skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, particularly in light of recent articles I've read describing improved safety as a result of increasing potential confusion (removing lane markers, etc.). The theory is that forcing people to pay attention, well, makes them pay more attention.

I'd like to add another possibility beyond what you've noted. Might it be that speed isn't itself more dangerous in that it "causes" accidents, but when an accident occurs and higher velocity is involved, that means more kinetic energy is to be dissipated, and with all that energy in play, the results may be more dire?

I'd also like to see more variables factored out of the data. I'd like to know about someone (like me) who observes other safety rules like seatbelts, proper lane discipline including signaling, safe following distances, etc.
It loads for me, it just loads slowly.

Cached version: http://cache.historious.net/cached/569458/

Edit: P.S. If you used the cached version, can you let me know how it worked for you? I stumbled across historious and I'm testing to see how well it works.
Robert Anton Wilson: The Illuminati Trilogy (rethink your thinking)

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal (very spiritual in its own way, but highly entertaining)
The fear is there for a reason: humans naturally avoid social interaction where there's a heightened risk of creating a bad impression (or a reduced likelihood of a positive outcome). Respect for others' personal space counts too - the complete stranger whose conversation you're considering politely butting into has "micro-fears" of their own too and the last thing you want is to be the person that _created_ awkwardness. I'm much more likely to strike up conversation with the person I catch glancing at me and shyly looking away than the person staring at me.

There's a fine line between always trying to engage people and being the loud, irritating guy with no social graces. Going to a networking event and failing to network is too far one side of the line; going to a networking event and trying to start conversation with a nails-down-the-blackboard-awful opening line is too far the other.
I apologise for the site loading slowly, my entirely unrelated page http://qntm.org/uk "The Great British Venn Diagram" is currently being hammered by Redditors.
If -I- didn't crash, I lost no time. Someone else getting in a crash doesn't increase my travelling average.
What a pointless list. Most movies contain rendered cgi and Linux is popular on render clusters, what a surprise. What would be far more interesting would be a list of movies made with the help of linux on desktop workstations. Or even movies made without the help of linux.
Many (hard to say how many) drivers will drive too fast because they are late for something. If you assume that their only goal is to either be on time, not be less late, then speeding makes sense, even in a simulation. Said driver has nothing to lose - they would be late if they didn't speed, crashes also make them late, but at least sometimes they won't crash and will indeed arrive on time.
That's probably a good way to look at the issue.
I prefer explanatory variable and method names to comments. Comments lie: they cannot be specced or debugged, and few if any developers take responsibility to edit and maintain comments made by others.

As a rule of thumb, I comment only when there is a surprising externality relevant to the code e.g. performance, obscure workaround.
Has anyone tried Facebook Scribe?
avand, one file in your code reads:

Dir.glob("#{Rails.root}/app/stylesheets/#{params[:package]}//.css") do |filename|

Don't you want to compile all SCSS files? Why '.css' then?
Also, wouldn't you have to exclude partials (_foo.scss)?

I had to add ':load_paths => %w(. ./app/stylesheets)' to the sass_options to get the @imports working. Did it work for you without that?
>>I also can't help but think that they could kiss further funding goodbye if they reported that driving faster is better.

So true...
Further, in Africa hunter/gatherer was doing pretty well for the most part until the imperialists interfered.

Hunter/gatherer did well for the vast majority of human history, all around the world. But imperialists did interfere. You can't handwave that away.

Communication is also practically instant now. If a Genghis Khan began conquering a government-less world with our current level of technology, by the time he finished conquering the first neighbor he would already be surrounded by everyone else.

Why would he be surrounded by anyone? People don't voluntarily protect each other unless they identify as part of the same group, whether tribal or national. How many Americans actually cared about the Syrian invasion and occupation of Lebanon? How many knew? And you expect people under anarchy to voluntarily mobilize for the sake of strangers around the world?

