skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is no such airline as "Southwestern".

Anyway, I love the legacy carriers. Last year, I flew about 110,000 miles on American, all economy. For that, I now get free upgrades to First Class, the ability to use the flagship lounge, special check-in and security lines, free stuff on board, and lots of other perks. Every time I travel, it's a joy -- there are no lines and the customer service is amazing. The service on the plane is nice too, even when I'm in economy. American makes me feel like I'm their only customer, and that they want my business.

So while it's true that the legacy airlines don't care about Joe Pricecompare who flies once a year, they do care deeply for people who consistently bring them revenue. (I miss this treatment in other industries, in fact, as I tend to be very loyal.)

Now it's true that my experience is atypical of the majority of the flying public, but it's typical of the people that keep the airlines around. The reality is that the average traveler is very hard to make money off of, and the legacy carriers just gave up. Bad for you, good for me :)
Even better, QR code. People love to scan QR codes, often just for the scanning more then the actual end result. I would be impressed if I could scan a big QR code and get a link to a planned event seating chart. You can use google's link shortener. Just add .qr to the end of the shortened URL. Also maybe qr to DL the app from the android market.
The only thing that has kept me from pulling my pre-order was that I do have high hopes for the device once I eventually receive one. That's certainly not a basis upon which to recommend the device, though, and my negative experience so far has lead me to do the opposite for now.

As for the blog, it's great to see that progress is being made, but the company's communication strategy has been inconsistent at best. I had no idea that there were public updates outside of the emails I'd received, and I can confirm that the last communication I personally received was on April 1st. Even when I initially put $5 down on the device, the only confirmation I got was from PayPal, not WakeMate.

The fact that the endeavor was a start-up effort is not lost on me, though, and so I'm trying to be patient. I just hope that there are lessons learned around customer communication and commitment.
"Sometimes what we learn about our core skills isn't what we want to hear, like the fourteen year-old who is told he's built to be a long distance runner rather than a football player, as he aspires to be"

She seems to be confusing skills (something you can learn) with talent (something you are born with).
The company I used to work at, is in the process on hiring 2+ employees and an outside IT services company to replace me. It was an amicable, planned departure and I've helped them keep everything running till my replacements are found. Frankly, it hasn't been easy to find the people. The helpdesk person was fortunately easy to find but proficient programmers aren't easy to come by.

My experience from reviewing/interviewing people based on job postings is that almost all of the applicants are looking to be a part of an already established team - very few seem to have the initiative to work on their own or create new systems from scratch - both of which are something you'd look for in potential employees at a startup. Almost all of the applicants have worked well in teams but haven't done much on their own. I'd say they're good 1/1 candidates but not 5/1. The latter are indeed found through word of mouth.
Any guesses what Facebook is announcing on Wednesday?
Web design california
Web Design Los Angeles California Web Design Company | Businessentials
As a fair warning - going up Page Mill requires being in very good shape. Its 30-60 minutes of climbing, some of it steep.
"All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection" —Butler Lampson, quoting David Wheeler
It looks like the CSS is selecting some variant of Palatino. A classic of the genre, it's a very well-respected typeface for books, articles and other long-form written works. However, like many typefaces designed for print work, it doesn't take kindly to on-screen display. Exactly how readable it is depends on which version of Palatino you have, your OS and font-rendering configuration.

If you're using Firefox, I heartily recommend going Preferences -> Content -> Fonts & Colours -> Advanced, choosing a nice readable set of typefaces (such as the Droid family, if you have them, or Lucida Grande on a Mac), and unticking "Allow pages to choose their own fonts".
To be fair, WakeMate did collect a $5 pre-order deposit from a number of customers which was later refunded.

I'm sure the money that came in this way was another vehicle towards finding investment, so I don't begrudge them at all.
"... except for the problem of too many layers of indirection." (David Wheeler's corollary)
No,

It really only works once.

Just like the New Deal only worked once and now every scam just claims it's the New, New Deal.

Sure, the populace might have a memory of a generation but the technocrats have a longer memory and after first success, the next effort is dogged by the realization, "look what I'm going to get, look who I get to be..." (as the gp said, it's the careers of the technocrats one has to look at).

I say this looking at the horrible, awful fail of the current president, a fail of what could have been the renewal of the country but by this very mechanism was fore-ordained to be a lurid catastrophe. Roosevelt sold out a lot to Wall Street too, btw, he just had a clean enough start to make his approach work.

Really, These deals only work once per country...
A buddy gave me a Firefox extension to auto-tag Amazon links with my referral: it appends this: ?ie=UTF8&tag=thstsst-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957 .

Why? Because I write a book blog (The Story's Story: http://jseliger.com/ ) and usually include an Amazon link because a) the page is uniform, b) Amazon usually gives a concise, pretty decent description of the book and that description is always in the same place, and c) if you want to buy the damn thing, you're right there, which makes it easy.

