skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No. There's still a human pilot flying the plane. Even an arc welder (probably) won't magically make it go in to a nosedive.

What could happen however is that certain navigation systems become unreliable during landing. Add that to bad weather, bad information, human error, and bad luck and you have a potential disaster.

But it doesn't seem likely that a terrorist would find such a plan worthwhile to pursue. After all, they want to be the star of the show right? Would they martyr themselves so some pilot gets the blame for landing on the wrong runway during a thunderstorm?
It's arguably unethical to mention solidcoin and link to their PR material without at least a little word of warning:

Solidcoin is not a decentralized system like bitcoin. Every other block must be mined by one of several trusted parties. This has advantages and disadvantages.

(Because there are only a few bitcoin clients and only one popular one bitcoin has some centralization problems too, but it's not really comparable)

The solidcoin trusted parties have used this ability to change the rules of the system substantially on the users. E.g. the payout per block was recently reduced from 32 SC to 5 SC. Users could not disagree by simply refusing to "upgrade" because the trusted parties stopped issuing blocks on the old network.

There is a bunch of other funny business as well. Do your research.
The idea is that you coordinate concurrent read/write to the same structures, yielding a shared data view without formal coordination. Also, the structures may be large enough that you don't want them all in-memory for each client.
I have used this sort of reasoning when arguing against low speed limits implemented in the name of safety. Surely, for each 10 MPH decrease in highway speed limits, we will observe a decrease in the number of deaths per year? Presuming both this fact and the presumed political validity of speed limit reduction to decrease death rates, shouldn't our vehicles be limited to walking speeds? The reality is that most people implicitly choose an overall level of risk in their lives and optimize the apportionment of that risk among activities in a way which maximizes their happiness. If it took me four hours to commute to work because I drove 10 MPH to be "safe", I could either spend less time with my family or move my family closer to the office. Would my children end up successful in life if they rarely saw me? The end game of everyone moving closer to the office might be little specs on the globe of uber density -- an unhappy way of life for most. How about subsisting on ration kits (like those currently sold to doomsayers) as a way of minimizing the horrific risks associated with un-necessary trips to the grocery store? Obviously, people have some threshold of risk at which they choose expected quality of life over expected quantity. Airplane travel, either with or without restrictions on "portable electronic devices" can be evaluated similarly. And, given Americans' propensity to drive places at high speeds, shouldn't they be equally willing to incur what seems to be a trivial risk in order to have more productive time?
Thanks for the feedback guys :) I really appreciate it

I'll be doing more abstract algebra stuff, so, followers would be great :)
There are a bunch of subreddits on this topic:

http://www.reddit.com/r/nootropics
> The U.S. is one of the few countries where you can not
> give up your citizenship.

It's hard to automatically give up your US citizenship, but you can go through the process of expatriation.
If 1 billion people take a 20 minute nap every day... that's equal to 38,000 years wasted time every day... which is about 20 lifetimes every HOUR! OMFG nobody should nap!
I'll do that for the next one, glad you enjoyed it!
People who hate math aren't going to be inspired by a collection of axioms and equations. Nor are they likely to be wowed by the examples of matrices and vectors. Some examples from geometry, or permutations, might be more likely to teach the concepts.

People who know something about math are going to spot several errors in the presentation. For example, the reals with multiplication don't form a group, since 0 has no multiplicative inverse.

Not an error, but a subtlety: the collection of axioms here says that the group has a right identity and right inverses. It's later assumed that the identity is also a left identity (in the proof of uniqueness). This is true, as it happens, but it's not entirely obvious. The usual presentation of groups has two-sided identities and inverses up-front.

Actually, the alternative axiom set of a right identity, but left inverses, has models that are not groups. An example is a left zero semigroup, where ab = a for all a and b. We have right identity (ae = a; no problem) and left inverses (for all a, there exists b such that ba = e; yes, just take b = e). This isn't a group! (OK, unless it has only one element.)

Maybe this illustrates an interesting point for developers: the axiomatic approach is like having a common interface for some class of objects, and it's helpful to be able to reason about them without knowing the details of how they're implemented. But reasoning about the expressive power of different interfaces or specifications can be horribly difficult. The Robbins conjecture (about the equivalence of two axiom sets for Boolean algebra) was open from 1933 to 1996 - and proved in an automated theorem prover, no less.
Show HN: Feedback on this subscription commerce + charity project (eat05.com)
So I've been working away at Cilantro in my free time (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2927607) ... and in working with local restaurants, I've learned a lot about the coupon and daily deal space.

