skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the success or failure depends on too many factors to just say "It won't work" based on the idea alone.

I remember that just a few years ago (in 2000), Amsterdam aborted a pilot program for public bicycles, because they all got stolen or vandalised [1]. Since 2006 a new nationwide scheme is being operated by the country's largest train company and it's doing great.

I currently live in London and the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme, operated by the TFL, is pretty successful. Successful enough to recently get expanded to cover a greater area [2]. It's not just popular with tourists, but also with people who use it to commute to work. I rarely see a bicycle vandalised and you have to be an idiot to steal one.

Some differences that I think make the London bicycles successful, whereas other plans failed:

1. To hire a bike, you need to either rent one on the spot, or become a member. In both cases, you are using a credit or debit card, knowing that you will be charged if the bike gets stolen or vandalised on your watch. They are also linked to your name.

2. Hiring a bike gets progressively expensive as you keep it longer, so you are likely to return it to a docking point sooner rather than later.

3. The bikes are ugly, heavy and instantly recognisable. Not something you'd like to keep home.

4. The bikes are built like tanks. I don't think it's easy to remove things like bicycle seats etc. at all.

5. The scheme only costs slightly over £50 a year. That is how much I pay in maintenance of my own bike.

6. Even if you buy a bike in London, you cannot always park it at your home or workplace. Renting allows you to bike and just park it in a docking station in the city.

The London bike plan also has plenty of problems (no available docking points, AARGH!), but overall it seems to work pretty well. I wouldn't discount the concept altogether.

[1] http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witte_fiets

[2] http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/media/newscentre/metro/18137...
Is the data used for other applications, like visualizing trends?
Ah, you're correct on the MacBook case. I didn't have any laptops nearby to confirm.

I can't find anywhere on my phone where the serial number's printed, though. The numbers on the back are not the phone's serial number.
> I thought the whole point of managed languages was to abstract this stuff away from the programmer.

It's a leaky abstraction.
I think people can understand that mishaps occur, and can forgive their property going missing/damaged/delayed. What is unforgivable is how airlines delay and refuse reimbursing the traveler for losses incurred instead of simply accepting their responsibility and making the disruption as painless as possible.
'Hybrid' Home Schools Gaining Traction
Both Branch and Medium seems pretty exciting. I can now see why I can live with Twitter as a one-way link sharing media company. However, I can only wish that Branch would let people be in control of the environment they host for authentic conversation, i.e, they should start with tackling the issues of noise, spammers, trolls etc. Make things authentic for people so they feel trust towards conversing online.

Medium seems little confusing at first but as a new publishing platform (over Wordpress and the rest of the old not-so-evolving-anymore), I look forward to participating.
Also, they add benefits to a city that are not easily quantified. They make the city look like a nice place to live, which increases property values, and attracts labor to the workforce. (They still might not be worth it from a taxpayer's viewpoint.)
My favorite Slippery Jim quote:

We must be as stealthy as rats in the wainscoting of their society. It was easier in the old days, of course, and society had more rats when the rules were looser, just as old wooden buildings have more rats than concrete buildings. But there are rats in the building now as well. Now that society is all ferrocrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints. It takes a very smart rat indeed to find these openings. Only a stainless steel rat can be at home in this environment.

This, to me, describes the attitude of hustlers and hackers perfectly (albeit a bit metaphorically).
In a country of 1.2 billion, there will many, many people who are talented way above average.

Someone is a natural theoretical physicist. Others are mathematicians, rocket scientists, or maybe just great electronics and computer engineers. Or great artists.

While it is criminal that many people are suffering like you describe, it is also a (smaller)crime that the talented folks above are denied an outlet. What should they do? Why should they suffer just because the country as a whole has failed to solve poverty and caste issues for centuries?

It is of no use to anyone that these people sit around twiddling their thumbs. Not all of them can leave the country.

The relatively minor amount allocated for Indias space program is well spent.
Edit: To highlight an important part: It may be quicker to get references elsewhere and then check whether they are on Safari, than to try to find the best choices directly through the Safari interface.

E.g. For one, off the top of my head, the reading list cited/linked by tptacek on his HN profile:

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek

--

At certain times, you can get the first year of unlimited-level Safari for $30/month instead of $43/month. I've only seen this for a month period around January or February, but some Googling might turn up an alternate means to get this deal.

Safari has a subset of publisher Addison Wesley's books. Many of these are quite good. E.g. some on networking, some on "Effective X" (Ruby, Perl, etc.)

