skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No. A CCD only records the light that comes from the boat, the same way film and your eyes operate.
NBA too.
Andrew, I don't hike, but a buddy of mine is always hiking. I forwarded him the link. Very cool looking screenshot on the homepage. I almost want to buy the app just to see it work as I walk down the street for coffee. Good luck with the app.
I believe that the system is actually detecting the lasers that the cameras use for range-finding, and then using a laser to blind the sensor.
Hmm, the links that were not working just a moment ago now seem to be working for me. Weird.
MythBusters: 'Using your head is a lot of fun'
Yeah I think you're typically right. I guess I interchange partner with spouse in my mind because of the whole recognition of de facto couples here in Australia and the whole civil union bit.
You're good to go. The neat thing about this community is strikes a good balance between give and take. My startup journey is well documented on this site. At different times I did my announcements and requests for feedback (take) but I also try to chime in on conversations like this one (give). It seems this behavior is well rewarded here.
The 'radiation' involved in an MRI is electro-magnetic radiation, otherwise known as radio waves. It's true that the field strengths involved are thousands of times stronger than what you encounter in everyday life but they are by no means harmful the way that ionizing particle radiation (X-rays, gammra rays, etc) is...

The most likely side effect is peripheral nerve stimulation and even that highly unlikely because the field strengths are controlled to avoid it...

In general MRIs are perfectly harmless and don't have any serious or lasting side-effects.

Check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_resonance_imaging for more info
Hey, thanks a lot!

Even if you don't hike, this app is pretty useful. I don't know if you have bought an offline maps app, but that's built into this. So you can select sections of OSM or MyTopo maps.

Taking geo-tagged photos around the city is fun too :)
Become pencils after you pass away...
The path to GNOME 3
Cool. That's the same Don Libes who wrote Expect.
I have a serious problem with this. About half-way down on the comments he THEN writes that he doesn't know what band it was and he doesn't know what the actual numbers were.

What?!?!

Basically he just assumed this was a great idea, that it worked, and that it "probably" made all that money.

This is theory only right now with an "example" being his own guess.
Twitpocalypse Tomorrow (again)
Especially since the CCD is only exposed for a fraction of a second while the shutter is open and the image is captured. It'll have to be scanning at a crazy fast rate (35 mm square at 200 meters, 30+ times a second?) .. and good luck getting the light cannon pointed in the right direction and fired before the shutter closes.

What I reasoned when I read this, was that the system would detect whatever it is the auto-focus emits, and point a laser/sharp light in that specific direction, obscuring any further pictures, and at least forcing the photographer to move. Of course, it's ridiculous easy to hit with a denial of service attack, and even easier to circumvent -- just don't use auto-focus, which isn't needed at distance anyway.
Three things that I hate about Android #fail
Anyone want a Free promo code for my iPhone app?

I'd take one, but I don't have an iPhone/iPod Touch!

Maybe Sunday was a bad day to catch people...I tend to look at HN mostly at work :)
My startup is using Clojure, for a webapp that is heavy in AI/statistics.

Yes, compojure is early, but for us it has been totally worthwhile. A lisp that has 1) a fast implementation 2) excellent support for parallelization and 3) well supported web servers has been a huge win. We have had to reinvent a few wheels, but I would much rather re-invent e.g. user logins than Clojure + the JIT, debugger & profiler support of the JVM.

Clojure is going to get better webapp support, Ruby isn't going to get better at number crunching or parallelization or get rid of its warts. So yes, we've been very happy.
Wow.... great response so far. I've had a nice post from Darren and two more people have requested codes.

Thanks so much for the support guys :)

Keeps the requests coming
I've had a nice post from Darren and byoung
At one place, we started off with beowulf and grendel, but then rapidly discovered that many of the other names are pretty much impossible. Stuff like hrothgar, healfdene, and so on.

