skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I loved this idea - until I got more involved with it. Ultimately, business accounts have a limit on cheque deposit (at least here in Canada) whereby deposits from camera can't be for more that $3k in one shot, or $5k/month. At the very least, those are the rules laid down by CIBC and Royal. Ultimately this makes it pretty useless unfortunately.

On the flip side, if you find a way around this - especially for Royal, please let me know. It'd make my life a better place :)
He probably has, which is why he's now asking for a cost effective solution.
29 stories that will make you feel better about your struggles
Search as a First-Class Object
US Cyber Command, the main elite military cyberwarfare unit, is under the joint leadership of the NSA director. What they're doing now is moving the techniques "down-market" so that ordinary units have cyber capabilities as well. Think JSOC vs. regular infantry. You need both to be effective.

Amusing side note, the MD5 hash of CYBERCOM's mission statement, "9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a", is to my knowledge the only hash emblazoned on an agency seal.
Can somebody executive summary this big lump of wooly garbage?
I don't know how relevant this is, but I have a similar pain but it's not associated with tax time.

If I'm going to be at a client location for a few weeks I need to save every receipt I get then I need to invoice the entire lump. It's a mind-numbing process.

On my last trip I had 97 receipts, it was an absolute pain, luckily I had a 10 hour flight to do it over.

In a perfect world I'd take a photo and it would OCR what it can and then voice prompt me for notes. That way I could just snap a photo and speak into my phone something like "£37 for pints... I mean dinner at the Old Flaming Hen".

When it comes time to actually use these receipts then I could download the lot of them and send them off as part of my invoice.

A small but VERY nice feature would be giving the file names something relevant as normally I have to upload them one at a time. Instead of DCR0299.jpeg if they could be "01-17-2014 23:11 £37 for pints... I mean dinner at the Old Flaming Hen.jpeg" then they'd be much easier to find when accounting asks me questions.

I haven't seen much in this space, maybe I'm not looking in the right places or there isn't a very big market.
It's true that the beginning of the talk is about how people abandoned backprop trained neural networks because they often underperformed SVMs, but the rest of the talk is about deep learning, which introduced a new generation of neural nets (since 2006) that are the current state of the art for a lot of problems.

In fact, deep neural networks are trained in an unsupervised manner at first, but then back propagation is used to "fine tune" and improve the results. Because they require unlabeled data sets, and can perform so well, research into neural networks has experienced a recent resurgence.

By the way, any talk by Geoff Hinton is fantastic. If you are interested in neural networks and their capabilities, and you haven't already seen it, his Coursera course [1] builds from a simple linear perceptron to the current deep learning methods.

[1] https://class.coursera.org/neuralnets-2012-001 (You'll have to sign in to see it)
This is roughly the premise of the Neal Stephenson novel Reamde. There's a virtual world named T'Rain after the terrain generation algorithm used to create it.
There is a typo with 'ZooKeeper'.It's an awesome framework.
We've also had tremendous success with XE.

Cheaper (lower fees + better exchange rate) than the bank, I can do it all online.

I've blogged about our experience here:
http://blog.preinheimer.com/index.php?/archives/418-Paying-a...
Bitcoin or any cryptocoin.
Scientists create purple-winged butterflies in six generations
CLAHub – Easily add a Contributor License Agreement to your GitHub project
This is the "Simpsons Did It" of video games.
The NSA doesn't opt out of pay scales -- all general employees follow the GS pay scale with GS 10 removed (GS 9 promotes to GS 11). For those with a degree in certain fields, they follow an increased pay scale but along the same grade. For instance, someone with an electrical engineering degree would follow the GE pay scale, which still has the same path (GE 9, 11-15) but makes something like 2-10k more per year.

