skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That might be more of an Android thing, but it does get permission to access the microphone on iOS. Maybe a bigger reason for iOS users is the recent change that removes messaging from the main app. That means you have to have two separate apps if you want to browse and do messaging. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/08/facebook-messenger-...
> but a standards body is not the place to do those things.

Whose job it would be then?

There is AMD's Mantle and Apple's Metal as well as Google's somewhat related RenderScript. As long as they're going to remain a single vendor API, they will be adapted as an universal new API.

But hopefully the work by these vendors (all of which are Khronos members) will serve as a basis for a future standard API.

Longs peak was a failure and the API was very complicated. It was definitely a failure due to design by commitee.

But in the end, there has to be an industry consortium to standardize on a new API. When we're talking about an API that is closely tied to the hardware it runs on (which is a lot more expensive to develop than APIs and software), there's no other option than to get all the big players around the same table. Right now, Khronos is the most likely candidate since all the key players are members in that group.

At some point there has to be a new API. OpenGL isn't just an API with some warts in it, it's getting more and more in the way of new development.
This holds even more strongly for Silicon Valley, where housing density is even lower, and zoning way more restrictive. A lot of people would like to live in San Francisco, but I bet a lot of people would be happy to live in Palo Alto or Mountain View if it stopped pretending to be a suburb and became halfway affordable.
World Cup Hashtag Marketing: Lessons To Learn
I've attempted to do this before for a side project (RateMyProfessor, but for textbooks!) and its incredibly hard to do accurately. One of the (many) issues that I ran into was that some schools still have all of their course data PDF format, in addition to the problems Cyranix listed above.

Much respect to any person or team that has to wade through this stuff.
Surprised to see a YC company doing an android app before the iOS app! Are we seeing a shift?
There's more to location than real estate costs. If that was the main factor YC wouldn't be in the bay area. The existing talent pool and ecosystem are much more important factors. Vancouver also has the advantage of being in the same time zone as YC.

Complaining about the cost of office space in Gastown is like complaining about the cost of office space in SOMA. There are many cheaper alternatives if you don't insist on being in a trendy neighbourhood. Office space in Burnaby or Coquitlam is a lot cheaper than Gastown.

You may think Montreal is more fun but I'd disagree. I can't scuba dive in Montreal. I can't walk five minutes and be hiking in a rain forest. Even if I agreed that Montreal is more fun this shouldn't be a consideration for a YC location. YC companies will be busy working.
"satiate the plebs" - Don't be a jerk.
I found this to be a particularly good read. Hatred has been very interesting for me since I started actively pursuing the goal of removing it from my life. It is very heartening to see this being done at the medical level. If I had any sort of medical credentials, I would put serious thought toward joining their studies. Alas, I am "unskilled".
Google cloud endpoints
Thank you for the great feedback. I have a real estate background as well and keep wanting to find a project that would benefit that industry. It feels like a lot of what's out there is stuck in the past. I would love to help fix that. Sounds like I have a new project!
Want a Chance at the Best Startups? Go Beyond the Resume
Or into Marin! Even a BART line along Geary to the ocean would be transformative.
Scraping really is a quite complex process, and not everybody does it right.
Do you employ a (distributed?) crawler pool? What if a scraped page goes offline (404/410)? And, how do you handle network errors, and 403's / getting caught (and possibly blocked) - if at all? Do you conceal the scraping by employing a fake user agent? Do you (sometimes?) request permission for scraping to relevant webmasters?
These are the things that can make it or break it IMHO.
20ms
The craziest thing I found in OpenGL API was that there was no way to bind data to a primitive. You have to repeat it for every vertex of the primitive, which sometimes also means that you can't share vertices between primitives. This results in a 9x overhead in data for triangles!

