skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know why you're being downvoted for this. It's clear from the article that AmEx is not really bothering to check the claims and counter-claims. When I had disputes via MasterCard, and then again via VISA, the claims were investigated properly and the documentation provided showed that very clearly.

I've heard this several times about AmEx - this is all hearsay and anecdote - that AmEx really doesn't help in disputes such as these.

Add this to the fact that AmEx is not accepted in many places in Australia and Europe (to my personal knowledge) and yet MasterClass and VISA appear to be accepted everywhere, I wouldn't use AmEx.

And now I also won't use priceline.
Use this link for a search interface on a faster site with essentially the same contents. Just try any subject/author keywords:
http://gen.lib.rus.ec

The menus there link to contents, torrents and other related stuff. E.g. the torrents are at http://free-books.dontexist.com/repository_torrent/.

This library (of which the link of reddit is one of the mirrors) has been maintained by Russian volunteers, mostly mathematicians and CS people, for a number of years. It used to be informally known as kolkhoz (Russian for 'collective farm').
One additional downside is that sprite atlases are annoying when you need to tile the image. Vertically repeating images can't be in the same atlas as horizontally repeating ones. X+Y repeats each need to be in a separate image altogether.

I'm also wondering if, to correctly emit the offsets in CSS attributes in all cases, you'll require some manually inserted placeholders.
A big issue for anyone doing web development is that the WSGI spec hasn't been updated for Python 3. With unicode strings as the default (only?) string type in Python 3, the current WSGI spec is ambiguous in lots of places, and solving that isn't straightforward.

Further reading: http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2010/5/25/wsgi-on-python-3
Remember, this is just a story, from the injured party's point of view. And its all hearsay to us.
Cloudant (YC S08) Looking for Erlang/OTP Developers
Resumator Link: http://cloudant.theresumator.com/apply/sbyZmB/

Cloudant is building a scalable distributed database and data analytics service. We're looking for talented and passionate hackers to join our engineering team. Cloudant is a venture-backed startup that was a part of the Summer '08 YC class.

To apply, use the link above or email us at info@cloudant.com with your resume, cover letter, and anything else that would pique our interest. Put something about Hacker News in the subject line; we'll give preferential treatment to HN users.
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Thanks for the research! I'll be looking into the used Android market very seriously.
I'm not sure the Coral cache will work with a username/password. Right now, it looks like multiple people are trying to do separate comprehensive crawls to do a complete torrent, without any coordination.
Anybody up for doing some experiments?
The application looks very nice. I wish there was more info about when it will be on sale, rather than just saying that it will expire in August. I don't want to get dependent on it and write my Applescripts just to find them useless when the demo expires.
"At the same time I found being able to read and knowing basic math useful, but that's just me."

According to the National Center for Education Stastistics, only 4% of high school graduates are able to read proficiently. (And by proficiently, they mean having the minimum amount of skill necessary to 'compare viewpoints in two editorials' or 'interpret a table about blood pressure, age, and physical activity', i.e. an extremely low bar.)

http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2006470

http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF
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A hint: search the title along with the filetype: feature to find the whole book ;)
I agree. It's just perception without any real basis for it, but I've always perceived AmEx as the company to do charges with if you expect to have issues and need a charge-back. Of course, this website is a single counter anecdote, so it's hard to say for sure.

I'm pretty sure there are further avenues. I'd imagine they could take either company to small claims court and get money back, but it's a shame that they couldn't resolve it through other means.
Someone from Chicago recommended Angie's list to me in downstate Illinois. There's not many reviews for contractors in my town. The concept is great, however I had to pay to sign up, and the user experience isn't great. There's probably free contractor review sites out there, but I don't know of them. Seems like this concept would be a good startup opportunity.
I don't think it's a coincidence that you don't live in the Valley and you're thinking of bootstrapping a small business. In the rest of the country I believe you are firmly in the majority, so welcome to the club!

I've always wondered why this is. I'm from Chicago myself, and while we have a growing community of tech startups that is beginning to resemble the Valley, small business owners are much more the norm. My theory is a lack of infrastructure and culture. I think it's easier to find someone to quit their job and work with you on some big, "internet scale" project in SV because that's (almost) normal behavior there. Plus you have the venture capital ecosystem to back you up once it's time to scale. I know of a few great startups in New York that are struggling to secure VC, and I suspect their jobs would be much easier if they lived out West.

Personally, I'd love to tackle a huge problem. I have some crazy, disruptive ideas. But I'm starting out smaller so I can pay my own way, Chicago-style.
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There are (apparently) torrent links to what is essentially the same library. They can be found here: http://free-books.dontexist.com/repository_torrent/
Being independent doesn't imply living a sustainable lifestyle.
What CWIZO said. But I wish to emphasize that this is a great example of just how nice it would be in a world without ie6/7. I got excited reading about this technique, but the maintenance work associated with including ie hacks makes the technique, for the time being, basically worthless.

