skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with your first sentence, but not your overall premise. We are all capable of a hell of lot, usually much, much more than we realize, but not everything. I think most of us, myself included, need to take more chances to try and learn new things and error on the side of trying. However, the wisdom to realize something is truly futile is not a bad thing, after all, we've all got finite time and resources.
Extra gewicht na bevalling verhoogt risico op diabetes | Ik eet suikervrij
It would be interesting to set up an AirBnB style site for this. I'd love to host burgeoning talent in exchange for some code / design / ee / me work.

It would be a pretty cool tradition to "do the rounds" prior to getting your first big job. Or even as a sabattical for more experienced programmers. 2 weeks to a month here, maybe 2 months there. Get a lot of experience and hopefully some recommendations in a short period of time.
Hard to tell. First: I'm a lowly developer here, right? I can't and won't sell you stuff. In addition: While I care a lot about my craft/developing, I don't care about the industry - I'm blind to most competition.

Regarding your particular problem: No idea about international license plates (or the one you are interested in). It helps a lot to restrict engines to character sets. German license plates are roughly [1] ([A-Z]{1,3})-([A-Z]{1,2})(\d{1,4}) which helps a lot.

Usually you try to combine 'dumb' OCR with datasets/fuzzy matches to rule out errors. Only you know if that is possible for your dataset.

Depending on whether I understood your problem correctly we might again have the localization issue (which I complained about above): Find the licence plate, crop and rotate it. Bonus points if your images might contain multiple license plates and a human operator would 'obviously' see the right one..

Recognition itself should be okay: Limited character set, a limited number of fonts (here: One only) and hopefully decent binarization opportunities (here: black on white, background reflective).

Feel free to shoot me a mail, details in my profile.

1: From memory, might be slighly inaccurate, sample only
I believe it implements Facebook Connect and the Twitter Followers API, as with nearly every startup since the social networking boom in 2008.

EDIT: The app uses friends of friends on Facebook, and also the Twitter Followings of your Facebook Friends.
Thanks for sharing. I've just embarked on this path recently so these are some timely tips.
It’s 2014. Is Web Design Dead?
Facebook had a very similar product launch in 2010 called "Questions." It not only distributed to your friends, but actually used graph data to surface to niche experts in the space of the question (similar to quora). That product flopped around for about a couple years before it was killed due to lack of valuable engagement.

I agree with what Biz is saying - "knowledge is very different from information." But I think the problem is that a lot of information already has knowledge layered on top of it in the form of indexed and searchable web objects, so for mundane questions like the example used, encouraging people to share the answer instead of retrieving it from an existing source is just wasted energy.
I think it's a play on the word "jell", which (as a verb) can mean "to become clear, substantial, or definite; crystallize"[0].

[0]: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/jell
Seems like the landing page is full of fluff. All I see are feel good sentences about helping each other, Albert Einstein, etc.

The big down side is this: "“What’s this?” That query is submitted to some people in your network who also have Jelly".

I have +400 friends on Facebook. Out of those, maybe 3 will install Jelly to try it out. Even with taking friends-of-friends taken in to consideration, it's just a very limited set of people. Would I really want to use this app to post a question that I can probably find answer just by looking a map, doing a google search or posting to Facebook/Twitter?
Yeah, but calling is the most effective means of being heard (short of appearing in person). Call bandwidth < letter bandwidth < tweet bandwidth.
SnowShoe Tries to Succeed With One Foot in Madison, Other in SF
Upgrading Through Every Version of Windows
> the purpose of the stuff isn't to change people's minds, but to solidify norms.

Well, no. The purpose is usually to resonate with norms that the intended target audience is presumed to already have, so that that target audience will feel comfortable with the show, come back to it, and show good stats so that the network showing the show will be able sell ads targeting that audience, so that they will continue to pay the producers of the show, who will continue to pay the writers of the show.

Occasionally shows have propaganda that is inteded to shape opinions, but mostly they are written to make money, which means selling advertising space, which means appealing to the existing views of a target demographic above and beyond all other considerations.
Do we not already do this to some extent with welfare? I know it's not optimal, and honestly, I tend to fall closer to the belief that if we are going to have welfare systems, they are more effective if you just give cash rather than the convoluted and easily gamed system we have now, so I see where this is coming from. To address worries about drug/alcohol abuse and the like, maybe some kind of system where you qualify for a bit more if you submit to testing or something like that? Not sure if it's workable or what externalities that introduces, but in general, giving more freedom to spend your safety net aid seems like a win to me.
In fact, the example at that link is even more telling: "The plan began to jell once we all met to discuss it."
Import the database dump (once provided) into Jekyll?
Shareholder Proposals: Aetna Sued Based on Poor Web Navigability
Mold is the new terrorism.
If you're writing configuration to manage your assets you're doing it wrong.
Cool project! Reminds me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine)
My work provided Lenovo w530 has all these. The F-keys do have volume and brightness controls on them, but you have to hit the Fn key to do that, pressing just F4 gives you 'F4'.