Examples illustrating what I am saying:

http://stackoverflow.com/q/6530700

http://stackoverflow.com/q/6056679

http://stackoverflow.com/q/23879737
I didn't know about this one. Nice!!!
Very nice! However, the demo and site seems a tad slow. Probably too much HN traffic :)
Agreed. The entire Bay Area needs a lot more apartment buildings and far fewer suburbs.

I'm surprised, sometimes, with all the perks that Google offers, they don't own an apartment building near the Googleplex. They're already 90% of the way to "company town" status; might as well embrace it.
Statistician by title, more of a project manager supervising data collection on a large scale. I aspire to code, mostly like this site because there is interesting material and reddit feels always the same.
Thanks, Peter. I don't speak Ruby. Uh, line 5 contains a small function definition, which is applied to each ...slice of the input string, is that right?

Do you (or anyone else) have time to describe this code in English or pseudocode?

I'll start.

Let there be a function called hash which takes a
string named str and an integer named
length_of_hash (which defaults to 20).
Slice the string (str) into length_of_hash equally-sized
pieces?
Take numeric value of each character (of each slice??)
and do.. something to it, something involving
modulo 256, unless it's zero. Save all the
results.
Express each numeric result as hexidecimal and append
all those together. Return it, probably.

Clearly there are bugs in the translation. :)
Translated highlights:

Carbon fiber once burned at high temperature breaks down sufficiently for it to penetrate mucous membranes. The risk highlighted by the Germans here relates to the ash left over after the fire. i.e. Hinting a potential long term dangers / contamination from the ash floating around.
It's on Canadian Netflix too.
The Privilege of Meaningful Work
Not BART's fault -- Santa Clara county officials backed out in 1957, which caused San Mateo to back out in 1961: http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_5162648
It won't get you a VP slot at Boeing, but you'll sleep better at night
hey its 1 of the key attributes that make me like email! its asynchronous!
Great article. Journalism at its finest (you know, in the context of latest news about Buzzfeed).

Very informative look at the issue from the other side. Side, that is often blindly hated by many.
I wonder about the effects of such establishments on the Bitcoin ecosystem as a whole. In theory, they're supposed to strengthen the network by providing more hashing power. But what worries me is the onset of mega-pools composed of such factories that will gain >51% of the network's computational power effectively gaining a monopoly on Bitcoin.
open defecation, which is more widespread in India than Africa,

For real? It's astonishing that India - a second world country, alleged rising star - could get beaten out in sanitation by Africa.
I really like the sheer simplicity of this.

I started building something slightly similar (http://i.imgur.com/hzEJgvK.png) as I wanted a simple to-do list that I could access from anywhere and was completely idiot proof (drag drop tasks etc) unfortunately I never got past the PoC as I'm simply too busy but I will get back to it, It had promise and was a nice itch to scratch.

Nicely done :)
Most of the comments here seems to be about the pricing. IMO if you're a small business, the pricing is fair. Yes, competition may be better/cheaper but keep in mind that Square is trying to create an entire platform here. They've got payments, point of sale, invoicing, and analytics.
Show HN: Mash Controller, Video Game News
It's nothing compared to what it used to be. The entire midwest was decimated over the last 40 years by factory closures. It'd be interesting to see a list of things we don't even make in the USA any longer, and when the last year was that we made them.
Without getting into details, the worst part of the API is the inherent statefulness of it. To exaggerate a little, OpenGL is essentially a very complicated global state variable where state changes have side effects. (actually it's thread local but global scope in most programming languages - but this only makes matters worse)

If you look back (or remember) graphics APIs from the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. the BGL library that shipped with Borland compilers), this was a common idiom.

Rather than saying

drawLine(100, 100, 200, 250, RED);
drawLine(200, 250, 300, 300, RED);

You did

setColor(RED);
movePen(100, 100);
lineTo(200, 250);
lineTo(300, 300);

The idea behind this was to minimize the number of parameters passed to function calls, because they had to be pushed to the stack and then read back. This was a major source of performance overhead back then.