Authors were a good one for an on-line bookseller I worked for (not Amazon). One of my current gigs has wines: merlot, cabernet, pinot, shiraz, etc...
I'd follow ppk to hell, but it seems he's already there.
It might be lucrative for the first sale or two, but someone like Abramovich sees firing people who disappoint him as a hobby (if you can judge from what's happened to the last several managers of Chelsea).
> but I carried it on

That's an interesting issue. When to start over with a new scheme?
This is fantastic work guys, thanks for doing this. It's especially useful since Topozone.com became expensive.

Anyone who's had to head to EMS to pick up paper trail maps or spend hundreds on the National Geographic map packs (me) should be equally ecstatic.

Distant, distant future feature request: a little augmented reality - let me mount it on my dash and display a 3D view of what I'm looking at.
Or showing your breasts.
MaxiScale’s Web-scale file system (50k nodes)
> Continue to use brown bottles for all homebrew!

This is good advice if you're going to bottle your home brew. I much prefer kegging. Sanitizing + bottling 50-60 bottles is a huge pain.

Now that I think of it, I don't think my local homebrew supply even sells non-brown bottles.
Twitter: The Secret Weapon in Customer Service for Web Hosting Companies
BTW, if anyone has recommendations for sites about non-gaming programming with articles that go into as much detail as Gamasutra, I'm all ears :) DDJ maybe?
It sounds like what he's talking about is the weak anthropic principle, that if the universe were any other way we wouldn't be here and able to observe it, and so it must be that way.

The pebble analogy doesn't really hold true for that.
My takeaway from the project is that Ruby is a great language hampered by a terrible execution environment.

He has a problem with execution speed and blames the tool instead of using the correct tool for the job. I could probably hammer a nail in with the back of a screwdriver but it would be better to learn how to use the hammer. Sigh. Call C from ruby/python/any interpreted language if you NEED speed.
Why shake him if he'd for sure cry more and more and more??
Facebook | Kelly Tee
Just downloaded it for myself. I figure I've read more than $3 worth of your HN posts in the past to justify buying the app regardless.
Don't tell anyone, but I use anime characters: kenpachi, guts, dix-neuf, spike, jet, elric, armstrong. Now THAT'S a large set.
Seriously? Was that a joke?

Hacker News is largely American because it's an outgrowth of YC, which is American Only.

I would hardly think having a website portray a particular provincial bias would be a reason to live somewhere.

Seriously, though, we Brits just hang out wherever the interesting conversations are. That's the beauty of teh interwebz: nobody knows you're not a Yank (until you go off and spell something with an s or an extra u or something silly).
Why would network neutrality and transparency laws bring us closer to censorship laws?

If you're arguing that increasing the scope of the FCC's authority leaves it open to future abuse by people we may not agree with, I think it's pretty clear that keeping the FCC out of it wasn't working either. Sad as it is, I believe I have more say in how the FCC operates than I do in AT&T and Comcast. Particularly given the realities of local telecom monopolies in the US.

And the entire point of the ruling is to emphatically state that subverting standards and protocols is not a business opportunity. Ad-supported broadband that relies on manipulating the IP stream is a danger, not a victim.
I have NO idea what this is about.

Nice design though.. so that intrigues me. I'm guessing some sort of social networking, but there's no way you're going to force me to sign up before I find out what you site's about.

Tell me, if it is a SN site, how do you get your first 10,000 users, so it gives the slightest chance of me finding someone I want to network with?

Assuming that you started on day one, with just your nearest and dearest signed up, where do you get your real customers (are they customers I still don't know if you're providing some sort of service) or users from? I'd love to know.
Retrieving data to process and storing back to some giant "storage units" are becoming more and more obsolete. The future is google style: data is replicated and backed up at all times and you push computation to data to explore data locality.
if you are female.
So do ad-supported web browsers.
Reported Occupations in US Labor Force, 1850-2000
hey, i don't know if your particular market knows all about this and i don't but you mention "kalmin filter" for improved accuracy. I doubt many users know this term, certainly not your average hiker. I think including an explanation would make the site more accessible for users
"He then thinks, Wow the chances of me picking up a pebble at random that has this weight and this diameter are tiny"

Meh. The difference between anthropic thinking and the pebble example is that, without the universe being the way it is, I wouldn't even be here to see it. This is a relevant difference.

