skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great, they're saying that, but, on the other hand, they only operate them in a small area in Mountain View because the level of detail the things need to operate is just not there anywhere in the US. In addition, the driverless cars have trouble dealing with temporary road closures and the like -- the kind of stuff human drivers have to deal with regularly. It's not at all clear that this is going to be a practical technology anytime soon, despite all the hype.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/530276/hidden-obstacles...

> Would you buy a self-driving car that couldn’t drive itself in 99 percent of the country? Or that knew nearly nothing about parking, couldn’t be taken out in snow or heavy rain, and would drive straight over a gaping pothole?

> If your answer is yes, then check out the Google Self-Driving Car, model year 2014.
It will be interesting to see if Mondo can overcome the issue Simple had. Originally they wanted to own the full stack and talked about how there would be an API. Years later they abandoned trying to own the stack and settled for being a thin layer on top of existing banks (Bancorp) and the API hasn't been mentioned in forever.

In 2012 I reached out to Simple through support and this was my interaction: https://s.joshstrange.com/ZuVu.png and the email that followed: https://s.joshstrange.com/x1MW.png

There was a little more back and forth on feature suggestions but that's not really relevant to the API so I didn't post it.

So the API is DOA which is sad but I still really do like Simple and their tools. It's by far the best looking bank out there and has been a joy to use.
Wow this is truly amazing.
What is better, owning 1% of a $1mm company or 0.5% of a $5mm company? That's why you shouldn't worry about dilution.
Recently I've been exploring the idea that small programs should consist of two parts; a "backend" that you can communicate with via a strict message protocol like protobuf. It can handle multiple requests because it is a mini server, the message format is locked to a "type" and you communicate with it via RPC.

The second part is a "frontend", a command-line client that does all the unixy stuff with text streams etc; but is just another RPC client to the backend.

This provides flexibility; for quick duct-tape situations you use the front end and pipe anf ilter to your hearts content. Then when stuff needs to get serious, you can bypass the command-line front end and connect directly over RPC using a strict message format which has the ability to handle a couple (doesn't have to many) of concurrent requests.

Of course this is early doors yet, but I think it might have legs in the flexibility in the text streams/hard message format debate, for very little additional work.
Jenkins can call whatever script or makefile your provide, you don't need any specific "rust" support.
TED-RNN: Ideas worth generating
Be fair, lots of folks had the same idea and didn't execute so well. The devil is in the details; thus, technology. Even the marketing/lobbying is a technical issue of sorts.
Will.i.am criticizes Apple Watch: ‘S–t is weird’
I've used mio and I also have nothing but praise for it, but it is a fairly thin abstraction over epoll/kqueue. That's certainly useful, but it's not nearly as nice or easy to use as the green threads that haskell gives you.

(That being said, I think 'woeful' is a pretty strong word to describe the situation. Sure, Haskell is nicer in that regard, but most other languages aren't.)
An FYI for people that don't know (foreigners, London taxi drivers) - Scotland has several different banks which issue Scottish currency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknotes_of_the_pound_sterlin...
Successful Content Optimization Processes and Tricks
The comment was meant to be lighthearted, but on the serious side we both:

1) Probably won't have done the full sort of inspection of our SSL cert checking to really ensure you aren't being MITM'd.

2) We won't have a chemspill / 0-day security fix infrastructure in place, so we won't have a way to push down fixes to 0-day exploits in OpenSSL, the JS engine, etc.

I'd love to be at a better point on those features by the end of this year, but it's not likely with our current roadmap & resourcing plan.
There is so much wrong with this post.
>What we’re seeing now is like what we saw with website development 10 years ago,” said Derek Dodge, Vice President of Product at Snappii, a Rochester, N.H., company with a cloud-based platform that allows users to visually create mobile apps. “Early on, building a site was difficult and expensive, then tools like Dreamweaver came along. That’s happening now in mobile dev. We’re kind of like Dreamweaver. We generate native code, but you don’t have to write it.”

