skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And on the larger airliners 300+ passengers trying to go to the bathroom all at the same time at 70 minutes before landing is going to be fun.
Wow, strange. I am not even sure how to design a system that could only support a single database connection for each request.
The most useful piece of information in this article, to me, was the concept of 'commitment mechanism'.
Whatever happened to The Future?
Are you saying that the Genera interface is badly designed?
It's true that these security directives don't seem to make much sense, but what is the alternative? I think what they are tring to accomplish is to simply reduce the risk of a repeat "accident" along the same line of the one that happened on Dec 25. After an incident like that, the TSA just cannot afford to have someone else pull a similar stunt, it would only further ruin their already low credibility.

The challenge is about striking a balance between having passengers bring whatever they want on a plane and having them fly naked and anesthetized, just like if they were cargo.
From my experience European flights are much easier than international flights, typically you only have to turn up an hour before the flight and security is pretty quick at both ends, especially at smaller airports and if you've only got carry-on.

From friends who've travelled business class out of City Airport in London, I've heard you can turn up as little as 20 minutes before the flight time.

Trains are more pleasant, but it's not the huge chore that say flying to JFK is.
It sounds like these directives are based on specific intelligence of currently planned attacks and not meant to be broader long term regulations. What if there is good intelligence to suggest there are a dozen other attackers known to be trained and ready for this mission? If they are already in-transit and have a communication black-out from the leaders it seems entirely possible they would attempt it despite the failures.
It's "art".
That makes sense, but I've never seen statement modifiers defined that way. Every explanation I've ever seen, the pickaxe included, seems to outright state, or at least imply, the former.
Why Do People Write for Wikipedia?
I wonder how Don Knuth would fare writing something like TeX under time constraints. I suspect that most programmers would prefer to have unlimited time to make things "perfect" rather than be under pressure; just because Knuth had the liberty to take that option doesn't mean he wouldn't do as well as (if not better than) anyone else on a restricted schedule.
Warren Buffett: How Inflation Swindles the Investor and other writings:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/16593184/Buffett-Inflation-File
gdocs quickview: http://bit.ly/8U0m62
I haven't seen this film. Did they actually use the word "unobtainium," as the article mentions?

If Cameron just tossed up a generic sf discussion term as a name, it really begins to sound like the script was phoned in. Why not just call the film "Dances with Smurfs," like the South Park episode suggested?

The only thing that turns me off more is the Cameron quote where he says something to the effect that the aliens aren't placental mammals, but they have to have tits.
Hacker News Twitter list
Yes, they are different. For example:

def ex1
a = 5

if a
puts "a: #{a}"
end
end

def ex2
if a = 5
puts "a: #{a}"
end
end

def ex3
puts "a: #{a}" if a = 5
end

If we start with the code in ex1 and decide to shorten it, ex2 is okay (although some people don't care for assignment in a conditional because it could be confused for a typo). But, ex3 will raise an exception that 'a' has not been defined.

I've just internalized using the longer form when using assignment in a conditional.
The regulation isn't applicable to the entire flight; it's perfectly ok to pull your blind down midway over the atlantic on a red-eye, for example.
Twilight Saga 2010 Desktop Calendars & Wallpapers
That was an interesting read, nice 'peek' into a (I guess) lot used method of defacing a site; without the defacing that is.
This includes all Twitter user ids Yahoo BOSS could find in your profile pages.

Let me know if I missed you. Please @reply (or email) me so it's easier to keep track.
It doesn't have to be. Flying for me is fairly painless, but i've been doing it enough so i can optimize the process out. It doesn't take long (or much effort) to make flying equivalent to train travel, for instance (and it's much faster almost all the time).
Exactly. I reject the entire premise that web apps are fundamentally "better for you". Yes, they have zero installation, and that's great. There are also a number of drawbacks that the author ignores or glosses over, such as requiring ubiquitous high speed (and often low latency) connections, having all your data in the hands of a third party, and apps being written for the lowest common denominator of HTML/CSS/Javascript rather than taking advantage of advanced OS functionality. Both web and local apps have their place, and there's no need for one type to dominate.
Why an exploding monetary base may not lead to inflation
so the 6,400 km number is correct (the inset) (curiously, this number is also the radius of the earth, approx).

