skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So you're saying:

def baz():
bar1()
foo()
bar2()

is hugely better than:

@bar
def baz():
foo()

I think it massively depends on naming and the general context. I can see myself choosing either depending on the precise situation.

As with all things in Python (and coding in general) taste and discretion are key: use decorators when they improve legibility and stop using them when they don't.
There was a bug in ls, long ago; it stuck around long enough that it became a feature. It was supposed to not list "." or "..", but instead it skipped all files starting with "."; which thus became the standard way to hide a file on *nix.
Yes, the formats are inspired by standards and similar, but that's not the main point.

Currently CalDAV and CardDAV agents expect servers to be able to store custom properties, and retrieve those again. This is relevant for sync clients such as yours, but it becomes even more important for scheduling systems.

In addition, there's many useful efforts already existing and underway such as recursion for non-gregorian calendars, consensus-based scheduling (a la doodle), inter-server scheduling (iTip, iMip, iSchedule), Freebusy, Calendar sharing, Availability, etc that all cannot be expressed by JMap.

I'm sure there's many more issues that would cause subtle bugs. As long as people are not actually storing iCalendar and vCard, and map to their own inferior data-models (such as Jmap, but Google Calendar is another big offender), we'll continue to have interop issues.

The thing is, they don't really like jCal. It has a bit of an odd structure compared to most json formats. So my thinking is that they don't have to support jCal to work within the wider calendaring world, they just need something that maps to iCalendar in a lossless manner. They can deprecate VTIMEZONE and other frustrating features, they can introduce new properties that are easier for them to use, just don't lose compatibility.

disclaimer, I'm the main author for sabre/dav and member of CalConnect. Fwiw I DON'T think that the iCalendar format is great, but a replacement will need to have actual backwards compatibility and not just loosely model the few things that a simple online calendar such as fastmail needs.
Perks are things like free first class upgrades, lounge access, no fees for checked luggage, no fee for flying standby on an earlier flight, free liquor, etc. They don't sound like much, but if you travel a lot, they are really useful.

Also slightly related: nobody pays for first class on domestic flights. Everyone up in first class is normally a frequent flyer (they tell you when you check in if you got an upgrade).
Honest errors are allowed for - there's quite often cases of online systems giving silly prices and the company isn't obliged to honour the price. Sometimes you see E&OE [errors and omissions expected] on adverts to draw attention to the fact that they might have erred and won't honour an erroneous deal.

Sometimes companies honour the error for PR reasons, there was a John Lewis situation I think where they did this recently.

Advertised prices are "invitations to treat" rather than binding contracts of sale.
New users want to discover, not  be educated
Auto-insurance disruption
Dan's Tools
In the US, at least for the last few years, the same legal principal that allowed airline to get away with correcting those mistakes was secondary to Department of Transportation Regulation CFR 399.88a

This prevented, explicitly including the case of "mistake" fares, the post-purchase increase in the price of airfare. This was done to prevent airlines from post-facto declaring a promotion a "mistake" when deemed "too successful" later.
Except that a dumb storage cannot do scheduling, and many other things.
4 Ways You're Unknowingly Irritating Your CIO
I wonder why they chose to use the word 'Chief' versus 'CEO' when the article uses CEO to describe the situation. At first I thought Sebastian Thrun would be the subject of this article...
> The distinction between being 'stocastic' and 'random' is one of 'predictability & determined' vs 'undetermined'.

The first sentence on the page you linked to suggests otherwise:

> The term stochastic occurs...to describe events or systems that are unpredictable
I no longer believe the Axiom of Choice
Particles with integer spin obey Bose-Einstein statistics. These are named for two papers, published together, by Bose and Einstein. Bose's paper described the statistics. Einstein's said that Bose's paper appeared to have an off-by-one error, but was in fact correct, because the particles could not be distinguished from each other.

It seems to me, then, that we have a physical example of a situation where the axiom of choice fails.

Therefore, using the axiom of choice as part of the foundation for all of mathematics seems to not be a wise idea. (ZFC can still be an interesting system, and consistent with itself, of course.)

Or am I missing something?
Writing a Resignation Letter That's Not 'Screw You'
Also phones with WiFi, and everyone having WiFi in their home.
Zillion empty pages is old interface, not new one. In new interface, me and many other are actively working right now, UI is way less cluttered. This is what me and others were hired to fix. Promo video probably did not address it well enough (which is good to know.)

I think [1] might give you better idea (although it is too much time to spend unless you are really interested in it.) You will notice, that some parts of UI are still old, but these are going to be replaced bit by bit, since Blackboard moved to continuous deployment model (which again, became possible only recently as schools became more relaxed toward keeping data "in the cloud".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLontYaReEU1tCbsCDP-u_...
Yeah. I find it hard to believe he just did this via some serendipitous realization. Doesn't pass the sniff test.
That is what I found great about this story. He calls 'em up and is frank about what he's doing.

