skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lighting changes everything. Even turning off the flash and living with noise and blur often results in a better picture.

After that, the biggest noticeable difference is (perhaps overly used) DoF and lovely bokeh to make subjects pop. That's something that really elevates some snapshots to being great photos.
It depends on which neighborhood you'll be living in and whether you'll have a garage.

I've had a car the entire time I've lived in SF (8 years), and it's been great (makes it possible to be spontaneous). However, I've always lived in neighborhoods where parking wasn't a problem.
I should have explained this a little better in the article. The ads boosted the game enough to get us onto some of the lesser Android featured areas, so most of those installs were organic.
>There's nothing about "comes from a truck" that makes food inherently worth less. The food I get from food trucks is almost always far better than equivalently-priced choices from brick and mortar shops in the area.

Of course there is. When you sit down at a B&M restaurant, you are renting space from them. You get a table to sit and eat for as long as you want. They provide you with non-plastic silverware and linens that they later have to wash. Air conditioning. Lighting. Waiters. Bus boys. The restaurant has to factor this into their prices, a food truck does not.
That's the one "add-on" lens I bought after lots of review when I figured it was time to add some variety to the kit lens.
I'm a relatively decent amateur photographer[1]. Currently I shoot with a Canon 5D Mk II and an Olympus E-P2 M4/3s, and I have a Fuji X100S backordered from B&H[2].

I have about $3500 invested in Canon glass (acquired over the course of six years), and another couple grand in lighting equipment (Pocket Wizards, Speedlites, stands, backdrops, etc.), again acquired over the course of six years.

It makes me incredibly sad to see people using their new, shiny DSLRs as oversized point-and-shoots[3], and I wish that everyone who went out and bought a new consumer DSLR spent an extra 15% to take a one-day photography workshop.

If you were to say to me, "Aaron, I want to buy a DSLR so I can take better photos," I'd probably tell you to just buy a Micro 4/3s camera instead. They're cheaper, lighter, offer pretty decent quality, and still have interchangeable lenses. If you were serious about buying a DSLR, though, I'd recommend buying last year's model (body only), and picking up a 40 or 50mm prime lens, preferably the 50mm f/1.4 if you were going to go with Canon. The amount of money you'll save over buying the new model is more than enough to pick up a book or two and attend a workshop, and the skills you'll learn from both will do far more for your photos than a couple more megapixels ever will.

I love prime lenses for a variety of reasons, but I think they're especially great with new photographers. Reason being is that it forces you to think more about composition than you'd have to with a zoom lens[4], which means that you're going to develop better habits that will carry over when you do finally get a telephoto lens. You're also going to get a much larger maximum aperture, which means you'll be able to keep that built-in flash turned off a lot more of the time.

edit: oh yeah, and please turn off full auto mode

[1] Here are a couple recent photo projects of mine, if you're interested:

- 365 for 2013: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aaronbrethorst/sets/72157632426...

- Final project for a photo class I was taking: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aaronbrethorst/sets/72157632966...

[2] I wanted something more capable for street photography than the E-P2, and the X100S, by all accounts, sounds absolutely fantastic. Here are a pair of reviews: http://zackarias.com/for-photographers/gear-gadgets/fuji-x10... and http://strobist.blogspot.com/2013/03/in-depth-new-fujifilm-x...

[3] For example: http://www.flickr.com/photos/scobleizer/8282247371/in/photos.... This makes me especially sad because the total cost of the equipment he's using here is about $4000. For a photo indistinguishable from a point and shoot. Were I taking this, I would've shot it at f/4, and dropped the shutter speed down to about 1/30s (rule of thumb is that you can shoot at the reciprocal of your focal length and stay sharp). This would've radically decreased the ISO setting and made the picture much more artistically interesting. I also would've cropped out my leg, but let's not go down that rabbit hole.

[4] As they say, ZOOM WITH YOUR FEET!
Imagine what would happen if we had technology that made breaking the law impossible. I don't mean top-down Orwellian-style tech, but bottom-up.

Behold, the Legal Singularity.

Cops would probably start shooting babies in the streets.
I thought that by telling them I would use google to learn what other people have already learned about the task, I WAS proving to them I know how to implement their ideas into code.

I am more worried about the folks that just jump into a complex project without seeing if someone has already done this beforehand.
Pivotal’s Coming Out Party: EMC World 2013
I don't read him as arguing you shouldn't do anything about it. He does end with "it is on you to decide to do something about it". What is another question, with the parameters depending on a lot of things, from personal preference (do you mind not seeing the sun?) to schedule constraints (job, children, etc.).

I just read him as arguing that you should recognize it as a natural condition rather than a failure of willpower or laziness, and approach it accordingly. That could still mean looking for methods to modify it, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder#Ma...
This is the sort of unscientific wishfulness that undermines the analysis.

