skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> it is a question of equality before the law.

Everyone is equal in the eyes of the law. Gay and straight are bound by the same laws - if a gay person ever wants to marry a woman he can (no questions asked). There is not two sets of laws - the tax law is the same (yet no one worries about that).

I would personally like to see the state absolve marraige and leave everything at civil unions. The only reason why the state should even have that is to keep track of children.

> Marriage confers many benefits, including financial

Uhm... yeah. We should therefore discriminate against people who are not married? If there is a benefit provided it costs someone something (in this case the burden is on unmarried people).

> control over partner's affairs when the latter is incapacitated

Uhm.. tried having a signed letter to the appointed executor? This can be solved within 5 minutes with a printer and 5 signatures.

> At the Federal level, the US prohibits same-sex couples, even if they are married in another country (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_marriage) to sponsor each other for immigration.

So, this is nothing major. The USA also have quotas for certain countries. Does that mean that the USA is racist towards that country?

The USA also have requirements for education levels. Some countries (esp. Australia) is fairly strict against people with transmittable diseases (e.g. AIDS). Does that mean that they discriminate against sick or stupid people?
You are right you're wasting time. Image processing is not the sort of a thing you can pick up on your own "to get work done"; it's extremely demanding and actually fun. Just hire someone.

If you're prone to falling into "hack mode", learning this stuff will not help you one bit. The problems are far too interesting and encompass wide areas of research that are guaranteed to please everybody; low level bit manipulation, file formats, numerical methods, signal processing stuff with filters and sampling, wavelets, edge detection, rank, laplacians, convolution, dithering, ray tracing, morphology, neural networks and other genetic learning algorithms, heaps of inner-loop and vector optimization, scene detection stuff that make use of ray tracing plus interesting data structures like octrees, statistics, information theory .. in a nutshell, it's something to give up work, wife and kids for.

Don't ever let curiosity drag you into that tar pit, hire someone.
Everyone seems to be missing the point.

No American can get this job. Only the guy the company wants to get a visa/green card for.

In Texas, the jobs have to be advertised and this demonstrated to the Texas Workforce Commission.
this is fantastic news, though i guess it makes sense. goldman attracts the most talented folks just by winking at them.
good point. add

if(v.size() == 0) return false;
I am not sure buddy, but it would be nice to see how it fits or replaces(?) the traditional approach from a high level perspective :)
I wish I could give a "positive" advice but best I can say is that what you describe is a tough, tough problem. There is no off-the-shelf solution and if you are new at this, you are up for a lot of pain with a slim chance of success. Sorry, can’t be more helpful.
I was using a mouse. It would have been less jarring with a stylus. Also, I was trying to control my hand for standard form/楷书, rather than everyday cursive, so that didn't help either. Had I started learning with a tool like this, my placement would be much better, just because I would have tried very hard to minimize repositioning. Maybe. I'm still trying to think through the implications.

You might try recognizing the strokes, but leaving them in the background in a lighter color?

[big edit here]

Maybe resize and reposition the model character around the input character as it is written, and then provide some sort of visual feedback at the end on the delta? eg, good proportions, but you are 25% too small and 30% off center.

I'm trying to think of some way to a) preserve feedback while b) reinforcing the rhythmic quality of writing. Rhythm is a mnemonic aid. If you can find some way to reinforce it, that would be a huge boon to students.

There's a rhythm to each stroke and a composite rhythm to each character. Combined with regular patterns like radicals and phonetic roots, rhythm is what allows you to memorize thousands of characters. To the point that sometimes you have to write a character to remember its stroke order.

[/edit]

Very cool site, though. I studied all through the 90s, and the pedagogy was just awful. If I knew then what I know now about language acquisition, I could have compressed my studies into 2 or 3 years, rather than 10. You should have an open field.

Also: I'd love to see a system like this for 行书. The heuristics would probably be a lot more complicated, though, and the market much smaller.
> if a gay person ever wants to marry a woman he can

In the same way that you, presumably, wouldn't want to marry/sleep with someone of the same sex, so a homosexual wouldn't want to marry someone of the opposite sex.

The question is, why do State governments specifically prevent same-sex unions? There are already 7 countries that have gay marriage.

From marriage all the other legal benefits flow.

> I would personally like to see the state absolve marraige and leave everything at civil union

Agreed - but not limited to only heterosexuals.

> Uhm.. tried having a signed letter to the appointed executor

Why do gays have to do extra work that heterosexuals get "for free"?

> So, this is nothing major. The USA also have quotas for certain countries.

Imagine the following: you are American, and marry the love of your life, a Canadian, in Canada. Now, if you are a man + woman, you are allowed to bring your spouse into the US, but if you are a same-sex married couple (yes, Canada has gay marriage), then you cannot.

