skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Above all, the purpose of arbitration clauses in consumer contracts is to eliminate class action lawsuits. Which may or may not be a good thing depending on your point of view. In the long run, companies will probably not see sustained relief from scrutiny of their practices. You'll likely see a move to a more European model, with fewer lawsuits but more aggressive consumer protection agencies.
I get to have this experience with one of my banks. And all I need to do to stay updated with the terms is click watch on the github repo. It's the way things should be.

https://github.com/SimpleFinance/policies
I meant 1 hour. But anyway that is the point of daylight savings time. The actual time doesn't change, just the number on the clock. Causing everyone to move their routines back 1 hour, so that they have more sunlight in the afternoon. Daylight savings time would work just as well if everyone decided to go to work from 8-4 during half of the year, and keep the clocks the same.
ICGrep: New approach to high-performance regular expression matching
Why doesn't somebody just create a git repository with contracts from major companies and push changes whenever they appear? Link to a subreddit that discusses said changes and voilà you get a little more transparency. Or am I missing something?
Thanks, we are probably on the same page here :-)

The mark doesn't honestly seem to be the issue here though, at least so far as I can see, but rather that the teacher marked something as wrong when it was right.
I just highlighted the phrases that made me interpret your statement as I did, but I misinterpreted. Wasn't intentional, thanks for the correction.
I've actually asked Dropbox to do exactly this, but no dice. Their mobile app allows you to edit text files fairly easily, but no web client.

It would be amazing if they would just let me use this on their website:

http://coolwanglu.github.io/vim.js/streamlinejs/vim.html
Thanks! Please try the "Fork" link at the bottom of a blab. You can either save as a public gist or (with a token from GitHub) a private gist. We have some ideas about merging forks, but nothing concrete yet.
Oh dear. Maybe in some places, which has a sensible and consistant addressing format. But there are plenty of places where there is no rhyme or reason to it.

Have a look at Germany in OSM. That's what crowdsourced maps can do.
Coding Academies are Nonsense
Same way any aspect of OSM is improved! By editing the map! Get out there and find some addresses and add them to OSM>
Looks nice. However, I cannot install it via M-x package-install. It says file not found when doing the request. EDIT: Never mind, I had an old listing.
As well as OSRM, there's also GraphHopper.
Life with my robot secretary
1 page is plenty long to bury unconscionable landmines in, especially for the party controlling UX. Until courts are ready to legislate UX, the better approach is to legislatively augment the court's "soft" power to void contracts that a reasonable person would "sign" without reading. Vague as hell, yes, but it fixes the incentive landscape without leaving obvious loopholes: longer and harder to read = more enforcement risk.

Also, this principle already exists and has a decent track record. Which is why my lease is 3 pages long, simple, and relatively landmine-free (I had to initial key clauses) while my iTunes contract is 50 page long, impenetrable, and landmine rich. The principle just needs to be strengthened & applied in the tech world.
Can you explain what you mean? The OSM data base (which you can download), doesn't have "layers". It's all just one big topologically connected pile of objects.

You are free to make a local map with OSM data, and then, in your browser, or GIS software of choice, overlay anything else you want on it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10482577
The author has some commentary on that here:

https://www.quora.com/What-does-it-feel-like-to-be-fired-fro...

I found it pretty interesting.
namedtuples are supposedly more space-efficient. For one, you don't have to store the keys every time.
I'm not gonna say that I'm glad he's off the road, but I do want to agree with the point that the article is clearly biased towards making us think that he is innocent, when we don't know all of the facts either. Okay, he wasn't drunk or speeding - according to him, at least - but it sounds like he might have been going too fast for the conditions. Just because the speed limit is 35 or whatever doesn't mean that it's safe to do 35 all the time.

