skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's the key...taxis are heavily regulated in the US, and the penalties are strict for overcharging customers, not using the meter, etc. The cost of taxi medallions in major cities is extremely high, so taxi operators take extreme caution not to get in trouble.

In countries I've been to where regulation is more lax, or where bribes are common to circumvent regulation (e.g. Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand), drivers were more likely to try to rip you off, like trying to charge you a flat rate that is double or triple what the meter would have been. In places I've been where regulation is more strict (US, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan), taxi drivers have been more honest (e.g. insisting on using the meter, not trying to charge extra fees).

It tends to be the wealthier countries I've been to that are stricter with regulations.
Getting AutoComplete Suggestions From Google
would this guy be ok if someone 'reverse engineered' his email password.
Every product wants to protect its IP in some sense...google won't like if someone reverse engineered their search ranking, apple won't obviously like if someone hacked the iphone to run android, intel won't like if someone was able to reverse engineer the chip design and then sell it for a tenth of the cost..heck would these guys like if I was able to hack their app and bypass the license check?

Certain internal software API's are as much intellectual property as is the physical hardware design.
Manufacturing a firearm with a 3D printer would be a federal crime in the USA. That's not why I asked.

I'm more interested in actual costs of the democratization of force for places that don't already have weapons (unlike the USA).

Stop assuming that this.country == "US" when you talk to people on the internet, please.
It worked for me. I've been blogging since 1999 (when it wasn't even called blogging) and even in the mid 2000s people asked me why I bothered. I wasn't really sure why at the time either..

.. but blogging led to me being discovered by an editor at Apress who asked me to write a book about Ruby (which I'd been blogging about). That led to a blog I created to promote the book that then became the most popular Ruby blog and was my main source of income for several years. I won't give the rest of the life story but it went on to getting funding for a startup, selling that startup, being invited to chair an O'Reilly conference, and more. All from that "unimportant" personal blog. So I totally buy into this idea!
I can only imagine that:

1) HP makes a profit when people buy this $699 printer (though not as large as when they sell four ink tanks without a printer for $822);

2) Every printer re-purchase helps maintain their 40% marketshare in the printer business, if it's measured by printers sold rather than cartridges sold;

3) Every printer re-purchase keeps a sale away from Brother or another competitor;

4) HP's printing division has now been merged into the declining PC division, so nobody would notice the declining printer margins amongst lower-margin PC's anyway.

"HP's new CEO Meg Whitman, who calls the printing division "the lifeblood of HP," responded to the decline by folding it into the PC division, which saw a 15% drop in revenue last quarter. That will solve one problem: concealing the extent of the decline in HP's printer margins by blending it with lower-margin PCs. More practically, it could give HP greater leverage in negotiating prices with component suppliers."

From: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/03/29/hps-printer-problem/
I'm surprised no one has mentioned haptics in this thread. Novint for example produces commercial haptic controllers. Haptics are what can get your controller to magically stop mid-air.
A very good point. Nobody likes talking about how owning >50% of the nodes let's you decide the fate of the network...
Quoting from the article:

>>In South Korea 26 percent of the population belong to a Christian denomination...

>> Creationism in South Korea gained more attention following the 1980 World Evangelisation Crusade, which was held in Seoul. The following year, the Korea Association for Creation Research was setup. The association’s website stays up to date with current evolutionary research, publishing news stories that often state the facts as published, before going on to poke holes in the results, point out that “accidents” of “random mutations” were surely by design, before finishing off with a few references to “the Creator”.

Looks like a direct import of American evangelism to a distant land...
It's dailymail... does it really belong here?
Suzy Miss A dan 2PM Menjadi Model Baru Untuk Caribbean Bay
First impression: APL does not handle high HTTP traffic well.
> seems a bit like reductio ad asurdum right?

That's because the grandparent's claim is absurd. Grandparent was actually claiming that you should do anything for a customer. I'm not exaggerating its position at all; that's actually what grandparent said. Absurd position yields absurd counterargument.