This has nothing to do with quotas, or "profiling" for numbers or against health-risks.
Most people who just want a cheap electric car probably won't care. And that's their great strength.
Urchin.js is going dark? No, it isn't.
Does a fact need to be grounded in personal experience? I know that 10 gigabit ethernet exists, but I have never actually experienced it. Likewise, I know that a degree in history increases someone's expected earnings much less than a degree in nuclear engineering. Even though I have no personal experience in those areas.
left is always the same side as the mole I have on my left wrist. I still check my wrist to this day, out of semi-conscious habit.

In a similar fashion, I learnt left and right because I 'write with my right hand'. I still run through this in my head to this day.
About left and right, I have a friend, a black-belt karate student, and he can't figure out either. He says he developed a method, and asked his teacher to do it instead of saying "punch with the right", "punch with the left".

The "method" is just saying "punch with the hand that you write", "punch with the hand that you don't write".

I had a hard time believing, until a couple days later, he was driving and I said "turn to the left!" (many times) and he missed the road. Then we developed our own method, which was "turn to the side of the radio", and "turn to the side opposite of the radio".

Freaky. But fun :p
Click on the language name and a drop down menu will appear.
By my account, Windows 7 hype is really annoying. They graft on a clone of Kicker and everyone swoons, wtf? There's no reason to believe it'll do any better than Vista that I've seen.
Is iPhone Enterprise Ready?
I've been using this for a good while and had very little trouble. It technically only supports Ext2, But Ext3 is backwards compatible , so it can mount an Ext3 drive as an Ext2 (just without the journaling benefits)

If there's anything off with the drive (such as data in the journal waiting to be written), the driver will refuse to mount it and you'll have to fire up linux to patch things up. (Data in the journal is handled automatically at mount time by the Ext3 driver.)
Banking the Monsoon
A former boss of mine, an old-school metallurgist and a viciously patriotic Republican hard-ass from the midwest, mentioned this to me

http://www.resourceinvestor.com/pebble.asp?relid=16620

Not that website in particular, but the general fact that China has nearly a monopoly on the raw materials needed to manufacture electric cars. That website doesn't make quite that statement, just that China currently has all the production capacity, but he's told me that almost all the rare earth metal deposits are in China. He's not too keen on mass deployment of electric cars in the US. Given how the US automakers have pissed away any shot they had at innovating in this market, it seems unlikely to me that a US company would ever manage to dominate that industry. The tree-hugger in me says "Screw em: buy a foreign electric" but the flag-waver in me says "Hey what about biodiesel?"
I actually just tried to find the papers, but don't want to put much more time hunting them down :) I was able to find the lab bills though, those alone came out to around $3000. I stayed 7 nights in the hospital, got a ton of tests and received a shit load of medication. Not to mention this was in NY, which has notoriously high medical costs. Maybe 50K was an exaggeration, this was a while ago. But it was in the tens of thousands for sure. There may be discounts when paying in cash, I'm not sure. Either way, its worth the money for coverage. Even if you don't get the top of the line, get something, especially if you have a family and little kids. Go watch John Q if you arent convinced...
This is a cool thing I've used for a long time, but I'm eagerly anticipating the addition of ext4. I don't know if this driver specifically has any plans to implement that, but I would like it. Anyone have any news on this?

And for the record, this has worked fine for a long time -- there were initially a lot of issues with running programs from ext3 in Vista, but they seem to have been ironed out for the most part. It even has a nice GUI to assign drive letters.
Don't worry, it's just Western hypocrisy. Dubai is just another fiefdom with oil that hired some good PR agencies and did a few things that pleased "the West."

Sure. However, Western patience only goes so far. They will ignore your crimes as long as it profits them, but as soon as they start to lose money they will notice how "barbaric" and "backward" you are.

Dubai is a victim of the economic crisis, and people have lost money there, including many Westerners. The people advocating for labor rights in Dubai are not friends of the working man. They're the same carpet-bagging finance parasites that got us into this mess. If their revolutionary spirit and humane conscious suddenly spring to life, it's only because Dubai represents the oriental Other, and with the collapse of its economy the last chord of Western loyalty to its petrodollar was cut and the Western Man is free to attack it, waving Human Rights as a banner. The Western Man can slap a Human Rights bumper sticker on a missile and sleep happy at night, knowing he is delivering his Way of Life to whoever is on the receiving end (the survivors can always accept democracy :-)

Read up on what they wrote on Hong Kong in the middle of last decade; the handover to China coincided with the Asian financial crisis and Western media went full out racist and sinophobic. A decade later they were all friends of China and singing its praises, until China crashed itself and now they're decrying China holding so much T-bills.

