skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're making edits directly to source pixel layers (or even making duplicate flattened layers and working on those), you're doing it wrong.

That seems like a rather absolutist statement. I work with PS CC and its great features all day at work but I guess I still remember the fantastic work that was done before those features existed.

I have colleagues who still edit their photos using the apparently-despised techniques you mentioned, and despite "doing it wrong" they manage to make a great living off their photography work.

When I was teaching PS at my local college, I allowed my students to try out alternative software packages for extra credit. Some of my brightest students walked away from those classes happy that they could do everything they needed to do with GIMP, even though they knew all about non-destructive editing.
Assuming their translation step is as cheap as they claim (single pass rewrite/substitute missing hardware for software macros), it's conceivable that there isn't much value in persistently caching the result.

In that case, everything could be contained to a single ld.so patch, or (doubtfully) a modification to the kernel ELF loader

Finally, and although it is less common now, in prior days Linux already had a post-install processing step for binaries on certain distributions - prelink(8) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prelink )
How Facebook manages macs at scale
I wonder if they aren't a little late on this. I assume that I'm not the only one that found out I can get along just fine without Office on an iPad (or in my own personal case, get along just fine without Office at all). If the free Pages/Keynote/Numbers doesn't do it, I probably need a "real" computer anyway.

That was always the real danger I saw for Microsoft as they delayed supporting iOS. Folks buy the devices anyway, despite their lack of Office. Then folks find out that they can do what they want to do despite that lack of Office. Maybe they've been using it by default, not because they really need it. Then Microsoft comes out with Office for iOS and there's a collective shrug and a "meh".
The Forbes article on this is much better.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2014/03/26/...
Nadella said "Let me go to my iPad"! I bet that wasn't allowed at the time of Gates and Ballmer.
Reimplementing scrolling. Isn't JavaScript amazing?
They've included only one of the Twitter patches that I know of -- Jeremy Cole's NUMA pre-allocation and interleaving work. Percona contributes a lot of great stuff to the MySQL community, but their focus has always been supporting their paying customers.
Publicity stunt.

Oh, and it will deff be leaked.
Microsoft finally brings Word, Excel and PowerPoint to the iPad
A digital kitchen scale (something like ) - http://www.amazon.com/EatSmart-Precision-Digital-Kitchen-Sil...

Measuring all of your flour, sugar, etc in grams will improve your baking a 100 fold. (It now assumes your recipes are based in ratios and metric though).
Or a dumb smart phone. If your phone plan has expired, unlock the device from the carrier and move to a pre-paid carrier. Yes it will cost more per text, call and MB used but it will give you convenience of smart phone with a $10 or $20 month bill instead of $75 or higher with unlimited data distractions.

It made me think about the bandwidth hog the corporate email was too, even for casually checking. So I removed that account from the phone. When I choose I can listen to internet radio or surf the web and if I use too much the annoying balance notification is a good indicator that I should be doing other things.
awesome. I like to do a little pre-reading and peruse a company's marketing materials to get a feel for what they do when reading entries like this. thanks much!
Looks like a clone rather than a port (as paint.net isn't open source you can't really port it), but I'll take a look.

Their github (https://github.com/PintaProject/Pinta) makes it look like the project may be abandoned.
Microsoft To Release Word, Excel, and Powerpoint for iPad at 11AM PST
Huh? What does this have to do with Gates? Under Gates leadership MS has been developing software for Apple since the 90's.

Edit: Fixed possible factual error.
USB attacks without physical access [pdf]
Music has no fixed meaning.

Some would argue that it is meant to be experienced, not heard.

What some people call "the greatest piece of music ever written" was composed by a deaf man, indeed Beethoven even conducted its première, setting the tempo for an orchestra he couldn't even hear. But still he got 5 standing ovations.
Absolutely true, I'd love to see that comparison.
Where in the article does it mention or speculate about BDNF having an effect on nearsightedness? And what would be a theoretical basis for that, given that it relates to the shape of the eye and not the health of sensory neurons?

Exercise doesn't work, broadly speaking, or millions who are nearsighted and who exercise a lot would notice their vision improve.

Assuming you're not simply trolling, did you start eating or drinking something new shortly before your eyesight improved? Did something change in your environment? Although I think it's more likely that a dramatic improvement in eyesight is the result of a rare chemical signalling fluke (possibly genetic), if you changed habits beforehand that's worth investigating as a possible cause. Exercise [alone], however, even Qi Gong/Tai Chi, is not worth investigating. Plenty of people practice those arts and other Oriental physiological philosophies, not to mention other things like yoga and meditation, and don't see improvement in their eyesight.
Hubble – Meaning Of Color
The pricing structure is interesting: Free to view, requires an expensive Office 365 subscription to edit.

