cubedice

the MSR video of decision-tree based body recognition/segmentation was pretty neat http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/145347/CVPR%202011%20-%20... . is there a list of good applications of this technique besides credit checks and face recognizers?

Well, about 4 or 5 minutes in they switch to a PIP view, with the majority of the screen showing the slides.

An "Open for another X hours" badge might be even better. I find restaurants are always closing within a half hour or so of deciding to go out to eat.

Haha, that makes me think of 'voting' for clojure as voting for Nader.

Funny, since I wrote my blog in clojure/compojure and found it easy going compared to Rails (which, to be fair, I had attempted to learn before having any real programming experience). That was my first experience with "a lisp", and it went well. Unfortunately, I think self-imposed cynicism about lisp is a big part of what keeps it from going mainstream.

EDIT: however, I respect that experiencing lisp not going mainstream for years would kill pretty much anyone's optimism :)

This looks neat, but it appears to be an 'academic' exercise. I couldn't find any source code written for the JOP (the only project in the Links section was down) after scanning some of the pdfs. I did, however, notice the 64 journal publications the creator has on the subject.

OTOH, he definitely appears to have put a lot of work into this, and I would like to test it out, if I can figure out how.

I noticed the R packages for various functions in the text can be found here http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn//Rfun.html .

Their names are pretty catchy; I'll admit I want to use 'gradient boosting' and 'Lasso and elastic-net regularized generalized linear models'.

I'd buy that. For me, listening to music while coding is an engineering problem: how to minimize the tendency to let the mind wander without overwhelming it with new input.

For me that means using music that is ambient enough without verging on elevator muzak style irritation. I ended up with instrumental hip-hop (dj shadow, etc).

Of course that 'solution' eventually led to the great schism and many different versions (king james, etc.). So maybe the deeper truth is that people enjoy arguing?

Ah, thanks, that makes sense. What I was thinking of was the many times I've crashed java by trying to load/render decently sized images in memory (something about how heap space takes awhile to dynamically allocate). You could specify initial heap size with a command line flag, but it was hacky and I had a hard time getting it to work consistently.

They should have called it clay (you know, model stuff, like with clay ;); the first thing I thought of was http://www.cray.com supercomputers. Maybe that was intentional.

After browsing the source, it seems they are using Java2D primitives, specifically BufferedImage to do textures and shaders. I wonder if this project could use JOGL bindings...

EDIT: btw, I meant to say that this looks pretty badass

Not really. Although that's a funny thought.

I'd go for a system that enforced a payment based upon a baseline # of listens on pandora, last.fm or youtube.

Hmm, you definitely have a point. People have rarely felt musicians should be paid (a lot) for their self-expression; I can't really recall when it was a lucrative career. What I suppose I meant was that the best musicians have often (though not always) been poor business people.

You're also right that sometimes they deserve to be paid. It is my intuition that the free market works against supporting the largest number of musicians. It may work to reward the best, but to me, that doesn't foster innovation (since musicians rarely look at the payoff in terms of money--probably fame). Certain acts are always going to be very famous, but there probably is a lot of room for diversity.

The optimal strategy for creativity/diversity would be to provide a (minimal) amount of reimbursement for attempting to create music. This would not only bring music creation back to the masses (where it probably should be) but could also provide an incentive for creative people to put work out and also buy dinner.

See, but this is very much the problem. Records provided an unequal distribution of wealth amongst performing artists before the internet. Why pay to listen to an up-and-coming classical artist when an exquisite recording of Chopin's work all ready exists?

Now, the internet has magnified this even further. An incredibly narrow band of artists are currently being compensated in any way (live performance, merch, cds), and this trend appears to be continuing. In general, the life of a performing musician pretty much sucks. Take a blog post by David Byrne I found on here awhile ago http://journal.davidbyrne.com/2009/08/080809-edinburgh-so-ho... . He's working pretty damn hard, and he's famous!

I'm not saying that file sharing is inherently wrong, I'm just saying deep down, we know there's a system that will rise out of this that will undoubtedly be regulated. I'd rather be having that discussion, than saying 'oh, I wouldn't have paid for that'

I imagine the startup/VC|Google relationship to be like my first girlfriend: neither of you is sure what it is exactly you're doing. She knows if you want anything to do with her, you've got to come take it. So you're going for it, but you're pretty sure if you act like a normal dude, she'll pass you up for that scene guitarist. The only option, therefore, is to be totally aloof, so as to create enough mystery that she'll bite.

