skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They're just going to have really bad photos, with bad composition etc.

Will it hurt their sales at all? Maybe not, so maybe they don't care?

It will hurt their journalists self-respect, and, I'd suggest, in the long term, hurt the credibility and respectability of their newspaper. To have unprofessional looking photos.
Context-Aware QR-code reader
Those tools look very nice, but it's a shame they run against TFS. Plus the entire toolset must cost what, 4000$ per license?
Ask HN: What would you suggest for a first time web developer.
Hi
I am an above average software developer but mostly I have worked in projects unrelated to web technology. I wish to pick up one of the web technology stack so as to work on some of my ideas and side projects?
There are so many technologies around web stack like node, django, spring, php , RoR, etc. Which one can I pick up a bit faster and get to work?
I code mainly in C.
Version 4.5 was designed to be backward compatible to version 4.0 and is indeed an in-place update. Therefore after installing version 4.5 you will no longer have version 4.0 assemblies but you can still target version 4.0 using the backward compatible version 4.5 assemblies.

Nevertheless I have read some worries that some bug fixes (may) break backward compatibility and therefore projects targeting version 4.0 developed on machines with version 4.5 installed may behave differently when run on machines with only version 4.0 installed. If this is a real problem, that is if there are observable changes and therefore version 4.5 is not fully backward compatible to version 4.0, I can not tell.

UPDATE: There is a published list of breaking changes [1].

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh367887.aspx
I think (now) you can do a startup and still keep your friends, have great health, have fun, etc... You need to stop being reactionary and be visionary.

Firstly you have to start spending quality time, and that means cutting off lots of the things you do at work that are only there to satisfy your need to feel like you are accomplishing things. You aren't. Quality time is true for family, and friend hours as well; just because you are there does not mean you are there. Many people who saw their parents regularly still feel they were very distant from them. If you are at home, be there mentally. If you are working, close that email window, and work.

Secondly make more time by waking up earlier in the day. If you wake up at 6, you can go to bed at 10:45, and that leaves you with 16 hours to do your magic.

Thirdly, stop being reactionary. If you have a plan other than the no-plan plan (translation "i don't know what to do so I am doing anything that comes to mind"), then you will know you can execute on it without having to spend 16 hours on it daily. While it is entirely understandable to work extremely long hours every now and then, it is probably more viable over the long term to have a plan and execute on it at your own pace. The things we will change the course of our startup (e.g. "we have to launch before July 7th") won't change them at all, besides if your startup is one event away from failure, even if it is Google launching a similar product, then it is safe to say it should not be called a business.

Kick back. Write a plan. Execute it.
Its an interesting (if controversial) theory, that your DNA is no more private to you than your fingerprints, and they already fingerprint you when you are arrested and put those fingerprints into a national database.

The sticky thing for me though is that DNA not only identifies an individual, it also identifies their parents and possibly their siblings. So now we've got more than just our poor arrestee's id we've got some 'known acquaintences' and it gets worse if people start getting arrested for misdemeanors just so that the cops can take a swab to check.

No doubt there will be more to this debate before the dust settles.
The Rod Humble Interview
I do not know what these 2900 employees do, but not to long ago I played one of their games for a while.
Some really big constant problems in their games.
Once one thing breaks its takes a long time to get fixed, then it gets fixed but breaks another thing.
I remember Thursday before thanksgiving weekend their game gave errors and was unplayable.
It took 6 days for they to get it to work.

That really shows devotion to the entertainment sector right? (Maybe it was a bad steak maybe I was the only one seeing these problems, who knows? Ask the company thats cutting 500 employees)
And all politicians and senators must have their DNA samples taken and posted online, with photo and name, as a show of good faith that it's not a big deal to let some cancerous arm of the government keep your specific blueprint for bootstrapping a human.
Reality speaks otherwise,

http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/2012/Mar/13/NET-45-is-...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11458159/how-to-keep-net-...
There's a good bit of tortured logic to rationalize the stagnation of real middle-class wage growth in the U.S. And, while there may be some relevance to those articles, they go a long way to avoid the globalization elephant in the room.

On the other hand, economists are now finally acknowledging the negative domestic wage effects of globalization and outsourcing on the U.S. I referenced these elsewhere, but it's also relevant here:

[1] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/29/changing-views-...

[2] http://www.cfr.org/industrial-policy/evolving-structure-amer...

The idea that continuous outsourcing to low wage countries would bring negative pressure to domestic wages was a common sense notion decades before now. Seems like economists are finally catching up.

EDIT: The other elephant in the room and perhaps the most salient point is that relatively speaking, the working/middle-class is bearing the brunt of stagnation, no matter which metrics you apply or how you rationalize it. That is, the wealthiest are realizing a massive acceleration in wealth accumulation, period.
I have to agree.

