Hacker News is one of my favorite sources of technical news and discussion. There is usually a nice variety of articles on the front page and the conversations around them tend to be more thoughtful than at many, many other websites.
Recently, Hacker Monthly was launched. It is a print magazine, based on Hacker News. Consider it a monthly best-of. This project is not affiliated with Y Combinator. Instead, it is a rather nice example of the community: A Hacker News reader saw this as an interesting project, took the initiative and decided to make it happen. Lim Cheng Soon approaches the authors of recently most popular articles and asks for permission to reprint in Hacker Monthly. If granted, the article gets published.
The PDF version of the first issue is available for free. After looking through it, I decided to also order a printed copy. I am impressed by the presentation as well as the content: This first issue contains an excellent mix of articles aimed at people interested in technology, software development and startups.
Even though a lot of my news consumption has moved online, I still read plenty of print magazines. Hacker Monthly is going to be on my regular list from now on. I appreciate the format and like the fact that the articles presumably had a successful run on the Hacker News front page.
I do not actually want to check in on the site all that frequently to see if there is something particularly good that is being voted up. Sure, social news websites can leave you feeling as if you should be coming back frequently, lest you miss something important. Now, I may not feel so bad though.
I may even be able to train myself to exercise patience and simply look forward to the next issue.
Does This Headline Know You’re Reading It? discusses Text 2.0, a very interesting AI research project that focuses around this premise: What if your computer knew, what you are reading, as you are reading it?
This is an intriguing question and this work could lead to a multitude of interesting applications. The following video (it starts a bit slow, but includes interesting examples later on) shows just a few of those.
People are getting more and more used to rely on technology and getting walking or driving directions using their GPS devices in the car or their mobile phones. I know few people who prefer asking for directions to using their phones in an urban setting.
Autonomous City Explorer (ACE) on the other hand is a robot that has to rely on successful collaboration with humans. According to thefollowing video ACE successfully navigated from the origin to its destination (a distance of about 1.5 kilometers) in about 5 hours – and by asking 38 pedestrians and interpreting their hand signals along the way.
This projects seems like a nice venue to explore a big collection of different problem areas, such as collision avoidance, gesture interpretation, detecting of people, route planning, and many more. I wonder what this project will teach us about the nature of collaboration itself, particularly between humans and machines.
Often connections and patterns only become clear, if the larger set is observed and not just individual pieces of data. Microsoft Live labsPivot shows an interesting approach to visualizing online data. Gary Flake presents the project in the following video (from Ted).
The software is available for download and experimentation. I would love to try it out but the requirements make it sound like that will have to wait until I can come up with a Windows machine.