It's not curious, and it's not approximate. The gravitational potential at distance r is - G M_1 M_2 / r, and the gravitational force at distance r is G M1 M2 / r^2; so you will always need to overcome exactly one radius of surface gravity.
>I'm skeptical. I've purchased a lot of Facebook/Myspace ads and I can tell you first hand, they just don't perform as well as other types of media.

Notice that you said "other types of media". So it's already coming true -- it is a type of media in the same way as newspapers, television, etc. Also, social media ads don't have to perform as well as other media to be considered media. They just have to be considered when a company is going to advertise.
How do you get a $4 million second round from Google Ventures at age 21?
The uncertainty will surely mean that Chrome OS will remain a secondary OS for many people (including me) for awhile. But over time as you realize that 80%, then 90%, then 95% of what you actually use is available as a hosted app, Chrome OS (or the MS or Apple equivalent) becomes your primary OS.
Poor Pluto
Yep. Which is why on European trips, when possible I travel by train. More efficient, more comfortable and on the right routes, you get to enjoy some good scenery too. I miss trains in the US, both for local transit and long distance travel.

I don't mind flying, and I fly crazy amounts, but it's become increasingly difficult to justify the headache, especially for some of the shorter fly-in, fly-out trips that I take
My comment from a dead link to a blog entry on this NYT article:

>Because of its domination of the global search market and ability to penalize competitors while placing its own services at the top of its search results, Google has a virtually unassailable competitive advantage...The preferential placement of Google Maps helped it unseat MapQuest from its position as America’s leading online mapping service virtually overnight.

Alternately, it was a better product. Remember the first time you were able to drag a map? It wasn't in Mapquest. Let's see which is better today. I'm looking for New York City. I go to maps.google.com, and see a single search box. I type in NYC, and I see, within a second, the five boroughs I was looking for. Well done you, Google.

Next, I go to mapquest. They've got multiple search boxes, so I have to break up my search into address/city/state/zip code boxes? Ugh. Is it still 1998? Ok, I put in NYC into the "City" field, and the whole screen dims, with a box saying "processing". Even after the processing box goes away, the screen is still dimmed. How ugly. I scroll down to the map, and see that nothing's changing, even after waiting two minutes. I click, and the dim screen lightens, but I haven't gone anywhere. I go back to the search boxes, and again, search NYC. Oh, it's popping up a "which did you mean" alert next to the search box where I wasn't looking. 2 results: 1. Nyce Lake, AZ 2. Nyctea Hills, AK.

If this is their example of "unfair competitive advantage", I want more of it.
I'd say this is definitely true at smaller airports (Munich for example), but horrendous at the mega-monstrosity airports like Charles De Gaulle or London-Heathrow. There's just nothing you can do to move through those places faster. (My last trip through London put a warning on my transfer boarding pass to allow 1-hour to get from gate to gate. I thought they were joking.)
This guy's amazing! He managed to get data up to year 2020! I wonder if he can get information on other things to come in the next 10 years ...
One thing to bear in mind- mass transit terror attacks over the past ten years have probably killed more people directly in attacks on trains (and subways/tube) than plane attacks.

Bombs in london and madrid caused hundreds of lives lost or serious injuries, bombs in the pakistan/india region often claim thousands.

The threat (as also mentioned here) is that a hijacked plane is, in reality, a massive missile and, to use the phrase, a true weapon of mass destruction. This however was resolved after 9/11 with new cockpit procedures and more alert passengers. (c.f. Bruce Schneier's blog for more)
Nice real world example of the poison null byte attack.

For those who don't know what a null byte attack is, that's where you pass in an http request that turns into a string that explicitly encodes a null byte, \0 at the end. So you insert something like subsection=/../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../etc/passwd%00. Now the code in the application tries to append something like .txt because "how bad could a .txt file be", and it arrives in C land as "/../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../etc/passwd\0.txt\0" and C thinks that the string ends at the first \0 and doesn't pay any attention to the .txt bit.

