skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The argument is not about whether the method is 99% effective. The argument is about whether the method works as intended 99% of the time, which means that 99% of the time, nobody is bothered by it and it may have the positive effect of catching a terrorist if one happens to pass by.

Incidentally, lets suppose the method was 99% effective and that one in a million passengers is a terrorist. That would mean that 10K innocent passengers would be suspected of being a terrorist for every real terrorist. There would be a 99% chance of catching the terrorist and a 100% certainty of harassing ~10K innocent folks, which gets them stripsearched, put on no-fly lists and demeaned in other ways. All under the guise of making air travel safer, which is complete BS, because the examples of journalists still making it through security with unchecked devices are numerous.
> but it's the symptom of a cancer that's spreading through the system. That might sound like a sweeping statement, but it isn't. The Indian state is slowly disintegrating due to the cause and effect caused by decades of corruption

By almost all metrics we have made great strides in raising the standard of Indian peoples lives in last 50-30-10 years.

1. Literacy.

http://www.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl=http://indiaimage.nic....

2. Life expectancy

http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_dyn_le...

3. Child Mortality

http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sh_dyn_mo...

About the wikipedia links you posted, you would be hard pressed to find Countries without problems, let alone a country with India's size.

> bureaucrats with little or no accountability to the people there are supposed to serve [disclaimer: my mother is such a bureaucrat and I read her files at times]. However, no one knows what's going on "over there" on the ground and recent reports aren't too encouraging.

> Anecdotally, I know of villages just a few hours outside New Delhi in whi ..

Your statements are too sweeping and repeat broad generalization without having any first hand experience.

tl;dr: India has many problems, but saying "The Indian state is slowly disintegrating" is way far from truth.
@mattmaroon a salary cap has worked in football, but the CBAs and relative strengths of players unions are very different between the sports. It wouldn't work in baseball (read my post above).

Worth repeating the Gammons quote: "In those 30 years, 20 different teams have won World Series titles, and it would likely be 21 without the 1994 strike that cost the sport’s best team -- the Montreal Expos -- a chance to win it all. In those 30 years, 14 different teams have won the Super Bowl, 13 have won the Stanley Cup, nine have won the NBA championship."
It's been a very long time since I've seen DOS.
I'm all for adding Game Mechanics in new things. (see my profile for my startup)

But, I'm curious how you plan on making any money from this. Are you hosting the evaluations of the conditions to earn an achievement on your server? Or is all the code local in the plugin? What stops me from gaming the game?
I kept getting alerts asking for my twitter credentials. Kind of disturbing to see that on a site as large as Wired.
Show HN: VoiceForms 4000, my submission to the Wufoo API contest
Hey guys,

Just finished up hacking on my submission for the Wufoo API contest. VoiceForms 4000 takes any existing Wufoo form and turns it into a phone survey. The app is written in Python, runs on App Engine, and uses Twilio for all the phone magic.

https://voiceforms4000.appspot.com/

Go ahead and fill one of the sample forms and tell me what you think. Enjoy.
Do not do this. One firing is bad. Multiple firings drawn out over time make people feel like the project is doomed.

Even if the people deserve to be fired, then people will be blaming you for hiring the wrong people or being indecisive.
Direct link http://css3.mikeplate.com/
No. Recent version of AutoCAD are customizable via .NET and core libraries that ship as part of AutoCAD are written in .NET too. If you have AutoCAD installed look at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Autodesk\AutoCAD\R18.1\ACAD-9007:409\Applications, all of the sub entries that have a entry MANAGED of Type REG_DWORD with a value of 1 are .NET extensions. With that being said they either have to ship Mono with the Mac version or rewrite a ton of code in C++.
Neat, but control is AWKWARD. Sometimes you move one square, sometimes you move two and BAM. WALL.
Try it out in San Francisco. San Francisco cabs are horribly broken.

Unfortunately for your argument, while the medallion system does unjustly restrict competition for cab driving jobs in Chicago and NYC, it does not in fact appear to harm consumers. Cabs work in Chicago and NYC. The potential harm of deregulating and devolving controls to unproven technology far outweighs the benefit.
Being in Canada, many of the Live benefits (e.g. Netflix) aren't even available here, which is a luxury that we pay a premium for.