I wanted to experiment with a subscription commerce model for restaurants. I just launched it today for my local area (San Luis Obispo):

http://www.eat05.com

Think of it as "Birchbox for Restaurants"

- Consumers pay $9 per month

- They get six to eight 2-for-1 restaurant vouchers

- $4 of the purchase goes to a local food charity (SLO Food Bank so far)

- It's free for restaurants to participate

Surprisingly, it's been easy to get restaurants on board. They're used to paying to run coupons, plus they lose less money than with daily deals. Now, I just need to see if consumers will pay for it. Eventually, I'd like to match restaurant vouchers/coupons with users' tastes (vegan, coffee drinker, night life, children, etc.).

Ideas, feedback and criticism welcome.

Would you pay for something like this in your town?
Talk to your doctor. They can take a blood test and send it off to analysis. It can be somewhat expensive. When I said "all at once" I didn't mean that a simple biochemical test can reveal all deficiencies, obviously, but that a single blood test can be sent off to have many different tests done. I'm not yet sure exactly how it works in the US, sorry.

The kind of deficiencies I had in mind would be vitamin (e.g. D, K), mineral (e.g. iron, calcium) and electolytic (e.g. magnesium, potassium).
Great article, although it doesn't seem to suggest any strategies for countering memory loss.

I may have to purchase the authors book to find out ;)
I intended the second paragraph as my though on why telecommunications related organizations don't exactly discuss whether cellphones works on board of a plane and this intention was then probably lost by inserting that paragraph break :)

FAA's and related regulations are probably motivated by fact that it's essentially impossible to test that aircraft's systems work as intended even in presence of random consumer devices on board. EMC issues can be caused by almost any electronic device not only devices containing radio transmitters (eg. EU regulations require EMC certification for anything that, possibly internally, produces or uses signals >=1kHz).
"Where could I theoretically move to if I want to stop living in the US" is something I sometimes think about. New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Brazil seem like interesting possibilities. Brazil doesn't really meet the criteria you mentioned; NL is part of the EU which I suspect means you would not be interested. NZ might fit though, and my understanding is that it is not hard to immigrate there.
"Rivaling the iPad ecosystem" doesn't necessarily mean "replicating" it. And I'd point out that I believe that's concept is something overexcited journalists decided, not something Amazon promoted.

Amazon seems to have mostly promoted the Kindle Fire as a Kindle with video and games, for less than you used to pay for a black and white Kindle. For $199, that seems like a good deal and I haven't seen many reviews done on that basis. Doing a review that compares the Fire to an iPad or another $500 tablet is like reviewing a Kia and complaining it doesn't accelerate as fast as a BMW.
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Upvoted. Very true, and thanks for the mistakes and stuff. I'll fix the ones I can, and I'm adding some more stuff that actually relates to CS.
You can feel the story is a myth, but it remains hard to argue that it'd "seriously endanger the aircraft" by doing what was described in the story.
If the elimination of risk were really the objective, they'd require passengers to travel in paper gowns with no carry-ons or luggage. But the fact of the matter is that they make the rules they think they can get away with, not the rules that will increase safety. And one way or another, I think it's vanishingly unlikely that anyone's life is going to be in danger from ten people playing game boys immediately prior to an air emergency.
I discovered this website 4 years ago, a lot of the animations at that time served as my inspiration for learning more advanced javascript - great to be reminded of this collection, and to see the new demos that he's been producing - love the blend of technology / artistic creation.
Sorry, but this is bullshit. What makes electronic distractions worse than non-electronic ones? Why does the medium of a dead tree versus an e-reader when the activity is the same: reading a book.

If people think the plane's going to crash you will have their undivided attention
Plan B section 2, whining about how exploitable deficiencies opens up people to being defrauded by vendors, consultants and recruiters who can talk the talk but not walk the walk, is still legitimate (though not constructive). There's getting social proof, and then there's not being a douche. Sometimes the line isn't clear either.
LINK: http://www.eat05.com

If you're curious about any tech, I used Unbounce for the home page. The signup area is a Rails 3.1 app on Heroku Cedar stack with SSL. Payment processing by Stripe. Oh, and Twitter Bootstrap natch.
> his also gives me ability to enter the mild mental conditions corresponding to the use of said substances, but without side-effects, at will.

I'm really intrigued: How does your not using drugs give you the ability to enter a state similar to using drugs? How are they two related?

Could you not use drugs, and also retain the ability to enter this state?
Another similar project: http://octophile.com

It is for followers only, but clicking the button will follow the user like Twitter's follow button does
> why you would use Redis instead of just using in-memory datastructures in your app servers?

