skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is a spot-on example of HDR used as a scalpel and not a hammer. To the viewer, it just looks natural, even though a normal shot of that scene would likely have a washed-out Space Needle or dimmed-out skyline behind.
My turn to ask the stupid questions :)

1. When you say strobed, do you mean simply flash? Is a built-in flash adequate for the technique you describe? (I usually don't carry my real flash around in the daytime, since it's so bulky.) How do you find the right exposure with the flash? I ask because whenever I try to use flash in the daytime, my shot gets blown out and sometimes adding -2 or -3 EC helps, but sometimes it doesn't.

2. For HDR, do I understand correctly that any HDR technique still requires multiple exposures and therefore some kind of tripod and a still subject? (I suppose I could wing it without a tripod if I find a way to set the camera down and have it fire off 3 shots, auto-bracketed?)
That's awfully tragic and I'm very sorry for your loss. :(
In fact I don't think his conclusion is sound. If you're into algorithmic competitions you most likely don't need to change the language. If you devise a solution with a good enough complexity, the competition (if well designed) should allow enough time for the execution of that (near-)optiumum solution, while not awarding points for solutions which are asymptotically worse. The time taken by algorithms with different complexities vary with the size of the input, as a nonconstant function, while implementing the same algorithm in different languages will give you a difference of a constant factor.

What I'm trying to say, (stating the obvious):
When the input is large enough, it doesn't matter what language you're programming in. And programming competitions should (and generally do) only focus on that.

But I'll admit that I'm a huge fan of optimizing my algorithms with bit-level operators, extreme care of memory allocation and other tools C offers.
People who want it to go back to its original function of a magic the gathering online exchange
You're thinking of a very limited subset of cryptography (I assume: ciphers).

As a counter-example of having to trust the receiving end, consider zero knowledge proofs [1]. Even if you don't trust the prover, you become convinced of what they're trying to prove to you (if it's true).

The basic trick to proper cryptographic voting machines is zero-knowledge-proving that they are working correctly. Any tampering, whether it be in the source code or at the hardware level, will either not affect the tally or break the zero knowledge proofs.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof
> Because you get a full VPS, maintained by me.

This is bad. You're throwing resources away and increasing your management overhead. It would make more sense to have some sort of bouncer-type proxy to determine the source then route through to a dedicated ircd instance on a shared box (e.g. x ircd instances, one per customer).
Just as Mario: Using the Plan9 plumber utility
I'd say that the photos were nice. Not great, not outstanding, not attention grabbing, not technically excellent, but nice. Phones are fine for getting photos that are good enough, and if that's all you want buying equipment that's expensive and has a learning curve might not be for you. But if you do use the more expensive equipment and learn to use it you can produce some outstanding, attention grabbing, technically excellent photography. It's all about what your goals are and using the right tool for the goal.
I edited the original post, what I was referring to was a P2P bitcoin exchange, impossible to DDoS, and possibly built upon the technology shown by the bitcoin project itself
Awesome!

From Jan Paul's thesis:
> The syntax tree can be used to generate back the original code, be it in normalised form, but also to generate the safe runtime. For every Javascript operation a wrapper function is provided, which sanitizes the input and output, and restricts the operation if necessary.

Like I said, awesome!!
Don't feel too bad about it. While I understand what the post is trying to say, the way he says it is pretty ignorant to photography in general, and even makes some poor suggestions and sweeping generalizations.

I've been there--a few years ago--with a point and shoot camera, taking what I thought were better photos than the pros. If I'd gotten a DSLR at that time, I wouldn't know what to do with it. But as I got more and more interested in photography, I started to understand the complexity and limitations, and moved up to a DSLR. Yes, I started on Auto mode and as I learned more features I used them more.

Yes, the lines between photographic technology are blurring. I've taken some incredible photos with my Note II (same phone as him, and far better quality than his), but I've also been extremely limited in many situations. He's only taking wide angle still scenes, which doesn't take much skill or technical ability. There are far more situations in which a cellphone can't even compare.

He says "Why burden yourself with such a bulky device, not to mention the cost of it, when your good old phone can take just as good photos." In reality, the Note II cost more than my DSLR ($700 vs $600), and the bulk of it is not just for ergonomics but also to keep it steady and shake-free.
Coming from a country with sane election practices, paper ballots don't cost anything but volunteer time to operate and there is no barrier to participating. On accessibility, we have printed papers each with a name on them that we secretly stuff inside an envelope. A blind person who didn't get Braille papers or prepare their envelope on their own can ask the officials (multiple volunteers from a plurality of parties) to read the papers for them so that they can remember the order.
In some cases, according to the article, by manipulating the dosages. The drugs they don't want to do well are given at either too low a dose, so as to be ineffective, or too high, so as to have an excess of side effects.
This is the kind of "off topic" article that adds something to this site. It's genuinely interesting to a subset of people here, and it's about a real accomplishment, rather than some political screed calculated to induce rage at some aspect of politics in the US (they're always about the US).
The reason more people choose Batman is he's more identifiable with. You can look at him and say:

"If only I really applied myself, I could make some money, learn Kung Fu, set up a base, invent some cool toys, do a lot of planning and do what Batman does."