But all that just goes to show that he deserves his day in court, in a justice sense. Which he will apparently never get, unless he's willing to spend a few years in jail first.
It's simply a symptom of the wider problem that is a scourge of all our lives:

- states are on the side of corporations not the people
Surveys in Crisis
If there were a way to transmit the altered user agreement back to the other party, the ramifications could be amusing.
TFA is about buildings and working environments, but I have been suffering through these same environmental aspects on my bus commute recently.

I have a short (35 min avg.) ride with no transfers from my place to the Los Angeles office. The past few months my transit operators have been really inconsistent in the use of the AC on the bus and it's killing me.

When I step onto a bus and the wave of warm, moist air hits me I will nearly freak out[0]. I can't help but snap at the operator, "Will ya' turn on the dang AC, please... it's hot in here!".

How can 20-40 people just sit there like that and not feel it, or say something about it?

With West LA (my area) having such a temperate climate, I suspect the bus operators -- who sit by their own window, and have the boarding door open constantly, providing circulation -- don't seem to know how bad it is in the back.

And while it may be 18c or so outside, as you HN folks know, the human body puts out a great deal of heat. I did a little BOTEC the other day, and 40 people on the bus puts out about the same heat as 2 1/2 conventional (open) gas fireplaces (~4kw).

I don't care if the windows are open or if its 15c outside -- it's going to get warm in the bus with 4kw of heat burning inside, and that doesn't take into account CO2 levels or water vapor (humidity) increases, which I don't have good maths for.

--

[0] TBH, most day's I am titrating some ADD (CII) meds, but I'm sensitive to these conditions even when I'm rolling my normal cognative/CNS self. (I'm from SEUS originally, so maybe I'm hyper tuned to muggy, stuffy air...).

edited for layout
A curated list of awesome Dropbox SDKs, tools, and services
The only folks that want to discuss recidivism are folks who don't benefit from the prison system (i.e. prisoners and their advocates).

If prisons were publicly measured and criticized based on on recidivism then wardens, parole boards, state and federal elected officials, etc, would all be at risk of being held accountable for the poor performance of prisons.

The public at large have really been fooled by this persistent avoidance of measuring prison success. Even a modest 10% reduction of recidivism (from 70% to 63%) would mean 36,000 fewer crimes and victims of crimes (about 10,000 prisoners are released weekly according to the DOJ).

To me that's the shocking part... improving recidivism would actually _prevent_ crime and reduce the number of victims of crime. Beyond that, there's the financial savings from reduced police man hours, courts, lawyers, and of course the actual costs of housing inmates.

Canada has a recidivism rate of 35% men/20% women, Sweden's is about 40%, Norway's is an astonishing 20%. If these countries can manage it surely the US can too.
It's curious to see Guantanamo Bay mentioned by name. I wonder if one of the reasons we're having trouble closing it is because the psychological health of the inmates has deteriorated to a state which so obviously violates ethical guidelines on prisoner treatment and perhaps even human experimentation.
> A full robocar product is only workable if you would need to correct it in decades or even lifetimes of driving.

I had a conversation about this with friends in Germany a few months back.

In most societies, a mistake that causes suffering to another individual is usually 'blamed' on the person causing the suffering. In many cases where causality is obvious, this assignment of blame is fairly straightforward. Example: Bob fell asleep, which caused him to lose control of his car, which hit the bus, which killed a child. Bob is now culpable for the child's family suffering. Bob remains one of many others who share culpability at this point, assuming others are also falling asleep at the wheel. FWIW, 103M people fell asleep at the wheel last year in the US, so Bob will likely have company.

Now put an autonomous piece of software written by company X into Bob's car. Bob engages the autopilot, falls asleep, the autopilot software experiences an error, the software fails to alert Bob, the software loses control of the car, which hits a bus, which kills a child. Who is culpable for the family's suffering now? The software? Company X?

The only way for company X to both a) allow Bob to fall asleep and b) bear the culpability for a family's suffering is to get the software to the point it only makes mistakes in a timeframe that is, at a minimum, several orders of magnitude greater than Bob making the same mistake.