[Edit: Oh, silent disapproval ;-]
That slide is a bit confusing. At first it seems to be condoning the use of CSS background images to give the perception of faster loading, but then he says that it was bad for IE ... which effectively is saying you shouldn't do it. That slide is useful because it should instantly discourage anyone looking to implement a technique like that.
Goldman Sachs is one of not many who had been behaving prudently. Next news would probably be "Chase is doing good.." or some other obvious thing brought as revelation.
sorry, I meant ctrl-enter (for evaluation)
It never ceases to amaze me how many predictions about the demise of a software product (in this case Windows 7), and it hasn't even been released yet!

Some reviews of Windows 7 have been very positive, some have been negative, but only time will really tell how well it will fare. Microsoft should be looking at ways to avoid the missteps of Vista and its adoption, but to say that IT departments can hold out forever on XP, or to think they will mass adopt Mac or Linux is less likely than the prognosticators will care to admit.
Nicely done! Google should use it as a showcase app -- It's definitely the most 'grown-up' App-Engine-based site I've seen.

As an aside, how did you accomplish those great perspective transformations in your front-page screencast?
There's so many competitors entering the market, it will be hard for anybody to charge much more than $5. Plus, almost everybody is using the same set of language data, so it is difficult to differentiate. There are already tons of completely free hobbyist- and university- created tools available if you know where to look. Plus, textbook publishers generally provide a suite of (sometimes free) apps to complement their textbooks.

Luckily, I don't think there is any place for ad-financed products (ads are too distracting when you are trying to memorize stuff like this), so there won't be many free commercial systems.

I am building something very similar to this. I have to say I am very impressed with what Skritter has done so far.
A good basic summary of this would be "don't use anything other than basic ASCII in filenames." There are two very common desktop platforms (OS X, Windows) that have outright broken filename handling (OS X in particular has really odd rules for storing Unicode in filenames compared to, oh, the world). Anything requiring character encoding in a filename, much like a source code file, is a bag of hurt waiting to happen. I know there have been bugs in Subversion related to filename encoding issues, and it's been controversial in the hg world as well, where the formal solution is to treat filenames as opaque bytes because anything else becomes painful rapidly.

(Unsurprisingly, this problem shows itself in other places. os.listdir() in Python 3 returned Unicode strings, which is full of suck because on a Linux system filenames are bags of bytes, so two files in a directory could very well be in different encodings. Until recently (at least, have not checked recently) os.listdir() would simply silently ignore any file whose name didn't properly decode into a Unicode from the on-disk bytes.)
not much free online SRS with effort put into it

Your customers are not buying online SRS, they are buying an opportunity to improve their Chinese proficiency, and the experience of being the kind of person who wants to improve their Chinese proficiency. Never forget that.

I have a friend with an as-yet-unreleased application for studying Japanese. I told him what I'll tell you: I wouldn't consider charging less than $30 but I would consider trying more than $100. Yep, that is quite a range, and it all depends on what type of student you are targeting. To be perhaps a little unfair to my friends' prospective customers, I would expect to see no anime-related vocabulary in the $100+ product.

Exactly how you present your choice to the user is up to you. ($49 a semester, $80 if you buy a year at once should lead to an ARPU in excess of $100, hopefully.)
It's much harder to get people to buy access to a website than it is to buy an app. Plus, the transaction won't be as smooth as it is with apps, so I don't think Apple has anything to worry about. Besides, I think Apple would love to see fewer free apps in their store, so the more that move over to HTML, the better from their perspective.
In the `Small Book about a Large Memory,' Aleksandr Luria described the case of `S.' a man with an even more astounding capability of recall. The Russian version of the monograph is even available online: http://www.psy.msu.ru/science/public/luria/small.html
These are programs similar to YC that we considered applying for: TechStars, Shotput Ventures, DreamIt, LaunchBox Digital.
Previous submission:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=530151
I don't like it.

Covering and uncovering the keyboard or screen mid-program is poor UX IMO. The keyboard is too big of an object on screen, too obvious, in an unhelpful way. Why not hide the keyboard, grey out your input box and refuse to take anything new until done processing and doing whatever it needs to do? Or move to a new view that has your information? And a loading box over the screen itself? Showing, hiding partially and then showing the exact same screen with little new information doesn't make sense and will confuse some users.

