skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"in some cases speed limits are justified".

But many believe they're not. In my case, I believe most speed limits were set for a prior age, and modern cars can safely handle more than the obsolete speed limits now.

There are endless discussions here on speed limits, and they are mostly negative about their effects:

http://www.google.com/#q=speed+limits+site:news.ycombinator....

fleitz - "Interestingly, most accidents occur below the speed limit and increasing speed limits decrease accidents"

"in Montana after a Judge invalidated their speeding laws as unconstitutional the number of accidents dropped"

http://www.hwysafety.com/hwy_montana.htm

"Speed limits on roads are almost always political decisions, not engineering ones. How else do you explain the straight as an arrow, flat as a pane of glass, brand-spanking-new, 60mph limit roads crisscrossing the american midwest"

The best speed limits I've seen were on German highways - they were variable speed limits based on road conditions (that actually made sense !!! ).
Perhaps you should look into solutions that could stunt the Croydonization, Shoreditchization and Finsburyization of the UK instead of turning cynical and bitter about the increasingly diminished role that the UK plays on the world stage.

The UK has showered herself with a surfeit of entitlements, post-war, that she no longer can pay for.
Time to perhaps start making things that the world wants to pay for, besides bespoke umbrellas.
Note that the article you submitted has a trailing /, this submission doesn't and so was not detected by HN as a duplicate story - or so it seems.
You're wrong about that last as a matter of law (at least in the US). Anyone creating a sexual image of a subject who is 17 or younger is guilty of creating child pornography, no matter what the circumstances are. I'm sure that if Congress had considered the case of 17-year-olds taking pictures of themselves they would have written the law differently, but they didn't. One would also hope that prosecutors would exercise discretion about prosecuting these cases, but while some might others certainly don't.
My first reaction to this was "No... Really???" with an obvious ironic tone.

The fact of the matter is, we are a product of our environment and we naturally try to pick up our traits, values, expressions and emotions from everything and everyone around us. But since books pull you in so much, it's easier to become influenced by them than, say, a short movie. I didn't need OSU to tell me this.

However, one critical point here is that the effect is often temporary. I've also noticed that often, where I will have a sudden boost of inspiration and energy after reading a particularly uplifting book, but this only lasts for days or weeks, depending on the book.

And that, my friends, explains why self-help books sell so much.
Three ways of building confidence on stage and making the audience listen to you
As an Indian I think you and your countrymen (used in the gender-neutral sense) do have the right to criticize/guide your country's spending. And with respect to the US's military budget, you have to think of it as our form of welfare. Most of that budget goes to overpaid company executives, managers and maybe even engineers. Our economy would be in tatters without that spending (or maybe we're in tatters now but would be naked otherwise).

I'd love to see more of our budget employ people doing useful things (directly employ I mean) ... and space science seems like a good long-term investment. So I'll cheer for India's success and lament its problems along with you, but I haven't a right to dictate its policy.
Can you name a time in history when it was not like this?
Growing a Full-Featured Calculator in 15 Minutes Using Dropincc.java
Yeah. How about providing electricity to villages and providing actual+reliable broadband connectivity to the country. People die of hunger and cold in India.
To expand on that Mint never stores your account passwords. Yodlee does and provides the data back to Mint. Here are their security claims: http://www.yodlee.com/security.html

As one data point, my credit union specifically recognizes accesses to my account from Yodlee, due to my Mint usage.
I didn't mean stealing from any particular entity. It was more in a "nabbing" sort of way, a little like saying "The Beatles stole the heart of many of a generation's women". They obviously weren't pulling hearts out of teenagers :)
The 'compile in the middle of my macro' problem is a tricky one. writeLaTeX won't interrupt you with errors while you keep typing, but that's the best I've managed so far.

Support for other backends is definitely planned.