The biggest difference, is that their promotion structure is split into two parts: there is a technical route to promotion and an administrative route. This means that you can either be good at being in charge of people and get promoted (administrative), or just be good at what you do (technical). It leads to interesting situations where a GS12 is put in charge of divisions comprising GS15 veterans of 20 years experience, but all in all it is by far the best government run organization I've worked for.
Robert Jordan told Sanderson how he wanted it to end, so he at least had an end in the works.

I agree that the last few books before Sanderson started writing them were lower quality though, pretty much everyone does.
You can quickly invent a distinction between a road and a street, where roads are indeed intended to maximize throughput but streets are intended to provide access.

So maybe those signs are on streets where throughput is not the primary goal, and where substantial barriers would interfere with people moving from their parked cars to the sidewalk and the like.
Government... It's made of people!

Good government isn't a natural right, it is every citizen's duty.
Back to The Future Final Timeline
Exactly. And the term I was looking for is "rolling shutter" (a confident term for an inaction).
I agree, Google has increasingly focused on big companies, ever since they announced the "focus on brands" 5 or so years ago.
Given that this is attached to a post about fans of Game of thrones being annoyed that the last book is taking forever, it's worth noting that the Kingkiller Chronicles is aggressively unfinished at the moment; it's planned to be three books, two are written, and Rothfuss quite up front about the fact that the final volume is taking a while to make happen, and that he's working on a lot of other stuff in the interim.

They're both beautiful books and I will be happy with them even if Rothfuss never gets around to finishing the series. But if you need your fantasy to end before you're willing to read it then stay away.
Getting Express, Azure, and Visual Studio Online to play nice
> If you don't want the older exception, why are you giving it to the constructor of the new exception?

Exceptions are chained automatically through the stracktrace and not because they are passed to the constructor. By raising an exception from an exception handler you automatically chain them.
I'd be curious to know whether LinkedIn is or will start working on a similar user-experience for medium-to-large organizations. On paper it would seem LinkedIn would have a strong lead ahead of CrunchBase with their own business graph model(s), but the existing LinkedIn UI would probably need some major overhauls.

Also, it's unlikely that LinkedIn would want to focus solely on early-stage startups since at this point in their trajectory there probably isn't enough money in that category to justify an additional LinkedIn Premium tier.

CrunchBase is immersed in the startup ecosystem and their Business Graph will probably provide and quickly return more relevant information based on their existing dataset.
Also check out http://opencorporates.com/ which is the world's largest open database of company information.

They've produced some really nice visualisations showing international company structures http://opencorporates.com/viz/financial/index.html
Did you stop to ask what her needs were? If you lost everything except your food supply, would you be all good to go?
I don't like it, the forums look like those spam pages that aggregate comments from other pages on the web to get clicks without providing any value (I'm talking about the visual aspect of the forums in the screenshots).

Also, it is too expensive, too expensive for a new product, specially when the field already has experienced competitors offering the same things for less (I'm talking about https://muut.com/).
I couldn't recommend these more. The variety is great. They're funny and insightful and there's plenty of them.
We're in this exact situation. Canadian Company with mostly US clients. We have a USD and CDN account through TD which allows us to deposit checks and receive wires in US funds if needed. From there we use TDFX to transfer funds between the two accounts as needed. TDFX gives pretty good rates on the exchange and there is no transfer fee. For example the spot rate I just got was 1.0916 USD --> CDN
Brandon Sanderson.

I empathize, I went through something similar. I picked up ASOIAF without realizing the series wasn't finished yet (predating the show by a year or two). When I reached the end of book 4, it had a little note about how some plot lines had been moved out of #4 and would show up in #5, which would come out shortly. Then I looked at the publication date, and thought "not again".

They're still enjoyable to read, and I think Neil's got the right attitude.

Personally, I think the show will catch, and pass, the novels, and it will become canon. And I'm okay with that too.
To be honest, I had read so much hype about the book before reading it, that, paradoxically, I ended up not liking Lord of Light that much (it does have a very interesting premise).

