skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This could lead to immense awkwardness if used for purposes to meet another of your preferred gender for dating purposes. Given that a photo is involved, and I assume you can decline a seating request - you will more than likely run into the requesting person waiting for boarding. However there are some types of people who have plenty of confidence in this (those who post publicly on the net already with their RealLife profiles) who may be open enough to decline/accept declined seating requests and not be bothered by the results.

Personally, given that being on a plane is an enclosed space, I would be loathe to offer my public profile as 'traveling alone' to other passengers. But I do find it interesting that, knowing these social effects, KLM went ahead with this anyway and I have high respect for Dutch considerations in these matters. It must have tested well.
In Chrome I do right-click, inspect element. Then I CSS the shadow away :)
Flagged for idiotic use of the term MAFIAA. Normally it is just childish, like M$ or crApple, but by using it along with MPAA and RIAA it also becomes redundant.
I like the idea of having a standardized way of dealing with actions (I run into this quite often when dealing with resources that are state machines), but I'm flabbergasted as to why something like a 'sum' action must be sent with a POST verb.

POST is supposed to be "used to request that the origin server accept the entity enclosed in the request as a new subordinate of the resource identified by the Request-URI in the Request-Line.", which is nonsensical for querying information like sums from collections, and furthermore is supposed to be non-idempotent, which isn't true for a sum operation.

Ideally "action" would be seperated into two different methods, one for manipulating resources (like state machine transitions, or other processing), and one (utilizing GET) for aggregations and computations on collections or resources.
Thanks a lot. Actually I was thinking about developing this new social network. You can only communicate by writing messages that's 70 character... think I'm gonna call it flutter. Nah, just kidding.

I'm also really tired of photo/sharing apps. I would really like to solve a real problem for people. Make something that's rally valuable to people and will make them come back to the service again and again. I love what Stripe is doing... Solving a real problem and doing it in an awesome way :-).

Would U use Javascript BTW? Not a Javascript framework?
"it's ok to be rowdy when you're drunk, it's expected and it's understood"

And here you've nailed the point that the OP of the first alcohol related post on HN completely missed. His repeated assertion of "drinking to get buzzed/drunk" was what riled everyone up so much - people I drink with are perfectly capable of drinking 5-6 pints of 5% beer without losing their ability to talk sensibly and act sensibly. (That's completely aside from the health considerations of regular consumption).

We don't drink specifically to get "buzzed/drunk". That's just a small bonus. Beer in the UK is worth drinking for its own sake! (The beer here in Australia, less so).
Cool man, great implementation!

Several years ago I had to buy flash version of this for some 70pounds or so.
JSON, HTTP and data links
This. Right here. Upvote it now.

I work in a small start-up making educational software, and this is exactly the kind of thing I want to achieve.

A couple of months back I read John Holt's famous book 'Why Children Fail' which had a profound effect on me and my work. What he says, and what I agree with due to my own experience and observations is that school can be a fundamentally scary experience for children. Self-esteem is so central to learning, because how you react to failure and your own progress (or lack thereof) defines the way you learn. Kids who are afraid of looking stupid, of being compared to their peers, and of having to work hard without the promise of success are the ones who are branded as lazy, unimaginative, or just 'stupid', when in fact they are just afraid of trying hard.

The internet and self education offers an opportunity for kids to escape that fear, and to truly experience the joy of learning. I'm sure many HN readers will relate to my belief that the greatest joy of hard work is not when you appear smarter or harder working than others, but when you achieve something for yourself, or learn something new. Many programmers get to experience that joy all the time.

Holt became so disillusioned with the inability of schools to provide a comfortable and secure learning place for children that eventually he became an advocate for home schooling. I believe in schools' potential and what teachers have to offer, and my company's software is built accordingly, but we have reached a point where there is too much focus on comparing students; through frequent nation-wide testing, intense competition for prestigious colleges, and through insecure parents who push their children an unhealthy amount. To balance that, the schooling system has lost sight of the original reasons for its existence. The judgment-free zone of the internet and self directed learning is giving us a chance to undo the bad learning habits of our current students, and ensure that the next generation of students do not ever need to learn them.

The Khan academy is not about taking the power away from schools and administrators, it is about putting the emphasis back on why we have them in the first place; which is because for all the good of self education, the greatest help you can give a student is a teacher who understands them and the way they learn.
M.A.M.E. Turns 15
Show HN: hacking our set-top box
We're 2 hackers out of NYC and we had tons of fun building Zapkast.com, our take on Social TV.

We played with:
- c/c++ for hacking our set top boxes,
- ruby/rails for the rest api,
- eventmachine/node/erlang for the xmpp api/real time backend,
- ios/cocoa for the iPhone app,
- redis & mysql for the datastores.