The logic goes that, once a company's software kills a child, it's going to be pretty hard to keep the public from reacting negatively, even though overall suffering will decrease. The only option company X is to require Bob to accept he is "driving" the car and bear the culpability of any suffering the car's software may cause, or alternately, be ready to pay a substantial settlement that offsets suffering.
These reactionary islanders should know best practice is to imprison your witches.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse
He did. I read the book. One of his biggest legislative accomplishments before prison was reducing from felony to misdemenaor status cases where dads failed to pay child support (usually due to their not having work). Lots of guys were going to prison with felony records for the crime of being divorced and broke. Saving taxpayers money was a big part of the argument for getting this passed.
It reminds me of this story - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-dark-side-of-d...
Get picka. If only you knew what it means in Serbian language. Although it's not exactly picka but pička....

https://translate.google.com/#sr/en/pi%C4%8Dka
Disparagement tends to be a lose-lose situation. To drag someone down, you often have to sink lower than they are.

I found this story insightful about burnout. But, could care less that was at BCG. I prefer to cut and chose: either named positive feedback or anonymous negative feedback.
Thanks--we'll take that on-board.
But will it beat Fusion power to market? :-)

In a more serious tone, there are lots of positive changes like this which are inexorably working their way into production. And I agree with you it will be pretty interesting when your phone lasts for a week or more, with heavy use, on a single charge.
While I'm with you on Jared Diamond not being the best scientist, your criticism misses the mark. What you've described is part of the scientific method: you come up with a hypothesis and you test it.

A better criticism of Jared Diamond's work would be that his work suffers from a lack of primary source evidence: he's not doing experiments or directly synthesizing actual data, he's synthesizing the results of studies. And since there's no objective way to choose which studies are relevant or evaluate the methodologies of different studies, that inevitably introduces his own bias into the process.

That said, I haven't seen any studies contradicting the claim that grains in diet are correlated with tooth decay (which is a smaller claim than the larger claims Diamond makes about health, and which I think the primary studies he cites actually support).
Riding the wave of West Africa’s digital economy
Pasting doesn't seem to work for me (tried in Firefox and Chromium on Linux).
GNU Hurd 0.7 has been released
If the author of this article instead references the definition of multiplication of natural numbers on wikipedia [1], then the student is correct since $a \times b = a + a + \dots + a$ with that definition.

Without access to this particular teacher's curriculum materials, it's not possible to know for sure what definition is being referenced by the "repeated addition strategy". I'm inclined to assume the teacher knows what they're doing and has graded the work appropriately.

There are many comments on this thread about multiplication being commutative by definition, but this is not quite correct. Following the same definition of multiplication I cited above, it is a theorem that $a \times b = b \times a$. When I teach Abstract Thinking (a sort of introduction to proof writing course for mathematics students), I have the students write proofs for this property of multiplication of natural numbers, and the other familiar properties (cancellation, distribution, etc.). If anyone is interested, I've broken the steps out into worksheets that I give to my students, and you can see them at the link below. [2] [pdf]
(Multiplication of natural numbers is section 5.5.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_number#Multiplication
[2] [pdf] http://billkronholm.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/MATH280.p...
Some states have this. In Texas for example there is a statewide standard residential lease contract. When you rent property in Texas you know what you're getting into.
They pull in public data. OpenAddresses is doing that and gives a sense of just how much is available:

http://openaddresses.io/

You also see Google talking about extracting building numbers from Streetview photos.
Code by Heart – Write better code by imagining it first
"If you hunt them down and physically punish them yourselves, you'll go to jail"

