skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Knowing the floor an exact exit from the lift-block of an Executive Lounge can also be quite useful. The bathroom of an Executive Lounge is often a self contained toilet / shower unit together with power-shower, towels and soaps. Depending on the arrangement (and visibility) of the lounge's front desk and lift block, and occupancy of the lounge (passing traffic needing to need to facilitate the facilities), a quick shower is quickly accomplished.
I recall something like this happening during the dot com boom of the 90s: Someone organized a big mixer so imported women could meet rich Silicon Valley guys - but it turned out to be the same day as Comdex, so no guys showed up.

(Couldn't find the full story anywhere, though. Anyone?)

It's 15 years later and we're still stuck with nerdy rich guy and gold-digger woman stereotypes. Except now we also have 'brogrammers'. Sad.

But isn't everybody in the Bay Area too busy "crunching it" to date anyhow?
I always wondered why they would use something like QNX and have more work ahead of them in integration vs. just put iOS on it like they did with an apple TV. The cost is low enough to make it practical.
These guys have built a very interesting system when sidesteps the photovoltaic effect by keeping the energy management in the heat domain. Basically for sub-megawatt installations they have a 24/7 solar solution in some climates.
3 Things Startups Shouldn't Worry About (And 3 Things They Should)
The effects weren't even that elaborate, they all look like they are on a wire.
The Gear Fetishists
Before entering the corporate work place I never touched anything. Once my one coworker started talking about it, the whole chain revealed itself, now it's super social to go smoke a joint with my bosses after work and have a beer, I love it.

I wonder how much I'm actually destroying my health by smoking weed every day, drinking coffee, and having some alcohol at least in a minor capacity.

I feel as if the emotional/mental pain I suffered by not having any outlet greatly outweighs the physical damage I'm doing to myself.

Now that I smoke/drink while working most of the time (self unemployed), I find that I am much more productive because I'm enjoying myself the entire time. Tunes, a drink, a smoke, and code.

Never seen talk on HN about drugs really. What's your routine like with HN? What are your experiences?
My suspicion is that simply removing barriers to entry for more cautious folks would not effectively resolve this sort of problem. Methodical people who take their time in engineering ironclad software systems backed by rock-solid accounting practices don't get first mover advantage, and they might not have bottom lines capable of supporting the kind of fee structures that would allow them to compete effectively with faster, sloppier businesses.

An unstated major premise of the "wonders of regulations" argument is that regulations exist because sometimes the hand of government is needed to handle situations where the invisible hand is a demonstrable failure.
Eh, I'm not sure they are incompetent. They are, however, swimming in a sea where the slightest mistake is lethal.

Some people see these stories and think "ha, I could do better than that!" Other people see these stories and think "can I really be sure that I haven't made even one fatal mistake?"

All software engineers write bugs. All software engineers write security holes. For most of us, the fatal flaw doesn't irrevocably wipe out a bunch of people's life savings.
There is a long and amusing history of trying to balance gender ratios with incentives. A fantastic story I read recently was a scheme by two brothers in early 20th century Colorado attempted to entice women by building a school in their remote mountainous areas. Two came to teach, one stayed. Not bad odds? I grew up in the 80s were the only difficulty was getting the boys to dance with you at the local disco when you were 14.
I feel like it's not the vastness we can't comprehend, it's the relation between such "tiny" planets and such big distances that's hard to grasp. You can't zoom out or else you stop seeing the planets, you can't zoom in or else the map gets even larger.
I actually think this is a really cute idea and I would love to support their quest for true love, however I can't shake the feeling that I'd be sponsoring vacations for first-world women who didn't want to date me when I lived in the same city as them (not bitter, I'm happily married now).
What I don't comprehend is how someone can know of all this and then still stay "you know what? fuck namespaces and PSR, we are doing it old school!" and come up with arguments like "I/O overhead is costly in one class per file scenarios"[0].

These people will be the death of all of us.

