skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oldie but goodie. One comment:

the kinds of programmers who buy extended warranties and self-help books and believe their bosses genuinely care about them as people, the kinds of programmers who attend conferences to make friends

One of these things is not like the others. I have made many, many friends at programming conferences. I am not sure why you wouldn't expect this to happen.
I agree... But they have the source available if you can get to the site. Otherwise, here's the Google cache link:

http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:http://cg.cs.tsinghua.ed...
Post on the lua mailing list: http://www.lua.org/lua-l.html
More of an artistic death. :/
The obligatory shark attacking a helicopter is a nice touch. This technology has epic potential in the LOLcat market.
The technical terms and researcher's names pass the Google sanity check, e.g. http://cg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/prof_hu.htm, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kadir_Brady_saliency_detector.
Wow, this is revolutionary. Anything that can use sophisticated technology to actually make things simpler for the end-user, instead of the other way around, is definitely a plus. I want to try this thing out right now.
Sit Up, Speak Up
Don't talk to the police : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc

[just in case there is someone who hasn't seen this before]
I've been in NYC for the past 3 years, and about to move to SF in a couple weeks. Here's a reflection of nyc I've been working on:

My first vivid image of New York City was from Salinger's A Catcher in the Rye. It was an intimidating and claustrophobic image. It was a city filled with sleepless characters running around in the cold trying to figure themselves out or trying to con someone somehow. To Salinger's credit, after almost three years living here, my first impression wasn't too far off.

It's hard to find a city more stratified along class lines. Or a place more materialistic yet also so bohemian. A city of greed and poverty but also of immense heart and empathy. It is a city to suite every mood while at times suiting none. A city of everything. A city you want to describe as a muse but stop when it seems it could not be any more machine like and heartless. Among its eight million inhabitants, it breeds patience out of necessity but can explode with anger without warning. And when it does, it may be rude and it may be ugly, but it does not fester and you learn that in New York nothing is personal.

If you fly into La Guardia in early autumn, the lights of the city make the overcast clouds glow a synthetic orange. It reminds you the city is vibrant and will be long after you decide to leave. The lights dazzle and mystify me still. Flying in for one of the last times before i leave for the other city on the coast, I don't try to find the places I know but scan the skyline for places I may have never been. Maybe that's the New York mystique, at least for me. After three years, those lights still look alien. When I look back, I don't think of what I did but of the so many things left undone. This is my lasting impression of this city, and it leaves me not with regret but instead hope, for I can always return as if it were my first time.
Apple leaves US Chamber of Commerce
Do you by chance have the link to his article? My google-fo seems week.

http://www.loudthinking.com/posts/2-getting-back-to-the-foil
"I wish someone..."
McDonalds tells kids there are 9 planets - is that too few?
I really want to try this, but the actual site seems to be down now.
They kept talking about "3 orders of magnitude" (3 OoM) between ELF (1) and neutrinos (100) which confused me. I had to go back and recheck the units before it made sense. ELF: 1 bit per minute. neutrinos: 100 bits per second. It would have been substantially better to compare them in the same units by saying 6000 bits per minute.

Aside from that though...I went to this article all excited. The title seemed to imply that they really had something. Unfortunately, to make it work they need to:

1) Improve their neutrino detection ability by 6 OoM.

2) Either cover the entire hull of the sub in detectors--tricky, since subs are already covered in acoustic tile and the insides are jammed with stuff, making it hard to retrofit the system in--or use Cerenkov light detection, which requires filtering out light from bioluminesce, moonlight, sunlight, etc.

3) Even if all this happens, the submariners can only receive. So this system needs to be in addition to, not in place of, their existing commo, and they still need to come to the (near) surface to transmit.

