skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd say it has enough historical significance to still be acceptable. Consider this: every image compression format out there has an example of their work done on the Lena image. The source code for various compression algorithms may have been lost, but the encoded Lena results for that compression algorithm may very well still exist. This means we can compare between compression algorithms of the past quite easily. We dont have to dig up old source code and find hardware that will run it to compare output - we can simply provide the same input that they had.

Regarding the image itself, it's not even a good test image. There are far better images out there that test the robustness of image compression, but those test images haven't been ran though every image processing algorithm since the 1973. Should we change default test images? Yes, but Lena should still be used as well. The historical data it provides is invaluable.
> Unless you want to deny a woman the right to permit

Not doing something you are permitted to do is somehow denying their right to permit? It's nice of her permitting the use, however her permission doesn't force us to use it. By the same logic, it would be perfectly okay use goatse image if the guy permitted it, right?
Sky & Telescope editor Kelly Beatty drew a pretty strong distinction between the two in an interview on the public radio show Here & Now a couple days back (http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2014/12/03/nasa-orion-mars):

INTERVIEWER JEREMY HOBSON: Do you think it's possible that the private sector beats NASA in getting to Mars?

BEATTY: Not with people.
1.25 is too low for the US, too. However, we're just establishing the minimum, so I erred on the low end. 1.5 or 2.0 would probably come closer to reality.
Why exactly is a website more trustworthy with your javascript engine than your app?
I've been using this one: http://gabrielecirulli.github.io/hn-special/
A related article makes a point about the very low morale from astronauts for going to an asteroid using Orion and SLS, which is the major first use for Orion: http://gizmodo.com/orions-a-triumph-lets-not-waste-it-166656...

I suspect public opinion about such a quest is just as low for this milestone.
Earlier, I had complained that this was just more of Sorkin's distaste for anything new. My argument was that no real SV billionaire would buy a traditional media company to turn it into the next Buzzfeed, since there's no value there. They'd just start from scratch.

Turns out I was wrong.
"Orion, which could one day take astronauts to Mars..." [1]

"NASA just tested Orion — a spacecraft that might someday carry people to Mars" [2]

"NASA and its commercial partners are designing Orion to take astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid in the 2020s, and to Mars and its moons in the 2030s" [3]

"Orion will facilitate human exploration of the Moon, asteroids, and Mars." [4]

"This time, the rocket was unnamed, but the craft is designed eventually to carry humans to Mars" [5]

[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/12/05/368652770/a-s...

[2] http://www.vox.com/2014/12/3/7322909/orion-test-flight

[3] http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/splashdown-orion-spaces...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_%28spacecraft%29

[5] http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/dec/05/nasa-launches...
Nothing replaces it. Lookup performance of the routing table has been increased by using an LC trie since 2.6.39 and the various information which were previously in the cache have been moved to other structures.

The performance of the cache was said to be bad (only 10% hit, but that doesn't match at all my experience where the performances of the cache were pretty good, see the article) and being an hash table, it was the target of DOS attacks. Moreover, many information were tied to the cache, triggering some additional problems, like the "neighbor cache overflow".
I wish quacks like Dr. Oz would stop promoting this 'detox' fantasy.
The purpose of a test like this is to measure visual performance, and the JPG result is performing very badly.

Open these two images in a separate browser tab, then switch back and forth between them:

http://a.pomf.se/fsnfxz.png

http://a.pomf.se/lfzyrh.png

Those are the upper images of the test. Also try these, the lower images:

http://a.pomf.se/bgqcag.png

http://a.pomf.se/hxlwcm.png

Again, JPG is not merely worse, but very worse. In fact, JPG makes it look like she's wearing a hat that's made of crosshatch material at the top, when in fact the top is composed of rings of fiber, not crosshatch.
Ask HN: Is interviewing for “culture fit” illegal?
I don't feel comfortable interviewing someone based on culture fit. I understand the rationale(would I want to work with this person). But how am I suppose to answer that question in a single interview?

First, the question assumes that I know how to properly define the local "culture". Judging based on culture fit is asking me whether I, personally, liked the person; but whether I like a person is independent of whether they're skilled or not.

Secondly, culture fit is a double-edged sword; qualified people are turned away because they don't fit the local "culture"(even though they are more than skilled which I've had happened a few times) or terrible people slip through because they fit the parameters local "culture".

Thirdly, there's absolutely zero discussion or literature on such an hiring important criteria within organizations. It's just assumed to be a good policy. I know this because every time I try to boast a conversation about this policy I get canned responses like, "would you want to work with this guy?" or "it's like being on a date" etc.