Thanks for the feedback!
Spread the dollar as in a welfare nation?
I think they could use less of that. They are just emerging now from decades of central planning and control which has stagnated growth.
As are the Russians.
If anything, they need a larger ampule of capitalism.
It doesn't necessarily, but I find myself spending too much time tweaking visual appearance and layout if I compile too often. I prefer (if I can manage the self-control) to write up a semantically oriented LaTeX document and then only do a round of layout-tweaking (e.g. babying the figure-placement algorithm) at the end.
well nice going google, first effectively kill or setback html5 video by torpedoing everyone with their anti h264 campaign and then get f*ed up the bum by them.

(here's a guy who 2 years ago said that flash is effectively dead long live html5 video)

pps. i won't really miss flash. but i do miss the time where every site had h264 vids up
Your site appears to be open source and you haven't mentioned anywhere that it isn't okay for someone to use your code. Your repository doesn't have a license or mention if it's okay for people to re-use elements, but I (and the OP too?) would assume that if it's open source (unless otherwise stated) it's free for anyone to use whatever. He probably should have given credit, but I don't think it would be considered "stealing".
How long does it take your servers to finish POST? Shaving CPU cycles on boot is not something I ever worry about, because just getting to the boot loader takes minutes.

Also, shell scripts rock for an init system language. It's a language that almost everyone knows and can debug without being a CS major. The only reason you 'have no idea what happened' is because the scripts are written poorly, and code in any language would be hard to debug if it's written poorly.

Fork and exec, seriously? You're worried about functions that take microseconds to finish? Look again - the huge sleep cycles to wait for drivers to finish initializing takes up a lot more time.

I have written my own init systems three times in three languages, and examined countless distros' versions. Trust me, shell is the best compromise.
really? it's strange to you that it's smooth on an i7? If it wasn't smooth on an i7, what would it be smooth on?
IoDeck - Create & Manage All Your Forms (PHP Form Generator)
ioDeck is probably the best PHP form management tool out there at the moment. ioDeck is very intuitive and can create forms within seconds.
Last.json
I love using my iPhone without a case. Been case-less since 2007. Feels so nice in the hand and slides into my pocket more easily without a case. Reminds me of this line from Steven Levy's Wired piece where he's talking to Jobs: "When I pulled out my iPod—I was using it as a recording device—he was horrified to see that it was covered by a plastic case, something that he considered an abomination."
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/ff_stevejobs/all/1
We started out with Asana and moved to Trello. The problem with Asana was that it was a very good write only interface, but ultimately it didn't work well for the team, because reading is just as important as writing. It took a little bit of effort to get going for Trello (eg which boards to have) but ultimately it has worked out extremely well for the whole team. The ordering of the cards providing prioritization is great and being able to assign more than one person to a card helps in some situations.
Can you post expected pricing? and some documentation, please? Thanks!
There was (perhaps still is?) a long-running battle as the BBC added extra protections around the iOS stream and users built various scripts to exploit this and download episodes. For example, I think that the BBC site uses the installed certificates to verify that the player is really an iPhone.

Obviously all of this is somewhat pointless, but to work on Android they'd either have to come up with an equivalent method or turn off one or more layers of "protection". That's probably difficult politically, if not technically.
Ask HN: Just got my invitation for the Start-up Games 2012. Anyone else going?
Hey guys,

I applied for this http://www.startupbritain.org/startupgames not really thinking I was going to get anywhere, but I got an acceptance e-mail this morning.
So now I'm pricing up hotels for London and looking forward to it.

Anyone else here going?
http://getpocket.com

It scrapes down and combines multi-page articles like this with a click for on or offline reading. Great interface and mobile apps too, I use it all the time.
I have little experience with servers, but... I must agree with your sentiment. One of the great things about Linux is how simple things are. GUIs are great, but not if I have to start a desktop just to get a network connection!
Is there a need for one? It works fine on my phone as-is.
? why did you put it on github then?
Are you sure you're not proud instead? :)
Well.
That never stopped them from turning nuclear - more than a decade ago - in the face of international sanctions.
If it makes anyone feel any better this article is getting pilloried even by actual U.S. submariners:

http://bubbleheads.blogspot.com/2012/08/not-everything-you-r...
I work for a medium sized public company (500 people), that went public about 5 years ago. After going public we had a CEO that was decent, but didn't know how to run a company to make it profitable. After 1.5 years of missing earnings we got a new CEO and our stock is 10x the value it was back then.