[0] https://www.sellvana.com/blog/on-composer-psr-and-namespaces
It really is depressing to me that people are OK with getting paid to flat out lie. I guess I'm less surprised it's celebrities, but still, it's sad.
Show HN: Video Summarization in flask + python + ffmpeg
Well, this is impressively creepy.
I cheated :)
Or be like plenty of places in Europe, chuck 50c in the basket outside the toilet. More if it's a number 2. Or if it was really clean.

One of the worst moments I had was in a rural part of Belgium, I had a call of nature whilst in the cafe, after completion I realised I had no euros left. Walk of shame to my table, the waiter notices nothing went in the basket and says something about Englanders just loud enough for me to hear.
I'll just quote Julia, the founder of Zidisha.

"My objection to most handout programs is based on the negative psychological effects I experienced time and again while working with development assistance grants in Africa and Asia. The resources we distributed would certainly result in an economic boost, but they also fundamentally changed the way the recipients saw themselves, and the way we saw them. Handouts caused the recipients to view themselves as dependents whose fortunes were subject to the whims of luck and on pleasing donors, rather than on themselves as drivers of their own lives. When repeated enough, this psychological side effect can be devastating not only for the individual recipient, but for the broader community that has come to depend on the handouts."
Nit: kM -> km; meters are abbreviated 'm', usually.
How Modern Marketplaces Build Trust
Well, yeah... but the difference between 320kbps and 96kbps is fairly negligible with all of that background noise.
Same as the old PHP.
Greg Franko Showing Off AMDClean.js - Video
the syntax of C++ is easy to learn in 10 days. Syntax is nothing more than a collection of rules regarding a regular language.

Thinking like a programmer/engineer, and problem solving, that takes a lot longer than 10 days.

I would say focus on learning libraries, since that's the majority of what people consider "learning" a language. Syntax is somewhat easy (minus some....okay many of c++'s nuances), but learning libraries is the difficult part.

Don't read though, do. You need to actually write programs to become good at writing programs. Don't spend time reading specifications, because that will only get you so far.

If you're good at math, the first few problems on project-Euler would be a good starting point, but there are other challenge type websites around.

Personally, knowing what I know now, the place to start is
* <iostream> standard I/O (console)
* <fstream> file I/O
* <cmath> Math library

Becoming familiar with some functions in those libraries will get you a decent starting point
but this algorithm is Rube Goldberg-esque

I think that's being a bit unkind, it's simply clear that the people are not experienced with computer vision and/or image processing in general. They approached the problem from their domain and found the solution that worked for them. If I had gotten to the point that I wanted to do a domain-specific image segmentation heuristic I would certainly build it up from a series of filters and image morphology steps. If the performance (both accuracy and speed) was satisfactory, I don't know why you would invest in optimization at that point. Also, from experience I know that implementing algorithms from papers is a slow and many times painful process as the original authors generally don't publish reference code, and if they do it's probably in Matlab. And if they don't have someone adept at image processing their potential for success would likely be low.

Also, OpenCV includes functions for image segmentation. If they couldn't use that, it would have been nice for the article to at least touch on why.

I agree that a quick "Here's what we tried that's readily available" would have been good for others to learn from, because for many the general solutions would be sufficient.
SF is more than welcome to take the women in New York that actually are attracted to guys in sandals and hoodies, if there are any
Ladyada tweeting "a day in the life of an engineer" (women in tech)
This is my 10th year anniversary in this country and you guessed it right, I am still on H-1B visa. Although my employer has filed for the green card, it is still a couple years away. I can decide to wait for my Green Card or I can start today. I decided the latter.

Having said that, I've started on this path just recently and believe me I am facing difficulties at every step, even the the ones I thought would be the most obvious. But again who said life was easy.

In case you are interested there are ways you can do business in the US on H-1B visa. Is it easy? Hell no! But in case you are still interested keep reading, feel free to reach out to me as I am going through this process right now.