If you're doing an app for a website (as far as I can tell, this is the main reason why a Loading view would pop up very often), why not look at Safari's Web Apps. They are still very good to use, and in some cases, will end up being much better then a native app would have been. Not to mention, you can distribute it however you like and not have to worry about the App Store.
Accounting regulations were changed last week [1] so that banks do not have to "mark to market" in "inactive markets" anymore. Since Goldman Sachs is now a bank holding company, they don't have to do this either. What is now a ~2B profit would probably have been a far greater loss by the old rules.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/governmentFilingsNews/idUSN09...
Đền thờ Quang Trung: Điểm đến mới của du lịch Nghệ An
Real Life Replicators - Desktop Manufacturing Today
Yeah, definitely devin. What we'd like to do is create both a character decomposition system and a mnemonics system that would be seeded across users so that people can get the stories (and hopefully by association) the character lodged in memory. A lot of Chinese-English dictionaries have exactly this sort of organization.
I think he meant to reply to @slavox's comment, not a general post.
"That's just a stupid thing to say and exactly the kind of hype that's getting on our nerves"

When making statements of that nature you should rely try to elaborate more. What exactly is a stupid thing to say? Claiming that I rely on Twitter as a source of news? Why is that stupid? I've been doing this since August and it's worked out really well so far. I'm not trying to convince anyone else to do the same, I was just responding to a question of whether or not Twitter provides actual value. To me it does.

The medium does not provide value to the message, but it does provide a very powerful way to spread messages and to organize people. What alternative communication medium would you recommend for organizing a protest? (Like the one that happened in Moldova http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/07/moldovas...)
I suppose it depends on the definition of "success". Learning about the state of the art and writing some enlightening code, no matter its ultimate usefulness, would be plenty successful for me.

I'm mostly surprised at the lack of papers I'm able to find that have been published after the mid '90s.

I will give major kudos to you though, sir. I've spent the last hour or so reading through the wiki. Please, keep up the great work.
Bash Prompt Magic
true or not, that design is terribad. no one will pocket something with cut edges like that
Also the Google web-based apps are not as nippy as apps written for the iPhone. The sidestepping has a cost.
There's so many competitors entering the market, it will be hard for anybody to charge much more than $5

Are you acquainted with Rosetta Stone? They sell language learning software in the "couple of hundred dollars" range. And they're pretty freaking big.

it is difficult to differentiate

People always tell me that about my product. It isn't true for me, and my product is substantially more boring and smaller in scope than learning the key to accessing the history/culture/economic potential of China. A short list of points to differentiate on would be who you sell to, what level of learners you target, what focus of learners you target, visual design, etc etc.
> State governments specifically prevent same-sex unions?

Uhm... Can't homosexuals have civil unions? Also - what is the use for the state? It does not need to keep track of the offspring.

> Why do gays have to do extra work that heterosexuals get "for free"?

It takes 5 minutes. Most straight and sane people do it in any way - it is simply a good practice (just like writing a will).

> but if you are a same-sex married couple (yes, Canada has gay marriage),

If the person you married was a woman with AIDS (or if you have a child with AIDS) you will also most likely not be able to come into Australia.

Also - if you benefit gay couples you conversely discriminate against 2 single people.
Thanks for taking a look at it smoody. We were actually waiting for some of the new features to come online before we submitted ourselves to the App Engine showcase, but that's definitely happening soon now that everything is put together.

To answer your question about the demo video, I used Adobe After Effects and 3D layer manipulations of video captured in Growler Guncam to create the video effects. We used Guncam, which is a pretty out of date capture program mostly intended for capturing in game footage, because it has the highest capture fps unlike camtasia and its ilk. The problem with Guncam is that it's really resource intensive at 24fps, so we were really restricted in how much of the screen we could capture. And just for total disclosure, I figured a lot of this out myself, but the web developer for fontstruct, who I contacted when building our demo video, was very helpful in guiding me to the right methods and I owe him one. He definitely deserves a shout out.
Ask HN: Possible negative effects of introducing coding tests to the interview process?
I wrote up a short coding quiz for my boss to give to candidates during the interview. This will be the first time candidates are asked to write code in an interview. I ran the questions by coworkers and they seemed ok. Now the coworkers seem to be giving me the cold shoulder. I am new to the company. Has anyone experienced negative side-effects of doing something like this?
Hanging Tough
As you watch democracy die to thunderous applause, remember to subtract the $10 billion of government funding and the $13 billion looted from the taxpayers through AIG face-value swap repayments.
Hey Tacomantor, sorry to hear about the problem with the demo account. I'll talk to Scott and Nick and see what can be done about that.

Edit They are currently asleep. I will let them know in the morning however. Thanks for the tip off.
Bite your tongue. I'm no defender of graduate education, but I think it's a tad on the mean-spirited side to refer to what these people are doing as "whining".

A lot of smart, hard-working people have just been screwed by circumstances that are beyond their control. Not everyone with a graduate degree knows how to code. Moreover, just because someone doesn't know how to code doesn't mean that they studied basket-weaving, and are therefore useless. If you worked your butt off getting a PhD in the sciences, only to graduate this year -- well, that's just plain bad luck.

Finally, trust me: if this downturn goes on long enough, even the programmers will feel the pain. So if I were you, I'd start hunting for a big hunk of wood, and start knocking as hard as you can.