Right and DreamWeaver and all those easy-to-use tools have disappeared and we're right back to developers doing everything and designing tools for themselves. Building a site is just as expensive as before and you still have to educate clients on the true costs.
That's a pretty weak objection. It's implausible that intelligence wouldn't be influenced by any evolved traits.
I do, and I would heartily recommend them. It was a bit annoying during the time period the article describes, but things are smoothed out now.
Problems with the engine block, cylinders or cylinder valves are rarely the cause for scrapping a car - which are the only parts being really affected by these 'tiny explosions'.

Most problems are due to failing gearboxes, clutches, water pumps, belts, electrical components, axles, brake disks, glue deteriorating over time, ... Mostly it just becomes economically unfeasible to replace all parts that start failing over time.

But true, an electrical car has a lot less components that are prone to wear, but there still are parts that will wear down and be bloody expensive.

And then we're not even talking about the electronics that become more and more important in these electrical cars. These are mostly already a bit dated when a car is brand-new - so what about in 5 year? These also don't have an infinite life. Right now cars are being equiped with already aging tech and communication standards. Right now you have Bluetooth, WiFi, Edge/3G/LTE, ... - and in 10 years those things will probably still be around in some backward compatible way. But in 15 or 20 years? Wouldn't put my money on that.
Never had a bad black cab ride. I'd trust any black cab driver over software/GPS etc.
It's not automatic at all, but I switched from Mint to You Need a Budget (commonly referred to as YNAB) a couple of years ago, and have never looked back. I've found it incredibly useful in managing spending and saving, and very straightfoward once I got the hang of it (they have lots of useful tutorials, too).

I think one of the advantages of YNAB is that it's not automatic - I used Mint for ages, and would tend to forget about it because there's so little work to do. The small amount of effort I put in going through transactions in YNAB each week (it doesn't take more than 10 minutes, and it learns the frequent categorisations) really makes me think about where I'm spending money.

The only work I have to do is downloading transaction data from my bank each week, which is simple, and has the side-effect of encouraging me to minimise the number of accounts I have open, because it makes managing YNAB simpler.

YNAB's not free software, but it is occasionally on sale. Even at full price it's well worth the money, provided that you really want to take control of your spending. It's available on Steam, so you may now be able to get a refund if you don't like it (give it a chance, though - the initial setup is most of the work, ongoing usage is much less).
So are taxis. So is every other form of transport that uses a road. I never ride the bus but in Avignon, I get to wait behind long congested lines of buses clogging the ring road when I just want to get my daughter from her little school. I never ride those buses. Also your logical fallacy is a little silly: how does going around 'without insurance' harm people that don't use the service? That statement is just untrue. ALL drivers in France must have insurance.
If you are using OpenCV and tesseract, you might have a look at Scene Text Detection in OpenCV 3. It's in the text module within OpenCV_contrib [0].

There are samples here [1] and here [2] to get you started. The paper is here: [3]

---

[0] http://docs.opencv.org/3.0-beta/modules/text/doc/erfilter.ht...

[1] https://github.com/Itseez/opencv_contrib/blob/master/modules...

[2] https://github.com/Itseez/opencv_contrib/blob/master/modules...

[3] http://cmp.felk.cvut.cz/~neumalu1/neumann-cvpr2012.pdf
Something that automates or assists with business banking tasks?
It's the same here in the US... The company I work for hires countless contractors that are required to work set hours and treated exactly like employees, except they're not given benefits, etc (in principle, they're paid more, though).

The biggest oddity is that I know of several "contractors" who have worked full-time for the same company for _multiple decades_ that are now being laid off with no severance and no warning.

Obviously, that's the advantage from the company's viewpoint, and you don't go into one of those roles without being aware that it could/will happen, but still... I've never understood how being a "contractor" somehow completely sidesteps employment laws.
> congesting the road, polluting

all cars do that. In fact, Uber should do it less because they don't have to drive around looking for a fare.

