skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> They didn't create an advanced robot. They created an advanced system that works really well in whole.

Of course, I understand that.

But if you watch the video again, you may notice that a vast majority of items being shipped are .. boxes, not irregular shapes. Determining if the order consists entirely out of box shapes is straight-forward. And since the packaging needs not be optimal in terms of space, just not overly wasteful, so there is a lot of potential for further automation.
Sure! In the e-mail send from this address let's tell them that SRJC means "Suing Rarely Justifies Competence" or something :-)
Yeah, keep it to I was laid off, cranked out X application while on unemployment the past two months, have just launched and want YC feedback.
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Don't worry about it.

The iPhone app store has enough DRM to move piracy below your radar. Casual users won't pirate your app; the few who might go to that effort aren't worth your time. If your app was available via direct download, an anti-piracy scheme might be useful, but for app store applications you needn't worry. Spend your time making other improvements to your app that will attract more players.
It's also a good example of someone taking 10 paragraphs to say "don't overfit"...which might be a bit terse for non-AI people, but the article still feels long-winded.
I'm buying a mac very soon.
Uhhh…?
Tell HN: Wolfram Alpha preview goes live
Does what it says on the tin. Accounts are private and there's no invites to hand out (sorry), but no NDAs or restrictions on reporting.

First impression: useful, but there's a learning curve. If you want a specific datum, it's usually there and presented in a a variety of useful contexts. Sometimes information is obviously there but it's not clear how to access it; for example, searching on 'Citizen Kane' will tell me it was directed by Orson Welles (along with other basic data), but searching on Orson Welles just gives the bare biographical data, not his filmography. It's not obvious how to dig that sort of information out.

The computational aspects are impressive and quite accessible thanks to good NLP; if you've already used Mathematica you'll be familiar with a lot of them. I feel like there's a great deal of power that I haven't properly learned how to manipulate yet. I'm looking forward to the aPI, which (per this morning's Webinar) Wolfram says will be public and IIRC, free.

Paid services will include license of the Alpha software for use on a company's internal datasets, as well as for commercial use of the data and 'large' computational tasks (whatever that means).

Finally, it's open to the public on May 18th.
Okay, so I guess I'm saying it should be easier ;)

You have places like Elance where people can find freelancers / contractors to do work for them and you have places like LinkedIn for finding employees, but there doesn't seem to be anywhere to find fellow freelancing folks to trade / refer work with. You're already letting them bill each other, so why not help them find each other in the first place? I think a lot of independent folks could be a lot more successful if they had even a small network of fellow freelancers they know they can trust to do good work in areas where they aren't experts.
Well, other than being slightly embarassing (if he even cares) to a bunch of people he will never meet, it could also get the attention of a nice nerdy girl looking for a 16 year old who designs space colonies.
I use a Mac at work, and I have, essentially, three problems.

The biggest problem as I run up against it all the time is the mouse tracking. I tried switching mice, Microsoft's Intellimouse software for Mac, and finally settled for a custom setting widget that lets me boost the mouse speed to 10x (!) that allowed by the default controls. This is a bit of a personal thing, but I like sensitive mice, and I dislike needing to move my arm to cross the screen. The weird acceleration curve that I am stuck with is very frustrating.

The second problem is Mac support. If I find something on the internet, it usually has a Windows version. And a Linux port. And maybe someone ported it to Mac. It's not always a problem, but it happens often enough that I don't want to reinvent the wheel to try a new program and I wish I were using another OS.

The third problem is cost- $1200 for 8GB of RAM?
http://store.apple.com/us/memorymodel/ME_IMAC_AL_20_G3
There are times when you don't need to go to Apple for hardware, but when you do, you get taken to the cleaners, and that's after spending quite a bundle on the software.
IME, many many developers have no idea how to measure and profile their code. The reason for the stories is to help educate people with less experience in what tools to use, and how to use them.
You missed my point entirely, so I'll spell it out. Some of the hacker types on this site like to complain about silly-sounding job postings, clueless MBA's, etc. It turns out, however, that writing a job posting, and being a good manager in general, is very difficult.