Seems like they're missing an opportunity to drive adoption of Office as an online platform. Why would I want to publish using Office instead of Google Docs when I can't assume that people I send the Office doc to will be able to edit it? Sure, Office is better, but not better enough to overcome that.

If it was free to edit, but $$$ to publish, Office 365 would be much more compelling. Especially since the situation w/r/t mobile looks much better than Google Docs.

Edit: My point here is about network effects, not whether the subscription is worth it. Office previously benefited from them, but it's vulnerable as a cloud platform given the free alternatives from Google and even Apple.
I couldn't even imagine how I'd feel if something I worked on for multiple years and only made one copy of was leaked. I'd have to question my entire existence.
Thanks for your reply.

I have no reason to doubt your projections. I mainly took issue with the 2.3x number in the parent blog post because I remembered you saying something different in your talk. That's all.
Strategy: Cache Stored Procedure Results
I thought most of Europe does bank accounts differently, in a way that allows people to safely transfer money directly?
Never Be Too Pleased With Your Past Work
Is it that surprising? Rap's hustling make it by any means mentality isn't so far from that of startup founders / ambitious people in general.
A lot of languages handle this idiom more gracefully.

Actually they don't. You can not resize a (static) array. What you really want is a dynamic array, an array list or whatever you like to call it. In this case you can double the size of the underlying array when you have to reallocate it and get the amortized runtime down but at the price of using up to twice the memory you need.

Maybe array_append is to blame because its pure existence somewhat implies that you are working with array lists and not with arrays.
I spent a fair bit of time trying to find an article or something about this, but came up empty. I was especially curious to know how you can decode the program's bits from the silicon.

I found a similar idea here:
http://members.iinet.net.au/~lantra9jp1/gurudumps1/decap/ind...
The photo in the upper-right looks like it could reasonably be turned into binary, if you knew what you were looking at.

Anyone have any more info about how this actually works?
Other sources have speculated that the sale of the box set will include the copyright.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2014/03/26/...
>The goal of your startup is not to get into YC

One of my friends who did YC said something that stuck in my mind: "Getting into YC is like getting into Stanford. For 70% of people it's their zenith. Sure the other 30% go on to do amazing things, but for most people just getting in is the most impressive thing they ever do."

I found the perspective extremely motivating and it doesn't surprise me at all that he and his company have continued to do well.
Alas, only for tech startups in one of the twelve select countries. We went with Paymill instead.
Nice write-up. I use a list in Evernote as my master organization system, and it really does act like an external hard drive for my brain. It helps me relax now that I trust myself to look at the list every day.
They've released for Apple since basically forever. The Apple II shipped with Microsoft Basic for a while, IIRC.
And that is being worked on:
https://wiki.gnome.org/Events/Hackfests/WestCoastSummit2014

We have an entire stack showing up to fix things in the right places not just in GNOME itself.
What's the point of working so hard on something for so long so that so few people could listen to it once?
People Who Single-handedly Caused Economic Crises
"Requires subscription for editing"

This is lame, IMO, and so typical for MS.
My 2 cents are a 8" or 10" victornix chef knife

http://www.amazon.com/Victorinox-Fibrox-8-Inch-40520-5-2063-...

My local butcher uses it so much it turns into a boning knife.
If I pay with cash at a store then I'm literally walking out with the goods. For services, I've already received the services before paying.

You're correct that there is no physical protection for the cash, but that is why most people do not carry lots of cash. Most store it in an insured bank account.
There is a trend towards the "subscription model". We've seen it with Adobe's suite of apps, Microsoft has done that with Office recently -- Office 365 subscription is access to the native apps during the subscription period as well as access to the online versions -- it has been around awhile.
Behind the Scenes at the Robot Olympics
> will it have clippy -- the office assistant?

Siri integration, obviously. We've come full-circle.
Great article; maintaining focus on growth is good general startup advice. However, I think it breaks down for startups in the Enterprise realm (not talking about the B2B startups that provide commodity services).

Firstly, getting traction by number of users is much harder. But every customer you sign on implies huge growth for your company in terms of revenue. Take Palantir for example; afaik, their initial massive growth came from a single, but huge, government contract.

Secondly, growth will never be a smooth 10%/week type of curve -- more like an irregular staircase; but taken over the long-term (years), it might get you higher. So taking a granular snapshot of the early beginnings might show no growth at all.

Thirdly, there won't be many early signups. Simply because the volume is much lower.

