skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm Aussie, so I did my schooling in Melbourne, Australia.

I don't recommend the same path for everyone, but my ugrad at RMIT University, dual bachelors of EE and CS. I then went on to do a Ph.D at the University of Melbourne in EE. My dissertation was on mathematical optimization of wireless and wireline DSL. (Prof Jamie Evans is an awesome guy if you're on the lookout for an advisor!)

I've been in SFO for just over 5.5 years, and started SnappyLabs after winning the "greencard lottery".

SnappyCam, you might say, is the embodiment of both a very practical ugrad and somewhat applied but very theoretical pgrad.
This is great context. Thank you.
This statistic doesn't seem immediately relevant. Success of marriage (let's say in years before divorce) is heavily influenced by the background of the individual.

Think about getting sent back to the beginning of your marriage, would you be better (with that one)? You would... that's the point.
Wow, poor reputation and a racially charged name with a historically insulting pictograph. I wasn't aware that such poor taste even existed in open source projects.
What do you mean by "work"?

Are you unable to hear the "warbling" variation at the frequency difference rate? Or are you expecting some meta-physical woowoo to happen just 'cause you're listening to it?
how many funded projects actually deliver something? i'd like to know the data...
You're welcome! Good idea on the painting. If you want to keep your focus (which is a good thing) then something creative away from the computer is probably a good idea.

There are tons and tons of things that overlap with programming in terms of creative focus. Writing, painting, etc. are all great.

I'd also recommend finding a way to spend time outside. Our brains get a little square sometime from sitting inside all day looking at the screen. I've had a lot of creative ideas while hiking or sitting by the ocean (when it's not crowded).
The breakthrough is in some very fast signal processing to allow the images to be taken on an iPhone, not a GoPro. Both are impressive.
Thanks bigiain. I have been mainly a Windows engineer for a while now, though I'm feeling increasingly uncomfortable about my skill level on Windows (very high, imho) against my skill level on Linux (I can't hack Linux with the best of them unfortunately) is off balance. I've spent some time hacking on Android (recently) and have a history with embedded systems, but again not at a level I'm comfortable with. I've also been thinking a lot about 3d printing and how that intersection can yield new opportunities.

Totally think the intersection of tech and art or tech & other fields is a good way to reach some balance, maybe it's time to pick up a Pi...
Related: http://c-faq.com/decl/spiral.anderson.html
The Legend of The Oregon Trail
When you read about 'DIGIC', 'BIONZ', or 'EXPEED' in dedicated digital cameras, you're on the spot with custom processors. (In some cases, more than one) They're often multi-chip modules that can be scaled depending on the level of camera and can be based on standard SoC or embedded macros.

On top of that, you'll have the 'firmware', which is where projects such as Magic Lantern/CHDK make things fun.

Some reading on the Canon gear:

http://cpn.canon-europe.com/content/education/infobank/captu...

http://magiclantern.wikia.com/wiki/Datasheets
Oh ok, I did a quick search and found this blog article:
http://intelnuc.tumblr.com/
and it looked like the cheapest model was the dual port HDMI one.. but you're right, checking on Intel site[1] there's also a Celeron based model, DCCP847DYE, that costs 165$ on Amazon[2]

[1] http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/motherboards/desktop-...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Intel-Next-Computing-Black-BOXDCCP847D...
jpap, if you ever find yourself stranded in Canberra, I'll buy you a beer (a proper Australian one).
Its for the future once we become immortal! Law makers are already thinking about it! :-D
Ivan Godard Out-of-the-Box Computing - Instruction Encoding
That's a lot of extrapolation from a few awkward conversations to reach the conclusion "There’s this stigma in the startup universe around being a contractor, consultant, or freelancer."

I have a hard time believing there really is an industry wide stigma against freelancers in NYC. It certainly isn't the case around here. Plenty of startups come from people, like myself, who have run consultancies for a while.

A major motivation for me to move out of consultancy is to make money while I'm sleeping. The fact you're selling time is the limiting factor on consultancy/freelancing, and one disadvantage the OP doesn't mention.