Also, it's not entirely clear that our current level of technology and communication would continue to function without government; they likely require a free market system[1], and free markets require consistent property rights and a functioning legal system, both available to all people. None of this can be provided without a government.

Things are vastly different now than they were in Genghis Khan's time. Governments are even more entrenched, and it's not clear that it's even possible for major parts of the world to function without them. Empirically, I'd rather go with what's been proven to work and improve on it.

[1] At minimum; you could maintain a communication infrastructure with a more centralized economic system, but that would be even less anarchic.
How is it trivial to verify whether a password unlocks something the existence of which is impossible to verify?
Sure! Coax a retrovirus into reverse-transcribing some chloroplast-supporting genes into your skin cells, eat a salad, and you're all set!
This is not surprising. Ballmer doesn't like the idea of losing his job in disgrace and Windows 7 Phone, while competitive, is still based on Windows CE. If you ignore the GUI, the underlying OS is every bit as sophisticated and modern as... Symbian.

These are the patents Microsoft mentioned to the International Trade Commission. They may or may not the the patents mentioned in the Motorola lawsuit.

5,579,517: Common name space for long and short filenames

5,758,352: Common name space for long and short filenames

6,621,746: Monitoring entropic conditions of a flash memory device as an indicator for invoking erasure operations

6,826,762: Radio interface layer in a cell phone with a set of APIs having a hardware-independent proxy layer and a hardware-specific driver layer

6,909,910: Method and system for managing changes to a contact database

7,644,376: Flexible architecture for notifying applications of state changes

5,664,133: Context sensitive menu system/menu behavior

6,578,054: Method and system for supporting off-line mode of operation and synchronization using resource state information

6,370,566: Generating meeting requests and group scheduling from a mobile device

I wonder what Google could do to invalidate these patents...
Yes. Too bad they did not have a comparison to the example image in the article.
Ask HN: ARPU and ARPPU estimation for Volume-Transaction based SaaS
How would you estimate ARPU and/or ARPPU for Volume-Transaction based SaaS application.

I did a simple calculations based on the great http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics/ however I'm missing a feeling about ARPU. ARPU is relatively simple for fixed-mounthly fees, but when users pay on demand, that's hard to estimate.

Any ideas on how to do it? Any estimates on ARPU of other volme-based services, e.g. Google App Engine or Amazon S3.

Interesting topic is ARPU distribution over user base, assuming all users are paying.... 80/20 rule there too?

Renat
I'd bet it's a pass phrase. The first few lines of a song converted to 3l33t will give you 50 memorable characters pretty easily.
I'm working on a podcast that does just that. Thank you.
Alternatively: body paint.
An Illegal Search, by GPS
Not how statistics work...
I don't think you'd end up with a single world government. I think you'd end up with thousands of smaller conquerers carving out territory for themselves, and a gradual process where empires grow, break apart, join together, etc.. You know, basically the entire history of the world over again, except with nuclear weapons.
Please fix title - Saturday is Oct 9.
Perhaps you're right regarding what the comparison is inviting. It might not be suggesting cross-country comparisons, but it's still making a normative statement concerning the ideal. My contention is that it should not do that; it should only focus on the decreased probability of death by reducing speed. Weighting the trade-offs is too objective.

(Edit: Also, it's a Canadian paper.)
I came, I saw, I lost in the first round of Startupcraft SF
Actually, that doesn't constitute discrimination.

Consider the case of a disabled worker in a wheelchair. The employer is required to make reasonable accommodations if the employee is otherwise suited for the job. That doesn't mean that the US discriminates against the non-disabled.

Incidentally, the same law protects the atheist with a tattoo of His Noodliness* as a statement of non-belief, as well as the Christian with a tattoo of the Cross.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster
Interestingly, most accidents occur below the speed limit and increasing speed limits decrease accidents, because limits are artificially low and thus almost no one heeds them, except for a few people who do who cause accidents because accidents happen when the variability of speed is greatest.

http://sense.bc.ca/disc/disc-09.htm

What speeding does generally is increase the severity of accidents and alarmingly fast (Thanks, Newton!).