So basically OpenGL is modelled after a performance optimization that was relevant some 30 years ago. These days it's actually hurting performance and adding unnecessary complexity. Premature optimization of the worst kind.

You could do a little comparison on how Direct3D 10.1 and newer work. The API is simpler, lot less stateful and you get a better idea what will actually happen. If I had a choice, I would use D3D, but it doesn't run on the platforms I care about.
Googled tried. The lack of apartments around those parts is not the fault of Google, but entirely the fault if NIMBy residents.
The standard client and by extension most miners will reject outputs smaller than a certain value ("dust")

You are correct that the protocol itself doesn't have a minimum output size, so if you mine a block yourself you can include dust reliably.
i'm building a database of games and scores. web scraping has been very helpful.

maybe instead of trying to change up the content, try to change up the method. ie. do a talk on running crawlers/scrapers to seed your database at an interval. (instead of just "scraping").
http://www.mv-voice.com/print/story/2012/07/13/google-housin...
So I wonder what ran through patio11's mind when he read that...

Though it is an all or nothing proposition - you can't take just the appointment reminding features and leave everything else.
Using this calculator https://alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator and using 575,000 Gh/s (is that right?) the calculator gets about $260k per month. With $60K for electricity and let's say $10k for misc. overhead I would guess they are clearing close to $190k per month.
Not a bad idea, but I think the grocery chains are going to fight you on it.
Isn't this what patio11's Appointment Reminder essentially does?
Six Clicks: The best Chromebooks for school
This is more of a knowledge expansion endeavor rather than career endeavor. Something to tinker with on the side was the appeal of the Ubuntu'd Chromebook in a threat here last week.

As far as learning and reversing goes, it has often been helpful to see how something is working while also attempting to make it work for me.
How about adding a page that explains the process and benefit to managers?
The California state plan proposal has been getting discussed recently: "How to power California with wind, water and sun (Jacobson and Delucchi)" (http://www.reddit.com/r/RenewableTech/comments/2btow7/how_to...).

J&D's proposal for a US national wind, water, and sun energy system:
(http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/sad11...)
is one of the more complete such prosals around. See more links on their website:

http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/susen...

Recently they've been providing proposals for each of the 50 states:

http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/WWS-5....

David McKay's Without the Hot Air (http://www.withouthotair.com/) is one of the few comparable efforts I'm aware of, though RMI/Amory Lovins Reinventing Fire (http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9781603585385-0) probably belongs in the mix.

Also being discussed on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/RenewableTech/comments/2d8ptl/a_road...

(Disclaimer: I'm a moderator of that sub).
14 nanometer process. I vaguely recall how impossible people said that would be to achieve back when the original pentium was an 800 nm process.

very cool.
That's not going to work. Facebook will block you from liking on account of "going way too fast". Calling a sleep() function after every like might help...
Ask HN: How do you come up with ideas for small side projects?
I believe that the best way to learn a new language is by diving into an actual problem. This begets its own problem though: that of what to actually work on. I'm curious how other people source good first problems. I feel like I have the programmer's equivalent of writer's block right now.
The thing is, it is in your browser. A machine without an internet browser is unheard of, the internet browser is everywhere. You can't say the same for Steam.

It is convenient. What is it not understandable about that?
Open-source, Hiring and Low-Hanging-Fruit
One of my friends said that their friend bought a unit at Divisidero and Fell and then another one in the same location a few years later, and AirBNB both for over $5000/month. I asked why they don't just rent it out, and they said it's easier to rent it out vs getting a tenant and being subject to draconian SF rent-control laws.
More details and screenshots on techcrunch.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/11/impraise/

Really glad feedback is moving in the direction of smaller, more frequent interactions.
Please Intel, release it in 2014! Don't make it slip into 2015! I really really want a 10W NUC with Broadwell i7 as my main desktop machine!
The key to happy, productive designers: teaching your team to critique
We do so to determine new pages on websites within our industry. Often the new information here is not formally announced or done so only weakly. We regularly uncover valuable new info about company developments and changes.
From the article: "The creators will also have the option of making their algorithms open source, so developers will be able to integrate them directly into their own applications"
Google Cloud Endpoints supports iOS, and I'm not even sure if Impraise is using Cloud Endpoints. Pinging impraise.com shows that they're using Amazon Elastic Beanstalk for at least their web app.
You can definitely "bind data to primitives" and share vertices between triangles in OpenGL and that has always been possible ever since the first version of OpenGL.