If you want to criticize something, you should do so with the experience of having done a better job at it. (Yes, I have written job postings, and I take great care and pride in crafting them.)
California sales taxes collection drop 50.9%, income taxes 43.6%
Don't forget the phantom ('seasonal') 60,000 jobs created by temporary hiring for the census...
Strange. My expectation would be that you'd hook a profiler up to the web process and it would simply follow all ruby code paths, regardless of whether Rails were involved or not. Or do we have different definitions of Profiler?

You're talking about a separate application that watches executing code and keeps statistics, right? As in, not simply a set of timing functions in a wrapper somewhere in the framework? If so, how does it come off the trolley after Rails finishes its job?
You can buy RAM for Macs from non-Apple sources for much cheaper.
How often do you need an answer to something that is not already available on the web and there is no other tool on the web that can compute it?

While Wolfram Alpha is more sophisticated than Google in some ways, Google is better in terms of being practical for a much larger number of people.

In other words, this appears to be a niche product.
Too bad git is not good for large files - http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/git/2006/2/8/200591
"The missing piece is how to identify over-specialization, and it's missing because it can't be usefully generalized."

If you read the literature on selective breeding they have extensive methodologies for avoiding genetic problems. If you just want a quick overview, Temple Grandin's book "Animals in Translation" has a couple of really entertaining chapters on the subject.
Er, isn't this a valid concern? I don't own an iPhone, so I don't REALLY know what I'm talking about here, but as a college student, I know quite a few people with iPhones who pirate ALL of their applications. I get the impression that they have pretty much the same applications as people paying for them.
Wii 2 HD: the final console?
This is very promising news, despite the recession; the gaming community are obliged to continue developing technology to make life more enjoyable for us (well, those who take pleasure in gaming)....
The multi-touch trackpad is a real boon for browsing and reading, but for anything pixel-related I find having an external optical mouse is useful still.
Price is still the big issue all round - especially as PC hardware just keeps dropping.
I really don't follow this line of thinking. Unless you are independently wealthy you always need someone to pay. If you are working on more abstract levels like kernels or libraries then you just have more technical customers is all. It doesn't matter how many downstream entities could potentially use your abstract product if you don't have someone to pay for it up front. Of course you could just do the open source thing and eventually hope to get sponsorship (eg. Linus), but really that's just another type of sale that is contingent on value you are providing.
Not to change the terms of the debate, but you know, at the end of the day, it's a bit tyrannical that a person should be expected to consult anything from Washington DC to hold a yard sale.
Indeed, I'd never heard of Metal before reading this post. The quote you included is what lead me to wonder why there are not better tools for such a popular development framework as Ruby on Rails.

As that quote states, there doesn't appear to be a profiler as such, but rather a set of "timing and logging components" built into the framework. If it's true, then ruby today is essentially handling profiling the same way PHP did it in 1998. I find that surprising and saddening.
Happy to see someone confirm this can be done. It also made me think of http://www.liquibase.org/
Did it really get the correct word for the first "weigh"? (which is "away", not "way")
Having lived in Ruby code for a bit, I think it's fair to say that you're entirely right. It's immature, it's poorly profiled, it has memory leaks, and the scoping rules are a nightmare.

But it sounds like you were doing profiling and optimization early and often, which might have been premature, and thus might have been a waste of time.

Who's to say? Ruby isn't for everyone. Perhaps your ideal web stack is what you're using. (What're you using, btw?) I've been itching to use Haskell for a webapp.
Well, the extent to which this matters depends on how often you run it. Even if the hashing for a 10gb database dump takes ten minutes* , it will still get backed up ten minutes after the hour, every hour. There are very likely better solutions, but it would be easy to set up, and better than nothing.