Articles about Entrepreneur H1B:

- http://www.murthy.com/2012/12/17/entrepreneur-h1b-petitions-...

- http://www.uscis.gov/news/public-releases-topic/business-imm...

-http://blog.uscis.gov/2011/08/encouraging-entrepreneurs-and-...

- http://www.uscis.gov/eir/visa-guide/entrepreneur-visa-guide

Further reading:

- http://blog.fosterquan.com/2012/12/09/the-sweet-smell-of-suc...

Success story of Vishal Shah from Traffio:

- http://www.nextbigwhat.com/how-to-startup-in-silicon-valley-...

Business Entity:

- http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x12qxuo_how-to-open-a-busin...
I found this passage from WildUtah's link very helpful in understanding the subtle differences here:

"But crucially, copyright protection allows someone to independently develop software to achieve the "same overall result" as a copyrighted program. In contrast, patent law doesn't allow independent invention limiting the opportunities of future innovators and creating the risk of accidental infringement and wasteful litigation."
Great. Airlift them all out of NYC. It won't make a difference to me--I might as well be living in SF at this rate. Of course I'll contribute.
Facebook probably realizes they can make a lot of money by allowing publishers to push "featured" content out to people who Facebook knows will be interested in reading the content.

Notice how there are no ads in Paper? Probably setting the stage for exactly this.
I posted this up because my startup is definitely guilty.

1. Startups worry about funding.
You should worry about building traction.
2. Startups worry about their ability to scale.
You should worry about creating a viable business model, meaningful milestones, and a scalable infrastructure.
3. Startups worry about creating buzz.
Startups should worry about creating a growth engine to open the sales funnel, accelerate the pipeline, and build their customer base.

I generally agree with the article's three points.

But to point 1: how can traction help if we can't pay the bills? This is our biggest struggle. We are considering shelving our onboarding efforts to focus on fundraising. Intuitively I know that that's a huge mistake, but fundraising creates this big fear of failure. It seems like a chicken and egg situation.

Advice?
1. Nice.

2. Obligatory question - how many working hours were just lost?

3. Why on earth would you use capital M for meters? I really hope I will not look really dumb in a minute, but I immediately knew something was wrong, but it actually took my quite some time to recognize it.
Anthropic Bias (Chapter 1)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire#Change_of_purpo...
The article missed pointing out a very important detail about H-1B1 visa (for Chile and Singapore): unlike the dual intent H-1B visa, the H-1B1 is a non-immigrant visa. This means that you must establish the non-immigrant intent to get it. It also means that, should you happen to change your mind after some time, you would have to switch to H-1B visa before trying for the green card.

Also, speaking from the personal experience, the fact that the H-4 visa doesn't allow your spouse to work deserves more emphasis. If there's anything that might drive me and my family back to Chile, it's the H-4 visa.
> more workers

Um, call me jaded but I really don't think the girls are looking for work. Believe gold-digger is the term.
Perhaps any online Bitcoin service is going to have to expect a certain loss rate due to hacking and budget accordingly. Just as credit card issuers expect to charge off some percentage due to fraud. The trick is to keep that loss rate manageable. It's clear that many of the same features that Bitcoin users like about it also make it attractive to criminals.
Ask HN: NYC startup looking to rent 3 desks
Hi,

We're an NYC-based startup looking to rent at least three spare desks in Manhattan. We are incredibly lean and expect to have a very limited footprint (we're super clean and considerate, will purchase our own printers if we even need them, need conference rooms mostly for brainstorming sessions if at all). Our top priority is to have a place the core team can come to to work side by side. Happy to commit more than our fair share to the snack room and don't require a lease or anything.

If you or anyone you know has any open space, we would greatly appreciate an introduction.

lefstathiou @ gmail dot com
This is un-related to the actual problem. If you live in a major city (like SF, London, NY, etc) you cannot park your car in front of your property unless you have a legal claim to the land. That will cost you somewhere around $500K.