Such a shame.
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Dropping out of school, esp. high school is a bad idea. First of all, no one will take a high school aged kid seriously. Second of all it would seriously hurt their chances of getting into college (regardless of what people say about college, it's still useful for most people with a tech degree.) I mean, sure you can backwards rationalize that once you drop out you will learn more, but success in life isn't all about how much book knowledge one has. It also has a lot (probably even more) to do with social skills which one can work on while surrounded by classmates and teachers in high school.
Jammit is a Rails plugin and command-line tool that uses this technique, along with MHTML for IE 6 & 7, and compresses JavaScript as well.

http://documentcloud.github.com/jammit/

The big advantage here over spriting is not having to deal with the complexities of trying to jam repeated background patterns into sprites, and having to compute pixel offsets for your CSS rules. You can just write your CSS as you normally would, and have the plugin generate appropriate versions of your stylesheets before deploying.

If you'd like to see a demonstration of the speed difference it can make, here's a page that loads 100 small individual images:

http://jashkenas.s3.amazonaws.com/misc/jammit_example/normal...

And here's the same page, using a single CSS file with data-URIs for all the images.

http://jashkenas.s3.amazonaws.com/misc/jammit_example/jammit...
Priceline is the only company I can think of that I refuse to do business with.

I had a similarly terrible experience in which I called the night before to confirm a hotel room in Boston that was paid for in advance. I was told by the hotel that the room was canceled by Priceline! No other rooms were available and Priceline denied any responsibility and made no effort to secure another room or provide a refund. Their customer service was wretched. Everyone shifted responsibility to someone else. No one provided a timely response. And no one had the authority or ability to make the situation right.

If you use Priceline, be prepared to make (pricey) alternative arrangements at the last minute.
I wonder if the fact that Amex has their own travel agency that competes directly with Priceline factors into this at all...

Heh thanks for the downvotes.

I wouldn't know anything about the issue. It's not like I'm not sitting at my desk in a Travel Agency right now ;)
Mobile browsers tend to do less caching, won't cache larger files, and don't caches files for as long. Doing an end-run around their image caching seems prone to cause problems.

Has anybody tried this technique on a mobile browser, say Mobile Safari on iPhone, to see how it stacks up?
And he had never even seen Rambo I and II...
You call out TC for adding nothing interesting or relevant, and go ahead to say the same thing that 12 other people say at every TC post on HN. As well as adding a false statement about their process.

We get it, a lot of people don't like TC.
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Again, you can call them "first" and "rest" if you like.

It is the ability to decompose an arbitrary sequential data structure efficiently that is important. It's not important because of any historical bias; it's important because it is incredibly useful.

If you can't support first/rest in an efficient manner, it is a bad sign.
One downside that hasn't been mentioned so far, as far as I can tell: the conflict between caching and downloading unneeded image data.

If you use image 1 on pages A & B and not page C, but image 2 on pages A & C but not B, you face a dilemma.

- If you stuff it all in one big CSS file, visitors to B (C) will download image 2 (1), even though it's never shown.

- If you split the CSS in 2, with A including both and B & C including only one each, you'll have an extra request in A, and require duplication or a third file if B & C share style rules

- If each page serves its own CSS file, you have only 1 request but it (and the image data) won't be cached across pages.

This restricts this technique to images that are used all over the place or images that are tiny.
who would pay money for angieslist? The whole point of review sites is to see negative reviews, so why would you want to get reviews from a site that only a tiny portion of people are willing to participate in?
Yep, a complete disregard for compatibility between versions means that there is no such thing as the "Python Language" anymore, just Python 2.2, Python 2.4, and so forth.

Back around 2001, Java apps were the scariest things to install on Linux systems because a good runtime didn't exist.

Eventually Java got it's act together and Python became the main offender. There were about four years that it was difficult to run the official BitTorrent client on Red Hat Linux because Guido decided to change the interface of the http libraries for no good reason.
When I say "the question is meaningless", I'm saying that the question doesn't identify a gap in useful knowledge of the world. It might be a purely definitional question for which the answer boils down to a tautology, or it may identify a trick of logic that appears to be knowledge but is not, e.g. a paradox, or it might simply be nonsense.

I say the question "does God exist?" is meaningless because:

(a) it is a simple Boolean yes/no question, but its is asking about the relationship between two incredibly abstract concepts: "God" and "existence". To address the question, these concepts must be defined in precise terms; but being abstract, there is no suitably objective metric to measure their precision against. Therefore, in practice, any logically consistent answer to this question will be a tautology.

(b) the validity of religion is not actually dependent upon the answer to this question; the concept of "faith" precludes the necessity of empirical validation. If you are religious, you may consider it important to believe in God, but this is not the same thing as it being important that God objectively exist.