And is directly contradicted by known animal behavior.
I recently had my references checked by a recruiter. I know because they called me to let me know.
It is inherently wrong in the sense that the models can either misdirect policymakers into doing things that are not helpful for economic growth or that are easy to manipulate, creating false proofs. If one desires to do so, they should study economics. It could be good, because they may discover what things are wrong with the discipline and how they might be changed.
Having crime spread into rich neighborhoods instead of being concentrated in only poor neighborhoods seems like a positive for residents overall since the more affluent neighborhoods have more resources to deal with it. Unless when you say "residents" you mean only the rich ones like yourself.
You could always adopt a more conservativ window upgrade strategy. Mine is currently something like "every other windows and/or only after sp1".
The kit version of the 5D Mark 3 is also about 8x more expensive than what Marco is discussing.
I would recommend my product: http://protocademy.com

Its a program focused on teaching you how to program to a level where you can get a job doing so. It focuses on having you prototype and build many types of applications with different languages. You also learn to work with the whole stack (as in learn to deploy those apps that you write).

I developed the program after teaching people how to program (online and offline) for a while. I realized that people usually have three main issues when learning how to program:

- They dont know how to learn how to program.

- They dont know how to find answers to their questions/doubts.and the

- They don't understand how programs work in general (breaking down instructions into simple steps).

So, with that in mind, I created the program. Its been getting good results.
Ah, thanks. I'm not an economist so the rankings were unfamiliar to me.
I don't feel a damn bit guilty, especially when it comes to blowing off work.
I'm deaf, and I can't wake up to the traditional beepy noises that alarm clocks have, so I have this really awesome vibrating alarm clock that clips on to my pillow.

I used to have such difficulty waking up, but this vibrating alarm clock annoyed me so much, I'd actually end up waking 5mins before to turn it off before it could vibrate...

I did that all through high-school, and now I've gone from a night-owl to a morning person, by training myself to hate that alarm clock.

The one in question: http://assistivetech.net/search/productDisplay.php?product_i...

I've had it for about 10 years I think. Changed the batteries twice. Love this thing to death. (this is not a plug by the way, the link above was whatever came up in Google)
His wife is a pro photographer but he is not. He just gets to play with high end equipment because it's available to him.
Fixing employment with consulting call options (Church of St. Michael, May 06)
Uh... no. I have never see this connoted as racist. You don't get to dictate what phrases the public can't use.
Nice visualization, I particularly like the link between the income graph and the map on the upper right. Built using D3, TopoJSON, Bootstrap, Angular, and JQuery. (That's a lot of frameworks!)
Could you convert your example to phonetic english? Spelling is one thing, pronunciation another.
I think you underestimate how long it takes to write a single Econ paper. I don't know enough about CS to make a comparison, though.
Be careful about assuming that everyone who could productively engage with you understands the world as you see it. Who else has done exactly what you're doing before? Nobody. Frankly, knowing how competently you do or don't pick teams is your job, not theirs. Your comment makes perfect sense, but ends standoffishly.
Yep my servers were restored successfully, good job Digital Ocean.
Software Engineers in Canada can be P.Eng if they choose to. What makes you think she/he's not?
The GX1 has a hot shoe, as do most of the micro 4/3 cameras.
discovery problems in the app stores are making life hard for small Indie developers.

I'm concluding any reliance on App Store promotion is a non-starter. Get out and advertise the app! For months I drove past a big Road Ninja app billboard. Our company's app (granted it's more of a service than just the iOS app) is being promoted to success with zero App Store visibility - requiring a substantial sales/marketing team. With over a half-million apps available, there's just no sense in expecting the App Store will make it easy to find yours. Don't just put it there and hope it sells, get out and advertise it!
This article is, quite simply, false. DSLR cameras have much superior sensors to consumer end cameras, including smart phones. The sensor makes an enormous difference in the photo; much moreso than the lens. Heck, I would be a 5D Mk III for the ISO improvements alone, forget the lenses. Unless you're doing something special that requires (a) zoom or (b) wide angle, the kit lens will do you just fine.

This guy is either a gearophile elitist or he's making referral money on those "pancake" lenses and the others he is casually "recommending".
A couple of times a week, I wake up at 3 or 4a & can't go back to sleep for a couple of hours.

Does anyone else run into this? What approaches did you take to counteract?
You're surprised that people assume your comments are on-topic? I'm surprised by your surprise. In general, when everybody is talking about a topic and you add something to that discussion, they will try to interpret it in a light that makes it relevant. That's just how our brains process communication.

If you intentionally mean to go off-topic (which you usually shouldn't, but we'll assume you have something really amazing to say), it's best to explain that you're not actually talking about the topic at hand but you thought it was interesting because X. That way people will be able to read your comment in the light in which it was intended rather than straining to find relevance.

