skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How do you expect consumers to view flying as anything but a commodity when I can pay 2x more then the customer sitting next to me? The airlines, with their byzantine and constantly shifting prices, have totally ruined any correlation between 'price' and 'value'. It's completely arbitrary from the point of view of the consumer. I might end up an old plane with a horrible seating configuration, or a brand new plane with plenty of legroom and in-flight entertainment. All on the same airline, between the same cities. My experience has no correlation with the price I'm paying, unless I decide to pony up for business class. Even then, among business class, there's a big difference among airlines.

The industry is so concerned with extracting the maximum amount per customer, they forget that it's more important to grow their customer base.

That said, I've been flying almost exclusively Virgin (America/Atlantic) for the last year or two, and they are definitely a cut above. Virgin America has an entire fleet of brand new planes, comfortable seats, personal in-flight entertainment and wifi, and great staff. Virgin Atlantic has Premium Economy, which is so worth the extra few hundred dollars (as opposed to the 2x for business) for flights to Europe. Here, at least, I can justify the price difference, at least vis-a-vis competing airlines.
> The first is price, the second is schedule. Everything else is a distant third.

Not in my case.

1. Not an airline on my bad_list
2. Price
3. Schedule

E.g. I will not fly Air India, regardless of the price/schedule.

Keep playing around with #2 and #3 but do not screw up so much that you get on #1 or else I will boycott you for life.

Also when #2 and #3 are same, I have #4 - Airlines I like (JetBlue, SouthWest etc.).

Off topic but relevant: I always check out my plane through seatguru.com before I buy the tickets. Definitely helps maximize my comfort at no additional cost.
I agree, every bit of the airline experience is being outsourced to the lowest bidder (from flying the planes down to fixing them). It's all too easy to purchase a ticket and never talk to any of the parent airline's employees but you'd never know. In some cases this is good and while in some cases, not so much.

IMO, most of the airlines don't want employees or to control a brand they just want to sell tickets.
It's a very nice design as other have pointed out. I like the periodic-table-theme for the different strains.

And I especially like the detailed page for each strain (e.g. http://www.leaf.ly/hybrid/ak-47). However, I wonder if the pie charts are the best way to convey the break-down of each strain. Sure, it makes it easy to see the relative effects for a given strain, but it makes it difficult to visualize the effects of one strain compared to another, because the position of a given effect in the graph is different for each strain. Maybe a simpler bar graph or something of that nature would be in order.

Also, along the same lines, maybe you could make it easier to do side-by-side comparisons. (btw, I also like the "Related" section on the detailed pages)
Thanks, the backend is Rails 3 with a JSON-based API. The backend is hosted on Heroku and images are served from Amazon S3, with logs saved to MongoHQ. The app itself is written with Appcelerator Titanium, but we're switching the iPhone version over to native Cocoa/Three20 because Titanium for iOS 4 is pretty unstable right now.
You don't need to invoke this sacred "justice" to accomplish any of this, though. Your latter example of putting the insane away so as not to harm others, falls under my first category of "preventing repeated offenses" and keeps them from causing further harm. (On a side-note, I think more attempts should be made at rehabilitation, but the stigmas around mental health aren't that much better today than decades ago.)

Again, with contracts, we have already decided that contracts are good and breaking them is bad. (But not in all cases!) By punishing, or putting a wrong right, is done to encourage this assumption of contracts being good and useful.

If we standardize on usefulness and in fuzzier cases "goodness", I think that's a step forward from this notion of Justice.

I suspect we may have a simple disagreement over the meaning of the word, and less so on the actual details, but that's all the more reason to go away from it. My usage of justice can be invoked to justify sentencing a murderer 50 years after the fact to death, and I don't see how that's useful or good at all given he's just a normal guy by then.
Does Language Influence Culture?
Now it is legal to do what everyone was doing already--to hack our own stuff. It is fascinating to see how laws catch up to the norm. Just wonder why it was illegal in the first place?
Hafele-Keating Experiment
Hummingbird shows traffic in real time. It doesn't show mouse movement or user activity in real time.
They worked hard to commoditize because that's what customers wanted. I had a great experience flying Porter last Monday, but I'm not going to pay $30 extra on my next flight just for free beer and terra chips.

The only thing I'd pay extra for is an exit row seat and I'm a special case (most people are not 6'5").
Getting started with virtualization: Choosing a hypervisor
Not sure, but these two articles do a quite good job of explaining the intricacies of the City of LA's contracts with both Google and CSC. This has been a very high profile contract and I wouldn't be surprised if the issue was primarily that not all of the right people on both sides had a good enough understanding of the current architecture and capabilities of Google/Apps going in, and someone was surprised. It could have been something simple, like the fact that Google doesn't encrypt user data (it obfuscates it), or that they can't guarantee US citizenship of support staff, even if the data is stored within the contiguous 48.

http://www.infolawgroup.com/2010/05/articles/cloud-computing...

http://www.infolawgroup.com/2010/06/articles/cloud-computing...
Why the $35 tablet will never exist
HBR: Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time (pdf, 2007)
I think you're mis-characterizing the article.

