skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These people are already getting on wrong elevators. The example given has banks of elevators for different floors, marked by sign and by buttons for the specific floors covered. If they don't pay attention they'll get a short tour.

If this was a deadly choice, between an elevator and a trash compactor, it might make sense to over-sign it. As is, it's a trivial and obvious mistake, especially if each bank has a sign saying 'Floors 1-x are reached via the other elevator bank' for someone to read on their round-trip.

Part of the reason users are so clueless is because we go too far in padding their environment. People don't slice off fingers because the sharp end of the knife wasn't properly labelled - they exercise caution.
I think my 4 year old girl is going to greatly prefer their new legos. Right now, she plays with Duplos, and all is well. However, I can see a day when legos are "too boy". That's just what they reported happening in the Lego studies. Duplo works, and then the girls doen't make the transition to regular lego.

We have an older boy as well, and so our house has every lego you can imagine, plus lots of really cool vehicles, trucks, etc. Our daughter never goes near them. If this can make them more attractive to her, that's fantastic.
Just stop buying lego and start buying K-nex instead.

They are almost infinitely better. They are incredibly open ended, and can be used to build some very complex stuff.
This seems like an good thing, but man is that an awful way of going about this. Forcibly removing the packages during a software update is shady enough, but pushing out blank packages that will cause a user's system to produce issues that the user might not know how to fix, or a reason for the failure?

Ubuntu has pretty much always been the "set it and forget it" distro. Problems are often introduced in upgrading to a new release, but once you've installed a release you generally don't get it broken with a routine update. Many people have installed Ubuntu on non-techies' machines in order to not need to do maintenance on them. Unless I'm misunderstanding, all those machines now need to be manually updated to avoid being broken?

I know the blame goes back to Oracle, but Canonical could have handled the issue better. In this case, it seems they're breaking the system to spite Oracle.
I'm the dev on this project (which is open source, code available at cumulonimbus.ca). We're looking to gain more users so that the data becomes more useful - we're starting to analyze pressure tendency in hopes that we can improve weather prediction.
1.8 Million Accounts Hacked from Square Enix Japanese Game Company
One American analyst ridiculed Iran’s capability, telling Defense News that the loss was “like dropping a Ferrari into an ox-cart technology culture.”

An ox-cart technology culture that is allied with China and Russia. I hope this kind of hubris is counterbalanced by more realistic attitudes in the defense world.
How an AT&T smartphone comes to life: behind the scenes (part one)
From Kitchen to Bathroom, Social Media Invades Our Lives
They won't be called public roads when this happens.
I'm guessing that you haven't worked at a place where it can take months to get a single line change implemented in production. This kills creators with the huge lag time between fix and implementation. I won't even go into meeting abuse.
When I see these stories taking companies to task over why they sell what they do, I always wonder why nobody holds consumers to task.

For example: why doesn't Lego sell to girls? Why doesn't Barbie have more realistic features? Why don't car manufacturers offer an electric vehicle? Why doesn't McDonalds sell salads instead of fries? Why do record labels offer such crappy music?

It's easy to blame the companies -- but in reality it's very hard for a single company to change the macro culture that informs their product decisions. If you want to find the root cause, look at the users and ask why they demand the products they do. In this case: "why are so few parents buying Legos for their girls?" or "why do girls feel a stigma about playing with Legos?"
Oh, BTW, I just had to share this guy's work:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/marshal-banana/

Especially his sand crawler. I really liked that

http://www.flickr.com/photos/marshal-banana/sets/72157626809...
This page 2 comment is making me not believe what I am reading. Data stream is not encrypted? Can anyone confirm?

The US military has reportedly been aware of vulnerabilities with pirating unencrypted drone data streams since the Bosnia campaign in the mid-1990s.