This is a good example of why your escaping mechanism should always be "allow only what is explicitly known to be safe" rather than "block what is known to be unsafe". Because you have no idea what unsafe things there are that you don't know about.
Being online: Group identities and social network identities
There are debatable aspects of climate change - but I hope these clear, data-driven, illustrative works help convince the tech community that if you can trust the science in the papers provided, that the outcome is clear.

I also like to mention the decision matrix - I forget the term in game-theory - but the possibility space is 2x2 - either global warming is man made or isn't on one axis, and on another axis is that humanity acts on this information is doesn't.

In the case that there is no man made global warming and we act, then the outcome is still good. Moreover - even if the warming is from natural causes, trying to understand and alter the global climate is an important skill to have for a species with ambitions to survive for thousands more years, at least.
The uk experimented with metal detector type screening at train stations after our bombings on the 7th july. It doesn't work with you have thousands of people streaming in and out of the gates- all you do is end up practically shutting down the station.

So now they focus on temporary gates and profiling - which turns out to be much more efficient than random screening.
I do not own a smart phone, and I think your position is basically reasonable. That said:

"Sure, there's no WiFi" to me is actually a complete deal killer. Even in areas with great 3G reception, I would always prefer to be using WiFi. You say yourself that you rarely use the phone functionality. That means that, of the functionality you use most, you can't do it as well as an iPhone. Maybe you'd be doing more than "a little" internet if your phone supported WiFi.

This is characteristic to me of the philosophical divide between Mac and PC users (I'm actually not allied with either one). PC users just don't expect things to be perfect, but they expect any feature they want, and they're not disappointed with a lackluster UI or faulty design decisions like a lack of WiFi. Mac users are OK with limiting functionality, so long as what is included is designed well and comprehensively (here I mean interconnected components work well together).

With phones, it seems people value that design more than computers. You can't take apart a phone and fix its problems. For the most part, you can't download hacks to sidestep poor design decisions. If you have the "Mac" mindset, everything else seems like death by a thousand paper cuts.
I think it's easy to get confused here because there's a natural tendency to read and interpret 'unless' as English and the fact that assignment in Ruby is also implicit declaration. Once this happens -

a =

a is defined. It doesn't matter at all what comes after (as long as it keeps the expression syntactically valid) - a is defined. The only question remains is what will end up getting assigned to it. Try

a = asdfgasdfweradsf

it will complain there is no asdf... but a is defined.
What are you referring to? Maybe I'm missing something, but the chart stops at 2020, but the data graph stops at 2009...
Jamie Zawinski, whom Peter Norvig called the best programmer he ever hired.
The TSA has now officially become like an abusive, paranoid husband. Every event that has happened thus far has made him more suspicious and less rational, but the "lap burner" has at last pushed him over the edge into raging paranoia, doubling down with fevered lists of arbitrary, bizarre restrictions that make sense only to his unhinged mind.

And there's nothing we can do. We depend on him. We can't just walk out; where would we go?
Ok, heres an example of a master:

Were all talking about how to optimize our lucene queries and cache intelligently and so on, because the memory overhead is getting big (mind you were practically replacing our database with lucene).

