Ethiopia cannot read black boxes from Boeing 737 MAX 8 which crashed - <AUTHOR> https://www.airlive.net/breaking-ethiopian-airlines-et302-from-addis-ababa-to-nairobi-involved-in-fatal-accident/ <comment><AUTHOR> Correction, black boxes will be sent to Europe: [https://twitter.com/airlivenet/status/1105808579758571525](https://twitter.com/airlivenet/status/1105808579758571525)</comment>


Show HN: Enabled Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.langoor.com/enabling-jobs/

<comment><USER2> It's an idea and a blog post. It is a good thing to try. For the U.S. market there are many legal and regulatory opportunities for you to grok before pushing forward this scheme. My first question of "will I get sued for placing these icons on some jobs" has a likely answer of "yes".

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It would be interesting to get your feedback. I am posting it here, as I first read that article on HN and wanted to see what the community here thought.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a joke, stop spamming HN with link baits.</comment>


Show HN: Recommendation system for conferences – never miss your event - <AUTHOR> https://lissajou.com <comment><USER2> Hmm. How about showing some examples of what is in the system and therefore what we could expect to be getting in our mailboxes?</comment>


Creativity Changes as We Age - <AUTHOR> https://thewalrus.ca/older-wiser-better-aging-artists-are-at-their-peak/ <comment><USER2> I'm 55 and I just finished writing a couple of books. I felt that I had done so much and seen so many cool things that before I check out I owed the world a "book report", whether anybody wanted to read it or not. So I wrote a couple.

I don't think I could have done that even ten years ago. There's a perspective you get, kind of a postmodernism, where you both understand the topics and the common ways of addressing them, then are able to move past that. I guess geniuses reach that point in their teens. It might take a bit longer for the rest of us :)

There's a thing I see with younger tech authors where they don't want to admit it, but they're for the most part chasing fame. That's a different kind of creativity. I never was good at that and it hasn't gotten much better, either. Perhaps you need a good foundation in order to "bloom" eventually?

<comment><USER3> What are your books about and where can I check them out?

<comment><USER2> \- I am not here pushing books. In fact, you won't find a link in my feed

\- Although these books are meant to help people who develop technology, frankly I'm not interested in what the average developer has to say about them. I wouldn't have liked some of my conclusions either had I read about them 20 years ago

\- _I have deliberately priced my books to only sell to people interested and dedicated in reading them_ This is the only reason I'm replying to you: I wouldn't want somebody else to go find the books and then start a flame war based on my price. If you can't afford it but are dedicated to learning, ping me. We'll work something out. Otherwise yeah, it's crazy high compared to the "Learn You Some Javascript in Five Hours" free YouTube-based courseware.

[https://leanpub.com/u/DanielBMarkham](https://leanpub.com/u/DanielBMarkham)

<comment><USER4> Have you found that people are willing to make the investment at that price?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have never felt as creative in my life as I do now in my early 40s.

I think the best way I can describe it is that it changed for me from my 20s, where I was driven by what I wanted to do — the end result — and along the way, would pick up the knowledge needed.

It's similar now, but it's more driven by what I can learn along the way and how I can connect it to everything else. Experience has shown me that more things are related than you think. And I feel like drawing these connections has made me think across disciplines and to try to connect things in multiple ways during the process, which has the side effect of creative solutions or accidental findings along the way.

I have dozens of pages of notes and snippets and am constantly adding — things I could make, topics I want to learn about. The amount can be overwhelming, but it's also liberating to write them down so that I can move on, and I feel like even doing that sort of validates that I'm "being creative" and keeping juices flowing.

Don't get me wrong — these are not world-changing ideas. But I've found that letting those flow has let little solutions or ideas here and there flow easily in the midst of bigger problems.

It also helps to have internalized the idea that the value is in the execution, not the idea. This is typified by a client who wants you to sign an NDA to hear about what their idea even is. That's a red flag that they think the golden egg is the idea itself and not the months or years, as well as discipline in saying no to a million little things, that will bring a good version of that idea to life.

<comment><USER6> > _my 20s, where I was driven by what I wanted to do — the end result —_

I totally understand what you mean here.

In my early 20s I was into electronic music and I wanted to make music like my idols. I was really more in love with the idea of doing it, or the end result, than the actual act of doing it. Because of that, I didn't really know anything about synths, synthesis, playing an instrument, etc. Which, ironically, are the fundamental skills needed to be able to actually do the damn thing.

Maybe if I had had someone to guide me it would have been different. Most of my friends were in rock bands, and those who were into electronic music production were just as lost as me. These days with Youtube it's a lot easier, everyone sharing their tricks and techniques.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The reference to William Utermohlen and his ongoing deterioration after his diagnosis with Alzheimer's is particularly poignant. He painted numerous self- portraits up to the point where apparently he could barely recognize his own face. His work is a vivid testament to the depredations that Alzheimer's inflicts upon creativity. [0] A bullet we should all hope we can dodge until an effective treatment is found.

[0] [https://www.boredpanda.com/alzheimers-disease-self- portrait-...](https://www.boredpanda.com/alzheimers-disease-self-portrait- paintings-william-utermohlen/)

<comment><USER7> Creativity isn't painting a photographic self-portrait. Creativity is, like, painting your own self over the course of your disease and so painting the disease.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My creativity has certainly changed and I'm middle-aged. I find myself constantly trying to make everything as ergonomic as possible. Years of sitting in an office chair has warped my spine, which now means I have to take regular breaks every 15 minutes or so to straighten out my back. In my early 20s I could go for long stretches in a chair, happily coding away doing 'sprints'. Now I've turned everything into a marathon, stretching out my work thinly over longer periods of time, paying attention to and mulling over details instead of glossing over them (something my younger self would do all day: gloss over everything and ignore nuance, yet still get things done)

<comment><USER9> could I rephrase it by instead of short term you can project long term and see how tiny papercuts would add up in the future ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Possibly a bit off topic, but I read this submission last night (and gave it the first upvote) because today is my 50th birthday. I am a software engineer that has followed a somewhat unconventional path, but have enjoyed my career passionately. I have told myself that turning 50 is no big deal because it's just another arbitrary day, and 99+% odds I'm well past half dead already. But, because others around me keeping making a big deal out of it, it's hard to not get caught up in some transcendental introspection.

If you're well past 50 (approaching 60 or beyond), what would you tell your 50 year old self and peers?

<comment><USER11> > If you're well past 50 (approaching 60 or beyond), what would you tell your > 50 year old self and peers?

Buy AMZN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm 58, and find I don't have the creative fluidity I had when I was younger (I was an artist[0], and a musician[1] -with bad hair), but I find that I have a _much_ more efficient and effective creative process.

Basically, my younger creativity was Jackson Pollock; splashing around a lot, with few boundaries, and my current creativity is a bit more like a scrimshaw artist; carefully making each line count, in a restricted and prescribed manner and medium.

A lot of the stuff I'm working on now, is stuff that just plain wouldn't have been possible -at all, when I was younger.

Basically, I have a great baseline for getting stuff done. I may not have the wild forest of creativity I once had, but what I imagine does actually end up existing, and at a pretty good quality level, and, sometimes, at a pretty sizable scope.

