skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not just about the relative costs of transporting overweight people. I am 180cm tall, and 70kgs in weight. On a non-stop flight between SF and London, I was sandwiched between two massively overweight men. I could not even eat a meal, and struggled to turn the pages of a book, since these two took up at least 30% of the space that should have been mine. I asked the stewardess to move me because it was so uncomfortable, but she claimed there were no free seats.

It's obvious that there need to be over-sized seats for over-sized people. I don't particularly care if they pay more or I pay less. Flying cattle-class is painful enough without being sandwiched between people who are much, much wider than the average person. It can't be comfortable for those fat people either to be crammed into a small seat. But at least they book flights knowing what they will endure (and they could book the more appropriately sized seats in business class). The rest of us don't have any determination in these events.

As for it being unenforceable, people get removed from planes for many reasons. I was recently on a plane where a man was removed from a 5 hour flight; he stank so badly that no-one could sit within 3 rows of him.
I speak only one language and found it pretty trivial to switch from JS to Coffeescript.

I guess it's always possible I have an innate capacity for languages I've never actually developed, though... :P
Knuth is a competent mathematician, though; that's closer to the core of functional programming than most languages get.
Starting up when the economy’s down
Quick look: Bill Gates spanking new interactive Visitors Center
This would be pretty much impossible for an existing airline to implement but what a great disruptive concept for a new discount airline startup. Your ticket is based on your total weight (body plus baggage) which means it would be totally attractive to anyone who is skinny and travels light (plus you're less likely to be squeezed in between two oversized seatmates). Sure you give up the heavy clientele but you gain a lock on an attractive slice of the market.
Wrong.

While there are a lot of Canonical folks that don't have backgrounds in upstream projects (more so than at other major distros), Jonathan has been involved in KDE since long before he worked for Canonical and is old friends (and still in frequent contact) with many of the top tech folks at SUSE.

You're reading way too much into that.
> or who post pictures for shock effect or even out of sheer ignorance

Many people do not view feeding a child as a private thing.

They think it should be no different than posting a picture of you eating a sandwich. It is important to advance their goal of being able publicly feed a child by making images of that as ho hum as images of you eating a sandwich. To do this, they must put things on facebook.

Facebook can censor their images if they want to, but they'll apparently get protesting mothers in front of their building if they think it that important.
when is it Anonymous and when is it just anonymous?
Perhaps – but it's certainly the case that if one wanted to find an exploit, it would likely be easier with the source code in hand.

Now, this isn't an argument against open-source software – much to the contrary, in fact, because, I'd argue, OSS has, by virtue of being developed in the open, had much more opportunity for bugs to be seen by contributors and by those looking to crack/exploit it. As exploits are found, they get patched. Closed source, code, on the other hand, faces a lot of catch-up when its code is released into the wild.

I'd argue that's a bit like what happens to one's immune system if it's not regularly challenged (particularly as a child). Frequent exposure to pathogens tends to make one's immune system better, whereas living in a bubble only works as long as nobody lets you out.

Also, as much as codebases change, many parts stay the same, so yes, 5 year old code may well still be similar to currently shipping code that unexploited/unpatched issues may well still exist.
Mathematical notation has been chosen, or developed over time, because it is highly efficient at communicating a huge amount of information in a short amount of space. It is almost as if the natural tendency of mathematical notation is to act a as a space-saving algorithm; the information content to notation ratio in mathematics is extremely high.

Most attempts to communicate this notation to computers has been difficult at best, with MathML being much too complex for humans to actually write, and LaTeX often requiring much looking up of the various short cuts that been developed, particularly for beginners.

Here's an example of some LaTeX to produce a mathematical diagram.