With AirBnB, you have an example of one small company that needed to hear the customer service message. But one example is not much of an argument when somebody posits a general trend.

I can defend the trend easily: a small company depends much more on customer service than a large one does. The first group of customers is make-or-break; once you reach a certain funding level, pleasing every single customer is less of an issue.
A Redditor's description of Hacker News
They're not as fast though. And unless you really care about size, a 65 watts doesn't matter. I've got a dead silent system with an 85W gpu and a geforce 9800 gxt+. (one fan in it, but it's a low voltage Noctua that can't be heard even with my ear right against it. psu is fanless)

I appreciate your sentiment for colder hardware. I do hope it's going to get there some day, but not at the cost of speed. I think we've reached a situation where it's becoming more and more practical to have silent PCs.
Does “overall health” mean being disease- and parasite-free, though? There's at least one disease I heard of from which the case may actually benefit with increased lifespan[0]. That said, I tend to agree that to equate fitness with health probably isn't correct either.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celiac_disease#Screening
where are you hosting that the cost is only $5/month?
Circular Template Inheritance in Django
I just spent half an hour reading through that. Interesting but scary how committed people get to their conspiracy theories.
This is a very interesting, focused service. I like how you quietly create a phantom account so users don't need to login to start working.

btw, I think I broke your site when trying to upload two test PDFs. The first worked correctly, but second never finished processing and now every page says "Application Error". The Done button on BoxySign's Account Settings dialog does not seem to work (but the X button does).

Also, the sharable URLs seemed disconcertingly short for documents that may contain private information.
Knuth on KMP algorithm
Regulations in Spain and Greece are somehow strict: a special licence, somehow equivalent to the New York medallion is required.

Furthermore, at least in Spain, being "a taxi driver" is a form of cultural identity. Typically, regulations specify that either the licence holder ora first-degree relative should drive the car.
The original printer claims it comes with 6000 page yield color cartridges but a 5500 page yield starter cartridge for the black.

There are also 2000 page low yield color and 11000 page high yield black cartridges available.

The replacement cartridges he is looking at are 6000 page yield for color and 11000 for black. So the black is twice the capacity of the original.

You can also find aftermarket compatible toner, the high yield version 10,000 black and 6,000 for each color, for $330 for a complete set of cartridges for this machine - http://www.lenscomputers.com/hp-m551-vp.html.
> Your second-hand source doesn't show "tons of budget cuts." It says that the 2012 budget is 20% less than the budget four years earlier

We may have different definitions of "budget cut." That, or you object to the adjective I used. What adjective you would use if your pay was cut by 20% for four years? I suppose most people would use a four-letter one, but I could be wrong.

To be honest, though, I consider this whole thread a derail. I wanted to find out how the federal courts were doing, not to get attacked by someone stressed out over taxes.
I've long had poor feelings about Cygwin being slow and a poor solution. I wanted something that didn't try quite so hard to completely distance itself from Windows.

So, instead, I've been using MinGW's msys project. I don't think it is quite as small, but it does offer a package manager.

One small thing in msys that I particularly like is that I can do thins like:
cd //server/share/some/directory
I never saw powershell or cygwin do that. On Solaris I can configure automount to do that which is good enough, but just working is also nice.
Came here to post that. The fact that Intel's version, years later, sports half the TDP and half the size isn't an innovation, it's just an optimization. As much as I hate Apple hardware I must again admit they did a thing there worth considering. No idea why you got the downvotes.
I've found that I spend more than a day tweaking my setup - I generally tweak mine once a week. Not huge changes, just useful settings in Vim, or new plug ins and whatnot.How are you getting the angled colors in your Tmux status line?
Reports: UBS may have $350M Facebook trade losses
The current problem in the Euro is too much disincentive (credit risk) for borrowing - because the borrowings built up in the past (when there was too much incentive). The incentive in the past was because there was a fixed money supply that no country controlled (i.e. a lot like gold or bitcoin) which meant that countries with a surplus (like Germany, exported more than they imported, leading to more currency going in than out) had to find a use for that money so they lent it out.