Rather than an extended conversation of the pros and cons of such a hiring strategy. I mean I don't like plenty of personality types, but I feel I'm at least cognizant of that fact. What if the interviewer is sexist or racist and is oblivious to that fact? Women and people of different races would be filtered out based on seemingly valid justifications(they had poor english, they weren't aggressive enough, etc).

Do construction workers get hired based on culture fit? What do you think HN?
One of Barnsley's notes with math, a concise algorithm, references, and a rather interesting set of figures: http://www.ams.org/notices/199606/barnsley.pdf via a comment on http://pointersgonewild.com/2014/01/02/tile-based-image-comp... from HN user Tachyonbeam who has experimented with the technology.

Remember that photo-enhancing scene in Blade Runner? Are you feeling motivated yet? For me the decompression speed and small file size were nice things when I first encourntered the format back in ~1992 but jpegs were already good in that area and it was obvious that the price of storage space and bandwidth would fall (though I continue to be surprised by the progress of technology). So to critics who say it's not competitive on size or speed - quite right, no argument from me.

However, nothing I have seen in the intervening 22 years comes close to FI compression for image enhancement. It's hard to find examples online but trust me, it was this good on everything we threw at it.

Also from the original thread: http://www.verrando.com/pulcini/gp-ifs1.html < windows en/decoder (IFS-BMP) and some other resources, straight outta 1997.
Despite there being a whole bunch of implementations out there, I had also written one a while ago: https://github.com/thebrokencube/yahnes . It does need some updating, but seems to work well enough for my use (plus, I just wanted to scratch my own itch).

Probably best to sort of consolidate some of these into a few really good ones, but we'll see.
Fractal compression is a scam. The "resolution independent" part especially.
Of all the things you shudl expect from a non-C++ language, performance is highly unlikely to be on that list.

If you can't get something to be performant with C++, it's pretty unlikely you'll get it to be performant with most other languages.

(Unless you want to try it in fortran)
More fully:

"Contrary to claims appearing on the internet, Professor Grimm’s work was not under formal review nor had he been given any notice of dismissal. It is standard practice at Imperial to conduct both informal and formal performance management. Professor Grimm’s line manager met with him on a number of occasions to see how the College could help him to develop more competitive grant applications, for example through internal peer-review, collaborations and letters of support. Discussions included talking about the best place for him to do his science, both inside Imperial and outside, and, with Professor Grimm’s permission, his line manager made enquiries about opportunities on his behalf."

So this may still be a situation of pressure being brought to bear, just in some manner other than via formal review.
> I'd say it has enough historical significance to still be acceptable.

This sounds a lot like Redskins argument.

> The source code for various compression algorithms may have been lost, but the encoded Lena results for that compression algorithm may very well still exist.

We need to compare a new algorithm to an obsolete one where we don't even have the source code and this is beneficial... how?

By the way, the image is remastered in 2013 so none of this is relevant anymore: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna#Remastering
Great start. Now let's add leap years. =)
Check out the "Laptop Compubody Sock" by Becky Stern. http://www.instructables.com/id/Laptop-Compubody-Sock/
Not to pick on your girlfriend but I've seen a variant of this phrase so often that I'm kind of baffled:

"the lack of clear policies and regulations governing academia is one of its greatest advantages, because it gives your mind space to explore, and expands creative freedom."

Are the folks in academia so creatively stunted that they can't find freedom outside of the ivory tower?

It seems like such a silly argument.
Be interesting to see if there are plans to integrate with BioKepler(http://www.biokepler.org/) or similar existing bioinformatics and lifescience workflow systems.
Quick gif with LICEcap (http://www.cockos.com/licecap/) would do wonders to show how awesome this is...

would be a nice-to-have on the README
Even if you use 3 bytes per char you are not guaranteed O(1) string indexing as you will still have surrogate pairs :( So you need to normalize these first... or deal with them in searching :(

String in more modern languages are standardised in one form and widely used in all libraries. C and C++ are the exceptions to this.

For example I hardly ever see CharSequence implementations in Java code. It is the most underused interface I know of, because for most people String is good enough. In idiomatic Java code the performance issue discussed here does not occur. Strings being final and passed by reference (or more correctly the reference is copied by value) the same string does not get reallocated all over the place.

The C++ problem is that std:string does not suffice for the common case and we end up with QStrings that are difficult to convert to boost:string.

In Java land when String does not meet the perf needs we implement a custom CharSequence but these are easy to convert to Strings if needed (easier than QString to Boost string).

So we end up with most Java programers knowing just StringBuilder, String and char[]. ByteBuffer is really about bytes and easy to convert to a CharBuffer.

The Java Language has some downsides in standardising on UTF-16 for its common String type (Moving on from UCS-2). But even if had chosen extended ASCII like Oberon it would at least be consistent everywhere.

I believe that javac replaces + with StringBuilder calls. And in loops the multiple StringBuilder allocs are removed and replaced by appending to one StringBuilder.