(Incidentally, I have no idea why you responded this way to my comment, which is explicitly about ways to ensure people read articles before voting on comments about the articles, and is not about you at all. Maybe you assumed it was on the topic of your comment?)
To me the conflict is not just time allocation, but it's the mentality. When you put your engineer hat all you can see are flaws, but when you put on your CEO hat, especially in the context of fundraising or biz dev you need to spin things positively. I find it difficult to make this mental switch.
I'm not trying to be mean but this game is just not fun enough to be a hit. It has no virality and it's very repetitive. The art is solid and the tech seems good, but you guys just need to do more market research and figure out what kind of game to make before investing so much time in a game that has no chance of ever making it into the top 100 grossing list.
I think most people are going with feedly or the old reader
> Here's the issue with prime lenses, like the 40mm pancake: beginners have little concept of composition and framing.

This is exactly why I think beginners should use prime lenses.
Cool videos/movies/documentaries/tv series on mathematics
That is someone's theory? That's what 'onomatopoeia' means.
I put a white paper box that I made over the built-in flash. It is open on the top and has a flap so I can aim it back at the subject if I want. It actually does a pretty good job of dialing down the harshness. Perhaps not as good as a rotatable external flash, but for the cost of free, it's pretty great.

One of my friends throws an empty cigarette box over the flash.
Looks like it's consistently the most popular page on the site. That's pretty good feedback on its own.
Person A starts with $0. Person B starts with $10,000 and spends it. Now they both have $0.

They are not equal.
It's awful in Chrome on 10.6.8, too. Not sure what they were thinking with that color and that aliasing.
Whether he misdiagnosed himself is kind of irrelevant. The case is:

- He's had a chronic problem with sleep.
- He was able to overcome his problem with sleep by realizing it was not so much a personal or moral fault, but a problem that was being approached the wrong way.
- He related the story to a friend who felt that her inability to sleep was a character weakness, and upon realizing that maybe it was just that she had a difference and needed to approach that problem differently was a comfort to her.
- He thought maybe that sharing the story with others would help them recognize that maybe their sleep problems weren't a bad character trait like laziness, but instead just an unsolved problem on how to properly let themselves fall asleep.

I disagree with some of his diagnoses, and even question whether the processes he was using actually helped in the way he thought they did. However, I appreciate the premise that "laziness" is not the cause of oversleeping, and approaching it as a solvable problem rather than trying to bruteforce your way to wakefulness and feeling like a failure when it doesn't work is a better solution.

What exactly is "willpower" and why would a lack of it need to be rationalized? "Morning people" don't need to exert a lot of mental effort to be wakeful in the morning. To insinuate that someone needs to "rationalize a lack of willpower" implies that willpower is some sort of moral resource that morally superior people have a higher quantity of. But all that's in there is hormones and neurons and flesh and blood. If they're not interacting properly, and you can organize yourself so they interact better, then it would be foolish not to.
2) Respectfully, pg, why are you bothering with this, and more with all the other "how to hack YC", "why we got past YC", "why we failed YC" blog posts? I'm surprised you don't have a bot that first-posts the following comment to every such submission:

Heh... I'm sorry, but I can't help but be slightly amused by the idea of a "pgbot". So much so that I started on capturing some "pg'isms" in AIML a while back.

https://github.com/mindcrime/pgbot

I'd love to play with this more, but I have to much respect for pg to do it. Any more and I'm afraid it would go from "cute, maybe amusing diversion" to the realm of actually offensive.

What might be fun though, would be to compile some stock expressions, advice, quips, etc. from a whole range of well known personalities in the startup & tech world, and create a bot that combines them all. You could call it "startupbot" and stick it out there somewhere for people to interact with.
I have never understood how people with median household incomes afford anything in the city.

For instance, the image someone else already linked shows even the lowest rents at almost $2k:
http://sfist.com/attachments/SFist_Brock/SF-Infographic.png

Yet the OP shows several downtown stops, like Powell St. and Civic Center as having less than $24k of income. That is, the average income is less than the average annual rent.

I have no idea how that possibly works.
Why would you even consider writing a post like this? There are a million ways to disagree, and you chose to go with mean-spirited and the throwing of wild allegations. Your post says much more about yourself than Marco.
Shakespeare, among others.
I think he's coming from the perspective of someone who uses his camera phone as his primary camera. I'm no photographer, but I've often gotten better pictures from my iPhone than my default SLR camera kit. Why bother spending $500+ when you already have a camera of comparable quality in your pocket? If you spend that much money on a piece of professional equipment, you might as well go all the way.
Traffic From Syria Disappears From Internet
In Seattle, the amount of time the sun is in the sky varies from 8.5 hours to 16 hours across the year. Do you believe we really need 15 hours of sleep in the winter, but can get by on barely 8 in the summer? I don't think our sleep schedules need to vary THAT much for seasonal disaffectance.
"...insecure baldhead attention whores..."