Energy levels follow square law and the human body has a rather low ceiling for the amount of energy it can absorb. It makes perfect sense that you're going to see large "averages" especially when the people going most excessively over the limit are the youngest and most inexperienced.

Now consider that young people also want to live in dense urban environments where there are a lot of other cars travelling at variable speeds, what you have is a recipe for high statistical impact accidents with energy levels following a square law with a low ceiling for death.

Lets look at a rather typical case:
Young family, two kids, ages (28,28,2,3) they are travelling 10 over rushing to daycare and jobs, they run into an 85 year old grandpa driving 20 under. Everyone dies, so you have 10 over associated with (75-28+75-28+75-2+75-2) or 240 years of life expectancy, now on the other hand you have 20 under associated with -10 years of life expectancy. Lets not even get into who caused the accident according to anyone but a prosecutor.

Do this study on people over 75 and you'll find that old people should drastically increase the speed of their driving. Do this study on 0-10 year olds and you'll find that we shouldn't even be driving at all. The only thing this study says is that young people speed and when they die they have a disproportionate affect on average life span. The rest of it is just asinine statistical interpretations on data that have nothing to with speeding, and everything to do with the fact that the faster you are travelling the more likely you are to die when you crash. If they wanted to make this scientifically valid they should publish a chart showing at what age you should be speeding by how much, because once you're past 2/3rd life expectancy it's advantageous to speed according to this study, but this isn't about science, it's about speed = bad, so they can tax (err.. fine) you for doing it.

It's absolutely idiotic to add those numbers given the age and driving preferences and think that speeding is counter productive. This study is as stupid as a study that says that if Bill Gates moves onto your block that everyone on your block becomes a billionaire. Yes, it works on "average" but everyone knows that you still have to go to work (you may even have to speed to get there on time) in the morning if bill gates moves to your block.

I'd much rather get in an accident going 10 over a 50 zone than 5 under in a 100 zone (especially if it's on coming traffic).

Also, in Montana after a Judge invalidated their speeding laws as unconstitutional the number of accidents dropped.

http://www.hwysafety.com/hwy_montana.htm

I'll take real world data over a computer model any day of the week.
In which case the judge would compel you to reveal your password to your attorney. The attorney would not be able to reveal the password as that would violate privilege, but they would be compelled to uphold the terms of the valid search warrant on the decrypted data.
Yahoo acquires dynamic ad creative startup Dapper
NASA's Explosive Findings on the Moon
Mitochondria are hypothesised to have originated from separate organisms. Could this be additional evidence of the same process half way complete?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endosymbiotic_theory
I'm sure simple things like not looking in mirrors to just being completely stupid and pulling asshat manoeuvres cause more accidents than speeding

In my time driving, I have never seen accidents caused by excessive speed but all the time by silliness which would have still resulted in an accident if people drove slower.

Methods of speed prevention such as cameras probably cause even more accidents due to last second braking.

What is needed is more education in safety on the road and how to control a vehicle or even in multi-tasking such as being told to navigate by yourself to a destination without being told where it as whilst the driver is still a learner.
He's probably bored and thus wants to extend the discussion
Their conclusion seems incomplete, or maybe they came up with the conclusion before the study.

Other possible solutions include: increasing driving skill, paying more attention while driving (no sending text messages), etc
The flipside, imho, is that it's simply less of a big deal to be late, precisely because technology makes it less problematic. 20 years ago, if someone was late for, say, a dinner date, you'd be faced with the unpleasant choice of having to leave and reschedule, or wait, not knowing if they'll ever show. Now you can simply text each other. The decision point comes earlier.