ETA: Another relevant difference is this: the amazing thing is not that the universe has precisely the physical constants that it has. The amazing thing is that it has any physical constants suitable for conscious observers.
How to Fix An Election
Google Can’t Be Gamed; At Least Not by Meta Keywords
Not if you rephrase the argument. Regarding the pebble, one might say that no matter which pebble he chose, its measurements would be unique and equally "unlikely." Similarly, no matter which universe we could ever observe ourselves in, it would have equally "unlikely" parameters enabling us to live in it.
Yep That's the crux of it.
This isn't serious journalism. It's just passing on an idea worth trying.

Terry McBride from Nettwerk talked about this at a music conference I was at, and while I didn't write down the exact numbers, I think these are correct.

Since the experience will be different for everyone, it doesn't really matter. Someone else in the comments (#80) said this technique has already pushed them from 5-10 CDs to 150 CDs per show.
Android Market's reliance on Google Checkout makes life hard for developers who want to get paid.
Why is it you despise arguing politics?

I know its a difficult topic to broach with civility, but I think that the United States would be a little better if more people openly discussed politics and policy, instead of just militantly sticking to their views (or their parent's views, and so on)
This is a more effective explanation. It will be interesting to see how stats evolve for "IT startups".

On one hand, we have loads of unemployed well educated young people right now that can afford to risk their time. These may be more likely to seek seed capital? Go big or go home models?

On the other, we have loads of seasoned industry vets with stable lives and cash in the bank to make a go of a new IT business. These may be more likely to start with one or two paying clients? Steady growth models?
I have seen much more impressive technology on the RC boards, although admittedly, not about altitude. For instance, I was just watching first-person-view (FPV) autonomous planes with head-tracking and on-screen-displays (OSD) flying several miles with a UHF setup at about 1W.
Agreed. Which is why skill based immigration has to be a huge component. Canada does this exceptionally well.
It sounds like you don't know many academics.
I did include a description, but buried it. I was hoping people would be intrigued and Google it.

Here's is the description (from http://www.gaiagps.com/acknowledgments)

Kevin Lacker's Kalman Filter - Underneath the hood, Gaia GPS uses a "Kalman Filter" to get more accuracy from the iPhone GPS. The Kalman Filter code was written by Kevin Lacker, a technical advisor to the Gaia GPS team, and egineer at Google. The Kalman Filter code is now open source and available for anyone to use. You can read more about Kalman Filters on Wikipedia, and you can download the source code on GitHub.
>wondering what can I gain from switching to Mac

As a person who has been using a Mac for about 5 years now, not much. Macs have a slightly better UX(for now, personally I think Win7 makes them equals) if you don't like the command line at all(or are command line only, but then it offers nothing over Linux). If you are a fan of both the command line and the GUI Mac OS is a bizarre halfling that doesn't play well with itself. Windows is much more coherent if you use both(even when you use Cygwin for the CL side of things.) If you stray off the blessed path with Macs things get ugly quickly(Steve Yeggie has a rant about trying to make Focus Follow Mouse work properly that is quite amusing.)
"no matter which universe we could ever observe ourselves in"

But you can't just assume that our existence is necessary. We might not have existed at all.
Hi Andrew,

I like it. My 2 cents:

1) Once i read your statement below I understand the app. I think you should make it plainly obvious that the app is for hiking (if that is your target market)

2) (This is based off the assumption that the target is hikers) The people who will use this are outdoors people. The app gui should be geared towards the market. I feel the app & web layout is geared for the high tech crew. Look at some legendary brands' color schemes (http://www.coleman.com/). Maybe partner up with a casing designer to provide rugged iphone cases (they'll be taking their iphone outdoors).

3) Why are you better than GPS motionx?

Cool app and I hope you can give me your feedback when our (phone halo) app releases.
> The pebble analogy doesn't really hold true for that.

