skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>And you fail on the "bit in the middle", because all the unpleasantness that I described in those earlier posts happens on a single flight.

You were talking about the start and the end of the journey in your OP. I assumed the "end" part referred to the return flight. Hence the holiday would be "the bit in the middle".

I'm know that people have bad experiences sometimes, but you're making an absurdly huge drama out of it. Refusing to fly is simply not a reasonable response to the typical level of inconvenience.

>Hundreds of people from my country have recently been held in hotels under armed guard

This has nothing to do with airport security, but rather immigration policy. You're going off on so many tangents here I'm not really sure what to say.
It would need to swap the common pairs on use. Which is basically this guys scheme except you manually define the pairs.

Then again on windows you can alt-shift-tab, so that pretty much takes care of that anyway, if could just have the programs in consistent order.
Practical short-term self-help advice, but irrelevant to this political debate. Troll?
Only if what you want to do fits into a wee box. If you want to break out of that box and work with a web page directly, JS is still your only option. Abstractions are possible via LiveConnect (the very thing JavaScript was named for - ability to communicate with applets!), but abstractions 1) leak, and 2) suck.

So: no. What we do have, however, is a number of shots, scattered throughout Mozilla's history, at getting other languages into the browser that crashed and burned. Maybe Miguel has the pull to get uptake for something like this, but I'm skeptical.
"The TSA does not, and cannot effectively, defend against terrorist attacks."

Very true. I know someone who has carried a box cutter on every flight he's been on since 9/11 - over 100 flights, just because he can.
Amazon: Thanks for your purchase. Now tell us which of your friends would also like it and we'll give you a buck. And, don't worry, we'll never tell them you squealed.
Nice one. For me the big takeaway from all of this has definitely been that when things get too complex, all sorts of things that we rely on for the system to function properly stop working.

In particular, the hiding of risk removes a lot of the correcting mechanisms from the system.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's argument that we should ban complex financial instruments and keep things very simple and close to those primitives makes a lot of sense to me.

Whether it's in anyway practical or not, I have no idea.
I recently had an interview at google which I did not pass. The problem I did the worst on was finding the median of two sorted arrays. If I had 5 minutes with my favorite editor and an easy way to run unit tests, I could have easily written a correct version of the algorithm.

For decades ordinary computer scientists wrote algorithms on pen and paper, translated them to punch cards or switches, and ran them on computers with no screens. Is it really so inconceivable that a company might expect you to understand and write code on a whiteboard?
Often the problem is that parts of the content are boring, and people don't want, or know how, to edit.

One would hope that with a shorter format people would have less of a problem filling the time with not-boring stuff.
- malloc() returns void* because it allocates memory, not objects. If you want your objects initialized, use 'new'.

- I was under the impression that a round-trip through void* always worked? Or do you mean that "Derived d;Base * b = (Base* )(void* )&d;" doesn't work (which I wouldn't consider "broken")?

- I like knowing that something won't be null. Also, your "bitwise and" operator was already an overloaded mess.

- You only need the #ifdefs if you still have to interface with legacy C code that has variables named "class" or other such foolishness that makes it not compilable as C++. :)
The OP seemed to be seriously suggesting that aiport security is so bad that he wouldn't consider flying to a foreign country for a holiday.

I agree that aiport security is a bit of a farce. But hysteria of this sort doesn't contribute much to the political debate either.

I'm not sure that providing practical self-help advice ought to count as trolling, anyway. HN isn't meant to be a political forum. Strictly speaking, any political debate is OT here.
Does anyone know how mature algorithms that use video for facial recognition are? It seems one could use multiple consecutive frames to draw better inferences about 3D geometry, and perhaps resolve various occlusions.
So you don't really care about performance.

Did I say that?

That was my original point: C++, even when you try to use a wisely chosen subset of it, remains very complicated and error prone.

Your original point, which I've now quoted twice, was that C++ is inappropriate because many programs don't need to deal with low-level details like memory management. My counterclaim, which you have yet to refute, is that C++ is no obstacle to that end.

I blame it's design choices.

The vast majority of people who blame C++'s design choices don't understand them. Have you read Stroustrup's D&E?

And on all other fronts, C++ really sucks.

