skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not compared to much of anywhere else. If you live outside the beltway (and BTW, Dulles Airport is WAY outside the beltway) then our public transit system is useless. Even inside the beltway, it's slow, expensive, and unreliable.

(Note: I am a huge fan of public transit, so that's not a general bash. DC's sucks unless both ends of your trip are within walking distance of a subway station.)
I don't know anyone who actively dislikes Southwest, but I do know people who dislike certain policies:

- Open seating instead of assigned seating. First on the plane = first pick of seats, and you board the plane in order of when you checked in (online or at the counter.) I personally like this, but some people don't.

- Limited amenities. Bring your own entertainment.

- Singing flight attendants. On some flights, the crew giving the safety briefing will "spruce it up" by singing or doing it as dramatic poetry or something. I think it's fun, but some people find it grating.
It looks like Southwest Airlines may have fallen into a growth trap: "Among all other influences, the desire to grow has perhaps the most perverse effect on strategy" - M.E. Porter

Southwest competes on cost, and this cost position hinges in large part on the rapid turnaround of aircraft. Rapid turnaround lowers Southwest's equipment and labor costs; its aircraft, pilots, and flight attendants are "doing work" for longer periods of time each day (rather than sitting idle on the ground).

A variety of activities contribute to Southwest's ability to rapidly turnaround aircraft, but some of the key activities include:

- Southwest's culture, where everyone pitches in to turnaround aircraft

- Using a single type of aircraft (737s), enabling simplified service and maintenance

- The point to point route structure, avoiding the issue of synching the schedules of hub and spoke aircraft

- Operating at less congested airports to avoid traffic delays

From my vantage point, it seems the AirTran acquisition threatens each of these activities:

- Integrating AirTran's distinct culture with Southwest's

- Expanding beyond 737s to operate 717s

- Divergence from the point to point structure to a hub and spoke

- Entry into congested airports, such as Hartsfield-Jackson (ATL), which was ranked #20 in 2010 for on-time departure performance by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics

In short, this acquisition is problematic from a strategic standpoint and appears to threaten the basis of Southwest's cost advantage.
Battery life on my Iphone 4 (4.0(8A293)) is so bad that I frequently have a brick in my hands. That was never the case with the 3GS.

Now, If I reboot the iPhone, and don't use it for anything other than making a few phone calls - I can go two, sometimes three days without needing a recharge.

But, if I use a few apps, Maps, Email, etc.. I typically either wake up in the morning, or end the day with a dead phone.

So, this is clearly not a battery problem - as it is related to App usage. I try to shut-down all my apps every time I use them, and keep the screen locked (and dim), but that isn't working (or I'm not as good at is as I'd like to be)

The one thing that does seem to work, repeatedly, is rebooting the iPhone every time I use a few Apps (and then not touching the Apps).

This is the first iPhone I've had battery problems with - it's clearly something running in the background that I'm not aware of. Eventually I'll figure it out - but anything Apple can provide to me in terms of "What is sucking battery life" would be much appreciated - so - your suggestion that the GPS arrow changes color to indicate that they are draining the battery, would be a huge win.

Even better, would be a screen that would show me which apps were pulling how much battery throughout the day.

And yes, I realize Apple does NOT want to take that approach (feels more androidish/windows mobile) - they want to make a phone that "just works" - but my position is, until they make that phone, i want them to give me the tools so _I_ can make it work in absence of a phone that is "Just working", yet.
Just having money is probably not enough, NOT having money is definitely no-no.
Appreciate the criticism. Understanding expectations is part of becoming a stronger writer. I post daily to polish/practice, but I can see now how I jumped from time saving tips to focus in the same piece without a fluid connector. Thanks.
IE9 not on XP due to hardware rendering that can be disabled?
So funny, and so true:
"When I get a text alert, it always makes me happy, even before I read the message. When my phone rings, I think, Uh-oh, what fresh hell is this?"
That's funny I was hoping by posting the article here I could get better tips from HN members about how to more efficiently cram in hacking time into my schedule.

