skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some technical points of interest, perhaps.

The gif explosion / creation is done server-side using python Wand, Pillow and the excellent images2gif script. Exploding the gif into frames was a giant pain in the ass until I checked out StackOverflow, and the source for Wand, and found the coalesce function a bit hidden. (There are many ways to recreate a gif from it’s exploded frames - coalesce handles all the permutations as far as I can tell.)

For the creation tool specifically I tried out several of the Javascript only gif creation libraries and wasn’t crazy about the colors they produced, and was concerned about browser support, which in the end ended up being gated by lack of support for either the Blob object, or webcam/getUserMedia on all but Chrome and Firefox.

I haven’t given up on using the JS libraries entirely, but I wanted to get this out there first and see what people thought. The requests to create a gif a put on a celery queue and handled by worker nodes to keep the web app from hanging on creation requests.

The live preview in the creation tool fakes a gif by drawing each frame to a canvas, compositing the cropped/erased image to it, and just using a JS timer set to the gif’s frame delay to flip-book through them.

All the gifs have been masked over with details of where, on each frame, the face should be placed, how big it should be, and how much it should be rotated.

That’s a part of the site that you don’t see which makes that not-so-magic happen - the masking tool. This is a tool that uses the same cropping interface as the creation tool to generate the set of coords/size/rotation for the face on each frame. There’s some usability stuff there to help make masking a (relatively) quick process too. The masking tool uses the same live preview technique to see how the mask is coming along. Right now only myself and some of the other people I work with have access to the masker, but we’re considering how to give more people access. After masking a couple hundred gifs, we’ve realized there is a craft to it, and that takes a little learning. In the meantime we’re taking suggestions for new gifs to mask on twitter @gifyourselfin.

We’ll also support multiple masks soon, so you could have a mask for anyone in the scene if there is more than one person to put your face over.
The men know everything syndrome.

I think you can genuinely believe that you know something until you are called out on it, only to realise that you can't even explain it.

If you don't know something just reply 'I don't know.' followed by 'Can you explain that to me?', you might be met with stunned silence. Or better still someone will have a go at explaining something. Sometimes the process of explaining it helps you cement your understanding. When working alone I really miss that type of interaction.
Wonderful! This is a great tool for restaurant service people to clone your card. I had my card cloned in a restaurant 2 times. Both times they were able to trace it to an employee who was cloning mag strips and selling them online. With this tool it's even easier! Awesome idea, if we lived in a more honest world.
If you are so fed up with them, why not host an internal Git service with gitolite for user access rules [1]. You could even add something like gitweb as a web interface for git/gitolite [2]. Or, better yet, use something like GitLab [3].

[1] http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/11-internal-git-server-wit...

[2] https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Gitweb

[3] http://gitlab.org/
Forgive my ignorance, but what would this potentially replace? Kafka/Storm/Something else?
So then, by this logic, most social sciences aren't sciences.

A lot of psychology, for example, rests on experiments run on 19-year old college sophomores in Western countries. Are these actually universal human traits, or do they change depending on cultural trends?
I'm someone that has thought like this for most of my life, the biggest problem I have however is persuading others to do the same. Take for example a client, I'm helping them with improving their email marketing. I ask them do they really need a huge disclaimer at the end of each email? They dont budge.

Or say - I'm working on a mobile app and try to persuade my co-founder that we should consider doing things one way and then his response "but xyz company is doing it this way. so should we".
what are the main problems with animated GIFs in your mind? for us being playable in just about every context on the web/mobile was really important
Funny! :) we call that a bitcoin faucet, they are notorious for being empty.
The material itself belongs to you. The servers it is hosted on belong to Google. You are free to access public domain material and do what you want with it, but Google has every right to limit how you access their servers.
Actually we have nfc in a lot of stores now, majority of the time I use that, using coin would actually take more time.
According to Kasparov, Carlsen has a knack for sensing the potential energy in each move, even if its ultimate effect is too far away for anyone — even a computer — to calculate. In the grand-master commentary room, where chess’s clerisy gather to analyze play, the experts did not even consider several of Carlsen’s moves during his game with Kramnik until they saw them and realized they were perfect. “It’s hard to explain,” Carlsen says. “Sometimes a move just feels right.”
Will you take bitcoin for the purchase price?
The same thing that prevents the merchant from charging the same card multiple times, or charging more than was agreed upon. Nothing.
Admittedly I'm cynical, but how is a "primarily responsible person" different from a lead developer? It feels a bit like you're just calling things different to avoid manager-like names.
Alternatively: people upvote and downvote based on how valuable, accurate, or well thought out a comment is.
The question is, do we matter anymore?
Funny how things would be different today.

ES4 failed mainly because some people thought ES3 was good enough.

Adobe,harshly critized for Flash was the one pushing for a better javascript.