[0] [https://littlegreenviper.com/cruft/ArtistWithBadHair.jpg](https://littlegreenviper.com/cruft/ArtistWithBadHair.jpg)

[1] [https://littlegreenviper.com/cruft/MusicianWithBadHair.jpg](https://littlegreenviper.com/cruft/MusicianWithBadHair.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER13> Strange that the author does not mention Japan's greatest visual artist, who by his own (and others') reckoning only became truly great in his old age. Although there are many examples of great artists who do great, and novel, work late in life, I cannot think of another major artist who peaked that late.

 _From the age of 6 I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was 50 I had published a universe of designs. But all I have done before the the age of 70 is not worth bothering with. At 75 I 'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am 80 you will see real progress. At 90 I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At 100, I shall be a marvelous artist. At 110, everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before._

Unfortunately he only made it to 90.

<comment><USER14> Well, you didn't mention them either...

The quote is from Hokusai Katsushika, the artist behind the famous Great Wave print: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokusai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokusai) [https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/314154-from-the-age- of-6-i-...](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/314154-from-the-age-of-6-i-had-a- mania-for)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The linked article is beautifully-written and thought-provoking, excerpted from "The Age of Creativity: Art, Memory, My Father, and Me" by Emily Urquhart.

</comment><comment><USER16> On a related notion, I can only recommend "The Courage to Create" by Rollo May. It's a fantastic work on the nature of creativity.

<comment><USER17> Thank you for the recommendation! I can also recommend "The War of Art" by Steven Pressfield.

[https://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Steven-Pressfield- ebook/dp/B0...](https://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Steven-Pressfield- ebook/dp/B007A4SDCG/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Of course creativity changes: The older one gets, the more one learns about a variety of topics and the more life experience one has. This is precisely the reason I tell folks to make sure to learn about different things, meet different sorts of people, and step out of one's comfort zone from time to time. I think this is why drugs - especially hallucinogens - are popular among some artists (and scientists that need some creativity). Drugs give experiences of different ways of thinking.

</comment><comment><USER19> Am I the only one who reads some homoerotic fan-fiction about Michaelangelo passed off as insight, and an unskeptical recounting of a medium "revealing" something about a late artist passed off as fact, and decides that this writer clearly has absolutely nothing useful to say? Who would take such drivel seriously?

<comment><USER15> Please consider that the OP represents an artist's personal, semi-poetic reflections. Whence the vitriol?

<comment><USER19> Personal, semi-poetic reflections based on wild over-speculation and an erroneous understanding of the world is fine for a diary, but this is on Hacker News with the title "Creativity Changes as We Age", alongside actual scientific studies and sound, fact-based reasoning. This person knows nothing about the science behind creativity, or really anything about science at all.

<comment><USER15> Context matters; the linked article was excerpted from a memoir, and published under "Arts and Culture". The author made no claims to scientific rigor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Well it would be astonishing if creativity didn't change with age, considering that the brain can dramatically 'rewire' itself over time.

</comment><comment><USER21> The author is has a famous painter as a parent, has studied art history, and this article is an excerpt from their book on creativity of artists.

</comment><comment><USER22> Great article, but in no way surprising. Look at a band like the Beatles; and watch their creative progression over time.

<comment><USER23> I see better technique and less creativity.

<comment><USER22> Whoa. I see both; extremely clearly. Comparing an album like 'A Hard Day's Night' to 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band' _surely_ demonstrates a clear increase in not only technique and creativity, but also originality?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This made me think about what I want to be doing on my deathbed versus what I'm doing now.

</comment><comment><USER25> Sometimes HN seems like just a bunch of old people lying to themselves about how great getting old is.

"Ask HN: What is it like to be old? What advice would you give to younger people?"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24527978](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24527978)

You know that a young person didn't post that. If it was a young person, it's a rather sad one.

Also, I'm beginning to think that social media is getting worse or more toxic, not because of ads/privacy/etc, but because the demographics is getting older. Not only that, I bet the demands for more censorship online correlates to the aging demographics online.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's a very optimistic view, and may be true in some limited domains and individuals but generally speaking _groundbreaking_ creativity (as opposed to the natural creativity within us all which declines gradually but doesn't necessarily completely disappear as we age) is a property of the young, though it may vary from field to field.

e.g. pop music, maths, poetry, physics, etc; you're done by 30. Writers/composers maybe another 10 years or so.

I say that not to be negative, but to urge any young readers who feel they have a talent to not be complacent and assume they will be an exception, or that its related to family/financial/work commitments when you see the decline in your heroes and you will just avoid all that.

Use it before you lose it!

<comment><USER27> Here you go: [https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/nobel-laureates- by-a...](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/nobel-laureates-by-age/)

<comment><USER26> Is that supposed to back or counter my claim?

I haven't dug in, just noticed it's age at the time of award, not time of achievement.

Eg Einstein early 20s for most of his stuff, early 30s for GR. Awarded in his 40s.

<comment><USER27> As you can see, people get award in rather old age. Not many geniuses in their thirties, that made great achievement in their twenties.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN my holiday project: thingsand.me, simple image blogging - <AUTHOR>

Did this during the holidays and just finished with few extra features:
http://thingsand.me/
And an example blog: http://thingsand.me/jori
I tried to keep the platform as simple as possible and focus on the images instead of making yet another blogging platform. Time will tell for what people are going to use it. I hope to add API soon (iPhone uploader would be awesome to blog daily activities). <comment><USER2> A little security tip:

<http://thingsand.me/media/images/image_228.html>

Your uploader is blindly trusting the file extension for an image being uploaded. It's possible to upload valid images that contain HTML or other content within them.

Deletions are also done via a GET request, which makes them vulnerable to a CSRF attack. An attacker can figure out the URL for a deletion based on the content of the post: once they've done that, all they have to do is trick the user into visiting a site controlled by the attacker.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll check this out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Clickable: <http://thingsand.me/>

Looks very nice and I can see a few ideas to monetize this.

Is the directory "empty" because it's a new service or is there a limit to the number you're displaying?

What about image copyright? I can easily imagine users just using images they found on the internet as opposed to shots they've taken.

API would be cool, yes. Keep it simple please! I was thinking a Posterous-like email blogging approach would be useful.

Also, consider adding basic online image editing tools. Things like cropping, lightening/darkening, saturation, etc. Nothing too fancy but enough to get people to use this on the go, like when on holiday.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can subscribe to other blogs and their updates are shown in the directory when logged in (you can also check latest from all users with min. 3 things added). Not really clear but directory was a last minute addition. I should improve it.

Image copyright is tricky but I don't change the images and there's links to original sources so it should be about ok. The service is hosted inside EU and I don't take credit for outside images (see footer). This is also the reason there won't be any editing features for the time being.

If you have some cool ideas for monetizing I'm all ears :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like this a lot and the barrier to entry is really low. Plus the simple design is a major plus.

What's a big negative to me is the design of my feed. It's actually what's preventing me from sharing this with my friends who are fellow designes/creatives. Specifically too much real estate for the sort option on the right, dropshadows are little bit distracting, and do you need "Thing from?" Just by having the URL, I can tell that's the source.

I think what makes more sense is if the tags run across the top horizontally (above the images), and there is an add button. The reason is so that the grid remains completely full width across your container and so more results are per row.

This would also help put the name of the person above the image results instead of to the right.

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell Very impressed. A few minor points though:

I'm using Firefox 3.6.13 on a Macbook and every page appears to be a pixel or a few pixels wider than the window meaning there is an unnecessary horizontal scrollbar. It doesn't look very good.

The login could do with SSL protection.