Not sure why I read that far, frankly, but I stopped there. Mr. Arment expressed an opinion. He didn't attack you personally. Why did you resort to name-calling?
Have they fixed the chromatic aberration issues with it yet? I couldn't imagine paying $6000+ for a body anyway, especially one with such fringing issues. If you haven't considered it, you might want to check out the X100S. Check out Zack Arias' review. He specifically discusses the camera in the context of Leica: http://zackarias.com/for-photographers/gear-gadgets/fuji-x10...
Hi everyone, George from Straply here. (thanks for the shout out bthinker)

If you've got any feedback or questions about Straply, I'd be happy to chat about it.
Flying-Car Maker Terrafugia Reveals New, Faster Design
On Antifragility and why we need a National Entrepreneur Day
I tried gmvault and found it lacking.

I switched to CloudPull ($10) from http://goldenhillsoftware.com and it's by far the best Google backup tool I've found.

It supports Gmail, Google Contacts, Google Calendar, Google Drive/Docs, and Google Reader. The app backs up a max of 10 accounts in the background and all the data is available in standard file formats.
Ray Harryhausen, Cinematic Special-Effects Innovator, Dies at 92
Happens to me from time to time. Usually I get up and do stuff. One of two things happens: I find I don't get tired and so I just get a really early start to my day, or else I get really sleepy again an hour or so later and just go back to bed.
>However, I do meaningfully disagree about "variations of Fizzbuzz".

What I was responding to was "variations of fizzbuzz until your brain bleeds". Which I interpret to mean doing a fizzbuzz, then the interviewer changes it a bit, and a bit more, and keeps dragging it out, having misinterpreted its purpose. Certainly the one and only "fizzbuzz" test you give a candidate can vary from individual to individual.
> Most critical failure points are mechanical.

Given that many mechanical and structural components are designed with the assistance of software that analyzes the stresses they are subjected to (and sometimes little or no analysis is performed beyond software simulation), one might question if it’s even possible to underestimate the role of software.
"I fervently disagree with the blog post."

Because you're massively missing his point, which is just talking about career prospects. Noah's criticisms of what's taught in grad school econ echo your own:

http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/what-i-learned-in...
Why is length stored with a signed integer in the first place?
Do you have to stick with neoclassical macroeconomics, or can you go into heterodox approaches and still do well? (Like, say, dynamic modeling, or agent-based models.)
Great point. Engineers sometimes like to see the broken in the world. Leaders need to have the tendency to see the possibilities. Emotional Intelligence is so, so hard (and something I struggle with consistently).
RECONNECT WITH CUSTOMERS AT A WHOLE NEW LEVEL
A dream never realized...(sadly)...that one day websites would be redesigned by only changing the CSS. I'd love to hear everyone's opinion on why this doesn't seem to happen, in practice.
I remember actually calling Yahoo about something (I think web hosting?) I remember I thought that was a huge problem with Google (and still do) that there is no way to call them.
"Exodus is also an extremely powerful debugging, development, and analysis environment, which I'm hoping will be able to serve as a very useful tool for communities involved in development, hacking, and reverse engineering, to be able to do more complex and thorough debugging and testing in software, where you can trust that if it runs properly in Exodus, it will run the same way on the real hardware, and vice versa."

this sounds cool. i'm not huge into the emu scene, but i haven't come across any emulator that has a debugger.
I consider myself an experienced amateur. I would give different advice. If you are a documentary photographer (sending in pics with an article) the use a compact or a micro 4/3rd camera. Those are easy to carry around and less conspicuous and give good quality photos for print. An iphone is just fine for web.
>We need CAPTCHA-style license plates :)

I was about to post the same thing. This is a technological problem, it could do with a technological solution: We need a way to make sure that license plates are not machine readable.

Or maybe this: Make them explicitly machine readable, but then have the vehicle alert the owner when something reads it. So instead of a license plate you have a radio transceiver with a range of a few hundred yards, which broadcasts the vehicle's make and model and allows anyone to request the VIN. You can request the VIN with a mobile device but every request gets logged and notifies the vehicle owner, and making a request would require probable cause by law.

Everyone in the U.S. will soon have a mobile device anyway (if only one without a data plan that was discarded by someone with more money and only used for wifi), so this actually serves the original purpose of a license plate better than existing license plates do, because you can read the VIN from a vehicle after witnessing a violation of the law even if it's at an angle that you couldn't have read the plate or is far enough away that you couldn't have made it out.

On the other hand, it prevents passive surveillance or surveillance without probable cause, which has always been a misfeature of license plates outside of their original purpose.
Well, except that at the post-graduate level that tell you half the stuff you learned as an undergrad was wrong.
PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS: THE POWER BEHIND NEXT-GEN MARKETING