Superman, on the other hand goes something like this:

"If only I was an alien... Aww screw it. Nevermind."
An idea for this has been proposed. See the "ripple currency exchange":

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Ripple_currency_exchange
Well, Batman's powers are handed to him on a silver platter as well, being born into wealth and given access to technology. When talking about story cop-outs, just as Superman is usually invulnerable to things due to superpowers, Batman ends up being invulnerable to things due to convenient technology. E.g., if Batman was shot, he'd just so happen to have been wearing bullet-proof armor.
It's all relative. The UK does include some remote isles of Scotland such as Shetland, however, with up to 10 flights a day, it may not be considered too remote in regards to access to supplies!

There are very few places that come close to feeling remote, certainly. And it's only getting more crowded =/
Check out the other videos posted by 91177info on YouTube. A huge variety of paranoid fantasies mixed in with lots of half-truths. Their focus seems to be pro-Iran and anti-US and Israel propoganda.

Also it would be nice to know what the forum was where these statements were being made. Just because they are in a fancy looking room does not indicate it is actually meaningful that the statements are "under oath".

That said you can definitely rig almost any large scale election. There are just too many way to attack the process. In theory computers could help make elections more reliable but in practice they just add new and powerful ways to attack the process.
"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad."
-Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
Ruby is great in terms of allowing people to experiment with different algorithms pretty quickly. It's easy getting the code written and tested because the code tends to be so succinct, the standard library already includes a lot of shortcuts, it's synchronous, there's a lot of metaprogramming features readily available and the interpretation allows for quicker testing when you can get the basic syntax right after some experience without requiring the help of an IDE as most Ruby code is written in text editors.

Languages that demand IDEs tend to be more complicated in many ways. They can be faster, but also might demand more code obfuscation through more code that need to be written like types and longer names and importing of libraries and so on. My pet peeve is that I absolutely love Ruby, but it indeed is not meant for ultimate performance. On the other hand, languages like Dart might allow for some compromise if you can get stuff done with less power at your hands like less metaprogramming and fewer shortcuts... Except that Dart is trying to tackle asynchronous programming with the standard libraries which is itself quite complicated (Future what?)

Go and Dart are not themselves too tuned for performance yet, even though they tend to be very quick when compared to Ruby. They tend to solve different problems though.

Ruby has a couple of architects, Matz and SASADA for the VM. Go has a few. Dart has many, with some tending to the standard libraries.

Programming is unfortunately way too complicated. In my opinion, languages like Ruby are wonderful when you don't have a need to hide the source-code. On the other hand, languages like Go and Dart might be good when you do have a need to hide the source-code when deployment time comes.
> Payment for…organs is likely to take unfair advantage of the poorest and most vulnerable groups, undermines altruistic donation and leads to profiteering and human trafficking.

That is probably the reason India is ranked high. No "surprise kidney removals". It is usually the rich (and sometimes people from the west) that can not get a transplant legally in their countries opt to buy their way out of it in more lax countries.
Asimov, as mentioned previously, was an atheist.

The ending was a powerful metaphor of what it may mean to know all and how such an all knowing entity may act when there is no one else around to share this existence.

This story isn't about religion wherein the origin of life and all that exists is explained on the basis of faith. This is a story on how such an origin can take place in a setting of speculative fiction that doesn't push faith at all. I feel sorry for you that you couldn't enjoy the ending or understand Asimov for that matter.
Only if you think of them as just encoded URLs; they do solve a myriad of real problems. "Just type the URL" doesn't hold when you want to add query parameters to it, use a different protocol or store data by itself. It's a barcode with more density, so it serves the same purpose as 2D barcodes; it is widely deployed in industry inventory control systems, shipping, access control, event ticketing, shopping.
Perhaps the biggest critique you can make of Superman is that because he makes it look so easy with the flying and the invulnerability that doing the impossible is somehow easy or even achievable. It’s big. It’s over the top. It’s unrealistic and no one human can ever complete the feats of a single Superman. But it’s not the individual feats of Superman we care about, it’s that we, as a group of humans, working together, can do anything, even though it’s never easy.