More recent O'Reilly texts I have found to be hit and miss. Go back 5 or 10 years, and the overall level of quality seems to me to have been significantly higher.

Safari also has some (but by no means all) books published by Manning, No Starch, MS Publishing (e.g. Code Complete (2), IIRC), etc. It may be quicker to get references elsewhere and then check whether they are on Safari, than to try to find the best choices directly through the Safari interface.

Safari will carry multiple editions. Make sure you're looking at the latest.

After a couple of years of Safari, I personally feel I would have been better off just purchasing eBooks (e.g. O'Reilly eBooks are DRM free and often available at discount through promotions) that I would continue to have access to indefinitely and without a network connection.
Amazon Cloudfront has been total crap lately. We'll figure out some way to fix this...
If we're golfing:

https://github.com/quartzjer/js0n/blob/master/js0n.c

Appears to work the same way, though it doesn't bubble back type information.

(Also, the `goto * go[ * cur];` trick was pretty crazy the first time I saw it)
Again -- where all those cars will be parked, knowing before I would either take a cab, or take a public transportation?

Will we get millions of parkings underground built the same time AC hit the streets? Dont think so.

Further, you saying that removing cabbie will cut the cost. Hmm.. my take is that it is the city that makes the most money out of cabbies. I can bet my left arm (Im lefty) that if the city will realize they losing large chunk of money due to AC driving everywhere, I am sure they will smack you with such an AC ride tax that taxis will become again a reasonable alternative!
There doesn't need to be control taken; instead, the government could just buy the patents to the best codecs and open them up. Software infrastructure, if you will.

It's sad and ironic that Google is doing this more effectively than We The People, it least in cases where their interests are aligned with the commons.
LaGuardia is like that. It's everyone's favorite airport to fly out of (apparently, I hate it), so there is no financial incentive to make it nice.
I've worked on more than one thousand+ machine distributed systems. These systems all use unix sockets extensively. Unix sockets are pretty much independent from each other from the developer's perspective. Scheduling and coordination is not a concern of the socket layer of the stack.

In most production distributed systems, there is an agreed upon common RPC protocol and a variety of ad-hoc messaging protocols. Often, this is HTTP for RPC coupled with a variety of job worker systems, maybe an "enterprise" message broker, and line-oriented protocol or two, and a few other custom services.

ZeroMQ isn't trying to replace unix sockets. Nor is it trying to be a panacea for distributed systems. It's trying to standardize a set of sound topology patterns with robust implementations over a common protocol. It's a damn useful tool for distributed systems. If you're system has everyone all chatting at once and saturating your links, that's not ZeroMQ's problem any more than it's unix sockets' problem.
Stop existing and start living: How o dramatically change your life in 1 week
26 million of what, though? I don't recall seeing that mentioned in the article. Are we talking 5%, 10%, 35%? What is an acceptable failure rate? Us programmers aren't perfect, either. Or course, it's not justification, but it would sure help put things in perspective.

A family member of mine worked for an airline on the ground post 9/11 and, barring a major issue at the departing airport, there weren't very many problems. The worst circumstances were short layovers (which usually arrived on the next flight and sent to their address) or reroutes to the wrong destination (which this person took the fall for, obviously, as it was all in their control).
They won't have different iPhones on sale they will have 'iPhone'. But there will be different prices levels and spec levels, just like with computers.

I very much doubt it, given that Apple seems to do all that it can to hide the specs of the iPhone to consumers. And rightly so, IMO- a 1.2GHz CPU vs a dual core 1GHz processor means absolutely nothing. The model numbers they have right now makes a lot more sense.
Montreal has the same system (Bixi), with exactly the same sturdy features as the London system. Some local management issues aside, the system is running quite smoothly.