Top US officials said in 2009 that they were working to encrypt all drone data streams in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan – after finding militant laptops loaded with days' worth of data in Iraq – and acknowledged that they were "subject to listening and exploitation."

edit: fixed the format
As a kid I found with some of the predesigned kits, the result was distinctly cooler and more sophisticated than anything I'd ever be able to come up with. As a result I was always loathe to dismantle them. Darth Vader's Tie fighter, for example.

It was much easier to tear apart my own creations because I could make something better.
This kind of thing was popular during the LEGO "dark ages" in the early 2000s but has really died out as of late. The Millenium Falcon that's being referred to has very few, if any, unique parts. LEGO has really gone back to its roots in the past 2 or 3 years, especially with the AWESOME creator series.
Which is exactly the reason I bought it. Sure, I like his comedy, but I wasn't going to buy his live show. That is, until I read his appeal and found out how humble he really is. It's great to finally see humans treating each other like humans and still make money.
It is hard psychologically to realize you can never built the set as intended again. You end up lots of sets in big ziplocs. We've finally moved most of our son's legos into a single big bin, but he was opposed to it for a long time.
I dont think its because they think it threatens Apple (let's be honest, Apple is going from strength to strength).

I think it's because they've been making this same criticism since Android first came out, and its UI is still laggy and stutters. It's starting to look like that is just a permanent feature of Android, rather than something which should be fixed "soon".

All their criticism boils down to this one thing: that Android doesn't have the same level of quality when it comes to UI interaction. They readily say nice things about the features, but the interaction model is still broken, and they keep pointing it out because its important to them. Its important to lots of people, and thats probably why the iphone is selling so well.

Its obviously not important to people who prefer android, and thats fine. But since its not important to them they don't understand the criticism and ascribe people's love of the iphone to "faith" and "evangelism".
https://1000.postmates.com/ doesn't show the right page, 443 seems to be not properly configured for this domain.
Firefox's codebase is now so big it fails to build on 32-bit OSes
It's much easier for a single company to make some changes than it is for a single or even very large group of consumers to drive a change.

It stinks, but every complaint about products asks for an Apple comparison. I would say both Apple and Pixar have demonstrated that sticking to the purity of your craft can be both fulfilling and extremely lucrative.
An Oracle developer's comment on why the DLJ was retired: http://robilad.livejournal.com/90792.html

I think this won't have a big impact on Java development or use on Ubuntu. Ubuntu's bundled Sun java lagged behind the Oracle official releases, so it wasn't much different from OpenJDK. Disabling the Java browser plugin by default should have always been the sensible option. The plugin has always seemed like an infrequently used security liability.
The standard encourages implementations to interpret numbers as decimal, and it doesn't say to interpret non-numbers (such as octal 9, which is what the number would have to be if you were taking "0" as the octal prefix) as 0. I don't see how it's necessary for compliance or even sensible to interpret numbers that don't exist in octal as octal 0, except that it's a quirk older implementations had and new ones don't want to break compatibility.
They also claim they have a "startup-like culture" which means that instead of getting a real desk, you get a door with some dowels holding it up. Not making this up. WTF?
Am I the only one who would love to have a real, life-size set of Legos, big enough to build an actual dwelling? That would be a dream come true.
How do you know if someone has been hellbanned?
In the blog post it mentioned that is uses node.js to render server side if the templates can't be rendered client side. I'm more interested in how they are able to determine that at load time.
MG's point is not valid, because iOS isn't noticeably better than android. I own an iPad and use an android tablet for testing at work. I find that my iPad has just as many inconsistencies and annoyances as android does. both operating systems are far from perfect.

he's right that some people notice the little things in their UIs and some don't. he's wrong in implying that the apple users are the ones who notice. I'd argue that apple fanboys like MG Seigler and John Gruber, who never seem to have any complaints about iOS, must fall squarely into the group of people who aren't able to notice the little details.
Hi Bastian, I love the concept but don't see pricing on the site? Any details on how much this will cost me? Do you have size limits?