If you don't have cookies enabled, trying to log in complains about a CSRF error. Might be worth detecting cookies being disabled and putting up a note on the login page to enable them. I admit this would only affect a tiny number of people, but still worth it imo.

<comment> mike-cardwell Also, you need a privacy policy so people know what you can/will do with their data.

And terms and conditions which deal with your rights and your users rights, and which explicitly deal with copyrighted data concerns.

<comment> mike-cardwell Also. A Facebook app would be good so people who decide to upload their photos to your website can still make them available within Facebook to their friends. Most people aren't going to want to upload to more than one site, or upload to one site and then have to log into another site to post links to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, this might be one of the best and most promising projects I've seen here on HN. I like the design and the simplicity and I can really see me using it. Good luck with the project!

<comment><AUTHOR> Cheers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Do you know about or are you influenced by: ffffound.com ? Great site.

Keeping it (or having an option to style it) VERY bare bones like that would be awesome.

Also, think about what you can do on your site that would be impossible on tumblr. For example I think they have a limit of something like 15 posts per page. Beat them in the images-only game.

Plans for custom domains?

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree, ffffound is awesome :)

You nailed it: limiting posts would be interesting approach but for now I just want people to get started. Have to think about it more.

Not sure about custom domain as the platform doesn't allow much customization. But lets see after it gains little traction. Until then I'll go with about.me approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Holy crap. I know tons of people who would use this. Only problem is getting them to migrate from using facebook to blog their images, to using this, which is (in my opinion), a much better user experience.

Then again, I'm not a big fan of facebook.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is very nice and simple, I like it a lot. One thing I would change is to make the "Select the thing to be added" pane disappear after I've selected something, or add a close button so I can get rid of it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Really nice idea and execution, well done! I already have a list growing in my head of friends who'll love this.

BTW a small but prominent typo: "beatiful" on the front page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Uups, how did I mist that one. Now fixed, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Pretty badass. I might be crazy for suggesting this for this idea(as this is pretty off) but it'd be terrific if I could take a snapshot of a page. For instance, I run the tool, the page I'm currently fades to black opacity(~60%) and I select the portion I'd like to share and click SAVE. It's automatically posted to my unique photoblog without me having to login(ugh, the login part is really too much work). As a user, I'd love to open up a photoblog of parts of sites which I love.

Cheers and good luck with the project, you're on a great track

<comment><AUTHOR> In-page screenshots would be awesome (especially for designers). Unfortunately I don't have mad skills with JS but if there's someone who would like to make this I'm all ears :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hey, just checked it out. Awesome stuff, but what's the difference between this one and Posterous, or Tumblr?

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried to make much simpler and image focused service than Tumblr and Posterous. I love Tumblr and have been using it in the past but I feel it's too close to Blogger/Wordpress level blogging platform.

There's a reason why posts at Things are limited to only images with max 160 chars of text and link to source :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is just beautiful. Love idea, love design, love execution :)

Keep working on it and good luck!

</comment><comment><USER13> It would be cool if the bookmarklet text was "♥".

<comment><AUTHOR> As a sucker for unicode hearts I'll test this out. Great idea

<comment><USER14> In case you didn't know, weheartit.com's extension symbol is a heart. Might be confusing for users of both services.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haven't heard about this before. Thanks for pointing it out.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A few days with Google Contributor - <AUTHOR> http://dangoldin.com/2015/04/28/a-few-days-with-google-contributor/

<comment><USER2> I've been using it, it's a good start, but can't believe OpenSky got 15% of my $10 and I don't even recall it showing Google Ads, but maybe that's from retargeting.</comment>


Ask HN: How will you spend your extra second tomorrow? - <AUTHOR>

It's not often we get free time, and I intend to spend my extra second wisely. What will you do? <comment><USER2> [http://spendyourleapsecondhere.com/](http://spendyourleapsecondhere.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> for anyone wondering: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second)

</comment><comment><USER4> Working, so that i'll charge 1/3600th of dollar more.

</comment><comment><USER5> Can you provide some explanation? What extra second?

<comment><USER6> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second)</comment></comment>


Distance Constraints with PostgreSQL and PostGIS - <AUTHOR> http://davidcel.is/blog/2015/01/29/distance-constraints-with-postgresql-and-postgis/

<comment><AUTHOR> Note: there's an error that I'll correct once I'm back at my computer... All my latitude longitude pairs are flipped :(</comment>


Graphene optical lens 200 nm thick breaks the diffraction limit - <AUTHOR> http://www.swinburne.edu.au/news/latest-news/2016/01/focus-on-results.php <comment><USER2> Link to the paper: [http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150922/ncomms9433/pdf/ncom...](http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150922/ncomms9433/pdf/ncomms9433.pdf)

This is an excellent result. It could also provide an interest boost to solar in terms of $/watt by focusing more light into a small area. Fun times.

<comment><USER3> > It could also provide an interest boost to solar in terms of $/watt by > focusing more light into a small area. Fun times.

I can't find a single use of this for solar based on the specifications of the lens in the paper. Also photovoltaic really doesn't need focusing it doesn't give you anything because eventually the amount of power you get per surface area is the same so it doesn't matter if you cover a 50 sq/m area with a lens and focus it on a 5 sq/m cell or have a 50 sq/m cell to begin with, also considering that photovoltaic cell efficiency drops with temperature you really don't want to focus any light on them as it will tank your power production.

Thermal solar does need focusing but mirrors will actually work better than this for that application as well because you need to reflect the light to a central location anyhow an a collection mirror does both at the same time.

<comment><USER4> See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrator_photovoltaics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrator_photovoltaics)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems like every month brings a new "miracle" application for graphene. Are these breakthroughs as surprising for the experts as they are for the layperson? If not, what fundamental properties would allow one to extrapolate its applications?

</comment><comment><USER6> A molecular scale Fresnel lens! Now we can create retro style nano-projectors, even if the transparency will be thicker than the lens.

<comment><USER7> Is it really a Fresnel lens? I was thinking it was more of a diffraction grating. The paper describes it as

> The 3D focusing is a result of the interferences of wavelets originated in > the lens plane from different zones19, as illustrated in Fig. 1d.

Which suggests it's more about interference than about Snell's law.

<comment><USER8> Things with rings are generally called Fresnel lenses, even if its not about interference, see:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_plate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_plate)

<comment><USER9> Fresnel zone plate, yes. Fresnel lens, no; they are not lenses.

This does look like a microscopic zone plate. This is not a new idea though, it's how we focus X-rays as most materials don't refract X-rays very well; I guess they just managed to make a really small one. I wonder in what sense it "breaks the diffraction limit".

<comment><USER10> It does not "break" the diffraction limit. The title is inaccurate. The actual paper doesn't say they've broken the diffraction limit. They only achieve a subwavelength focal point.

I'll make an attempt to mansplain this...

The actual diffraction limit depends on wavelength (lamda) and the numerical aperture (NA) of the lens. Diffraction limit is ~ lamda/(2*NA).

In traditional objective lenses used in confocal scanning microscopes, the diffraction limit has been ~0.5 microns. If you increase NA, it also means decreasing working distance-- to the point where the focal point meets the surface of the lens.

They've managed to increase NA with their zone plate, but since their "lens" thickness is "200 nm", they still have a useable working distance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Would this also allow visible light microscopes to zoom in further than they currently can?

</comment><comment><USER12> What is the operating temperature of such lenses? Is this one of those magic devices that only exists near absolute zero?