\png
\definecolor{blueblack}{RGB}{0,0,135}
\color{blueblack}
\begin{picture}(4,1.75)
\thicklines
\put(2,0.01){\arc{3}{3.53588}{5.8888}}
\put(.375,.575){\line(1,0){3.25}}
\put(1.22,1.375){\makebox(0,0){\footnotesize$ds$}}
\put(.6,.5){\makebox(0,0){\footnotesize$x=0$}}
\put(3.36,.5){\makebox(0,0){\footnotesize$x=\ell$}}
\dottedline{.05}(1.0,.575)(1.0,1.10)
\put(1.0,.5){\makebox(0,0){\footnotesize$x$}}
\dottedline{.05}(1.5,.575)(1.5,1.40)
\put(1.5,.5){\makebox(0,0){\footnotesize$x+dx$}}
\put(1.22,.65){\makebox(0,0){\footnotesize$dx$}}
\dottedline{.04}(0.6,1.12)(1.25,1.12)
\put(1.0,1.14){\vector(-1,-1){.45}}
\put(.58,0.83){\makebox(0,0){\footnotesize$T$}}
\put(.77,1.05){\makebox(0,0){\scriptsize$\theta(x)$}}
\put(1.18,1.16){\makebox(0,0){\scriptsize$\theta(x)$}}
\dottedline{.04}(1.5,1.41)(2.1,1.41)
\put(1.5,1.44){\vector(4,1){.67}}
\put(2.22,1.59){\makebox(0,0){\footnotesize$T$}}
\put(1.95,1.45){\makebox(0,0){\scriptsize$\theta(x+dx)$}}
\end{picture}

Can you tell what the final output of this LaTeX will be? (See http://www.forkosh.com/mathtex.html for the answer)
Funny that I was just teaching that lesson about fraction comparison last Saturday morning, but I was using fraction pairs that are a bit more challenging (from the excellent textbook Algebra by the late I.M. Gelfand and Alexander Shen).

http://www.amazon.com/Algebra-Israel-M-Gelfand/dp/0817636773

I just put problem 40 from the book, which I taught last week to children of third-grade to fifth-grade age, into Wolfram Alpha's natural language interface.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Is+10001%2F10002+greate...

The Wolfram Alpha input and output is convenient for making the teaching point, and could spark a discussion about problem 41, which is

41. Which is greater, 12345/54321 or 12346/54322?

Of course a sensitive mathematics teacher is supposed to recognize at once that what is really being asked for by the second problem is a way to generalize when a/b is greater than (a+1)/(b+1) and when it is not. I will wrap up that part of the lesson next week.

I have posted recently here on HN that "There will continue to be an important role for in-person teachers,"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3555728

even after online teaching tools become much more fancy. I recommend some good tools (I don't think Khan Academy is the best available online mathematics teaching tool, but its price point is appealing) in that comment. I also include links in that comment to thoughtful recent articles about improving mathematics education. A skillful teacher will teach learners how to use tools, when tools are suitable for getting the answer, and how to use the unaided human brain and speech when that should be enough to get (and EXPLAIN) the answer. A big part of mathematics learning is learning how to use appropriate tools and methods in different circumstances. I don't decry online mathematics learning tools; I model in the classroom using the good-old human brain, sometimes with some help from pencil-and-paper or whiteboard-and-marker calculations, to puzzle through challenging mathematical problems

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2760663

and get reality checks on whether the procedure used to reach a solution is correct or not.

AFTER EDIT: After posting this comment, I asked my Facebook friends (who include a number of professional and amateur mathematics educators, including homeschooling parents who have brought up International Mathematical Olympiad gold medalists) about the blog post submitted here, and one of those friends suggested that the blog post author look closely at the Art of Problem Solving

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/

model of online mathematics education. "The medium is not the message, because the medium is only stepping in to do (interactively) what you would do in person if you could, and instead distributing the teaching resource more widely, but basically in the same mode." I agree with that suggestion, and with that comment on whether or not the medium is the message if online mathematics education is well done.
It is clear that something isn't going according to plan. With two startups coming out of the same program at a top school, I'm sure there is enough bad blood, lawyers, friendships, and did I mention lawyers that people don't want to talk.