I'll certainly continue posting along this topic line as I uncover more tips that work for me. I need to monitor hard metrics for application development (commits) while trying out different time saver tricks.
Using multiple accounts has been very unpleasant; I don't know if that has been fixed. As I said, we had to quit using Dropbox for the club. And many folks already used Dropbox for other things, so normally are logged into their own account.
It's a different experience, even from the other discount carriers. If you can get your head around it, SWA is easy to love: straightforward pricing and scheduling, no-frills and no-hassle.

The thing that sets most people off is the lack of assigned seating, but in the past year or so that's been mooted by the "buy your way into group AA" option.
"Confirms it may not be ready"? Really?

I've just confirmed I may have solved cancer.
I'm confused. Are you or are you not notifying your customers of the added expense of supporting IE6? If you are, then I don't see how your method differs from what is stated in the post. No one is making their client "feel bad" about a business decision. Whether or not they do is more a function of how that unfortunate news is delivered, or perhaps whether or not they irrationally view IE6 support as mission-critical.
>And if work isn't getting done, "what they're up to" is irrelevant.

wtf
I would recommend getting out of the 'Microsoft burning bridges' mentality. I don't think it can help you in the long run.

As a start-up we get completely focused on what we're doing and how much energy it takes. I'm sure there are times you've messed up a contact, didn't get back to somebody, transfered to a partner who didn't respond, etc. Now put yourself in their shoes. They have 100x more people trying to get their attention. Sometimes we don't realize that these larger companies with multiple levels of bureaucracy.

At the same time, it was very smart of you not to give them our source code without a contract.

A 'they burned us' mentality won't help you in the long run. You just happened to make a contact at Microsoft and it didn't work out this time. If I were you I'd send them a 'thanks, we're here if you need us' response.

They just qualified your market if it wasn't already done.

As mentioned by Zacharycohn, LinkedIn is likely the best resource for finding contacts. I'd recommend adding your Microsoft contacts to your linkedIn contacts. That way people may be able to find in association with that Microsoft group, and you seem to be that much closer.

One last thing, doing anything with the big dogs is likely going to take time. I hope you aren't putting all your eggs in one big basket. I think it often helps a bigger company take the plunge if a moderately sized one has done it already.

Is anybody already using your service? Is there a start-up you could work with that might give you an added bit of publicity?

Best of luck,
Pete
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apples_and_oranges

I think apples should lead apples and oranges should lead oranges.
Don't be a twerp. Of course we know how to share. But our shared files amount to nearly 2Gb, using up Everybody's allocation. So if they for example had half a Gb, they are now required to "upgrade" too.
I actually find it really elegant. I fell in love with comprehensions as soon as I discovered them. They were the terse, expressive syntax I'd long been searching for.
I for one support the suggestions and I don't have anything against implementing them in American high-schools, but that may be probably because I am not American.

Now I would request these people to stop saying that the Indians and the Chinese are taking their jobs. They are taking your jobs because they are apparently better educated (for the job). </generalisation>

The new suggestions include some fairly ridiculous points.

>Weigh the merit of using any essay questions at all

Objective-type answering system will seriously affect the way students learn. I suspect this will dampen creativity in students.

>Offer a maximum of 3 choices

This coupled with the suggestion to avoid negative-marking will make the exams just a waste of time for everyone involved.
The problem with conversation-view is that it breaks the simple chronology of e-mail. If I want to look at an e-mail that I remember receiving last Friday, I have to scan through my "conversations" until I recognize the correct subject for that particular conversation which will appear in a seemingly random order, depending on the last time I replied or received a reply.

