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Next they'll partner with OkCupid and we can just push a button when we want the next date to show up.

tinkerdolon The ‘Loser Edit’ That Awaits Us All

Well that was strangely pessimistic...

>The winner edit, even in its artifice, is a gesture toward optimism, the expectation of rewards waiting for that better self. Whenever he or she shows up.

Shows up? I'm right here.

http://www.ihighfive.com/

tinkerdolon Your lifetime earnings are probably determined in your 20s

Exactly. I now make more than double of the highest-grossing year from my 20's.

This article is just fear mongering. If you belong to the group of people reading comments on HN, you are able to drop in and out of the work force as you wish and do whatever you want with your life. If you want to maximize income in your 20's and reap the rewards of early investment, fine. If you want to travel the world now and jump in the game later, that's also fine.

tinkerdolon NYC Space/Time Directory

Really interesting! Could you further explain how you grouped points into buildings (as shown on slide 10)? I would imagine that different sections of the city have different distance thresholds, for instance. Were they determined by hand or automatically?

tinkerdolon By Making a Game Out of Rejection, a Man Conquers Fear

Anyone have a deck of cards for handling fear of success?

tinkerdolon Python idioms I wish I'd learned earlier

"Missing from this list are some idioms such as list comprehensions and lambda functions, which are very Pythonesque and very efficient and very cool, but also very difficult to miss because they're mentioned on StackOverflow every other answer!"

Can anyone link to good explanations of list comprehensions and lambda functions?

tinkerdolon Rosetta comet landing – live stream

My guess would be they are getting rest now before the flurry of activity and long hours starting soon.

tinkerdolon Consulting Medieval Manuscripts Online

cool, thanks :)

tinkerdolon Consulting Medieval Manuscripts Online

Tangentially related: does anyone know good sources to find 3D data of old objects (e.g. old roman arches, museum objects, etc.) ?

tinkerdolon My Startup School Europe talk: The Technology

I agree -- artificially injecting enthusiasm into a speech draws more attention on the speaker and turns it into some sort of performance, and can detract from the message.

Another person there commented to me afterwards, "yeah that was a great speech, but I just wish it had more energy, if it did it could have gone viral!" But this person was from California... I think different regions are calibrated to different communication styles, and to someone calibrated to a reserved European temperament (wherein "enthusiasm" often is auto-encoded as "insincere" or "silly") the delivery was perfect :)

tinkerdolon An interactive exploration of Boston's subway system

> One study was done in NYC which showed that making the busses free would actually save them money

I wouldn't go that far either -- but why not decouple the functions of driver and ticket checker. This is already done in some systems and seems to work well. The people pay for their ticket at the station instead of the bus and stamp it themselves when then board (with a time stamp). (or avoid the process by buying monthly pass). Then people can board directly through the back doors as well because the driver doesn't need to check. Periodically, a ticket-checker or police-type of person comes through and gives fines (lets say $50) to those who don't have a ticket.

tinkerdolon Interactive map of music based on clustering by similarity.

Interesting! What is the clustering based on?

tinkerdolon The rise of the female founder

>I would pay not to have dinner with you.

How nice of you! When can I collect my check? :)

tinkerdolon The rise of the female founder

As a female, thank you for your post. I should also mention, I find this attitude very attractive, and if you are single, I would like to take you out to dinner. As long as you don't mind, of course, that I will pay with all the money I make from my tech job.

tinkerdolon “Let’s, Like, Demolish Laundry”

What does a ring on your pinky do?

tinkerdolon Why Germany Dominates the U.S. in Innovation

Good point, I have no idea what the return will be. However it is still pleasant to be employed as a researcher in this type of environment, and is something I think the US should do more of too, including increasing the funding of NASA. Which leads us to an interesting question of how you even measure the benefit of such things... what was the financial gain returned from landing on the moon, for example? Lots of types of research have no direct financial gain yet still add to the overall progress of society. (Although this point might be straying far from the original intention of the article.)