> without adequate insurance

I don't know about other countries, but in the US they definitely require adequate insurance. All of your points are wrong.
Quake III on Your TV with Chromecast Remote Display API
I liked Circa, especially its "breaking news" feature. The only reason I didn't use it that much was that it was very US-centric (I live in Europe). In particular, it would give me "breaking news" about some US sports celebrities I'd never heard of. Other that that, I really liked the way it structured stories that unfolded over time.
Multi-threaded rendering is less of a win when a single desktop core is already pretty powerful. Servo is going to make a big difference on mobile platforms with multiple underpowered cores.
Regulations didn't save John Nash from dying in a traditional taxi. If you're happy to entrust your life to a random stranger that's shielded from market conditions/feedback, then go ahead and get the regulated taxi.
There is very little proof that the techno-utopian version of autonomous vehicles is going to play out the way people like you want it to.

Sure, on the surface Taxi's are dead, but I would wager that it will be a lot slower than people on here think, not least for the difficulty of cleaning autonomous cabs.
Hello, I'm the author and the person who shared the post.

Have I done something wrong to have this marked as spam?

I've written about financial tech startups for the past 5 years and can confirm, banks are worried about these guys as well as Apollo bank which just got a license this week.
Exactly. Having worked on vacuum systems for physical vapor deposition, I can assure you that there's an enormous amount of energy going into gently wafting the materials onto other materials. (The wide area glass coater I worked on had a 2MW substation running dozens of 150-200kW power supplies (not full tilt all at once, obviously).)

Really, I recommend anyone look into this stuff. Just to get silicon to the purity and precise structure to just start chip fabrication:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czochralski_process
Imagine the whole supply chain, from smelting metal for wires and cases to plastic molding to storage, economies of scale truly are vast.
Thanks, that is really shocking. Did not know that employers were going that far in low wage industries in the US.
I thought it didn't look that impressive at first since it looked small on a body that is already pretty small, but apparently its height is on the scale of Mont Blanc! That's both impressive and kind of odd.
"We’re trying to make it so that people educate themselves for 5 minutes as opposed to play Angry Birds," Galligan said.

Yup, that'd do it.. if you predicate your success on changing human nature, you're gonna have a hard time.

Circa had some very good elements - following the stories, and the clean no-nonsense layout. I was very excited about it when it first came out (and mad at them, because I thought they'd built something I was trying to make). After a while I noticed I used the app less and less - partially because it was a bit buggy on iOS, partially because I could not share stories outside of the app (they eventually fixed that).
Google's system was intolerable.
You put yourself up for competitive promotion.
Draining, rewards those who pay the optics game.
Worst of all it left the great people who don't know how to play politics behind and left a lot of terrible people promoted who did
The analogy breaks down a little bit because you aren't just shopping, you are getting the product, and the price of that product is listening to the salesperson. So the situation is probably closer to sitting through a timeshare presentation to get something free, although online you are not forced to pay attention to the ad for any amount of time.
I'd feel less bad if monopoly protections for billionaire patent holders and land owners (who collect rents from these very taxi drivers) weren't simultaneously getting much, much stronger.

Sadly, some people only seem to care about liberalizing industries that the little people derive just enough income to get by on.
In the US I more often see "contractors" who are official employees of a consulting firm and work alongside and onsite with normal employees of the firm's client. If the client ends the contract, the firm will soon fire you if there's not other work. I tend to think this is the worst of both worlds for the actual worker.
GPU Real-Time Resizing of Images on Flickr
Truly impressive!
A while back I found a grievous bug in CERNLIB, one that withoubt a doubt resulted in erroneous results in the physics journals.

The day I blasted this news throughout every corner of the physics community, a CERN staffmember sent me a patch. "Here's what you need, but the guy who maintains that part of CERNLIB wont accept it because Im british and hes french."