The way the article ends with the bogeyman, "What if we didn't fear nukes as much?" has a circularity to it. What "nuclear warfare" meant in 1945 was obviously different from what it became just 15 years later - a political football that diverted people's attention, vs. an entire strategic doctrine that acted to encourage low-level proxy wars and interventions, while discouraging the "total war" practice that was conventional through the World Wars.
Computer games become museum pieces
There is a lot of cultural resistance in the US to any kind of price pressure on health costs. This problem will exist regardless of whether you have a private or government system.
The only similarities between the two logos is that they both use script fonts (widely used before Pinterest), and they both use the prefix "Pin".

Services like this one pop up all of the time. Little apps like this enhance the use of a site like Pinterest.
Frankly, I'm not sure why you think you even know if there have or have not been offers, or what sorts of problems they are actually solving. A lack of media screaming and investor drum banging means absolutely nothing.
if i get my old passport, ofcourse, if not, then id just have to tell him sorry my friend, I am taking back my tablet, the internet found you !
The kindle looks good, until you open up the browser. You really don't want to browse the web on eink.
Clouds with Friends!
I think "a way we would expect" would be kind of precluded by the fact that, if something were looking back, it probably would've had to develop or evolve some sort of perception/method of observation that we don't have access to, otherwise we'd have a much easier time accomplishing said feat. :)
This was hilarious - so many of these I could relate too ... I've definately gotten in trouble because of the "snape don't lie to me" one and the woman typing in "nonesense" vs. Jim Carey reminded me how she calls what I do "typing in some codes", good stuff :)
At Build 2012 it was mentioned that the C code that still exists was being made C++ compatible.

Similar to what GCC did before changing to C++ as implementation language.
A long formal letter sounds like it would be better on paper, but is that actually true? I can't imagine taking any solace in such a letter if I were working there, whether I was among the shitcanned or not.

Insistence on a long formal letter seems sort of like an east-coast style insistence on wearing a suit; it isn't really "for" anyone. If it makes the wearer/writer feel better about what they are doing then go for it... otherwise who is the party that cares? Pincus is a scumbag but I don't think this is an example of why.
As the sibling comment states, writers rarely get to pick their own titles.
I loved the first part of the argument, that many a time causality is not from one source but multiple (often overlapping and even contradictory sources). But towards the end, you sort of do the exact opposite :). The assertion that "But dropping the bombs on Japan saved millions of both Japanese and allied lives". Allied life, I can understand that, but Japanese life. Also the assertion that the bomb somehow magically safeguarded the Japanese culture.
following up via email now.

I'm aiming to get a wee tiny open technology preview out in the coming month or two, and subsequently i'll be chatting with a few orgs to sign some "enterprise" contracts so the work can move forward from there.

Also the open layer stands a good chance of becoming the default lin alg substrate on hackage once i get it out. So theres an interesting ecosystem Gambit there.
Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning by Christopher M. Bishop

Machine Learning: A Probabilistic Perspective (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning series) by Kevin Murphy
...and those of you who were laid off will no doubt be reading this email on our website as security has shut down your network access and escorted you from the building.
It sounds like you have bigger problems than can be addressed by the hard-working people in Redmond.
I think there is a contradiction in one of the things that you say. You say that counter-factuals are speculative and not useful, yet later you say the bomb saved millions of lives - that itself invokes a counter factual. i.e. The millions who would have died if the bomb hadn't been dropped (we speculate).

Is it even possible to imply any causality without a counterfactual? You can obviously take things too far and start speculating on an alternative time line, but the immediate turn of events is surely a legitimate area of speculation (even for 'serious' historians) and I would say the decision to surrender in japan is one of those.
As I've said elsewhere, why do we need to be told? If we use it, we'll notice. If we don't use it, we're unaffected. Why should every trivial, transient outage get reported on HN?
"Lanier's strident warnings of giant mainframes run by a few to control the many missed so many critical trends that it now sounds like 1980s science-fiction. "

...except for the part where it's a pretty decent description of "cloud computing". What is a datacenter but a modern mainframe?
Introducing a free tier (Feb 2013)
Well, I'd have had a hard time building an empire off copy/paste game development, spammy-to-fraudulent marketing schemes, encouraged social pressure/spam, an 'arcade' currency, and a pretty shameless twisting of game designs to really squeeze profit from that situation.

So I'm pretty sure the stress I'd personally feel isn't worth talking about.

Which is why I not-so-subtly reframed the assertion in terms of the person who is in that situation.
Just look at all the code shipped to run in browsers...

I use Visual Studio ship code to run in browsers every day.
Mozilla has been fighting the MSVC linker's 3GB virtual address space limit for years. Mozilla has asked Microsoft for a 64-bit linker that can produce 32-bit code, but Microsoft apparently has no plans for such a configuration.

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/mozilla.d...
In this case, Zynga offered us 3 months + 1 week/year.
> it also identifies their parents and possibly their siblings

Also children.