(Besides, any solution that has to deal with a complete db dump is going to have to hash, diff, or otherwise process a large volume of data.)

* As a single data point, sha1 just ran for me at approx. 800mb/min.
Thought police muscle up in Britain, soft totalitarianism arrives
Yeah. "Overfit" is more of a ML concept than AI concept though. Many ML people don't believe in AI at all.
I'm for it. Why don't you write a blog post about the idea and share widely.
A Lockbox Built from DNA
Hand the software out for free and charge for user accounts on the server.

This turns the problem into one of "How do I prevent account piracy?", which is hopefully not dependent on characteristics of the iPhone.

edit: I'm not sure what sort of kickback Apple would like in this case. Be sure to check that out first.
Tech Jobs Still Scarce But Layoffs May Be Slowing Down
http://searchyc.com/virginia?sort=by_date

Minimum five hits over the past five days.
I've done low-calorie dieting many times before. I know exactly what my basal rate is and know about what I burn in calories through exercise. This isn't low-calorie dieting. And I'm not hungry.

Trust me. Look into the insulin hypothesis. The "calorie is a calorie" thinking is naive pseudo-thermodynamics. Feedback systems are a lot more complicated than that. Read the Taubes book.
And what do we, as a startup crowd, keep saying about niche markets?
And of course, you've come to this opinion after extensive use of Wolfram Alpha over a good period of time. No? Just empty prejudices based on second-hand impressions?

Honestly, what's with the battle lines being drawn? The product hasn't come out yet, and basically no one has used it. It seems like it will be an excellent compliment to existing search engines and data sources, but you have to wait and see.
I didn't mean Spielberg AI...rather, AI as the umbrella term for things like ML, vision, heuristic search, some parts of robotics, etc. But yes, more specifically, it's a ML term.
Before anyone complains or flags, let me say that I debated whether or not to submit this, as HN has been especially touchy about government-oriented posts lately. I decided to submit it anyway because 1) the piece is careful, non-hysterical, and thoughtful, and 2) as PG has implied elsewhere, the existence of thought crimes are particularly onerous to innovators. Try to imagine Feynman living in this place...
Thanks but these all blow
Piracy exists, sure. But I would suggest that iPhone developers not worry about it. Anti-piracy measures for iPhone applications would require time and energy invested that would arguably be better spent improving the software.

Users who pirate applications aren't necessarily lost customers; they might not have purchased it legally even if they couldn't pirate it.
For those who are considering replying, that's a (uncited) quote from Atlas Shrugged.
no way.

i'm selling gadgets & gizmos and another smart stuff (thinkgeek like), people is not interested anymore in something which is not digital (except laser sabers)
The exclamation mark that disappeared from the headline really borks its parsability. Suggest someone fixes that.

The article does make an okay case for journalism being interesting, but it fails to convince me that "old news" is something that can or should be saved.
Does the Kiva system work with garments (hanging merchandise)?
That book looks hugely interesting--thanks for the recommendation!

We've been using biological metaphors in this discussion, but I'm not sure we can extend them this far.
That could be accomplished in the upcoming 3.0 SDK which supports subscriptions.
Leaked Google presentation meant to counter monopoly criticism?
Unlike a prudent household or business, when times are good governments spend every penny, and commit themselves to future spending as if growth will continue without interruption forever. Invariably then, when the downturn hits, rather than cutting the spending and entitlements that caused the problem in the first place, the politicians ask everyone to 'share' in the sacrifice by higher and more ubiquitous taxes. Hence, the effect is like a ratchet, always turning towards bigger government.
We had a couple resale/used children's stores here in town that went out of business because of these same regulations.
brilliant, this could finally end the recession!

people working and living digital must use digital money and help others via donations instead of mandatory offline taxes.