It's not as stylish as a MacBook Pro though.
Show HN: New Year of Coding Lesson 1 - Creating a Webpage with HTML and CSS
Please don't take this as discouragement.
To Intelligent people at Jelly : Please spend you time and effort on something useful or fun.
Life-threatening cold wave hits US.
Looks nicely designed and maybe fun to use, but I can't imagine (and the website certainly doesn't help one imagine) a reason for using this instead of Google other their one provided use case of taking a picture of some unknown object and asking the community what it is.

Even with that, you could just post that photo and question directly to facebook, thereby cutting out this app which seems to serve as a middleman between a user and his or her already existing social networks.
> comes with a production ready web server, and watches your files by default

If it's watching your files, it's not production ready.
So instead of asking my social networks by just asking them, they're trying to convince me I need another app installed to be able to do what I can already do?

This is a solution solving a non-existent problem.
I'm just not sure I have those types of questions -- ones more easily solved by my network than by Wiki or Quora. The video uses local art identification as an example, but I can think of a few different ways I'd solve that problem to have an answer in a minute or two.

Am I missing something? What problem does this solve?
In the wake of Nelson Mandela's death, there were a lot of people who expressed the sentiment that he was not actually a great man, because he espoused violence, because he blew things up, etc.

I've seen similar sentiments expressed about Dr. King. In short, he was a womanizer who does not deserve our praise. He is lauded for political purposes.

It makes me wonder if the government embraces, and perhaps even plants, ideas like this. Nobody is perfect, and the more stuff somebody accomplishes, the less perfect they're likely to be. No hero will be without something like this to tarnish their image. By convincing the public that a hero should be perfect, they can hold their past transgressions over them in order to gain compliance, as the FBI tried to do here. They can control the narrative afterwards, by concentrating on the flaws of heroes they don't like, and ignoring the flaws of those they do.

It certainly seems to have happened in politics, anyway. Few candidates with anything interesting to say make it to office, since they inevitably have something pointless but "scandalous" in their past. If they do, then the threat of exposure should work wonders for getting them to behave.
That's not going to save you from failing to capture key records, or capturing them incorrectly.

You do have a point about manual testing being just as effective as automated testing, just a lot more time consuming.
What is Your Startup's Answer to "So What?"
I'm the same. I do it because I like it; nothing is implied about who I am and every actual comment I have received has been positive or neutral.
While I agree with his viewpoints, I just can't take a security professional (or CTO) seriously who uses Windows as their primary machine.
> "How much does it cost to rescue and restore" could be a relevant question

Nope, it's purely a FUD question. Considering questions like this may be part of balanced reasoning, but you need to ask them to yourself first and spend a modicum of time thinking lest you just help derail the truth over a non-concern.

How much does it cost? Camera + N99 mask + shower -> $100 total

Although you'd probably want to opt for the deluxe package - scanner + cartridge respirator + long hot shower -> $300 total

I'm sure multiple members of an "archival society" would have individually come up with these resources if that's what was required. And I'm sure Google would have happily hauled, scanned, and properly disposed of the records just to put them behind their adwall.

And to the extent that there was a higher figure for institutional overhead, then before just being destroyed, there should have been a period of public notice and access for a volunteer can-do team to take the simple approach.
Show HN: ReadingTime.js - A script to get the average time to read a blog post.
Well, the pictures might contain

- cars, with numbers (license plate? advertisement, a la "who do you call...")

- billboards, with numbers

- multiple numbers (some buildings are on street a, 1 and street b, 42)

- a lot of noise (garden obstructs most of the house, number isn' that special anymore)

Your next task is to find houses.. I don't disagree with you, but you make it sound more easy than it is, in my opinion. Again: Getting a decent start is probably no issue, but competing with human operators...?
Mapping high level constructs to LLVM IR
Cool article, the advantages of token based auth for single page apps is very well explained.
Would've loved to see the source code for the examples, but their link (https://github.com/auth0/angular-token-auth) was broken, I got a 404 on github.
I think there is an obvious motive; individual writers are portraying what they believe.

At the very least, there are lots and lots of anti-institutional characters in U.S. television. Maybe it is unfortunate that lots of them are presented as being held back by a system gone soft.
if you "100% own" your answers, how does the site have permission to display them to other users?
The others, to clarify, in that case being: a court.
Yeah I did.

1) Inheriting someone else's bad code and habits is a huge reason to throw testing out the window. It's really frustrating and always comes with a "We'll write tests in the future."