Stating a claim is no defense of it.
TL;DR indeed. it doesn't have to be that complicated.

i needed a credit card processor for corduroy (plug: http://corduroysite.com/) to process monthly subscription charges. i filled out a form (i think, it was 2 years ago) on braintree's website (http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/), they emailed me back some info, i filled out and faxed over their forms about my business and already-established checking account, they created my american express/discover/visa/mastercard merchant accounts for me, and i used activemerchant (http://www.activemerchant.org/) to talk to their gateway via my rails app. according to my email archive, i received the signup forms from them on april 14th and they emailed to confirm my first charge through their gateway on april 22nd.

i wrote some simple code to use activemerchant to process the monthly subscriptions from a cron job that submits a charge to braintree using the customer's vault id (the only thing stored locally, braintree actually stores the credit card and address information) and the subscription monies are deposited into my bank account the next day.

i get a monthly statement from braintree in addition to instant email receipts. i've had to change my bank account and address information once, which involved contacting braintree and american express/discover/visa/mastercard and was relatively painless.

i'm not sure what is so difficult that services like recurly are trying to make easier, but if the problem is lots of different points of contact, i'm not sure that another middleman is the answer. braintree stores and charges the credit cards, the credit card companies deposit the money into my local bank account. simple.
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If they start massively upping the costs for IP addresses, it's really going to hurt the VPS companies.
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Alternatively, he could do himself a favor and _do_ go into science. Or however that sentence should have been formed.

Then he'd learn about the difference.
A bytecode specifically for Javascript would probably be sub optimal for performance of non-javascript languages. I'd rather have something lower level like .NET/Java bytecode or perhaps even LLVM.
Google did it to be nice, not because they were legally required to.
I'm not sure why so many of these guides seem to operate under the assumption that having the transaction happen on someone else's server (ie, traditional Paypal, Google Checkout, Amazon Payments, etc.) is a bad thing. I would think it'd be a good thing. Google and Amazon in particular are well known and trusted brand names that most customers likely already do some amount of business with.

I know that for my own online shopping, I'm much more likely to purchase from a site that uses Google Checkout or Amazon payments than on that wants me to enter my CC information onto their own page. I figure Amazon already has my CC info anyway, and Google is more likely to have sophisticated security measures than joe-random ecommerce site.
Incompatibilities Between  ISO C and ISO C++
I've mentioned making this exact thing many times to my wife & friends. Instead of iPhone, I wanted to do real-time video from a hidden cam with the processing done on a remote PC. Imagine walking around the town and casually saying "Hey Sharon" to some random girl while she and her BF both wonder how you know her name. Would be pretty funny.
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What's the lab extension called? I can't find it. The closest I could find was "Got the wrong Bob?", but that only warns you after you pick an unusual Bob. Sounds like a dirty hack which wants to parade as a clever feature. They should instead just fix the ordering of the auto-suggest dropdown.
Javascript faces similar problems - it has no int type - all numbers are represented as 64-bit doubles. &|! operations are done by converting the double to an int, performing the operation, then converting back to a double.
Wow. The algo is really awesome. I detected every single face here: http://chir.ag/gallery/md/nature-coast-kayaking/047.jpg and got smile + glasses right for everyone except one. Nice domain too.
As an on and off PyPy contributor here's my impression: the goals for the next release are going to be a) cpyext support a wide variety of real world extensions, b) keep making the JIT faster for as many apps and benchmarks as possible, c) fix a pathological condition in the GC. And in the medium term adding support for x86-64 to the JIT.
This is rubbish no where can I find a requirement that we need to go above and beyond what we normally do to remain compliant with PCI-DSS if we do not store our customers credit card data (which we don't).

I am marking this one as link bait and moving on, annoyed at the waste of a couple of hours.
There was an article on HN about the subject a while ago (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t....) that was quite interesting and modest.
> the price driver is not so much the cost to produce as it is the rate of production.

Yes, it will require a rapid expansion of CTL plants and demand will drop.

It would probably mirror the expansion of South African CTL plants after numerous oil boycotts.
> But hysteria of this sort doesn't contribute much to the political debate either.

It's not hysteria, it's fact. I personally will not fly to many destinations now, because the unpleasantness and inefficiency mean it is not worth the effort. I have been finding out recently that several of my friends and family now share this view, so I'm certainly not an isolated case.

For comparison, I will happily travel between London and Europe via Eurostar to Paris, where the equivalent checks required about five minutes and nothing particularly onerous or unpleasant, and in fact the staff were friendly and helpful throughout.
...but if you aren't back here in a week buying something else we just might.
Well, I fly between the US and UK quite frequently, and I don't have any problems.

You do seem pretty sensitive (e.g. worrying about the fact that people are "glaring" at you).
We're talking (or at least I thought we were) about replacing the scripting language in a browser, which visually renders the structure and styling of a DOM. That's how browsers work.

Replacing the scripting language of a browser does not magically make the applications you describe possible, any more than it's possible to draw high quality vector graphics on a 5250 green screen. You're presuming all sorts of hardware-accelerated graphics, network connectivity, font manipulation and many other fundamental sorts of hardware manipulation that just isn't possible within the confines of (most of today's) web browser.