It's a stretch to say "This will never work!" when something already is working, and avoiding the specific issues complained about.
"streaming, distributed parallel calculations" certainly agree on these ones, maybe the code just change from app logic to these things...
How to Setup an Upload Handler for Redactor using Django
on that note, does anyone know what patents for h.264 are still valid, and for how much longer? I've been looking for that info for quite a while now, without success.
First Waco, then Megaupload.
Older version of Chrome was the strange part. I was assuming effects were getting offloaded to GPU.
should websites outside of the U.S also do this?
and I'm not sure this will happen, computational power is becoming so cheap I don't think it would make any sense to offload it to google
I was thinking the same... although with a little less doom & gloom. One of the reasons ZipCar, et al. have been successful is they exist in places where owning a car is impractical (infrequent use vs. price tag, upkeep & parking fees) so short term, ad hoc rental is optimal. If you remove the costs (since bikes can be pretty cheap, low maintenance and easy to store in your domicile) infrequent use does not make bike ownership nearly as impractical as car ownership. I could see moderate success in a tourist market. I could see jumping on BART into SF and renting a bike to ride around for the day. Those services exist but not in a "self serve" capacity like ViaCycle.
"The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both." - Lao-Tzu
While I wish I could comment in depth on the subject, I will add Rio de Janeiro to the list. Here, we have orange Itaú (a bank that sponsors the program) bicycles throughout the city and they're quite popular. You sign up online and they have some sort of integration with your smartphone. I was recently informed they are R$10 (US$5) per month on a monthly plan. The downside is, also from what I've heard, you have to dock them every hour and take another bike.

Here's a picture of them

http://www.bikehype.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/alugue...

and a supporting article

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/global-observer/take-two-for...
YEah true, though I wonder in the new world of self-driving cars whether some incentives for motorcyle driving will go away.. that and I imagine a decent tranche of motorcyle accidents are caused by cars.
now it is: 'modern'
Amazon reviews from people you know are better than you (many HN regulars, Peter Norvig etc) has worked for me.

For any given topic there are usually a few 'classics' amongst umpteen flim flam frothy books. At least for technical topics, you can just ask on HN (or email any HNer say tptacek for security related books, patio11 for SEO etc) and get some good recommendations.
It does no runtime memory allocation, and since it doesn't depend on libc and has a very small size, it can be used on highly resource-constrained embedded processors.
"building beautiful, meaningful things. Things that people want."

Just because people want what you've built does not necessarily make it meaningful. Meaning is a very subjective, personal thing, based on your core values. What person x finds meaningful and is willing to pay for, person y may think is meaningless. So ask yourself whether you want to build something meaningful to you, based on your core values or do you just want to build the next hot game/app/whatever, and get rich. There's nothing wrong with the latter, but be honest with yourself.
Here's a slightly different perspective.

I'm part of a group blog with an active community, and we've experimented with various commenting systems. Our problem hasn't been getting user engagement, it's getting quality engagement. The nature of our blog (a cultural blog) unfortunately invites a lot of trollish and abusive comments.

We've experimented with our blogging platform's native comment system, Disqus, LiveFyre, and Facebook. Right now, we've got Facebook Comments active. The number of abusive comments seems to have decreased, as have the number of good comments (most probably because of the barriers of using Facebook). So the jury is still out on which is best for us.

Looking at TechCrunch's comments, it doesn't look like Facebook Comments has helped their quality level that much - though it's much better than Disqus.

So I'd advise understanding your audience before deciding which comment system is best for your site. Each system has its pros & cons. You just have to determine if the cons are worth the pros for you.
Heh, the cure sounds worse than the disease. "Make the bikes so unpleasant that no will want to steal them (or use them)."

I agree that there is room for creativity here. There are so many things to try. For instance, I noticed that ViaCycle seems to be piloting on college campuses. Might it be possible to put docking stations _inside_ of academic buildings, requiring a college ID swipe to get in, and possibly being within viewing distance of a building attendant?
National Geographic 2012 Photo Contest Winners
Can we get some neutral coverage on this guy once in a while? Why always torrentfreak?
Dumb question: are there any reasons not to install the updated JDK/JRE?

E.g., any known backward compatibility issues or bad experiences anyone's encountered (aside from looking bad on a retina display)?
Italy's Lost Generation
From the numbers given for US carriers, it looks like US carriers lose about 0.5% of baggage.

That's equal or higher to FedEx's loss rate, based on numbers I've seen inferred from their insurance rates and the assumption that the insurance rates are set to at least cover their costs.

Given that checked bags cost money now, why not send your bags by FedEx to your hotel? You'll likely reduce your risk of losing them, and you won't have to deal with carrying them to and from the airport.
You've not seen ugly code until you've read 90s-era Win32 UI code written with Hungarian notation everywhere. Ugly code comes from the programmer, not the language.
I haven't seen anybody else cover the story.
Google ranking The Pirate Bay (and others) lower
Previous discussion on the article he's talking about: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4326647
Dropbox In Space
Don't Be Afraid of Git: The Basics
Here is the comparison between different web browsers. Note that the image does not even load in IE8, so it is not included.

http://i.imgur.com/ibi7I.png
Yeah, I know... I'm just ranting I suppose.
I had no idea closing costs were so high (~6%). Guess I'll be waiting to buy a house for a little longer than I thought.
Flip side: with accurate and trusted self-driving cars in mass use, speed limits could be raised, car following distances can be reduced. There's no need to keep traffic controls and flow patterns that were designed for humans when instead there's a network of autonomous vehicles.