If you mean actually storing the data (scores on a leaderboard) on the app servers, the problem is it can only scale so far. If data/state is stored on app servers you can't load balance across multiple servers. HN runs on one server, and it has been hitting scalability issues lately. It's also harder to do high-availability, if everything runs on one server there's nothing to fail-over to.
The Kindle Fire lowered the definition of a "REAL" $199 tablet.
Hmmm.....could the terrorists cryptographically encode their flight schedules along with techniques, drop the encoded versions on public repositories, and distribute the keys to the media upon successfully killing people? This way, they could prove their involvement.

Your point about the compound nature of risk is valid, but doesn't it also suggest that the actual risk of allowing electronics during takeoff/landing is quite low as well?
I'm curious why you would use Redis instead of just using in-memory datastructures in your app servers?

I make fairly pedestrian use of Redis, generally as either a persistent cache, shared memory, or schemaless DB shared by multiple Rails processes. In-memory structures have a lot to anti-recommend them in the Rails world: at any given time I have 4 server processes and 2 worker processes running, and each of them would need a separate copy of everything. There would be consistency problems. Those processes have a lifetime measured in days in the best of cases to minutes in the worst of cases: following a restart, any in-memory structures have to be rebuilt from the underlying data source. Hypothetically assuming demand for my products explodes and I can no longer deal with only a single physical server, Redis plays very well with being accessed from multiple servers, whereas I'd have to write some sort of REST API to reimplement Redis (poorly) on top of my actual people-pay-money-for-this application code to share that state among multiple physical servers, if I were to go down that route.

Redis has been an absolute dream to administrate: the total overhead for me was "apt-get install redis-server", adding three lines of configuration to Rails and tweaking two in Redis, and doing one SCP command when I migrated servers. The RPC/command parsing overhead is, empirically, negligible in my use cases. Don't take this advice if you're Google (I know you're Google, but for the general "you" here), but many people are not Google.
If headphones are the problem, ban wearing headphones during takeoff and landing. Why the slippery slope towards all electronic devices?
http://instacss.com is a nice quick-search interface for it.
This would be a great advertisement if it were marked "special advertising section".

I've always wondered what it would take, money-wise, to get Businessweek to write a non-researched fluff piece like this. Palantir has a hell of a sales/marketing department.

There's not any mention at all of any of the recent, and quite public, controversies surrounding this firm, HBGary, Industrial espionage against a competitor, Glenn Greenwald and others.

I'd almost flag this if it were just a blog, but this is really pathetic reporting and worth seeing for the crap article it is.
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That's why it's mandatory that Americans vote for someone that is strong on upholding the Constitution above anything else, in the next elections. The country is going downhill regarding stepping all over people's rights, and it's only going to get worse if we keep electing the same people, or the same type of people who could care less about people's rights - all in the name of "security" and against terrorism, which isn't even a specific enemy, but a tactic, which means it can be whatever they want it to be, indefinitely.
I added some CSy stuff.
Freelance like a King or Queen
Peggy Noonan on Steve Jobs and Why Big Companies Die
As far as I can tell that was never in style.

Historically man and he have been used a universal gender neutral pronouns. In most latin languages this is spelled out clearly as proper grammar (e.g., French). In English it has been left ambiguous. That said, one clearly is making the conscious choice to swim against the tide when specifically using 'she' for this purpose, so it's going to distract some people. Though I agree far less than he/she and (s)he.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_English
The Five Big Surprises of Radical Managment
Open Source Projects - Less is More
Oddly enough, there are no major parties in the US that are built on a platform of strong constitutional protection.
There's probably only 80 different commercial airplane models. This testing probably costs around $1000/hr - figure 5 days testing @ 8 hours a day = 3200 hours = 3.2 million dollars. Seems to be a reasonable price to pay.
They also love the free market, respect their natural resources, and have great sea food.
They do if the power button malfunctions. Are you aware of any devices that cannot be turned off because of a software error?
On the hunter gatherer theme I practice alternate day fasting. This is where you eat normally every alternate day and limit your food intake to 600-700 calories on your 'off' days.
The theory being that hunter gatherers when going to hunt wouldn't eat every day, but might be out for a couple of days subsisting on berries and fruit. I aim to try and do a off,off,on pattern when I get used to this.

Lost 5kg in a month.
All you do your entire life is what you're confined to doing on an iPad in an airplane? It's not that huge of a loss. You're not dead for half an hour on each flight.
OK, I suggest that you stop looking at this situation from some sort of idealistic perspective. The thing is that American President and Congress are serving interests of Americans, not foreigners (H1b, green card holders, etc). They have to find a delicate balance between what to give foreigners to please their constituents (not just people but also companies who have powerful lobbies).