On the other hand, I basically stumbled on the Chronicles of Amber - I bought the huge omnibus book because it was good words-per-dollar value, back when e-books didn't exist and I needed my books to last me my whole holidays!!
If you want a nice, visual, explanation of what a neural network is actually doing, I found this blog post to be particularly helpful. [1] Although there is some math, the rest of the post gives a good intuitive understanding of what's going on without it.

[1] http://colah.github.io/posts/2014-03-NN-Manifolds-Topology/
I like your idea. A small amount of randomisation can be very effective at (1) defeating gaming, (2) finding unexpected signals in complex systems (3) Preventing over-fitting of results when optimising.

All three of these advantages come into play here.
For large transactions, I don't think it's true that rates are lower using a forex broker. In the limit of large transactions, Norbert's Gambit fees approach the bid-ask spread cost, which should be lower than any forex fee.

For example, according to the calculator, converting $100k saves about $350 versus a 0.3% conversion fee. Even converting $10k is cheaper than 0.3%. What are Interactive Brokers fees?

Another reason is that you don't have to transfer your money out of your accounts to a third party. Everything happens within your brokerage accounts.
I can only say that I was very glad that Robert Jordan had time to plan out and pass on the whole of his story to another writer.

I know it's entitled - but I really expect GRRM to make considerations to ensure that the whole story will be told. I don't think he owes me the story now, I don't mind waiting for him to do the writing as he envisions it - but I do kind of feel that he owes me a complete tale.
Show HN: The Year-Long Open-Source Sabbatical
> I never said I didn't want it there; I said I didn't put it there. You can't tell me I have no right to put something on the homepage when it ended up there because of HN's algorithm (which suggests that others did want it there).

Don't confuse the argument. If you wanted it on the front page then you wanted to drag your entitlement beyond the original discussion onto the HN front page. You have many rights to do all sorts of things, but exercising it in this case just makes you seem entitled to me.

> This is nothing to do with using a web service as an ORM, this is how web apps work - code runs in your browser, and needs to communicate with a server where I can retrieve or persist things. How do you think Gmail marks an email as Read when you open it? Fetches your email? etc.

Don't strawman my argument. You need data client side, why is it necessary that they need to take the specific form of your own custom Dart classes mapping exactly to the shape of your JSON?

> This is nonsense. Pulling data from a server into a Map is bug-prone, because if you use it as a map, all of your code can be wrong. If it's converted to a type, then only the mapping can be wrong, and the rest of the code can have static analysis.

Maps have no pretense of type safety. Manual mappings have actual type safety. Reflection based automated mappings only have the pretense of type safety with a whole lot of problems.

I'm not saying reflection based mappings don't have merits. They do. But in a context where mapping-to-classes is not shown to be a necessity ("99% of all webapps" don't do that) and where there are plenty of alternatives, you are blowing up the problem.

> This is one of the selling points of Dart, and it's totally stupid to throw it away.

Except for the fact you're not really arguing for real type safety, I do agree. It is a missed opportunity in the Dart ecosystem. Does that really equate to Dart missing basic functionality? I think it just shows that it would be nice if there was a library for that. In the meantime, there are plenty of other things you can use.
TL;DR - the developer of PDFy wants to take a year-long sabbatical to develop open source projects. Let's help him out!
Sorry, my question wasn't very clear. I get that the driver icon came from the Microsoft's example driver code. My question was why MS chose to use a toaster as their example.

Of course, there is always the possibility that these things are chosen just out of pure chance / randomness. But often there's more history to the decision than that.
Yeah, except I can't check for bugs presence with Modernizr. SVG implementation is broken in Firefox, how am I supposed to detect it in wonderful world of HTML5 and user agents containing name of every browser in existence?
I'm looking for an affordable way to transfer money from Singapore to Germany, but so far the cheapest is sending the money to a VISA or Mastercard. It's fixed S$10 per transfer and it's instant transfer, very handy.
Codyhouse
I only have a handful of servers and gave chef-solo a try.