Having said that, zooming out on the macro scale (years), your advice still holds (growth > everything) -- but it doesn't apply to the YC application process :)
Microsoft announces Office for iPad, available later today in the App Store
Docker, CoreOS, and the entire ecosystem are moving really fast, it is a bit hard for me as a developer to keep up. For some projects we are creating containers with Docker and will need to get some things into production as soon as Docker 1.0 is declared stable.

At the same time I want to switch to CoreOS, I also want to wait just a little while for blogs, tutorials, and tools to catch up to where CoreOS and Docker are at, and be usable in production by people who are not professional devops.

The most exciting thing for me in this post is CoreOS CloudInit. It seems to be one of those tools that a small shop could use. It looks a bit like the yaml for fig, but is something that could be used in production as well. At the moment, I have been trying to solve everything a bit on my own with Makefiles, which include Makefiles for custom variables and Makefiles for commands that can be run against each container. It is working great for dev, but I could never really see how to run the containers in prod. The Makefiles didn't really seem like a prod solution, but CoreOS CloudInit looks like it could work.

We also skipped boot2docker and use vagrant with ssh, so seeing that there is a Vagrant box which will run just like an EC2 box is pretty exciting. I would be excited if Digital Ocean would start supporting CoreOS too.

[edit] Quite a few people would like CoreOS on Digital Ocean - http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea...
It's not changing, expensive subscription for editing is the proof. Same greedy corporation which cares about its cash cows.
I'm not trying to deny that GIMP has technical deficits compared to current versions of Photoshop - I'm certainly not enough of a Photoshop power-user to say that. I am annoyed about the amount of time wasted in making GIMP look like Photoshop rather than attacking the feature deficits. (Of course, those developers are just scratching their own itch, and we should all be grateful to them for it, and if I care about it so much, I should be coding it.)

If I were a Photoshop user, and GIMP looked just like Photoshop but worked differently, it would leave a really sour taste in my mouth. Additionally, Photoshop can change interface elements at a whim, so it's a moving target of dubious benefit.

>GIMP is basically just an enhanced version of MS Paint

GIMP is 10000x the tools that people used to do wonderful graphic work over the history of photography. If you're willing to pay thousands in order not to devise a workflow that doesn't need "real non-destructive editing features," the GIMP is currently not for you.
Microsoft Office Is Finally on the iPad, Available for Download Today
Spinlocks – how should one do on Linux what YieldProcessor is doing on Windows?
See http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/2014-03-27#i_8503498 for the discussion so far which has started with:

Question for the masses: on Windows, if you're doing a spin-lock style thing, the YieldProcessor macro is defined so as to ensure that in a hyper-threading situation you don't clog up the execution units with your spinning (note it doesn't do a traditional yield and de-schedule you - it just doesn't get in the way of a hyperthread running on the same core). Does anybody know of an equivalent macro or function call on Linux and/or other systems?
The US government practices pretty much no direct censorship of the internet. You can read about the number of laws that have been struck down, and the handful of cases where domains/servers have been seized:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Uni...
Funny, I've used many image editing software using different paradigm and Gimp manages to cut me at every corner.
Crows' reasoning ability rivals that of seven-year-old humans
TED Talk: The strangeness of scale at Twitter
I would like to know more about the animations they used here. :)
I wouldn't exactly call office 365 that expensive. It's $100/4yrs for students (university) and $100/yr for 5 users. That's hardly expensive. (Sure if you live alone it's more expensive, but you could probably just pair up with friends/family to split the cost)
Try Agda.
Agreed. Some gifted people create stunning works of art with unconventional or limited tools. Tatsuo Horiuchi uses Excel to create beautiful paintings.

I guess my point is that it's hard to argue against using non-destructive editing if it's available and you understand it. Can you create great things without it? Of course.

Bringing the analogy back to programming: some people create useful/beautiful apps without using any form of revision control, and that's fine for them. But if you know how to use revision control and have access to it, then is there really any strong reason not to use it, especially if you're working professionally? It helps increase productivity far more than not using it. For that reason, I'd definitely tell other developers that if they aren't using revision control for professional work, they're doing it wrong.

If you were to pick two professional photographers or retouchers at random - one who uses non-destructive editing and the other who doesn't, I'd be willing to bet the one who uses it (all else being equal) produces more consistent, high quality results and with greater efficiency than the one who doesn't.
Twitter Plays Hardball With Facebook Over TV – and TV Networks Gripe
Yes. On the other hand, it's really easy to make a throw-away type in Haskell as a newtype wrapper.
Changing this comment, the [Pending] thing is stupid.

Back to /r/programming it is then.
Hacker News is slow or inaccessible 
The site has been slow to respond in the last 24 hours and I have gotten a few 502 bad gateways.