(c) formalities of thought aside, my underlying metric is how useful answering the question is, not how true it is, and I do not see useful value in answering the question. Asking the question, on the other hand, opens the door to interesting conversations like this one, which give us an opportunity to analyze, exercise and improve our thought processes, which is why I'm participating in the discussion so extensively. :)
If a consumer even has a HINT of a real complaint or a valid reason to chargeback, most CC companies will side with them which makes me think Priceline probably made a good case.

Particuarlly AMEX - Merchant's don't like AMEX because they typically charge considerably more to process their cards (up to 2x as much) as with Visa or MC.

Therefore AMEX pushes hard for their consumers to keep them demanding that merchants accept the card in the first place.
Then why do you think there are people paying $40+ per click for traffic via Google Ads?
Good one david! Thanks for sharing..
Student to teacher ratios show progress
A few months ago the author of this article, Clifford Stoll, wrote a short, thoughtful note admitting how badly he got it wrong:

"Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995 howler.

Wrong? Yep.

At the time, I was trying to speak against the tide of futuristic commentary on how The Internet Will Solve Our Problems.

Gives me pause. Most of my screwups have had limited publicity: Forgetting my lines in my 4th grade play. Misidentifying a Gilbert and Sullivan song while suddenly drafted to fill in as announcer on a classical radio station. Wasting a week hunting for planets interior to Mercury's orbit using an infrared system with a noise level so high that it couldn't possibly detect 'em. Heck - trying to dry my sneakers in a microwave oven (a quarter century later, there's still a smudge on the kitchen ceiling)

And, as I've laughed at others' foibles, I think back to some of my own cringeworthy contributions.

Now, whenever I think I know what's happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff...

Warm cheers to all,
-Cliff Stoll on a rainy Friday afternoon in Oakland"

Assuming the author really is Stoll, major props to him for admitting he got it wrong.

Source: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/26/curmudgeony-essay-on.ht...
Nice use of tabs. Although an accordion may have worked better. Or better yet, a timeline thingie showing an increasingly older and angrier William Shatner.
Considering CSS sprites were something that dhh mentioned as putting into Rails 3.1, maybe you should see if you can just get that moved into Rails core, before the sprites work starts.
http://www.hermit.org/Linux/ComposeKeys.html

The list is a bit old, but maybe it helps with some odd keys. Now that unicode is pretty common, I try to stick to the ellipsis for example… I have to say that the compose position for dieresis is a bit more logical (compose-" as opposed to macs alt-u), which is quite useful if I don't want to switch keyboard layouts when typing a bit of German (or write a lot about Motörhead and Queensrÿche).

X11 also has "level 3" support, which is straight-forward additional characters when pressing a certain key, as opposed to combining multiple key presses. Mac's alt key basically does both to a certain degree. The fact that it's turned on by default and the keyboard viewer makes it a lot more common usage in my experience.
If people can use drugs at home and escape detection by their employer, how is it the employer you mentioned is able to enforce his rules?

The United States State department reports "Penalties for possessing, using, or trafficking in illegal drugs in Djibouti are severe, and convicted offenders can expect long jail sentences and heavy fines."

http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1101.html

So severe penalties for drug use don't seem to work in your example. And they don't work in prisons in the US, either drug use runs wild and the state has complete control over the lives of the inhabitants.
In my experience it's typically less than 100 bytes. You'll struggle to squeeze the HTTP overhead below that.

Anecdotal evidence: I just base64+gzipped a JPEG with 13668 bytes. Result: 13713 bytes, delta: 45 (0.3%).

Command used:

base64 -w 0 infile | gzip -9 -n > outfile

For HTTP you can even use raw deflate, which does away with some of the gzip file format overhead. IIRC this saves you another 18 bytes for the header (10 bytes) and footer (8 bytes).

Tangent: the reason I'm such a gzip nerd is that I used it to implement compression for level assets in Battalion Wars 2 for the Wii. I didn't want to make up yet another format, and gzip was ideal save for the fact that the size of the raw data is stored at the end of the file. We needed the info to allocate the necessary memory, but seeking to the end would have caused some latency from the DVD drive mechanism. The solution was to add a proprietary header which is ignored by the gzip code and the rest of the toolchain.
Traction != Hype
Is anyone else but me worried about the legibility of the CSS with Data URIs? I mean, I can see how it can be useful, but I think the code is more readable with "spritesheet.png" than with:
iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAABGdBTUEAALGP
C/xhBQAAAAlwSFlzAAALEwAACxMBAJqcGAAAAAd0SU1FB9YGARc5KB0XV+IA
AAAddEVYdENvbW1lbnQAQ3JlYXRlZCB3aXRoIFRoZSBHSU1Q72QlbgAAAF1J
REFUGNO9zL0NglAAxPEfdLTs4BZM4DIO4C7OwQg2JoQ9LE1exdlYvBBeZ7jq
ch9//q1uH4TLzw4d6+ErXMMcXuHWxId3KOETnnXXV6MJpcq2MLaI97CER3N0
vr4MkhoXe0rZigAAAABJRU5ErkJggg==