(offline) citizenship is in the same way fake like the original sin.
I'm looking forward to seeing if it can answer the question, "When was JFK shot?". Was chatting with someone previously from PowerSet who maintains it won't be able to, but I'm hoping he's wrong...
Hah, ok score -1 me. It didn't. It came up with way (which was prefixed by a). I think you'll forgive me as that piece is something of a landmine.
How do you keep several billion people gainfully employed, with robots able to do so many tasks without supervision?

It means we will need to change our economic systems to adapt to that reality. Otherwise, Manna might be the result.

So, as sci-fi that makes you think, I find it useful.
Maybe off topic on the ridiculousness of this patent, the headline after "IBM patent for" should be taken seriously.

The standard for me used to be one hour long meetings.

About this time last year I read a chapter in a management book (name escapes me, and it would probably be great Prior Art) that suggested never scheduling meetings longer than 30 minutes. So I set some rules for myself based on the meeting type.

Brainstorming meetings/topical discussions: 30 minutes, max. Never recurring. I start the meeting on time with a simple statement: "I value the time you've given me here, so I want to get this going. If we tear apart <topic> we can probably be done in twenty." I get consistent, on-time attendance (from people who do not report to me) and consistent participation (on conference calls people are taking from in front of an internet connected PC).

Status Meetings: I rarely schedule these, but when I have to, they're set to 15 minutes and very structured. My daily status meeting lasts between five and seven minutes.

I have a totally unscientific theory as to why I insist on shorter meetings work (based solely on how I behave):

1) I don't have an hour to kill in a conference call being hosted by someone other than my boss or in my reporting chain. So I work during those meetings. I do have twenty minutes assuming that the problem attempting to be solved hasn't already been solved by the organizer and my attendance is simply ceremonial.

2) Half hour meetings may mean having to have two instead of one, but that may also be a benefit in that it gives people time to think more deeply about the problem at hand and be prepared for the next meeting.

3) Status meetings suck, especially if they are simply a formality or legal requirement. I see them for what they are (a necessary evil) and try not to waste anyone's valuable time. When I host them, they have a strict agenda and are very short.

When I participate in "manager status meetings" (sometimes called "What did you work on this week?"), I come prepared with a list and put it through a filter: "Is this item something that anyone on this call will find useful or care about". My responses are short and to the point. I regularly receive follow-up questions targeted at a specific bullet point. Maybe that's bad, but I'd rather provide a little less than is necessary and have someone ask me for specific information that's important to them, than provide so much information that everyone's eyes glaze over and they stop paying attention.
What does "Orson Welles' filmography" return?
The Next Age of Discovery: New finds while digitizing ancient texts
In addition to second-hand impressions, there's a long history of failed products/approaches similar to this one.

Google has found a sweet spot. And it won't change anytime soon.
Your criticisms apply just as easily to the carefully built, optimistic buzz Wolfram is attempting to create...the same thing he tried with "A New Kind of Science".
But did they get paid by Apple yet? Cashflow is king and depending on one customer or partner for the majority of income doesn't make for a healthy company.
For an MMORPG, that IS a valid concern though. Pirated copies take up server resources and increase costs. Piracy also makes it more difficult to enforce rules - if everyone has to pay, closing a misbehaving account is feasible, but if a significant percentage of the userbase pirates it, then they can just make any number of free accounts, and degrade the experience for paying users.
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it takes a couple of minutes / hours and everybody is so happy
So basically our government acts exactly the way most of us do. Democracy in action.
a better fix is to mysqldump every table individually, and then git commit those as distinct .sql files. This way less-often updated data (reference tables, etc) tend not to need updating, and your hash generation is typically smaller. Plus, you can skip log/session type tables if you are that way inclined to use them. :)
The tapbot products really are awesome. These two guys wanted to create their own interfaces for their products from scratch, and they succeeded.