2) This goes in line with another thing I've been finding. It's super easy to show why you should test, but It's much harder to actually show how to test in the real world. These tutorials show the simplest way to write a test, and it hurts those trying to learn.
The Steam Machines play fewer games than your PC, with less functionality
The PDF is quite small and loads in a second from Scribd

http://www.scribd.com/doc/196758024/Steam-Machines-CES-broch...

Since it has taken more than 30 minutes to load just two pages in Firefox from http://media.steampowered.com then it must be a different problem....
Agreed, clearest comparison. When Aardvark worked it really was great, and I would imagine that one of the biggest usecases for a product like this is asking questions in a new location so a mobile-first approach makes a lot of sense.
Adults are usually impatient. They don't see results right away and give up, not realizing it takes time! Children however can go forever without giving up, and I believe that's one of the (many) reasons why it is easier to learn a skill as a child. Sometimes it is good to remind yourself of this when you want to learn something new or feel like giving up.
Neurocircuits, Neuromorphic Processors, and Computational Neuroscience
I understand and appreciate that, but I do hope some day it will be considered as normal and acceptable as it is for a woman to. It's just self-expression, and although it may seem strange, I don't do it to stand out even though such an action naturally does cause me to, and I'd rather I was able to without being 'unusual'. I'm far more confident than when I started, but still feel self-conscious from time to time.
If anyone is going, please take notes? I was planning to drive down from LA but deferred at the last moment due to jetlag/fatigue...
Care to expand on that? What are the drawbacks?

It sounds to me that they've integrated a site build system into their webserver. What's wrong with that?
I just did some comparisons, it is indeed cheaper than a MBA in similar configuration. In terms of price, the 13" retina MBP is a way better deal than both the Dell and the Air.
> What strikes me is how little was gained by both sides in this, and how futile their actions seem in hindsight.

To quote Chuck Palahniuk: "On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."

If you give history enough time, it will always look like little has been gained in terms of eradicating oppression. Sure, some forms of oppression don't exist anymore, but society evolves other forms as a replacement.

I don't honestly believe we'll ever "figure out how to use the political process [...] to stop our government agencies from doing things that we don't like." I think history is like a power game where rules keep changing over time because one side keeps finding ways to rig the game. Sooner or later, there's enough evidence that the game is rigged and the other side realizes that it's futile to keep playing by the same rules and finds a new way to fight back.
At first I thought he was being unfairly racist too, but after a second reading I think he has a strong point. His point being that in order to make it politically achievable we need data that proves it works with the type of people that bigots believe it will fail with. People might be publicly politically correct, but they vote they way they truly believe. Prove without a doubt that it works with poor minorities in America, and you prove without a doubt that it works.
Previous to your comment, my experience with Montessori schools was limited to hearing of people sending their kids to them. Now I wish I'd gone to one. :)
In this case, it appears that a portion of the documents were in an unstable condition and thus, there was good reason to focus first on preservation over reproduction, dissemination, and interpretation.
I bought a Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga a month ago and installed the alpha of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on it. The only thing that didn't work out of the box was the lock button and scrolling in Firefox using the touch screen (install the Grab and Drag Addon). Features: matte screen, TrackPoint, Pen Input.
Can you explain what an 80K note is and how it works?
"Twice a year we invest a small amount of money ($14-20k + an $80k note)"
frankly, it would have done PC's a world of good too

Ah, the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco. I wrote before about http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011... and how it ignores the limitations of the 32-bit Windows extenders, including the lack of preemptive multitasking.
One of my common hangups with these kind of posts is the lack of history as to what lead people to these consulting gigs. Where were you before, and how long were you there? How long have you been in the game and what do you offer that is unique / special? I feel like I've wanted to jump into the consulting game for the past few years but haven't because I don't feel like I'm an expert in a particular field that would warrant consulting/contracting expertise, and I feel like you need to have a certain skill set / years of experience under your belt if you want to maximize your chances of being successful as a freelancer.

Happy for the OP, but it's just as important to provide how you got there (not to mention I'm really interested to know what led you to this level of expertise to be so in demand) so a greenhorn dev doesn't quit his job thinking anybody can do this.
My latest Bitcoin experiment - Hashing in the Cloud
Show HN: Premier Crowdfunding News & Strategy 
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I'm following a lot of Twitter and other SF tech people on Twitter, and I had tons of questions waiting. Maybe it will stick for a some people, but indeed, I don't think most people have enough questions to check this kind of app often.
Seems like it would be a support headache to me. So much can go wrong with random uploaded images on the way to the printer.
Are you going to get latency spikes when it decides a file has changed? What happens if the syntax for some, but not all, of the files is wrong? Deploying to a production webserver is something that wants to be as explicit and simple as possible; complex tasks like compilation/substitution of these script files belong earlier in the pipeline.
I think it's an expected response from a community that is largely comprised of people that desire YC-bucks.