tinkerdolon Why Germany Dominates the U.S. in Innovation

> They’re caused by culture, and luck and magic as much as and more than they are caused by the “three factors”

Germans don't believe in luck and magic, maybe that's why they make great industrial engineers :) Although you're right that it's surely a complex process. We'll have to wait and see how much and which investments really pay off, but in the meantime it is nice to live in an environment where billions are invested (check out http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/ to read details about a new European wide program).

tinkerdolon Why Germany Dominates the U.S. in Innovation

My work in Geoinformatics could also be called "experimental software engineering".... I work out of a University of Applied Sciences near Frankfurt. Not connected to the car industry. I think the article was spot on in identifying the huge investment that goes into research in the country, although they might have strangely overemphasized the Fraunhofers (while forgetting institutions linked to Leibniz or the DLR/ESA or just the massive employment through universities such as mine...)

tinkerdolon Deep Learning From The Bottom Up

Sure, please post the link to the paper, it sounds interesting.

tinkerdolon Animals in the wild found to use running wheel if given the choice

If they put a human-sized one of these around my residence, I'd run in it.

tinkerdolon Pearls Before Breakfast (2007)

Serious question: where would this be? Outside of North America, I've only been to Brazil and multiple European countries, and American pop music is still ubiquitous in these places.

tinkerdolon Ask HN: Do you have a side project you want to sell?

Wow, this is awesome! How does it work? Or, if you don't want to give away your secrets, how could one get started with mixing and transforming music like this?

tinkerdolon Are Malls Over?

Which mall in Stuttgart? I lived there a few years ago and never noticed the shopping areas looking American...

tinkerdolon Streetpong [video]

Germany has a whole different level of first-world problems: "Hmm what was my biggest annoyance today? ... I was bored while standing at the traffic lights"

tinkerdolon DeepMind to Work Directly With Google’s Search Team

> if you want to learn about deep learning, just learn about neural networks. It's the same thing.

Hi, could you explain this further? From my limited understanding, couldn't deep learning be achieved without neural networks? If we define deep learning as something like automatic feature extraction on one level of hierarchy in order to aid classification at a different level. I understand that you are saying that neural networks are the most common tool used, however what is the reason for this -- couldn't one also stack the results of other algorithms (decision trees, SVM, etc.) into a hierarchy of features?

tinkerdolon Linda Liukas' Programming book for Children has Huge First Day on Kickstarter

Agreed. And since when is criticism a bad thing, esp. on HN? Especially since most of it here seemed meant to start a discussion, as in "I'm not sure this is the best way to teach programming, wouldn't X be better."

I thought this would be a worthwhile discussion to have as opposed to only useless "OMG this is the BEST thing ever" comments.

tinkerdolon Poll: Full-time software engineer salaries in Berlin

Also relevant: http://www.make-it-in-germany.com/en/

(American junior developer/researcher outside of Frankfurt here -- also very happy)

tinkerdolon World's First Massive Online Degree Program Starts Today

>My guess is that the $7K price that seems revolutionary in the US is just too expensive in a worldwide context.

Yep! That would be my guess too. As an American who immigrated to Europe for an affordable Master's degree, I can understand both sides of this. $7K would have sounded completely reasonable to me 5 years ago, but now after I have paid only 500 Euros a semester, that is my new threshold for what I'd probably be willing to pay... Not that there is any strict logic behind what an education is or is not "worth," but compared to other opportunities there is no reason for me to pay more.

tinkerdolon High-end CNC machines can't be moved without manufacturers' permission

Here is a graphic to add to that explanation if anyone is curious: http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/12866/why-does-gps-po...

tinkerdolon Commit 15 minutes (11/16) to explain to a stranger why you love your job.

11/16 is very clear to someone in the U.S., and very confusing to anyone else:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1179/

edit: actually, according to my first link, Belize, Canadian newspapers, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Philippines (when speaking English, although not Filipino), and Palau all also use the month- day- year date system. TIL!