hnriot

Keeping up with starbucks opening/closing stores would be impossible without the distributed power of their users, they pop everywhere, move regularly and aren't really critical for mapping. Luckily in SF you can't throw a stone without hitting a coffee shop, and of course, people here only use starbucks to meet people for craigslist transactions, no self respecting hipster would ever go in one.

I was surprised at the number who had a degree was less than the national average for California. I guess there's a lot of immigrant workers who don't achieve higher education levels which skews the perception living and working in the valley. States like Virginia and Kansas beat the national average, yet not california, that's really sad.

an utterly pointless distinction, since a "rendering engine for content that contains JavaScript" is a browser. so like the guy before you said, on iOS you don't build a browser, you build a skin.

The very short answer is that they of course didn't. It's utter nonsense. I was around in those days, worked on Mozilla and Nutscrape etc. Back in the day there were many browsers, all spun off the Spyglass original code, the internet was pre javascript and it was a very different place. Then the browser wars started, there was Netscape and IE and others, back then it was viable for individuals to actually make a competitive browser, but over time they got to be big complex pieces of code, basically a VM. Security became a big deal and the open source movement built the best browsers, Mozilla, Phoenix and Firefox ten years ago. Microsoft tried to get the Internet to come to it rather than the other way round, just as companies like AOL did. They tried to add proprietary technology to lock in the internet to their Windows platform. Can't really blame them for that, but meanwhile every user on the planet was free to install any other browser they wanted. Just because they didn't isn't Microsoft's fault. They didn't prevent you doing so.

These days the internet has shifted from the desktop to laptops to mobile phones and tablets where Apple and Google have the lock in as Microsoft did. Apple allow other browsers provided they don't want fast javascript. Yet nobody's accusing Apple of holding up the internet.

The main things that really did hold back the internet was bandwidth, it was/is the phone and cable companies because they really do have a stranglehold on their customers.

Others here have suggested microsoft tried to stop others from innovating. Again, total bullshit, they forced exactly nobody to use their software.

I am no fan of MSFT, I haven't used their products in years, but someone who was around then really needs to set the story straight.

shown with the iPhone 4, what's up with that, it's really a contact printer (as in the old days with an enlarger, except the phone's screen is the light source)

bigger screens like the iPhone 6 will crop since it's a contact print.

The guy shakes the fuji instant print, reminiscent of polaroid, but no longer makes any difference, kind of funny.

the results will be horrible looking and cropped. Waste of time.

anyone can make an arrest, but campus police et al can't shoot you legally as the government police can, they can't call in other branches of government like swat or air support or even the military, they can't take you to jail, after an arrest they need to call the real police. There's a big difference between campus police which are benign and the regular government police. sometimes (as at UC Davis) the campus police get ahead of themselves and start acting like the real police, but thankfully they can be reigned in, unlike the real cops who can do whatever they want and get away with it.

nonsense!

these are still tests just as much as if they'd been written first, it's just a different methodology.

nonsense. Just because people and companies have contributed new features and capabilities to the language doesn't make your point. It's not a horrible language, any more than any language. Of course it has things that aren't ideal, but it's highly expressive and if you know what you're doing it can be elegant.

London already is a police state, every square inch is monitored with cameras and servers equipped with licence and face detection capabilities. While there are some upsides, the down considerably outweigh them.

As an aside, and being from the UK, I wouldn't say it's common to make jokes about being from the north or south. It's also not a very good "joke".

any decent stats analysis has built in outlier detection and ignores them, there are people that either lie or just make stuff up for attention and detecting these (data trolls) is just part of the analysis. Blindly averaging is never effective.

at first I thought, cool, but then realized that I'd miss google docs too much if I went back to Office. Aside from Excel which I don't use (prefer Pandas), I'd miss the collaborative document sharing and interoperability between laptop (Mac) and desktop (Linux.) Maybe Office does the document sharing/collaborative editing thing now. It's been a long time since I've used a MSFT product. although I will buy the Band, that looks awesome and the price point makes it irresistible to early adopters.

wow, unless you got a different question that I did I am amazed at your response. The algorithm is used often in CS, that you didn't know this kind of makes my point. Sure you can probably work as a programmer for years and not care about writing well optimized code, processors are so damn fast these days you can ignore the code quality and get away with it.

Also if you couldn't reason your way to the answer how would I have any confidence you could reason any other problem of similar difficulty level. This kind of problem shouldn't you more than 5 or 10 minutes to figure out.