Also, there may not be any available even then. Certain areas in europe, in particular, are not architected for vehicle co-habitation with residential real estate in urban centers. So, by all means you can own a Tesla for your country home. But it may be rather impractical for your town-house. Even in NYC, its quite normal for people who own cars to keep them garaged off-stite. Athough, presumably, this is less of an issue as over time professional parking storage businesses could make a nice secondary income stream by charging a "convenience fee" to Tesla owners. Maybe 100 to 200 a month, maybe a whole lot more more. This type of fee is what they charge currently for a Range Rover or other SUV.
You don't even have to be an Indian citizen, merely India-born. I might be a Briton, but in the eyes of USCIS my nationality is classified as "Indian" since I was born there.
Protip: Find the neighborhood police station. It's free to use, and always very clean.
I work at a large bank (trillions in deposits). When I am asked to give an estimate, I say: "I haven't done the estimate yet."

When they say "How long will it take to do the estimate?" I reply: "I have no idea until I get into the details of the problem."

When management asks for an estimate, with rare exceptions, they actually mean: "We are putting pressure on you to get this done by a certain date, but we don't want to tell you what that date is, and we're betting that if you give us a low estimate now, you'll pressure yourself to meet your own deadline, and we won't have to manage the project."

The problem with that type of reasoning is that in the end, the workers are stressed, and the solution is suboptimal.
"There is only so much you can do on Castro Street."

That is so true. You only have houses and more houses, nothing to do other than work 24/7.
I will not debate common language use of 'background subtraction' because I have not discussed it with laypeople before, but what I can say is that if you were trying to implement what the article is trying to implement and were trying to find relevant literature, then searching for background subtraction would not turn up anything useful.
> My (completely pulled out of thin air) opinion is that there is no way that startups populated by young, hip developers can build a proper system for handling money.

At least not if they are populted solely by young, hip developers. Those developers can probably build the system, but what they can't do is specify and validate the system. So, those young, hip developers need to at least spend some time talking to some experienced domain experts.

Or, you know, keep repeating every failure in the history of finance and banking that has led up to the industry practices and government regulations they are ignoring. Sure, you can likely find better solutions to some of those problems, but it would be better if you at least "anticipated" the well-known, obvious problems and solved them, rather than repeating them first.
What, are each cities respective pools becoming too incestuous?

First world problems...
I agree. I was pointing out that background subtraction is not the same task.
Nice way to see that my computer monitor is very dirty.
Can't relate to your story.
Moved my startup in early 2012 to the US on an L1 visa. Applied for Green card mid-2012 and got accepted in early 2013. From nothing to Green card in a year. Yes, you have to deal with some bureaucracy and get a good lawyer, but if you're intentions are good it's very possible.

From your sarcasm I read that you never really wanted to build a life in the US? That's fine, but don't start calling names just because you couldn't pull it off.
> Japan's consumption tax, which is set to rise to 8% on April 1

So they're actually going through with this, when the economy has been depressed for over a decade...?
This is striking testimony about Aldous Huxley taking LSD on his deathbed written by his wife: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/03/most-beautiful-death.ht.... It seems that this very emotional account is in accordance with the findings of the Swiss psychiatrists.
Honey Pot
Maybe I'm a bit childish, but I totally misread the little text that says "Tilts at $10,000".

Yep, I'm sorry.
1. Stop reading hacker news. Procrastinating is (probably) what got you into this mess

2. If you are in twelfth grade, you aren't expected to be a good C++ engineer/dev, you are expected to know some curriculum they gave you already.

3. If you have the curriculum, you should start grinding through the lessons you have already been given. It's what you are going to get tested on.

Sorry, this may not seem helpful, but getting as far as you can through the courseware you should already have, is going to be the best thing to do. Unplug the internet if you can, and just grind through it. If you pass, it will have built character.