We did everything ourselves, even the logo and UI :) Tell us what you think!
http://zapkast.com
It’s very dangerous to use a single metric as a proxy for something else that is obviously related to it but not directly so. We see this here with market share and profit share. We’ve seen similar things like lines of code and productivity.

There’s an apocryphal story told about an IBM salesman. He was the sales leader year in and year out, selling almost as much as all the other fellows in his office combined. One day, his manager retires and Armonk sends out a hot shot MBA to run the sales team. The MBA summons the top salesman.

“I’ve been running some numbers. Your sales are very good, but you’re only averaging 1.2 calls a day. The other guys are doing 3.7 calls. Imagine how much you could sell if you could get your average up to 3.7!”

The sales guy realized he was going to have to train another manager. “Oh? I was wondering how much the other guys could sell if they did a better job of qualifying leads and got their averages down to 1.2..."
Yeah, I noticed I can't "back" out of the demo page altogether.
They can only diverge so far though. For example, Apple needs a reasonably sized slice of the pie to maintain the App Store. If they had 0.1% of the market, there would be drastically fewer people willing to write apps.
I disagree.

Infrastructure as code can be implemented any way you want. The DSL portion of chef should get you very far, if it doesn't you should just be writing ruby, C, or python code to meet you needs.

Automation is really what devops is about; infrastructure as code, continuous integration, continuous deployment are all just synonyms for automation. I think again, what ever get the job done the most reliably, and quickest.
This article has a legitimate argument of qualitative vs quantitive learning, however it has an undertone of resentment towards KA as a technology platform.

Pull vs push-based learning.. labor inefficiencies.. Disintermediation. Many markets will be disrupted, including the educational process.

For example, looking at iPads in the classroom, "HMH Fuse" students scored about 20 percent higher than students who used traditional textbooks.

http://www.hmheducation.com/fuse/pilot-1.php
Overall very nice, there is some weird page folding going on when you act weird but probably just some small quirks.

On a side note, please make your own arrow on the corner of that front page of the book. I think almost everybody knows where that's from...
I think that is a bug in the hardware acceleration of Chrome. I've got the same problem on my website where I use CSS to do a crossfade on the background image. Everytime the images are crossfading all the text on the website gets blurry.

By the way, if someone knows the real problem and, even better, a solution for it, I'm very interested.
Another recent Lomo-esque JS library: http://vintagejs.com/
Definitely putting this article into my archives. Thank you for submitting it, and please don't listen to the nay-sayers who claim this isn't technical enough for HN. The mind can be a more interesting puzzle, a more imperative problem to solve than anything man made.
Hey, I always welcome constructive corrections. Btw, I actually attended International Biology Olympiads twice, but it was too long ago for me to remember the details.(Ever since I was too remote from biology)
I get clients sending me PSDs, every once in a while, that I can't just export as-is with Wenovo PSD Viewer. It's kind of a pain to have to chase down a designer pal just to have him or her turn on/off a layer or two and export to PNG for me. I do this maybe 8-10 times a year, so it's hard to justify paying for a Photoshop license just to perform some exports.
Plus one for "how do you know?". My only caution to add in the case of teachers is that since the problem (or benefit) with standards is that there are so many of them, and since one corollary is that when a standard is chosen it's hard to change later and experimentation is rare, then the situation is doubly worse for teachers whose jobs revolve around a standard of performance because unless they have tenure the risk of a failed experiment aimed at helping the students learn (as opposed to only getting a high score with some performance standard) is too high. Anyway, your comment immediately reminded me of this anecdote I had saved in my quotes file that I thought was apt:

'One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction.

At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, “Do you have any controls?” Well, the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, “Do you mean did I not operate on half the patients?” The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room very hesitantly replied, “Yes, that’s what I had in mind.” Then the visitor’s fist really came down as he thundered, “Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death.”

God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, “Which half?”'

Dr. E. E. Peacock, Jr., quoted in Medical World News (September 1, 1972), p. 45, as quoted in Tufte's 1974 book Data Analysis for Politics and Policy; http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/12...
Palo Alto Hackers - How do you afford to rent / buy in that area?
Hi All,

I live in the east bay & have been working from home for two years (Rails developer), just back from an afternoon drive around the leafy suburbs of Palo Alto as I've been considering getting a full time job in the area.

I'm kind of shell shocked at just how much rent costs, we currently pay $1600 for a one bedroom apartment within walking distance to the BART, gym, restaurants etc.. but in PA a similar place looks to be around $3.2k!! Buying looks even more insane, we seen a few old piles of soon to be ruble, disguised as homes, being flogged for upwards of $800k!