Still, great concept. As other people have commented, would be great to see it used on land.
It's 100% effective!
A link to the original research paper that works: http://cg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/montage/main.htm
Ask HN: Apartment search site that doesn't suck
HN helped me find raveable.com, which quite easily destroys every other hotel search site on the net. Can it do the same for apartment listings?
Classic Line: "what metadata is allowed on index cards"
I'm not a runner, but recommend "Born to Run" as a fun read (it's mentioned in the article and clearly inspired the article). I've always thought ultra endurance athletes were a little off - in a fun way - and the book tells some good stories on these folks, including the Tarahumara Indians, who run barefoot or with minimal gear for incredible distances as a social activity.
How do you know that he is not secretly creating something amazing, to be released later? (This is my fantasy anyway)
Biologically, the races are different.

As someone concerned with maximal design, I am seeking someone similar but not identical to me, so am looking within my own racial and ethnic group.

Obviously, it only makes sense to write back to those!
I agree with you, especially with regard to open source related conferences (I've made great friends at PyCon); but perhaps there's a difference at the more old-fashioned corporate conferences?
Mumbai florists
We are one of leading online gift shop for delivery of flowers and cakes to Mumbai, Pune, Nagpur and all major cities of Maharashtra, We do same day delivery for perishable items like cakes, flowers. You will find a wide range of gifts for all kind of Occasions.
How I Became a Keynesian
No, it would have (and did) cost $0 to access legally since it was accessed during a free trial.
An interesting project but I don't really see any practical need for this as Lua provides plenty of ways to construct just about any object system.
You're assuming that people are willing to pay for your product up front for 12 months. If your price point is so small that an annual subscription is under $20, then it doesn't really make sense to charge monthly. I was speaking mainly for higher priced items.
I'm not presenting a ridiculous argument, I'm just pointing out the consequences of making non-discrimination your highest principle. I'm not interested in telling other people who to have sex with. And there are definitely zoophiles who seek acceptance and are waiting for their Stonewall, probably necrophiles too.

It looks like you've arbitrarily decided where the cutoff should be between acceptable discrimination and unacceptable discrimination. There are others who still think (as almost everybody did from about the 60s-90s) that the line should be drawn entirely outside of dating preferences. I don't see what makes your opinion any more binding than theirs.
Are you in the NYC area? http://renthop.com
I think colorful is a little too generous. I think it's far beyond that.
It would also be interesting to see how American-born Harold and Kumar do compared to whites who are otherwise similar to them.
Why exactly is unit testing of GUI components a waste of time?
fwiw, I wrote the original blog post (that Norvig was speaking about in his interview) which compared the Sudoku efforts of Norvig and Jeffries) - http://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku-s....
back in the day I ran the numbers on this - there's about a dime of gold in a ton of seawater - the salt is way more valuable....
The download doesn't include source.

It does include 5 executables totaling ~140k. I am not quite brave enough to run them but I did run them through strings, and a cursory inspection suggests either that they're either attempting to do what they're claimed to do or they're the best disguised malware in history.
Beautiful Love Wallpapers, Romantic Love Photos
Can't blame him for not googling it himself.
Quite far from it. That does seem to be the poster boy for rental sites though.
I wonder if that is pretty standard? Do most services throttle at 3 seconds or is that being overly strict?
Actually I think it's both. You can make a good product that nobody ever hears of, it happens all the time. You can also make a sucky product that a lot of people hear about and never come back to.

Digg was the right product for the right time, but Kevin's celebrity among its target audience was a large part of why it came out on top. It got a quick lead in terms of users and the network effect exacerbated that over time.
Why didn't he just Googl... er... uh... nevermind.
Indeed. My few-year-old Core 2 duo @ 1.44Ghz (I think) is much faster than my newish Atom netbook. Power and cost savings does not come for free.
Alright I may have a tendency to be overly excited about new technologies, but this is seriously amazing. The possibilities (and problems) that arise from this application are vast. This could completely revolutionize the stock photography industry and web design in general.