But how does a startup handle this? When it is clear to your customers that you something is happening, but you aren't at liberty to say.
Show HN: WISHCAN, where Hackers can trade help for karma points and cash
Do you have any evidence for the extraordinary claim that one fat American causes increased health care costs for a skinny American. Take into account overall life expectancy, variable insurance rates, and fit people that fall off mountains and get hurt playing sports.
I doubt anyone will attempt to form a community around 3rd party builds/modifications to it. Malware authors will look for vulnerabilities, and curious people might study it (though you should be extremely cautious about doing so)
would they lower the price for thinner people to balance it out?

The author of the article does mention a "petite discount:"

Conversely, a female weighing just 50 kilos would get a "petite" discount of $14.50 each way.
Hmm.. yeah I suppose I would categorize this as "thick value".
Bespin didn't choose Canvas on a whim. IIRC they initially prototyped with divs and found that performance simply wasn't good enough.

Since then browsers implementations have advanced such that this is no longer so -- it didn't make the initial choice necessarily bad.
According to Thoughtbot's post, Exceptional has been running Airbrake for months now.
Silence vs. Communication
Watch out, there will be people who will point out that this isn't theft, because Symantec still has it's copy - and they are technically correct. And the following discussion if this is morally equivalent to theft will never end.
Why don't they send an email "class cancelled" so people know what happened to it?
Cyclone Woman
I'm interested to see where this goes next. I feel like Airbrake hasn't gotten much love lately, and there are multiple times during the day where the response times are abysmal.

Here's hoping the new stewardship brings some better architecture/hardware and some new features.
I agree that there is no algorithm for love. But I think the reason of the dating website of matching the people with the common attitude or interest is that when they go out, at least they have the common denominator. And from the common denominator, people can explore or discover if they are really compatible with their partner.
Wanna Poach me?
You know, one thing I like about your system is that you aren't at the top of it. I have to question peoples' motives when I see an article like this where they're clearly at the top of the hierarchy.
Having direct experience in being a third party payment aggregator, here's some notes based on this post and their FAQ (if anyone cares):

1. Fraud will now be your #1 issue (if it isn't already). People will make fake Etsy accounts, add fake products, and then make "purchases" using stolen credit card numbers. They will have the $ deposited to an E*Trade bank account, a pre-paid debit card that accepts ACH, or use some rube's account they found on Craigslist. Most of the time, you won't catch it until the money is already deposited. Then the chargebacks start coming.

I don't have the luxury of having a $50M warchest of VC money. You will definitely have to spend money and engineering resources towards this soon.

2. Based on your FAQ, you're requiring sellers to mark an item as "shipped" before depositing their money. We actually had to turn this requirement off because it annoyed so many sellers. When a seller gets an order (in our case, photographs), getting it fulfilled becomes their focus. Making them go back to the web and mark it as fulfilled is something they will often forget. Getting their money deposited is something they won't forget.

IMO, I would try to make this more automatic. Use something like Twilio to send the seller a text 5 days after the order ... "Has order 24039 (yellow scarf) been shipped to Suzie J yet?"
Amazon Experiments with Physical Stores
It happens when a treaty is drafted in secret and the leading countries behind it don't have open debate on it before signing it.
Apple claimed a staggering 80% of mobile profit in Q4
Why Old Media and Tom Cruise Should Worry About Cheaper Technology
No one is buying that the 33.8% of obese Americans fall into that category - it's a choice for them

I buy that many or most or nearly all obese Americans have made lifestyle choices you find repugnant, but I don’t buy that they all do. And for that reason, I do not go around making blanket statements like “It is rude for overweight people to drive up the cost of health care because they refuse to take care of their own bodies.” Some--maybe many--overweight people make choices about their bodies, but some do not.

Furthermore, I know many overweight people who make dietary choices I disagree with but who are also very hard-working in their chosen fields. Your suggestion that overweight people are “lazy and fat” is unsupported. Some are sedentary, some are not.

Overall, I find that your arguments are unsound. But that being said, I don’t think you’re trying to be cogent here, your use of terms like “rude” and “refuse to take care of their own bodies” and “lazy” sets a tone that depicts every obese American as being at odds with you.