For us it is simply a gaming matchmaker for online play, and a way of buying grossly overpriced movie rentals (with 24 hour viewing periods from the moment you click play) and overpriced downloadable games, like a ghetto version of Steam.

I can't believe I actually pay for the ability to overpay like this.

Here's the best part -- some time back I bought Ghostbusters on Games on Demand. Somehow over the following months the install got deleted from the console, but that's okay: one of the big advantages of XBL Games on Demand is that if you buy a new Xbox, your hard drive crashes, you need to make space, etc, you can just redownload it when you want it again. So I navigated looking for it.

But I couldn't find it.

They had removed it from their catalog -- this is apparently a regular event for a wide range of titles -- which means that my virtual purchase is now forever gone and irretrievable.

That's the last Games on Demand I'll be buying on XBL.

And if you try to cancel the auto-renew that they surreptitiously enrolled you in...have fun. Xbox Live engages in the most atrocious hide-the-link behavior. It's incredibly shady for a company the size of Microsoft.
Nit: the technical term for "integrated language" mentioned here is domain-specific language. People spin off DSLs from Ruby all the time.

Incidentally, one could argue that SQL is the most widespread DSL there is.

Edit: The author mentions this is basically a DSL in his post, which I missed the first time around. Not sure why he didn't just stay with that nomenclature though.
man sudo
Perhaps if you're willing to let other folks look in the box and see what they have, you'll not only get a honest assessment but also some advice on what it holds for you?

I don't think I'm that person. But many folks here are.
I didn't watch the video, did he mention his Tesla?
IPad dictionary app Terminology comes to the iPhone
GitHub launches Pull Requests 2.0
Aristotle also apparently did this.
Ben Franklin put it well:

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
What are you using to get the second external monitor working on a MBP? I'm thinking of doing the same, but haven't researched the best way.
I feel like I'm nitpicking but I couldn't let it go, and yes its already been mentioned once but I feel that argument offered by confuzatron was lacking. I'm referencing to your characterization of Linq in C# as something inextricably linked to the language, how you cant even begin to separate it from the language.

Straight off the bat the most glaring problem with that statement is that Linq is not part of C# in any way shape or form since all C# code is compiled to bytecode, it would be literally impossible for C# to have Linq and for it to not be available for the rest of the languages supported by dotNet. The funny part is the expressive form of Linq that reads like a sentence is not even fully supported by C#! Only VB.Net has fully implemented Linq expressiveness.

There are many more reasons that argument is wrong, but I feel just pointing out that one above shows how far off it is.

In my experience its almost always best to shy away from hyping your idea of better by knocking the competition, your article stands well on its own and C# has so many obvious flaws that theres no need to add to it. Stick to whats good about X, not whats crappy about alternative Y.

Again all in all an interesting read since im not familiar with Clojure, but I just had to nitpick.
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4116/4774485856_e9aa9d81cf_b....

30" Dell LCD, typically 2/3 emacs 1/3 terminal (no, I don't use a terminal inside emacs).

I use my ThinkPad's keyboard by choice because I really like it, and the laptop screen is where I flip between browser / IRC / etc.

Ubuntu, xmonad, Chrome, Emacs, gnome-terminal. Nothing too special.
I live in SF now, so I leave it out year round, maybe brining it in on the coldest nights. In NY though, if they are in pots or raised above the ground, I wouldn't let them freeze. If the roots get frozen they may never come back. Plants in the ground don't get as cold usually so they will be better off. (Your mileage may vary, I'm still learning this myself!)
http://www.weebly.com/features.html
We have to disagree on the importance of this latest feature then.

Folder sharing: User A gives read or read/write access on one of their email folders to user B. I don't think I've ever used a mail service which doesn't support this simple long standing feature of email.

Delegation: User A delegates permission to user B to organise events in their Calendar, or to send mail on their behalf.

