skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Would you use an API for image/video processing and computer vision tasks?
Hi HN,

We’re a team of former Imperial College post-doc researchers who are looking to make some of our state-of-the-art algorithms available via an API. We’re not simply sticking OpenCV on the end of a REST API here, but attempting to make the capabilities of a team with 20+ years of computer vision expertise accessible to anyone.

Some of the proprietary functionality we’re currently looking to provide includes:

Super Resolution (Video Resolution Upscaling) - Our algorithm extends recent medical imaging research and is able to convert low resolution videos to high resolution ones whilst minimising loss of quality. Our methods can achieve much better results than interpolation based approaches (example: https://www.dropbox.com/s/74duixpek7fxhl4/superResolution.png?dl=0).

Image/Video Depth of Field Adjustment - Our algorithm is able to estimate depth information from and adaptively apply filters to emulate different depth of field - effectively allowing for a clip captured with a smartphone to look like it was shot with a different lens (example: https://www.dropbox.com/s/7qhfgnwl08vtk63/compare.png?dl=0).

We’re intending to eventually make as many state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms available as possible and would love your feedback on the kinds of image/video processing tasks that you would want to be able to use.

Would you find this a useful tool? If so, what functionality would be most valuable for you?
I still shoot with a Digital Rebel XT as well, generally with a 28mm/1.8 but I also have a 50mm/1.4. I just finished a two week trip doing entirely street photography with the 28mm and an iPhone 6.

No question, the Canon wins in everything except ease of use. I don't use it to take a snapshot of some street food dish, I reach for my phone. But for walking around Taipei street markets at night the iPhone doesn't come close. The low light performance of a large sensor with a wide-aperture lens is superb, even with a camera that's now 10 years old (still going strong!).
>not a helpful addition to the thread

Seems quite helpful to me. Without this kind of thing it's hard to see at a glance which of the 542 comments (at time of writing) are worth reading
Most official output from russia needs a really heavy filtering. But to use the word 'bandit state' - I think it's a bit more complicated than that.

To me, a bandit state echoes a temporary institution that is held up mostly through the use and threat of direct violence. To my eyes elements of the current status harken to a russian tzardom hundreds of years back.

Strong autocratic leaders have always been a part of the political apparatus and the fatalistic psyche of the population drive individuls to yield, survive and pour their energies to something else than politics. It is also notable that russia is a typical country suffering from the curse of oil which itself is empirically a really hard thing to avoid or heal from which twists the dynamics even further.

I would suggest three brief bodies of text to explore the problem of russia to those who are not familiar with them:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

Kennan's long telegram:
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/documents/episode-1/ke...

And thirdly, a bit longer work that reads like an autobiographic surrealist version of Catch-22, a description of the soviet system which trained most of those now in power (Suvorov:"Inside the soviet military"): http://militera.lib.ru/research/suvorov12/index.html
Introducing plugin-free Skype for Web
You can use cartodb. It's a service but it's faster than use libraries like leafletjs

http://cartodb.com/

Regards.
Did you watch the video? The fish is sustainably caught (only straight nets, single line).
Its tragic to see the self-inflicted damage that out-of-control surveillance has caused to the international reputation of the US and its tech industry. Sad.
In addition to the explicit subsidies mentioned in the sibling comment, also keep in mind the implicit subsidies of allowing people to pollute without paying the costs. Environmental regulations have diminished this substantially, but it's still pretty big. Pollution amounts to a subsidy of billions of dollars a year for fossil fuels, only we pay with our lungs instead of our wallets.
50mm is an aberration, it is the only glass you can get <f/1.8 affordably (35mm are ok in this regard as well). Go check out the price of a <=f/2 100m+, which is much more suited to portrait, macro, etc. Then go look at <f/4 for 200m+ for wildlife and sports. Now you see why it is so damn expensive to be a professional photographer, and why the average person isnt posting stunning wildlife or safari shots to their facebook wall.
What is the use case for this? I can't imagine that I would be doing a lot of hardcore development on a machine that wasn't my dev machine which has Dash on it.
Oh! This is sadly a bit too late as I've recently switched from Highcharts to Flot because I did not want to buy the so-expensive commercial license for Highcharts.