After about 30 minutes of hypotheticals and complexity, this one guy (previously sitting there listening) just says "Why not run java 64 bit and set the max memory to 20 gigs or whatever is appropriate, let the operating system page for you". KARATE CHOP! I think if we could, we would re-create the scene from "The Mask" where his mouth just drops to the table.
I used to joke that in the future they'd simply take all of your clothes and personal possessions at security, stamp your hand with an ID number, and make everybody wear hospital gowns.
For the vast majority of users (ie people who aren't tech geeks) usable interface trumps all. Look at all the features missing on the first iPhone, and it still sold like hot cakes simply because of its interface.
It's really because trains cost a whole lot less than an aircraft....and that's about it. The theater of security has very little to do with protecting passengers if you notice. I'm always surprised nobody has just blown up the security line at an airport. Easy access to the line, hundreds of people, no security on the way to the line. It's about as soft of a target as you can find.
Right, one large argument against the 'sterile area' joke is that it's very easy to acquire weapons - anything from workmen's tools to steak knives are easily accessible.
Apple is probably just buying Crunchpads (warning humor).
Similar issue a while back with SSL certs wasn't there. When will people learn how to deal with null bytes properly :/
I've noticed though, that ever sense the TSA got their new dark blue uniforms (from the old white ones), they seem to be quite a bit more respectful at least.
I don't see this as a big problem. There are bound to be many cloud vendors competing for our business, so we as consumers can demand data portability. And we can still have control of our software if we host it ourselves. There's nothing stopping anyone from writing an open-source gmail clone that we can all run on our own servers.
you mean "joojoos".
The don't need to be on a plane bit- if you end up leaving the plane once you've boarded, the plane isn't going to pull away from the gate till you're either back on the plane or everything you took onboard with you is deplaned.

Now, that doesn't mean to say that you couldn't hide a bag onboard with such a device, and then make some kind of excuse that you have to go back to your office because there's some kind of emergency, and you won't be taking the flight after all. But then, you'll have had to somehow get your device into the sterile area (requiring accomplices who work there, or some surprisingly good luck getting through the x-ray scanners and explosive detection machines).

In other words, the security we had pre 9/11, with a little bit of modernizing, does the job fine. The rest of it (shoes, liquids etc) are really just theatre.
Ask HN: Where do I go from here?
I've been working as a developer at the same job for almost 5 years. While the work is somewhat interesting and challenging, I'd hardly say it's something I'm passionate about. On top of that, I'm working with proprietary technology in a proprietary programming language.

My problem is that I don't have much inspiration to come up with my own project ideas. I'd like to do something, but I feel like I'm dry on ideas. I'm not looking to create "the next hotness" or to become some Social Media Kingpin. I'm really just looking to do something fun and useful, that others might find useful as well.

My problem is - or, rather, one of my many problems (because I surely have more than one problem) - is that my hobby, my passion is programming. The problem therein is that programming - at least in my mind - is akin to writing poetry. If you're a poet and the topic of all your poems is poetry (whoa, that's meta, dude), well, you're not going to be a very profound poet.

I'm a programming nerd. My dream project is, "Hey, we need someone to develop an infrastructure for scheduling and running thousands of jobs on hunreds of different boxes and to keep the status of said jobs, etc." But that kind of makes me an architecture astronaut which, supposedly, is A Bad Thing (tm). And, besides, the above problem has been solved many times over.

I guess my question is: what should I do? What do you do for inspiration? How do you come up with your personal projects? When do you find time to do them outside of work?
Specifically, "C-x v v" is C-x (extended commands), v (version control prefix), v ("next action": do the next logical step for the current buffer, usually committing).

C-c twice is used in several modes to mean "save and close out". It's also what you hit to send an e-mail you're composing, for example. Holding control and pressing c twice is pretty easy, just like whacking v twice for "next action". (C-c usually prefixes commands specific to the buffer's mode, such as "send the definition under the cursor to Python".)

If you ever forget any of this, you can type "C-x v" and then C-h (Help) and it will list all of the keyboard shortcuts prefixed by C-x v, i.e., all shortcuts related to version control. (I find VC shortcuts go straight to muscle memory, but just in case.)

What NikkiA says above about those five keystrokes being a 10 page wizard in other systems is spot-on.
oh, yeah, right.
i often leave a code comment near a bug fix if there was something non-obvious that i messed up the first time. eg, "sleep required here because blahity blah".

it is true that writing a larger overview of, say, the thread timings is useful near the thread timing tests. i'm not above just putting a thread timing explanation in the docs folder though, especially if that influences much of the architecture and coding conventions elsewhere.

commit messages seem nice to look back on, but anything that impacts the current code state should be present in the current docs. otherwise new developers and maintainers have to look through a chronology of logs messages, which presents the same problem as blogs and hacker news compared to say wikipedia.
Social media is a subset of media. It doesn't blend into the superset (in an advertiser's mind anyway).