I will never understand why Microsoft basically killed ES4. They had their own implementation on .net ( JScript.net ) so it's not like it was going to be a huge effort. The only reason would be Microsoft pushing Silverlight at that time which was a huge flop. We basically lost a decade because of it, as i predict javascript will eventually look like ES4,that's inevitable.
(Car analogies: the bane of hackers everywhere.. especially when talking about cars ^^)

The gas is available and you already paid for it (via the power bill) - DRM reaching out to kill the system is a third party action.
The client handling it is ideal from a systems perspective, because the app won't forget to be fault tolerant on its connection to the server.

Its less ideal from a maintenance perspective, because there will need to be feature-rich clients in Java and C (with dynamic language bindings). Applications will be running many many versions of the clients. Also, for coordination, the clients will need to communicate, so there may be configuration and/or firewall issues for the app to resolve.

It will be interesting to see Amazon make this tradeoff for what I believe is the first time.
Making distributed FPS games possible
I'd be curious if the folks at Google and YC would be flattered by this, put off, or both.
Yep, Amazon's version of Kafka/Storm with pay as you go minus the headaches of maintaining the cluster.
You must do a lot of online business. ;-)
Shouldn't that be "new income FOR authors"?
I love the idea behind Coin but what I need is a fat wallet.

I carry 19 cards, of which 16 are essential. Some of them are not for swiping so they wouldn't benefit from Coin. The solution for me is a wallet that can hold 20 to 30 cards, but as far as I can tell there's no such thing.
I understand the rationale for dropping the exam, but it's the last academic endeavor on my resume. I've got a ton of work experience since then and many of my projects would be worthy of today's buzzwords. My lament is that only forward-thinking advising professors would see the value in what I have done.

Note that no professors have actually been tracked or harmed.
where can I find this decent SRS extension?

Specifically I'd prefer open source JavaScript.
When you have a lot of machines, the more you utilize them the more efficient your use of that asset. Google saves a ton of money by using cgroups.
From 2 sec to 39 min: Researchers smash through quantum computer storage record
:) I think the mods made the headline human readable now.

For those who didn't see it, it's still on the blog.
For most self-swipe checkouts, it seems like this card would work well (coffee shop, grocery store, etc). But, it isn't too uncommon to have a merchant request to see the card, and some larger retailers (e.g., Lowes) have to input numbers off the front of the card, as well.
Google Wallet, Apple Passbook, and a number of other apps will let you do this. Scanning from a phone screen is not perfect though.
On point #1, you're right - not everyone will know about the auction right away. But I have been able to alert a large group of people early.

I have a good-sized email list, and they found out this morning. I structured the sale to (hopefully) get attention as well early on, and that has also seemed to work well. This was also the rationale behind the 5% referral bonus - to get people to spread the word.
So there will be some buyers who, yes, won't see it until mid-way through. But there should be (hopefully) enough early on watching to get some serious buyers interested at the right time.

On point #2 - you're absolutely correct. The 2 hours / day assumes just the day-to-day operations. There will be other things that need to be done (updating site, misc. work, etc). In the full post, I do disclose this and am not trying to say it's 2 hours a day only, for the entire year.

But generally, with small eCommmerce sites like this, there is an exception for a full-time owner salary when calculating the earnings, which is what the multiple is based on. Given the fact that the total hours per week are 20 inclusive of maintenance (if being liberal) - and a 40 hours owner's salary is usually excluded from calculating income - I feel it's fair.

And thanks for catching the typo! Would you mind letting me know which post it was in? Appreciated.
Four Unknown Awesome Fonts
You obviously don't visit Flippa too often. As someone who does, I can tell you that you have quite the wrong impression. Flippa is a cesspool full of people selling crappy sites at inflated prices and if you really want to get detailed info on a site, you usually have to spend hours and hours pulling it out of the seller.
Something as detailed and transparent as the auction here is a very rare exception. Not to mention that it actually seems a solid business with increasing revenue over the years. Most people sell their sites only when they start going down the drain.
I like the FAQ:

Q. My soufflés keep collapsing! What can I do?

A. In order for the meringue to peak properly we suggest adding a little lemon juice to the béchamel. This strengthens the mixture and prevents tragedy.
[Video] coming soon.

So.. the topic is wrong?
Just people are aware:

https://www.dynamicsinc.com/Developer/

http://www.cardlab.com/Mobile-Payment.html

http://www.getprotean.com/
Thank you. I was a little disturbed by how quickly this turned to "you're an ass for not thinking this way." I expected disagreement, but not, well, so much rage.
Google Gambit for Groupon Raises Concern (2010)
My phone, like many others, has a simply way to lock it so it doesn't accidentally call it. That doesn't make it difficult to make phone calls, it just makes it difficult to accidentally make phone calls.