Note also, the linked article doesn't look right in firefox on windows.
Give it a few more moments... perhaps an engaging discussion on brand loyalty and tribe-based consumerism will ensue somewhere in the troll pit
What I don't understand is why doesn't Microsoft provide an upgrade that actually allows IE6 (and possibly other versions) to run as they did, on a site specific basis. This way corporations that need some IE6 only app can run them forever, but their employees can still use the rest of the web unhampered by this. Having it possible to run multiple "virtual browsers" within a single browser would also thrill web developers who want to test their sites on all the browsers without having to have multiple machines.

Yes it would be a bit bloated, but the default install would probably be the one that just ran the latest version.
Online gift ordering + enthusiastic kids at the keyboard + Unicode
(By the way, if you ever want a conclusive argument that girls being raised to love pink and hate math is societal

The most staggering thing about these assumptions is not merely how they contradict current scientific understanding, but they contradict reality. Pink used to be a boys' color: the idea of pink as "girly" didn't exist 100 years ago. Ironically, this commonly-given-example is itself a fantastic example of how wrong such assumptions about gender differences actually are.

It's rather laughable -- and sad -- how almost every single "scientific study" (often evolutionary psychology, a popular pseudoscience) claiming such absurd biological gender differences just happens to support 1950s stereotypical American gender roles, as opposed to gender roles anywhere else in history, anywhere else in the world.

The reality is that the biological differences are negligible in most regards, at least mentally -- claiming "girls naturally prefer pink" is just as absurd as insisting that blacks are genetically predisposed to like playing basketball. It denies the vastly greater importance of societal and cultural effects, dumps blame for problems -- such as gender bias in STEMS -- on biology instead of humans, and is pretty much flat-out sexist.
Install cpandoc[1]. It's supercharged perldoc command.

It lets you explore the CPAN ecosystem without installing the modules.

$ cpandoc XML::Twig
[ ... documentation for XML::Twig ...]

[1] Coincidentally, today's Perl Advent article covers cpandoc (http://perladvent.org/2011/2011-12-15.html).
Sr. Software Engineer
Leapfrog Online is looking for a talented Chicago-area Python engineer to work in our Evanston office. Our Python engineers build and maintain high-traffic web sites using the Django web framework. We offer a great working atmosphere, a strong focus on work-life balance, and tremendous opportunities to learn new skills and technologies. We also have competitive salaries and benefits and close-knit teams who like what they do.

As we principally focus on the web, we look for real-world experience using Python application frameworks (such as Django) to build high-traffic web sites and applications. Experience with other languages is welcome. What are the extras we look for? Experience producing and consuming web services (SOAP, REST, XML-RPC); experience working with message-oriented systems (AMQP or other message, pub-sub and task queues such as Celery); deep knowledge of version control systems (especially Mercurial or Git); an interest in non-RDBMS data stores (CouchDB, MongoDB, Redis); knowing what it really means to develop RESTful applications; and, experience with functional and declarative programming models in addition to object-oriented development.

If you're a bright, self-motivated engineer who enjoys using open source software to solve interesting problems, you’re our kind of programmer, and we’d like to talk to you. You can apply on our site, where you'll also find full job descriptions and information about Leapfrog Online:http://www.leapfrogonline.com/who/careers/
To go in the Description field of your bookmark: (quote)

If you are currently using the Oracle Java packages from the partner archive, you have two options:

1- Install the OpenJDK packages that are provided in the main Ubuntu archive. (icedtea6-plugin for the browser plugin, openjdk-6-jdk or openjdk-6-jre for the virtual machine)

2- Manually install Oracle's Java software from their web site [4].
I'd say Honda = affordable and dependable, not especially luxurious or loaded with features, but not necessarily cheap either. There are Honda models that start near $30k, and other models that start around $20k but have configurations over $30k.

I'd think Kia or Hyundai would would be seen as the "cheap" brand.

And the Honda company certainly doesn't shy away from serving the luxury market with their Acura brand.