To pe perfectly candid, the conversation we are having reminds me strongly of many conversations around discrimination, stereotyping, and bias. Which is unfortunate.
Agreed and to expand on this, there's a big difference between the advanced architect who takes a year to build an incomprehensible framework, and the multi-paradigm programmer who solves problems efficiently.
No, Facebook is not more addictive than cigarettes. Facebook may be addictive at first but when you reach the saturation point, the addiction diminish. Unlike cigarettes, the more you smoke, the more you become addicted to it and it is hard to remove from your system.
I'm happy to be a part of the new Airbrake + Exceptional team. I'll be heading up the product, UX and community events . We've already taken huge steps in improve the exception developer workflow and will be launching much needed search, notification workflow and integrations to Airbrake in the coming months. We are going to officially support more languages, and better support mobile exception tracking.

We are still working out our Exceptional + Airbrake roadmap; but if you have any questions or concerns please e-mail myself at ben@exceptional.io .

If you prefer Sans Serif, check out the exceptional blog. http://blog.exceptional.io/news/how-exceptional-and-airbrake...

On a side note; it's been a pleasure working with the Thoughtbot + Contrast team.
Travis needs your Help
Based on the tax forms I've had to fill out whenever I've joined an app market or affiliate network, there is definitely government regulations with tax filing.

My assumption is that since you're collecting money that is 3rd party's profit, you need to show the paper trail that you're holding this money in escrow for a 3rd party.

This is why ebay transactions are buyer<->seller and then you're billed at the end of the month. Lightens the admin burden.
Complex scripts?

I hit the "reply" button to tell you that no, no amount of "complex scripting" is as mentally challenging as developing a Turing complete language.

But maybe you mean scripts as any program? In that case, I agree that developing things like, I don't know, database engines and file systems and such are equal in complexity to developing a language.

I suppose the only caveat is that those things are usually teams -- sometimes huge teams. A language is often a 1-man or small team effort.
Ask HN: Stripe + GoCardless = eventual merger
Both are YC funded, both have founders who were involved in Auctomatic. Both are directly involved in making on line payments simpler. Stripe seem to be taking the US market; simplifying credit card payments. GoCardless are taking on the UK market with DirectDebit style payments(direct from bank a\c to merchant) . Is a merger on the cards as both are simplifying & cheapening on- line payments(albeit via different vectors)? [Unique challenges for each to be sure but seems like there must be a massive amount of crossover]
I was mostly agreeing with you until you starting on the technology bigotry.

> Because while the Java+IDE environment makes it extremely difficult for an individual engineer to have a 1.5+ impact –there are two cases in recorded history of programmers breaking 2.0 in Java; one is Martin Odersky, who wrote Scala, and the other is Rich Hickey, who wrote Clojure

What about people like Doug Lea and Josh Bloch? What about people like Trustin Lee? Why do these people not qualify as 'multipliers' in your framework because of their choice of technology?

The idea that using a single technology or approach - in your case a functional language and not even a functional style - would be the difference between an adder and a multiplier is simply absurd.

And then you go on to say:

> This is because the Java+IDE environment, and operating systems like Windows, are designed to bring up the rear (0.7 to 0.9) while holding back the best programmers, artificially imposing that “ceiling” around 1.2-1.5

You have now introduced a definition which implies that the designers behind projects like the Windows kernel, MSSQL, and Kinect are a lower level of programmers because of the technology they use or the company they chose to work for. What about many of the really useful sites and services that are served from Windows (or Java running on Windows, gasp!) or the innovative and world-changing pieces of software which are primarily developed for Windows? Excluding all the people behind those from being upper levels seems like a stretch.

> these technologies are intentionally designed for a performance-middling effect– to make it possible for huge teams of “commodity” developers to produce something while holding the excellent back from producing great things.

This is the core of my problem with your argument. I can think of many more things I would call great that used technologies like C++, Java and Windows than used technologies like Lisp, Scala and Clojure.