I assume these can be built into sheets to focus light onto masks. No doubt intel might be interested.

<comment><USER13> "Just over two years ago, PhD student at Swinburne's Centre for Micro- Photonics, Xiaorui Zheng, tried fashioning a lens using graphene oxide — a variation of the super-strong, atom-thick carbon material, graphene. The team, led by Associate Professor Baohua Jia, developed a three-dimensional printer that could quickly and cheaply produce the lens using a sprayable graphene oxide solution. Lasers were used to precisely pattern the surface, creating three concentric rings of reduced graphene oxide, which enabled its extraordinary focus"

No I think it's purely geometrical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> imaging if the lens being used for the light field display, could be another solution for a mixed reality display device that the Magic Leap is developing.

<comment><USER15> Even more "traditional" VR/AR devices would benefit from techniques to make thinner lenses. Advances in optical engineering will have as big a part to play in that sort of thing as processing power and faster chips.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I find the "billionth of a metre thick" phrasing painful, but I guess it's better than if they'd written that it was "a trillionth of a kilometre thick"

<comment><USER17> BTW, it's not even 1 billionth of a metre thick. It's 200 nm. That's 0.2 microns. That's 2 * 10^-7. It's 0.2 of a millionth.

They should have just said 0.2 microns instead. It carries just as much actual meaning for the layperson, and it's a lot easier to parse if you are scientifically literate.

<comment><USER18> I thought convention in SI units was to drop down a level when at less than 1 of a unit..?

<comment><USER19> A pretty common approach (at least in Canada) is to use prefixes at intervals of 1000 - mm, m, km and then larger unit to one decimal for large values - 700m as 0.7km, 0.9l instead on 900ml, and so-on.

you'll rarely see cl, dg, or hm used here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > It's early days, but the new technology has the potential to reduce the size > and weight of mobile phones in which cameras are currently dependent on > thick and heavy lenses.

Maybe by comparison to this, but hardly anyone cares about the size or weight of their phone camera lens.

<comment><USER21> Counter example: the protruding camera bump on iPhone 6/6S.

<comment><USER22> I like to think that's more due to the total thickness of the camera unit, not so much the lens. That, or the required distance between the lens and sensor. Either way, it's a bad design decision, one they're embarrassed of themselves (it's edited out on sideways images of the device on apple's website)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My apartment mate (currently a PhD student in Chemistry) noted that the research is cool, but article this is based on in Nature Communications is pay to publish, so err on the side of skepticism.

A quick Google search found this:

[http://www.the- scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/41072/...](http://www.the- scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/41072/title/Nature-Communications-Goes- OA/)

"At present, researchers can choose an open-access option when submitting a manuscript to the journal, selecting one of three publishing licenses: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY), the more restrictive Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC- ND), or Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA). Authors pay a fee of $5,200 to publish a study under a CC BY license, and $4,800 for each of the other two... Update (September 23): After this article was published, Nature Publishing Group's Amy Bourke responded to The Scientist, noting the flat article processing charge (APC) to publish in Nature Communications: $5,200"

Edit: other users seem to note that the journal is very reputable. I do not know myself, was reporting my apartment mate's reaction since he is much more knowledgeable in the area. It is clear from conversation I mis-understood his response. Apologies.

<comment><USER24> Uhm, Nature Communications is a subjournal of Nature Publishing Group. There is literally no more reputable publishing group. None. Nature, their flagship journal, is the highest impact factor journal in the world.

<comment><USER25> I upvoted you, but I want to add text in agreement since such upvotes can't be seen as an endorsement. gavman's warning about the reputation of the venue is unwarranted.

<comment><USER23> I talked to my apartment mate about it. He said that when he showed the article to his advisor, she had the reaction of "they're pay to publish". I can't speak to the reputability of the journal, just providing his response.

<comment><USER24> EDIT: sounds like a misunderstanding more than anything.

Here's [0] a link to the rankings of nature journals. Nature Communications is 3rd in general science, and Nature is 1st.

Tim Gowers and the freedom of knowledge group are pushing hard on journal fees.

[0][http://www.nature.com/npg_/company_info/impact_factors.html](http://www.nature.com/npg_/company_info/impact_factors.html)

Old post :

I can speak to the reputability of your friend's program. The statement is jaw dropping. It is so wrong as to make it hard for me to believe he goes to an accredited university.

<comment><USER23> As I said in a comment below, he's at a top tier program (CMU), so it's likely I didn't understand his adverse reaction. You mention below his/his advisor's adverse reaction may be about "a movement to move to no cost journals", not about reputation. When I see him tonight I'll ask.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Using Pattern Recognition to Automatically Crop Framed Art - <AUTHOR> http://artsy.github.io/blog/2014/09/24/using-pattern-recognition-to-automatically-crop-framed-art

<comment><USER2> If you ever took pictures of paintings at a museum with your phone (some museums do allow it, for example in Sweden) you would want an app that does what this post describes. It is clearly nontrivial to do it well in this type of processing aka blind processing. Author: check out the book by Cichocki.</comment>


Rise of the Shaman Programmer - <AUTHOR> https://blog.sourcerer.io/the-rise-of-the-shaman-programmer-f13a54810961 <comment><USER2> Personally how much I understand the system I am working on is a function of myself and the system at that point in time.

Sometimes I have been new to a system and had to fix a problem in a hurry and had an incomplete understanding.

Sometimes six months later I understand what really went wrong.

Years ago there was a bug in the Linux 2.4 kernel that I understood so far as "sometimes there is a null pointer in this particular place" and was able to make a patch that mitigated the effect of the null pointer. I never understood why there was a null pointer in that place and it wasn't worth doing because Linux 2.4 was hopelessly broken.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's good to draw attention to this, but is it new? Newton said "We stand on the shoulders of giants."

The potential(actual?) problem with this is it can necessitate crippling specialization. Who maintains an overview? Who directs goals and avoids harmful drift is the overall direction?

Maintaining the overview is perfectly practical, but who does it, what is their motivation, and how is it legitimized?</comment>


Ubuntu announces 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) Beta 1 - <AUTHOR> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QuantalQuetzal/TechnicalOverview/Beta1

<comment><USER2> Note that this version of Ubuntu will not be shipping with Python 2. That's kind of a big deal.

<comment><USER3> I wonder if this will cause much strife. I run ArchLinux, for which the default /usr/bin/python is Python 3. Often I run into issues with (admittedly software not from the repos) which uses the

#!/usr/bin/python

shebang, and expects it to reference Python 2, thus causing breakage.

<comment><USER4> There's always:

#!/usr/bin/env python

too

<comment><USER5> which btw wouldn't help at all with op's scenario of Python 2 scripts finding an unexpected Python 3 interpreter.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. Whenever a script is made, it should have #!/usr/bin/env interpreter# as the first line.

#!/usr/bin/env python2 #!/usr/bin/env python3

Explicitly declaring the required version fixes that problem. In arch, most of the PKGBUILDs will have a line to sed the explicit line into the file in place of the generic python line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was about to say "What the hell? Beta already?" and then I realized it was almost October. Summer flew past, wow...

</comment><comment><USER8> _There is no longer a traditional CD-sized image, DVD or alternate image, but rather a single 800MB Ubuntu image that can be used from USB or DVD_

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

<comment><USER9> What the heck is that? A pig looking at the golden gate bridge? What does it mean?