The U.S. Constitution actually has provisions for legally doing that. Lobby your congressmen to issue "letters of marque and reprisal", which Congress is authorized to provide precisely for businesses to engage in warlike behavior against pirates et al, which includes the modern form in "ransomware".
That's a very misleading characterization. The purpose of the FAA is to eliminate judge-created exceptions to enforceability of arbitration contracts. The premise is that arbitration clauses should be enforced the same as any other voluntary contractual provision and that the judiciary shouldn't be allowed to give such provisions special treatment. The verbosity of form contracts has nothing to do with regulation or the FAA, except to the extent that they waive "default rules" which often protect consumers.
That's what I was thinking. Off the top of my head (not 100% checking compatability, but with current Newegg prices), to replace my current machine, not counting the 24 inch 1080p monitor (which in my experience last a long time as long as a tornado doesn't throw rocks into them (really)) and keyboard, mouse, etc.:

Supermicro XnSAE workstation motherboard: 215
3.3GHz 4 core Xeon E3-1226 CPU w/HDMI out: 217
32 GiB DDR3 1600 ECC Kingston memory: 240
Low end 1/3 w/year for 5 years data center 80GB Intel SATA SSD: 100
Seagate "enterprise" <550/TB/year 4 TB hard disk: 210

982 USD plus shipping plus whatever enclosure, power supply, high quality fans etc. you put into it, which ought not go over $200 new. E.g. after discovering a Lian-Li enclosure I love I bought 3 more and cycle through them.

Plus backup, however you do that (make sure critical stuff is offsite!). And, say, a man-week of your time to configure, order, build, install and configure Linux. The result will be very fast and rock solid (well, if put behind a good UPS) workstation class machine with a 5 year design life.
Speech to Text Application in Node.js
MCG: Visual Functional Programming
Network outages, downtime can cost Egyptian enterprises millions
Ask HN: What should I learn to position myself to work on a self driving car?
Hey HN, I'm a CS sophomore at the University of Toronto, positively obsessed with self driving tech. What can I learn before I graduate, or add to my portfolio, to position myself to work on a self driving car at a startup or of course Google/Tesla? I only have experience with CRUD apps and full stack web dev (only just beginning to learn "low level" stuff). I am taking an introductory embedded systems course right now, and loving it, the whole deal with robot localization, sensors, and control systems.

I would appreciate any advice on courses to take, online communities to get involved in, or fun projects to build.
Russian airliner with 224 aboard crashes in Egypt's Sinai, all killed
This all assumes that the FBI's purpose is to go after criminals who are harming the citizenry. I am no longer certain that is the purpose of the police (federal, state, or municipal), given their exceptionally poor record of preventing crime, and finding those responsible for crimes.
For (1), this is the reason the ransom is small. Since "many" are actually trustworthy, it's a small risk to pay the relatively small ransom. (Also, you can verify via bitcoin address if you're dealing with a hacker who is known to give data back.)

For (2), could you also find a way to get the FBI to release a statement saying you are trustworthy?
One possible issue with this approach is that you may need to add methods in the future to the tuple.

For example, the following pattern would improve code readability as well (by making values available as attributes) but also allows you to extend it in the future when you need to add additional methods to your object:

class Person(object):
def __init__(self, **kwargs):
for key, value in kwargs.items():
setattr(self, key, value)

Example: p = Person(name="John", age=30, weight=78) and p.age for access. When needed you can add methods to this class while still keeping the code readable.
You going to post this everyday?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10479292
The History of Gaming: An Evolving Community
What the Bible Says About? Part 2
There is absolutely NO incentive for anyone to change. The valued added (if any) is not large enough to change established practices.
Watch+latest+African+Nollywood+Nigerian+Ghanaian+Movies+online+Free
If you're going to do that, might as well just spell out the members, although it's verbose. What you're doing doesn't check that the attributes are valid.
Employment laws in Switzerland. I knew a few people who were just walked to the door with their copy of the signed non-disclosure and a page explaining COBRA benefits in the US.