The austerity that everyone except Germany wants eased is deflation in action. And pretty much every economist agrees that it's disastrous for the countries following those policies; much better would be floating currencies and inflation getting rid of the debt instead.

(In other words, I think you have it almost 100% backwards.)
Why isn't Java used for modern web application development?
According to CrunchBase Meebo took in about 70 million in investment over the course of the company. They started in 2005 and kept growing so you might guess their burn rate is about a million bucks per month. (LinkedIn lists 160 Meebo employees, so a million might even be way low)

Perhaps 6-12 million dollars is insignificant by your standards, but if they don't have the dough then they have to close up shop. You could argue that they could fire everybody and just keep a skeleton crew to keep the site running for a year, probably much cheaper. But what purpose would that serve for them? It would be a dead company at that point.
Thomas Earl Hamilton Marsden | Thomas Hamilton, 9th Earl of Haddington
I Update, Therefore I Am
>I'd guess that the algorithm "map number of Microsoft Word reported spelling errors from (0 -> 800) to (20 -> 400)" does a pretty damn good job of guessing students' SAT Writing scores.

The best part about that is the fact that people misspell words even with spellcheck! Come on, how hard is it to notice the squiggly lines and correct your error by picking the correct spelling from the drop down list?

And I wouldn't say what I produce is shit, but then I would have said that when I was twelve. And I mostly have to double time on projects and essays, so they probably are shit.

EDIT: And since losethos (Schizophrenic dude who's hellbanned.) asked, the boss; it's pretty clever to use someones tendency for pedantry against them.
On{X} Market, a marketplace to share and sell on{X} Recipes
> Nice read.

Thanks, made it into a blog post: http://cheater.posterous.com/art-and-values

> if I still remember the idea a week from now, two weeks from now ... whatever. If I have an idea consistently for a long period of time, then there's probably something there.

Hmm, I think you're losing out a lot by not making an honest effort to work on your ideas.

Something insignificant today could be important ten years from now, that's why photographers often have such huuuuuge collections of photos.

I'd also venture a guess that sometimes your work is repetitive. If you start recording what you did when then you can notice this and 1. stop repeating yourself 2. start re-using the work that really does need to be repeated

But the biggest reason to keep a scrapbook is that quite often the best ideas work like this for me: I have an idea today, two months down the line I get something in my mind and I try to compare it to things already in my scrapbook; turns out it's that idea from two months ago. Then, a year or so down the line I'll revisit it, and come up with a tiny detail that makes the thing complete and ten times better. Ideas are like puzzles, and sometimes you get a new piece every ten years. By not keeping a scrapbook I deprived myself of the ability to solve the puzzles of my life. It was like some Kafkan nightmare where I ran around in circles with no apparent purpose and nothing to show for all my effort.
Interesting - as a private citizen, I was under the impression that I could not own a fully-auto assault rifle. I'd be interested in hearing sources that point to the contrary.

Great point about the democratization of force. I wonder if it's any easier than obtaining them on the black market in those countries.
Laptop juices smartphone in Intel demo at Computex (w/ Video)
As mentioned by JackC, if you need to understand the context in which a method is called, use a REPL. But to understand what a pure method does should be context free, by definition.
I just watched[1] Super 8[2] last night, sounds familiar, maybe he did too.

[1] Not that good of a film, sorry...

[2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1650062/
Yes, yes, very funny. The unmentioned part is the guy who doesn't say a word, but learns quite a bit about the underlying technology from the discussion between all the "characters" ...