> No doubt there will be more to this debate before the dust settles.

Absolutely. The fact that the court didn't split along political lines tells you that this issue hasn't been through the political process yet. There will be quite a bit more to this story down the road.
I mean that Microsoft already at the Visual Studio 2012 launch mentioned that the C tooling won't be updated except for critical bugs.

The main native language in Microsoft tooling is C++.

http://herbsutter.com/2012/05/03/reader-qa-what-about-vc-and...
What is QR Code and How Does It Work
Yeah, IMO it's really easy to read between the lines with something like this. It's not like he's trying to disguise his meaning. What is ultimately communicated is:

- I don't enjoy having to do this.

- We need to do this to keep making money at the rate we want to.

Of all the things in corporate America to worry about, the wording of layoff emails is pretty far down the list.
Nice algorithm !

Kind of related: in the Tetris community, there iss a human player who's specialty in making Tetris pattern (using legit piece generator). He began by making the classic ">" pattern (famous amonst the bored Japanese Sega-styled (TGM) Tetris players) [1]. Then he progressively improved and he can now do some quite impressive "sculpting". Check out his space invader [2], repeated triforce [3], Luigi [4] and the rest of his youtube channel. It's mesmerizing.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBrl2-f5vjI

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF8KWzDxpqY

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_buHvlra5A

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tipJDjeKuY

[5] https://www.youtube.com/user/Shuey187/videos
Haha yup I have been guilty of many of these. A little too close to home for me haha
OK, sure. You go and try to run a real web-based business with employees, offices and the required infrastructure without "money money".

The point stands: If you as a user don't explicitly pay for it with cash, using an ad blocker means you have chosen to deny the service some revenue.

OK, don't call it theft. That's fine.

Here's a simple mental exercise: Assume that 100% of the entire world-wide Internet audience used ad blockers. How much of the internet would cease to exist as free services? The answer: A huge chunk.
I actually firmly believe that we have a pisspoor civics education in the US. Here's the main suggestion I have to correct this:

- Give student senates power. That means (1) a significant amount of money and (2) the permission to spend it. There are some definite limits on what they can do, though I'm not sure where to put those limits, but for the most part, give them experience in actually handling the budget for a heterogenous group that exceeds their Dunbar's number. That experience includes consequences. I'd absolutely expect to see dictatorships, rebellions, and anarchies all arise without adult input, too.

Of course, this will never happen, since there isn't any such money available. I actually wonder if it'd be feasible to get someone wealthy do just donate a chunk down at some primary schools in order to try it out.
Yes.
https://www.duosecurity.com/sla
The UI is not so bad, it's the behaviour which is awful.

I'm constantly finding myself logged into YouTube with my work account after logging into Google Drive to see a document shared to me by the coworker. Except after clicking on the link in the 'so-and-so shared a…' I just get a regular 401 'You're not allowed to access this content', because I'm logged in as a different account, but not provided an option to change accounts.

I have three google accounts: work, 'Google-related stuff' (gmail, calendar, other google services), and YouTube, and I'm constantly logged into the wrong one. Google seems to assume that everyone has a Google account, and only one, and they're always logged into only that. As soon as you break those assumptions, things start behaving in unfortunate, unpredictable, and inconvenient ways. Even with their new ability to change between profiles, it doesn't work all the time, and when it fails it's overly confusing and arbitrary.
When it comes to salary negotiations ask for a precise number
To be honest I dragged a 1.5MLOC .Net 1.1 Web Forms and SQL 2000 application up to 4.0 and SQL 2008 R2 last year.

It wasn't that much of a problem. It took about 3 days and most of that was fixing deprecation warnings and porting the in house test framework to NUnit.

The real problem in the process was getting the build tooling and all the associated crap surrounding the solution up and running. This was also only because the muppets who wrote it originally put it together with sticky tape and string.
I wonder how many HN readers actually pick up a physical copy of CST? almost none.
There will still be some pro freelancers. Sad for newspapers and for those who lost their job but I doubt this will have an effect on readership.
Doesn't quite work as expected.
From "python -m calendar 1752 9" I get:

September 1752
Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su
1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30

"cal 9 1752" on the other hand gives:

September 1752
S M Tu W Th F S
1 2 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Maybe python doesn't auto recognize the timezone?

EDIT: Actually this is pretty bad because python gets all the days of the week before September 1752 in North America wrong.
It's not quality of photo that will be lost, it will be the ability to focus on reporting. Even if taking a photo is easy as Instagram, you still have to take time to edit the photo and prep it for print/production.

More problematic is the awkwardness of trying to photograph and interview at the same time. "I'm so sorry for the lost off your children, Mrs. Smith. Now can you look at my iPhone?"