Delegation is very useful for people with secretaries or PAs. Folder sharing is very useful for people working in teams or all kinds.
I'm very skeptical of virtual admins. Every time I consider it, I realize most everything I want them to do requires them to be in the city I'm in. I've seen a number of friends and colleagues e ruin relationships and look like jerks after they got their VA. It appears to come from a latent blue collar desire for status, the same one that makes people put $3,000 rims on a $2,000 car, or buy a $3,000 television when they can't afford their mortgage payments.

When a close friend or colleague gets a VA and starts telling e to schedule social or business events through their VA instead of doing it themselves, I stop calling them. The only word for this is Douchebag, downmod me if you will.
searching & annotating are the two main usecases I can think of.
Lucky guess on my part :)
Use Microsoft Office's Clippy to Annoy IE 6 Users to Upgrade
Your users have problems. Write about solutions. Eventually you'll want to scale this, but for now, start writing.

For example, if I hypothetically ran an innovative photo sharing site, I might assume that there exists, somewhere, a busy mother who wants to get baby's first steps to her grandparents who live in another state, and I would list up every possible thing I could think of that would frustrate that mother, and then I would start knocking them off the list. Bonus points if I actually knew a busy mother. (I do, but if I didn't, I'd probably find one.)

Then, after putting that up on my site, I might ask my busy mother who she reads. Oh, mommy blogs? Wonderful. (And a little terrifying -- those of you who work with mommy blogs understand.) So I'd try to learn a bit more about mommy bloggers, use Peldi's approach for emailing, and try to convince them that their readers will have even more loving, peaceful relations with the inlaws if only they had read what I have to say. Maybe they would be interested in a guest post, or in linking to my pre-existing series on how to solve their issues with getting baby photos to grandma?

Note that I could do this well in advance of actually having a photo sharing site running if I were so inclined. And I could do it for audiences not limited to mothers. And I could probably get someone other than me to do it, too.
I wanted to show an example of an embedded language people could relate to. Querying is something most everyone has done and has felt the pain of doing from other language. Any other non-trivial example of an embedded language would be even harder to understand b/c the problem domain wouldn't be familiar to the reader. It's a tough concept to communicate, I did my best.
That picture is a fake. That's how the scans actually look.
WebOS 2.0 Developer Beta
The American Express Blue Card: Best for Travelers | Around The Globe
What does xmonad change about cut/paste?
I think by saying "just money", you've pulled quite a trick. Not only do you implicitly dismiss the opportunity cost of one's own time better spent elsewhere, but you also assume away the problem of having enough land to develop, the capital cost of this land, the opportunity cost of not using it for other things, not to mention the risk costs of weather and disease - there was a pretty bad potato famine back where I come from 150 years ago, you might have heard of it.

Sure, just money.
It will probably be something similar to Autodesk Design Review:

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?siteID=123112&...
Huh? EDS still holds this contract? I remember EDS lost a large ($1bn+) contract 8 or 9 years ago when it botched up a PC refresh so badly that by the time they started installing new desktops, they were 6-7 years old. I don't fully blame EDS, having interned there a long time ago, they're just a huge inefficient corporation hired by a larger, more inefficient government.
The distinction being drawn here is between a DSL which is defined in terms of pre-existing syntax, and one which defines its own syntax.

The "integrated languages" that are discussed do not need to be stored in strings, or have some sort of special pre-processing step to coexist with the primary language. In Clojure, a Cascalog query is a first-class structure simply by virtue of being defined in terms of Clojure syntax. Integrating LINQ into C#, on the other hand, required modifying both the compiler and IDE. And as pointed out in the OP, SQL is a second-class citizen pretty much everywhere you look, which leads to issues like injection.
For Mahalo, the difference was immediacy. Mahalo had a lot of existing pages that did not provide adequate information. Remember that the vast majority of Mahalo pages were created automatically by a bot or by using outsourced labor that didn't do a very good job. They were ranked but crappy.

So, when a trend hit or for whatever reason, a page started to receive traffic, you could see it right away, add a bunch of content to it and then almost magically, push up it's search engine result position to snowball the page. For topics such as "Tiger Woods Affair", recall notices, etc, it worked really well.