Sorry, we pass on your application :)

no not at all, these are examples of some of the things you're expected to know as a competent engineer. being able to solve a puzzle is one thing, being able to solve it at the optimal efficiency is a feature of the best engineers - don't you think the people that can arrive at these solutions would be better products? It depends on your job, but I work on big clusters on machine learning systems and the difference between an optimal algorithm and one that's just ok is huge.

sounds a little like cognitive dissonance there, not wanting to work for a company that gave you a perfectly reasonable test of your algorithmic abilities.

it's not whether you immediately forget the question/solution, it's about reasoning your way to the solution. It doesn't matter if you forget after because you've proven that you can get there.

This seems very sensible, it limits your choice to companies that want to throw away revenue, but at least it keeps you in your bubble.

that's not unreasonable, when applying for job you need to get your stuff together. So many companies have later found out employees claimed degrees they never got. HR protects against that.

I don't see it, the app works, but it's just a bunch of horrible filters a-la-instagram. They work fast but they are still nothing like Lightroom which does a lot more than ruin photos with filters. All the ones I tried degraded an image, not once did I see any improvement, it's either blowing out highlights, introducing color shifts, or expanding the range to lower contrast or compressing the range and crushing the contrast.

I guess it's cool that you can do this kind of thing, I'm sure Chromebook users will be happy, but photographically speaking, gag.

why would there be? they are content already. I think it's dangerous to bucket people in this way, i know plenty of people with $30k+ gear and use their iPhone most of the time. Those two categories you have are not mutually exclusive.

Autofocus in the iPhone is much faster than the majority of Canon (or Nikon) DSLRs, regardless of the number of focus points. Partly because it's a lot easier to focus a lens that has nearly infinite depth of field! Most photographers are also gear heads, which is another dangerous thing to say, just like saying (quite correctly) that most serial killers are keen photographers. which true, it doesn't necessarily add much to the conversation.

why we have this obsession with resolution is largely because of computers. In the "old days" I would make contact sheets and then prints, mainly 8x8" (from a Hasselblad, pre instagram-square-hipness), and they would (and do) look stunning, to use object oriented speak, a fiber print IS-A photograph, where as a digital print HAS-A photograph on the paper surface. They are different, when silver crystals are in (vs on) the medium it becomes something altogether different. In these modern enlightened times we put a photo up on a retina big screen and stare at it from 2' and of course we're going to see imperfections, this creates a cycle of obsession with sharpness. But of course it doesn't matter, would a painting be any better if it was created with a smaller brush? This is all a very classical philosophical debate, it's the medium is the message all over again.

From my perspective this work is impressive, does it make better photos? No, but it does make the photos more representative of what the taker was looking at. Over time we are subtracting the technology component from photography, eventually we will have the ability to record easily any visual experience we have. For me this comes from having enough experience in using equipment and eeking the most out of it, but in contrast my daughter is frustrated by cameras (both her Canon DSLR and her iPhone), she will see something like the solar eclipse and wonder why simply pointing the camera at it won't bring about a photo that looks the same as the one that the Mt Hamilton took on their 36" reflecting telescope, or why a photo at her friends candle lit birthday party didn't look how she remembered it. Her generation will grow up with sufficiently advanced technology that a lot of the inconvenience of photography's technical side has been automated. Just as I grew up in a time when emulsions were capable of exposing in a few hundredth's of a second rather than minutes.

"destroy almost every DSLR made today in the quality of the final result" why would you say this? The GR1 has a decent enough lens if you are happy with just one, but 28mm doesn't suit everybody, and f/2.8 is not always very useful, it does guarantee the lens performs reasonably well wide open though (it's not a very ambitious lens), but most (full frame) DSLRs have higher resolution that that camera. You need to use medium format to beat a D810 or Sony A7r today. I am not saying film isn't great, I shoot film, but it's just plain wrong to go through life, or try to convince others that your little GR1 can beat a Nikon D810 at anything. You need to use a lot of scanning technology to eek out much resolution from the 35mm negs, even dynamic range is better in the FF digital cameras now, and as for ISO performance, film cannot even dream about keeping up. The A7s can shoot in the dark, by starlight!!

A hasselblad 500c/m with its 6x6cm negative will have more tonality and even on a flatbed scanner will have slightly higher resolution that a D810, you'll need an imacon scanner to really get the full resolution of film.