Edit; ColinWright has some good comments too. Seriously look at what you already know, and try to use any questions/tests built into your curriculum (if there are any) to test yourself.
Yeah. use plugins embedart and fetchart
QNX is pretty freaking cool...
Ok, that's fair. $5b is still not a small chunk of change, even for Microsoft and even with Silicon Valley valuation arithmetic at work.
Right, image segmentation is the correct terminology. Background subtraction is incorrect. I don't think it's quibbling to point that out.
I don't think you should handwave this. Companies have hot bitcoins because they need them to cover transaction volume. Their "hot" liability scales with their business. When you're six months old, a 50k loss (more accurately: the requirement to redeem BTC that start with a market value of 50k) kills your company (or the rational incentive to continue pursuing your company). When you're a year old, 100k does the trick.

This isn't a problem bitcoin companies outgrow; it's a problem that festers as the company gets more successful. Do you go out like Flexcoin did, or like MtGox? Either way: you eventually do get taken out.
> Worse myths exist around tampons--that a woman who uses a tampon is no longer a virgin.

Lest someone believe this is a belief held only in rural areas, let it be clear that ideas like this are incredibly common in not-so-rural places like in the US. It's usually accompanied by some equally ridiculous beliefs about what virginity is in the first place (protip: it's about having sex for the first time, not about whether the woman bleeds or how "tight" anything is), hard to find comprehensive and unbiased education, the total lack of knowledge of or misinformation concerning alternatives to pads and tampons (reusables, cups), and straight up shaming and misinformation about birth control usage. The big difference between the poorer and the richer is that honor killings, genital mutilation, and whatnot are far less common for the latter.

I love what this guy did for his wife and other women in the same situation, but there's no shortage of similar problems for women elsewhere and I wonder if there will be something revolutionary on that front too any time soon. I've been considering going to med school and see if I can eventually merge my interest in that and tech at the same time to do something here but that's a long term iffy goal, and surely there are already others interested in the same thing too.

I'm pretty lucky to have had reasonable and educated parents that were willing to tell me (or let me discover) all I wanted to know about these things when I was 10. But it feels like at least once a week if not daily I discover a teen or a preteen or even an adult woman asking basic questions on one of the women-focused communities I spend my time in. I wish I could help them. :(
Some people do, because they don't know better.

Others are trapped by circumstances. For example many users uploaded/stored coins at MtGox, and similar, because they wanted to trade them. But then the sites pulled the rug from under them, by disabling trading - leading to people having coins trapped that they couldn't reclaim.
First of all can you tell me if you are a cbse class 12 student?
How much does YC cost to attend (like boarding, food, transportation, social events)? Would those who attends likely come from a well off background?
However, to find merely a good pub, √n is enough, given the assumptions mentioned later in the article.
Interesting article. I'm kinda fascinated by the hidden life of small storefront businesses.

There was a little cafe that I used to patronize on the weekend because it about the only place within walking distance that I could get a decent cup of coffee.

When I first started going there, I would find myself worrying over the fate of the place, as it never seemed to be busy enough and I really wanted it to succeed. Then, after about a year, when it seemed it had just gotten over the hump and was regularly busy and had amassed some positive reviews on Yelp, it closed up all of the sudden.

I ran into one of the workers there at another nearby restaurant a few weeks later and asked him what happened. He said the sheriff had come by a couple times for non-payment of rent or something. Finally, one afternoon, deputies came in, shut the place down, and put up an eviction notice. While they were still open for business serving customers.

Apparently the owners, a chef who seemed to always be working there and his partner who I'd often see in there with his son, just disappeared into the night, without paying any of the staff for the last three weeks they worked there.
I think it was designed for a Macbook's excellent trackpad. That said, I can see how it would be really difficult to scroll without one.
When you can't avoid Email
IMHO this is a watershed event. It recognizes that Bitcoin has perceived value enough that the regulator is compelled to protect consumers. Never mind how regulation can be gamed internationally, the recognition is so significant I'm going to investigate speculating on Bitcoin's future having kept out so far.