Maybe I'm a "foot-dragging improvement hater" but it's much easier for me to remember "e-mail from Fred last Friday" and to find that by going to last Friday and looking for "Fred" than it is to remember the last time the conversation was updated.
To be fair, you also have to factor in the SWA clientele, which is noticeably less business-centric than even Airtran.
You got it: http://www.victusspiritus.com/2009/03/05/the-walker/

Now my schedule is 7 days a week ~10 miles a day. I find it cathartic and calming. Helps my state of mind stay clear most of the day.
I consider myself to be an underzealot. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who doesn't already know how to get in and out of nano or vi.

My main motivation came from noticing the extensive support for haskell packages. I would have been happy to use a debian-based distro, but haskell seems to be too bleeding edge for distros like ubuntu to keep up.
The Intellifactory guys really know their F#. But this seems too much like WebForms and MSAjax for my tastes. After a while autogenerated javascript and HTML becomes very problematic, to say the least. If I want javascript, I'll just write it myself.

Now what I'd really like to see is an F# stand alone webserver - that would operate outside of ASP.NET/IIS. I envision a functional Request/Response pipeline, where you can augment the pipeline using function compositoin. Perhaps this could even handled by a computation expression or workflow. ( For those unfamiliar with F#, this is one of the killer features. See how simple it is to handle Async or parallel processing in F#).

Chris Smith has an interesting example of a Session State workflow in his F# book - I would like to see someone attempt that with a full fledged server.
As another poster mentioned, it's a demographics issue. Right now, I'm working on a site used in US K-12 schools, and IE6 usage is around 5%. It doesn't sound like much, but our client can easily justify supporting IE6 based on marginal revenue. We have a large Google Web Toolkit application, so IE6 wrangling is limited to CSS and performance hell -- the JS differences are compiled away.

If you're developing a consumer app, you're probably in pretty good shape though. Some friends at a consumer-focused webshop report IE6 rates < 3%. Furthermore, most of that 3% probably have Firefox installed and could use it easily if they were told that the site wasn't IE6 compatible. So, for them, the ROI of IE6 support is probably quite negative.
Ah. How unfortunate. So because they chose to change Dropbox into some repository/history thing, instead of just file-sharing, now they have to charge everybody.
Aren't job bids typically considered confidential? How would you know what another firm wanted to support IE6?
Technical Requirement Checklists (TCRs) for iOS Games
16-bit ALU in minecraft
The nice thing about differently colored icons is that they

A) Are not more complex. It's still just a Location Icon.
Clearly explains the Privacy Scenario.

B) For those that are alert to the color, provides
more information that can be very valuable.

There seems to be a deeper concept here - creating user interfaces that add information for experts without introducing any more complexity for beginners - kind of like the RSSI indicators you have for WiFi - they show you are connected _and_ how strong (roughly) a connection you have.
The issue isn't how they configure their workspace, it's their productivity. Assess their productivity from a black box perspective, don't even think about how their desks are arranged, that's not the issue, it's not even an issue.
> You have a block that runs before anything else happens, a block run just before the program exits, and a block run for every piece of input

Interestingly enough, windows powershell structures its cmdlets in the same way. Makes lots of sense for stream processing as you said.
How old are you? I'm curious because I used to be like that. Now, my back hurts if I am anything but sitting upright or laying flat.
Had a negative experience with MS recently. They were very interested in licensing some code for use in bing and we did a number of presentations to the top of the hierarchy which was extremely time consuming. In the end there was radio silence so we followed up and didn't hear back, then things were delayed multiple times on their end. It seemed highly unprofessional of the business development lead to string us along because it burns a bridge for future partnership while only gaining a delay of deployment on a competing property.

None of this sounds peculiar for a company as large as Microsoft. The near-glacial timescales that exist for project management decisions can be daunting for the unfamiliar or unaware. But glad you didn't hand over the keys without a contract. Lessons learned.
I'm not sure about the original reasoning, but I'm sure that's why some people still support the restriction. Or, at least, that's what they claim.

Seems like if noise is the problem, then noise is what is what you should regulate. The exact same plane that today flies from DCA to Houston could just as well fly to Seattle.
Chromium OS running on an iPad
COTA rocks!............
I think this is partially the reason YC stays away from music company startups.
Be careful what you wish for.