That said, having had to fire people in my career it is always a lose-lose type situation, the manager is losing what ever help they were getting from the person and the person is losing their job.
From my understanding, the microkernel approach has been deemed impractical for real-world use. I wonder if there is anyone out there using it?
> A key notion of economics is that if two people voluntarily agree to something, it must be of some benefit of them at that moment compared to alternatives else they wouldn't have agreed. A market can consist solely of such interaction.

The problem is that interactions of two other people can also impose cost on me. Then if this is worse than some opportunity lost is not clear cut.

> Pure free-market economics adopts the epistemological stance that utility isn't quantifiable

I know, but it's an absurd stance, isn't it? It let's you do things like seeing a person that has a heart attack and thinking "I see you have a heart attack, but why should I help you, maybe it's your preference!"

I think any actor has to assume certain, at least very fuzzy, preferences of other actors to be able to operate in the world.

I suspect there are actual rational reasons why people don't want to have their preferences revealed, and this economic school of thought's usage of the "non-quantifiable argument" is just a one of the possible rationalizations.

> so discussing solutions without defining optimality is pointless

I actually feel the same way reading the article.
The Best Career Advice I ever received
This is what we call FUD.
> fresh food year round

Fresh food is one of the things significantly lacking in Hawaii. The state has very little sustaining agriculture, and it has to import large quantities of its food from the mainland.

Areas like Kaneohe on the windward side of Oahu used to be the breadbasket for the islands, rich, fertile, and arable land. The tore all that up and replaced it with a city (they paved paradise, and put up a parking lot..)
They've done the same all over the place, and where they haven't, farmers are preferring the more commercially valuable crops, such as coffee beans.

There is a small but growing farmers market scene, and while the food there is clearly of better quality than store bought (richer flavours, fresher), the local farmers don't produce anywhere near enough food to serve even a fraction of the market.
I am very familiar with arbitration agreements and how they both are enforced and came about. For years companies have tried in vain to get theses clauses accepted by the courts and failed, until recently when SCOTUS chimed in with their decision: Congress wanted the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) of the 1920s to be the law of the land and forced arbitration was considered statutorily okay.. The FAA [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Arbitration_Act, 1925] originally was a maritime law, where two parties in different countries would rather pick an arbiter to decide their dispute rather than in any one country.

What may surprise people is it's not just the signing of a contract, which enables this clause to be enforced, but also just a business' intent to settle cases arbitrarily. For instance, opening up a package of something you just bought might show intent that the contract therein is what you agree to. One nurse wasn't going to sign her rights away to an arbitration agreement, so she told her company 'no' to renegotiating her employment contract. But the courts upheld that she knew the intent of her employer and forced her into arbitration.

These companies are hiring their own judges, basically. What's scary is that these just aren't private contracts, and private court systems we are dealing with -- but private law!

SCOTUS ruled recently that even if the parties do not like the outcome of the arbitration decision, they have no legal recourse. Imagine going into a situation where a company knows the history of a judges decision and you do not? How incredibly unfair, let alone intimidating. I wouldn't even bother to sue, would you?

I won't go on about this. I can write a lot. Here's a list of links I collected about companies shorting the normal process of laws that protect citizens. The area is non-compete agreements:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/more-firms-requiring-non-co...

http://www.lexisnexis.com/legalnewsroom/labor-employment/b/l...

http://rickmasseyblog.com/2010/10/04/are-you-trapped-by-a-no...

http://www.romingerlegal.com/floridacourts/court_opinions2/5...

http://apps.americanbar.org/litigation/committees/adr/articl...

http://www.justice.org/cps/rde/justice/hs.xsl/19905.htm

http://www.flacorplaw.com/Non-Competes.html

http://thenoncompeteblog.com/2013/01/18/prominent-florida-ch...

http://floridamediationgroup.com/articles/spero/2000_Employe...

http://www.noncompetenews.com/?tag=/Arbitration

http://www.franczek.com/frontcenter-Nitro-Lift_Arbitration_N...

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-08-01/jobs/sns-20120...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quZL7WKLXt4