So I don't think it a terrible conflict of interest to use Amazon referral links: I think of it as a convenience, and I make a little bit of money (enough for more books but not very much). I'm skeptical that it affects the books I write about, but if it does, readers are welcome to call me on BS. One has actually said the opposite: http://jseliger.com/2008/11/06/on-books-taste-and-distaste :

One thing I will say, as now a fairly regular reader of your blog, is that you don’t seem to read very much that you actually like. You seem, in some ways, doomed to be disappointed either by your tastes or the bar you’ve set up.
Ask HN: How do I find a good factory?
I am working on some designs of a physical product to be made with plastic and aluminum. I want to put it into production and have been looking for a factory that can do injection molding, investment casting, and CNC machining, but the price quotes have been so varied, I'm not sure who to believe.

Anybody have tips on how to find a trustworthy factory for mass production of products?
That is good advice for bike safety, but it really has nothing to do with the point of the article, that people think being just a dish washer is pathetic, but if you look close enough a person is more than just a two word job description.
It is, certainly. My only issue is that it wasn't treated like an approximation.
Argh. I guess I need to edit the post to say if you are in a good coverage area (I'm not) - you can stream Netflix with no latency issues.
...except too many levels of indirection.
Chrome Gains, Firefox Holds, IE keeps dropping
The final clubs that the movie presents as the driving forces of social life at Harvard were and are fundamentally and functionally misogynistic, relics of a time when women couldn't own property and gained access to elite spaces based on either pedigree or sex appeal. At Harvard a year ahead of Zuckerberg, I stopped attending parties at the clubs my sophomore year out of disgust (with a rant at one club's president that I was tired of either being invisible or hit on in his club, which essentially ended with him hitting on me and me telling him to fuck off).

She seems kind of bitter. I wonder what her thoughts are on the female-only clubs at Harvard. It has always struck me as highly hypocritical that the same women that scream loudly about any sort of all-male social club have no problem whatsoever with female-only gyms and the like.
How can I know if my writing has value?
It’s also “playing with fire” to, in the name of keeping inflation down, depress demand so much that it plunges the whole country into a massive recession. In other words, any economic policy can be taken too far, and the dangers of any approach can be caricatured and exaggerated. It’s not like the policy of inflation fighting isn’t equally driven by “private interests, demagoguery, blind ideology,” &c.
You can't just agree on syntax, IMHO the reason for that is the best template languages have the full language available. You need a full-language for a great template language. Smarty, for instance, sucks. HAML, which is terse, but has access to the full syntax of ruby rocks. You can do things like:

= @users.map {|u| sprintf("%04d: %s",u.id, u.status.capitalize)}.join(', ')

Sure there's some special operator is smarty to do this, but I don't want to have to learn it, and they're always more clunky.

Additionally, I always hit complex, weird situations where I need a full-language, and migrating that logic out of the view makes no sense. For instance, I was working on a site where I had repeating content, with ads at predetermined offsets. I rendered it something like:

ads_positions = Set.new(2,8,10,12)
content.each_with_index do |content,i|
if ad_positions.include?(i)
content
ad
else
content
end
end

I hate expressing that stuff server-side or in half-baked templating languages.
Ask HN: What if God existence is more probable than our existence?
Is this a good question?
Want to Know if the FBI Is Tracking You? Look for One of These
is this how one gets into "Ask HN"? just do a self post?
Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg in the Social Network Aren't Real
Military Orders Less Dependence on Fossil Fuels
I'm surprised SuperHappyDevHouse and Hacker Dojo were not mentioned. Many people, including local press, describe both as microcosms of Silicon Valley culture.

If you want to see Silicon Valley, sure, go to Palo Alto and drive 280... but if you want to experience what Silicon Valley is about, you should go to a SuperHappyDevHouse or visit Hacker Dojo.
Martin Fowler seems so 2008.

To think I believed him that TDD was a good idea... It seems so far in the past.

I vote MF take Zed Shaw up on his ring match offer. At least ZS has an honest job now, soaking up government-guarantee student loans while MF seems to still be rolling ignorant corporations with his "experience"...
Although it's true that in the movie women were basically presented as sex objects, and that in real life, Zuckerburg has a close and presumably non-sexual object with his COO, it's also true that the startup world is insanely male dominated. I've heard that VCs are sexist, and tend to want to fund young single white men, and I've heard other reasons given. But attempting to confine the gender imbalance entirely to the silver screen is disingenuous. We as a community really need to be doing some soul searching about why women aren't found in "man" Jose and silicon valley.
15 Sex Positions You Can Perform In The Car
Hi,

i thought you might like the following article: 15 Sex Positions You Can Perform In The Car -

Enjoy the rest of your day.