Copyright and privacy issues are my greatest concern though. For example, could you imagine seeing yourself as a digital model on some corporate website--doing something you never actually did. That is a scary thought in my opinion. I wonder if you could input your own pictures into the system and have it perform the same procedure though (I loathe the pen tool).
Affordable human moderation - very cool idea. I'd pay for that on my blog, just to catch the crap that akismet misses.
That's pretty much what the article said...
"I'm not here to make friends."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w536Alnon24
The Recovery Equation for Business [pdf]
Oh yeah, the blogger/HN identical orange favicon problem :-)

What's worse for me is when apps/favicons use a single letter, leaving me only typography for discrimination (for example the google "g" and the guardian.co.uk "g" get me every time). There's enough of them around that I am starting to get collisions.
Oh man. Do we really want to get into a huge fight over what actually defines a planet?
We've been seeing some pretty fascinating developments in graphics and pattern recognition recently. A few days ago someone submitted that amazing Photoshop plugin that allows you to select a region and move it around seamlessly, and also fill in areas seamlessly. The demo showed the software filling in the broken areas of the Pantheon and the results were quite impressive. A combination of both technologies would be simply incredible.

Edit

The official site of the plugin is definitely down. Its probably overloaded by all the people who are interested in checking it out. ;)
Most of the parts have been done (a couple things look new, but just read through the list of SIGGRAPH papers for the last few years; the field is sprinting forward, as computers become fast enough to do this sort of computation), but putting it all together is pretty damn impressive.

Now, as hard as what's been done on the algorithms side, someone has to figure out a usable user interface for these tools, so that regular people can play with them.
My guess is that it's real, but that it doesn't usually work as well as the example images provided. If it really works for any kind of input sketch, then how come there are so many images of dogs catching frisbees and bears catching fish?
That sucks, just got the dead tree version last week.
I must say that it is cool in a retro sort of way, but I still like Wikipedia better. I mean the fact the page titles tend to have no spaces, and instead have the first letter of each word capitalized such as:

ExampleTitleInTheVeryFirstWiki

That's interesting from a programming point of view, but I'd rather see clear, clean titles. Hence my judgement that is is cool in a retro, back to the early 90's sort of way.
Here Is Where To Get Free Brandable Reports For Your Twitter Give Away Campaigns
We’ve all heard it, that giving away FREE stuff on Twitter is the way to build your Twitter following fast given you have something to offer that is worth your potential Twitter followers time because who wants to waste there time and energy on something that isn’t.
> "I'm just pointing out the consequences of making non-discrimination your highest principle. I'm not interested in telling other people who to have sex with. And there are definitely zoophiles who seek acceptance and are waiting for their Stonewall, probably necrophiles too."

The problem with your argument is that the high percentage of females refusing to associate with different races (even their own race) is essentially dictating who other people have sex with.

What happens if this trend continues? A large portion of the male population will likely either die out as virgins or be forced to relegate themselves to a dwindling number of minority females.

I'm not trying to pull the race card, but you as a white male are likely not very concerned about this as it will not affect you in the slightest while minorities are worrying daily about how their dating prospects and why so many people simply ignore them.
The Gizmodo story says that they presented it at SIGGRAPH Asia 2009. According to http://www.siggraph.org/asia2009/ that doesn't take place until December.
I for one am happy that there isn't Flash on the iPhone. If it could be garenteed that it was only delivering a video, than I would tolerate it.

General Flash use on my desktop is annoying, but on an iPhone it would be way worse. Plus not having to download the extra content, which really ends up being useless anyways is a waste.
Nope, you can actually develop using just Windows. From Adobe's Ryan Stewart tweets:
http://twitter.com/ryanstewart/statuses/4636390111
"One of the biggest things about the Flash/iPhone news is that you no longer need a Mac to build iPhone apps."

http://twitter.com/bit101/status/4636544212
"@ryanstewart really? so it uses your cert and provision and creates the .app file? no xcode needed?"

http://twitter.com/ryanstewart/statuses/4636642995
"@bit101 Yup, no Xcode needed."
Surprisingly, not really. Computer vision has been moving along lately. This is good stuff, but incremental progress against the backdrop of other good stuff in the field.

