skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Remember, you have no right to drive a car. So you're not losing any rights when the government says you can't talk on the phone and drive at the same time.

If you build your own road network, you don't have to follow any traffic laws. But most people are too cheap to do that, so they deal with a little regulation.

In this case, people aren't capable of making the right decision about cell phone use. They know there is a tiny risk of killing someone while distracted by their phone, but they feel that driving is so safe that it won't happen to them. Unfortunately, "it happens to them" rather frequently now, and a lot of people are being killed or injured unnecessarily. So it's clear that people aren't handling the freedom very well, and it's time to adjust it down to see what happens.

Take the train if you want to txt during your commute.
There is an organization called bluehackers, that tries the help the hacker-minded (aka hn-style) crowd with, to deal with those days: http://bluehackers.org/ If it saves one life, it's worth it.
Chrome Stable Bumped to 16.0
The obligatory xkcd reference: https://www.xkcd.com/320/
I'm a little fuzzy, but wasn't he painting his kids' rooms in that house at the end of that episode?
You wouldn't be the "driver" then, would you?
I saw him on the most recent tour and he mentioned something about flying first class, and then apologized but assured the audience that he probably won't be doing that long, he'll mess it up lol

extreme paraphrasing, but I'm sure you all understand.
At least I do the opposite. The Humble team are clearly making my life better by e.g. motivating Linux ports of these games. Meanwhile there are much better ways to donate to charity (and "better" charities).
Stratolaunch Systems: Paul Allen launches commercial space project
To be somewhat devil's advocate:

There's only so far you can go to try to protect people from being idiots.

There are plenty of data points now that show that texting related accidents and deaths went up when the bans were enacted because instead of doing the sensible thing and NOT texting while driving, these people simply moved the phone into their lap instead of in a place where they could still kind of see the road ahead.

It's an unfortunate fact that people have tendencies to be extremely stupid under the guise of "I can do it, it won't cause me to crash", and no law will fix this.
You are right. What you say is accurate. And it is an objective observation.

Ignore the downvotes.

They might be coming from Facebook employees (it's obvious they read HN and apparently they feel the need to defend FB's choices) and other PHP coders who do not know/like the other faster languages you mentioned.

Quite silly.
I know what you mean, Stripe just seems like the perfect solution. Unfortunately international money transfer law is minefield, which is why they're taking their time to get non-US availability sorted.

They recently tweeted that they haven't even got a timeline for international availability. So I'm not holding my breath...
Programmers for Auction
Node.js modules you should know about: redis
Apps and web apps and the future
Meeteor VS. The Social Giants
Sorry, my brain made the connection from the previous sentence between "before you begin to download" to "telling you the IPs". I should have added that to the sentence that confused you as well, I haven't seen any that tell you the IPs that are currently connected before you begin to download. So you have to initiate the download before you can find out who is connected.
PHP User Survey Part V: Administration Layer
n the last piece on our PHP online user poll, we look at the administrative service and how the site supervisor enters, deletes and manages the poll data.The first poll administrative page checks if the administrator is logged in. You can choose from Session variables or Cookies to check the site administrator login status.Once the application has confirmed the identity of the site administrator, the page lists the available polls.
Very true. I stand corrected.

Only thing left is browser "splash screen"/loading image customization and the experience could be near native.
Obviously, and my question is why? If they (or GitHub) could easily satisfy demand for this, why haven't they?
Le Scienze - Homepage
For software tools along these lines I adore foreui - the skinning feature is great for placating pointy-haired bosses^H^H^H^H^H^H customers
Let's not forget about the civic duty to call 911 if you suspect that your friend or your neighbor is suicidal. Emergency medicine has experts that can help much more than National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
It seems like I get calls from recruiters every other week looking for people with Grails experience.

I used Grails for a project four years ago - I think it made a lot of sense then. We wanted a simple web UI for something that needed to deeply integrate with some java libraries. We had just done a relatively simple UI with Spring and it was pretty amazing how much better it was to work in Groovy.