One quote says it all, "25 years at Avis and I've never seen anything like this"

Not only did they know, but they thought it was cool and helped the guy max out his opportunity. The object lesson here is to never underestimate the impact of boredom or just the chance to be part of something unique as motivators.

Bet those people had an interesting day, and you know they all got to talk some about where they live, where he lives, etc...

Heck, I would jump on something like that just for the conversations that day, if nothing else. As long as the guy is nice, why not?
That's true. Here is an article that goes into the topic in some depth:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/money-sav...
The only relevance his Asperger's had seems to be his uninhibited talking about his manipulation which probably helped lead to his conviction.
> In C you can certainly jump "sideways". The condition for using longjmp is that the function where the context had been saved has not terminated. This means a function can longjmp to itself (regardless of block nesting).

However, you can't longjmp to a function that's a "sibling" in the call tree: if f() calls a(), then calls b(), b can't longjmp to a, though it can longjmp to f.
For every story that comes out (either written by the exploiters themselves or found out by others), I wonder how many more there are that quietly hack the system and don't tell anyone?
As far as I can tell, R&B is firmly rooted in the western tradition and has stylistic influences from African American and Cuban music. R&B does not trace an origin back to Carnatic music, making Carnatic music not the original R&B.
Victorian Photoshop
Laziness (value judgement) is a poor headline when what they're really talking about is minimizing energy expenditures (factual information).
What? In the movie he wishes for the companies to stop doing something they are actually doing. They are overzealously testing for any possible problem and marking people as unclean.

It's unsubtle textbook discrimination, removing perfectly good candidates from consideration. The company is hardly affected, there are plenty of candidates, but since these people are shunned by most companies they suffer terribly.

How in the world does that related to people with imaginary causes of autism.
e.g. http://www.delta.com/content/www/en_US/skymiles/medallion-pr...
I am guessing the bluetooth radio was connected via USB. Thing about USB is that the Linux drivers were built around a misunderstanding regarding the sleep/suspend of USB devices.

While the Linux code assumed the hardware was required to be up and ready in 2 minutes or less, the 2 minutes mentioned in the spec was just a suggested minimum wait time. Thus it would give up on devices that was still in the process of powering back on.

That not to say that bluez have been in great shape in recent years. But then it is also a complicated concept for *nix, as it straddles root and user. You have their whole pairing interface on the user side, and then all the device nodes (HID, Audio, etc) on the root side.
From an environmental perspective, these kinds of economic incentives seem highly damaging. Not that I've got anything against you for exploiting them.
I think a better example would be: paying to have a house built and then paying to tear it down.

Another good example could be: think about the cost spent every year for lawyers to write EULAs or liability waivers that nobody reads, or to file tax returns that comply with our super complicated tax code. If the underlying legal system was simpler and/or less friendly to these liability lawsuits, the same effect could be had without needing any of those legal/professional billable hours.
HackerWeb – A simply readable Hacker News app for iOS
XML will be slightly slower than parsing JSON simply because you have to scan more characters for each item.
Get Design Feedback on Your Site, App, or Design Concept for $5 per Screen
And then you have the problem of proving that the specification is bug free...
You look at the technology from first principles. The idea of isolating cancer stem cells is not new. Identifying them, culturing them (sequencing them) and using them to graft tumor into a xenohost are all interesting technologies themselves. These new models themselves seem to be very valuable and better than what exists currently.
Making a backdoor that relies on raw packets may net you benefits in terms of avoiding detection of network connections/syscalls by system tools (netstat and the like). Writing your own micro tcp/ip stack will also avoid having to throw libpcap into your backdoor. Of course, raw packet access is usually only reserved for root, so you'll have to fall back on the OS's network stack & calls to get this type of tool in, but eventually it makes for a more stealthy rootkit.

If you get really fancy you can fuck with network protocols in general and avoid getting caught by network detection & analysis. One good example is finding some traffic like DNS or ICMP that gets overlooked easily in graphs of network traffic and is already connectionless, so it's more difficult to catch someone constantly connected via backdoor.

Once I saw a backdoor use ICMP to do basic communication with a CNC, and when it got the correct reply it'd use another protocol (and host) to pass data. Only even realized that was happening after another compromise was found. And of course it was totally valid traffic so it didn't get picked up by any network sensors.
They are not master keys if they are the only keys and they only open the lock they were built for.
Southwest's website didn't mention it was repeatable, just said 1,500 points. So that's what I went with (I don't know Southwest's program all that well, and it's debatable whether it should really be considered "status" in the same league as the AA/Delta/United programs).
> He then goes on to imagine that 3% economic growth means that in 200 years we'll all have 400 times as many cars and refrigerators (or maybe just one car the size of a luxury yacht), eat 400 times as much food, have houses 400 times as big, etc.