Amy
The Real Jobs Machine
Review My One-Day Project: Shared Words
How do I encounter such a price?
How do I encounter such a price?
Good quality, strong function, fashion
I'm actually glad to hear that. I really scratched my head over why on earth Sun invented a new language for scripting UIs even while simultaneously funding things like JRuby, or having options like Groovy or Jython they could have simply run with (albeit, with some slimming down). The mind share they would have gotten by tapping into any one of those communities would have blown the lid off JavaFX adoption. Heck, even just use Javascript / Rhino which already ships with the JVM (which would ironically be a fast way to port Flash / ActionScript developers over). But announcing yet another new language to learn that is not used anywhere else in the universe? Meh.
I don't know if I agree with his assertion that Firefox users are jumping to Chrome and IE users are jumping to to Firefox. Google does some pretty aggressive advertising for Chrome. I think the average IE user is more likely to discover Chrome by using Google than to be convinced to use Firefox.
Ya, it's no FIOS but With 4 bars on my modem's signal indicator Netflix usually works well. It's a little dodgy when it rains. Try moving your modem around your house and setting it at different angles. I initially had it in a position where it got three bars I moved it across the room and set it at a slightly different angle, now I get 4 bars and it's nearly twice as fast.
We've had Crowd deployed for two years to handle web app auth. Configuration, deployment were a bit painful.

We're pulling it out and writing our own - seems to be the only way to get necessary features such as delegated administration which have been on the Crowd roadmap for years now.
have no problem whatsoever with female-only gyms and the like

i'm speculating that what they're mad at isn't the fact that there are all-male facilities, but it's how women are treated when they enter said facilities (i.e., like pieces of meat). i think you can fairly call them hypocritical if they attend female-only gyms where every male that enters is only viewed as a sex object
Unthinkable
Unthinkable Unthinkable Unthinkable
There are contributions from many large companies including IBM, Google and Intel.
Further, she doesn't seem to offer any actual evidence that Facebook was built by female ideas. It seems that everyone that was involved in Facebook in the early stages was male, and everyone that sued Facebook about those early stages was male. Of the two women she cites, one is his sister, and the other joined the company in 2008, long after the company was prominent.

As far as depicting successful, prominent, men as more likely to attract women, I'd have to say that's pretty analogous with reality. I have a girlfriend, but when my company has local events, my business partner has significantly better luck than he would otherwise. I went boating with, then to a bunch of bars with the Real World DC cast last year, and people were throwing themselves at them, and that's pretty C list. If you don't think women are more likely to perform sex acts with men with money, or who are famous, or both, I think you are either a liar or delusional. Power is sexy.
I like the action of the site. Looks very interesting.

FYI: When I'm on my pokey DSL I notice something weird in playing your demo video: when my DSL can't feed data into your video player fast enough, the player jumps me back to the start of the video (rather than pausing and signaling that it's buffering).
The key is that these questions lead to good follow-up questions. "Oh, you don't like memory management in C++? How do you mitigate the downsides?" "Neurolinguistic interpreter? What language did you use? Walk me through the core algorithm."

These always help with your #1 and #3. Nobody ever knows if anyone will do the work, but it's pretty easy to determine whether or not they'd be able and how they'll approach it.
And by the way, you would never know from the movie that The Phoenix, the club Eduardo Saverin belongs to, was the most racially and ethnically diverse one of the lot.

Well, the Zuckerberg character does explicitly say Saverin got into the club because he was Brazilian.
The domain name seems to be wrong or expired.
Depending on the JVM is a bigger issue than you suggest. Without an unencumbered open source JVM, any languages which rely on the JVM will ultimately be dependent on Oracle. Bugs can't get fixed, new platforms can't be ported to, improvements to the VM can't be added.

Jumping to Scala or any other language is just ignoring the more fundamental issues that have always made a proper open source JVM important, regardless of Java's corporate owner.
Making Things: Soap
I don't actually think that would be a problem for most men.
I live in Michigan, but work for a company headquartered in the Valley and I've flown out there a few times for them. You might be used to it if you live there, but it is something worth seeing, trust me. Yes, there's even more than that, but just the seeing is itself a worthwhile endeavor. The mountains, the houses, the downtowns, the campuses, definitely worth seeing.
In The West Wing Sorkin created some of the smartest and interesting female characters in the history of television. If he wants to create a fictional universe in which quasi-historical figures inhabit a more sexist world, and in particular if he wants to do that with a view to establishing an ironic subtext for the film (social network as rooted in deeply problematic social structure), then I think he's earned the right.
Texify - Online LaTeX equation writer
I don’t quite understand why we’re comparing reading with watching.