Dont Fuck With The French.
Alternately, an existing social network or reader like Flipboard could implement micropayments. At one time, https://flattr.com had linked Twitter favorites to donations, before Twitter blocked them and never implemented an equivalent service. A monthly recurring "subscription"/donation could be micro-disbursed by the social network.
> Rust pulls some really nice trick, but cannot match Haskell.

I'm not convinced that's true. Rust is even stricter than Haskell in many respects (first example that comes to mind is incomplete pattern matches, which is a compiler error in rust) and strictness also avoids some run-time errors. I've managed to produce infinite loops in Haskell by accidentally defining recursive values more than once.
This may shock you, but I don't read every story on HN. Who are you to tell me what I do and don't know?
All cars do that, but most cars are driven like 2 hours a day. The insurance coverage Uber has is rather skimpy despite Uber's success in changing regulations to get it to be considered adequate.
Tried tesseract, it worked very poorly. I don't think there is anything that compares well to Abbyy.

Unfortunately the native Linux version is a bit pricey:
http://www.ocr4linux.com/en:pricing

Otherwise I would use the command line version to help me index all my data.
A nice algebraic law that holds in data types is

a -> (b, c) = (a -> b, a -> c)
(b * c)^a = b^a * c^a

This is useful as common argument factoring and can optimize repeated function calls.

Another is the famous

(c^b)^a = c^(b * a)
a -> b -> c = (a, b) -> c

Which is curry/uncurry or the "product/exponential adjunction" in category theory.

Finally, consider

a^b * a^c = a^(b + c)
(b -> a, c -> a) = Either b c -> a

Which essentially says that given a tuple of functions we can choose which one we want to evaluate. Choose b and c to be unit and notice that `() -> a` is essentially `a` (after all, a^1 = a) and you'll have

a * a = a^2
(a, a) = Bool -> a

Which is the seed of a useful way of memorizing pure functions (look up memo-combinators for many more details).
How could it possibly be harmful to pedestrians or other drivers to have underinsured drivers on the road? Gee, I wonder.
Baby steps! We're first trying to figure out how we can share components written in Rust - ideas people have had are URL parsing, media container parsing, image decoding, etc.

If (when!) Servo continues to execute well, plans for integrating more risky pieces will require more top-down planning than the bottom-up, grassroots work that is going on today. As much as I love Servo, even I wouldn't argue we should stop the world and move 200 developers off of Firefox onto working on it full-time for the next year. Such initiatives rarely go as planned.
You'd think the etymology had anything to do with another cute term - "code rot", but no. No science of origin here.

Programming culture (today?) is highly egotistical, judgmental, conformist and, paradoxically, divisive.* Ageist too. Such pejoratives are now common in tech.

So we wait for gangrenous functions or putrid variables.

* I mean I don't see cabbage farmers go at each other with the same ferocity and psycho venom about methodologies of growing greener or purple(r) crop. (Ok, I admit my ignorance of the whole cabbage farming culture.)
Not OP but I can answer this. I use Simple and I HIGHLY recommend them. I've not had any of the issues mentioned in that article but had 1-2 friends that use Simple that did have issues (around that upgrade) with deposits not getting posted and/or transactions not being posted misleading them on the true balance of their account. Simple cleared it all up and reimbursed them like $50 for their trouble (on top of not charging overdraft fees in one case). Simple's support is better than anything out there. PERIOD. They get back to you in normally less than 1 hour (if you use their mobile/site chat) and only once did I get what I felt like as a form letter. Most of the time they are very personable (see: https://s.joshstrange.com/ZuVu.png and https://s.joshstrange.com/BbKS.png + https://s.joshstrange.com/glaC.png I've got a few more if you want to see them) and a joy to work with. If you have other questions let me know.
I had the same experience. Uber was routinely cheaper than taxis in France. And hailing with an app is astoundingly better than waving at cars in the rain.
Ask HN: How able is a random website to find your personal details?
I know it can see (and potentially track) your IP, your browser signature - user agent, time zone, and others. But is it enough details to find something like your name? (assuming an average computer user, and not someone who tries to hide their identity)
Well yeah that's the view being taken to its logical conclusion here:

- Private methods are just an implementation detail with respect to the public methods. (You really care about whether the public methods reply correctly.)