I can imagine multiple ways they can handle this, all of them fairly trivial.
This is essentially a hosted Kafka (http://kafka.apache.org/). Given the complexity of operating a distributed persistent queue, this could be a compelling alternative for AWS-centric environments. (We run a large Kafka cluster on AWS, and it is one of our highest-maintenance services.)
The ruling doesn't allow wholesale display of said books on books.google.com though.
The offer was withdrawn.

They didn't turn it down.
Here is a proper quote with a reliable reference.

"All great achievements of science must start from intuitive knowledge. I believe in intuition and inspiration.... At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason."

-- Albert Einstein
The Glass Ceiling in one page.
My problem is that I tend to wear out card before I get a replacement. For example, my debit card currently requires 3-4 swipes to get it to work. I'd probably keep a backup card in my wallet if I decided to get Coin, just in case, but really like this idea.
If you're an authorized user on a credit card, you're issued a card in your own name. I'm not sure what you're doing is compliant.
The invisible hand is not a law, but an article of faith.
You have a few options.

1. Phonegap.

2. UIWebView for iOS and android.webkit.WebView for Android.

3. Sencha. etc...

It shouldn't take that long to do this.
I purchased one and I'll use it for all my loyalty cards which should help my wallet to be thinner - except Costco since they require you to show it! Not sure I would use it with my actual debit card but it does have the "that's cool" factor, congrats to the team I expect this to be a very successful launch!
No, it just requires understanding something about the nature of mathematics and its relationship with reality. You can't prove the existence of god any more than you can prove the existence of gravity. To make the connection between the math and reality requires interpretation, as Einstein repeatedly pointed out.

Gödel's amusing exercise is just a formalization of St. Anselm's, and most of the centuries of criticism of the latter can be applied to the former. In particular, his little proof has three definitions and six special-purpose axioms, and, in addition to all this, depends on a property of goodness or perfection that is only defined implicitly. Naturally, the existence of something that he interprets as "god" falls out as a theorem. Big deal.

The nature of mathematics are that the theorems are contained within the axioms. If the axioms are self-evident, and the conclusions are surprising, we have some interesting math. But at least two of Gödel's axioms are not self-evident. Therefore, this "proof" strikes me as a setup, and is not very interesting.
My team uses Slack (http://slack.com) and is very happy with it. It's in active development, and has good cross-platform clients. (Flint for Campfire is great, but last time I asked they didn't have any way to do volume licensing)
This, perhaps more than anything else, should be a huge red flag for Google. Vi Hart is the epitome of what Youtube was born to be, an enabler of talent discovery like no other. Losing this would be a huge blow.
Many credit card companies are starting to issue new cards which are completely flat, making it impossible to make imprint. My new CapitalOne card is an example of this. Is your company planning on refusing to do business with them?
This is amazing. Mildly annoyed at the name though.
Out of curiosity, what do you do that requires 16 cards on a regular basis? At some point, the limiting factor of how many cards you can carry becomes your pant pocket (or purse). My jeans wouldn't stand more than a few cards and far less than 30.
My latest Visa credit card has the numbers printed onto the plastic; the numbers are not relieved/raised. How do you take a physical imprint of these types of cards?
Whats to keep a waiter from skimming my card on the sly with this?
A "ghastly hassle"? If I don't use this it's because I only carry a few cards and so I don't have the problem it solves, not because of the solution itself.
Good question! I was actually wondering about that when I was drawing up the financials. I don't honestly have a good answer for that.

Speculating here, but it could be minor changes in the manufacture pricing (they set minimum pricing levels). It could be slight differences in which supplier we use over time (given different costs at different warehouses). I'm really not sure. Sorry I don't have a better answer for you.
"While the readers here might aspire to being the next Zuckerberg, in central part of the US there is a statistically significant part of the population which has this 'over rich, under religious, morally suspect' view of "successful" people in tech."

Working in the fly-over (and quite cold this time of year) part of the states in a position that puts me in contact with quite literally thousands of them every quarter, I call BS on this one. I wouldn't say that most people see tech folks as that. I would say that most people in the farmy part of the country don't really have an opinion about the tech industry, and those that do see tech people as generally useless, or just disconnected from the lives of the rest of us.

They believe that there is a lot of money being thrown around, and that some of the technology coming from the coasts will be useful in their lives, or will be convenient for talking to people, but for the most part they're indifferent.

It has very little to do with religion or wealth, and more to do with lifestyle (city v country) and focus (work v family).
These options are based on the spot price of another exchange, rather than being tied to a futures contract or something you could actually settle by trading USD for BTC or back. You aren't actually buying or selling an option, but gambling on how much you would have made or lost with a given option trading strategy.

This is known as a "Bucket Shop" and is a classic scam.
It's a tradeoff. Intuitive/gut thinking and heuristics are faster. But they'll be wrong when things are counterintuitive. And people that rely strongly on these models are often the hardest to convince of counterintuitive results.