I wonder how many people were still using the CD sized image. I'm guessing not very many, and with the size constraints, Canonical were probably itching to get rid of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/flipping- tables-%E2%95%AF%E2%9...](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/flipping- tables-%E2%95%AF%E2%96%A1%EF%BC%89%E2%95%AF%EF%B8%B5-%E2%94%BB%E2%94%81%E2%94%BB)

<comment><USER10> I would rather not have to resort to that sort of stuff here on HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really think it's time Ubuntu ditches the bizarre animal names. This one is going to be barely pronounceable for most of the world. 12.10 would suffice

<comment><USER12> They're almost at the end of the alphabet. What are they going to do next? They won't stop until "Zebra" though.

<comment><USER13> They've been avoiding mainstream animals lately.

My guess is the Zonure[1], since it is South African and looks awesome.

Although if they continue the trend of increasingly hard to pronounce names they might go with Zyzzyva.

[1] [http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4033/4447517348_9bf8d8b2a6.jp...](http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4033/4447517348_9bf8d8b2a6.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looks like Wayland is not included in this release after all.

</comment><comment><USER15> As a developer from Guatemala, I must say I am proud.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice :)

I didn't understand the reference until I saw this: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan_quetzal>

"The quetzal is the currency of Guatemala. It is named after the national bird of Guatemala ..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks like this one will handle dual monitor properly with nvidia cards at least.

<comment> mike-cardwell I plugged my 12.04 laptop into a projector the other day for the first time, and dual monitors worked just fine, without doing anything.

<comment><USER16> Try fullscreen Sdl or rotating one monitor's picture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A (bit more) stable Telepathy stack for KDE is a big deal.

Also LightDM and guest mode finally come to Kubuntu. I hope it gets backported to 12.04. I'd prefer keeping my LTS system.

</comment><comment><USER18> Using it now, but kinda stuck on an ia32-libs problem

[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ia32-libs/+bug/101...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ia32-libs/+bug/1016294)

</comment><comment><USER19> Bummer, I didn't see anything about hidpi support in there.</comment>


Adwords Triangulation Method - <AUTHOR> http://www.stompernet.com/blog/marketing/stompernet-going-natural-30/ <comment><USER2> The link doesn't work ... gives me a timeout</comment>


Build realtime application with gRPC/protobuf/HTTP 2 in the browser - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nicolasgere/tawny/tree/master/dist/typescript-web <comment><USER2> ..this doesn't actually use HTTP 2 though? It's using grpc-web, which relies on a proxy to downgrade HTTP 2 to HTTP 1.1. Thus it can't support key grpc features like bidirectional streaming.</comment>


[HN Meetup] Anyone around Sunday night in Palo Alto? - <AUTHOR>

My housemates and I are going to put on a meetup for the folks in the southbay/penn. Probably around 7-8.
We have a house with enough parking, a large front projection setup, and a wide array of beer/spirits (although I don't see this as a big drinking event).
I wanted to gauge interest first, however. Just want to make sure there is some critical mass. <comment><AUTHOR> Well it does not look like we hit anything close to a critical mass.

I suppose the HN demographic has grown to the point where it is difficult to get one of these types of articles on the front page.

If anyone is still looking for something, remember there is a super happy dev house on saturday.

</comment><comment><USER2> I'll be there. I'll try to get my roommates to come too.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds good.

</comment><comment><USER4> maybe +2</comment>


An Efficient Way to Extract the Main Topics from a Sentence - <AUTHOR> http://thetokenizer.com/2013/05/09/efficient-way-to-extract-the-main-topics-of-a-sentence/ <comment><USER2> This is neat.

Shlomib, you might be interested in SHRDLU [1][2] if you are not aware of it. It was developed by Terry Winograd [3] for his dissertation [4] at MIT. It is a _natural language understanding_ [5] parser that allows you to interact with a small world of 3D solids.

I think you will find the paper interesting, because it goes into detail on sentence structure and associated parsing.

Here is a sample dialogue with the program, taken from Wikipedia:

      Person:   Pick up a big red block.
      Computer: OK.
      Person:   Grasp the pyramid.
      Computer: I don't understand which pyramid you mean.
      Person    (changing their mind): Find a block which is taller than the one you are holding and put it into the box.
      Computer: By "it", I assume you mean the block which is taller than the one I am holding.
      Computer: OK.
      Person:   What does the box contain?
      Computer: The blue pyramid and the blue block.
      Person:   What is the pyramid supported by?
      Computer: The box.
      Person:   How many blocks are not in the box?
      Computer: Four of them.
      Person:   Is at least one of them narrower than the one which I told you to pick up?
      Computer: Yes, the red cube.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU>

[2] <http://hci.stanford.edu/winograd/shrdlu/>

[3] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Winograd>

[4] <http://hci.stanford.edu/winograd/shrdlu/AITR-235.pdf>

[5] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_understanding>

<comment><USER3> Why does this seem so scary/amazing?

It's basically taking what computers already do really well today and adding a language "mask" onto it. Yet it still blows me away.

<comment><USER4> What's really amazing is how old SHRDLU is. It was developed back in the late 60's, early 70's.

Although... I guess you could look at it two ways: Be amazed at what SHRDLU could do in 1970, or be disappointed that, given that we had that in 1970, we don't have the "Star Trek Computer" yet in 2013.

<comment><USER5> SHRDLU is definitely amazing, especially given its age, but one's amazement is tempered a little bit (or maybe enhanced, depending on perspective) when you realize that it achieved what it did primarily through really great engineering rather that some fundamental insight about language. Since SHRDLU's world is so limited, Winograd was able to explicitly program every facet of its language understanding. Unsurprisingly, this approach is totally not scalable and this reveals a little about why we don't have fully human- like language programs.

<comment><USER6> I think people underestimate how explicitly-programmed human language is in humans. I'm starting to think that this might be _the_ central problem in NLP right now.

Humans have good natural pattern-matching engines in their heads, but the entire body of syntax and vocabulary available to a person is the result of the memorization of a _huge_ amount of text. I suspect the majority of people rarely ever develop truly novel words or phrases on their own (with the notable exception of Lewis Carroll). (Aside: in fact, this is exactly how "memes" work in the modern online sense; one person invents a novel word or phrase, and that is then parroted by a huge number of other people.)

I recently started work on an attempt to improve the classification of English vocabulary by grade level. I built a database using publicly-available sources, and the number of unique words that the average child has been exposed to by the 8th grade is _mind boggling_. One source cited 15,000 unique words and over a million words read annually.

Aside from the words themselves, children have also by that age memorized an even larger number of phrases, pieces of sentence structure, and full sentences.

I think that because we aren't able to enumerate everything we've memorized, we don't fully appreciate just how much data is stored in our heads. As a result, I think it's possible that computer science researchers have largely been chasing a ghost in terms of some kind of magical "understanding" of language; the answer to NLP might actually be to simply store and access a terabytes-sized data structure of vocabulary and phrases.

<comment><USER7> _the answer to NLP might actually be to simply store and access a terabytes- sized data structure of vocabulary and phrases._

Isn't that effectively what google translate is doing? And it's results are... varied.