There's no shortage of socially awkward engineers, so perhaps the OP has just run into a few who don't know what to do when the conversation goes off the script they're expecting?
This is what I find fascinating about it.

I understand from a math/physics perspective why a microphone places betwen two sound sources playing slightly different frequencies "hears" the beat pattern. I don't understand why that still works once the two individual signals have made their way into your audio nerves and brain. (If I didn't have actual work I shoukd be doing now, I suspect I'd happily drop into a 6 or 8 hour wikipedia and google mediated deep-dive laymans research session.)
Sounds like they were applauding Alexander.

I'm not liking the vibe of the audience there.
Google knows you hate your job
If you have the chance to quit you job, why will you quit and how much in dollars will it take you to quit your current job?
What makes you think there will be a c(r)aptive portal?
I believe that abuse of power in general, and illicit surveillance in particular, is nothing new, especially for the United States. This does not make any of it kosher of course.

But in an age where the courts can literally, retroactively re-write the laws to serve their own interests, protests and petitions are as evocative as a breeze.

I suspect that portions of every generation feels that things will get worse before it gets better. I believe that other portions of every generation believe theirs to be the ultimate showdown, the Armageddon. All said, I don't see how we can be backed any further into a corner. I've been running daily news aggregation articles at my website:

http://thelotteryparty.com/

And every day's post makes me feel more and more like a sadomasochist. I see no easy solutions. I think we will all need to go without many things that we've been taking for granted, before life will look anymore hopeful for future generations, even the next generation.

Edit to add:
I have not had a bank account since the big bailout of '07, and have never owned a credit card. I pay only sales taxes. I do not vote. I boycott freely and widely. These and other small battles make for a truly awkward lifestyle, but I think it the best way to buck the system- by not enabling any of it. Take the power away from the Powers That Be. The People own the gov.
“And if you disagree with what we’re doing, you should help us twice as much.”

Right, so they end up like Snowden...
It's supposed to influence your brain waves. Also don't be such a
Works fine in Firefox, FWIW.
jpap,

Could you take the 'trimmed' section and create a looping GIF from that? (Can I do that already?)
Anecdotally, most. I've backed about 50 projects and none have failed to deliver, though plenty have been delayed.
Is it the mint or the cocaine that cures the hangover? :)
Yes, that does require some explanation:

1. The receding circle is the capture buffer being processed. When you're tapping on the thumbnail, SnappyCam sees the start of the living photo being available and shows it. It does not, unfortunately, refresh the thumbnail list as more shots complete processing.

This is a (feature) bug and I'll work to address it.

2. The circle with percent progress is what I call "turbo rewind", where the camera is shut down so that all CPU cores can be applied to compression so that you can take back-to-back living photos quickly.

You can select the buffer "threshold" for when this kicks in under the advanced settings: look for Turbo Rewind.
Note that it's not numbers per-se, it is a list of things (with the length of the list identified, and often a 'top' list.) This is a well known method to drive hits in blogging.
It's interesting that you and vijayboyapati focus on this one paragraph of a much longer reply, and that you perceive correcting somebody as attacking them. Indeed, that's something that hasn't gotten better over the years, anywhere.
As someone who worked on operating systems back at Multiflow (late 80's, the first VLIW start-up as a spin-off from Yale research), it struck me recently that something like an LLVM representation of binary code might solve the "compiler problem" (needing to know the exact specifics of the chip's latencies). I.e., you'd run and load LLVM binaries, and have a runtime final optimization pass that took into account the specific latencies of each opcode for a particular implementation. (The LLVM architecture is actually already set up to do optimizations at runtime on LLVM "binaries".)

But perhaps that "final optimization pass" would be nearly as hard as the whole compilation problem in the first place; dunno. I wasn't on the compiler team, so this is perhaps a naive viewpoint.
A GoPro can do 720p (1 megapixel) at 120 FPS; this app can do 8 MP at 20 FPS. Also, it's using JPEG instead of a video codec so when you want to pick out a single frame it's already in the format you want. Likewise there are no motion artifacts because it doesn't use a video codec, so every frame should be equal quality.
To be fair security services are planting troublemakers into organisations for a while now to justify themselves:

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/06/23/police-infiltration-of...