That kind of breaks the rhythm.
One question, Zynga - Why are you constantly hiring? Even now, even for the positions you're laying off...
I don't disagree that companies should seek manufacturers with good rights records (among other things), but at the same time I'm honestly curious as to how many such mfg's can come in at a price point that's at all competitive.
I'm not a compiler guy, but wouldn't this be true for any compiler?
Most things don't suck

Nobody sets out to write a terrible novel, open a crappy restaurant or create a horrible movie, and people mostly succeed in not being abysmal.

Not actually true. The abysmal stuff is filtered out for you by gatekeepers in publishing distribution, financing and so forth. If you want an example of how things look without gatekeepers, consider an unfiltered app store (like Android's a year or two back) filled with endless imitations and one-note ideas (Justin Bieber sliding tile puzzle! Miley Cyrus sliding tile puzzzle! Paul Graham sliding ti...you get the idea).

The approach of Facebook and G+ is that if you don't like something, ignore it and it will go away. This doesn't really work that well (see the other popular post about FB on today's front page, and the diminishing quality of Google News as more sources are added to it).
It seems that one of the "background" blobs is aligned with the exoplanet.
It is scary, in that you have a near-monopoly, operating in a market that affects almost everyone who goes on-line to some degree, without much regulation.

Having said that, it's important to remember that without a site like Google, many of these small businesses wouldn't exist in the first place. For all the criticism, having a search engine that does a good if imperfect job is almost certainly a big net win for society. As long as that is the case, and as long as Google aren't actively/unreasonably harming anyone, I think we're a long way from saying they are dominant and dangerous enough to require statutory regulation, which would be the normal next step if an actual monopoly provider of an actually essential service was misbehaving.
Execs from Apple and publishing houses calling each other idiots
نتيجة اعدادية دمياط 2013
I wonder how you can even train someone for this... Tap to focus, now tap the shutter button, AND done.

Oh, and turn on HDR and wait 5s for it to process.
DNA also contains confidential medical information, fingerprints do not. Even if we accept that it is okay to collect DNA, it certainly cannot be treated like fingerprints are, it has much more stringent privacy and data security requirements. Simply as a practical matter, I don't think I am comfortable with their ability to handle this data.

(I imagine the collected DNA is currently not digitized, but in the future I would not expect that to remain true.)
I was thinking of the original NES version, specifically. You'd need to emulate it yourself so that you could figure out when to supply inputs to manipulate the RNG and give yourself the pieces you need.
Good point. I do not know if there have been, or not, any offers. What I do know is that their technology so far is not impressive, it is pretty average.
I use this extension -- it comes with a Blue theme which provides a color scheme that's reasonably close to VS2010 (for those that prefer it).
Realtime updates (if you're not using Websockets) are usually done with long-polling, for which 30 seconds is perfectly acceptable. Socket.io, for example, uses a default of 20 seconds [1].

Streaming music and certainly video are generally delivered as chunks, with a few chunks per request that don't require long connections [2].

[1] https://github.com/LearnBoost/Socket.IO/wiki/Configuring-Soc...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming
To abandon skilled photographers with quality equipment because of a few great photos by unskilled people using poor equipment is to miss a salient point: We notice great photos taken with poor cameras by unskilled photographers because sheer volume will produce a few worth noting; what isn't noticed is the many great photos which don't exist because equipment and/or user was unable to make the picture happen.
By the time Leahy published that, nuclear weapons were an existential threat to the US Navy, see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolt_of_the_Admirals
Many cross-platform libraries are written in C. Microsoft's terrible support for C causes those projects a significant amount of pain. If the upstream library developers don't have time/interest to restrict their dialect to avoid various C features and to test regularly with Microsoft compilers, they either (a) drop support for Windows, or (b) only support Windows via non-Microsoft compilers. Neither of these options are very appealing for users of those libraries on Windows.
There's a slow trend toward doctors not taking insurance. A few of the higher profile cases have seen private practices reduce their prices between 50% and 80%, while still making a very healthy profit. For those that need charity care, they're actually able to provide it due to having a huge block of resources (time and money) not being tied up dealing with insurance claims.

I commend your move toward transparent prices for the services you provide in the medical industry.
Why? Are trapezoids really so important that all human beings need to know what they are?
That's a great anecdote. All to often you find when people are forced to do something they hate it no matter what, whether it's deserved or not. I'm guilty of this a bit myself. Ada had a DoD mandate in the 90s which really riled a lot of folks and put them off of the language for good. It's part of the reason Ada has not had more of an impact in our lives. That, and compilers for Ada were much more expensive then as well. For many many years though we've had GNAT, a free software project and GCC frontend. We are truly lucky to have it developed by it's corporate steward which is funded by dual-licensing the compiler for FLOSS and commercial support contracts.
R.I.P. photojournalism, hopefully we can share some humor to brighten the mood.
Canon 5D Vs 1D
http://youtu.be/bEwUnENlc9M