<comment><USER8> I get the impression that Google Translate is strictly doing it in a Bayesian sense. For example, the recent "he praised the iPad" debacle. [1][2]

[1] <http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=38538> [2] [http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/04/google-now-and-google- trans...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/04/google-now-and-google-translate- praise-the-ipad/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Cool idea, but basically reinvents chunking, which NLTK already has (<http://nltk.org/api/nltk.chunk.html>). Keep up the writing and NLP research though :)

</comment><comment><USER10> Nice writeup. A few comments:

So you're just identifying NPs and VPs in a sentence? So lets say I run your program, and I get NPs "Instagram" and "Facebook", and the VP "acquired." The question is, who did what to whom? Did Facebook acquire Instagram, or did Instagram acquire Facebook?

Second, I think you're way over-emphasizing the supposed slowness of CFG parsing. Yes, the complexity is O(n^3) in the length of the sentence, but in practice, n is usually small. Modern statistical PCFG parsers are _fast_.

<comment> alok-g My understanding is different, so please correct me / supply missing information.

From what I understand, the average length of a typical written sentence is n = ~27. OK, this is small by itself, but Stanford Parser (lexicalized PCFG) I am using needs about 1 second to parse a sentence of this size. Imagine how slow that is on a computer time-scale by comparing it to string-length operation on the same sentence.

I do encounter many sentences that are as much as 100 words long (and reading them myself, find nothing wrong with them). At about four times the length, these take about a minute to parse!

I am trying to find information about speeds of other PCFG parsers, including Collins, Charniak, Berkeley, etc. I understand dependency parsers are faster but also generally lag in accuracy.

<comment><USER11> The Stanford parser is particularly slow --- it's in java, and it's written for research more than anything. The C&C CCG parser runs at about 60-80 sentences a second, although it gives either CCG constituents or dependencies -- so the output may take some interpretation.

Shift-reduce dependency parsers are linear time, and are giving state-of-the- art results. My parser's currently a pain in the ass to install, as it hasn't really been released yet, but it does hundreds of sentences a second. Accuracy is state-of-the-art -- 92-93% depending on the beam width and the evaluation set (Stanford or MALT dependencies).

<https://github.com/syllog1sm/redshift/> . You'll want the develop branch. It's GPL licensed.

It's implemented in Cython (i.e., almost all the code is Cython --- I'm not using it just for the speed critical bits), which would make it easy to work with if you're using Python. But, as I said...I don't claim it's currently fit for human consumption.

A C++ implementation of the same algorithm is here: <http://www.sutd.edu.sg/yuezhang.aspx> . Note his papers too -- he did some of the important work on this line of research.

The last few years of work in shift-reduce dependency parsing have been a bit of a break-through in parsing, imo.

<comment><USER12> _The Stanford parser is particularly slow --- it's in java, and it's written for research more than anything._

The choice of language is not what causes the slowness of the Stanford parser. It's the choice of search strategy, which trades-off speed for accuracy.

 _Shift-reduce dependency parsers are linear time, and are giving state-of- the-art results._

No, this is incorrect.

The choice of parsing logic (shift-reduce, dependency) and the search strategy (greedy, sometimes erroneously called "deterministic") are orthogonal. It's the greedy search strategy that leads to linear time performance.

The choice of logic determines the lower-bound (best-case) on parsing complexity. If you do exhaustive search for the exact solution of a shift- reduce dependency parser, it is worst-case exponential. In practice, you don't do exact search, and by using a beam search approximation you can get observed linear-time performance.

[edit: You can read my thesis if you are not familiar with what a parsing logic is.]

I am not aware of state-of-the-art results from greedy shift-reduce parsers. Do you mind sharing?

<comment><USER11> > The choice of language is not what causes the slowness of the Stanford > parser. It's the choice of search strategy, which trades-off speed for > accuracy.

Even amongst chart parsers it's not a very quick implementation.

> The choice of parsing logic (shift-reduce, dependency) and the search > strategy (greedy, sometimes erroneously called "deterministic") are > orthogonal. It's the greedy search strategy that leads to linear time > performance.

They're really only conceptually orthogonal, because in practice once you choose shift-reduce you're always going to choose greedy/deterministic/whatever search. I'm not aware of any shift- reduce/transition-based parsing results that don't use 1-best or beam search.

> I am not aware of state-of-the-art results from greedy shift-reduce parsers. > Do you mind sharing?

Zhang and Nivre (2011) [http://www.sutd.edu.sg/cmsresource/faculty/yuezhang/acl11j.p...](http://www.sutd.edu.sg/cmsresource/faculty/yuezhang/acl11j.pdf) 93.5 UAS on Stanford basic dependencies. This is the best published result on the dataset, and the best published dependency parsing result for English.

Probably the parser is still worse than the C&J reranking parser, when 200 parses are supplied to the reranker. But I'd be very surprised if it wasn't better than the Stanford parser, and probably also the Berkeley parser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The sentence subject is one thing, the sentence <i>topic</i> might be quite another.

Consider sentences like: "He joined the not-yet-famous Liverpool band in early 1958."

To many human beings the topic is quickly obvious. Parsing won't do the trick.

<comment><USER14> The only reason that sentence is "obvious" to many people is because we have a reference to a famous band from Liverpool that got its start in the late 50's/early 60's that is already embedded in our brain's library of facts.

Removed from that context human beings see that sentence as equally meaningless as a parser, because it is. I'd imagine many young people (who don't have the "correct" reference points) wouldn't have a clue that the sentence is about George Harrison.

In order to properly handle this sentence one would need the same external reference that your brain has. Without the reference the sentence can be discarded as incomplete, since that's what a human would do too.

<comment><USER15> You don't necessarily need knowledge to distinguish a topic from a subject though. It's a grammatical distinction. See

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic%E2%80%93comment#Definitio...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic%E2%80%93comment#Definitions) e.g. in the sentence (3) As for the little girl, the dog bit her "the dog" is the subject NP, "the little girl" is the topic. That toy example is perfectly parsable without semantics or even probabilities (though take any real-world sentence and I'm betting you'll need more than just grammar).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is neat!

The article gives an example which I find a bit confusing.

>I ran it on this sentence -

> _"Swayy is a beautiful new dashboard for discovering and curating online > content."_

>And got this result -

> _This sentence is about: Swayy, beautiful new dashboard, online content_

That misses "discovering" and "curating", which I think are the most important parts of that sentence.

<comment><USER17> Nah, it filtered out the meaningless buzzwords.

It's a dashboard for online content. That pretty much implies the picking and finding of said online content to be displayed on the dashboard.

<comment><USER18> Huh? "Curating" and "discovering" may be overused tech verbs, but they are vital in describing what the "dashboard" does. For example, you would never describe the Google Analytics dashboard as something that curates or discovers.

And far worse than buzzwords are adjectives. Does "beautiful" add anything to that sentence?

<comment><USER17> Google Analytics has nothing whatsoever to do with online content.

<comment><USER18> You're missing the point. The OP is talking about a system for interpreting sentences in bulk and extracting useful keywords. "beautiful new" are not useful, and arguably, "dashboard" is not particularly useful. "Curating" and "discovering", while grating to our ears, are definitely descriptive words of purpose...because there are "dashboards" that have nothing to do with "curating"...so ostensibly, "curating" has some use as a keyword

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Or you could just drop stop words and gerunds. This is another post from "TheTokenizer" that over simplifies a complex problem and creates devistatingly bad results.

The method described doesn't tell you what the sentence is about it tells you which things aren't verbs and articles and does a poor job of it.

Granted single sentence keyword extraction is not easy, but this is an awful approach. You'd be much better using Word Frequency analysis to determine the rarest words in the sentence.