I like how minimalistic the graphs look. Though, missing the pie chart.

I might just switch to this if I see that it's going somewhere ;)
Back when this was happening it was big news because the Swedish military didn't really hide they were searching for a submarine in an enclosed bay. In the end they didn't catch anything, so this could be seen as an embarrassment for them whether or not there really was a sub.

The political side is that Sweden is not in NATO, as the electorate sees NATO as too global and too likely to draw the country into remote conflicts or the next world war. Russia is the only remotely plausible military threat in the region, so it's the bogeyman NATO will have to use if it wants to lure Sweden in. This incident will be used to argue the Swedish military is inadequate on its own. On the other hand Russia is testing everyone's military capabilities, e.g. Russian planes routinely skirt US airspace. In the 80's Sweden had lots of similar incidents (as well as confirmed ones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_submarine_incidents), and those didn't drive Sweden to join NATO. However Swedish society has become a lot less militant since then, abolishing conscription and reducing military budgets, and the memory of Sweden faring splendidly through WWII by staying independent is not as fresh. Eventually Sweden may end up in NATO solely because there isn't political will to do anything else.

If Sweden were to join NATO that could have implications for the neighboring Finland, which isn't in NATO either but still has conscription. Finland is the buffer between Sweden and Russia, so it is a given Finland would have an independent Sweden's backing.

Another thing is that there's much trade between Finland and Russia, and it's certainly old hat in Finland to fish for benefits by being the one European country that's not overtly russophobic. Finland even has much Russian military equipment.

Also, this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B19kYo80yec , though I don't really remember its backstory. (The RT article linked in the description seems to be reporting on a Swedish site reporting on that video, and the link to the Swedish site is broken.) But the impression I have got is that Russian media is overall unashamed in reporting on Russian interests abroad.
And what has that do with the core developers? Is there a bug that prevents 2.1.5, but not 2.1.4 from running on Windows? The hostility against Windows is usually rather a community issue.

And they're not releasing pre-compiled versions for any other OS either. Build it yourself [1] or try to be patient until Luis Lavena uploads the Ruby Installer for 2.1.5.

[1] https://github.com/oneclick/rubyinstaller (edit config/ruby_installer.rb to compile 2.1.5 and not 2.1.4)
I always do. It helps to have a virtual KVM in case anything goes wrong, but I've never seen it during updates.
You might be looking for Mapbox and/or Leaflet

https://www.mapbox.com/developers/

http://leafletjs.com/
You skipped the article entirely and went straight to the comments, didn't you? The article is about names of ice cream brands, not the phrase "ice cream" itself.
I'm sure that there's a lot of that going on, yes.

But Google has the legacy of their "don't be evil" company motto to content with. Which is to say that people expect (foolishly) for them to at least try not to appear evil.

The difference between Google prioritizing Chrome vs anyone else is that Google owns Chrome whereas Apple doesn't, and some random startup certainly doesn't.

It smells of Microsoft's "we'll only make this work in IE and fuck everyone else" strategy and that doesn't bring other warm thoughts to mind.

So it's not JUST that it's fashionable to think the worst of Google these days.
It's my first choice if I have to build a standalone app with GUI. With freewrap you can build an executable for Windows and the same source works for Linux.

I wonder why it isn't more popular.
Which VPS provider do you use for FreeBSD. Does anyone have recommendations?
SuperResolution: https://www.dropbox.com/s/74duixpek7fxhl4/superResolution.pn...

DoF Adjustment:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7qhfgnwl08vtk63/compare.png?dl=0
Marketplace for algorithms – buy/sell as cloud services
Senate version: https://efdsearch.senate.gov/
Yes but its also not Google's sole responsibility to endow this. It would be great to see other companies follow Google's lead.
Have you heard of Joe Naccio? http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_25434854/former-qwest-...
I'll be honest. I much prefer these oil sands operations that ruin sparsely populated bits of remote wilderness in the Canadian Arctic to other operations that destroy pristine wilderness near somewhere livable to more than ~300 people or contaminates water supplies for hundreds of thousands of people.
That's assuming energy is the only marginal/variable cost. But, I guess we are playing with contrived examples either way.