I'm certain that this infiltration will be a pretty standard play; you can bet the security services also have people who get extra money at Google, Amazon, Facebook, Skype etc.
People consume bullet points easily. Headlines that promise a quick, content dense read frequently perform well.
The part you mention as difficult took me 5 years to get comfortable with--as in, "ready to start thinking about buying a house as a full-time freelancer."

If you are a serious freelancer who wants to make a go of it as a lifestyle, you are selling a result (e.g. beautiful website, better search rankings, lovely illustrations). So when somebody calls you and says, "we are looking for a freelancer," you start to realize that maybe they want some sort of staff auxiliary rather than a result, and they won't respect your boundaries like other clients, and you learn to ask them if they can pay $150/hr. just so you can test the waters. You might even try to recommend that they dial up a college student and see what they do. I did this last week with a furniture company that was about to pay me $600/week for an hour-long meeting and maybe 1-2 hours of web design work. Sooner or later they'd realize they don't need my skill set, and I don't really want direct furniture sales in my portfolio. My job is just to help them out.

Lots of long-term freelancers will drop the hourly stuff ASAP too. In this way you'll get freelancers who say, "my favorite client pays me $500/hr. for web design," and they're really just saying they bill by the project. But go talk to those clients--they're typically very happy and feel like they've got a real solution on their hands.
The problem, as I see it, is that despite the company's best efforts, many backers simply don't understand the risks involved in backing a project.

I think Kickstarter has done more than enough, but my prediction is that failures of this kind will not be tolerated by regulators. The US is very business friendly; considering limited liability and bankruptcy law. However on any front touching consumer protection the law often reaches too far, and punishes failure egregiously.
Yes, indeed, a sentiment shared in some form or another by most of the users here. However, your call to action is nebulous at best. Most of the solutions that myself and others are taking include 1) Encryption, 2) Writing politicians, and 3) Discussing the issue with friends and family. If you are able to suggest something more effective, please do so.

Also, if you are truly want to make a difference, I think it's a good idea to start using Bitcoin. The ability to circumvent taxes (at least, for now, while Bitcoin is fresh) decreases the government's ability to control you. Of course, Bitcoin's public success is more of a fantasy I hold. Regardless, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on that matter.
I love it when I see a blog post about a HN discussion about a blog post about a HN discussion about a blog post.
My (almost) 4-year-old has a new favorite activity. Thanks!
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Rotten Tomatoes
A lifesaver sometimes: http://cdecl.org
You mean as in

func(foot);
/* Should check func != gun.shoot */
If they have funding, they'll still try to poach you. For some reason people seem to think "consultant" = up for grabs
It's been being weirdly suppressed on reddit: http://www.anonmgur.com/up/17832a6eafb09376d012090ff1b06dbe....

Every time a thread on this hits the top it gets mod-deleted.
I find complex Scala declarations much harder to parse. Have a look at these examples:

def
scanLeft[B, That](z: B)(op: (B, A) ⇒ B)(implicit bf: CanBuildFrom[Iterable[A], B, That]): That

implicit def
flatten5[A, B, C, D, E, F](f: (A, B, C, D, E) ⇒ F): ((ImplicitConversions.this)#~[(ImplicitConversions.this)#~[(ImplicitConversions.this)#~[(ImplicitConversions.this)#~[A, B], C], D], E]) ⇒ F

implicit def
flatten5[A, B, C, D, E, F](f: (A, B, C, D, E) ⇒ F): (~[~[~[~[A, B], C], D], E]) ⇒ F

These are, thankfully, exceptions and most declarations are easier to read, nevertheless, as a Scala beginner, it takes me quite some time parsing such a declaration when I intend to utilize the function in question. But that's probably the price to pay for complex static typing.
Cheers mate, I'm from Melbourne and might just take you up on that! (I live here in SFO at the moment, but try to get back as much as I can.)
It's now on the list. Had a few requests for it, and agreed, it'd be cool. :)
Yes. https://api.github.com/users/mojombo
I wish Overtone -- as someone who has no idea how to setup jackd with pulseaudio and SuperCollider -- was easier to jump straight into and play around.
>A major motivation for me to move out of consultancy is to make money while I'm sleeping.

