skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a lot of room for improvement:

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/e0val/how_pricel...

I work front desk in a hotel and Priceline, Expedia and Hotwire... basically all 3rd party booking companies [oversell our rooms]. They are the number one reason we get oversold. Most frustrating experience in the world...

It sounds like Priceline was closed out to booking rooms by the hotel, but still continued to sell rooms on their website after the cutoff period. I have been oversold numerous times by these companies and we will actually have to call them (more than once usually) and tell them to stop selling rooms because we have no more. And sure enough, an hour later I will still have people come into the hotel and say that they just bought a room through expedia when they landed at the airport. In this case, there is nothing I can do for this person because their money is with expedia and not the hotel.

My best advice: next time you see a great deal on expedia/priceline/etc. call the hotel up directly and ask them if they can match or do better. Hotels have to keep their promises with guests and if it is our fault we overbooked we have to walk you to another hotel and pay for it out of our pocket. Expedia/Priceline don't have to do that at all because they simply don't care.
Chrome actually reopens all tabs for you if you use the command after restarting chrome. I don't like the author's solution because I use cmd 1-9 for navigating between tabs.
"Dorsal" means "top", like where the dorsal fin on a fish is. It doesn't even remotely mean "everything except the front". (The belly of a fish is "ventral".)
If they weren't paying 2-10x for their power (the cloud tax), it wouldn't be so bad.
Perhaps Haskell can be an inspiration?
I've downloaded the crack screen app and he's using adMob on that one.
Stop using qwerty.
How Cookies Can Measure a Child's Intelligence
Ask HN: What's the word on November launches?
I thought it was a good idea when it was posted. How's everybody doing?
And I'm sometimes a little annoyed at all the things to which I've been saying for the last week "I'll get back to that" suddenly showing up in my company's proxy logs all at once.
Rackspace Cloud used to have the upper hand on smaller sized instances. This is no longer the case with EC2's new 640mb micro instance at about $8/mo reserve. Not top performer, but it gets the job done for lower traffic servers.
Safari didn't prompt for the first major version or two — and didn't have 'reopen all windows from last session', either. Suuuuck.
Can you provide some details on your infrastructure?
It is usually much faster. I think it may have something to do with being on the front page of HN.
This just goes to show how worthless mobile ads are. Eventually advertisers are not going to want to pay for the presumably pitiful conversion rate.
But then C-q C-j is too close to C-q C-x.
C-x anything is too close to C-z, though that is more of an annoyance than harm.
Another distinguishing factor between Rackspace Cloud and EC2 or Linode are bandwidth caps. Rackspace limits outbound public network throughput to 10mbps for 256mb instances to 70mbps for 16gb instances. EC2 and Linode both provide an uncapped GigE Internet uplink for instances of any size.
http://cloudservers.rackspacecloud.com/index.php/Frequently_...
Huh, that's good to know, thanks. That makes my moving choice easier :)
I don't like the author's solution either. Cmd+Option Q seems like an unused alternative that wouldn't require a major re-wire of habits to change to, just a slight mash of the keys to the left.

I initially thought Cmd+Shift Q would be better, but that is tied to System Logout.
You don't have to pay to use Rails, BDD, Agile, or other tools and approaches. Certainly there are books and courses for sale, but also quite a lot of material for free. Saying "Here's a 'medicine,' it might work for you in some circumstances, but it's certainly not always appropriate, and by the way it's free, have as much as you like," is not the promotional pitch of a quack.
WSJ's Guide on How to Pick Your Next Computer
How to store solar energy indefinitely: potential energy of an elevated mass. Done. Is it really that hard? Just use the solar energy to lift something really heavy, and then prop that thing up. It won't leak or discharge for a really long time, depending on what's holding it up.
I have a hard time that a person living in the same world as me can reach such wrong conclusions.

> If a piece of code is buggy, how do you fix it? You add debug statements and observe the output, not construct a formal semantics and then prove the relevant properties.