The trick is to become facile at both methods.
At a minimum, cards should be issued to a specific person and immediately revoked when no longer authorized. If this infrastructure is in place, why should the employer care?

If it's not, then we're assuming a shared account, which increases the risk exposure for normal loss, theft, etc. by the number of people using that account. Can you afford to have your organization's payment ability severely hampered because a field rep got mugged?
Thanks for the advise, I am thinking of concentrating on JavaScript + Meteor for now.
Honestly, a good decision is a good decision, and I'm not going to worry too much about who in particular was able to argue it.

Had it been a small non-profit, or some bootstrapped startup, they may have been able to get cheap representation via the EFF or some other group that defends the public interest.
A typical (sealed-bid) auction has the exact same problem. I value the business at X, but know that I can bid less than X, probably still win, and keep more surplus.

To give bidders the incentive to bid their true value, you need a Vickrey auction where the winner only has to pay the next highest bid. But, this is suboptimal if there isn't a lot of liquidity. Also, you won't have the credibility to do this if you are auctioning off your own business (you have an incentive to lie about the next highest bid).
I think I understand what you're saying now. My mistake was reading "the tool analogy is undeservingly cliche/popular because it's rarely accurate" vs "the tool analogy is doesn't apply in this instance (to programming languages) because hammers don't have lasting side effects".
I will if you will offer me a 60 day options contract to sell bitcoins at a fixed price after close! Otherwise, the volatility cold double or half the purchase price. :-)
Can Mastercard or Visa prevent or try to prevent this? Also what about cards that are shown example Costco?

I just wish my phone did all stuff related to money.
> (By universe I mean something that follows a defined set of rules.)

I just want to make a mention for this point. Ahh but you see, for all we know, the universe could have simply followed 'a set of rules' up till the point we are living at and until a set future point in the 'timeline' (or something we perceive as the timeline). Then all of a sudden all the laws we know will break because the 'universe' entity decides to play another recording. Then all of knowledge of the 'universe' collapses. I think this is what the parent was talking about. You cannot predict nor even conclude that such scenario cannot happen.
Actually, I think this is not exactly a circle. The reason why we moved Databases to separate machines for performance was we did not understand how to schedule tasks or jobs.

Also, it comes from the age old debate of whether an Operating System is sufficient to perform a certain type of resource management function or should the application which knows about its own semantics build its own resource manager. One popular incarnation of this is Michael Stonebraker's paper on "Operating system support for database management" - http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~margo/cs165/papers/stonebraker-... where he discusses if Database management systems should builds its own buffer/caching mechanism or those mechanisms provided by filesystems are good enough. This can be extended to the problem in question now, which is about scheduling of jobs on a huge cluster seen as a single computer.

One of the major reasons (of many others) why we moved Databases to separate machines was because OSes did a bad job at scheduling tasks. Rather than saying bad, I think I should say that it is difficult for the operating systems to understand the types of workloads. However, in this particular case, Google knows a lot more about its workloads and hence can do a better job at scheduling them on the same machine.

Also, it is very important to note that Google has been able to do this because they run 1000s of machines next to each other and everything is distributed. If they can't schedule a task on a particular machine because it is overloaded, they always have the choice of scheduling that task on a next machine in the rack. This may not be the case for most people outside Google. If they are using a single machine to host both the database and the computation itself and if for some reason that machine is already running at its peak, there is no other option than making the tasks to be scheduled wait, because there is no where else to schedule those tasks.

Moving DBs to separate machines was really to keep the utilization at low levels so that there would be cycles available when needed.

EDIT: Typo fixes.
> Economics is not a science. In its normal form it's mostly a propaganda arm for some force in society trying to justify its actions.

Well said, I don't think there's more to add to your comment.
pt-online-schema-change from Percona addresses this particular point with MySQL nicely for us, incidentally. We use their Percona XtraDB Cluster fork and are quite happy.
Lemon wallet will do this - though I've had very mixed success using it, with barcode readers.
I think in your scenario, a good fit would be a cigarette case that you'd keep in your front pocket.

I'd love to have one with a classy finish and that would block NFC signals from leaking.

I ended up ditching all but essential cards and got down to five. One debit, credit, health insurance, license, and AAA.
There certainly were some attempts to introduce more cars to the city centers in Europe, tram lines used to be closed etc. but thankfully a lot of streets were too narrow to handle an ever-increasing traffic so they just had to give up. Not to mention that a good network of public transport has already been there, so people have always been accustomed to it. Nowadays most of my friends here don't use their cars in the cities, because it's way faster to get everywhere by bus/subway/tram or even bike.
DRAM inventor Robert Dennard gets prestigious Kyoto Prize
Is it legal to rewrite credit card magnetic strip data?
.....So?
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