I'm actually interested in why you think that analogy doesn't hold true. (apart from the last bit about fireball - it makes the same mistake as the one he complains about)

I would generalise the behaviour to: Pick object X and its property Y after you confirmed that property. Be amazed because of Y. claim that Z must exist based on only that one sample.

X ∈ (earth, pebble), Y ∈ (sustains life, specific dimension), Z = power that caused X to have Y

Am I missing something here?
Or Java from JRuby; it's really useful to be able to just use a native Java class without any extra work whatsoever.
even if they manually approved all uploaded documents (clearly, a financially impossible proposition), they would still undoubtedly miss some works where copyright information wasn't easily publicly accessible, and be liable for "infringement" for those.

if you want the youtubes, scribds, googles and weeblys of the world to exist, this needs to be the way the law works.

alternatively, you could shut down all user-generated content sites and there would be no company-provided hosting of any kind. but how is that really any different from your ISP?

EVEN IF you decided that everyone should be forced to set up their own web server and host their own content, the copyright owner would still need to patrol the internet for violations -- so your problem is still not solved.

so while, as the copyright owner, it sucks to have to police for violations, the system as a whole couldn't exist by putting the onus on the provider.
The Art of zen-coding: Bringing Snippets to a New Level
Wow - there's no excuse for bad css anymore...
I personally hated school for most of my life, and I have a hard time putting my kids through the same thing.

So put them through a different thing. There are several different types of schools offering several different educational philosophies. If you look around a bit you might just find something that is a good match for your kid.
Message out a clear value to your customers. I was prompted for personal information with no idea what I was receiving in return.

I think if you focus in on that clarity of message you'll see a good increase in sign-up conversions.
No, the difference is not relevant.

Just because it affects you doesn't make it more scientifically valid.

This is akin to saying that life had to produce intelligent primates because I am an intelligent primate.
Ditto. I spend 95% of my time writing Monte-Carlo based financial simulations. Obviously, they are computationally intense. That being said, after many years, I finally figured out that prototyping in in a scripting language (formerly Python now Ruby) and then factoring out parts into other languages for speed (usually just a C++ or C/CUDA binary via a `cmd` call) makes me 100 times more productive than just doing it in C.
That seems like a great app - well done.

Minor niggle, change the tacky stock photos in the header and footer of your web page. People make subconscious judgments on the quality of your product by subtle clues they pick up on in how you present it. You've done all that hard work in the coding, seems a shame to not to maximise your potential sales by not giving your full attention to your sales page.
sweet. Another incf for Clojure.

Is there auto tree balancing?
It's easy in the sense that it's more or less a sure thing. It's not easy in the sense that you still have to go through a lot of paperwork and bureaucracy, and even have to go in for a doctor to poke you and prod you to see if you're fit to live in the US. Nothing like being treated like livestock to make you feel welcome.

It was way easier for me to deal with the Italian bureaucracy once we were married than it would be for my wife to go to the US. And that's saying something: Italian bureaucracy is about as bad as the stereotypes make it out to be.
You would not, but it's entirely possible that something else could be.

The analogy is not man:pebble::you:universe. The analogy is man:pebble::universe:you. If the man had, by happenstance, picked up a different pebble, the current pebble would not be there (in the man's hand). If the universe had, by happenstance, slightly different constants, you would not be there (in the universe). Something else might be, but then, it might not: we really can't figure that out.

The weak anthropic principle is basically survivor bias on an enormous scale.
I think the law is fundamentally wrong. I think there should be some sort of requirement on those uploading to assert that they have the right to do so, and there should then be a means of pursuing those who upload material to which they have no rights.

Yes, scribd is probably within the law, but they are acting in a manner that I find immoral, and I'm not the only one.

The upshot, as so many others have observed, is that copyright law is a mess, as is patent law. Completely absolving vehicles for theft such as scribd from any form of liability is wrong.