YMMV, but my circle seems to simply be generally more flexible about time. That may be considered rude to some, and rude by standards of 20 years ago, but as long as everyone is generally on board, it's not a problem. In fact, it's more flexible and arguably efficient (I'm thinking of just in time inventory). I'm wondering if we're simply witnessing a generational shift here. (Full disclosure, I'm in my 40's).
> am I the only one who sometimes finds refactored code harder to understand or change?

No, you aren't the only one. I made a similar case in a related discussion a few months ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1224210
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1224206

This particular tutorial seems to have some merit, but it's a bit too clever for its own good at times. For example, the very first change introduces a named constant called SIGHT_SHOT_RADIUS_PX, which is not in fact used as a radius at all. Indeed, if it were, the later refactoring to split out a testForHits operation that in turn uses testForXAxisHit and testForYAxisHit would break down, because while testing for hits is a useful atomic operation, the tests on the two axes would not be independent and the logic in those functions is meaningless out of context.

No unit test is going to warn you about traps like these, and breaking things down according to dogmatic rules rather than to separate meaningful, self-contained concepts does tend to create such problems IME.
It's also fair to say that entropy has taken its toll on the implementation of the system, and it's overdue for some refactoring.

Let's be more constructive here. For starters, how many people know their local reps and actually expect said reps to improve the quality of life in their neighborhood? Why is that?
It does; OTOH people post some outrageous shit w/r/t their adventures with the law on Reddit. Yesterday, for example, some guy posted pics of an FBI tracking device he found on the underside of his car (http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/dmh5s/does_this_...). A couple months ago some guy wrote an AMA a days before he was to start a multi-year bid in Federal. (http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/chc3k/iama_fella_getti...)

Personally I am inclined to believe.
I'm reminded of something I once saw written (tweeted?) by the astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson (although I doubt he is the originator): "Any good remedy will cure the common cold in about a week. But left to itself, it will linger for seven days."
But the plant DNA is encoded into its genome. "Half" is stretching it, but it's certainly partly plant since it received the plant genes via horizontal gene transfer from the algae.
The pipe versus a tangle of wires
The situation isn't entirely hopeless. Even within the most aggressive labels (and by that I mean their legal departments) there are parties who do encourage innovation. These are the people that go to bat for artists and are trying everything imaginable to promote them. They try new advertising campaigns, are experimenting with alternate branding, and moving to the sports business model (ie endorsements). Its unfortunate that the legal departments have been the ones with all the power, but this will fade with time as current employees are replaced with ones who see the effectiveness of all these new promotional channels.
I believe there is a backup parachute.
Countries never just get lucky. The work doesn't stop on launch day. Both countries' power structures were built in a way that allowed a willing populace to correct its problems. The self-correcting mechanisms seem to have lost their footing in the US of late.
Anyone have good stats for the browser-vs-non-browser (i.e. dedicated FB/twitter client, Instapaper, etc.) use of HTTP to consume HTML. I bet you'd find that c. 2002 IE had 90% of the browser and browsers had 99.9% of HTTP+HTML, but that now browsers have more like 90% of HTTP+HTML. Then there's the desktop browser vs mobile browser issue, and RSS ...
Anything involving 98% H2SO4 is probably not properly described as "DIY" project either...
> 1. What does the business person do in the weeks/months before there is anything to sell?

What do you think that one can't sell something before it's available?

In some circumstances it's illegal to accept payment before a product is available, but you can always sell.
In 2007 he made them the bulk of their 1.4 Euros net income. That's inexcusable for a CEO and his board not to know where the bulk of their net income comes from. Especially when it's from one single trader!
A Canadian paper on US data, not enough people actually live in Canada for cars to approach each other on average. (I'm Canadian, but also making fun of the abuse of averages to describe this data).
+-5 years in 2000years of German history ;-)

Sorry, I had thought the hyperinflation + general chaos led directly to the rather unpleasant party seizing power in 1933 and so assumed the bad times were immediately before then (ie 1930-1933). Hadn't realised they were actually a decade earlier.
Academic quarter is for teachers, not students.

It's not ok for students to be late to class even 1 minute.