This reminds me of former NFL great and Monday Night Football announcer Frank Gifford. At one time, he charged $10,000 per corporate appearance. The grind was wearing him down, so he doubled his rate to reduce volume. Funny thing happened though, the higher rate made him more desirable to corporate program directors and his demand actually increased.

I wonder how applicable this phenomenon is here. You could easily become known as the "ie6 web design experts" who corporate drones turn to first. Sure, you'd make tons of money, but is that what you really want?

[EDIT: Lots of us are constantly dealing with the trade-off between whoring ourselves out for high paying shit work and doing what we really want. Just sayin'.]
Yeah, better add facebook and twitter.
How to build a technology brand?
I'd like to get HN audience's opinion on how to build a tech brand. Assuming you already have a consumer/ecommerce company, what steps should you take to get recognized as a technology company? Amazon, Netflix, LinkedIn, are among companies who have successfully done this. What do you think works best for a smaller company?
Practice, watch the masters, browse a lot of sites, go to design sites and CSS sites and see what makes them good. Keep doing that for 10 years.
Sounds like they're addressing some of the growing pains in Django's ever increasing popularity. Good problems to have I suppose.
The latest stable or development? I'm running the dev channel and it worked fine.
I was on Sprint for several years before picking up an iPhone 3G, and it's frustrating has heck. I rarely had a dropped call on my Sprint dumb-phone. In fact, it was so rare that when a call did drop, it was a memorable occurrence (at least for a few days). Now, dropped calls on my iPhone are a daily occurrence and a crap-tax to owning such a device.
Good thing I don't have a motor cycle then ;-)
How are you monetizing the app? Do you have a way of seeing how much people are actually using it after downloading?
if I recall Youtube was never profitable during it's run as a startup.

Some models require massive adoption before the value goes up. If they succeed in being a go to music destination, the money will likely follow.
I hate phone calls, unless they are pre-arranged. Send me an email so you don't interrupt my train of thought.
The Microsoft part is typical. It's more or less the Stacker/Intuit story with a different product.

Never, ever, under no circumstances, trust Microsoft.

Also, check if they aren't violating any patent you may have failed to disclose during the negotiations. If they are, enjoy every minute.

(burn, karma, burn)
Sure, that's why Graham Hutton can do it in one chapter. Most books discuss lists and functions anyway, and from there is not such a big step to give an introduction to lambdas/closures, maps, folds, and filters.

It's not as if we are discussing monads (which are also easy to understand, given a good teacher).
Chrome doesn't hide the "www", only the http:// protocol, as there might be differences between the www.example.com and example.com DNS settings.
"For important calls, I use a land line that serves as my fax line. If I receive a call on my cellphone, I try to keep it short, or I call back from my fax line."

Why aren't faxes obsolete? Over 10 years since President Clinton e-signed the e-signature law into place. About 150 years since the first e-signature (over telegraph). Seems like an opportunity missed here.
Weak signal seems very much like an American problem.
Just click "show search options" and enter "Fred" in the from box and "Friday" in the date box.

Much easier than scanning through pages and pages of messages.
Public transit from BWI means, you either have to take Amtrak, MARC (only on weekdays), or a bus to the Metro (which can take 45-60 minutes during rush hour).

If you're flying from Ohio, it will probably take you longer to get from BWI to your destination in DC than from Ohio to BWI.
This. Totally normal for any large firm. And yes, there are no guarantees at the end of it.
Brian, I might have a solution for payment :) PM me :)
No Child Left Behind aims to shed light on poor performing schools in part by requiring them to elevate graduation rates in order to meet "adequate yearly progress" goals.

Many schools are addressing the perceived urgency of these federal mandates by doing whatever they can to get the kids out the doors in four years.
> You know Google has pretty well always read your gmail right?