When I purchase AdWords, that's just media. It shows up on Google, blogs, some professional content sites, etc., and I don't know or care where. If they added Facebook to that, it would drag CPMs way down so they won't,
There were 877 new snowfall records set this week. That would be rather unlikely if we are experiencing catastrophic warming. Also there is this (from Watts Up With That)
"Keep in mind, everyone sorta has to admit that CO2 by itself doesn’t do much. Even at current concentrations, it’s a teensy weensy bit of the atmosphere (.00038) that soaks up only a teensy weensy bit of the sun’s long-wave radiation at a particular high altitude in the tropics (the tropics account for about 80% of the Earth’s energy budget). Moreover, we have long since passed CO2 concentrations which are more than sufficient to flag down 99% of that wavelength."
Feel free to do otherwise, just don't count on me coming to see you during visiting hours.
Missed me: @marascio ... mine is in my profile. How did you match it?
Benchmarking JSR-223: JRuby, Rhino, Groovy and Jython
What do you think will happen after this directive expires?

EXPIRATION: 0200Z on December 30, 2009
this is wrong!

>> a = 1
=> 1
>> b = 2
=> 2
>> a = 3 unless b==2
=> nil
>> a
=> 1
>> a = unless b==2
>> 2
>> end
=> nil
>> a
=> nil

The difference is in the variable definition semantics, not in the assignment semantics. Please do not spread this misinformation.
Continuous Try Server Integration
Yes! JIRA + Mylyn (for Eclipse) makes this automatic and let's you see the commits made for the ticket in Jira, and link from the commit e-mails to the Jira ticket(s). Huge fan.
Or just buy a ticket to a major area, figure out what the transit time will be, and pop the cork at T-5 minutes or something....
Dead on. Its $200 on a puzzle, which simultaneously shows that the person cares about this $200 more than their personal information, which is damn useful for marketing.
So now we know it's not going to be an e-ink screen.
A very good friend of mine once told me a story about how her brother's partner visited Paris, was drugged, and woke up in an alley feeling very unwell. He was taken to hospital, were it was found one of his kidneys had been expertly removed. I was dubious about it, but she told me she had seen the scar!

When I retold the story later, people laughed in my face. I guess I don't need to link to Snopes.

I'm just saying, one or two embellishments along the way can make all the difference in credibility...
An Apple netbook would be far more commercially viable IMHO.
The Unbearable Complexity of Climate
.. kind of. There are some reports of these rules being enforced on domestic-only flights, too:

http://gizmodo.com/5435117/the-unofficial-guide-to-flying-af... (scroll down to the 'be ready for anything' part)
Have you ever tried to leave a plane after boarding?

This isn't fool proof but the FAA policy that my dad experienced years ago was that the passenger was dissuaded from leaving, the captain came out, and he was told that if he exits the plane they have to sweep it and because of that he'd be denied reentry. Passenger insisted. Argued a bit.

Long story short, the passengers all had to disembark with their luggage and go back through security screening. And the flight crew presumably did their standard pre-boarding sweep.

This was, oh, 2002 or so. I wouldn't be surprised if they even let you off the plane anymore, at least not until the 3-hours are up that the new regs mandate.

And similarly, there has long been double-checks to make sure that no checked luggage is on a flight that isn't matched to a passenger. My understanding is that luggage that is freight checked (like, they lose your luggage and throw it on a later flight to get it to you) has to be more thoroughly screened.
+ $200 a puzzle + other products. Not too shabby for a potentially 1-2 man operation.
Hmm, not sure how I missed it, I matched twitter.com/[a-zA-Z0-9_]+ and @[a-zA-Z0-9_]+

Maybe it didn't show up in the search results for some reason ("twitter inurl:user site:news.ycombinator.com")
Replicating the Google Wave layout in 100 lines of js code with UkiJS