The Java Strings are far from perfect in UniCode terms but a whole lot better than std::String and its 16+32 friend.
Real deep learning[0] is a very particular type of machine learning that has recently been shown to be quite useful for certain specific tasks. But as often happens with technical terms, it's been regularly abused once it started getting press.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning
This one is also noteworthy because the algorithm it attacks was developed specifically with resistance to quantum attacks in mind, unlike the breed of public-key crypto currently in use, which is widely known to be vulnerable to quantum attacks.
What's wrong with free functions?
too slanted to be journalism, its like reading the opinion page of any local newspaper. So if that is the last bastion of journalism then journalism died a long time ago.
Julia is a niche language... you comment is quite vitriolic just to point out that it's not in your niche.
components could be achieved using xslt, you have a high level app spec, and you transform all the components.
not just about image compression, he also did some Tiny C compiler a while ago. he also had some other nice tech demos...
Node.js – Listening to the Community
Make beautiful charts with RethinkDB queries and Charted.co
The improved syntax is interesting. Are there any better front-ends to XSLT? A quick google turned up SLAX, but I wonder if there are others.

https://github.com/Juniper/libslax
I think we crashed the site. Coral Cache has the front page, at least: http://bellard.org.nyud.net/bpg/
If PKC turned out to be almost impossible post-QC, boy would that ever change the world of computing, networking, pretty much everything. It would mean everything would have to run on pre-shared secret keys.

It would also be the absolute end of Bitcoin and derivatives, at least as far as I know.
I guess the JS is just for proof of concept until support is shipped with browsers etc, but it isn't rendering properly in the stock Android browser (4.2.2).

It gets to Lena's head in the first image, then becomes brigtly multi-coloured, though it looks like the difference between colours right... as if maybe an int overflow in the browser's JS implementation?
Depends on which one, the Escape Analysis in java7 Hotspot is quite conservative. The one in Graal is very aggressive https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/Graal/Graal+Partial+Es.... Not sure what other VMs do.
He is referring to <https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-ios>.

But you will note that none of those things are "in" Firefox. H.264 support in the <video> tag is implemented via platform-specific APIs (which, for example still don't work on OS X). DRM requires a CDM binary blob, which is again platform specific. You do not have the open-source freedom to port these features to some other platform that does not support them.
Yep, the Mars line is sales. NASA has been aiming for the moon as a more realistic possibility with this thing, which is why they rebuilt Apollo with modern rockets.
Wow. "It took almost 4 minutes to convert a 1.3MB .TIF file to a 228K .JPG file." Those were the days.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8687714
> What I like about them the most of the separation. You're actually manipulating the data (XML) and displaying it to end user in HTML without going through the formalities of coding.

How is writing XSLT not coding?
Now show me a picture of a man from that dataset that could possibly be construed as sexual.

This is not a matter of prudishness. I would be totally fine (see my other comment in this thread) if researchers used both male and female crops, but they don't. So to make your point you need to show me all of the male French researchers who are accepting of male nudity in their image processing research. I would be very surprised if you could find me a single one.
You reminded me of a fantastic video about positive and negative motivation, especially with how they relate to blue-collar vs white-collar work:

Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc)
"Best" is a pretty hairy topic. Does it mean "Most fulfilling existance", does it mean "Most benefit to humanity", does it mean "Most benefit to this country/children/etc..." There's no right answer. I submit that "Letting people expressing their freedom in a way that maximally lets others express the same." is more useful/enlightening/profitable than "Getting the best". But that's pedantic and hair splittery, like the rest of my comment.
People aren't priceless. If we were industry would grind to a halt. There has to be a reasonable price on human life or there would be no calculating the impact of 1, 10, or 100 deaths, and then to upper limit on the $ spent on safety. The value of a human life is around 50-100K$/year to 100$K-10$Million Total, depending on the application.
don't forget QEMU.
I think the public is going to have to learn the hard lesson that even if the person on TV is a real doctor they may not be trustworthy and may not really have your best interest in mind. 'Detoxing' is just the latest in a long line of thoroughly debunked scams that Dr. Oz has promoted.
A Note to Our Readers (regarding “A Rape on Campus”)
The smallish downside of continuing with it may outweigh the very small upside. The image by itself might not be a big deal, but we're trying to disrupt the pattern of women being used only as objects, not perpetuate it.
I think mmxiii is saying that the phone+GPS combo has enabled people to become cab drivers, not to summon them. Previously, you'd either have to either be very familiar with geography, or purchase a GPS unit - probably not very expensive, but still an investment for a very part-time job.
> On the other hand, when other people are involved,
> especially those with "seniority" like P.I.'s and
> advisors, it's no longer obvious what decisions you
> should make.