Anyway, if inconsistency is an inherent cost of solar it needs to be treated as such in comparisons. Even if storage gets "solved" it won't be free. There will be energy costs to it and other costs. To have consistent capacity of X, you will need a peak capacity of several times X. If peak grid usage is completely covered by solar, there will be wasted capacity at the coal plants at this times.
My understanding of this answer is that the SMTP said it had accepted it, but the sender would have been notified afterwards that the message had not been delivered, had the return addresses correctly been set up. This seems OK to me; I would have received the bounce.

(Also, the mail was sent from www-data, which I think was an acceptable clue to classify the message as spam no matter from which server it came from.)
I've read through the FAQ and I don't understand downvotes here. As I'm quite new, can you explain to me the reason of this particular downvote?
Video Tutorial  Part 26 of my Python/Flask web development series
From the post:

"look out for access to Skype for Web on Skype.com in the coming weeks"

and

"We’re making Skype for Web available to small number of existing and new users to begin with, and gradually rolling out worldwide in the coming months – look out for an invite when you sign in to your Skype account on Skype.com."
Shutter latency is the single thing keeping point and shoot cameras, or smartphone cameras, from truly dominating.

That depends on the use case. A couple years ago I took a train ride across the country, taking photos from the observation car with a P&S camera. The shutter latency was absolutely infuriating.

On the other hand, when I'm doing a landscape on a tripod with remote shutter release, I wouldn't even notice if it took an extra second or two.

IMHO, the biggest thing is control, of which shutter latency is just one facet. All the other stuff about aperture, ISO sensitivity, pre-focus, etc. come into play in various use cases.
I can certainly see the use case for this being on the desktop (and for those that don't know: it is). I have been in plenty of situations where I can not access the internet so having offline copies is incredibly helpful.

I don't understand the use case on iOS. I don't want to just outright poo on the idea so is there anyone who is going to pick this up that can articulate why? I feel great value in having it offline but being able to ctrl + f or copy and paste on a larger screen (the same screen I'm developing on), I just don't get the mobile.
To 3solarmasses' point I do cringe every time they do the bit where the "Indian guy who is very awkward and shy around women and never gets better about it" happens.
SUPPORT COST?! HA HA HA HA HA!

You can't get support out of Google at any price, unless you're an advertiser. But in that case, it's only help for your ads and nothing else.

You can't talk about "support cost" when it's zero.
I think I have found this guy. I went one step upper in the URL (https://home.comcast.net/~rburn/) and then walked down the links here: https://home.comcast.net/~rburn/metalsculpture/content/me.ht... The first Wayne Martin in Google search results for "Wayne Martin PCB rework" query is https://www.linkedin.com/pub/wayne-martin/49/4b2/506
Someone find me a lawyer that specializes in recursion!
You can still link in C libraries, right?
They also seem to be pretty russian themselves.
Websites Product Managers Should Visit Daily
I wonder if DHCP works on Hyper-V again now (it didn't for the 10.0 cycle which was a PITA)
Took me at least 1 minute to notice that it was not "damn", which was quite puzzling me...
Bubble of competence -- well put!
"Victim" in the sense of not having a fair chance of applying for the job in the first place.
i eat sardines a couple times a week. they and other low-food-chain fish are apparently overpopulating the oceans right now due to overfishing of predators, which is having bad knock-on effects on zooplankton.
From the linked article: "First thing I tried, is to switch the user agent from Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:33.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/33.0 (Firefox default user agent for me on Ubuntu Linux) to my Google Chromes user agent instead Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2125.111 Safari/537.36"
There is a strong sentiment that Tk is not attractive/not platform specific enough.

(I guess this has been at least somewhat remedied in later releases, but that doesn't necessarily have people taking a second look)
Helpful tip: George Grellas has never, in the entire time he's been on the site, written an unhelpful comment. One good way to read HN is just to start with Grellas' comments.

