that people (CEO's, traders, salesmen) who can directly point to profit/income that they are responsible for can more easily show their value and in many cases claim a portion of that rather than a wage based on more normal market competition.
Yup. If you look at the docs, they haven't finished renaming it yet. They seem to be using 'karma' and 'testacular' interchangeably.
> A competent mechanical engineer graduate attending college in the past 5 to 10 years has more CS experience and coding ability than most CS graduates

what fractions of ME and CS graduates would you say are competent, out of curiosity?
I disagree because this predicate doesn't take in account the backpressure of mediocracy. A mediocracy is when mostly incompetent people are dominating and pushing back people with merit to preserve their domination, culture, ... The academic example is Galileo Galilei. US citizen should also look at the history of their own country and the way they handled black people. "If they were at the bottom (slaves) it's because they deserve to be there" ? This is mediocracy !
Wuala still doesn't support camera sync/instant upload.
Very cool.

Here is the flight path, for those interested: http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=SFO-CDG&DU=mi
I recently tried SpiderOak, which supports client side encryption, lan sync, shared folders, backup, AND syncing.

It was dreadful: sync took hours for a single file, and once they fixed that it took five minutes. Dropbox took a few seconds.
Using the keyboard shortcuts is just faster and more convenient if you don't have a scroll wheel.
Don't think of it as client or server code. Think of it as presentation code. And it happens to run on both the server and browser.

Though, don't write your business code in javascript. Hell to maintain.
Right click -> Inspect Element -> click Console (right most tab) -> paste code and press return.
"You are given a set of constraints and facts, and you have to apply some set of rules (man made laws, or algorithms) in order to take the input and create a result that you want."

I'm a programmer and I have a law degree, but I don't quite agree with your assessment. Practicing law (as opposed to the study of it) isn't usually about applying the law to facts; most of the time, it's representing the facts in a way that is favorable to your party under a given set of rules. It's a lot more soul-crushing than I thought it would be (I still like the theoretical, academic aspects, so I stick to those areas now)

"I think it is for this reason that many on HN enjoy discussing the law"

Well now we're getting near a pet peeve of mine - the absolute cluelessness about law that most technologists have. Most take one or two paragraphs, read it literally in a way that is beneficial to their prejudices, and call themselves lawyers, using the 'law = algorithm' analogy. I see very little nuanced legal reasoning when it comes to topics nerds like to discuss (look no further than all the nonsense written about the Aaron Swartz case a few months ago, and the idiotic responses when people like Orin Kerr write an actually informed piece about it).
Seriously, try hiring someone, the influx of irrelevant applicants and those who won't take even thirty seconds to read your ad is truly dispiriting.

The average time of inspection of a resume is 15 seconds, so it seems it's a two-way street.
I think if you have "brass eggs" you go start a start up.
An initial opinion of Go and its uses
UK based Commonwealth Bank of Australia hacked - The Hacker News
This looks fantastic but hearing the shutter release every few minutes would've irritated the hell out of me if I was sitting anywhere near him on that flight.
> the narrative seems to be "Ivy League or you might as well commit suicide, unless you're the rare lucky chump like Zuckerberg or Gates".

Both of which actually did go to Ivy League schools, so they are actually counterexamples to what you are trying to say. They may not have graduated, but to focus on that is to miss the point.

The point is that these Ivy League schools come with networks, which are more important than the education itself. When you are part of such a network, you are more likely to be considered for high-ranking positions. Going with the article's example, being in the network is the difference between being a Lisper vs. a Pythonista.
Ah... my house at Buenos Aires has around 10 trees that just produce all kinds of fruits. I harvest a lot of fruits, make homemade mermelade. And not to mention my particular collection of vine planted all around the park.
Well, you are assuming that the candidates have eggs to start with.

How would you describe emailing a hiring manager/developer with something like "lol, give job pls?" Not very egg-like at all...
Hgroup element removed from the HTML5 specification
The decision has been made to remove the <hgroup> element from the HTML5 specification.
You can combine the two. I learned a trick from a friend - for your employment history, have a prose section that describes what you did. At the bottom of that, put the skills used in a box. The checklisters can look at the box, and the people who want to know more can scan the prose.
Why is deflation bad?

Let's look at a single-currency country first. Prices fall. Including wages. Credit is tight - money appreciates without being invested and borrowers have to repay debts in more expensive currency tomorrow, making them more likely to default [Fisher]. People with money benefit - the rich get richer and the banks hoard capital, refusing to make loans. Inflation fuels asset bubbles as the economy over-invests; deflation fuels the opposite as the economy starves itself.

Yes, we have seen deflation. The U.S. and U.K. both experienced crippling deflation in the 1930s [1]. Before that, remember the American populist movement's "Cross of Gold" speech [2]? That wasn't a reaction to an inflationary gold standard. The euro zone offers a more contemporary view of the effects of deflation, as does my Switzerland [3].