What you describe is indeed possible, e.g. Silverlight and Air, but putting a new scripting VM in today's browsers is not going to get you there. You're not talking about web applications, you're talking about a new class of web browser.
The author's original "I'm out" post: http://speirs.org/blog/2008/9/12/app-store-im-out.html

What I find sad is that every issue he had with Apple is still just as bad. The only thing that has changed positively is the app store approval time. Everything else is either the same or worse. And so basically he's just saying, "Fine, you're just going to keep doing the things I find reprehensible, but consumers love you, so I'll play your game." It's an understandable position to take, it just makes me sad to see developers feeling like they're forced to cede their strongly held beliefs because Apple has gotten too big and the momentum is too great to ignore.

And yes, I realize nobody is actually forcing him to act against his beliefs, but he clearly feels that way.
Some weight lifting sources (e.g. http://stronglifts.com/) say that cardio-exercise is almost useless for losing weight. They hold that building muscles with, say, weightlifting will work much better, because you will have a higher base metabolic rate.

There should be studies about this in the literature.
Look back on how JRuby developed. At first the concerns were to make sure you could simply run Ruby code. But over time that became a given, and speed became the new focus. They've done quite well and I expect the MacRuby team to do so as also.
> I'm know that people have bad experiences sometimes, but you're making an absurdly huge drama out of it.

The point is that almost everyone I know seems to be having a bad experience with flying these days, and almost all of it is directly due to the over-zealous security and related issues. Why should we "come quietly" and accept our quality of life being reduced in this way?

> Refusing to fly is simply not a reasonable response to the typical level of inconvenience.

I, and an increasing number of my friends and family, disagree with you. Fortunately, where and how we travel still remains our choice, so those modes of transport and destinations that offer a pleasant, efficient experience will benefit, while those that do not will suffer.
I guess they'll have to trade in the S-class for an E-class to pay for Obamacare. I guess the single-parent college kid between jobs who got hit by a hit-and-run driver should suffer instead.
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> makes you wonder why the author bothered to "steal" the setting at all, when they could quite clearly make their own.

It gives the work a prefabricated audience. It's much harder to convince [random member of the public] to read "my original novel" than it is to convince [random ______ fan] to read "my ______ fan-fiction."
> The sort of apps built with Flash are unlikely to be the sort that would need to access the multitasking API.

The sort of apps built with the iPhone SDK are unlikely to be the sort that would need to access the Flash runtime.

> See, they have the choice whether to use the toolkit or not.

See, developers have the choice whether to distribute apps via the app store or not. There's always the web.

See how that works?
Also see Philadelphia Inquirer report: http://www.philly.com/philly/news/breaking/20100503_Lower_Me...
> Well, I fly between the US and UK quite frequently, and I don't have any problems.

Are you a US citizen?

(Edit: And on the glaring over the passport thing, that is clearly not a deal-breaker in itself, though for me the arbitrary strip searching is, as is the biometric scanning to enter certain countries.)
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Get a pre-paid sim from another carrier. Don't activate it, just put it in your phone while you install whatever you want. Then switch back to your normal sim card. Presto - apps installed!
Right, but if they get those snazzy Facebook Like buttons on a third of the Top 100 sites on the Web, now they know where you go. And what you do while you there. Hmm.
I would simply connect an OpenWRT router to my serial-to-usb thingie, run a terminal emulator on the Superbrain and Links on the router and call them.

"Guys... Is the Flash menu really required? Because, apart from that, the intranet looks just fine here"
Suddenly the App Store doesn't seem so bad.
Just a thought: don't people love google. I mean in the sense that even non-techy users can look at google and say "wow these guys have changed the world". Or even at the very least, "hey cool, I found it".

Doesn't that brand affection count for something?

I have never met a non-techy user express love for facebook in the sense that it was doing anything special or even worthwhile. To them it's just yet another way to talk to their friends. Sure it may be the best way, but the perception is that its just a damned messaging interface. A cool contact book. I don't know.

Personally as a more tech-savy user, I love google. They have done so much good it makes it hard for me to get upset with them over privacy issues; so many things become pretty trivial. Google made information easily accessible to the entire world. They liberated costly video media by taking on youtube's ridiculously non-sustainable business model. They run goog-411! <3. Google maps is the best, google mail is the best, with google docs i can say goodbye to bloat-ware to write a freaking essay. There's google scholar, google translate, google code, ... they don't have to do any of these things, much less make them freely accessible and zero-cost for the entire world. Oh yeah, then theres little teeny tiny google.org

Man I love google, they can have my information anytime they want it. <3

Thanks google!