</comment><comment><USER20> Just apply TFIDF to text and it extracts the most interesting words out of the phrase - it's dead simple. You just count words and do a little scoring and sorting. Example applied to tweets. Check out how the least significant words come out last. Some words have been dropped (those with frequency less than 5 in a corpus of a few million phrases).

\</comment><comment>

\- "math final today 6-17-09 piece of cake hopefully i should do well since i m a math nerd amp english amp social"

\- math, nerd, studies, piece, cake, english, amp, final, hopefully, social, since, should, well, today, do, of,

\</comment><comment>

\- "anyone want an incredibly designed unique limited edition tee for the summer check out www artcotic com"

\- tee, designed, incredibly, unique, edition, limited, summer, anyone, check, www, want, com, an, out, for, the,

</comment><comment><USER21> As a working computational linguist I shiver anytime human language technology is discussed on HN. Smart developers (who don't work on human language) are shockingly ignorant about natural language processing. For instance, this article reinvents "chunking". People who are interested in these problems are advised to read the entire NLTK book and Jurafsky & Martin textbook before reinventing square wheels. </$.02>

</comment><comment><USER22> For some NLP, I really suggest using OpenNLP (<http://opennlp.apache.org/>) from Apache. It has libraries that can be trained to do different NLP tasks like sentence splitting, tokenizers, POS tagging, and document classification. I still didn't manage to use all of them but in my experience, it's very easy to use. Documentation is good too!

<comment><USER4> I'm a fan of OpenNLP as well, although I haven't done a lot of performance evaluation around it yet. Apache Stanbol[1] is also a very interesting project, which leverages OpenNLP (among other things) for doing semantic entity extraction from text.

Also, FWIW, I wrote an article[2] a while back, focusing on Open Source NLP tools. It was aimed slightly more at business users than developers, so it doesn't dig real deep on the tech side, but there is a list of popular OSS NLP tools that people interested in this topic might find useful.

And if I can throw in another shameless plug (only because I think it will genuinely be of interest, of course), I'll point out this post[3] on Prolog resources, since Prolog often finds application in the NLP world.

[1]: <http://stanbol.apache.org>

[2]: [http://osintegrators.com/opensoftwareintegrators|howyoucanbe...](http://osintegrators.com/opensoftwareintegrators|howyoucanbenefitfromopensourcenaturallanguageprocessing)

[3]: [http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2013/05/prolog-im-going-to- learn...](http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2013/05/prolog-im-going-to-learn- prolog.html)

<comment><USER23> _And if I can throw in another shameless plug (only because I think it will genuinely be of interest, of course), I'll point out this post[3] on Prolog resources, since Prolog often find application in the NLP world_

You missed the nicest and most satisfying book ;):

<http://www.mtome.com/Publications/PNLA/pnla-digital.html>

It is simultaneously an introduction to Prolog and natural language parsing using Prolog.

<comment><USER4> Very cool. That post was originally written quite some time ago, and it was never meant to be an exhaustive list. That said, I'll add this to the list as well. Thanks for the pointer!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Good job. But I need to make the note that the title is confusing to NLP/ML practitioners. 'topics' usually refer to clusters as captured by so-called 'topic models' [1], the output of an unsupervised learning method, usually a variant of LDA. [1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_model>

</comment><comment><USER25> I was interested in this to parse some user entered data extracted from Facebook, and found Text Razor[1] to be pretty good at this.

Natural Language is a beautiful thing.

[1] <http://www.textrazor.com/>

</comment><comment><USER26> Without having Brown and NLTK in Node.js, I'm not sure how well I can add this to my port of shlomibs original code. For those who haven't seen yet, I wrote a port of the first part of this here <https://github.com/jbrooksuk/node- summary>

Maybe later I'll give it a crack :)

<comment><USER27> <https://github.com/NaturalNode/natural>

<comment><USER26> Heh, I raised an issue on my GitHub page <https://github.com/jbrooksuk/node- summary/issues/2> and found natural shortly after.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> <https://github.com/taf2/rb-brill-tagger>. For anyone usin ruby can do something very similar much of the code is c++ with smaller ruby API ... It's pretty good bug reports welcome...

</comment><comment><USER29> What happens when you apply it repeatedly? Does the text keep shrinking?

</comment><comment><USER30> I smell a $30 million acquisition in the near future..

<comment><USER23> By those standards, many companies will be worth billions ;).

(Chunking is not exactly new and PCFG parsing is pretty fast these days.)

<comment><USER5> I think this was a sarcastic commentary on the Summly acquisition.

<comment><USER30> bingo :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Building a Game with a 6-Year-Old - <AUTHOR> http://johnpolacek.com/2014/11/29/building-game-6-year-old/

<comment><USER2> This is awesome. I am hoping to start teaching my kid programming at age 5. I've been working with him on his reading since he was around 2. He is 4 now. He reads pretty well, but amazingly well for a 4 year old. We are on level 2/3 books at the moment.

I was hoping to have taught him basic math skills by now. But unfortunately I have not had any success with that. He doesn't understand subtraction yet, and his addition still consists mostly of counting.

I didn't want to push him to hard, because it is more important for me to instill in him a love of learning rather than teach him specifically how to read, or his multiplication tables. As a result we haven't progressed as quickly as I had hoped, but I couldn't be more proud of him.

The trick I use to get him to read is "no video games until reading is done". There are plenty of days where he opts to not read and not play video games. And there are plenty of days where he reminds me he can't play until he reads.

<comment><USER3> Dunno, man. I just let my kids be kids.

<comment><USER2> He is still very much a kid. If you met him, you wouldn't know that he could read unless you asked. To give him this skill took 10-15 minutes every few days over two years with months in between of no reading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Phaser is awesome. If your kid has an idea for a game, odds are there is already a decent example or tutorial out there to get you started. [http://phaser.io](http://phaser.io)

</comment><comment><USER4> Been doing a game with my (now) 5 year old daughter for the last year. Also uses her own hand drawn artwork, which in itself makes for interesting challenges (mostly collision detection for non tiled sprites) but she's very much the creative director to my lead developer. She loves that we can but is less interested in the how at this age

<comment><USER5> If you are using Phaser, you can use PhysicsEditor ([https://www.codeandweb.com/physicseditor](https://www.codeandweb.com/physicseditor)) with the P2 physics to auto-trace a picture into a polygon and load it into Phaser. It is easy and only takes a few minutes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> very cool! I'll try this with my 4.5 year old - he's just about getting a hang of an internet as an 'abstract invisible something' \- that like electricity is out there; that it can be turned on and off. And when it's on he's able to see pictures of lion tiger and other animals on our tablet. I might just start by replacing car gif with a lion. Lion on wheels - should be fun heh! :D

</comment><comment><USER7> Cool! I used to build Lego with my dad, but doing things with computers was mostly by myself. It would be really fun to just build what a child wants, without diluting the creativity with adult 'thinking'.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd recommend Construct2, Friendly, gentle learning curve

</comment><comment><USER9> Super cool. I hope to do this kind of thing with my kids one day. Thanks for sharing it.</comment>


Ask HN: Would you be able to explain a trillion dollar GREEN company idea? - <AUTHOR> For example: recycling.
Current recycling is far from optimal. A company could exploit this and raise recycling to a whole new standard.
Its raw material costs would be zero or very low, its logistics costs would be high, but by using technology and automation it could definitely become (very) profitable.
And to take on the task of retransforming, by extensive chemical engineering, all the discarded products into vanilla raw material, and to exploit the non-renewable rest as a source of energy for the whole system by burning it.
Any other ideas, guys ? <comment><USER2> Carbon removal companies ? Renewable energy such as space-based solar ?</comment>


Language and social signaling - <AUTHOR> http://clipperhouse.com/2013/08/24/language-and-social-signaling/

<comment><USER2> Yes a human language or grammar doesn't come into being the same way a programming language does, but the notion of correctness still exists and I'd probably define it as:

Correct === Tradition + Lots 'o' Time

And Matt wasn't arguing this, but I have to link to Eric Lippert whenever I can so:

The idea programming language isn't 'correct' is kinda wonky. As I learned from Eric Lippert's [Three umpires]([http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2009/11/09/three...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2009/11/09/three- umpires.aspx)):

      Three baseball umpires are having lunch together.