Where does the author see the methodology of writing formal proofs used to solve problems in the real world, exactly?
What I see is the first methodology ("debug statements") applied in every field of human practice with the sole exception of mathematics: you make some observations, you create an informal explanation for the observations that's the most likely (based on previous experience and knowledge of the failing system) and you either do more observations to verify your explanation of just try to fix it. If it doesn't work you try something else.

That's what medical doctors, mechanics, plumbers, police investigators, etc.

> Even the academics recognized the importance of “medieval practica; handbooks listing disorders from head to toe with a description of symptoms and treatment.”

And if my friends that study medicine and veterinary are to be believed those things are still alive and kicking.

Now, I'm not saying that medicine is still the same as it was in the middle ages (BTW 1500s is not the middle ages, the author gets that wrong too) or that computer science will never make any progress and there is no space at all for formal methods, however formal proofs is not the way most science and technology progresses, stating that is simply historical falsification.

There is an old school of thought in computer science academia that worships mathematics or actually, an idealized version of how mathematics works. It is not realistic nor applicable to the reality of computer science.
you just changed one of the consistent features of all os x applications, how to close applications and close windows/tabs of applications.

for some reason i always use the finger motion/press of thumb on left ⌘-key + index finger on q key to quit things and i've never experienced the ⌘q ⌘w issue.
I wonder what happens when a normal person refuses to be scanned by these newfangled scanners?

I'm going to the US soon and I don't like the body scanners.
Yea, I did VB in high school, but it didn't take...

As I was Exceling it up tonight, and I thought to myself if I used Python as the spreadsheet language I'd be quite good by now. Excel feels like an extension of my body - I want Python to feel that way.

To be honest, my first thought was having a Scheme-based spreadsheet. I'm already used to lots of parenthesis and Excel script is sort of functional already. Not sure it'd work though.

I keep thinking that Python(Scheme?) + Spreadsheets = what Yahoo Pipes wishes it was. gDoc's ability to pull from APIs and data functions was a good step as well in this regard.

At least making programming a step closer for noobs like myself.
Chrome for Linux addresses this by using Ctrl+Shift+Q.
I second. Moved from Rackspace to Linode.

The bandwidth overage charges are much more reasonable, too.
Segway pizza bot would get mugged. They also have to go the long way around, avoid cars pedestrians, dogs, obey some rules. A flying pizza delivery bot could pretty much keep 10 ft away from anything.
A Pivotal Pivot
I've refused (and I'm flying again tomorrow and plan to refuse again if asked).

You get a, rather invasive, pat down. But, if everyone refuses, it will cost them enough time that they should have to stop.
It looks like the startup climate in Midwest is starting to get focused. With the state of the economy right now that is a great thing for everyone.

One thing that swayed us as a company to move to Austin was the great business climate offered by Texas. One of the stated purposes of the Texas government is to "get out of the way" so a company can focus on the competition, and they seem to do that very well. That along with the favorable tax climate (no personal income tax, and a relatively high threshold before any corporate/franchise tax kicks in) made Austin seem very attractive to us. You don't even need a business license in Austin. Basically, you can keep and reinvest a lot more of what you earn.

Maybe Kansas City can take a look at what Austin has to offer and use some of the positives to build an even "greater" startup atmosphere than you guys have now.

Here is a YouTube speech by the governor of Texas outlining the Texas philosophy about startups. He pretty much hits on all of the points that we found attractive when locating here. Maybe you guys could use some of these ideas too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbOtHDshfj4
This argument/response comes up every time....

Argument: "Lisp has too many parentheses. It's unreadable."

Response: "It's conceptually elegant that everything is parentheses."

This doesn't address the real point -- you can't read it well. You do get advantages for macros and symbolic processing. But the cost in readability is still there.
We also use colocation. I'm not a developer on the team that uses the infrastructure but we use OnRamp in Austin, TX (http://www.onr.com/) and I have rarely heard of any issues. Most delays are from international CDN requests which I believe we have also outsourced to speed it up.
I like this and can see it being useful. Kind of an interesting twist on traditional map search.