My salary expectations as a Rails developer, 29 years old, 8 years experience, 4 in a team lead role is about $110k, maybe $120k.....maybe this far to low for a "valley job"?

Just wondering how other technologies manage to live in this area - do you commute long distances OR is the typical salary far higher than what I'm considering?
Another thought- market share is often desirable not only for profit, but influence in that market.

Clearly Apple has demonstrated you do not require market dominance to influence or even drive the market, but their success in that regard does not appear to be easy to replicate.
> Self-esteem is so central to learning, because how you react to failure and your own progress (or lack thereof) defines the way you learn.

See this BBC article, which is about a good school teaching pupils that it's okay to fail.

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-16879336)

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3554136)
New York City Open Data Highlight: Restaurant Inspection Results
$200K? In a bank, or a startup? That's not something I've seen outside of CTO roles.
In the same way that a bad parent who becomes a better parent knows they are now a better parent. Some things are not quantifiable. I know of no effective national evaluation system for parenting and yet some parents are good parents. I know that I am a better teacher now than when I first started.

I'm not claiming to be a good teacher. I'm just claiming to be a better one. It's common for a practitioner to get better over time so one should assume that I've gotten better and not worse. What is the point of disputing this claim or doubting its veracity? I don't know the purpose of your question?
International Travel Tips
I think you're overstating the friction. After I graduated, I wanted to learn Mandarin. I signed up for a course at the University of Minnesota through the Continuing Education department.

I didn't have to apply, it was really trivial. I took one course, and they were happy to let me do so.
There's an iPod/iPhone app called jsAnywhere that's free and I like it. You can create projects, have an HTML, CSS and JS file, and run it. Might not have an iPad version.
too bad it's limited to the US store
My understanding is that most publications are not heavily cited, and address very specific problems. I'm curious as to how you plan on creating incentives for qualified people to review the papers in their field which focus on problems outside of their present research interests.

To give a personal example: I used to work in a research group that applied techniques of a field called geometric control theory to the problem of modeling flocks of birds. There are not that many geometric control theorists in the world, and their interests range from robotics, to circuits, to modelings schools of fish. Right now, there are journals of control theory that force their reviewers to review all submissions, regardless of their personal interests.

How do you plan on emulating that? In other words, there need to be incentives for geometric control theorists who work on modeling schools of fish to spend a few days of their time grinding through the proofs of some grad student's paper in modeling bird flocks, which he needs for his thesis.
People certainly have written real software using formal methods: http://compcert.inria.fr/ is a good example.

Of course this does not constitute an argument that programming must be taught as a formal discipline, but it does indicate that formal methods can be useful in some circumstances.
This is probably my number one criticism of most "REST" APIs out there - they are horribly non self-documenting, and the effort required to make them self-documenting is really fairly trivial:

1. Ensure that you have a URI to the resource in question every single time you reference an ID somewhere (in collections, when referencing resources from another resource)

2. Make the root of your application document all the collections available and their respective URIs.

3. Include paging URIs as mentioned in the article.

4. If a resource has nested collections, include URIs to them in your JSON representation of the resource.

Boom! You now have a REST API better than 99% of what's on the web today.
Let us install a set-top box at your place and you should be good to go ! :)
well, it's not like a lot of people are going to watch live american TV from abroad ;)
I hate when people try tell me REST isnt the way to go. I guess if you're an out-dated organization with a lot of time (and money) on your hands, you could stuff around with something else...but why would you in this world as a startup do anything else?

Nice article, i think the world needs a very basic "this is how you use REST" bullet point style blog post somewhere. This lesson would be 1 of those bullet points if i were writing it.
I can't speak to business, but I can about technology. When you're "on the job", you don't have extended periods of time where you have the luxury of studying a complicated topic in depth. Many tech jobs also don't give you the luxury of breadth, but rather are guided by an overarching practical purpose -- to get the "job" done.

Your generalization of the knowledge one gains by doing a degree is much too broad.
I wonder if the innovator's dilemma will apply here, with cheap Android phones (and Windows too) catching up with the iPhone and they can no longer charge a premium.
and this is what i was talking about!
The internet also allows everyone to avoid the crappy teachers, which is hugely valuable.
This is an incredibly depressing post. The discussion over educational reform has devolved into one side begging for teachers to stop being treated like cattle and the other saying, essentially, "if you cared about the kids, you'd be happy being treated like cattle."

Doctors go through significantly more schooling and receive significantly more professional development — yet they are still perceived with respect as professionals who care about their patients. Why can't we do the same for teachers?
Tracking email tasks with munin
I cannot agree with this, at least not entirely. While it is a risky path to tread, historically market leaders have leveraged price to very great effect against newcomers, and newcomers have done the same to crack open closed markets.