Generating pages with inadequate information is in the same vein as throwing crap at a wall to see what would stick. It could be thought of as SE spam, but when quickly and carefully built out it was just the way that Mahalo worked.
I'm not bashing C#. I'm just saying that you couldn't define Linq in vanilla C#. It had to be implemented as part of the compiler.

In Clojure, you can create embedded languages without modifying the compiler. That's all I'm saying.
What are some good, widely-available variable-width fonts that also help distinguish commonly-confused characters (O, 0, I, l, 1, etc.)?

The verdana here at HN is reasonable, but what if I wanted an even stronger distinction -- especially on the zeros -- without going fully monospace? I'm thinking of a reference-info use case where precision is important, but code-like alignment isn't.
Hah - and we were in Gibraltar a few weeks ago :)
Yes, my proposal is to reduce the wages of current cabbies, increase the wages of future cabbies (the people currently making $25k/year, or perhaps who are unemployed, who would take jobs as cabbies at $35k/year) and lower the cost of taxis to consumers.

Which in NYC, with its existing low cost subway and bus alternatives, basically translates to "helping rich people by eliminating the lower-middle-class jobs their fares currently support". You would expand the pool of people who choose cabs over the subway down from the top a little bit while pushing the actual service workers further out from the city.

As for the number of vehicles, that's an issue not primarily caused by cabbies.

Perhaps because the current medallion system restricts the number of operating cabs?

A congestion charge (levied on cabbies and drivers alike) and eliminating free parking seems like a solution to that

I'm all for a congestion charge (though my version actually wouldn't apply to medallioned cabs) and eliminating free parking. But you said the point was to lower costs for consumers by increasing competition. We're getting to the point where we actually have to do the math to see where everything falls, but if you don't tweak the parameters right, you could easily find yourself in a situation where consumers are right back to paying today's fares (because there aren't actually more cabs on the road) but instead of the money going to the cabbies, it's going to the city in fees.

it works pretty well in London.

London, where cab drivers are probably the best paid, most skilled, and most stringently regulated in the world?
There is a lot more to a monitor than it's physical dimensions. The 27 inch display that you linked has a similar or lower resolution than most 23/24 inch displays and is a tn panel with limited viewing angle, color reproduction, and overall clarity. There are many good options for quality 24 inch (1920x1200) panels at reasonable prices but 27/30 inch panels at resolutions that make those inches worth having (2560x1600) are still quite pricy.
Yup,
Picture used in the article.

http://www.f1online.de/premid/000518000/518434.jpg
Appreciate the feedback Bill. I recognize garage sales are dominated by local classified ads, and some are covered by Craigslist. We'll continually refine the pipeline of sales, and we're hoping to complement them with user participation.
This works:

javascript:(function(){function I(u){var t=u.split('.'),e=t[t.length-1].toLowerCase();return {gif:1,jpg:1,jpeg:1,png:1,mng:1}[e]}function hE(s){return s.replace(/&/g,'&amp;').replace(/>/g,'&gt;').replace(/</g,'&lt;').replace(/"/g,'&quot;');}var q,h,i,z=open().document;z.write('<p>Images linked to by '+hE(location.href)+':</p><hr>');for(i=0;q=document.links[i];++i){h=q.href;if(h&&I(h))z.write('<p>'+q.innerHTML+' ('+hE(h)+')<br><img src="'+hE(h)+'">');}z.close();})()
I marked up the code pointed to by mrduncan with comments (a semicolon begins a comment in Arc).