Are you talking about legacy OpenGL style glBegin/glVertex/glEnd? That hasn't been the preferred way of drawing ever, and since OpenGL 1.5 (circa 1999), vertex buffers are the way to go.

If you want to share vertices between triangles, you should build and index buffer and use glDrawElements* functions.
Google Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ZwsYcfx...
This is an interesting concept. Why the focus on a mobile app, as opposed to email or web? Is there something about the interaction that's better done via mobile device?

I feel like the site is light on details about how it actually works, but I'm intrigued.
I'm really sick of this notion that rent control is targeted at the poor in SF. It's not. It's targeted at whoever got there earlier.

If you are or have ever been in the market for room shares in SF, you'll know there are TONS of professional workers making a decent wage coasting on rent controlled leases that have somehow been passed along for years paying way less than they should be.

I also know tons of professionals making 6 figures+ paying way below market. NOT exactly poor people.

How do you think it is for the young kid hired in to work somewhere that has to look for a place in SF while his boss's boss who probably makes 10s of thousands more pays $1300 a month?

But wait, that never happens...rent control is for poor people. Yeah right.
Google tried, Mountain View nixed it.

http://www.mv-voice.com/print/story/2012/07/13/google-housin...
Cryptic Ruby Examples
Getting started with ElasticSearch [video]
Thanks for this. I appreciate how lean and no frills the list is and the RSS support.
If you've been visiting HN for a while, you'll probably recognize most of my examples of out-of-the-box resumes. It's been a while for some of them, but they all got a lot of attention here when they were produced.

I just started looking for a job in the Bay Area and decided to go the extra mile to increase my chances of getting the job I want.

The examples I included were part of my inspiration for creating the SaaS growth course I made to help me with the job search.
Do Financial Plans Matter in Tech Startups?
I agree with you but I don't think the revenue for self-hosting is likely to be all that "awesome".

The main problem with it is if its the developer/sysadmin crowd, most small businesses wouldn't pay for support. So you'd be limited to a few large companies that likely wouldn't use it anyway.

I'd really like to see a SaaS version that was also open source. That way people had both options.
Thanks HN for these comments.

I was looking for an appointment SaaS for a dental office and was only aware of ZocDoc[0] which charges a steep $300 per month.

[0]http://www.zocdoc.com
BART was originally intended to reach Marin, but fierce opposition kept it out.

Sausalito doesn't have the infrastructure for high density living, there certainly isn't room for, say, 5x as many people to commute into SF.

A lot more people need to start both living and working in the east bay, it's not tenable for most of the lucrative work to be isolated in downtown SF, leaving vast swaths of the bay area largely vacant during the day, with basically noone able to live near their work in the city.

Those other communities have worries about gentrification and displacement as well, but the bay area as a whole would be better off if growth were spread more evenly.

This is why I oppose the luxury shuttles. If you want to work in Palo Alto, Sausalito, or Mountain View, I think you should live there.
Interview withMax Kuhn, the developer who unified the machine learning models in R
This operation currently mines about $262k per month:

230e9 (each machine does 230 Ghash/s) * 2500 (# of machines) * 3600 (second/hour) * 730 (hour/month) / (2^32 (average number of hashes to solve a block at diff=1) * 19.8e9 (current Bitcoin difficulty)) * 25 (BTC/block) * 590 (USD/BTC) = $262000/month

The article says their electricity bill is $60k per month. Subtract the 3 employees salaries, say $5k per month (this is China). So you are looking at a pure profit of $197k per month. Of course these profits are declining quickly over time; look how fast the difficulty has been rising: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed.png (logarithmic scale!)