"We at the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) propose an unexplored solution to the software liability issues that are increasingly pressing as the population of IMD-users grows--requiring medical device manufacturers to make IMD source-code publicly auditable."

I defy you to find the place in the article where it makes "unscientific" claims that opening up software will solve all of it problems. It mentions some problems and adds that opening the source code might be worthwhile.

You may call the requirement open up code an "agenda" but given that the public grants a equipment manufacturer a number of privileges (patents, protection from liability, etc), it seems in bounds to ask for a few things in return.
They may actually already be required to do this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty_...

It would really be interesting for someone to try to make an argument under this law that Apple must show that jailbreaking the device caused the malfunction before refusing service.

That said, mentioning the guy who dropped his iPad and was pretty much asking for a favor (Apple does not cover accidental damage) is silly. In practice, Apple actually /does/ ignore jailbroken-nes ls of phones when it comes to serious hardware errors, and they have even stated as much in their DMCA commentary.
They have awesome swag too, I love my EFF cap:

https://secure.eff.org/site/Ecommerce/267350841?VIEW_PRODUCT...
I hear you guys loud and clear. I'm going to work on redesigning the homepage ASAP. Thank you.
I think as marijuana legalization becomes more of an inevitability, the stigma surrounding this very real market opportunity will disappear.

Kudos to you for getting in early.
> Apple has maintained…

I don't recall Apple ever mentioning jailbreaking, let alone threatening that it was a criminal act. During the initial iPhone announcement there was talk about the supposed dangers of letting any particular app free on AT&Ts mobile network, but since then I can't recall a time when either a phone manufacturer or a service provider has said anything about the legality of jailbreaking, SEEM editing, etc.
For those who've gone a bit downvote-happy, this is a reference to Douglas Coupland's Microserfs which you all ought to have read...
We have some local competition from an app called Tip City, but we think we can do better. There are also a good number of competitors based in other cities, and it's pretty much a race to see who can expand to other cities faster. We're focusing on direct relationships with the businesses and really taking their feedback into account when developing features. Plus we have some "special sauce" in the works that none of our competitors have.
For me, price is #1, and everything else is a distant third.

Then again, I'm not the target audience of this article. I fly rarely, and an airplane ticket represents a very sizable chunk of my income. Because of that, I will put up with a poor experience, and this is why I am not prepared to spend $10 more for the plane that gives the better 'experience'.
Sounds like your opinon on this topic ends up depending on your locale. In America, you can walk up to a bank and open an account with $20 no questions asked. It's been a few years since I rented an apartment, but I only needed an extra month's rent for a security deposit.

As far as lawsuits go, that is really more about government regulation. Depending on the what the regulations say, getting sued may or may not be a real concern.
interesting, but full of inaccuracies (no variables?)...

Originally designed for programming massive telephone switches with hundreds or thousands of processors, Erlang has no classes, objects, or variables, and its file handling is miserable, but there is still a lot to love about it, Bray added
There are some discs that make it mandatory that something be played back first. There's nothing stating you can't mute your TV and go do something else for a few minutes.

That said, I consider this an acceptable workaround given the lack of a real solution.
Unless WP7 allows for user interface customization, its licensees will be competing in a fully commoditized market, making phones that cannot differentiate themselves from one another in anything but physical form and price and doomed to low margins.
Title is a bit sensationalist, but he makes a great point. It's ok to be a little less DRY and implement your own helper methods in the namespace of your gem rather than include the whole low-level object invasion of active_support.
No no no no no. Please guys, let's be very clear about what the DMCA does and does not do; misinformation hurts the case against it considerably.

The DMCA, among many other things, makes the circumvention of copyright protection illegal -- that much is true. However, not "for any reason". There are numerous clear exceptions in this, e.g. for the purpose of interoperability. These are very important and often overlooked, but need to be taken into account when talking about the DMCA as a whole.
I think air travel is destined to be a commodity for most people. Typically when we are flying we are trying to get to another place, where we will be away from work and spending a lot of money. Think the trip to Disney World. Or your European vacation. By saving money on the flight we will have more money to spend at our destination.

I remember looking between Jet Blue and Continental for a flight to NYC recently. I had a great time with Jet Blue because they had TVs on board and I enjoyed the free wifi in their terminal when returning. But, price-wise Jet Blue would be $20 more than Continental. For me, the extra $20 I save could be used to eat out a couple more times in NYC so it was easy to forgo the in flight convenience for what I weighed as the greater use of my money.