In any case, the comparison of Mercedes vs. Honda was about fit and finish and creature comforts, not price. It works just as well when comparing a loaded, well-kept $9000 used Mercedes to a brand-new $15,000 Civic.
No, I am suggesting that we already have a solution for "I need a single authoritative source of rules about this data". And it is called a database. Treating your database like it is just dumb storage is what creates these problems in the first place.
Why Louis C.K.’s big payday proves the Internet has ethics
One problem (afaik) is that the pieces are more and more specialised. A single regular lego piece can be anything. Look at the old ad; almost all pieces shown are regular rectangular pieces. And it even says Universal Building Set. But now you just get 1000 distinctly "millenium falcon" pieces.
No, I don't understand why my comment does nothing to advance the conversation.

It's too short, and your intent isn't clear from just "Are you a scientist?"

The poster ericabiz says the US needs more women scientists and I asked her if she was a scientist. If not, I was going to ask her why she wasn't.

Putting all that into your first comment would have made it clear what you were trying to accomplish, and spared you the downvotes.

...[edits]...

So you got downvoted. It happens to all of us. No need to get disrespectful over it, just diagnose what went wrong and avoid it in the future.
i am also confused about the emphasis on GPS (see my comment), but i would guess that restricting the technology used in these things keeps the price down. GPS is good enough to label images, and probably good enough to guide something flying at a moderate altitude. it may have made more sense to keep these things (relatively) cheap (that also means if they are lost, there is less technology lost too).
That's the product, not the way it was sold. That product is still available. My nephews are guilty of the same build the set and chuck it type behaviors. I've got my own son and daughter interested in the building aspect.

I remember looking a the awesome pictures of what you could build with the Technics sets (this is way before Mindstorms). That was me being marketed to. I wanted those sets without knowing anyone that owned one or having ever seen one outside of the adverts. That's being marketed to.
(Prelude edit: A few people seem to be missing the point I'm making here. I know quite a lot about the predator, and a bit about the Global Hawk. I do not know much about the Sentinel. The jab about building a drone with parts on my kitchen table is a joke, meant to illustrate that this is either an absurd level of incompetence on the part of Lockheed Martin [not likely] or the article is incorrect, the latter being most likely. The Global Hawk, for instance, uses inertial navigation as well as GPS. Spoofing GPS against that platform would be annoying to the people controlling it, it would not get you a free Global Hawk. It is a near-certainty that the Sentinel has a similar navigation system.).

Some clarification on these drones:

Some of them require a human being with Line Of Sight to land them. "Predators" (what a lovely name), for instance. This thing is basically a gigantic R/C plane, and a pretty nice one at that.

You taxi it to the runway, take it off, and fly it via remote control. There is a human watching it the entire time (although the human may not be in close proximity to the plane. The militarized versions, for instance, have pilots living in Nevada, and planes living in Afghanistan).

Another plane, called a "Global Hawk", is much larger, and requires almost no human intervention at all. You open the hanger door, press the go button, and then leave it alone.

It taxis itself to the runway, powers up, takes off, flies its mission, comes home, lands, taxis back to the hanger, and powers down.

If this article is accurate, it would mean that this drone model requires no human intervention, which makes sense if it's primarily a passive, camera-platform.

What becomes really really scary about this is the idea that they're relying solely on GPS to fly.

How do I get into defense contracting, again? I have the parts for a "drone" sitting on my kitchen table right now that, from the sound of things, is about navigationally equivalent to this thing.

(By that I mean a $30 'duino, $50 worth of gyros and accelerometers, and $60 worth of a GPS. Hey government, here's a cost cutting measure: hire me to build you some drones.)
I'm curious, is "Christain" really such a long word that you have to weirdly abbreviate it as "Xtian?"
Maybe. But 2-3% is about the right price for a financial txn between strangers, especially when not face-to-face.
First of all, take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law for one major reason why we have an entrenched two-party system in the first place.