I mean it: go look, you won't find a single bad comment. It's spooky.
Inplaymaker - West London (Hammersmith) - Software engineer or Junior software engineer (backend)

We're a small (~8 people) startup working on a mixture of our own products and commissions. These are all mobile apps supported by REST APIs. The most significant is a tinder-style fashion app to be released in the next couple of weeks.

It's important that you have:

- Experience with Test-Driven Design

- Experience with *nix

- Computer Science fundamentals including data structures and algorithms

- Interest in agile methods

It would be helpful if you:

- Have some interest in configuration automation and the DevOps movement

- Have some interest in RESTful APIs

- Already know how to use git

- Have some interest in relational database design

- Have some interest in machine learning and/or natural language processing

What we use:

- Python (with Flask)

- PostgreSQL (with SQLAlchemy)

- CentOS

Email your CV with a note explaining why you're interested to:

cal.paterson@inplaymaker.com
Not too shabby. Check out dygraphs for some inspiration. Lots of powerful features and handles huge datasets.
I disagree with lordbusiness - disregarding focusing time (as previous poster said, "half-press" the shutter first), EVIL/mirrorless cameras are going to be faster than SLRs unless incompetently engineered.

There are outliers like the NEX-5 which had a shutter lag of over 100ms, even when pre-focused, but the modern mirrorless equivalents of the 7D achieve less shutter lag.

A DSLR has the intrinsic problem of having to wait for the mirror to move out of the way before the image can be captured. The mirror mechanism's speed is limited by the strength and flexibility of its materials (too fast and it'll break), and the power level of the actuator moving it. Not to mention the faster you move the mirror the more slap you will get, causing vibrations in the camera that affect image quality. There is a "limit of physics and material science" problem inherent in SLRs.

A mirrorless camera has none of these disadvantages - and it shows, even the vaunted Canon 1D has a shutter lag between 40-50ms depending on model, while the Sony NEX-5N has a shutter lag of 22ms.

The Canon 7D lordbusiness brings up clocks in at ~70ms. In fact none of Canon's DSLRs can get below 40ms.

The Olympus E-M1 comes in at 50ms, as is the Fuji X-T1. Mirrorlesses already outperform even high-end DSLRs when it comes to shutter lag. And they will continue to get faster as more mirrorlesses move to electronic instead of mechanical shutters.
A recruiter here in Chicago tells me he's dying for entry level ASP.NET and back-end Java coders. I think a lot of these companies just run these guys through at largely unimpressive wages, run a bunch of candidte through as temp to perm, and hope to god one guy out of 20 isn't a complete moron. I've had the displeasure of working with some of these guys. They have some paper certs and some basic understanding of what they're doing but they have zero big picture and any love of what they are doing. Don't get me started on their work from a security or stability perspective. These guys are just in the wrong field. They heard the siren's song of being a coder, did some coding bootcamp or took a community college class or two, and are shoved into big departments churning out junk code.

I think these jobs echo how a lot of basic IT support staff in the late 90s and early 2000s got work. Companies were scrambling for someone to sit down with end users and explain how Outlook worked, install software, and maybe reboot the occasional server. These guys all ran to braindump sites, got a MCSE or CCNA, and now are lifers at the company they fooled into hiring them.

There's something somewhat sad about all this. These people probably would have been better off in a different field but are now stuck in unpromotable positions because they just don't have what it takes to move up. Our own support guy is in his 40s and is barely competent at providing basic level 1 PC desktop support. He's totally in the wrong field. I'm not saying this stuff is a calling, but in some ways it is. Like a lot of technical jobs, you kinda have to make it your religion and invest a bit of your personal time into it because its so fast moving that if you treat it like a 9-5 desk job, you'll fall behind very quickly.
The benchmark is mostly superfluous anyway. It's enough for me to know that generators no longer bail out to the interpreter.
Twitter has become a dumping ground for what used to be RSS. The "twitter" traffic is now really over at Instagram. Instagram needs to upgrade their product mix (multi- accounts), but geeks and news organizations are propping Twitter up, but it's not a general conversation or personal broadcasting tool anymore.
Well, isn't it what the whole article was about? ;).
> Within the last couple of months literally

I would rather say it has become apparent over the last year. I say windows 8 marks the moment.