If Zuckerburg is still playing a part in engineering, he should be the CTO of the company, not the CEO. Having a business minded person person holding the reigns of a company can help the shareholders, otherwise the stock price will have a good chance to continue its descent.
Stand Up And Run A Rackspace Private Cloud In Less Than An Hour…For Free
It would be awfully hard to make a service that didn't work without systemd. Your software shouldn't depend on systemd, just as it shouldn't depend on init.d, rc.d, or anything else unless it's a tool specifically for working with that (like chkconfig or update-rc.d).
Thinking and Doing
Can you solve the mystery of the encrypted Gauss payload?
The lack of hackability is not fun. And some strange new programs won't make up for it. Bash might indeed be not the perfect thing for an init system but having no scripting capabilities at all forces systemd to implement everything hard-coded. What if that hard-coded Blob lacks a feature I require? What if that hard-coded blob contains errors? What if that hard-coded Blob contains security risks?

systemd opens a lot of doors for potential new Errors. I agree sysvinit sucks but worse is better in this case. Ideally an init system would be a lean and smart turing complete scripting language and every feature is implemented on top of it.
It is my understanding that, if there's no license, the author retains all rights, so that's not really a good argument (neither is "why did you put it on GitHub?").
And, as with otherwise normalized marijuana and cocaine, we'll probably still be looking the other way as kids in 2033 continue to get prosecuted, and futures continue to be ruined, for the grand crime of having been caught doing something that almost everyone has been doing for decades.
I'm often disappointed to find comments veer off track and never return. In rare cases the digressions are more valuable than the original article, but it sure would be great to be able to collapse ego wars, etc.
Oh what? I loved these novels! I found them thrilling yet hilarious. Some of his other work was very provocative, a great SF author!
Here's the thing.

It initially seemed like a good thing for Android to support Flash but as time as gone on it's become apparent that the end result is a lot of sites produced a premium iOS experience and sub-par Flash based one for Android. Whether this flawed experience was due to limitations in the platform or lack of effort on behalf of the service I wouldn't like to say but it happened either way.

Hopefully now with Flash unequivocally end-of-life'd (on mobile at the very least) we might see Android devices being served the same experience as iOS devices.
Appeals Court OKs Warrantless, Real-Time Mobile Phone Tracking
This is particularly timely given the recent success of the Mars rover landing, which is a good reminder that having a ton of meetings and spec-ing something out robustly in advance is still a valid approach in some contexts.
Migrating from Drupal to Plone with transmogrifier
I believed this point too when we first started our company, and were more Uber-clone-y than we are now. However, after spending a year working in the industry, I've learned that it's more "catchy idea" than reality.

It turns out that the taxi industry is a little different: the fleets have wanted to innovate for years now, but have little idea how. The regulations clearly permit innovation. In cities where taxis aren't run by the municipal government (i.e. "in cities that aren't New York"), there is healthy competition between taxi providers, in spite of their commoditization (regulated pricing, supply, etc.).

IMO, the existing taxi technology players are the ones who are stifling innovation (and/or "protecting a group of entrenched companies at the expense of consumers"). 2 of the big 3 dispatch technology providers charge hefty fees just to open access to their APIs for new entrants, if they'll even grant you access in the first place. And, due to the long-term, hardware-heavy, dispatch-focused nature of their contracts, they rarely have any incentive to innovate for the passengers; one of them once told me that they have nobody on staff who understands the web or web technologies!