However, the law has never been about right and wrong, so it won't start now. I've largely stopped writing now, concentrating on personal appearances. That at least turns a tidy profit, and is difficult to duplicate without my knowledge. My other company relies on commercial secrets rather than paying through the nose to divulge secrets, only subsequently to have to pay to find if they're stolen, then pay again to defend them.

With regards scribd and its ilk, I know I won't get my way. Morals can't be policed, because laws will always be gamed. I don't like it, but I'll have to accept it. I just won't play. Apart from continuing to check for infringements I won't use their site. It's an old-fashioned view, but quite simply, it makes me feel grubby.
All cameras I've ever owned used purely passive, optical autofocus with rarely activated IR assist off the flash unit, which only fires when it gets really dark and works only for distances under 10-15 feet.

From the article it's completely unclear to me how could that possibly work: those "lasers" would have to scan every square inch of the landscape (possibly a couple square miles) at the rate of about 100-1000 times per second in order to blind an SLR camera during the day.

Any experts here?
Any universe in which a thinking being exists will be suited to the existence of that thinking being.

No one can claim "isn't it suprising that the universe suits me" because anyone who can say it, can say it :)
The laser is the light cannon.
The Kalman filter code is in C and available via Github in case you're curious to take a look -

http://github.com/lacker/ikalman
Let's just say my parents are staunch Republicans and it hasn't been easy at family dinners when politics is the subject of discussion.
Ask HN: What country does better than the U.S. in immigration law?
I see there have been some threads recently discussing pg's proposal for a founder's visa as part of United States immigration law. Those threads reliably lead to a lot of replies from persons in other countries who desire to immigrate to the United States but find it inconvenient to do so.

But is there another country more welcoming of immigrants, or at least more welcoming of hacker immigrants? I was born here in the United States, and I have lived abroad about six years of my life (two stays of three years each) and have visited a few other countries besides the country I lived in. Where could I go and get a job fresh off the plane? What would be the best country to immigrate to for

a) a high-tech engineer from Norway?

b) the same from Britain?

c) the same from India?

d) the same from China?

e) a peasant from China?

f) an AIDS orphan from Africa?

Where can people go and find work immediately without immigration hassles, or with minimal hassles?
Because gentle jiggling/rocking tends to calm babies. Mine, anyway. Sometimes, gentle jiggling doesn't work, so you do it a bit more. Nothing much, just kinda a joggle with the knees, but the increased frequency/amplitude works better sometimes. Add the factors explained above, and sometimes you end up shaking that kid for all he's worth.

I managed to avoid doing so, though. :)
the app looks great. as a hiker the topo maps excited me more than anything else. paper maps are expensive!

only other thing is i wonder why you don't use mapkit for regular maps instead of another map source. with mapkit you get the same great user experience user's expect and all the mapkit improvements coming for free.
"blames the tool instead of using the correct tool for the job"

Uh, why the negativity? Basically he is saying that Ruby is not well suited to certain tasks. How does that differ from what you say?
I disagree. What I believe is that, if some conceivable universes could support conscious observers, and some couldn't, this is an interesting fact which warrants further discussion. I see 5 possibilities:

1. It was an unlikely fluke. The universe had to have some properties, and it happened to have these ones.

2. It was a likely fluke. Many of the conceivable universes actually would support conscious observers of some sort.

3. There's some deep physical reason why the universe had to have the properties it has.

4. God did it.

5. Multiple universes exist, drastically raising the odds that conscious observers exist somewhere.
I'm getting a geek boner just thinking about this one...
Any advice for programming languages that are both fast and pleasant to use? How does LISP fare? Or maybe Haskell (because of the static typing)?
Can you point me in a direction for source?

Academic success and income, sorry.
Thanks, I didn't know about de facto couples.
What this says to me is that the argument is fruitless, whether you are an IDer, or a "new athiest". So let's stop using it.
Agreed.

It's not clear if the OP knows what "anthropomorphic" means. It's not the same as "anthropic".
On the other hand, you can get a lot of money by shaking down big companies. It depends on what your goals are: winning, or getting money from your win.