Cloudflare location: Newark
This is awesome Adrian - I wish this existed six months ago. I've been asked this many times lately, and I think it's important enough to add it here as well:

The best way to prepare for the YC application process is to actually work on your company.

You learn so much about your customers and product space by actually building something and talking to customers about it. By doing that, thinking critically about the results, and iterating, you'll find the YC application and interview questions get easier to answer - because you'll know more about what you're doing and why than anyone else.
Is BACS in the pipeline?

(BACS is the UK equivalent of ACH as far as I can tell.)
So corporations aren't supposed to make money from their products? Google docs does not work well on the iPad and I would love something that conforms to the iPad properly.
The latter.

Ideally you should always talk to potential users/customers first to validate if you you idea truly is one that solves a genuine problem (ie problem/solution fit).

Only then go and build an MVP and test it with these same people - who can then also refer other interested people (ie product/market fit).

Here you will truly validate the need for the product and/or pivot to something else that can get to product/market fit.

Then, and only then should you look to do things like marketing to get the product in front of people.

This is the lean startup approach.

Following (something like) this significantly raises the odds of success.
Building it in the hope of someone finding it/using it is a waste of time/money/energy.
Inkscape is actually very good, and certainly comparable to Adobe Illustrator, if not superior nowadays. The main problem I see people have with Inkscape is when they have a MacOS computer, the only available build is from 3 years ago.
How is this lame? If you only require viewing docs on the iPad you can do that for free. That's fantastic and most people will probably be satisfied with that. A subscription is only to edit and I believe gives you access to Office 365. For software you use daily a subscription shouldn't be a problem.
Mozilla employees tell Brendan Eich he needs to “step down”
Oculus founder: Rift is open, Sony's Project Morpheus is not | Joystiq
Immediately reminded me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_American_Tail - although a children's movie even back then it striked me as odd that names were Americanized.
IIRC the MS Excel, a cornerstone of the MS Office was first released for Mac, and only later for Windows.
The Green PaaS: Innovative Data Centers Will Save the World Billions
It actually works, and without any hardware or even a webcam. Clever ;)
This release is absolutely phenomenal. As liuliu mentioned in the release notes most of the pre-existing implementations are either not-that-good, closed source, or their datasets are closed. This is, seemingly, the first good open source deep learning classifier out there! There is a whole cottage industry of commercial deep learning image classifier services springing up (like http://www.ersatzlabs.com/) but this will surely make this technology even more accessible. I can't wait to use it in some of my side projects!
Excel and PowerPoint are live already.
Excel: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-excel-for-ipad/id5...

PowerPoint: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-powerpoint-for-ipa...
Are they a greedy corporation, yes. They are in business to make money. Is that "evil"? No.

Does the new Office look good? Yes.
Ex-Gimp User here. The article does point out that most photographer workflows are in their raw editors. You get Non Destructive Editing with tools like Darktable in Linux. Non destructive editing helps to improve your productivity. It's similar to making code changes knowing you have a revision system behind and to when you don't. That being said non destructive doesn't make you a better retoucher, it's there to save your ass, which happens less often for the seasoned professional. Professionals were productive long before non destructive editing. Gimp is used professionally, even though we hear little about that. Krita and Blender have all been used on big budget movies as well. Gimps biggest problem IMHO ( and strictly from my experience) is usability. This post isn't going to turn into a typical gimp ui rant even though gimp does makes my head hurt; a lot but I don't think I'll be going back to gimp unless I really have to. I have used since it since 2001 and seeing it lag behind other open source editors makes me sometimes wonder why usability is an after thought.
SpinachCon Zero == A Huge Success
But if I'm alone using it, that's not 5 users. That will be $100/yr for 1 user. And that appears to be expensive in general.
A cracked version will come with editing capabilities, make no mistake. I'd gladly once pay a fair amount of money for a version with edit and without subscription.
Oh yea they should just give you the software for free. Because that's the way a business works right?
No the difference is that GNOME is moving towards a 'product'. Everything is designed to work together, to be consistent everywhere. When you mix and match, you just get medicority because none of them were designed to work together at all. I would not call that even a Unix philosophy, it's just something that happened organically.

Doing what GNOME is doing is hard. Making hard choices on what to keep and what not. Fixing the things in the other parts of the stack instead of band aiding it in their own.
I've talked to a few potential applicants this week and something that perturbs me in particular is that YC will somehow "make everything work". In startups things rarely work (at least initially).

YC should be regarded as fuel to the mythical fire... whether that fire is your passion, an initial sloping growth curve, or a crazy new technology you just created in your attic.

Partners, the schedule, constant accountability will all provide structure and tremendous value to accelerate your progress - but the mythical fire must already be a spark.