That is a loaded question that does not cover how and why google uses your emails.
If you're scraping 10 feeds, can you plot the hotels off each feed as they come in?
It's also a marker of personal respect and status. If you walk into someone's office, like a lawyer or a doctor or a professor, do you sneak up behind them? No. They're facing the door. The desk is between you and them. Behind them are bookshelves or a panoramic view of the local freeway or diplomas framed and mounted on the wall, and you're face to face. Even receptionists get this courtesy. It's comparatively kind of degrading to work in an environment where as soon as someone enters your workspace they're looking over your shoulder.
Not entirely coincidentally, Asia - with its high-bandwidth internet infrastructure - sends a lot of spam. (Although it's getting better lately.)
Maybe you could change it to "Not as optimized as Rhino to parse JSON under heavy load."
> If you start a new conversation from an old thread, just change the subject...

I'm not the one starting the conversation so I'm not at liberty to do anything.

There is a thread. Then, days later, some member of this thread decides to start a new conversation by replying to this thread. It's the same "mailing list" but it should be a different thread. (But GMail has no way to know; this isn't a failure of GMail. The failure was, until today, to not allow to do without the threaded view).

At least GMail should have had the option of breaking a thread; for each message in a thread, display a button that says "start a new thread here".
The problem is not the near-glacial timeframes. It's using you to gather requirements and knowledge and to avoid pitfalls and then, after sucking you dry, building internally.

That's simply not ethical.

(burn, karma, burn)
You were saying that V8 GC is failing here so I just explained why JSON.parse is especially bad for V8 GC.

Strictly speaking I am not even convinced that GC is bottleneck here. Only profiling can reveal the real bottleneck.

[I tried small experiment: used thirdparty pure-JS JSON parser instead of V8 JSON.parse --- that changed GC profile, but did not affect response time.]
I'm a community college teacher and a member of the Board of Regents for my system wanted to make our pay dependent upon how many people pass the class. I was praying that his proposal went through.

We get pressure all the time to increase student success. There's no real push to make sure people know what they are supposed to know. The administration just wants a high passing rate. Every year my tests get easier. I let people turn in late work. I give retakes on tests. I'm getting to the point where I just want to give everyone an 'A' and not give any homework or tests.
Man, they are getting ripped apart in the comments (They had it coming with the previous response). Whats annoying is that the Product managers are still answering more questions than the engineers and as usual dodging a lot of them with PR speak. Its almost like someone has a gun to their head and they are really carefully with what they say.

Edit: It looks like Seth (an engineer) is answering more questions now after Reddit admin (Raldi) recommended that he do.
Does Internet Use Lead to Addiction, Loneliness, Depression…and Syphilis?
The Vdara Death Ray, or Unintended Consequences
Given how "quirky" IE6 is, a "run as IE6" mode would be a lot of work. (Of course, they now offload the work to everyone else, but that's not their problem is it?)
In Texas, SWA is a favorite of many, many business travelers, not least because of the casual on-board atmosphere and the funny (as in humorous) and good-natured flight attendants. Friday-afternoon flights can be almost like a party.
Are Texting-While-Driving Laws Making our Streets Less Safe?
Introducing SymPullCDN: Getting Free Bandwidth From Google
I personally prefer it. I don't need to see the http://www before each link, and if I'm just glancing up at the location bar to see where I am, on browsers that do show it, I have to mentally parse that out.

On the other hand, when I copy and paste it, that means I intend to DO something with it, like send it to a friend over IM, or email it or something, during which case I want a full, clickable link. Which is exactly what they give me.

On the off chance that I want to copy and paste the de-http'd URL, then I am in no better (or worse) shape than I would be with any other browser, in that I have to paste it and strip the 'http://www as I ordinarily would.
IDEO: Good Stories Make Good Brands. Here's 4 Tips and 7 Examples
Gödel, Escher, Bach Lectures
<side note>

Kinda ironic you can't get to the Colbert rally by flying into the airport named after the individual who fired 11,000 air traffic controllers, de-certified their union, and banned them from their profession for life.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0808/12292.html