See Hyundai, for example. For the past few years they have been leveraging price to gain entry to the North American auto business. It's working.
Or you could just go at your local library/bookstore and get a book about transistors :)

I agree with your general sentiment but I feel like your premise oversimplifies the situation.
"And at its heart, education remains a fundamentally human endeavor."

This is not necessarily true. There may be a way for technology to facilitate the alternative learning methods that the author is suggesting.
It was intended as "whatever you call them" rhetoric.
Am I missing something? No content is loaded when I click any of the tabs in Chrome 16 or Firefox 9.
Am I missing something? I see just a nice big blank page.
Experimenting with GHCJS, the Haskell→JavaScript compiler
I'm not much of a free-marketeer, but if enough people "in the neighborhoods" want to eat at a burger king such that it would be economically viable, why should other people be allowed to prevent them from doing that?
Feedback: When you launch a site like this, it's useful if you seed some content on the site.
Thanks for the suggestion! I just tried this with a recent PSD that a client sent me, but it came back with an error.
It's the same fallacious argument that they could not possibly have rolled out the same improvements if they named it Firefox 4.10 instead of implying that they are rewriting the the whole product from scratch every two weeks.
Doesn't work for me (Chromium 15)
i love the screenshot feature
Not JavaScript, but you can play with Lua in a really nice environment with Codea: http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/
Web workers are not well-supported yet: http://caniuse.com/#feat=webworkers

The most important omissions from that list are IE < 10. Using web workers if present and falling back on a different strategy are probably the right way to go because web workers will finish more quickly.
Has anyone ever made the claim that LW is lampooning? I have only heard that testing early is important because it is expensive to fix mistakes after development, and more expensive after release.

I guess the straw man argument is that design bugs are worse than implementation bugs in a project, but that's also true. In both cases, the issue is that time cures all wounds, where cure is used in the sense of made permanent, not fixed, or fixed is used on the sense of locked, not restored to working order.
Would you please explain STB component of the app? I don't see any.
It's worth noting that achieving immortality isn't just about medical breakthroughs.

Even if one were to have "immortal" cells, an accident resulting in fatal physical trauma would likely occur within about 400 years [0].

[0] http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortality
Cool! It really is an awesome project otherwise. I'll definitely play around with this as some point.
Sometimes I really prefer the manual process. For instance, to really learn what each key stroke does, say adding, merging and pushing some git flow, instead of throwing it all in a Makefile, it's nice to write out the 5 or 6 commands so I know/learn what's really going on. I guess to a point I enjoy this process -- once I fully understand then I can live with automating it.
clickable:
http://zapkast.com
As was noticed a long time ago on roughlydrafted.com (before it became a pure fanboi site without anything interesting to say), it's exactly the same in the PC market. Apple grabs something like 80% of the market in PC over 1000$, hence they grab almost all of the hardware margin; then Microsoft grabs most of what remains, and all PC makers are fighting over breadcrumbs.
I doubt the author has watched many Khan videos; Sal consistently harps on understanding over procedure, while explaining both.

I started at pre-algebra and have kept going - geometry, trig, calc I, II, III, linear algebra - racking up 60 hours of video watch time. Due to lack of practice problems, I probably wouldn't do well on a test; however, I have no problems conversing and theorizing about what I've learned. Due to Sal's method of explanation, I understand the concepts. My entire perspective of reality has changed, for everything, from relationships to spirituality to basic mechanics.

Just a couple of weeks ago, my friend and I were discussing the basic nature of expectations in relationships, and I realized I could prove my points using calculus, and show her how relationships worked in terms of the fundamental theorem. The problem wasn't my understanding, but rather that she would not have understood the language.

Indeed, it seems to me the author has a peeve about a common educational problem, and has ignorantly and unfairly grouped khan with the rest.

The truth is, I would have never done this with any other available system. The overhead of every other method, both in cost and time, is too high.

Long live Khan!
Noty - jquery notification plugin
While this is extremely positive for Apple, it isn't necessarily bad news for Google and Microsoft--their profits and losses simply aren't captured by this chart. It compares profit from a firm that makes both software and hardware with firms that only make the hardware.
"You should believe me because I say so"? Really? I'm not saying you are or are not, but this line of justification is an insult to anyone who considers themselves rational thinkers.
AT&T math: 250MB &lt; 350MB &lt; Unlimited &lt; 3GB &lt; 5GB
misunderstanding 'Unlimited'...and redefining what it means...
they really need to learn and mean what 'Unlimited' means...