But you nail it. Had Gmail, Reddit or any other unpaid service gone down like this, the uproar would be heard from another galaxy.
Should be back up. Sorry about that. I upped the instances which might have caused it.
How did you resolve your WiFi issues? Quite often I've found the laptop unable to connect to random hotel WiFi (with no useful indication of why in logs/dmesg) and I have to connect via my S3 and share the connection via USB.
The GTA5 torture scene with Trevor and the car battery, pliers, etc. was difficult to participate in. If I recall correctly, he at least didn't get anything useful out of him, which would've implied that the ends justified the means.
So basically you don't take something like 3 of the top 5 vulnerability researchers in the world seriously.
That's the point. It's still a side project, but the community has enormous value.
It's convertible debt. (a loan that gets either repaid when it matures or is converted into equity at the next priced round)
There's a website that helps you pick and order the parts, you can get advice on builds, or use someone else's build

http://pcpartpicker.com/

Otherwise there are plenty of small companies that supply gaming PCs, as well as Asus (Republic of Gamers) and Dell (through its purchase of Alienware).
Do unto others...

How quickly morality fades ....
Yes, on second thought, DJB would probably have much more impact working in a group that's creating crypto standards rather than just reviewing other people's proposals.
Didn't Yelp do something like this before switching business models?
Any plans to take a crack at solving #2, or does your book already do that (we'll assume for now that #1 is an impossible situation)? I understand testing on an intellectual level, and I understand completely how to write tests for a 5-minute blog. But I have yet to experience instruction on writing tests that actually use real-world classes (i.e. not Dog inherited from Animal) and actual real-world data. First one to do this gets my ebook money.

Specifically, my software deals with hardware devices. Do I simulate those devices in code (and if so, do I need tests to test my device simulator)? Or do I somehow gather many MB of data and keep it stored somehow for testing? I'm thinking these are simple questions for a testing veteran, but nobody I work with is that. And getting permission to spend time learning is not easy in a bad economy. :)
For what definition of able bodied and what definition of decent?
See http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/07/convertible-note-seed-finan...
> I think people tend to exaggerate. If you say 9 hours, I'd believe 4.5 hours.

I'm describing tested battery life, not anecdotal estimations. E.g. http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Update-Dell-XPS-12-9Q33-....

Battery life obviously depends on your usage scenario, but the one described in the article is very light. Moreover, he's using a very low brightness setting, and seems to be using wi-fi intermittently. These points are important to note because on most workloads, the display and the wireless adapter are the major sources of power draw.

The usage described in the article is:

> I get about 6 hours of usage from a full charge (or more if I leave my desk for breaks and the screen shuts off after 5 minutes, which saves battery). As I mentioned earlier, that's usually on the lowest (or second to lowest) screen brightness setting, with the keyboard backlight enabled for about 50-75% of the time, and having Firefox open with 5-10 tabs, sometimes YouTube running in the background for some music, some Terminal windows open, Steam open in the background, Skype running in the background and a few text editor windows open.

Since idle background apps should take up very little battery, this seems even lighter than Anand's "Light Workload" scripted test, on which the MBA gets 11 hours (close to its rated 12). See: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7085/the-2013-macbook-air-revi.... Anand's test is at 200 nits (80% screen brightness). The author of this article says he's running at the lowest or second-lowest screen brightness, so maybe 10-20% or 30-60 nits. Even with the heavy workload test, which involves constant Wi-Fi activity and 1080p video playback, the MBA gets 5.5 hours.

If you mimic the usage in this article, with some apps open in the background, the brightness turned down, and typing into some terminal windows, the MBA would probably get 15+ hours: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/18/#battery-b....
Mold can be considerably more dangerous than a lot of the artifacts of Fukushima that people have been worrying about.
I had a friend that was selling about 20 items a week on instagram. This seems like it would make it easy. Good job!
|Subway famously took the opportunity to turn a true story into pure gold. College student Jared Fogle demonstrated that you can lose a ton of weight on a diet of Subway sandwiches... The Jared story ran as the lead campaign for Subway for 10 years — during which sales doubled.

Fellow NFL fans here might have seen a segment featuring Jared behind a table of Subway sandwiches last weekend on the set of Fox's pre/postgame coverage. I'm not sure which amuses me more- that this guy is still cashing checks as the spokesman for Subway, or that the company is still milking the ad campaign for every last ounce that it's worth.
Kelner was my advisor as an undergraduate - I loved listening to him talk about graph problems. He always seemed to have a novel way of looking at something like this. I'm glad to see him get some excellent new results!