My one complaint is that the icons representing the hotels/food/bars are way too small and non characteristic.

You need to give your map some more personality and try to differentiate yourself from the same exact look as Google maps. I believe Google made some cool changes to the API recently that allow you to really customize the look and feel..
The class I'd like to teach
I think I found the actual paper: http://zeppola.mit.edu/pubs/FvRu_Thermal_Reversal_AngewChem.... [ http://zeppola.mit.edu/index.php?option=com_joodb&view=a... ].

* It stores energy from light, at 350nm (near UV)
* It releases energy when catalyzed or heated (barrier is 30 kcal/mol)
* It stores 0.2 MJ/Kg (vs. 0.5 MJ/Kg for lithium ion batteries)
* Using iron instead of ruthenium lowers the energy barrier for returning to the ground state, enough that it's useless at normal temperatures
I don't use Excel though - Mac Numbers, OO:Spreadsheets, or gDocs. Sounds sweet though.

I think a "slick web app through a spreadsheet" is a beautiful thing for noobs like me. If "business guys" were able to mock up sites like they make Excel sheets, I think the world of programming would be better off. This is the modern version of full literacy!

Haha - why is Mac Numbers so buggy and lame?!? KeyNote is awesome, but I guess none of the UXers at Apple use spreadsheets... They don't even have freaking trendlines on the charts - for shame.
A plea to my fellow developers
I suspect that you have it backwards. Making great products comes first. Profitability validates that, and makes it possible to keep making great products.
Hi, we are also working on a "real-time social shopping tool" that we hope to pitch to online retailers. I'd like to talk to your further about your experiences. Is there any way that I can contact you?
How do they bypass the account lookup page they mention? (Screenshot from the article: http://vinhboy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/account-l...)

Presumably, there's some sort of verification that the account's valid and has paid for Internet there.
How about for a fixed time period, like 6 months, I remember something being posted talking about long term longer hours but I think there is more to look at here.

For instance what if I work 8 hours a day usually but a couple of times a week when I am in the zone put in 12 hours? What if I make up an extra 4 hours casually on the weekends? It'd be hard to say that there is no way to include more than 40 productive hours into a week, using any scheme.
Ask HN: What's the best method/tool for cracking a SHA384 hash? (educational)
Hello everyone.
I'm currently on a security challenge and I stumbled on a 48 byte alphanum string which I assume to be a SHA384 hash. Can anyone help me out on what to do with it?
I'm willing to bet the author is either A) not a touch typist or B) Comes from Windows/Linux. It's not the author's fault, of course, but it has been around since 1984 and it's unlikely to change. The 'native' way to type commands on a Mac is using your thumb to press Command and your pinky to press Q, or your ring finger to press W.

It feels awfully weird pressing Q with your ring finger.

Window/Linux users use the pinky to press ctrl, taking your hand out of the usual touch typing position, and thus making it more prone to mistakes.
I refused last week. I got pat down pretty invasively. The TSA agent seemed rather embarrassed about it. The protocol says that when they touch private areas, they must point out that they're using the back of the hand, but being groped is being groped.

If everyone refuses, I hope, it will be simply too costly to continue ... but I'm still not sure if allowing myself to be literally manhandled is any less an invasion of my privacy except insofar as there's no photographic evidence that can be stored indefinitely.
Ah, that must be why there's the inconsistency between Mac and other platforms here. On Windows and Linux, Ctrl-Q does nothing; Ctrl-Shift-Q exits Chrome.
How does it show that?
If that's a serious concern you might want to rethink your company ;)
I wanna develop a iphone/ipod touch app
Where do I start?
One of the huge reasons for manual door control in fires is that the IR sensor to detect if something is blocking the door can't tell the difference between a person and smoke. Door opens up on a burning floor, smoke pours in, door refuses to shut, everyone gets stuck and dies.