I think that also, the capital intensive nature of the business which yields low returns on investment, in the context of being in a highly regulated industry with unionized employees makes risk taking pretty limited. So, most of the players just copy each other which also helps re-enforce the commoditized product that they produce.
From an SEO perspective, doing a "site:leaf.ly marijuana" search in Google resulted in only 6 results. "Cannibis" only shows 7. Adding more of these references and/or putting them in the URL may help.
I dont think even the Indian government is claiming it will cost < 35 dollars to build. 35 Dollars seems to be the subsidized price.
I'd be interested to hear other people's airline bad lists. Mine is basically United at the moment. (Largely for fleet age (in my personal experience), and dismissive FA's)

Prefer to when possible fly, JetBlue, Southwest and Alaskan Air if the price is drastically all over the board.
Ask HN: Anyone interested in a hack night in the SF Bay Area Peninsula?
Anyone out there interested in getting together once a week or two and working on our own individual projects for 4-6 hours?

I have some side projects I'd like to finish up and this would help with my motivation for them, plus I'd get to meet some people from hacker news and we'd have some people with common interests to bounce ideas off of.

We'd have to meet up somewhere on the Peninsula, near Redwood City/San Mateo area.
Life may not be fair in every situation, but if you were really creating value for the company it shouldn't be too hard for you to find another job that may even furnish you with a proper chair.
It's not just a question of the amount of time it takes to fill out a registration form. It's the added mental overhead of adding yet another website that has my email and/or personal information.

Furthermore, (and I mean this in the nicest possible way) in the context of this website (with no design and no information about what it actually does), you have zero credibility in my book. So I'm sorry, but no. If you cannot take 5-10 minutes to add a paragraph or two to the site about what it actually does, then I cannot take 20 seconds to register for the site in order to try to figure it out myself.

EDIT: I realize you've sort of explained it now in this thread, but the point I'm trying to get across is that this is the thought process your typical visitor is going through.
Adding Hardware is not always the cheapest option
With such a simple registration form, why not just include it on the page?

Also options for OpenID, Facebook Connect, etc would be great as it would reduce the need for me to worry about one more username and password.

Less Worry only produces Greater Happiness.
Photoshop is incredibly powerful, but not for interactive design.

- type rendering looks nothing like any browser or OS (as described in the article)

- subpixel rendering makes drawing shapes and lines with clean edges a chore.

- direct selection tool is difficult to use and therefore makes the layer palette the primary means of selecting layers, which becomes tedious with large files

- no support for multi-page documents

- positioning and resizing objects at a pixel-level is difficult

- slicing and image export system is kludgy

- no support for symbols

- objects with rounded corners are a pain

Do you use Photoshop for 5+ hours a day designing web layouts? I'd imagine you'd have a hard time going back to Photoshop after using an application that is better suited for interactive design. I actually started using Fireworks a couple years ago, and while I pretty much hate it, I will never again use Photoshop to design a website.
Startup Culture Lessons From Mad Men
Home - SUDHAKAR
how will you get people to remember to use leaf.ly?
Logical conclusion: A great lawyer is willing to blackmail or assassinate any unfavorable judges or jurors who can't be eliminated through legal means.

Surely you don't believe that actually falls under any reasonable definition of good?
I'm really sorry if it's a bit of an off-topic, but this thread seems like a good place to ask: anyone remembers this long and interesting multi-pages document (was posted on HN) about how prices on air tickets are calculated and how all this big system works? Can't find the link.
Many of the arguments made here against STM (and in the linked papers) are nicely addressed by Clojure's specific implementation of STM. This article is from 2008, before Clojure was more widely known.

More importantly, Clojure is wisely designed with several other equally useful concurrency mechanisms: atoms for serial access, promises for dataflow, pmap for divide and conquer, and agents for uncoordinated concurrent activities.
To summarize the argument: ActiveSupport is awesome because it has all kinds of fantastic features that Ruby lacks out of the box. But don't use ActiveSupport in your gems because it's going to cause all kinds of crazy dependency issues in folks' applications, whether or not they use Rails!

It strikes me that what's really harmful here is the glacial pace of change in the Ruby Standard Library. Of course, we shouldn't see untried and untested functionality shoved into the standard library willy-nilly: pollution of the standard library with ill-thought-out code is probably even worse.

But, that said, Rails 1.0 came out almost five years ago. In the same time span, we've seen the release of Ruby 1.8.4-7 and 1.9.0 and 1.9.1. It was big news in 2007 when Rails' Object#tap method made it into 1.8.7 and 1.9.

We should be seeing more of this functionality pulled out of ActiveSupport and pushed into the Ruby Standard Library.
It's not too impossible. Take for example that I could buy an Android tablet from dealextreme.com for about $100 (free shipping). 7" touchscreen, wifi, sd slot. It's not the fastest, but it's probably usable.