(def comment-score (user)
(aif ;; (aif test true-part false-part) ;; if test is true, assign its value
;; to the variable it and evaluate
;; true-part. Otherwise, evaluate
;; false-part.
;; This could alternately be awhen, and leave out nil at the end
;; of this function
(check (nthcdr 5 (comments user 50))
[len> _ 10]) ;; if the user has at least 15 comments, assign
;; the comments numbered 6-50 to the variable it
(avg ;; get the average of the list returned from the next line
(cdr ;; take every score but the first
(sort > ;; order the scores, so the "first" score mentioned above is
;; the highest-scoring one
(map !score (rem !deleted it))))) ;; get the scores of each comment
;; as a list
nil))

So it takes your comments numbered 6-50, throws out the highest-scoring one, and averages them. This is assuming the code posted by mrduncan is still correct (I'm not digging through a fresh copy of the source right now).
I feel like I get $60 of value per year out of playing online with my friends, having voice chat, fooling around with avatars, and particularly, downloading free games and demos from XBL Arcade. No complaints here.
We're absolutely interested in solving that kind of problem. We have upcoming support for sessions and schedules which should help out there (preview at http://lanyrd.com/2009/full-frontal/schedule/ - regular users can't add those yet though). We're also going to add support for CfPs and other deadlines related to conferences - at which point "tracking" a conference will actually be useful.
Previous thread(s):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1597641
http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2007/08/a-history-of-th...

here is part 2.
WebOS 2.0 will include node.js
Moment two lionesses launch extraordinary attack on a threatening male
It would also seem reasonable that, on average, these officers are better at advancing to powerful positions than those who care about ideals.

It does not seem reasonable because you have cited no statics or data. It would seem reasonable to assume, that on average, ants are all red. You can't just say something and it become true.
Your "compare with" link is a millimeter wave image, not a back-scatter x-ray image. The later really is much more detailed...

http://www.naturalnews.com/gallery/articles/WaveScanners.jpg

...though not quite as detailed-looking as the hoax.
I grab a bunch of mint, scrunch it up, drop it into a pot, and pour boiling water over it. Leave it to steep for a few minutes and then serve however you like it.
I work for the federal government, and I work with (but not for) HP/EDS in the building, as they supply the majority of infrastructure services to this agency (including Active Directory, DNS, core and edge network, etc.)

While HP is a competitor to me here, we work cooperatively more than not, and I've never had an issue where another contractor was the impediment.

Conflicting, or impossible-to-meet requirements are the norm from the government. Schedules shift in ways that aren't humanly possible to complete. The government competes the work out to contractors, establishes a contract for the work, and then refuses to live up to the terms of the agreements made.

As part of a video collection effort I was working on, the government wanted to use a reporting tool in place of a document management system... as a document management system. When we explained that we could not purchase that software for them in good faith, they bought it anyway, and then insisted that we use it instead of the document management system we'd proposed (but had not yet purchased) -- citing that we should 'leverage existing resources'.

Rest assured, even at the best of times, the government is a difficult customer, and impossible to comprehend. I understand that DOD-agencies are supposed to be a little better, but I've yet to see anything even remotely close to what I'd consider rational in a business sense.
Node.js now powers services on webOS
Sure, most of those plants can be cheaper to buy than grow, if you treat your garden shop clerk as a used car salesman and let him connive you into buying every unnecessary over marketed garden gadget in the shop. But really, most plants will just require a shovel, trowel, cheap fertilizer, and a bit of time. Wheat and others are obvious exceptions, because their actual value is so low it's easy for any expense to exceed the benefit. Wheat also benefits hugely from mechanization, but the initial costs are high. It's basically an oddball. Potatoes don't fit that pattern, just buy seed potatoes once, then let a few grow "eyes", cut them off, throw them in the ground and weed them a bit. Done.
But it doesn't take any effort or resources to include it. It should be standard, like listing the city in which the article was written at the beginning.
So, what exactly is the state of Palm and the WebOS. Is the dev community still growing? Is anyone actually making apps? Are people even able to buy the phones still?
AutoLisp was added on in a later (albeit pretty early) version.
Blackberries are weeds. I spent much time in my youth fighting them back - they grow about an inch a day, if not more.
It should make sense if you keep the word Bubble in the back of your head. Most acquisitions are ridiculous, $20m to hire a team of 10 people and throw the technology away has become commonplace. The math doesn't work out except for panic buying "Let's make sure they don't aid our competition".
This was not specifically for showing my coding development but my computer setup. Linux on the left 2 monitors, Windows on the right 2 for VS2010 (dayjob).

http://www.provokedguild.org/images/rig/Pic8.jpg