15 minutes is the amount of time that students must wait for a teacher to arrive before they can assume that a class has been cancelled and disband.

This is not about tolerating tardiness but a rule that clarifies what happens when a teacher doesn't arrive to teach the class in a timely manner.

It's also not something that happens often. It's a rule for contingency planning and not a rule to promote a standard of teacher tardiness.

At least in Poland.
Calling a service going down a "danger of the cloud" is sensationalist, like calling any pervert who has ever touched a keyboard an "Internet predator." The adjective 'Internet' in that case, or 'cloud' in this one, does not usefully divide the problem space.

Your service will have the same amount of unpredictable black-swan downtime whether it is local or remote. The difference is, when the only person you have to blame is yourself (or someone you empathize with), you mentally downplay the downtime—whereas, when you can point a finger and create a mental "us/them" division, you exaggerate it.
The Historious cache link works just fine for me too.
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Rubberhose Deniable Encryption by Julian Assange of Wikileaks fame. That's the entire concept.

Page: http://iq.org/~proff/rubberhose.org/

Description: http://iq.org/~proff/rubberhose.org/current/src/doc/maruguid...
Nicely handled response. Kudos.

I think I was somewhat irked when I realized that these were likely to show up on HN every single day, and when I noticed that you're promoting your own site. (every... single... day.)
Did you read the "CustoMalloc" paper? It's more of the same. Just to illustrate, the paper you referenced has the title "CustoMalloc: efficient synthesized memory allocator".

That is, "CustoMalloc" takes a look at memory usage patterns of a particular program, then generates a semi-customized allocator for that program.
Funny mistake. The French (led by President Sarkozy) are actually talking about stripping nationality from certain types of criminals.
See: http://www.france24.com/en/20100730-sarkozy-looks-strip-citi...
I am a Franch-American dual national, maybe I will be just American after making this comment... Liberté, égalité, fraternité! ;-)
So, that was a bummer
But the real point isn't "can you do a better job", but is it worth it to a better job?

If I can use an OTS memory allocator and get within 2% of my hand-crafted hand-tuned allocator, I think I'd need to be extremely perf sensitive to care.
Android is now the most popular OS for people aquiring a new smartphone
Oh yes, by reducing speed, we could maybe reduce the number of accidents and thus reduce the travel time.

BUT - after few years, the drivers will adjust! they will still drive slower, but a little more risky. All the savings will vanish.
No, performance of complex systems is really really hard to predict.
i was at a conference recently and had my phone on silent the whole day, I have 8 missed calls and 2 emails in the space of 7 hours from a recruiter. Really, if i didnt answer the first 4 times that day what made him think i would answer the last 4. he was recruiting for a php contractor position

</end rant>
I find the spreadsheet-style interface pretty uninspired for something as personal as music. The linear list of albums/tracks breaks down very quickly once your library starts growing, and iTunes becomes a confusing, disorientating mess. To Apple's credit, they've been taking baby steps towards more interesting ways of browsing your library with Genius playlists and mixes, but they could and should do so much more.
Could you defeat that somehow by having rotating keys?
Remove ?sexy_title from the URL and you get:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1734510

Flagged. I hold out hope that the difference between a 12 point story and a 120 point story on HN is not a sexy title.
Here's a clip of it moving.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQNIpW0LlsU
Somewhat related, what's the status nowadays of un-DRM'ing music you've purchased, say from iTunes Store, to play on other players, particularly on Linux? Is it possible? What if you don't have access to Windows or OSX (to burn an non-DRM cd)? Legal?
A friend of mine flew back home to Canada. After clearing customs, he was one of the random people chosen to have their luggage inspected. He had his laptop on him and the customs agent booted up the computer, asked him to enter his password and then took his laptop away before bringing it back without telling him anything about it.

I wondered what would have happened if he refused to type in the password.
I can't leave a comment about the story, but I can leave a comment about the registration wall preventing me from reading the story.