Actually quite a few consultants and freelancers do this. I've been making money while sleeping, as a freelancer, for the last 5 years. It's actually my favorite part of what I do, and I have an advisor who helps me figure it out as I go along. Perhaps a startup is just another vehicle for pursuing this dream that is better suited to you.

There really is that annoying "freelancer???" thing, but I think it's really just a matter of the other party's experience & education.
It's a phenomenon that happens to all waves, whether they are acoustic or electromagnetic. In fact, it's how your clock radio tunes to various stations. This property is a mathematical property of all waves, hence even when your brain mixes an electrical representation of the sound going into your left and right ears, you still get the effect.
I agree - I was actually being careful with my call to action, as the truth is that taxes are the only way to truly fight back peacefully - but will aggressively be attacked by the government.

I made the call to action more nebulous so as to see what would come from open discussion.
Me too! – It has this classic modern look with a distinct impact printer feel about it.
> I ended up with simple draft but I am sure somebody more competent could look into that.

If nothing prevents you, you ought to throw this up for others to see. Worst comes to worst, no one finds it useful.
In general sensors output raw and the ISP does the image pipeline including demosaicing, so a phone could support raw with different ISP firmware. (Reportedly Nokia wrote custom ISP firmware for their fancy camera, for example.) I wouldn't be surprised if one of the upcoming Samsung or Sony phone-cameras supports raw.
So cool, great start up story. Nice that he had parents that could afford to invest $300K in his dream. Behind every great start up is some rich person who handed someone a pile of money to get started. Bill Gates Mom was on the board of directors of IBM. People forget that. Wouldn't it be interesting to see if you could take someone who grew up poor and see if the same thing would work.
Looking forward to taking these pics and testing out http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/69699e5a-5c91-... Image composite editor with things like photosynth
[In the voice of Steven Wright]:

I'd like to get an email address that nobody knows. That way when I don't get any email, I won't be disappointed...
How are you paid without a bank account? I'd be really interested in hearing how you manage that physically.
Modular WordPress
Hate all you want on Phoronix, but I still don't know any other good "news aggregator" for X11, Linux GPU drivers and optimization news. It's not like everything on Phoronix comes from -announce mailing lists, they do a pretty good job at filtering noise from development mailing list and providing fresh news. They also always link to the original source if you're not happy about the quality of their articles.
Practice. A lot.

A good start is actually the ARM processor; since it's a RISC instruction set, it's quite simple.

I've done lots of assembly in my ugrad days, even writing a Motorola HC11 micro-controller emulator, but ARM would be a much better choice right now.

I found the "Tonic: Whirlwind Tour of Assembly" [1] site invaluable to get me started for SnappyCam, as it covers a lot of the ARM ISA.

For iOS-related assembly, I'd recommend [2].

And for a taste of ARM NEON SIMD, have a look at [3]. The one thing that "clicked" for me on SIMD is that you should look at each register "lane" as trying to unroll a loop. I initially dived in thinking I'd just make a sequential algorithm parallel, which is often too difficult to arrange.

[1] http://www.coranac.com/tonc/text/asm.htm
[2] http://www.shervinemami.info/armAssembly.html
[3] http://hilbert-space.de/?p=22
I'd support having a nice and loud discussion on doing this. Being able to trace the authorship of line items doesn't seem to have stopped pork in other countries, but it might mitigate it. And we'd be able to yell at people better.
Maybe. How is the hosting handled by your project? One of the things I'm looking forward to on Ghost is the ability to hack on their dashboard. I'm asking about the hosting as well because I want to have the power to host my blog on my own servers.
I hope you're right. If I ever get a chance, I'll ask. =)
haha, very cool. Smart man! :D
NaCl is actually designed to interoperate with JS in a fairly rich way and this interoperability is designed to be provided entirely by the browser. The idea is that you pick the runtime that you want -- probably the one provided by your browser -- and it pokes (hopefully secured) holes in the safe box that native client guarantees. This includes a sort of networking API that JS can call in to.
Gmail is basically just a blob of js. A lot of modern web apps are. If your definition of the Web is "View Source" capable JS, that battle was lost a long time ago.