However, these days I don't see why anyone would pick Grails over Rails. You can deploy rails on the jvm just fine, and it's much more mature. There are tons of tutorials and example code out there.

It's not a performance thing - it's just that ruby/rails is pretty mature now and runs on the JVM very well.
Its Time for QD Tv not 3D
Researchers have developed a new form of light-emitting crystals, known as quantum dots, Which can be used to produce ultra-thin televisions.The tiny crystals, Which are 100 000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, can be printed onto flexible plastic sheets to produce a paper-thin display that can be easily carried around, or even onto wallpaper to create giant room-size screens.
Normal people never cared about web browsers, but that didn't stop web browsers from spreading like a virus. Most of them don't even understand the concept. If you ask them what a browser is, they'll probably answer Google.

As an example, I love my e-Ink Kindle. The one big annoyance I have is that the browser on it is so awful that it is unusable. And it bothers me because book authors are often placing links to external references in the books I read.

And I just want to read those references. Maybe add a comment or two if it's a blog. Since I'm there anyway, maybe I want to recommend the book on Facebook or Twitter with, you guessed it, a link. Maybe I want to search on the web for other discussions on the topic. And so on and so forth.

It's not about love for the web browser per se. The browser is an awful virtual machine. Also the HTTP protocol is one of the featureless protocols in existence. The development model is scary sometimes as you've got to learn dozens of technologies, each specialized for a certain task, each broken in its own special way.

But developers bitching about this are missing the point. It turns out that the openness of the web is disruptive and simple form elements communicating over a simple protocol is all you ever need for 80% of the use-cases.

Quite the contrary, I'm seeing the web stronger than ever before. The one big problem I'm seeing however are walled gardens. Some day from now we'll look back and actually see what a big mistake this was. But the web as we know it will still be there. Because nothing can really replace it.
Thank you so much for making that site. I've never come across such an accurate description of the symptoms of depression. I can relate to a lot of what's written there and it really helps put things into perspective. Meditating, exercising, and spending time with friends has helped me feel a lot better.
Nevada (the first jurisdiction to officially allow self-driving cars) has, in fact, added an exemption to its cell phone ban for that type of vehicle.
In 1990 we used source routing to spoof. :)
It's just another regulation that is impossible to enforce consistently without invasions into one's privacy.

We really don't have many "rights". Most "rights" people talk about are priviledges, like health care, schools, a job, etc.

The real rights we have, such as privacy, free speech, and the permission to own firearms, are being assailed by the government every day.
It wasn’t really right to put this in the post, but:

http://samroweis1972-2010.blogspot.com/

I miss you, Sam.
I think calling it a talent shortage is a mistake. It's not a talent shortage, but it is difficult to hire.

As for difficulty to hire, it seems to be driven by all kinds of things.. lots of potential-employees-turned-founders, a pretty decent splintering of tech-stacks, more companies getting more done with smaller teams (and therefore having more specific desires), and shorter term thinking in terms of velocity and exits.. making investing in longer-term talent/training less likely.. to name a few.
There is no reason to ban talking if you don't also ban handsfree use. Studies show it is no less dangerous to use a handsfree device.

My question is: Will states implement a mapping exception?
> not only do they refuse, they are getting rid of all GPLv2 code in favor of BSD code.

This claim is completely fictitious.

We started an effort a few years ago to migrate MonoDevelop code to LGPL and MIT/X11 (not BSD) from GPL. Our reason for doing so was to make it possible for third parties to write extensions (addins) to MonoDevelop and license it under whatever license they wanted, i.e. we did not want to force them to have to develop their addins and license them under GPL if they didn't want to.