While I entirely agree with the commenter regarding Superman being an unpaid cop for the capitalist class, I do wish to note that Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, at least, manages to be properly revolutionary with many of the same themes ;-).
On the Fields of Trenzalore, on the Fall of the Eleventh, when no living creature can speak falsely or fail to answer, a question will be asked...
The biggest problem I have with my phone camera is that it only works well on close shots. Take a picture of anything more than 5-10m away and it looks terrible. I'm no photographer and only ever used 'decent' point and shoots (£100-150) with an optical zoom. I sold mine when I got the iPhone 5 but I'm considering getting a POS again.
Is that really how it started? What prompted the change?
Remember PAPP[1]

[1] Richard Buckland's awesomeness - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTAkUs-NjxU#t=44m21s
First of all, the Galaxy Note II is more expensive than many entry-level DSLRs. We're really just talking about tradeoffs here.

>they do it because they think this will magically make their photos better

Truth is... DSLRs and cameras in general are becoming magical.

My girlfriends dad just came bak from Africa with a point-and -shoot, and I was convinced that several of his photos were stolen from National Geographic. These were not average snaps.

My dad just came back from Dubai, and not only was he amazed at the lowlight performance of the camera (yes, on Auto), but the camera was also cropping portraits by itself (sony's Auto Portrait setting), taking out the skill of composition. Instead of spending hours stitching his photos into a panorama, he was able to do it on the fly. And he could take incredible lowlight HD movies without changing any settings. Intelligent Auto settings also detect what scenes you're shooting and can do some pretty advanced settings to make your shot look professional.
what does

"ruby 1.9.3p194: 3.7 seconds"

mean?
Relevant Al-jazeera documentary

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/indianhospital/2012/05/2...
I think they mean fill flash, which can help a lot. You can use a built in flash for that, if you look up "fill flash" tutorials you can find info. appropriate to your camera. I use a speedlight for fill flash, since I tend to shoot things that are a ways off, but the built in works well enough for close subjects.

True HDR is bracketing shots with different exposures, so the camera and subject need to be still. It requires a tripod for best results, though I've set the camera down on a flat surface and used a remote to do HDR. Without a tripod it's very limiting since you have way less control on where the camera can be placed.
Everything you thought .. was wrong (collection of talks)
Yeah, it was just a tour over the most common flawed arguments in favor of e-vote. I just got tired and stopped somewhere (you can see I got a bit into secure protocols instead of secure programs).

Last time I checked the protocols had several drawbacks (including the "destruction" problem, vulnerable to collusion, etc.) Maybe I missed good protocols? Could you please point me to good papers? (a video is too slow and hard to skim over).

Thanks! I'll check the video ASAP and report back if I have questions!
Yes, i am wondering how much this holds true with a recent kernel.
Still interesting though!
i still find it very difficult to read. much harder than google's tiles.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=48.8432&lon=2.356&... vs https://maps.google.com/maps?q=48.8432,+2.356&hl=en&...

here's a google cache of an analysis from a while back:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:k2wum-J...
Yes, I watched quite a bit of Spider Man and he's fine. But for some reason I don't like him. Maybe just because he's all good and nice guy while Batman works alone and can be a badass at times. And not to forget that he's mysterious as well. In Justice League series, others are open books but no one knows his plans.
I would go farther than that. I think the FDA has to interpose itself between the drug developer and the entity doing the study. The developer should provide a sufficient amount of the drug to do the study, and write a large check. Everything else should be handled between the FDA and the university or whoever it is doing the study; the latter should have no contact with the developer. Ideally, the drug developer and the university should not even know each other's identities. The university would be answerable to the FDA for the quality of its work and to no one else.

I don't see any solution short of doing this. A study can't be considered truly blind unless the study design itself is done by researchers who do not know the "desired" outcome.
Google Glass Signal Jammer
I want to create a device that will haze the Google Glass camera image to avoid facial recognition.

The reason? To remain anonymous! A global CCTV system at eye level and everyone is allowing it to happen.

Its nice to not be recognised all the time.

Be a ninja.
http://ggfielddistortion.tumblr.com/
This article is the best illustration possible of the saying: "You don't know what you don't know".

Eg, the author's pics are pretty awful but he doesn't have the eye to see it.

A while back, I was setting up a shot and trying different approaches for several minutes with my DSLR. A friend laughed at me, whipped out his phone, took a pic, and showed me an awful picture saying "See? What's taking you so long?".
intended for Professionals

Professionals at what? Professional developers, professional photographers, professional writers... all would have pretty different needs.
I'm utterly opposed to electronic ballots. No touchcreens, no email voting, no internet voting. Elections with electronic ballots (records) cannot be audited. Nor can the voter's privacy be protected. [1]

That said, in my opinion, Clint Curtis is not a credible witness. What he claims is certainly plausible. But he doesn't have the technical chops to pull it off.

For something more reality-based, check out voteraction's lawsuit in New Mexico. http://voteraction.org/legalaction

VoterAction proved that Kerry won NM in 2004. What happened in NM certainly happened elsewhere. Especially Ohio, which had so much going on in so many directions, there's no way to summarize other than to say "death by a thousand cuts".