And this mine only represents 0.3% of the total network speed (about 170,000,000 Ghash/s).

Edit: bellerocky: most exchange fees are < 1% to turn BTC to fiat.

Edit: FigBug: roughly yes, but because the network is growing, there are more than 3600 coins mined per day (blocks are solved a bit more often than every 10min).
OsmAnd really lacks text (Google Maps-like) search for me. The thing I use in there is the address search and it always asks for city name, street name, even a house number (or intersection) before it finds the point. Not sure if I can search for say a restaurant or a lake in there. (Am I missing some functionality?)

If there is some OSM solution for Android that offers simple text search and offline maps, I would like to know about it.
How Apple Uses Picasso To Teach Employees About Product Design
The eleMMent Palazzo, a $3m land yacht
I don't understand how this happens. The tech industry is pretty much the only economic game in town. How does it fail so hard at politics, losing out to a relatively small amount of middle-aged homeowners?
"Why the focus on a mobile app"

I would imagine mobile suits this very well because reactions and praise are immediate and device in always in your hand no matter where your physical presence is (you may not be near a laptop or desktop).
It seems Intel's misleading marketing is already working, even on the HN crowd. The whole point of the "M" chip is to be low-power/low performance. If you want "Core i7", get a version that actually has a lot of power behind it, not a "10W i7". The 10w Core i7 won't be faster than a desktop Core i3 SNB. Heck I bet it won't be more than 50 percent faster than the latest ARM chip either.
We're looking to trigger feedback when it's still fresh in the users' minds (i.e, after you just left a meeting), thus the focus on mobile; but we put a lot of effort into our web-app as well, and see that some users prefer to use only that.
BTW I write tailor made PHP+MySQL scraper scripts, targeting English or Italian language sites; contact me for more info :)
The hospitality and travel industries are very slow to update their technologies. I used to work with Ritz Carlton and St. Regis and even those brands are practically in the stone age, so I can't imagine how scraping for flight info would go.

I've thought of even building a simple event aggregator for some friends in the industry and they are blown away that it's possible. Then I remember how many venues are in cities like Charlotte and San Francisco and realize why these industries lag in technology. There just isn't a large pool of developers who want to solve their problems.

Do you have any projects you are currently working on?
Do you really want to live in a building owned by your employer? I lived in corporate housing when I went to a corporate school and when your relationship with that entity ends, you become homeless fucking _real_ fast.

It should be tenable to increase density with the right community support in MV, Palo Alto, etc.. - a regional agreement which is perhaps not as binding as it should be requires those cities to approve housing equal to the population increase of all the office developments they approve.

When Mountain View and Palo Alto approve office developments which welcome 100k new workers and apartments for 20k, they shuck the responsibility for residential civic planning onto SF and surrounding areas and collect the corporate taxes. And fuck them for that.
If they stop marketing BookFresh...people don't buy what they don't know about, eh?
The only reason rent control has persisted and protected any poor people into this era is that the program does not select based on class or income, but based on who has been there. There are a larger number of poor people who benefit, and some rich people too. This is why it has not gone away, and continues to benefit those poor people who need it most. Like social security.
Another good name for this would have been "stroked".
You're welcome! The goal is to keep it minimal and easy to scan quickly.
I'm currently scraping data such as "tweets, comments, likes" a website gets each day so I can graph them over time.

One thing I am having a hard time scraping backlinks to websites. Currently using bing but they are paid after like 5000 queries. I really wonder how other companies like seomoz do this daily against millions of websites.
> So you are looking at a pure profit of $197k per month.

Not including liquidity issues and fees for turning that stuff into actual money, at least until you can start paying all your bills with bitcoin.