Now if only there was a way to define a data URI in a similar manner to @font-face. Maybe @data-object or something like that.
Ask HN: open source projects looking for a technical writer?
I'm a writer. Most of my work has been contract-based, and a lot of it has been protected by NDA for various reasons. That means my public portfolio for technical writing is rather slim. I'm unemployed, and I'm looking to transition into a full time role with a single organization rather than doing contract work on a piecemeal basis. I would prefer this to be technical writing, preferably for a software company (my first choice organization would be Oracle), but I'm not entirely picky. I mostly want to do interesting work with interesting people.

This morning I started work on a journalistic piece on audio encoding to follow up seven years after my last article on the topic (for Ars Technica), and I've been looking at the LAME project to see how it's changed over the years. Then I got to wondering if they had a documentation guy, and they do.(Roberto Amorim, the guy who hosts the head-to-head quality encoder shootouts on Hydrogen Audio). So I began wondering if there were other open source projects that need a technical writer to write documentation on a volunteer basis. (I'm audience-agnostic, so I don't care if it's for developers or end-users.)

My only criteria would be:

1) I'd get credit for writing/editing the documentation

2) It would have to be public so I could use it in my portfolio

3) It'd have to be worthy (yes, this is entirely subjective.)

4) The software has a release publicly available, and is under active development

It also wouldn't hurt if the project had some name recognition cred, but this isn't a hard requirement.

Know of any projects that could use a technical writer?
Look at that, yet another browser automation tool that violates Google's TOS in its demo.
Oh, there is structure. Criticism comes in the following best practice, and you'll see this construct throughout most all litcrit (except for, you guessed it, the page-padding hacks who talk around the topic rather than about it):

1) Establish the "text" in question as well as the "context" of the text (certain themes, symbolism, diction, universality, etc.)

2) apply culturual congruity (whether you are applying the criticism to the time when the text was written or to modern times),

3) Establish your point of argument and/or analysis.

4) Apply argument to the text

5) Connect the evidence of this argument.

6) Conclusion

The fact that I use Bloom as a shining example of "good" criticism should steer you in the direction that there is quality there. His just one example of good work.

Is there an API to access Plato's Republic's quality hooks? No, but there are best practices. Just because you refuse to see them as common criteria doesn't diminish the task at hand. If you refuse to accept it as legitimate, you might as well refuse to accept there are such things as great literature and creation beyond the programmatic kind.
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What's the internal culture of Apple like?
He also wrote Silicon Snake Oil in 1996, which seems to have been an expansion of the argument he made in this Newsweek article.
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Does it scare anybody just how quickly the technology has evolved to negate many of his arguments?
The errors seem large and obvious. A simple review would have found them. Was it rushed?
That gets you half-way there, but you're still stuck using the option key as meta, rather than the much more natural command key.

To swap the command and option keys, but just in the terminal, you can use: http://github.com/aim-stuff/cmd-key-happy
Excuse me? We have an obsessive regard for backwards compatibility and stability through minor/micro releases. Big changes are reserved for Major (2.6->2.7/3.0) releases.

Frankly, I've never worked with people more obsessed about not trashing existing code.
Selling me cheap stuff of reasonable quality is all I ask my retailers to do. (Or alternatively, higher quality at higher prices. Depends on what I am looking for at the moment.)

No other moral requirements needed.
"You have nothing to lose. If you quit your job and start your own company, and fail, you'll be much better off than if you hadn't. If you go look for a new job, you will have run your own company. Would an employer rather hire someone who hasn't run their own company, or someone who has?"

Well, there's this little thing that you will be out of a few years worth of salary. You may think it's worth it, but that's hardly "nothing to lose".
Designed for, or designed to induce?
But don't forget that America was having a hard time funding the war at that point. They had to end it quickly or they would have run out of money and given Japan time to rebuild their war machine.
Great suggestion. I presume they'll want to roll their own solution (hopefully taking advantage of existing gems like ruby-yui-compressor and closure-compiler). But I'll open a ticket for it.
They can always blame someone in their supply chain. And I'm pretty sure returns aren't permitted anyway. And they have guns and are on drugs and could even report you to the police.

The normal incentives for ensuring quality simply are not there. I don't think they know about Six Sigma.
i wonder if someone smells the business model in this.
Were the coworkers who thought there might be bugs in his code called "deniers" and accused of being funded by outside interests? And did he stonewall their efforts to look at the source code? because then you might have a closer analogy.
So, this is like "micro-finance" but with larger granularity suited to the North American environment.
Not sure. He said his first wife. Who knows how many wives he had...