      The first umpire says "Well, a lot of them are balls, and a lot of them are
      strikes, but I always calls 'em as I sees 'em."

      The second umpire says "Hmph. I calls 'em as they are."

      The third umpire slowly looks at his two colleagues and declares "They ain't
      nothin' until I calls 'em."

When a designed language is presented to you, you can't really argue about correctness, only suitability to a particular purpose or taste.

</comment><comment><USER3> oh, language, so happy to find you, Matt</comment>


How to: Marshalling/Unmarshalling Java Objects into XML File using Spring OXM - <AUTHOR> http://www.adobocode.com/spring/marshallingunmarshalling-java-objects-into-xml-file-using-spring-oxm

<comment><AUTHOR> any word from XML people?</comment>


Unwind: A privilege-separated DNS recursive nameserver for every laptop [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan2019_unwind.pdf <comment><USER2> [https://man.openbsd.org/unwind.8](https://man.openbsd.org/unwind.8) uses libunbound; it detects whether local DHCP DNS is working, works correctly with captive portals, and supports opportunistic or strict DNSSEC.

This was discussed in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19738313](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19738313) in April

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it basically just a stripped down version of Unbound or does it provide any additional functionality?

<comment><USER3> The blog post gives some hints at what it does differently but makes odd claims about unbound not working with captive portals, which I've never had any problems with. But maybe I've just been on well behaved networks or something. Look forward to this being done and ported.

<comment><USER4> It depends how your unbound is configured. In my case, I have unbound running on my laptop configured as a recursive resolver; i.e: it will not query the DHCP provided DNS.

In networks with captive portals, the DHCP provided DNS will have a record for a URL where the user has to enter credentials or at the very least agree to the terms and conditions. Very often though, that URL only resolves locally, so in my setup the captive portal setup doesn't work seamlessly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Mental note: Find the talk where these slides were presented.

<comment><USER6> BSDCan 2019, in Ottawa happening this week!

[https://www.bsdcan.org/2019/schedule/events/1055.en.html](https://www.bsdcan.org/2019/schedule/events/1055.en.html)

Recordings tends to show up YouTube.. later. This talk was also live-streamed earlier today.

Video from previous years: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuQhwHMJ0yK2zlfyRr1XZ_Q/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuQhwHMJ0yK2zlfyRr1XZ_Q/videos)

I'm always surprised this conference isn't larger, it always has a wide breadth of low-level technical C/systems talks, with a mix of Unix/networking sysadmin content.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Founding a company – what's your one piece of advice? Why? - <AUTHOR>

If you had to give ONE piece of advice to a friend who's preparing to found a company, what would it be? And why?<p>I'm looking for your biggest non-obvious insight / "aha" that you discovered when preparing to launch (prior to bringing employees on board and/or scaling). <comment><USER2> Starting a company is not rocket science, do you want to hear interesting non- obvious anecdotes, that may be highly specific to the individual situation, or do you want to tell your friend what works?

Focus on the factors under your control. When you start out, the easiest factor to control is your expenses. Stay lean and you'll make profitability much easier to achieve. Starting is great but until profits are fueling your growth don't overthink what you're doing, keep your energies focused on that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Has he worked as an early employee in another new company before? Because all of the best founders I know have. (Zuckerberg is an extreme outlier.)

Experience will save you a lot of heartache. I'm learning so much at the startup I'm currently working at, just by witnessing how decisions are made, what tradeoffs need to be made, etc.

These will all be invaluable if I ever start my own company, and yet I never realized any of this until I accidentally ended up working for somebody else.

</comment><comment><USER4> Your MVP is always half of what you originally thought.</comment>


What do you get when you photocopy a mirror – and *why*? - <AUTHOR> https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/PhotocopyAMirror.html?sc28hn <comment><USER2> The why's in the second to last paragraph of the Quora/Slate article.

<comment><AUTHOR> I disagree. That's still talking about the "how". It's talking about how the scanner works, and how that gives you the result you see. I contend that the statement in that article is still not the "why".

I've tried many times to make it clear why I think the Quora article is giving the "how" and not the "why", but I've never been able to convince people of the difference.

So _why_ is the scanner designed like this? Even if you didn't know how the scanner works, why is this result an unavoidable consequence of how you want a photocopier to behave?

I'd be happy to try to explain this distinction further in an email, but to do so would require giving away the answer, and some people may still want to think about it. My email is (sort of) in my profile.

 _Added in edit:_

Quoting the article:

> _To understand why we got the result we did, we first need to look at how a > scanner works._

My contention is that this statement is wrong, and the result can be deduced from first principles of how a photocopier must behave.

<comment><USER3> My guess is that the paper scaters the light, so the image can bounce on the scanner's mirror, even with a small offset. The mirror, on other hand, reflects in a coherent way, so the light doesn't hit the scanner's reflector.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is what's happening, yes. But that still doesn't explain the why.

It would seem that people really don't understand the question I'm asking, and I'm at a loss to find another way of asking it that makes it clearer. Everyone is answering the how, no one is answering the why.

Here's another way of asking the question:

Based purely on what a photocopier does, and without knowing anything about how it works, can you deduce the result of photocopying a mirror?

<comment><USER2> > Based purely on what a photocopier does, and without knowing anything about > how it works, can you deduce the result of photocopying a mirror?

Setting aside technology the only thing I'm left (no pun intended) with is the experience of a mirror's handedness swapping.

It doesn't seem like the correct why (dark page) can be adduced from the fundamental of a light emitter/detector pair coupled with lateral motion across the thing being copied because the result would be undefined absent some averaging feature at the output, and that's not what happens with most photocopiers that generate a dark print, and those are all forbidden hows.

Will you be posting additional hints here or at the OP?

EDIT

> Try to answer the question without referring to how the photocopier/scanner > works, and only refer to what it does.

The thing reproduces an image of the source, that is, the mirror. I'm not satisfied with that because it feels like it's begging the question or leads to a series of infinite reflections.

<comment><AUTHOR> >> ... without knowing anything about how it works ...

> Setting aside technology the only thing I'm left (no pun intended) with is > the experience of a mirror's handedness swapping.

You also know what a copier is supposed to accomplish, so you can consider the results of copying several different things.

> Will you be posting additional hints here or at the OP?

I will be posting a discussion of this on my blog - I'm unlikely to post additional hints here.

>> Try to answer the question ... only refer to what it does.

> The thing reproduces an image of the source ...

Try thinking about different, related sources. Believe it or not, there is actually a connection here to some aspects of cryptography, although that's not necessarily helpful, and certainly isn't essential.

 _(and thank you for engaging with the question)_</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>