I read it as an explanation of why in 200 years we won't have 400 times as many cars and refrigerators. Looked at another way, freed from material and energy constraints, why wouldn't we have a fleet of drones and other appliances to fulfill our needs? Why wouldn't we have, if not a giant house or property, at least properties spread around in all the geographic locations we cared about? I think the answer is constraints on space, material and energy.

Alternatively, you can read that growth curve not as the individual's increasing utilization of resources, but as the increase of individuals themselves and the increase of resources this entails.
Tube strike benefited economy, according to Big Data
You'll still need parking, but you can put it underground in lights out parking facilities.
Show HN: Websites Speed – Comparison Test in a Comprehensive Report
No.

Well, the correct answer to almost any such technical question is "yes and no". This one comes as close as any to a bare "no".

It's a good question. PDF->SVG conversions are quite powerful--when they work. They simply do NOT work, in the general case. I deal with a hundred-thousand PDFs at a time, and they demonstrably don't behave with enough regularity to allow for the kind of general transformation I suspect you have in mind.

As it happens, our little company does quite a bit of business extracting content from specific classes of PDFs http://phaseit.net/claird/comp.text.pdf/PDF_content_extracti... Coincidentally, I also research and deliver advanced SVG effects http://phaseit.net/claird/comp.text.xml/SVG_examples.html I certainly am sympathetic to your aim. To be successful, you need to specify your situation more precisely.
Thanks internet for the app ideas – Mad Steve
Dill herb
Google requests to test riderless robot motorcycles
Fantastic! Do you have any tips for getting children into programming? Or did he pick it up by himself?
What if the vigilante has been forced into vigilanteness as a victim of circumstance and misfortune?
Agreed. I don't know why etsy isn't profitable (really? seems like a fairly simple site), but I use it exclusively to avoid manufactured stuff. Same goes for tindie.
I don't buy that. How we value things really does vary from person to person.

His time and money commit was not large, yet he got a nice perk, at least one or two awesome flights somewhere he would want to go, status, and a chance to hang with the locals where he did the rentals.

Bonus, a nice day just driving around a part of the world just for the hell of it.

To me personally, that and the chance to interact with some people there is worth a lot. And this guy didn't pay all that much.
React.js Best Practices and Tips
>Currently CalDAV and CardDAV agents expect servers to be able to store custom properties, and retrieve those again. This is relevant for sync clients such as yours, but it becomes even more important for scheduling systems.

What's wrong with storing a file inside the calendar folder? Why do clients need to do this?

Even in CalDAV/CardDAV's case: Flock had massive compat issues because no server actually supported this. So I guess it's not actually necessary?

I'm not knowledgeable enough to respond to the rest of your points. Perhaps somebody from FastMail could respond to them. But I wonder if we should simply ignore some of those feature requests to make a simple protocol for the majority of us possible.
Generalizing Overloading for C++2000 (1998) [pdf]
It's the difference between how we would well meaning-ly like the world to function and the way in which it actually does.

The war on drugs is responsible for the cartel situation in the same manner that the prohibition was responsible for the rise in prominence of the Mafia during the 20s. Individual individuals decided to go down the path of providing these illicit services but the well meaning legislation provided the substrate on which they could go about making their fortune exploiting.

This is simply the economic reality of what happens under these scenarios. The conservatives Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell correctly predicted many of these negative outcomes decades ago during the start of these policies.
Vodafone Australia admits hacking Fairfax journalist's phone
I think a lot of people on here just believe that crime is manufactured by the government. They chafe at western justice systems and they chafe at vigilante justice because they have a hard time coming to grips with the idea that any of this could be necessary. That societies are naturally full of criminals who don't, without outside coercion of some sort, respect other peoples' rights.
The video game Metro 2033 (recently remastered for modern consoles, so it's still around and relevant) envisions a typical post-apocalyptic future. People live underground, in subway (metro) tunnels under the cities, which are hellish radioactive wastelands.

Something that struck me about the game was the role of women. You mostly see them in the context of children or, more regrettably, in the kitchen. It's not reflective of even the present day in Western cultures, let alone decades in the future.

However, the game isn't Western, it's Russian. I can't help but wonder if the role of women simply reflects the Russian male game creators' view of the world and an expanded role for the women of the future was simply not on their collective horizon.

Otherwise, great game, especially for $10.
The big problem I have with WebDAV is that the specs for very pieces all do kind of "vertical" slices of functionality without separation of concerns between low-level protocol (what does HTTP provide and what is it missing, and how do we generically extend it to provide what is necessary for the applications we are trying to do) and content semantics, so that where it extended the HTTP protocol (with new methods, etc.), those extensions were tightly bound to content semantics.