- Public methods are just an impdet with respect to the module API. (You really care about whether the module's public surface replies correctly.)

- The module's API is JAID with respect to the user/game API. (You really just care about whether the gamer gets the right responses to controller inputs.)

- The user/game API is JAID wrt to the code/gamer interface. (You really just care about whether the gamer likes what you've written.)

- The code/gamer interface is JAID wrt the company/customer interface. (You really just care whether people still give you money.)

- The company/customer interface is JAID wrt the investor/company interface. (You really just care whether the venture throws off more money than you put in.)

Nevertheless, you'd still like to catch the failures as soon and as narrowly as possible!
Look there needs to be a French Uber for this to work. Simple as that. We can't take global revenue forever. It's not fair to these countries. Lucky for them, we're helping them innovate
"It's a corrupt industry."

A detroit taxi driver told me that if he pissed anyone off the dispatcher would stop sending him fares.
I don't think it's going out on a limb to say there is obviously some under the table collusion going on here.
Facebook, delete my account when I die
I'm posting this here hoping that it reaches a Facebook employee.

Dear Facebook,

Please add an option that will let me choose what to do with my Facebook account when I die.

I do not want my friends or family to make this decision, as is your current policy outlined here:
https://www.facebook.com/help/103897939701143

Just as I have control over other belongings through a will, I'd like to have control over my Facebook account through these options.

Verification of death can be tricky. So let me nominate a person from my friends list, who can notify you of my death directly from within Facebook. Facebook can then execute whichever option I have set.

I'd like my account to be deleted on my death. However I imagine others may want to let it be memorialized, or let the account stay on as is, or (as is the current situation) let their friends and family decide.

Thank you for your attention.

A Facebook User.
It is there: EPSG:3857
Can these Baytrail processors handle HEVC / h.265 at HD well?
Night guard at work came to the front desk one night, pockets jangling with quarters. "Did you know the change machine will accept a photocopied bill?" Desk called the police, who called the FBI who came and took him away. Never saw him again.
I think neor (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9776826)'s point is the intended impact on developers, not on users. I believe that the contention is that Apple hopes to coerce developers—or, rather, content providers—into taking down public-facing web portals that are out of Apple's control, where their ad revenue will plummet, and creating instead an app that is to some extent under Apple's control, because that will become the only effective way to get ad revenue. Your choice as a user will then go away; there are already some, though fortunately not yet many, sites that must be accessed through apps (for example, my bank accepts deposits only through their app).

(I'm not endorsing this point of view myself, although it sounds more than a bit plausible to me; it's just, I think, what was being said.)
Tinder is going public
Emacs is an example of a complex application written consistent [more or less] with the Unix philosophy. One might argue [anything, it's the internet after all] that Emacs four decade shelf life demonstrates the robustness of its embedded Unix philosophy [at the risk of being a bit circular].

Where it butts against contemporary practice is in places like threads where it is still not proven that YAGNI doesn't apply.
If it wasn't for the cute child like drawings this would be a truly terrible piece of link bait. As it is it's still pretty and, and I expect better from NatGeo.

Anyone who lives in a mosquito heavy area knows that mosquitos (like almost all airborne insects) go into hiding during heavy rain and/or wind.
Show HN: JavaScript non-blocking cartograms
Killing Off Wasabi
Disclaimer: I work for Mondo.

I was a big fan (and user) of Simple in the early days - I really admired their vision & UX focus. However, Simple wasn't able to lend because fundamentally they were not a bank - they were a skin on Bancorp (and now BBVA).

If you're relying on card interchange fees or net-interest income ("NII") without any real lending business, it's almost impossible to make the numbers stack up. As a bank, even if you pay close to 0% interest on account balances, you'll only make about 1% investing that money in government gilts, giving a net interest margin ("NIM") of 1%.