EDIT: btw, it was a pretty mediocre strategy in the long run. Not sure what that means for Twitter, however

What an imbecilic name for a company

I've always been a fan of roundabouts, especially for smaller intersections.

Although interestingly, as I post this, Bing returns the one (correct) result while Google attempts to redirect me to a Sopranos Wikipedia page and clutters the main results with a few irrelevant links.

What's interesting is that after reading this article I've realized I always expected e-mail search to be bad. Why? Possibly because, when another entity holds a large portion of my social information, it feigning ignorance about deep technical knowledge of my personal life (which is likely better than my own understanding) makes me feel good.

It's less 'big brother'y, which may explain why poor e-mail search doesn't bother me. It's as though its waiting for me to get the answer first.

previously submitted http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=694545

Mostly tangential, but I have to code in MFC at the day job (legacy code base). God, the winapi guys must have had a sadistic sense of humor when they designed it. My guess is they were so used to low level programming that they saw object orientation as a crutch for the infirm. I imagine them shoving random subroutines into objects while laughing maniacally to themselves: "let's see these pansies make sense of DDX controls! muahaaha!"

I agree that users should participate if they want to make the site better. And yes, there still are interesting posts. Still, I see people getting modded up for saying "go with the flow," and modded down for questioning the site's direction. First of all, these are OPINIONS, usually not worthy of up or down mods.

I guess what I should have said was discussion about this site's direction used to be an important part of HN, and I wanted to continue that tradition.

Why is this at -2, exactly? All mILK did was respond to a question. If people don't like the response, they should at least post a reply.

Maybe. But it's still sad to see this site change into a big site with a wider audience. I definitely care less and less for the "discussion" that takes place here, which is frustrating to watch. Perhaps I'm just feeling pessimistic, but it seems like recently the tide of new visitors is too large to be assimilated without permanently changing HN's culture. Damn, maybe I am getting old...

EDIT: I also seem to recall that constant vigilance about the site's quality has always been a topic of discussion here. It's definitely healthy to raise a concern or two every now and again

I managed to overcome the slacker lifestyle. However, this was forced upon me. I found myself without a home for a short while, then living with two roommates who were 10 years older than me. They were mildly dysfunctional slackers, and much worse off than myself. I think having a visceral reminder of what could be your future is a pretty solid motivator.

I wish I had known about this during my OOP course. This looks slightly more intuitive than the quick sequence diagram editor (sdedit) http://sdedit.sourceforge.net/ . The thing about sdedit, however, is you can see your diagram as you code it, which I always thought was pretty sweet

Something bothers me about Bill Hicks, and I don't think it has anything to do with his material. He was (IMHO) a moderately funny comedian who eventually fell off the deep end. The problem I've found is that he was more a mouthpiece for his era, and now is being quoted without that context (by, uh... random people on the internet).

I like taking it easy and enjoying life as much as anyone and posting this (mostly inflammatory) quote probably wouldn't have changed my mind anyway. So don't be an internet douchebag and quote Bill Hicks.

At work so I can't actually demo. However, the video looked nice. One thing I noticed is that the tabs correctly displayed minor chords while the text simply said B or F# (implying major). Additionally, how good is it at picking up alternate tunings (i.e. down a half step a la hendrix) or obscure jazz chords? I suppose I can just wait until I get home to try it out, so maybe I'll report back then...

Sort of like French proverbs or Zen koans, I suppose. The fact that they are often too general and contradictory doesn't seem to stop older, wiser folk from repeating them.

I started coding up a site using this (yesterday, actually) and it's very easy. Whoosh support is cool, although you have to use a forked version that reverts a couple changes. One thing that bothers me is that you have to label the template files for search results as *.txt for some reason.

Pardon my ignorance, but why is it that Deep Blue can't be recreated on a reasonably fast modern PC in software? In fact, why is it that this sort of program would be considered difficult at all?

EDIT: answered my own question via wikipedia

"In a recent match, Deep Fritz vs. Vladimir Kramnik in November 2006, the program ran on a personal computer containing two Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs, capable of evaluating only 8 million positions per second, but searching to an average depth of 17 to 18 plies in the middlegame."