The biggest challenge with film, besides the poor ISO performance compared to digital is the cost.

no, please stop spreading such misleading information, it is not survival of the fittest at all. go read about evolution please. You're right, evolution is not sentient, we're passed that, it is useful to think of it in that light when looking backwards at the process (as we can only really do anyway), we've all read the Blind Watchmaker and don't need this obvious point made over and over when it's been explained why we are doing so.

to be honest I can't follow what you're even trying to say. It's making no sense, and in general just inaccurate.

I'm not talking about individuals, but in general, and in that regard we are all sex driven. Of course evolution isn't sentient, but when you think about it, it's a reasonable way to think about it because the results are the same. It just depends which way you're looking at the process, looking forward, you cannot refer to evolution as a design process, but looking backwards you can. The design we see today is the result of the evolutionary process. It's tiresome having to explain all this.

hunting skills are much the same as war skills and man certainly hunted (I believe that's what I said) but we are also a very violent species.

the fuji x series are NOT RANGEFINDERS! they are auto focus cameras and support manual focus with the EVF. They might look a little like rangefinders (in that they mostly don't have "hump" for the pentaprism which is an SLR feature) but they do not have coupled rangefinder focusing like the Leica does. Leica are the only rangefinder digital cameras (besides the now ancient Epson R-D1)

So much misinformation as usual anytime anything comes up about photography.

yes rangefinders are prefered (or were) by street photographers because the cameras and lighter and smaller, the lenses too, with the mirror box to overcome the lenses can focus much closer to the rear lens element which makes for lighter, smaller lenses. The main reason for their success in street and journalistic photography was because what is moving into and out of the frame is visible at all times, and in crisp clear focus, no matter where the lens is focused. if you shooting a tank rolling into the city center its better to know what else is going on around you and you don't want to have to focus the camera before realizing you're going to get run down by an M1A1 Abrams.

Please let's confuse retrostyled with rangefinder. That doesn't the Fuji X series aren't good, they are, for an APS-C sensor they are decent performers with some nice lenses.

the built in meter is perfectly capable of metering accurately enough for slide film. If you're not sure what you're doing just set the iso to exp comp about negative half a stop to avoid (as with digital) blowing out the highlights.

the meter in the camera is obviously reflected light only, so adjust if you're shooting black horses or white dresses. Just use common sense and meter a stop either way to compensate for the deviation from 18% grey.

this is a bit condescending to teens to write them off as that. Biologically we are not programmed to sit in a classroom, teenage girls are programmed by evolution to do something not too dissimilar to HS (show off their new found sexuality and attract a mate), boys on the other hand are better suited to hitting stuff with sticks. That's exactly the kind of mate you want if you're a teenage girl, someone who can go off and bring nice big juicy protein sources for all those babies that are coming soon enough after flaunting their newly grown hips and breasts that signal sexual maturation.

About the only times that boys get to be what evolution programmed them for is during war time. When boys race their cars and do crazy shit we think of it as delinquent behaviour, but those are the exact same skills that made for the best pilots.

Algebra and Shakespeare didn't feature much in evolution's "plan". Even Shakespeare would rather have been shagging Queen Elizabeth than writing Elizabethan soap operas, but he needed to put food on his table... And let's not forget where Richard Feynman did some of his best work - in a strip club. The modern world sadly is something that will take us a long time to biologically catch up to.

I think, although cannot speak for the person, they really meant CPA, they mention taxes and only a CPA would be legally able to do that.

yeah, isn't it even quite the opposite, I'd be really surprised to hear otherwise. The startup scene in SF is predominantly white, but SV is nothing like that, pick any large software company and you'll find the split is something like 80% Asian, split with varying amounts between south asian and the far east (india and china/taiwan) with the remaining 20% being of european descent. Whenever I interview for a position, I can guarantee one or more of the candidates will be from one of the IITs. As someone said, with CS being such a strong emphasis in two of the largest population centers of the world, this really isn't very surprising at all. America was and continues to be an immigrant's best opportunity for prosperity with the shift over the centuries from europeans to asians.

this hasn't been my experience at all, I guess it depends which areas you're contributing to. I've contributed to CS and art pages, with good success, I stay clear of opinion pages, or contentious topics.

it's not as simple as that, the whole stack is GPL, mainly due to Standford's usage of GPL for all of their NLP.

GPL is a killer for any project that's not a toy or for school.

You may want to look at Factorie (https://github.com/factorie/factorie), that has a decent POS tagger and it's not crippled by the license. It also has dependency parsing which works reasonably well.

GPL :( can't use it