> Functional programming is a shibboleth of good (1.5+) engineers because it's usually what they first learn as they break through the 1.2 ceiling observed in Javaland (since Java and enterprise programming actively work to prevent people from having multiplier effects).

You are simply wrong about this. There are many marks of a good engineer. An interest in different programming paradigms is one of them, for sure. To call functional programming a 'shibboleth of good engineers' seems to exclude too many people I would call good engineers to be a good or even useful measure. I would go as far as to say that, for above average programmers, interest in and use of functional programming is orthogonal to their contribution and skill.

I have been lucky enough in my career to work with many great engineers, leaders in their fields, who have chosen to use the technologies you deride and are therefore forever stuck at the lower levels of your hierarchy because of those choices.

(On the other hand, I may have just fed the troll).
Can you bring food to airplanes in the USA? I don't think that's allowed in most of Europe any more...
I could see how the inclusion of BTFS in FreeBSD might promote free software, and its inclusion would not be prohibited by any version of the GPL.

But how does the use of GPL code in a proprietary project, as would be the case in your consulting example, benefit free software? The whole point of the GPL, any version, is to make sure that derivative work is itself free software. It's not that GPL "sounds good on paper" and in reality, it's totally different.

GPLv3 on paper: You can't use it to make proprietary software. You can't use it to take away users' freedom.

GPLv3 in reality: See above.
You can't be convicted of a crime without evidence. It's pretty easy to obtain public content and look at it without leaving behind any evidence. Tor, full disk encryption, and anonymous remailers are your friend.
Do you find eating a private thing? These women don't either. Breastfeeding is a baby eating. Something they have to do a LOT of times a day.

Would you like to eat in bathrooms? In tiny little closets? Under a blanket in the dark? These are all places baby feeding alarmests try to make babies eat.

How would you feel if any picture that had a bit of a plate in it was censored off facebook because a group of mostly childless and old men found it offensive?

Think about changing your atitude. Just because you're not used to seeing something doesn't mean the issue is with where it's happening, perhaps you're just not used to it.
The author mentioning it in no way means airlines would do it.
I suspected this becuase of the radio silence as of late. It's definitely disappointing.

I was wondering what the class would be like - it certaintly couldn't be like the class that Steve blogged about a lot last semester.
Agreed. I think the only time I ever saw Stallman pussy out on something was removing the SaaS stuff from the GPL3 and separating it off into the AGPL3. Without even the FSF fully behind Free Software ideals in the web world, things seem quite stagnant on that front now.
Software licensing requirements being worked on.
it does make it substantially riskier for companies to depend upon GPL(v3) components.

I think we can call GPLv3 a success, then!
Sherpaa - around the clock email and phone access to NYC-based doctors
They're really using RAM as a proxy for other real costs. The amount of RAM you allocate is a pretty good predictor for server/VPS utilization -- which means their actual power, bandwidth and hardware replacement costs as you wear out hardware faster. Virtually all unmanaged VPS and dedicated hosting companies make RAM the primary factor in determining the monthly service cost even though the price-per-gigabyte is more each month than it'd cost to buy the physical RAM outright. In other words, it's a mistake to think that the actual cost of RAM is the reason pricing is proportional to RAM size.
Apple rakes in 75% of all mobile phone profits in Q4 2011
An RSS feed would be nice, I think. I'd prefer to keep my email inbox uncluttered.
This is what I've been saying for a long time. It makes no difference if the weight is in the bag or in the seat (and as a small guy with generally large bags, this is obviously a self-serving argument.)
Here's a useful, but lengthy, talk on the subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY

Memristors look extremely likely to be able to provide non-volatile storage with latency, access speeds, and density higher than existing DRAM and flash. They also look like they can be used to make FPGA-like devices which can approach the speed, power efficiency, and logic density of custom designed ASICs but with extremely fast reconfiguration speed. And those seem to be the less fascinating aspects of memristor technology.
What can they do? All it takes is one employee and a flash drive to leak the source code anonymously. Considering the value of a 0-day exploit on the open market, I'm sure that an interested party could find some low-level junior developer to bribe to steal the source code. And here we are today.