NaCL does permit web apps, the Pepper API allows calling browser APIs just like JS, unlike Flash.

The way I look at the browser is, it's a layout engine that manages a Render Tree built by DOM and CSS. It has external bindings for APIs to manipulate DOM, CSS, plus canvas, audio, storage, et al. These APIs may be called from JS, Dart, NaCl. It's the APIs that define the platform, not the programming language.

Too many people are fixated on JS. Really, all that truly matters is having a portable, secure mechanism for distributing code that can call into these bindings. Right now, JS is the only game in town, but there's no reason that has to be the dominant mechanism for the next decades.

If the Web is to be around for another 20-30 years, it needs to avoid stagnation via language zealotry.
Nice summary. However, the comment about first example is slightly inaccurate. Saying the `sayHello` function does not take arguments is wrong. It does, it just does not care about them. You could still call it with arguments like sayHello("world", 15) and there would be no compiler warning nor error.

If you want to declare a function with no arguments, just do it as `sayHello(void)`. Then, the previous example would result in compile-time error.
At least in Norway, the pay is also about 30% higher without the need of a administration. So there's that too. Instead of saying freelance, say independent contractor.
Great, I'm not actually sure how the iPhone photo library handles GIFs.. but I'd much rather be able to choose 'export as GIF' & 'export this frame' than to save all 100 photos.

great app man, thanks
Congrats fellow Australian. Two of us here in an office in Adelaide just bought the app.

Guy behind me said "Hey, this is pretty cool. Have you seen... oh, you're looking at it already."
Weird. Could be a bug in the dropdown component I wrote in AngularJS. :( Glad the keyboard still works.

Will look into it...
Cash primarily, though I cash checks at non-chain pawn shops as needed. I've been getting lucky in the last year or so with trading goods and services- such as covering my hosting fees by proofreading/script doctoring/ghostwriting for others, etc. Even lawncare for groceries in the funner months. It is not easy, but I watched Turk182 waaay too much when I was a kid.
The Intel Labs Haskell Research Compiler
I wanted to read this because I believe it's a great article, but the fact that he doesn't use semicolons pretty much turned me off.

While I was looking at the JavaScript code my brain almost exploded.
Love the "we'll iMessage you a download link" feature on the web page. Are you using a service for this? Note it doesn't seem to work for me in Germany, it doesn't change the country code, it leaves it at +1 (instead of +49)...
I can't work right now, Tim has the cone.

(this was a pretty great idea from the manager though)
I guess it depends on what you mean by reliability - from the FAQ:

RethinkDB is not a good choice if you need full ACID support or strong schema enforcement — in this case you are better off using a relational database such as MySQL.
Many years ago I worked on a now defunct project (RapidLingual.com) that mixed binaural beats over spoken language lessons. Binaural beats had been marketed for a long time as a 'super learning' technique that could induce a state of mind that's more focussed and receptive of a lesson (though the theory was there, there was no study that confirmed it).

Unfortunately the guy who was supposed to write the lessons never really did his part and the whole thing collapsed, but it gave me a chance to play around with it and noticed:

- Binaural beats are common in urban environments for things like air conditioner units that resonate at slightly different frequency, but pair up for a loud binaural pulse

- Adding white-noise enhances the effect of the beats (you find similar backing noise in products like Holosync)

- You can only encode to FLAC. Because of the lossy psycho-acoustic nature of Mp3 encoding, it strips out the inaudible part of waves that you apparently need

- For a trippy experience, I wrote a program that fades the screen (red-black) in sync with the beats
I read the TC article, bought the app, and came here in the hope that the developer would be here. I was not disappointed!
There may be a protest on Sunday near you: http://1984day.com

Many hands make light work.