As for your other question: why would third parties get any more money than they get votes? Look at the abysmal number of votes that go to third parties; why would they get money from people who don't vote for them?

I won't claim the system we have doesn't suck. I will claim that most potential replacements suck more.
Year-End Top 10: Early Stage Funding
They're not one of the sites listed in the grandparent post, but YouTube has a program where they share the advertising revenue. Though that would have been even more interesting if they had managed to do that in this case, because they'd be getting revenue for a something they do not own.
Here are some HN perspectives from 2009 (when Lego announced a large increase in profits (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=768093). The article is no longer available on Yahoo Finance, but can be found here (http://www.hartfordbusiness.com/news9940.html).

Branded, themed Lego sets simply sell really well and Lego is responding to the demand with increased capacity and more focus on these markets.

Here is a scenario of why it works:
Visualize a parent and child walking down the toy aisle at a typical large retailer (e.g. Target, WalMart, ToysRUs, etc.). The shelves are full of dozens of single-focus, low cost, electronic toys that are flashy and are very appealing to kids. A big box of Lego bricks just doesn't provide the same instant gratification as a talking toy with a "demo" button. Although, the long-term value of the box of Lego bricks is clearly much higher, explaining that to a 4 year-old is very difficult as they are concurrently making a strong appeal for, an even cheaper, talking doll.

Lego has responded with purchasing shelf space in retailers for branded sets that offer instant gratification while also satisfying the parents need for a more creative toy. Regardless, most of the pieces from the branded sets end of in the "big box" of Legos :).
URDU SEX STORIES: Khalaa Ki Beti
Some would argue that 'capitalist corporation'='evil'.
Having the same rights as an individual (and in some cases more) corporations often exhibit traits that, if observed in an individual, would result in that individual being diagnosed as a psychopath.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_(film)
It's not Lego that's "highly-problematic". They're simply trying to give the kids(parents?) of today what they want.

If you follow the NPR article linked in the article, you'll see that Lego clearly did their homework before embarking on this new line. In light of this, I think it's odd for them to be accused of reinforcing stereotypes when their research showed that this is how (most) girls like to play.

I do think it's sad that we now have 'boy-lego' and 'girl-lego', but (for the moment), that appears to be appropriate for the world we live in. Maybe some of those girls will want to do more than just play with handbrushes and handbags and check out the Technics or Mindstorms. Who knows.

NPR article: http://www.npr.org/2011/12/15/143724644/ith-new-toys-lego-ho...

LEGO product lines: http://www.lego.com/en-us/products/default.aspx
Just put more of your point in your original post, and people will realize that you actually have a point. They'll be less likely jump to conclusions about your intelligence. >.>

For example, "Are you a scientist? If not, why not? I ask because I wonder if we're jumping to conclusions about the cause of the gender disparity in STEM [...]" would suggest that you're a sane person who has a real point to make.

I want this discussion to go somewhere, by the way. It was an interesting thought.
Some of the speculation I've heard is that these drones have an auto-return-and-land mode that could be triggered by successfully jamming the communications links. It may be that the auto-land was designed with the hope that the legitimate operator would take over with a direct control when then drone got close enough to home base. It may be that the thing wasn't really able to make a completely graceful landing on its own.

Sounds plausible to me.

Russian-made GPS jammers have been reportedly on the market for over a decade now.

Alternatively, it might also be enough to simply fly your own plane and GPS receiver some relative distance away from the drone and rebroadcast the signals received from there with a higher strength. Of course, this type of forwarding attack could end up with the Iranians landing a plane of their own at the US base. That would be bonus points for style. :-)
Brador, current pricing starts at $15 for a two hour delivery in San Francisco. We will switch to a more dynamic pricing pretty soon though. Thanks for sharing the Firefox bug.
Megablocks are awful. They stick together for a second, then pop off. You end up with cracks everywhere and pieces falling apart. Do not buy...