American universities are interested in foreign students because they can pay a lot of money for the opportunity to study and then have some time (a year or more) to get a job in states. Most Americans fret at the idea to let foreign graduates (even from US universities) to compete for the same jobs with American-born graduates (I already hear: "our own children cannot get jobs after college, why let foreigners to compete!"), however this is part of the deal: allowing them some time to get employed here makes this student visa more attractive. Read: they will be willing to pay more to study. Good for American universities.

However, giving them 5 years of time to get employed or start a business? In the eyes of most Americans this is beyond reasonable. It's going to create a major outcry and will not be voted by Congress. The only situation it's going to work is if America had a population shortage and needed more people (like Canada, Australia), but this is not currently the case in America.

Now let's look at American businesses. They are interested in skilled but cheap labor. And H1B gives them exactly this. You call this slavery? I agree, up to some extent. But these people are foreigners and until they become citizens, they have no voice and are effectively nobody. So, it's their price if they want to be in America and eventually become 'somebody'. Sounds harsh? Correct. We live in the world of conflicting interests of different people, not in a paradise. Don't forget about this.
So, when you fly private what do they ask of you?
I've visited point reyes but I didn't think so check for vacation rentals. Those are the right price and range so thanks a lot.
Borders did not merge with B&N.
I have to admit, this article is really awful. I initially upvoted this too quickly, after only reading the first page and seeing that there were five more to go. After reading most of the article, you're right-- it's pure fluff.

I suppose it's tough to actually discuss how this technology works since there are so many security issues involved, but I feel like I learned almost nothing about Palantir's system. All I learned was that they have a bunch of fun anecdotes about their founders and CEO, and that it apparently has been used to somehow solve cases.

Pretty weak. I wish I could take back my upvote.
For me it's great. The last thing I want is to hear someone's boisterous 4 hour conversation with an excited family member while I'm sandwiched between said conversationalist and some 300-pound whale who keeps leaning on me as (s)he repeatedly drifts in and out of consciousness.

Everyone's phone plays movies now anyway. Isn't that good enough? Do we really have to be plugged in every second of the day? Americans are too spoiled. OMG I can't jabber on my phone while flying? waa waaa ='[
A Million Gardens (for the 99% of the 99%)
How could you even tell if you had one?
I've been taking mine as a dry pill. In lay terms, can someone explain why this is worse than gelcaps?
From a supremely cynical view point this is a good thing. It is yet another step towards making living in the west impossible for the middle class.

Of such things are revolutions born.

It is terrible that we still need war/strife/etc to push ourselves out of complacency.
I hope there is more discussion of this interesting article this time than there was the last time the article was submitted here on HN.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2911331
Palantir: One Step Closer to 1984

Those Who Sacrifice Liberty For Security Deserve Neither.

- Benjamin Franklin
You might try checking out the Dragon Go Server: http://www.dragongoserver.net/

As opposed to the live-play servers, Dragon Go is intended for a much more measured pace of play (the FAQ claims the average player makes 4 moves per game per week). As an added bonus, there's also an iPhone app. It's definitely not the same as playing in person, but it's currently how I get my fix.
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Show HN: tWeekPic, a Twitter avatar every day of the week
So how are your competitors, who you claim are breaking the law, able to raise money?
Good practice. If you don't word-wrap plain-text emails, each paragraph will show up as one long line; the program reading your mail on the other end can't wrap it automatically, because it might represent code, ASCII art, terminal transcripts, or something else that shouldn't get wrapped.

So, wrap your paragraphs in plain-text email at some sensible column. Common convention suggests 72, because that allows for a few rounds of quoting before it passes 80.
looc s'taht llew
Tests are performed when inflight connectivity is added to a plane -- and it has resulted in finding interference issues, such as WiFi blanking avionics screens (http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/wi-fi-interference...).

The degree of engineering incompetence that would be required to make that happen is nothing short of jaw-dropping.
Not actually necessary these days. vim knows to match the names used for mutt temporary files, and automatically puts uses mail mode and a sensible text width.
Tips and Tricks for editing Text Directly in PDF File on Mac OS X
"The reality is that most people implicitly choose an overall level of risk in their lives and optimize the apportionment of that risk among activities in a way which maximizes their happiness."

Do you have anything to support this? Most economic theories say that people make tradeoffs of time and money, but not risk. Risk is generally too nebulous a concept for an individual to make any kind of rational decisions about its allocation - we have no real concept of the risk we're incurring when driving a car or stepping on a plane (and generally, our gut feeling is wrong.)