I found bootstrapping chef was a pain compared to running Ansible.
Hey folks of HN!

I’ve recently developed an Firefox OS application that makes you able to read news around the world with minimal amount of data usage and with maximum speed. This is mainly for myself when I’m traveling in the metro and want something to read but not use my whole data plan in one go. I then found that other people might find it useful as well so I fixed up the UI a bit and published it.

It’s mainly developed for Firefox OS but since it’s a responsive web application, it’s usable on on desktop/other devices as well. It’s installable from the Marketplace[0] or browsable directly from the same url as the Marketplace application uses[1]

Features right now:

Ability to read top voted news from r/worldnews on reddit[2]
Removes images from articles to minimize data usage

Planned features:

Able to switch between top voted news and new news from r/worldnews
Ability to switch between different sources like reddit, HN and similar
Cache the read articles on users device
Ability to cache every article on current page for offline situations
Show message when device is offline

The implementation is a mashup between the reddit API[3] and Readability API[4] and the application itself is using React[5] and Bootstrap[6] for UI elements.

My main focus have been to make the application as small as possible, with as low data usage as possible with a clean user interface.

I would love to hear your honest feedback, good or bad.

If you happen to have spare time to waste, please also rate the application on Marketplace[0] to help me get some extra visibility, which would lead to more feedback and better application end the end! :)

Thanks!

[0] - https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/worldnews/

[1] - http://victor.bjelkholm.com/worldnews/

[2] - http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews

[3] - http://www.reddit.com/dev/api

[4] - https://www.readability.com/developers/api

[5] - http://facebook.github.io/react/

[6] - http://getbootstrap.com/
In Science, It Matters That Women Come Last
Indeed, their lack of openness is frustrating. I recently wrote[1] about the importance of open source code, and open data too, specifically in terms of crowdsourcing projects for scientific advancement. It'd be great if more of these projects were open, especially the ones with "open" in their name.

[1] http://www.jacobsheehy.com/2014/02/open-source-software-is-i...

(Full disclosure: I run an open project, PressureNet, that WeatherSignal competes with in the crowdsourced weather data space)
It's kind of fascinating how the supposed economic and social benefits of the open web that people spent 20 years or more evangelising are dismissed as 'far-left' once powerful incumbents have cornered the market. Suddenly advocating for the destructive forces of open competition is the same as being a radical socialist.
I don't think that's an accurate TL;DR.

He's saying that Google is a plutocracy, not a democracy.

I have an joke/axiom for social networks: "It's not really a social network if you can buy your way onto it."

A search engine follows the same principles. If I can pay a SEO professional to have my results promoted, then information is not truly being organized.
The EFF launches a router project – and LWN reviews it
That's how they work everywhere except the US. For us, we have to do a BIC/IBAN transfer to an account in Estonia. (Just re-checked the instructions they mailed me yesterday to verify that's the case.)

If they had a US account you could do with ACH, life would be easy. But they don't.
Hi ljsocal, unfortunately we require every single permission we ask for in order to provide all the functionality we currently do. If its a specific permission you have issue with, I'm more than happy to elaborate on exactly why Stacker needs it.

You can rest assured that we encrypt all sensitive information before storing it in our databases.The security and privacy of our customers is our number One priority.
The Only non essential field we ask for is your Date of Birth, and we only do that so that we can wish you on your special day.
It sounds like you either haven't identified a need or haven't identified the right solution for that need (I'm guessing the latter).

I'm willing to bet you could gather some more customer feedback, but let's consider the item you mentioned:

"I don't offer "unlimited" everything"

My guess of what the customer is telling you is that because they don't understand the technical side of things, they are worried they will end up paying more in fees / overages. Same reason cell phone companies are offering unlimited plans - they provide comfort that you won't go over.