Wouldn't it be fantastic to get on a freeway where the speed limit's well over 80, because the vehicles have necessary reaction times and are guaranteed to be well maintained (why not have a car take itself in for routine and regular maintenance when it's not in use)?

And regardless, sign me up for Florida octogenarian driving patterns. I'd love to get in a vehicle that takes me point to point with no effort on my part. I can read, nap, work, or fully interact with other passengers – things I can't do when my attention must be focused on controlling the vehicle and monitoring traffic around my car.
CRONY CAPITALISM . . . AGAIN
As far as I can tell, this is for running JVM code on the GPU (CUDA, etc.), not graphics.
One convention I use in lots of my code, where I'm doing typical file-esque type stuff, is to call my input file object `inf` and my output file `outf`. Makes it nice and easy to keep them straight.
3to2 as I understand it works best for supporting Python 2.6 and 2.7

Django had committed to supporting older versions of Python 2.x that weren't Python 3 friendly (largely because of older installations of RHEL and CentOS).

Here was a discussion asking about dropping 2.4 support during development of Django 1.3:
http://python.6.n6.nabble.com/Django-1-3-and-Python-2-4-td50...

Django 1.2 still supported Python 2.3+, Django 1.3 supported Python 2.4+, Django 1.4 supported Python 2.5+.

Django 1.5 (which is the current trunk) finally has Python 2.6.5 as its minimum platform which reduces some of the major compatibility pain points.
Unconed abandons GitHub termkit code
The feeds are there: https://groups.google.com/group/golang-weekly/feeds?hl=en

RSS or Atom, for you to choose. Worked with Google Reader for me.
Concerning the design of the bikes, I think there is still room for improvement. The designers can look at the design of the Public Transportation Bike ("OV-Fiets") in the Netherlands[1] which was a major success in a country where there already were more bikes than people before it's introduction.

For a bike that is available 24 you would want a bicycle lamp on the front with a dynamo instead of just reflectors. This is a safety concern because reflectors have proven to be unreliable to signal other road users.

The bike doesn't have any mudguards but I suspect the weather in SF allows that :).

The carrier on the back wheel doesn't look that sturdy and there is a large gap in the middle. A front rack to place heavier cargo on could be a benefit.

What about bright colors so the bike stands out?

[1]http://www.ov-fiets.nl/binaries/content/gallery/OV-fiets/nie...
Not specific to hacker culture, but I always felt there was a bit of a double standard when it comes to alpha male behavior. Women are attracted to aggressive men. Women like men who take charge. Women like men who are the initiators. Now obviously there is a line that crosses over into sexual harassment, but the fact is that men who behave aggressively are the ones who succeed in sexual pursuits most often. It's almost as if when the girl is attracted to the guy, it's flirting, but when she isn't, it's creepy/sexual harassment. I wish it weren't like this because I, personally, am not very aggressive.

I'm not trying to defend the behavior described in the article, I'm just saying that men act like that because it works.
>Like the man who drunkenly tried to lick my shoulder tattoo. Like the man who grabbed my hips while I was waiting for a drink at the EFF party. Like the man who tried to get me to show him my tits so he could punch a hole in a card that, when filled, would net him a favor from one of the official security staff (...) Or lastly, the man who, without prompting, interrupted my conversation and asked me if I'd like to come back to his room for a "private pillowfight party."

Ugh! Words fail me.
Not yet, but I did think briefly about plotting purchases of a product across days.

Any other ideas regarding visualization?
Nope, never got published. Our first project in grad school was writing a report on "The service centric car of 2020" [1] (don't read, it's bad). I spun off a project called "Sustainable urban mobility in the megacities of the future" with a friend and we both landed scholarships to do research in the US and publish a paper on it. Then I got involved with startups and was never heard or seen again in academia (I think I'm technically "on leave" from school)

[1] http://www.cdtm.de/events/entrepreneurship-camp/about-cdtm/b...
Yea right...why will they try to even think of this? They are on a suicide mission by stopping support.