Books have always been substantially more interactive than radio or TV, because you can go at your own pace, you can skip forward or back at will, you can take notes in the margins and underline important parts. You can set the book down and pick up another, or look up references when they seem interesting.

Reading books and letters never got less interactive with the development of telephones or IMs, which are the long-distance extension of the face-to-face conversation, and they won’t with the adoption of video chat either. The media (conversation vs. reading/writing) have completely different uses. Writing things down (or recording in general) is a way to crystalize knowledge. Talking in real time is inherently ephemeral and driven by instant reactions.

In response to the grandparent post: sitting down around the dinner table has always been an “interactive audiovisual experience” (tactile too!) – the addition of widespread video-chat seems unlikely to transform society nearly as much as the internet already has.
An illustrated introduction to HTML5 Web Workers
I commend the 12Seconds guys for innovating and iterating a good idea as far as it could go.

The public video cam space (ie not Skype/private messaging and not adult stuff) has never gone mainstream despite many people trying hard - and no matter what you might do the fundamental proposition is just not attractive to most people.

Facebook has had a similar feature - most people don't even know it. Seesmic video (the original product there) is not worked on. Chat Roulette is really a meme/joke and no where near a proven business. TinyChat has video but it's still semi-private and certainly not mainstream.

I actually thought with the front facing camera and FaceTime on iPhone we'd see a shift but it still doesn't seem to be happening. Just like next year is the year for video calls, it still hasn't happened.
The New Deal never worked but oddly enough, it's trying to happen again. Bad deals happen over and over. The ones that work, the ones that require effort only happen once.

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonge...
Seconding the recommendation for David Lowe's paper. It's easy to follow and seriously impacted image detection. If you have MATLAB you can also run his demo: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~lowe/keypoints/

It's very interesting to see.
What basis do you have for equating the "Philosophy of Ayn Rand" with the "Theology of L. Ron Hubbard"?
I don't have access to the full text article so I can't say for certain but the article makes it sound like the effect is accomplished in a fashion similar to phase contrast microscopy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_contrast_microscopy

The basic concept of phase contrast is that certain objects (notably, monolayers of biological specimens) don't greatly affect the amplitude of light passing through them. IOW, viewed under "normal" optics, they would appear transparent.

On the other hand it was noticed that these objects do cause the phase of light to shift as it passes through the specimens. The basic idea is that you create a system that has light passing through the specimen in two paths. The major light path is dimmed and accelerated by half a wavelength. This gives us a situation of theoretically perfect destructive interference at the point of observation. When the reference light waves pass through a phase object, it changes the phase of the light and introduces perturbances to the completely destructive interference which results in an observable image of the specimen.

The reason these glasses remind me of phase contrast is the concentric circles milled to specific depths and widths (which is one of two important pieces of a phase contrast microscope, the objective). Also, the article describes the effects based in terms of phase:

The rings shift the phase of the light waves passing
through the lens, leading to patterns of both
constructive and destructive interference. Using a
computer model to calculate how changes in the diameter
and position of the rings alter the pattern, Zalevsky
came up with a design that creates a channel of
constructive interference perpendicular to the lens
through each of the 25 structures. Within these
channels, light from both near and distant objects is
in perfect focus.

I never took the optics courses in school so I'm not able to connect how the phase properties are leveraged for focus. The only thing that comes to mind is that they're using phase differences to selectively destruct out of focus rays and reinforcing in focus rays (hand wavy factor: 8.6 of 10).

[ed: speling]
I had CLEAR back when they were called Clearwire. Many corporate name changes are designed to escape a poor reputation, and I have no doubt this is one of them. If you have CLEAR and you move to a part of town with poor reception, you drop packets. And, thanks to how TCP works, dropping packets == sabotaging your connection speed forever. And canceling my service with them was pure stress because they operate on a contract/termination fee structure.

Maybe they've improved since then, and maybe it's worthwhile if you just want a mobile solution and can pay for a home internet connection on top of it, but I remain skeptical.
At Harvard at least people didn't like that the male final clubs (which are no longer affiliated with the university) predated all other clubs by many years and came to own prime real estate in Cambridge. It's near impossible for present-day female clubs to afford similar spaces. In part it's that imbalance that rankled, I think, though I'm not sure there's a good solution.

Besides, as pgbovine points out, she didn't say she minded the fact that the clubs are male-only, just the attitudes therein.
You can download 4 Steps to the Epiphany from Stanford.edu in pdf format (my preferred format anyway).

http://www.stanford.edu/group/e145/cgi-bin/winter/drupal/upl...

Not sure what the legality is of that but it's there if you want it. Do buy the book and support Steve if you find it useful.
She seems kind of bitter.

This is jezebel.com, and thus must be expected. Not that all content on the site is bad, but I usually don't like the site any more than I like male-centric misogynist blogs.