The great part about HN is the learning, not the trolling.
Facebook: Smells Like Enron
If it's really so risk-free, then others would provide competition with lower rates, less down, payment-free period, etc.
Small E.coli strain outbreak
This story links to the parent comment. Here is the comment actually describing HN: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/uqii2/xipio_a_m.... Linking to the parent is unnecessary - you can add "?context=1" to the URL to show the parent of a Reddit comment.
I guess the idea of just blacklisting the client's IP after the first 1,048,576 failed attempts is too boring, or has some other drawback.
How to overcome resistance to work
>It doesn't surprise me at all that so many beautiful iOS apps are created in XCode

Seems like a spurious correlation to me. Both Xcode and the iOS frameworks were designed by Apple, a company known for their excellent interface design and aesthetically pleasing look and feel. iOS apps aren't beautiful because Xcode is beautiful. iOS apps and Xcode are beautiful because Apple designed their interface elements.
Apple's great achievement has been the cultivation of this intense variety of brand tribalism.

The purchase is not merely an exchange of money for a product that gives pleasure or does what it's expected to. It certainly isn't the guilty pleasure of someone who recognizes that they are consuming more than they really need to. No, it has a kind of ceremonial importance. It is a badge of social honor and distinction, a proof of discerning taste which sets the buyer apart from the grubby masses and puts them in the company of Personalities even as they enjoy the new-box smell and savor the kinds of product claims that we are jaded to in most advertising.

So it is that a post about configuring free tools for productivity results in a paean to Linus Torvalds, MacBook Air, Vitamix, Moccamaster, and your real passion for beautiful, most beautiful, stunningly beautiful, truly good, beautiful, simple, high quality, high-quality, feel good. The 99 names of Apple.
> Governments create money "by fiat" and then pay people with it and collect it from people. FIat money is not debt.

Actually, the typical way modern central banks create money\* is by giving out loans (consisting of money they just created) to banks, which must post some collateral for it. When it's paid back, the money returned to the central bank is destroyed.

This is done to create a "spring" effect in the money supply -- as having money in existence has a cost, it prevents too much liquidity pooling up in the economy. If the banks are not using the money, they want to pay it back to the central banks to get rid of the interest payments.

\* Most money is not created by the central banks, but by the commercial banks, by using fractional reserves to "multiply" the money supply. However, fractional reserves always use the central-bank-created "base money" as the base they multiply.
Linux Developers Hit Undo (Software) To Go Forward
The fonts he mentions aren't bad; I think though, that Monaco is quite possibly the finest font ever made. I've yet to see a font that beats its cleanliness and legibility.
Kendo's pretty far from realistic fighting. The fact that it's a contact sport is cool, though.
> You're demanding hard conclusions where there aren't any.

I am demanding hard conclusions, failing which I am demanding you don't make any if you aren't sure(gender difference became apparent to me that day, gender segregation works etc).

> It's the difference between correlation and causation, and correlation is not "meaningless."

I didn't claim correlation is meaningless - I just claimed you are claiming correlation, and for fuck's sake, causation, when there isn't any.

Correlation is when 2 random variables aren't probabilisticaly independent. If you can cite me correlation between gender and behavioral traits when it comes to learning, and that study isn't some crackpot theory based on how I taught a ruby workshop, I am more than willing to be corrected.
But this article advocates using automated grading to reduce costs and free up teacher time for better things.
So what I'm wondering, and this is an open question to everyone here: would anything convince you, personally, that gender bias is real, or has a significant measurable effect, or is a problem? Would it take a certain kind of experiment? Some kind of data or analysis? (Or is the answer, "it's not a problem"?) Like, what sorts of articles would people _not_ jump on the bandwagon to tear to shreds?

Yeah, this is extremely simple, and I've asked for this probably a dozen times in various forums without receiving any answer whatsoever, let alone a satisfactory one: show me some indication that discrimination is worse in tech than any other field. Not just that the gender ratio is skewed, or evidence for that, but that the behavior you'd like to blame that on is actually worse enough here than in other fields to justify the massive gender gap here.