To the non-firefighters, this is why there are so many signs telling you do take the stairs. Power failures too.
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This is pretty sweet. I see it has CSV and Excel export... I'll definitely have to check this out. Thanks for posting / building this!
With a bit of practice, you can train your hand to do ⌘-W as a 3-finger "chord" by touching your middle finger to the 'Q' key before allowing your index finger to depress the 'W'.
Hacking Registers onto the Stack w/ Piet
Your comment is from a developer perspective, while zoiker was talking as a user. I agree with both of you, but there is a difference.
Did you know that they had full dose radiation-driven "shoe fitting" devices in over 10,000 shoe stores up until 1970?

They were eventually pulled when reports of burns and stunting of bone and cartilage began to emerge.

It's the little vignettes of history like this that remind me how many grand-experiments there are out there using us all as the unwitting test subjects.

Is the Pilot Union’s boycott a kneejerk reaction to the measured warning about potential radiation damage?

Maybe.

But never underestimate how quickly politicos helping to equip our airports with $100 - 200k a pop units will happily ask for forgiveness, not permission.

Citation for shoe stores - http://www.hemonctoday.com/article.aspx?rid=28218
In theory maybe but in practice I've never typed cmd+q instead of cmd+w. (A little bit like I've never typed ctrl+a (which select all) instead of ctrl+s (which save)).

However, I've pressed f1 instead of escape a couple of time so I make sure to bind f1 to escape in vim
It looked to me like he just misunderstood the question. He shouldn't be answering "Yes" when he doesn't understand, of course, but I don't think he was admitting to fraud or dishonesty.
I agree -- but fraudulently violating HIPAA (e.g., if you advertised "this is a safe place to put your HIPAA data" while knowing that it wasn't safe) is probably a rather different matter.
What Travels Faster Than the Speed of Light?
Spreadsheets with python . . cackles evilly . can you feel the POWER!

In all serious I play with data in CSV format with python all the time so this could be extremely useful especially when I want to automate something spreadsheet related for a client/friend/coworker.
"Dorsal" means "top", like where the dorsal fin on a fish is.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

e.g. "of, pertaining to, or situated at the back, or dorsum."

Seems fish are the oddball, in a way. Their top is basically their back.
This seems to me a simple instance of the general fact that, for telling things apart, you only observe as deeply as you need to, and it takes a while to get used to observing deeper.

For example, suppose I learn the phone numbers of my neighbors. Then I meet a friend who lives across town, and his phone number starts with 322-, while all my neighbors' numbers start with 494-, so when I see a caller ID beginning with 322-, then I immediately know it's him. But then I make several more across-town friends, and holy crap now there are four numbers beginning with 322-, so now I learn to pay attention to all seven digits.

Then I meet someone at a summer camp, and his phone number is in a whole freakin' new area code, so if I see "(408)" then I know it's him. But then if I meet more people in 408, I'll have to learn to look at the rest of the number when it begins with 408.

Or, think of backpacks. I have the only black backpack in my class; that makes it easy for me to tell mine apart. But now someone else gets a black backpack, and I say to myself, hmm, well, mine's got thick straps. Then maybe someone gets the exact same model of backpack, and I'm like, dammit, fine, I'll write my name on mine.

Cars. Mine is a big white car. That worked fine for a few years. Then I saw other big white cars. Mine is a Toyota minivan. Worked fine for some more years. Then I saw another white Toyota minivan, but it had different hubcaps. Fine. Now I've seen a few that are the same model and color of car with same hubcaps; gotta look at the license plate to be sure.

With people, there are many ways to distinguish people. Male/female. Long hair, frizzy hair, buzzcut. Really tall, really short. Color of skin. Color of hair. Facial features common to certain races. Fat. Always wears a particular hat or jacket.

At any time, people's methods of telling people apart are likely not much more sophisticated than they need to be, and if they're thrust into a situation in which those methods don't work well, then obviously they'll have trouble telling people apart. And, given time, they will learn and use new methods and get better at it.