Uncertainty in the future path of deflation that is more toxic than deflation per se. The U.S. grew through the Great Deflation in the 1870s and Japan has had mixed real effects from its almost two decade deflation [Morana]. Theoretically, if deflation proceeded at a steady clip, markets could accommodate (Milton Friedman advocated for an economy deflating at the real interest rate [Friedman]).

But what if we have two currencies, e.g. U.S. dollars and Bitcoin? Argentinians have a choice between black market (or "blue") dollars and an available but inflating peso. Tellingly, Argentinians buy dollars primarily for overseas vacations [4]. This is an example of a bad currency (the peso) and a good (the greenback). The Argentinians still execute the bulk of their transactions in pesos, not dollars.

Deflation is not likely to be Bitcoin's death knell, but rather a ceiling on its usage. A deflating Bitcoin will crimp transaction demand for the currency as spenders shift preference to more easily borrowed and spent dollars. Sellers would respond in kind (or, alternatively, sellers who respond in kind would gain market share).

Caveat: if Bitcoins are treated as a financial asset, for speculating versus spending. If so, deflation would proceed un-checked, with speculators driving out the transaction value of the currency. That said, gold has survived both deflation and speculation, so this isn't a fatal blow either.

[Fisher] http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/i332559 The Debt Deflation Theory of Great Depressions (1933)

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0143116800/ref=redir_mdp_mobil... See Norman Montagu; British depression

[2] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech

[3] http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/1c23c088-60c3-11de-aa12-00144... Swiss central bank moves to weaken franc (June 2009)

[Morana] http://www.icer.it/docs/wp2004/Morana29-04.pdf (2004)

[Friedman] http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1412804779/ref=redir_mdp_mobil... The Optimum Quantity of Money (1969)

[4] http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2013/01/17/argentinas-blue-... Argentina’s “blue” dollar blues (January 2013)
It's PLA. It does compost, but at much higher temperatures than most organic waste.
Learn more than just code - A course with a difference
And if I am a consumer who licenses the DVD I just bought, I for some reason now have to re-buy the license or whatever when it gets released in a new physical format, or through a new medium.
Absolutely - you need a minimum of a cover letter to indicate which job you're going for and where you saw it. The resume should then do the talking for you - if it's nothing but a dot-point list of skills, it needs rework.
If you can do it without code duplication, why not just consider it a kind of caching? That's how it seems to be used here: as an optimization.

If your definition of the JSON to HTML transformation is declarative, it makes sense to allow the server to do it for the data that's available to it.

The web has a semi-long history of "dumb clients," and that means the server has to be able to do the rendering. There are some pretty good reasons for this, and projects like Rendr try to make it as easy as possible. Seems good to me!
Yet to update LinkedIn. Ex Infy since Nov 12, back in India.
Pleasantly surprised by how fun and informative I found this article.

I initially suspected the title was a metaphor of some sort, and almost stopped reading. Very glad I didn't - you've inspired me to give it a try! :)
This is really fantastic - thanks to Spike and the rest of the Airbnb guys for releasing it to the world.

My interpretation of the key benefits: large speed increases for users, and vastly improved SEO.
The 19th and 20th centuries has seen a lot of improvements. It's clear that thing continue to improve in a lot of domains, but it is not clear that it accelerates. IMO 1995-2005 has major impacts compared to 2005-2013.
Well I have posted this on HN! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5478064
Ah, I wonder if that's why I can't scroll with the keyboard in Firefox.
There is an entire movie that was shot using this technique:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40U5D2eI7_8
Thanks! Sorry for asking this, but why the strange (to me) indent?
I had a good laugh at that quote, but now I'm thinking: is it legit to cite one or more persons doing their job poorly to dismiss the entire profession? Do you keep around bad code to remind you why you don't talk to programmers? Examples of quack medicine to remind you why you don't talk to doctors?
I'm not sure everyone is asking for that. I think it would seriously water down the courses in terms of discussions in the forums, sharing online (study room, hangouts), in terms of the quizzes and assignments.

The only thing I'd like is the more intense 6 week courses split over say 10 weeks. Other than that I think they are taking the right approach.
Radically rethinking the bus system
Also painters.
Put yourself in the child's position. You'd grow up and discover that your deafness is not due to some random genetic mutation, or even just inheritance - but your parents selected you to be deaf - just so that you could be exactly like them.

I'd be outraged. Wouldn't you be?

And I'm not saying that we should abort deaf children, nor am I saying that we should deliberately select "hearing" embryos instead.
I agree with the others but; design should be important in enterprise applications as well. I have seen many enterprise applications which were designed so badly people can't really use them very well. Of course I am not talking about fancy design things, but their usability sometimes... argh. Though they need to cut down money on something, so they focus on the functions instead.