How do hostgator and many others offer Unlimited Disk Storage & Bandwith for such a low price? Because they know that even if they posted real limits, most customers won't even go close to those, and I bet they deal directly with those that do to optimize. Saying "Unlimited" is worth the (likely small) risk to close the deal. Listen to the customer, they're telling you what they want!

Something to consider, not sure how they would respond - what if you charged by the size of the organization (churches : church members)? That would loosely approximate bandwidth, and probably make sense to your customer.

One other thing I would point out, a little customization goes a long way. Can you offer to customize the site for their organization, or their specific needs, for low cost or free? You want a recurring customer, right? Put in a little work up front (show them their possible site?) and you may have a better chance of closing the deal. IMO, for non-technical clients, it's much easier to sell them on something they can see.

I wouldn't give up on this just yet, I think it's a nice niche, but you really need to understand the customer needs and why they would or wouldn't make a purchase decision.
> As such, we can think of these languages as type safe according to the null type system

I think a term like vacuously type safe is a good description of what Python/Ruby are under this set of definitions. So as to distinguish from languages where type safety actually means something slightly stronger than "all syntactically valid programs are accepted by the null type system".
TL;DR - sound is a physical phenomenon, pushing on objects (more pronounced on wide thin lightweight things like bags). A fast enough video camera with image enhancement can "see" the sound affecting the object, which then can be translated to recreating the sound from the video image.

Not long ago there was a spate of HN articles about apps that could measure your heart rate via the camera (it watches for & measures subtle changes in your skin color which occur during the pulse cycle). This is exactly the same idea, just with a much faster "pulse".

I expect the researchers will next discover the "rolling shutter" (a "that's not a bug, it's a feature!" of cell phone cameras) and discover how to extract the audio info without the need for high-framerate cameras. atomatica found a perfect example: http://youtu.be/TKF6nFzpHBU?t=10s
I've used this pattern and I like it a lot (for the reasons you say) but I find I still spent way too much time on really mundane stuff... particularly table<-->object mapping if the database table has a lot of columns.

My current approach is:

1. I basically judge ORMs on how easily they allow me to use custom SQL. (ActiveRecord makes this pretty tolerable with find_by_sql)
2. Let the ORM handle as much CRUD and table<-->object mapping as possible
3. If I have complex SQL, I try to wrap it in an appropriate database object (view, sproc, function).
His point is that none of the businesses in his industry can get a listing within their industry. His point is that intermediate "marketplaces" inject themselves into an industry and then control consumer access to that industry's products. These "marketplaces" are not actually in these industries - they are in the internet business aggregate industry, and serve the consumers very poorly, because after all the consumer is NOT their customer, their customer is their investors.
Thanks, I was trying to find a list like that, I guess my searching let me down.
I'm pretty sure she and the other doctor were airlifted because they were Americans. The other high-profile doctors who have caught the disease haven't been evacuated to the US for treatment, because they're Africans.
Why do you feel he owes you anything at all? Unless he held a Kickstarter in which he promised to finish the series if he got enough money, or something like that, why is there any obligation of any kind whatsoever?

I feel you owe me a reply, so get to it. (Kidding, but I hope you see how absurd that is.)
LowRISC: Open-source RISC-V SoC
There was a quote in an article yesterday, where a doctor at Emory basically said: our treatment strategy with Ebola is just to keep the patient alive long enough for the body's immune system to fight the disease. People don't die of the bleeding per se, but the fluid loss and organs going into shock: http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-ebola-vi.... A doctor in that article estimates that the mortality rate with proper medical care is more like 45-55%.

So the proper base rate to consider for an experimental treatment with respect to U.S. persons is not the 90% mortality rate in Africa, but the ~50% mortality rate that might be expected of someone in a hospital here in the U.S.
How do you roll the first time? All I get is a mostly blank page with links to the help and multiplayer.

Edit: nvm figured it out this relies on WebGL.
But 50lbs is pretty light. If you're in reasonable shape moving objects of that weight every day should be fine. It's only (approximately) one big Olympic plate.