I think rethinking the same problem domain with a more RESTful approach, a lot better could be done, with a lot simpler set of generic protocol extensions covering the few real gaps in HTTP/1.1 and a simple set of metadata content types [0] to cover authoring/versioning information, with primary content just using any content type.

[0] And, really, this is two problems that should be addressed somewhat separately, in terms of representation-neutral metadata content models first, and then in terms of various representations for those content models.
HN vs Reddit results: https://www.dareboost.com/en/comparison/55f6f1430cf2b0b29ed3...
Sorry, that was not a well-written wording. The intention was to demonstrate the concept of 'predictability' not whether it was actually predictable. Edited and fixed now.
The key could be added to the appleid on the server, without telling the phone about it. Others sending messages to you would then also encrypt with the new backdoor key. Likewise, you don't get notifications about your friends' keys updating (in fact there's not even any UI to show the current keys for a contact), so your phone would start encrypting messages to the recipient's additional backdoored key silently too. :(
$200 Arduino color robotic painter
Best Practices for Mobile Apps
If the breakdowns given by the airlines are to be believed, the bulk of the retail cost of a plane ticket these days are in taxes, fees and duties.

I booked a ~£400 return flight from the UK to the States just a few weeks ago and the airline claim to be only getting 40% of that. I'm not sure where fuel fits in.
Isn't this basically a shuffling machine with blocks instead of cards? Surely a solution is a smart engineer away.
Codename: lish

Now on NPM !

$> npm install lish

:)
The planes are flying regardless of the people seeking frequent flyer miles. Aside from the marginal fuel increase due to the increased load, there's not much impact.
Years ago I read the story of a professional photographer that used that trick to carry his -very expensive- equipment without fear that the airline would loose it.

Aha, not the original text I read, but same idea: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/09/expensive_cam...
ttylinux will probably shutdown this october
But how many of the 80-90% male murders are related to drugs, gangs etc? Vs these girls and women, who don't seem to be associated with any criminal activity? Not saying those men don't matter, just that drugs/gang violence and murder of innocents are two different problems
The email validator is a pretty need tool!
Never mind that the term systemd can be used both for the init binary, and the larger project (systemd, networkd, udev, journald, logind, and the list goes on and on).

As best i could tell, Torvalds didn't have an issue with systemd as the init.

Nor do i think many would (outside of the whole journald thing), except for the snowballing of sub-daemons and absorbed projects (udev for instance existed for a decade as an independent project before being folded into the systemd code tree).

Without all that, it may well be that systemd would just be one init among many (i barely noticed the existence of upstart for instance).
And don't forget the economic impact. Think about all those people whos job it is to drive: truck drivers, bus drivers, taxi drivers.
There used to be a rather negligent backdoor in some 3COM products - you could log in with username 'debug' and password 'synnet' to get a full admin shell with extra debugging commands. IIRC it wasn't printed in the user manuals, but was fairly obvious from poking around in the firmware updates. Fortunately the password could be changed, so it wasn't a completely irreparable security hole.
Talking Machines: Strong AI and Autoencoders with Hugo Larochelle
When one can break into most zipping suitcases with a bic pen, rezipping it so you never know I was there, what's the point of a lock?
Or you can have it do useful tasks. Have a car fleet that's passenger-only during peak times, but couriers packages/freight during its downtime.
Er, what's the data source?
Autopilot and Slack: Powerful marketing automation
Boost asio UDT implementation
Flights are probably a major expense and inconvenience for lots of people here, while grocery spending isn't. People are naturally interested in things related to their situation, it isn't necessarily anything nefarious.

For instance, in the game Battlefield 4, using the mortar, considered on pure game mechanic merits, is worse than the crappiest of Atari games. Yet it is still compelling within the larger battle, especially if you are using it with some goal in mind like taking out recalcitrant snipers.

Reading an article on extreme couponing or hyper miling might be likewise dull unless it relates in a personal way to a challenge you have faced or goal you have had, even if you would never actually go to the lengths described to alleviate it.

(Mortar in BF4, gamplay wise it is basically just moving a crosshair over little arrows: http://i.ytimg.com/vi/XYawN6jiaRc/maxresdefault.jpg )
Because oil is the only source of energy we have, right? Things like nuclear energy, geo-thermal, hydro, wind and solar don't exist. And there's no chance of creating a technology that allows us to produce even more power, say, nuclear fusion...

Regardless, I did mention an 'idyllic' future. Obviously we'll be burning fossil fuel for the immediate future.
Curious about what you mean by'a "caste system" mentality'?
> If a company sets up a promotion, it's their responsibility to ensure that the terms are favorable to them.

If an animal sets develops a new organ, it is its responsibility to ensure that the functionality of the organ is favourable to them. If it screws it up and a worm infects that organ, then it should keep evolving a bit more.

Of course this is a somewhat trivially true statement, but it doesn’t change the fact that the worm is parasitic.