So: There's nothing special about race, there's nothing special about faces, and there's nothing special about finding it hard to distinguish things in ways that you're not used to.
And machine code printed in binary is all 1's & 0's. What could be more elegant than that?
Is Hot Frog Business Directory Network THE Place to Submit Your Business Site?
Hopefully. I suspect instead, they'll just make the body scanners mandatory.
I will give plenty of karma to anyone who can tell me an easy way of doing something even remotely similar in Linux. I'd love it.
In Hong Kong the 'close' buttons really do work in the majority of elevators and they show at least 50 times more wear and tear than any other button.

It shows how damn impatient we are in HK.
> To be honest, my first thought was having a Scheme-based spreadsheet. I'm already used to lots of parenthesis and Excel script is sort of functional already. Not sure it'd work though.

You may be interested in the "Siag" spreadsheet tool, which stands for "Scheme In A Grid": http://siag.nu/siag/
There's a big difference between the cost to install and operate and the cost to scale. If your hardware utilization characteristics are easy to calibrate for and capacity requirements are predictably steady, you can certainly optimize your own racks at a colo. However, hardware changes quickly, businesses typically change even quicker and capacity requirements are often highly variable. Unless the above conditions are met, it's insanely risky to go into a contract for a colo. Let us know how that one year investment recovery works out for you.
This doesn't address the real point -- you can't read it well.

By "you", don't you mean you?
Many sites use session cookies, which expire on exit.
I just realized that someone may be upset that I didn't give any motivation for the last statement. There are four reasons why formal proofs do not really work for computer programming:

1) the fact that you wrote a formal proof doesn't mean that you proved something, proofs are as easy to get wrong as writing the program itself

2) the reason why proofs work form mathematics is that there's other people interested in reading through your proof. No one is interested in reading my proof that my code builds a valid SQL query string to retrieve some data from my own database. Even assuming that I can publish it without revealing too much about my proprietary system.

3) to prove a system correct you first need a formal specification for the system. Even assuming that you know exactly what you want the system to do, you have to get the formal specification correct, and that's as easy to get wrong as the code is. Then you go on to prove that the system is correct and it isn't. Did you get the specification wrong, the proof wrong or the code wrong?
``I have a problem, you decide to use a formal system. Now you have three problems.''

4) At this point people propose we just write the formal specification and let a magic system write the code. This system doesn't exist and we have 60 years of experience writing code that works, 0 years of experience writing formal specifications that work.
I'm a little surprised that this is news. The profit margins in hotels appear to be much bigger than in flight.
Or they'll just stop letting those who decline fly at all.
Why? If it is truly "in HTML5"... that implies there is not a server side component. If it is just grabbing the drawing from canvas and submitting it to the server, I'm not really impressed.

And considering how slow it is now, I'm not sure what exactly to think. :/

edit: Yup, a quick run with Chrome shows that it is just sending a list of the strokes to the server. It explains the speed. I'm more interested in the algorithm (and why it wasn't ported to client side JS. That would made for a much more impressive showing and a lower hosting bill).
> there's no photographic evidence that can be stored indefinitely.

The machines are capable of storing the pictures, and all we have is the promise of a long abusive government agency that they are not.
In Soviet Russia, off-topic jokes add nothing productive to YOU.

Sorry, I couldn't resist.
dictionary.com seems to think you're kind of both right[1].

[1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/dorsal
Why do you keep showing their numbers? Why not some of your own?
Units of measure has always struck me as a pet feature of F# that's only there because it happened to be what somebody's PhD dissertation was written on. Whether it is useful in practice is unclear.

I saw Don Syme give a presentation where he tried to add twice the variance to the mean of a variable. This is actually perfectly sensible to do -- it's some quantile point. But it gives a type error since variance has units squared in it. So he took the square root to solve the "problem." Obviously it was just a demo, but he claimed the the Microsoft Ad team had similar bugs confusing the variance and standard deviation. I can almost imagine some code maintenance guy adding units of measure and thinking there's a bug in some carefully constructed algorithm when in fact there is not.

All sorts of statistics have this issue.
Clever way to get free Internet service from Comcast