It was not some big conspiracy to prepare for some Microsoft takeover or anything.
It gives me a US toll-free number. They probably only show it to people for whom it probably wouldn't be an international call, so if you're outside the US or using a proxy, that would explain it.
Super-nice. I registered a domain painlessly...on a tablet, at that. Minor quibble - don't use fixed screen ratios for everything. But otherwise, great so far. If it keeps up like this I'll transfer in the 5 or 6 domains I have at other registrars (1&1, godaddy).
It took me several false starts over the course of a few years to finally take the plunge.
This point is also relevant with New Year's Eve coming up.

Invite a couple of extra people to your New Year's Eve party whom you might not have thought of inviting, and you might do more good than you think.

It's also worth mentioning that being alone is perfectly fine, but when people become lonely, it's something that needs to be addressed. It's all a state of mind, after all.
But it is easier to check the the GP's solution:

return definitions.get(candidate) != null;

vs

foreach c in definitions(candidate.charAt(0)) {
if c == candidate.charAt(1)) return true;
}
return val;

That leaves aside the general usefulness of knowing the definitions of words.
Ask HN: Marketing to a Distribute​d (Niche) Market
I've gone through the process of qualifying a need for SAAS product I'm currently building that targets a niche within the (non-technical) "work from home" market. And while I've gotten great feedback/support from 50 or so folks looking to sign up when we launch, its the other thousands/millions that I want to reach, but am struggling to do so.

The "work from home" market is fragmented, with a few forum sites here and there that I've been able to target, but most won't permit you to post sales/marketing info, and I don't want get our product misconstrued as spam.

I just see that with so few places to go to target a larger audience all in one spot, its going to be difficult and resource intensive to go from 50 to 5000.

Any thoughts/advice is greatly appreciated.
How true. In a small organization the distance from the source of discontent to someone with a brain is short. So even if the person who answers the phone is stupid the caller senses that, complains and gets someone higher up who might give them what they want just because otherwise they can't finish lunch.

Additionally the distance from between aggravation to a person who can do something (or it becomes their problem) is also very short. Large organizations can put something in place because the person who has to fend off the anger (front line) is far removed from the person at 50k feet who thought up the policy.

There is also a lack of empathy. In a previous business I owned I did all the jobs (ran equipment, worked sales, counter work the whole thing). So I had empathy for the people doing those jobs. I knew what it was like to stand and deal with an angry customer. But the people that I hired had never done any of those jobs in many cases (they had only managed). As a result they didn't have empathy and made all sorts of jobsian "just do it" policies and rules.

Some things people do though make you laugh and there is no "information ... in some policy book" for every situation. We had a charge policy with a minimum floor charge of $10. One day I found out that someone came in and owed us $.25 on some invoice. So the counter person rang up a $10 charge and gave them $9.75 in change.
I was pretty disappointed to see that, especially at a crucial time for electronic freedom with SOPA and PROTECT-IP looming. I'm sure the boosts from HIB were helpful to EFF, and if anyone needs a boost right now, it's EFF.
Microsoft spins Android malware into Windows Phone giveaway
One thing I think separates the Humble Bundle from the Indie Royal bundle is that Humble Bundle games always work on Windows, Mac, and Linux. I primarily use OS X and Linux these days, so that's a big incentive for me, and helps keep my "fatigue" down.

That said, if this turns into a never ending string, the amount I contribute towards each bundle would likely drop since frequency would be going up.

Probably something for the Humble folks to investigate - which performs better - more frequent small bundles or less frequent larger bundles.
That DropBox example is not typical though. What about the case when investors want to invest a couple of million, and make the valuation 10-20 million. Wouldn't that rule out a potential acquirer who wants to acquire it for $5 million after a couple of years? Because the investors want a bigger return? Investors are looking for home-run. You, as a normal Joe are happy with a base-hit and some fu money.
Your arguments pretty much apply to drunk driving, don't they?
I feel guilty about my parents paying $50k a year to send me to college?
Startup Team
I like hearing the fan kick in on your laptop after you start a couple of parallel reductions :)
It sounds like they looked at the research instead of the not terribly well thought out state laws. E.g.:

This research examined the effects of hands-free cell phone conversations on simulated driving. The authors found that these conversations impaired driver's reactions to vehicles braking in front of them. The authors assessed whether this impairment could be attributed to a withdrawal of attention from the visual scene, yielding a form of inattention blindness.