That's where Microsoft realized they needed to garner goodwill and at that point Google had so much global market share (web traffic, browsers, mobile) they could say fuck all to everything and anyone.

And they started doing just that. Anyone else remember the forced and sneaky adaption tactics that was Google+?
I really like grafana but unlike the parent's suggestions, it uses Flot not D3 as the charting backend.
Can you post an example of what you want?

If you just want to produce choropleths, you can try Leaflet. Other options include d3.js and kartograph.

http://kartograph.org/

http://d3js.org/
Intel Subsidiary Agrees to $750,000 Penalty for Unauthorized Encryption Exports
Relaying for xan:

I'll have you know tänzer is a lady! And a very improper one, at that.

In lieu of answering a more technical inquiry, I shall iterate my reasoning for being so persistent in cranking out this piece of software. Quite frankly, it's on account of me becoming quite ROYALLY PISSED with dealing with Impostor Syndrome all these years; it was such to a crippling degree that only today have I bothered even considering getting a Hacker News account. I felt I was a nobody, that I could NEVER possibly belong in the pantheon of bearded programming gods and shiny, happy goddesses, so I lurked.

Until this year, wherein I got a proper bonk on the head from a very lovely handful of people in the Perl community who encouraged me to make an ass of myself on stage with a talk on Filesys::POSIX (which I wrote). And I may have pooped out a blag post on Impostor Syndrome along the way, on http://xantronix.net/.

Anyway, pursuant to the idea of utterly crushing and subsequently extinguishing Impostor Syndrome inasmuch as I possibly can with my available wherewithal, I wrote tänzer as a labor of love to myself, and as a tribute to the concept of minimalistic antiframeworks (like antimatter, but antithetical to bulky frameworks instead). So far I think I've succeeded, given that I wasn't quite ready to blast this to the world yet (at least not without some really good profiling and a quite requisite, complete testsuite), people thought it good to release this to the hordes anyway.

Such is life. Consider writing software as a love letter to yourself occasionally. It's like taking a bath with candles and some real lovey-dovey music on in the background.
I have just took a quick glimpse and the source seems to be written very clearly. It is an excellent example of how coding in tcl looks like. Perhaps this could be used as an example when you are learning to program in tcl.

I don't use tcl neither I know what the actual state of available libraries the performance is, but tcl honors its fame as an easy to read language, this is not Perl.

One feature I like a lot is the ability to create secure interpreters that bypass military specifications.

Perhaps some benchmarks could give us an idea of what is the current state of affairs in the tcl world, but sometimes the bottle neck code just recurs to calling C libraries. I didn't see that ffi calling here.
There are always more problems that you can solve before you release a product. This is universally true of all products. It doesn't matter how developed the thing is, there are always more things you can do.

But at the end of the day, you do need to ship a product. Which means some of those go un-done. Especially when it's a product in beta where you're looking to get feedback and iterate.
See? The system works!

/snark
Fantastic work. It looks like a lot of fun. Any plans to bring down the weight and produce one for sale?

I have two nephews that would flip out with joy if they got one of these.
Show HN: Nettank – a little socket multiplayer game
If you guys have any suggestions I can add them to the list.
As a fan of daily emails - I built thebirdy.com and just launched whatwedid.today - I love this concept. However, I find the pricing really confusing. Could it be a simple seat license? And have a look at your site on mobile. It was pretty broken on my iphone. Good luck!
Running is not the same as running securely and with acceptable performance. You don't ship things you know will perform poorly.
Cool, that's new!

For ages there was only 2.0 available. Being a patch release behind is no big deal indeed.
You can style maps using https://www.mapbox.com/ and embed them very easily using leaflet.js.

If you want to go a bit further, stamen mapstack does some cool stuff: http://mapstack.stamen.com/