This problem has been described as "The Tyranny of Structurelessness." [1]

[1] http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
Surely there are opportunities outside of academia that do not restrict you to the 9-5 grind or subject you solely to the whims of "the man." But academia is one of the only options where that kind of freedom comes safely packaged and institutionalized. You get the advantages of prestige without the risk of something like entrepreneurship, which may be another option for finding creative freedom.
but that's trival, isn't that already solved?

function f(x) { return 28 + maybeLeap(x) + (...); }

I remember it's something related with "(x % 4) == 0" and "not ends_with(00)"
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Thank you and Happy Holiday!
In my opinion, Orion is pretty much worthless, although that's a strong opinion. Realistically it is at the very least a hugely flawed program.

Orion has no mission yet, it's really just a component of a larger system, but that larger system hasn't been designed or funded.

Worse, Orion has several design flaws that limit its usefulness. For example, it's designed with an old-fashioned tractor abort system, a huge solid fueled rocket that will be attached to the capsule during launches. However, in most realistic scenarios the crew for a mission that would use Orion would not actually be launched from Earth on Orion, rendering that feature nearly useless. Except that it's a feature that takes away literal tons of useful hardware from the spacecraft since it is a heavy (7.5 tonnes) component that steals payload mass from the rest of the vehicle.

That sort of issue is endemic to the entire Orion project, and even worse for SLS. It's a hugely expensive hypothetically useful system designed around hypothetical constraints for missions that haven't even been designed, let alone funded, yet. Realistically it'll probably end up not being useful for whatever mission architectures we end up with for future manned interplanetary missions, and more flexible designs or newer systems are, I suspect, far more likely to be useful and practical when that time comes.

Orion is particularly interesting since it's sort of the cornerstone of a potential manned Mars mission. But when you compare it against competing designs such as SpaceX's "MCT" architecture there is about 1-2 orders of magnitude greater cost, significantly greater complexity, and yet less capability. At this point there is a very high likelihood that no human crew will ever end up in an Orion spacecraft, and the more likely outcome is that the project will be abandoned prior to anything interesting happening with it.
How to tell if an early stage company will succeed in one meeting
I interned at a company with an XML+XSLT based MVC framework once. I actually thought it worked really well and generally agree with the article. A lot of more "modern" template and transform solutions are aiming for the same goals: sandboxed, side-effect free, limited logic, and so on.

I especially like the power of combining XSLT with Batik and FOP. You can take backend data and present it as an interactive table, a visualization, or a PDF report really easily.

I will say that the syntax is awfully obtuse, though. I find that support for various powerful-but-obtuse 1990s/2000s solution stacks splits along an IDE-user line: those who use IDEs are generally comfortable working with XML and XSLT in Java while text-editor devotees tend to hate that class of solution.
I hate to promote my own site (http://theexceptioncatcher.com) but I found that it made it a lot easier to separate the design of the site from the content. Most of my websites rarely ever change, so having a dynamic site is over kill. XSLT/XML helps to keep it as a static site, and I have the opportunity to change/fix the design at will.

Also, I've managed to setup a system to generate my resume via an XML/XSLT transform. I haven't published how I do that (or the public version [which is out of date]).

It's a tool and it can be very useful if you understand what you're doing. Additionally, there is Unix support for XSLT processing.
Understanding fair labor practices in a networked age [pdf]
5/5, sorry... I don't have a great explanation why. I think it has something to do with personal interaction. If it was over Ebay or something I wouldn't worry about giving low rating, but when I meet someone face to face and they are nice, then it's hard to rate low.
As long as it continues to be profitable for quacks to promote fantasies, quacks will promote fantasies.
Remember that on a little-endian machine (i.e. nearly everything now) the "last byte" of the pointer is actually the first byte of the string. The only way you can use the 8th byte of the string as your sentinel is if you can be sure that the allocator won't ever give you a pointer with MSB=0x00.

You are right that on big-endian machines you can smuggle a 7th byte into the pointer though by sharing the "tag" and the '\0' terminator. You don't really have to worry about the 0-byte case since in a traditional implementation there is a shared empty-string sentinel that the default constructor uses. So if you are mutating a short-string and the result is 0 bytes you can always just replace it with a pointer to the shared sentinel.

I agree with your intuition about the costs. I think your program would have to be pretty dominated with tiny strings for all of this optimization to help much. My guess is that it would microbenchmark well. However, all of those extra branches would add pressure to I-Cache and branch predictor history which would offset it in the real world.

folly's fbstring actually has 3 separate regimes (interned tiny strings, classic normal strings, threadsafe-COW large strings) so I guess they decided that the extra branches were worth it for them. I still prefer a simpler design where c_str()/size() don't require any branches though.
http://wentin.github.io/underlineJS/