A few times in the past few months the question of whether "all the good stuff" has been discovered or whether there's no progress left to be made came up, and computer vision has been one of my go-to examples of a field that has just been booming lately. Interestingly, digging in shows that it's still not "AI", just as you don't see any "AI" here, but there's still been a qualitative sea change in the past few years. I think the fact that a $1000 machine is now unbelievably powerful has been a real boon for the field.
>but I couldn't get over the mental overhead of having it shipped to me

I'm the same way. I find that I will not buy things that have to be shipped, but have no problem buying digital items, such as games.
The resumes I like the most explicitly list the languages, platforms, environments and tools the candidate has been working with for the past 8-12 months separately from the larger list of things properly characterizing their full experience.
This is good to know -- the icon for the app I am working on is blue as well, now I am considering changing it!

As a coder who understands UXP but is not great with design, I often fall back on blues or grays for my projects. For whatever reason I find that designs I make tend to look better in blue than other colors. Reds too often look pink, oranges and yellows are hard to keep from looking overpowering. Greens aren't too bad, but I still have trouble getting it to look just "right." Maybe it is just me.
I still have yet to see a decent semantic system (I've seen dozens) that worked as they were promised to work...and that's with absolutely clean, lab built data and rules.

It seems that the amount of work required to build the appropriate ontologies is > the amount of work that goes into building the content...reference Cyc as an example.
The probability of mis-matched images seems like it would be incredibly high, but if they manage to pull this off, it would be amazing.

However, I wonder about this technology being used for evil (custom porn). =/
Victory, of a sort!
When I started programming, I think someone (most likely my father), told me that most of my time writing code should be spent thinking about how to solve the problem (not writing code).

What I am concerned about is that methodologies end up trying stand in for this old fashioned technique of Thinking Really Hard and Being Smart. (TRHBS).

You'll notice that Norvig follows the TRHBS methodology.
(He is a serial TRHBSer).

Anyway, I guess the difference is that I see TDD as an implementation strategy for when you already know what the answer to the problem is, and are having trouble writing the code to implement it.

(Although sometimes that is a clue that you are doing it wrong... Whenever I see old code with a lot of debug printf statements, I know it is going to be a much more complicated answer than is probably actually required, I can't imagine it is much different with unit tests).

-j
They aren't safety critical and you can test them by using the GUI.
I'm not sure what this has to do with child abuse? Anyhow, I'm not advocating, just pointing out that the "colocate in Venezuela" trope is silly.
That's what voting's for.
narrowed the niche even further, because now tablets have to find a space between notebooks and iPhones

True, on the other hand there is an e-book reader niche that wasn't around a decade ago, which is ripe for the picking with the right kind of platform.

I'm expecting, and kind of dreading, Apple proving me wrong and persuading me to part with $600.

Tell me about it! In many ways I am "in the market" for a device that shall we say represents the idealised sum of all the iTablet rumours, but the price will be an issue - not so much in terms of cold hard cash, but at $600 it exceeds my comfort level for the cost of a device that I routinely carry around.
That was a fabulous analysis. For my part, I can't quite figure out why people seem to get emotional about TDD one way or the other. If it helps you, great. If not, ditch it. Do people work in environments where they'd like to avoid TDD but are forced to work that way? Or vice versa?
Here's one example: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/roots-of-evil-wo...

Accusing people of "deliberate obtuseness" is no way to have an argument.
Steve Yegge, if you are reading this: please write a book. I'd buy it!
Former biofeedback therapist here. The effect of caffeine on muscle tension is measurable: it is impossible for nearly everyone to achieve as deep a muscular relaxation (measured by EMG) after just 100mg caffeine.