So my point is people can say xyz company is the next Google killer all they want. They can say feature is X is going to turn the tides. But really, perceived brand awareness/trust/loyalty does count for something. Does facebook even have a charity arm?
Why would you be concerned about 3G radiatiom at all? I don't think cell phones cause any problems for children.
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Nobody really expected everyone to default on their homes at once. It was unprecedented.
The difference is that Google's various products, unlike Facebook's, provide data that isn't strictly necessary for their ads to be relevant. As their giant pile of money attests, simple targeted advertising based upon search queries is more than enough to build a giant empire upon.

They won't wither on the vine if their various other session-based tracking datasets, such as those you mention, are cut off for whatever reason. The same can't be said of Facebook's trove of private information they're apparently banking on selling to the highest bidder.

The bottom line is even if there are some short term successes for Facebook via targeted advertising from social network data, they will live in constant fear of a bad news day causing all Facebookers to log into their account and uncheck the "share my personal information with 3rd party sites." It could be an overnight death, at any moment.

Those folks might also kill their GMail accounts for the same reason, but they'll still be anonymously searching Google for information and getting relevant ads.
What I'm wondering is: can't Facebook create intent? If they know my favorite bands and location, can't they sell me concert tickets I might be interested in? If they know I'm in school and who my friends are, can't they not only advertise new places to rent, but who I can rent with depending on similar interests? It seems like they have all the information they need to create intent, they just need to develop that "Oh, I got that through Facebook" reputation.
Wow, this made my day! The Latin and Rock/Pop categories sound like Monkey Island :D

Amazing. Whoever didn't see it yet should watch Stephen Wolfram's talk about computation: http://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_wolfram_computing_a_theory_...
(One of these days I might really learn X programming and do a tiled WM configured with Lua, but I've got too many projects already.)

This has already been done. It's called awesomeWM and it is exactly as good as its name indicates.
There's so many different HN pages (ie news.ycombinator.com/noobs, news.ycombinator/ask etc.) that it would be helpful if there was one page that listed all of them. It does't need to be nice, or accessible itself, but it would help make it so users don't have to try and remember each one or remember where links to the different pages are located.
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> I guess you weren't the only one who didn't understand that you could disable all notifications from a particular app in two clicks.

At one point my friends were discovering new apps to spam notifications from faster than they could possibly be playing them. Blocking an app is no help when you have requests from a hundred different ones.
No, I'm British, but I'm studying in the US at the moment.

FWIW, the visa makes very little difference to how you're treated. Same experience as when I've entered on a visa waiver. Customs & immigration are generally polite, often even friendly. Security is a hassle, but not an unbearable one by any stretch of the imagination.

Before I went to the US for the first time, a lot of British people did warn me about how awful US immigration officers are. But frankly I'm now inclined to put this down to the general British tendency to expect the worst :)
One of my favorites is QuickSSHD - dead simple, starts an ssh server on your phone so you can ssh in and browser around or even better, scp files to / from it (no need to plug in your phone to put files on it any more ...)
Any recommendations for a Google Reader app? The mobile site is nice but I would like offline access for commuting.
Needs a search option.
I'm surprised to see so much skepticism on this thread. When I read the article, I was delighted to see my own experience described so accurately. It's the second failure that's really galling.

It made me wonder what it would take to implement something like this on OS X (in terms of hooking into the OS, rather than in terms of the heuristics). Since the application Witch (http://manytricks.com/witch/) can be used as a replacement for the built-in App Switcher, it must be possible ...
Yet we all think Apple's App store policies are draconian. Besides, it's not about copyright. It's about trade marks being expanded to include characters. I'm cool with trade marks (I wouldn't want to buy a book by JK Rowlings if it was actually written by Umberto Eco), but re-using characters doesn't seem so bad.
That's true from a rational perspective, but people aren't rational. They have expectations of a nice, consistent experience that doesn't bounce them from one service to another.

I'm working on a business-oriented startup that requires credit card transactions, and part of my desire to have payments on my own site is because of the signal it sends out that you have your stuff together.
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But neither "fast" nor "easy" carries any semantic weight in the sentence—no one will ever say "Foo is the slow, difficult way to bar." Just say that "Foo helps you bar" or even "Need to Bar? Try Foo."
Having worked with a few sites that offer both direct-entry and PayPal payment options, I'd say PayPal gets far less than 10% of the transactions.

Given that PayPal has more established accounts than Checkout or AMZN, my assumption is that those services would get even less.

I understand business' distaste for co-branded UI; it can be a jarring experience for users and it often feels unprofessional.
Precisely it. Everyone knows anyone can throw up a Paypal link, but to have the transaction go through on your site makes it feel more official. Sure, it's not completely rational, but people sometimes like it better (alternatively, some people will only pay through Paypal, but unfortunately I can't sell my merchandise through Paypal/Google/Amazon).