$100 - shipping costs - profits (from all sources) = maybe $50? Or less? If the process was optimized more, the costs could go down to $35..

(I am not associated with the website.)

edit - I forgot about the 2GB of RAM, which the article does point out will bump up the price quite a bit. It's probably not possible unless they drop the RAM to something smaller.
From the article:

"So why is air travel, among the most differentiated experiences we have in the normal course of life, purchased by so many people as a commodity?"

So not true. A restaurant is a much more differentiated experience and also a "perishable" one that people are willing to pay a premium for. JetBlue has TV's and SouthWest has free luggage but you can't pick your seat -- what other differences are there between airlines?

I you think you hit the nail on the head with the airlines destruction of any price/value correlation. The table next to me might be getting a free appetizer or desert but they are not going to be paying 1/5 or 5x as much as I am.
Yeah, listen. I'm a python programmer as a matter of profession and paycheck.

It's a matter of taste.

Do I prefer significant whitespace ala python/haskell?

Yes.

Does it matter? No.

Does it matter when you're discussing a programming language you've just now encountered for the first time and is rather new and has many novel things to contribute to the world?

Fuck no.

Like I said, it was a vacuous thing to say. There are far more important questions to ask like,

"Are the generics a space-time trade-off similar to C++ templates?"

"Can I use the type system to encapsulate and restrict behavior in powerful ways, allow me to create performant but safe code?"

"Can I make a beowulf cluster out of this?"

Any of those questions have more substance than, "hurr whitespace is bettar why didn't you do tghaaaasdfsdgsg"

Christ-sakes.
So how do you raise money today?
25 Influential Business Women in Silicon Valley
topcoder will be able to settle the debate.
Programming languages is one of those topics which demonstrates the difference between online and offline discussions. In an online forum I don't mind reading a back and forth argument about languages especially if I can learn something from it. But in person I find it comes through as just completely pretentious, even if it is polite.
I'd add a fourth factor: The fact that we travel more frequently.

If you are flying something like once per decade flying might feel like an adventure in its own right and you may be willing to splurge a bit.

But the more often you need to fly between A and B, the more similar it becomes to taking the bus, subway or a taxi, all of which already are commodities.

I expect there is room for more "exclusive" experiences at a higher price, just like there is for groceries. Or as with limousine rental vs taxi.

But fundamentally it's just transport - I'm flying because I need to get somewhere else quickly. If I were traveling for the experience I would probably go by motorcycle, train or boat instead.
Technological locks aren't always about ethics. Often times it's about being practical. As much as people love bashing Apple, Apple works hard to give people a stable environment to build apps in. If you think it's not stable, then you've certainly never built apps in the jailbreak environment. Sure there are cool things you can do which you can't in Apple's sandboxed environment, but it's also the wild west. It's cool if people want to jailbreak and invent cool stuff, but expecting Apple to support it doesn't really support the community at large in a scalable way. Jailbreaking is a good thing, but most people don't really consider the business implications of it.
I came to a similiar conclusion a few weeks ago and have just finished setting up a system to try and record anything interesting I learn or find out in life in text and/or video form. I can't wait to get it rolling. Merely being able to read digests of what I've read or learn before should, I hope, bring most of the ideas back. Is there a name for this sort of recording?
Always up for carving out time to work on side projects. contact info in profile.
Thanks, the visualization of effects is definitely something we went back and forth on for a while. Ultimately settled on the pie chart just so we didn't spin for too long, and it's five minute implementation with google charts.

Comparing different strains is next on the list for features, have a couple good ideas floating around to make it pretty simple.
very nice site, though the length of the "high" attribute is kind of hard to gauge, esp. if you're a chronic smoker.
Does this mean that watching DVDs on Linux is finally legal as long as it's for education or criticism?
How do you plan on monetizing the site?
> So not true. A restaurant is a much more differentiated experience and also a "perishable" one that people are willing to pay a premium for.

Yes but a meal at a restaurant is the primary experience. People are deliberately seeking a good one as eating a fine meal is their intent. Flying an airplane is just a means to an end. An annoyance really. And in that mind set most people aren't going to care, myself included.
True, and I think the reviews are most useful if you are filling them out while high, at which point you don't actually know how long it will last. That attribute isn't currently surfaced anywhere so we may end up scratching it at some point.
Yes and no. It's a sensible way to represent very large pictures, and many interesting graphs are unreasonably large. Large interactive graphs can also strain an interactive viewer more than seadragon, result in incosistent views, and require some amount of interface and filter design.

On the flipside, interactivity and animation can be very welcome, and can work well even when offline.
Working on a Startup? You Need a Hobby.