I haven't looked at evidence in years, but the gastrointestinal and heart rate effects of even higher levels can be remarkable. I remember medical journal articles (Am J Psychiatry, i believe) referring to it as "caffeinism" - since the mental-alertness benefits habituate, but not the autonomic stimulation.

Like with any mind-alteration: exercise caution. Listen to what your own body tells you.
Pluto will always be a planet to me.
I run in Vibram Five Fingers. BHousel is right on when he says start out slow. The first day I got them, I excitedly ran my usual w/ shoes length of time. I spent the next two weeks with calve muscles and ligaments so sore that I had trouble walking down any lightly sloping hills or escalators. That was three months ago. I now run exclusively in these shoes. I used to have knee problems; Now, no part of my legs ever are in pain during or after running.

Mmm, anecdote.
I still can't figure out the point of a Tablet. That should be the number one reason.

Laptops are an easily portable version of a Computer.
Netbooks are really cheaps/simple versions of a Laptop.

A tablet is a ????? version of a computer that isn't covered by a laptop.
Yahoo Buys Full Page Front Page Ad In Times Of India
Because it takes a lot of time and effort but does not provide much benefit.
I'm sorry, but I think renthop sucks. I know this because I am taking a job in NYC and spent the past week crashing on ferric's couch, conducting an apartment search full-time. And renthop was useless to me.

Searching for "shares" in the East Village yields no results, for example. How hard would it be to harvest craigslist ads? Also, what if I want to do a combined search for shares/studio+s? The neighborhood "Lower East Side" isn't listed. And their "browse" feature is slow and awful.

No, apartment search site needs to function more like a social networking site, so you can preview your roommates' profile, photos, interests/disinterests. And so you can quickly filter by pets, no pets, sex, age range. Everyone asks you to email them a summary anyways. And you need to be able to keep tabs on your applicants/places you are applying to. Not to mention the social proof aspect of having people recommend you.

An NYC apartment site that doesn't suck is next on my to-do list. It's certainly needed. Probably makes more sense as a facebook app.
Did anyone get a chance to try it before their site went down so we can hear some first hand accounts?
If anyone cares, I wrote an article for InfoQ around this time which gathered some of the better commentary: http://www.infoq.com/news/2006/12/future-of-agile (buyer beware: I am (or was, at least) biased in favor of agile methods).
Bites of Passage - Rise of the Domesticated Mosquito
Wired.com: FBI Investigated Coder for Liberating Paywalled Court Records
Sigh...third time today and I only got one karma point for pointing it first. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=862216 if you feel sympathetic :)

EDIT: gee guys, the smiley should tell you this ^ is not a serious complaint. I thought people might actually be interested in reading the actual paper v, since project page link has been inaccessible. Sheesh.

Site is down but this is the Siggraph paper: http://www.ece.nus.edu.sg/stfpage/eletp/Papers/sigasia09_pho...

I have downloaded the binaries (also requires openCV1.1, recently updated OpenCV2.0 doesn't work) and have made some progress, though it's very clunky and the instructions are, um...lacking. http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencvlibrary/files/
http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/
More discussion regarding Aaron's FOIA request and background.
Do people work in environments where they'd like to avoid TDD but are forced to work that way? Or vice versa?

Yes. Unfortunately, it's one of those things that only works well if you have total buy-in from everyone on the team. Maybe we should avoid methodology that requires too much of that. Reminds me of how communal living only works if everyone pitches in. How about a methodology that works entirely off of inherent human laziness and self interest? XP works off of some laziness. But it's more like Air Cavalry in Vietnam. Land the soldiers behind enemy lines, and they have to do something productive just to save their own butts. Likewise, write some failing tests, and you have to code something to get the tests to turn green. (pass) But the problem is getting the soldiers on the choppers to begin with, or getting developers to write the tests. In the Army, there's the threat of the stockade and the firing squad. In XP, it's just getting fired.

Another problem that startups are supposed to be able to avoid.