Cell phone-induced failures of visual attention during simulated driving. Strayer, David L.; Drews, Frank A.; Johnston, William A. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Vol 9(1), Mar 2003, 23-32.

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/xap/9/1/23/

and:

Summary: We used a high-fidelity driving simulator to compare the
performance of cell-phone drivers with drivers who were legally intoxicated
from ethanol. When drivers were conversing on either a hand-held or hands-free
cell-phone, their reactions were sluggish and they attempted to compensate by
driving slower and increasing the following distance from the vehicle
immediately in front of them. By contrast, when drivers were legally intoxicated
they exhibited a more aggressive driving style, following closer to the vehicle
immediately in front of them and applying more force while braking. When
controlling for driving difficulty and time on task, cell-phone drivers exhibited
greater impairment than intoxicated drivers.

Fatal Distraction? A comparison of the cell-phone driver and the drunk driver. David L. Strayer, Frank A. Drews, and Dennis J. Crouch. Proceedings of the Second International Driving Symposium on Human Factors in Driver Assessment, Training and Vehicle Design.

http://cellphonefreedriving.ca/media/fatal_distraction.pdf
I found that Albert Camus' philosophy of Absurdism provided less depressing insights on Man's "existential crisis" that other existential philosophies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism

According to Camus, one's freedom – and the opportunity to give life meaning – lies in the recognition of absurdity. In acknowledging the absurdity of seeking any inherent meaning, but continuing this search regardless, one can be happy, gradually developing his or her own meaning from the search alone.
How about approaching the problem from the suffix point of view?

Instead of having 25 prefix having suffixes, you have 20 suffixes having prefixes.

The prefix technique has an average of 4.96 suffixes per prefix, and the suffix one has 6.2 prefixes on average for each suffix.

Maybe this would be easier to deal with?
The same could be said about native apps. There are more than enough apps in the various app stores to fill numerous 'springboard screens'. On the other side we only use a small set of apps. Why would habits change when switching from native to web-based when the experience is the same?
Sounds like a bad idea. How would you enforce a ban on the use of hands-free devices while driving?
how long did it take to get 10,000 users?
There's only so far you can go to try to protect people from being idiots.

This isn't about protecting people from being idiots; it's about protecting people from idiots.

DUI bans aren't about the drunk drivers, they're about the innocent third parties they kill and maim. Ditto the requirement to hold third-party insurance when driving a vehicle.

I suspect that what's needed is not merely a ban, but a public education campaign to ram this point home. ("Do you want to be maimed by an idiot who can't pull over to answer a text? If not, don't do it to other people!")
Income equality contributes to economic growth
It seems like public shaming is the only way to get auto-reply customer service companies to talk to you. See the Paypal/Regretsy fiasco. I never feel good about them because you just know for every Regretsy/HN vet who can get some swirl going, there are a thousand helpless users who can't, and thus get the full length of shaft.

Yeah, customer service is expensive, but automating it all and essentially saying "fuck 'em" unless the victim can get outrage built is incredibly shitty.
>There's only so far you can go to try to protect people from being idiots.

If the only people impacted were the idiots, I'd agree with you. When some 21 year old valley girl kills a 5 year old kid because she was texting, or some 50 year old investment banker runs down a pregnant woman because he was screaming at someone on his cell phone, then it's not just the idiots who get hurt. Government shouldn't protect you from your own stupidity, but it should protect other people from it.
Is there a successful DRM system for anything? Again, I think the DRM that remains unbroken is unbroken because there's no point in cracking it. MS's PlayReady protects music and movies, so there's no reason to crack it since you can just rip the DVD/CD instead.