Working with the existing dispatch companies, while not a necessary evil (take Hailo or GetTaxi, for example), is the best way to ensure scale and distribution -- the amount of cash consumer-focused players must spend in this industry in the hopes of curbing cab booking behaviours is enormous. Our research showed that, when calling for a pre-arranged cab, 95% of taxi passengers chose their fleet because it was first to mind, or the fleet they always called. In other words: only 5% of consumers chose what TaxiCo to call for any rational reason. Having an existing brand identity, and a number of cars on the street constantly hocking your wares, goes a long way in this industry.

But even before Uber came along, a wave of new dispatch companies had started cropping up, most of which are relying on a healthy partner ecosystem in order to make it in the first place. But, since dispatch technology contracts have typically been signed as 10-year license agreements, evolution naturally trends to a slow change: a lot of forward-thinking fleets I've met with renewed their contracts in the last year or two, since they didn't feel the new technology was mature enough yet (and, in most cases/for their needs, rightly so).

All this to say: I'm not yet sure what the best way to spark the necessary change is (FWIW: currently leaning towards "open standards", but I'm not 100% sure how that would look yet...
); figuring it out will likely be a huge benefit to my company. But I firmly believe, based on facts and experience, that it's not a regulatory issue.

(edit: formatting)
Creator of writeLaTeX here...

I find the auto-preview useful when I'm making tables or figures. It also enables some cool stuff, like this 'workbook'-like document that I recently did with a friend:
http://writelatex.com/4134bzfwng

There should be probably be a way to turn off the preview, though.
People Flying RC Planes
Wouldn't the Pythonic thing be to only fail after you've tried, instead of validating your parameters in advance?
even works on Android nightlies
Exactly. Primary key is a subset of attributes - thus necessarily populated by values.

It's worth considering the correspondence between the concept of functional dependency in the relational model, and the concept of a pure function in functional programming. The issue under discussion, then, is whether referential transparency is afforded in the database.

While referential transparency in a database is achieved momentarily at the right isolation level, it is not achieved in the eternal sense of a pure function.

This is because the functional dependency in FP encodes an intensional definition, whereas the functional dependency captured in a relation is extensional, usually modelling the state of the knowledge of the relevant world, and therefore being subject to change.
Usually reserved for legacy databases with lots of custom queries and jdbc code, mybatis (previously ibatis) is a pretty flexible solution. Hooks into Spring pretty well too.

http://www.mybatis.org/core/
Metrics as a Service - Librato Metrics
Extremely iPhone-hostile site, sadly. Can only read like two paragraphs before it cuts me off. Too bad, it started good.

Edit: The reader button did the trick.
Parenthood Seasons 1-3 DVD Box Set
Based on the 1989 film of the same name, 'Parenthood' is an hour long comedy-drama produced by Jason Katims and Ron Howard.
Adobe seems to be pretty much clueless when it comes to Flash if you ask me. They never bothered to make a solid version of the plugin for Linux and OS X until the whole Flash-on-iOS debate started and Flash really didn't need more bad press. Then they tried get Flash on the millions of different hardware configurations on mobile, even though none of the existing Flash content was made for touch, none of the handsets had enough power to run most Flash content well, and all despite all the trouble they had supporting just the 3 major desktop OS-es. All of this effort even though Adobe doesn't make any money on Flash player at all, only on the authoring tools, which everyone could see is a dwindling market now that you can do so much on the web without any plugins.

I think their current strategy on the desktop is not so much 'content-protected video' (Flash did that 15 years ago already), but high-end gaming. They have some seriously impressive 3D stuff in the pipeline, which coupled with Air would finally make some good use of Flash as a platform-independent way to create games. But my guess is that it's all too little, too late, and that the market for cross-platform advanced 3D graphics development is pretty small. The really big guys that would make good use of it already have their native engines ported to those OS'es that matter, and the small developers probably don't have the budget to create games that really benefit from the technology.