Briefly, in NM, spanish language touchscreens did not count votes cast for Kerry. Further, "faulty" storage devices (memory cards) were sent to back vendor HQ to be fixed, totally mooting the chain of custody, etc.

The whole election integrity thing is like a jumping down the rabbit hole. Things are so ridiculous, it's hard to believe. And when you try to explain to people what's happened, you're dismissed as a "sweaty paranoid kook" (that's a quote).

Speaking for myself, I used to think that I mail my ballot and it gets counted, what could be more simple? The more I learned, the more my confidence was shaken.

I could go on and on and on about this topic...

[1] Yes, I've studied the crypto proposals. They're included. Briefly, crypto schemes rely on a secure one-way hash to hide your ballot in the herd of ballots. Alas, US elections are administered per precincts (1-1000 voters) and typically have a dozen or more issues per ballots. Meaning combinatorially there's no way to hide an individual's ballot. Crypto works for simple ballots with thousands of voters.
Yeah sure.

It's just that for performance reasons some languages really are better than others.
Meet the grad student who upended the GOP
How ironic that now they are ... promoting "going native"

Actually for me this is a sign that they are finally starting to Get It. I agree with your sentiments on the last decade but it seems to be improving now.
These requirements are most often ignored. The law requires that trials be registered and their results published within a year of completion, but most registered trials never have published results:

http://www.bmj.com/content/344/bmj.d7373

The results are simply buried if they're not sufficiently favorable. There have been a number of meta-analyses which dig up unpublished results (which is very difficult) and demonstrate that medications no longer have statistically significant effects when you include the unpublished data. For example:

http://www.bmj.com/content/341/bmj.c4737

(Both these papers are open access, so you can read them if you'd like.)
Not all of them though. His strength(both mental and physical) comes from hard practice.

Agreed about technology though. Technology and wealth combined make him Superman born on earth most of the times.
The one time I tried bootcamp (to run Windows 7) I ended up being unable to boot anything at all. Had to reinstall from DVD.
If a person says that something is a gem, they can be sincerely saying that they think it has positive value. Your interpretation was that the phrase was being used in a sarcastic manner. That may well have been the case here, but it doesn't have to be so.
Why the heck is this on front page of HN? I am flagging it now. Apparently there are still people haven't heard of this and this is why reposts will always be popular.
While we're at it.

If you want to read some great, inspirational, and easy-to-get-into story about Superman, read All Star Superman by Grant Morrison.

http://www.comixology.com/All-Star-Superman/comics-series/16...

I also loved Superman-Batman by Jeph Loeb. But it's way more... action comic-bookey.

http://www.comixology.com/Superman-Batman/comics-series/378
GFX Montage from Oblivion Makes for Dashboarding Dreams
Yeah. Check out Ripple:

https://ripple.com/
The specs on that MBP are bizarre. Why would anyone order a new machine with a 5400rpm drive and 4gb of ram? That was a bad purchasing decision.

I think the article would have been more helpful with some kind of first hand account about using the device. I'm super curious about it, but am still leaning towards a think pad x series. The keyboard alone is almost too attractive to pass up, and they appear to be quite Linux compatible.

Edit : correction, MBP not MBA. Typo.
A lot of people are talking about the problem itself - which is interesting - but very often you run into real problems which cannot be simplified so easily (NP hard problems, many different other cases). In addition, when you need to do important calculations on a server for your product and you're using Ruby, you may very well end up requiring 10x as many servers. This is pretty massive when you consider an AWS server can be $350/month with Go (1 large instance), and then $3,500/month with Ruby - if you can even parallelize your problem that well - generally you can't. That's a lot of startup runway being eaten for not that much benefit.

Of course, most products don't really need to do calculations outside of a database and this is why Ruby has taken off so well - but it's still important to realize that choosing Ruby over PyPy/Go/Whatever really can be a very expensive choice in the long run when your product suddenly relies on some unique math solutions, and having half your product in Ruby and half in C is awful to have to deal with.

The solution to this is a project like PyPy for Ruby, but it doesn't seem to be coming...
Well, I for one will be taking two tylenol daily starting to day. You know, to dull the existential angst.
It means using Ruby 1.9.3 patch level 194 took 3.7 seconds.
/\ndy: No Place for Bugs to Hide
Neither the description nor the first few minutes of the video state what Court or tribunal or committee or whatever this testimony is for, nor when it is taking place, nor what other witnesses might have testified that contradicted this witness.

Without that context, this is pretty meaningless.

Several comments so far have discussed ways to improve voting. Good cryptographers have already solved this problem. See http://scantegrity.org
Now that's a long list for Batman but yeah, he can be identified with more easily. Superman, he just has the powers! No way we punny humans can get those.