But - if you want to get attraction (like said below) you need to focus on design. You won't look at a Mercedes if it was ugly.
Testing libc++ with -fsanitize=undefined
Forgoing treatment for yourself is one thing. Forcing deafness on your unborn child is another.
Follow me here:

a) it's illegal to 'just go to an exchange office and buy CHF or USD'. Literally can't do that at the moment

b) You can still buy bitcoins from people inside Cyprus

c) then you can convert them back at some later date, to whichever currency you prefer, outside the currency control area.
Plenty of people burnt by G's often parasitic and monopolistic forms of monetisation. E.g: placing "search this site" in SERPs for brand queries (actually performing yet another Google search + Ad's) to get more adwords ad's in front of users. Forcing brands to bid on their own names in search results by not protecting trademark claims in any cohesive way.

Suffocating industries with verticals, with poor /no support and then moating, (Think local search and Yelp/online Yellow Pages").

The Binghoo vs. Google pissing contest, (They both look like bullies).

Hijacking loans, mortgages, credit cards, new cars, (and other 'big ticket' items) with aggregated results yet cracking down on aggregators algorithmically in core organic claiming it's not good for the user, (Double standards).

G +... fake numbers they are throwing around when they've clearly strong armed users and 'advertisers' such as the Google Places migration.

Google reader...

Lots more, but generally it's the "Do no evil" BS. Where folks feel hoodwinked into believing G was anything more than a money making machine, even at the cost of their own integrity.

I blame Mayer for the mess in search and Schmidt for the borg like focus on $$$ and social, at any cost.
That is pretty f*ing unethical in my book...
SEEKING FREELANCER | Developer(s) | Remote

In the next weeks I will need assistance from one, or more, freelance developers with skills in HTML/CSS/JS, WordPress and/or Magento.

If you are available; please drop me an email at mail at magnusforsberg dot com with your experience and preferred rate
Nice to know there's a JVM-based library (http://acs.lbl.gov/software/colt/). I remember in HN somebody mentioned something like this but for Scala, anyone?
I'm not sure it's a smart move from Amazon. Their offering seems pretty lame (no Linux client, JVM required, etc.) and even if the Amazon price is half of Dropbox it's hard to argue that Dropbox is expensive.

From my experience, Dropbox is perfect; it would take me much more than a discount to switch -- actually, there doesn't seem to be anything a competitor could do that would make me switch. The only reason I would leave Dropbox is if they did a major fuckup (like losing all my data).

Why would Amazon compete with Dropbox? Don't they have other priorities? (I love Amazon too, but I just don't get this).
God, that guy with glasses is so... awkward?

I'd say dumb, but I know astronauts undergo a rigorous selection process, so that cannot be it.
Got a number?
The $17,000 Linux-powered rifle
That's excellent news. I'm close to graduation at the most intense hacker school in SF and definitely have a solid grasp of the fundamentals and domain expertise in JavaScript.

I'd be very appreciative of any leads you could offer to top tier companies (FB, Google, Amazon, MS, mid-sized YC companies). My contact info is in my profile.
They actually have to be open during take-off/landing, in case of a crash the rescue crew has to be able to look inside the plane from the outside.
See previously John Carmack on the importance of static analysis http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2011/12/24/static-code-analysi... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4543553
This is awesome feedback. Exactly what I was looking for.

I like the idea of sourcing say signed items and reselling this. Collectors items.
Brewster Khale and Ted Nelson eat sushi paid for with Bitcoin
That's only even more confusing. The strike price is by law supposed to be the "fair market value" of the stock option. So what do you mean by the "price of stock as determined by management." While the strike price is typically kept artificially low by use of 3rd-party audit firms that calculate valuations, how do you know management is not artificially inflating the price of stock (so as to give you a misconception of the worth of the stock).

Also, you should make clear what the cash equivalent of stock is. Is it cash = cumulative difference between strike price and "price of stock as determined by management"?
WG Decision on request to drop hgroup from HTML5
Totally agree. Dropbox is perfect. It's super fast, even when you make duplicate copies of huge files (like Lightroom catalogs!). I have a local backup using rsync, and it's much slower than Dropbox.

Dropbox also syncs over LAN, which is a big deal if you use several computers from the same location.

I don't think $99/year is expensive.

(Search doesn't work too good, though).
The average time of inspection of a resume is 15 seconds, so it seems it's a two-way street.

Heh, quite. Although from my experience, receiving a hundred CVs featuring C# application development alone when you've requested PHP will have a significant effect on the average reading time ;)
link to video: http://vimeo.com/62831216
This point is utterly irrelevant to jonkee's point. For all intents and purposes MS and GS are large investment banks.
April Fool's Day 2013: Tech Industry Pranks
It does not.

Teaching python requires some experience.
Why should that stop you from scrolling the screen?