However, I think it's worth noting that the tapbots programmer has been writing objective-c since the 80's. Even with that amount of experience it took two months of "nights and weekends" to create their weightbot app. If you're just starting with objective-c / cocoa / iphone development, I think it's unrealistic to expect to achieve their level of quality in as short a time.
I think Wolfram Alpha targets a different target audience as Google does. I second the fact that WA appears to be a niche product, since a lot of people will find more information using Google rather than WA (the "Orson Welles" example is a good one. the second search result on Google is Welles' IMDB-page). summa sumarum we have to wait 'til the 18th of May to see what is hiding behind the big WA wall.
The iPhone app store has enough DRM to move piracy below your radar.

Do you have numbers for that? Anecdotal evidence (forum posts from developers, statistics provided by companies hawking anti-piracy solutions) suggest that piracy is actually a significant percentage of all app installs.

I'm not entering into a debate about spending time fighting piracy versus spending time adding new features. I'm just curious about your assertion that piracy of app store applications is negligible. Is it based on specific experiences, or gut feeling?
It's actually worse. The government gets to spend other people's money.
"Thanks to the new two and a half strike law, we're repossessing your car as an accessory to copyright infringement."
This opens up a whole world of resource allocation algorithms. Usually the logistical mathematics is limited by human-based constraints. It might be worthwhile to throw the book out on bin-packing and random access methods and try some new, fun linear algorithms from scratch!
THE PLOW IS GOING TO MAKE THE FARMER OBSOLETE!!!

Okay, I'm kidding, of course, and I struggle with this all the time. I mean, if a factor that used to require 1000 people to build cars now only requires 100, or 50, or 1 or 0 or whatever, then what happened to the rest of the workers?

They have moved on to auxiliary industries such as engineering (somebody needs to design the robots right).

The endgame, however, will be the mechanized production of everything. At that point, energy will be the currency (instead of labor..think about it, paper money is just a unit of time*energy). If we can tap the near-limitless supplies of energy from fusion, we will have achieved a nearly Utopian Society.
We check for pirated apps in our iphone analytics library (we haven't released yet) and provide some tools to combat it. One of the ways we do it is using this code:

NSDictionary *info = [bundle infoDictionary];
if ([info objectForKey: @"SignerIdentity"] != nil)
{
//app is pirated
}
Twitter's Visitor Traffic Growth Rate Falls
Computers to keep our emotions in check
I find my self saying this a lot lately

Just because technology A can do action B, does not mean it's the most appropriate path to take
It depends on the update . . .

I'm currently hosting a series of meetings where we are certifying all of our existing IE 6 and IE 7 based applications for IE 8. Much is broken because of hacks necessary to make these sites work properly in older versions of the browser.

While I'll be the first to say that we apply the IE Cumulative Updates the day after release ... silently ... to every PC in our company, we wouldn't dream of deploying a major browser update without reviewing it.
Anymore, 99% most of our applications are browser based. A major browser update (Firefox 2.0 -> 3.0 or IE x.0 to IE x+1.0) can be as impacting as upgrading the operating system silently.

Yes, yes, I know. We standardized on IE, bad us. It wasn't my call :o).
8GB of RAM isn't exactly a great example though, 4GB DDR3 SODIMMs are expensive nearly everywhere. Going through Crucial is still almost $1k.

http://www.crucial.com/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=836DF3A...
To be clear, those are y/y per-month changes. Otherwise, this would be even more terrifying than it is.

That being said, the majority of general fund revenue comes from (in order), personal income tax (55%), retail/sales/use tax (27%), and corporation tax (11.1%), and other (6.1%). So a drop in income taxes of 43.6% is far more important than the change in sales tax of -50.9% -- if those rates are sustained, that implies we need to look for something to replace the (0.55*.436 = 23%) of our general fund revenue. Suck.
... because all the school shooting in recent years were done by upstanding adults carrying concealed weapons permits.

Banning guns in schools works, now we just need to tell the young psychopaths that they must take their violence elsewhere.
Pokec.sk
which are the the similar failed stories?