I don't think the argument that their DRM is exposed to a lot more risk by presence on desktop Linux is legitimate. Someone can break it on Windows or Mac without much extra effort if they cared to break it.
My weekend project - alternative to Pinboard / Delicious
Hi everyone,

I'd like to share with you my "weekend" project - LStack (http://lstack.com/), simple web application built as a by-product of another project I'm working on (on which I've tried to get HN feedback few weeks ago - see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3194597).

LStack was born of frustration with one specific limitation of other bookmarking apps (like Delicious). I'm doing a lot of research for my projects and I needed to store some attributes about bookmarked articles, companies, webapps, courses and certifications info, etc. My tags, plain text description fields, notes were becoming a mess.

I needed my bookmarks annotated with parameters like "price = 100 USD", "integrated with = facebook", "integrated with = twitter", "filetype = pdf", "filetype = doc", "funding = 1M USD", "prep = gmat", "prep = lstat", "payments = paypal", "payments = credit card", "type = news", "type = company", "type = product", "contact email = support@company.com", "supported language = english", "stage = private beta", etc.

So about month ago I've spent few days to implement LStack which allows me to save not only bookmark but also additional "structured" data connected with it. The webapp is still very raw and not even close to feature-rich predecessors like Pinboard or Delicious, but I've successfully switched to it and extensively use the unique smart tags feature.

What do you think of the application? Do you face similar problem? Do you find the webapp useful? I'm wondering if anybody could be interested in additional, especially "premium" (paid) features. Do you think something like LStack has a chance to become a business, not just hobby side-project?

Best regards,
Seele
ONLINE MOVIES: Hugo (2011)
As described, this has interesting implications for GPS navigation: The NTSB recommendation calls for the ban the nonemergency use of portable electronic devices for all drivers.

When I'm driving in an unfamiliar city, I often keep my phone in a windshield holder, and leave the navigation display on. This allows me to glance down for an instant, and see the big arrow indicating the direction of my next turn.

Done right, this takes about a quarter second, and it gives me a half mile of warning before changing lanes. This seems like a net safety win, especially around cities like Boston, where last-minute lane changes can be dangerous.

Do the Feds have studies showing that dashboard GPS navigation makes us less safe? I'd love to know one way or another.
My first thought was typical Microsoft FUD, but at least they're not alone. Apple has used the virus card often enough. (http://www.apple.com/why-mac/)
How do you enforce a ban on drunk driving?

Police patrols identify drivers who're driving erratically, video them if they're holding a handset, then pull them over. If not holding a handset, then (a) it's possible to detect cellphone emissions and pull over those who are driving without passengers, or (b) dangerous driving constitutes Probable Cause for pulling the driver's cellphone usage log to see if it was in use while the vehicle was in motion.

(It's labour-intensive, but it's not rocket science.)
"...impossible to enforce consistently without invasions into one's privacy." What? You have no privacy on the road, through a clear windshield. I fail to see any such violation. It would seem to me to be unconstitutional, but I assume they'll skirt around that like with drinking ages: withhold funds to states that don't pass the laws the federal government wants. That way the federal government technically isn't making something illegal, but is basically blackmailing the states into doing so. (It's not technically blackmail because the states aren't entitled to those funds, as they're provided at the discretion of Congress.)
Sosh, From Second-Generation Entrepreneur, Helps People Find Unique Things To Do
I think too often "nutcase" is just a less well-reasoned way of saying, "decision weighting algorithm has different priors from mine," or, "doesn't conform to societal norms," rather than the "makes decisions with no rational basis" that the word seems to imply.
Yippee, another on-high edict completely out of touch with reality. People are just going to end up texting instead, so they aren't using the phone as long..

Does talking while driving divert some of my attention? Of course. But driving on an artificially speed limited controlled-access road (with low traffic) requires a limited amount of attention in the first place (a good chunk spent checking the mirror to avoid being hassled by the standard cop driving 95mph).