It's weird to see how Adobe seems to screw up so often, because they really make some very good products. The whole 64-bit Adobe CS for OS X debacle comes to mind, it took them about 5 years too long to transition from Carbon to Cocoa, even though it was clear from the very first OS X version that Carbon was going to be replaced and would never have a 64-bit version.
Green Light for Food Labelling
Honestly, I don't think I would have even noticed my tablet didn't have Flash. I don't have Flash on my Linux laptop (I use Chromium there) and haven't missed it --its nothing ideological: if I ever need Flash I'll install it right away. On the Windows netbooks we do have Flash but only because there we use Chrome instead of Chromium and it comes with Flash. I don't think I actually use it for anything other than playing video games with my son, which is not very often (his favorite games now are puzzle apps he plays on an iPod Touch, not that he plays those that much either).

(Off topic: now that I mentioned it all, it felt like we have a lot of hardware, but then I realized altogether I payed less than the cost of a high end laptop for it.)
Also, two finger scroll.
Should Gov't Be Able to Track a Cell Phone Using GPS Data With No Warrant?
There are some details on the actual compression techniques here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#Fe... although at first glance I don't see anything especially different from H.264 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Features

eta: For historical and comparative purposes, here's DarkShikari's evaluation of an early prototype of an encoder. http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/360
A larger amplitude in Capitalism does nothing for the many millions living in rural area where running water, roads and electricity are non existent and food is commonly scare. I'm afraid there are still huge areas in India ravaged with flooding and there is no government support. None. I saw a bit of it myself and its shocking. I think that can be solved initially with actual government intervention (handouts if you will). It wouldn't take a lot either. Capitalism doesn't build infrastructure where it doesn't exist.
http://codepen.io/anon/full/lCAEc

Missed a spot! This is true non-glossy.
Prophetic 1995 Student Internet PSA
1) meh

2) meh

3) lol
Wow, I didn't know that aspect of the DMCA had ever been used. Do you know of any other cases of that happening?
I think some unofficial ones.
There really is a dearth of high-capacity PMPs anymore. I still have my Zune 120 in my truck, constantly plugged into the stereo. I sync it over wifi when I want to add new music, and I have my entire music collection available if a certain song unexpectedly pops into my head and I have to listen to it. 64GB is still too small and too expensive to be feasible for carrying around an entire catalog. With the Zune gone, Apple is the only game in town for high quality, high capacity media players (surprisingly, CNet doesn't include it in their "best hard drive mp3 player" list, only the mediocre Archos 5 at $500).
best approach for software development: trial and error
John, while I think that a lot of value will be derived from this (the environment is very cool!), your blog included the following:

"When I look back at how I became interested in programming, or ask other programmers about how they started to program, the answer is very frequently: “I was given a [Basic/QBasic/Python] compiler and a bunch of programs and I wanted to understand how it all worked so I could write my own!” It was only after digging in to the code that the student wanted to understand how to tackle certain programmatic challenges – but they then did so with great gusto!"

Which sounds great, but speaks directly to what cantankerous mentioned: this is more about computer programming than it is about hard Computer Science. Programming is just a subset of CS, and I've personally known several CS researchers who haven't touched code in years. This topic has been beaten to death, but this approach is conflating the tool (programming) with the study (CS). I realize that there's much more to come, but the introductory material that I've viewed thus far does nothing to dissuade me of this fact.

Again: I think that this is a laudable effort, and hopefully will encourage many more youngsters to get into programming. I was just hoping to see material more along the lines of computer numerical methods, computer architecture, data structures and so forth, that would be a true introduction to the wider world of what CS is.
>He also loves to call bullshit on trashy link bait.

By linking to it. On his massive blog.
TLDR:

> The bad news is that there is no best approach
> to software development.

The article is mostly rants about all the current "best practices" everything from NASA strategies to TDD, DDD, lean, agile, etc. He thinks you should avoid dogma and be pragmatic.