That should be easy, right? If the reason women don't go into tech at a 4:1 ratio is that all of us fucktard guys are assholes, it should be easy to pull numerical evidence of that fact, I'd think.

The wage gap should be more pronounced than in most fields, right?

Or the number of sexual assault/harassment incidents per woman should be higher than in other fields, surely?

Ok, or maybe more women leave the workforce in this field per year than in others, presumably because of the horrible atmosphere that us piggish guys create?

Don't just tell me that it's hard for women in tech, that could merely be because this is a hot button issue and there are few women in tech; show me that it's worse than it is elsewhere, in all of those other fields where women have their asses grabbed every day yet still keep on keeping on, without (for instance) blog posts blaming the lack of women in waitressing on the harassment that waitresses get from men in the field. Give me some explanation for the fact that the harassment my girlfriend receives every day in retail, including from her male boss (and this is not unusual, I know dozens of women in retail), beats out the worst of the women-in-tech harassment horror stories, yet her field is better than 50/50 women to men. I need something, because to me it seems like there's something a lot more important and powerful going on than mere sexism, which is everywhere and still doesn't keep women from taking jobs.
Ted Dziuba is starting over
Thanks for the book suggestion, I just purchased it. I had been looking to read a book about Medieval times but hadn't taken the time to find out what one to read. The reviews look promising.
New Lawsuit Threatens Netflix Stock
As a freelance developer you don't have to build things that are profitable. You just need to build something for someone with money that they think will be profitable. I don't know how many stupid products I've built that I don't personally find to be profitable.

It's easy to find many products that are wanted by only one person. Therefore, consulting is easy. Building a startup is about finding one product that many people want, which is much more difficult.
I am not saying like it's a bad thing. I am pointing out a group of students isn't going to be consistent and coherent for a group size > 1. At a broader level, if you are claiming that a group of females is different from a group of males, that is true; but that is meaningless since a group of females is again different from a group of females.
Exactly what I was thinking. The ability to reliably predict human scores, says more about the terrible way we "standardize" creative writing, than about the quality of the algorithms.

If the grading curve of an essay is a checklist how is this finding a surprise?
I agree. A robotic arm (even a weighted stand with a hard plastic arm and thin plastic sword) seems pretty much required to get realistic sword fighting in. A good camera on the base that keeps an eye of where the "sword" is could do a reasonable job of keeping it from hitting most things, yeah?

And I think people wouldn't have a problem with it. They made room for the entire Rock Band ensemble. Just make it fold flat-ish to stow under a couch or in a closet.
What's new with Isolator++
DejaVu Sans Mono is a must have (or a must try at least). It has 10x more Unicode glyphs than any other monospaced font out there, and is easy on the eyes (close call with Monaco on readability I'd say). Menlo is just an Apple-botched version of DejaVu (saying this as an Apple fan btw), without the extra glyphs.

With DejaVu, you can easily get awesome things like: ▷ λ ⇒ ≤ ⊥ ⧺ ∈ ∆ ⤜ ∅ ∑ ≡ ∘ √ (all in true monospace that plays nicely with Vim!). I have to admit this may not be for everyone :), but fun to hack Haskell with.
Another reason you should learn to code: Python for Excel
I have to say; sword fighting is perhaps the least interesting subject I could imagine, but since it's Neil Stephenson, he can have my money. I also enjoyed the part where he threw the cookbook at Sir Dumbass.
Great thread! I love seeing actual projects people are working on.

I wrote a 55-page eBook on starting a profitable drop shipping business which has been downloaded over 500 times in less than a month (http://www.ecommercefuel.com/profitable-ecommerce-ebook/). I started writing in late April and released it May 15th.

Since I'm giving the eBook away and my monetization goals are mostly long term, revenues have been very minimal - less than $100 in affiliate commissions so far. But in 2.5 months since I launched the blog, I've received nearly 10,000 visits and almost 600 subscribers which I've been really happy about...