skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"As you can see from the screenshot snippet above, Zappos' terms of use says "We reserve the right to change...these terms and conditions at any time." Zappos isn't the only website using language like this; it's ubiquitous on the Internet. Unfortunately, despite its widespread usage, this language is toxic to a contract."

Isn't toxic to strong a word here? That particular clause it unenforceable, but the rest of the contract is unaffected, because of (I presume) a severability clause? The article seems to indicate that this clause taints other aspects of the contract.
The Erlang versus Haskell UAV dogfighting tournament.
You wrote a large reply, so I feel I owe you a good response. Honestly, I feel it's kind of, let's say, interesting, that I have to defend things like "maybe we'd like more than one font size". Maybe it's worth the sacrifice for having vim retain the same look-and-feel in the terminal, but to outright think that variable font sizes are inherently useless in a software program? Whose primary purpose is to edit text, no less?

Still, here are some examples of more functional ways vim could be better. Most of these are related to visuals, yes, because that's the main thing that plugins can't change in vim.

Examples:

1. Code folding is there to make it easier to scan code. Vim's folds take up a lot of space, and aren't very easy to scan. Yes, this is subjective - it's possible that for you, it's the easiest to scan thing in the world. But for me, the way many modern editors work is better - have a simple, colored, "..." indicator at the end of the line that has a fold after it. Simple, easy to scan, doesn't take up any more lines on screen. Minimal, in the sense of UI.

2. Adding some kind of info in the margin. Most editors add some kind of way to see folds in the margin. This is usually kept very tight, since all you really need are some dashed-lines and a "+" sign, perhaps. Not possible with vim. The closest we have is "foldcolumn", which a) takes up a lot of space, and b) is less visually appearling, making it harder to understand or use. Other info is also sometimes added, not just folds.

3. The project opening. While I love ctrl-p, especially over the alternatives, it has several flaws. For example, it's very, noticeably, slow. And I'm on small projects, usually.

But here's the bigger issue: the way ctrl-p in Sublime works is more beautiful, but that's not the only advantage. It makes it easier to see what file you're going to open. It makes it easier by doing things like bold-ing the letters that it's matched. It makes it easier by making the filenames "REALLY BIG", but still giving you the details of the file's location in a smaller font.

There are really many more issues I can bring up, but these are the keys. In all honesty, vim is a bad choice for most people because, to get it to the level of what Sublime Text or other editors do out of the box, you have to spend months tweaking vim. This makes it irrelevant for the vast, vast majority of people, which is unfortunate, because it has text-editing capabilites that are simply unsurpassed by any other editor.
See also: Memacs, doing a similar idea using org-mode in emacs:

http://github.com/novoid/Memacs
MegaHAL (chatbot) poetry
As someone who's never worked in the Microsoft development world, is a "Dev Center" account what one needs to publish apps to the MS Store, or is this something else?

I have an interest in playing around with WinPho/Metro apps, and if dropping $8 now means I can push anything I create to the store, then this is pretty appealing.
How are you going to make money? Edit: I ask because it says that this is a free service on the site.
"Why is the taxpayer responsible for unbounded medical expenses for everyone?"

The answer to that is another question: do you want first responders checking to see if you can pay your bills before treating you, when literally moments can make the difference between life and death?
Is there an Osaka in China too, or are you talking about the one in Japan?
Met one of the founders at their offices in my city, Pune. Mighty impressed with the product team & culture they have built.
Locality in this sense refers to the presence of "hidden variables" as first put forth by bohm and later suggested by other people. It was believed that the various CHSH, HOM, and other bell-inequality inspired experiments would have put a nail in the coffin but critics always came back and say "but you didn't control for X." This experiment is just another in the long line of experiments started by Aspect and continued by others to put bounds on this.
Why This Won’t Work | Socyberty
That's what I meant - siphon the fuel up to the pump at installation, so you don't have any gas and don't have to rely on a vaccuum. As the pump draws fuel through the one way valve, the fuel continues to draw more fuel from below.
> Our goal is to never have to cut someone off for what seems like legitimate use.

In that case, can I recommend that you determine what your costs will be and ensure that you charge, at each tier of usage, enough that you will be able to continue providing your service at a profit to these large-scale users?
Dreaming Of Being An Investor? Learn From The Best In Silicon Valley WIth Smart$
The pressure waves are ultimately manifestations of the exclusion principle, expressed through forces that are constrained to travel at or below c.

So yes, relativity dictates that you can't create a rigid beam 25 molecules long, much less 25 million miles long. There can be no such thing as a perfectly rigid beam of any length.
Exactly, you can only construct beams at any scale that seem rigid at some scale. A 2 foot long piece of re-bar looks pretty rigid, until you look closer.
Putting flash into the physical address space isn't likely to be practical due to their block based nature.
The Horrible Future of Social
Hi, I wrote the blog post. I haven't been able to find any public discussion about a spec from the parties involved other then Atwood's blog post.
They use SQL server for StackOverflow, FogBugz and Kiln. But for Trello they use only MongoDB.
Cuomo's suggesting steps such as that, given that major storms seem to be "the new reality" in New York (both city & state).

http://saratogian.com/articles/2012/10/30/news/doc5090186b1e...
Am I crazy for actively preferring the inside-the-head soundstage? It's one of the main reasons I've switched to using headphones even when speakers would be more convenient.
I don't know the answer to your first question, but in response to your second question, yes, formatting is preserved.
> I hate being the guy who sidetracks a thread off the bat by complaining about something unrelated, but...

Then don't do it.
Any providers that have the simplicity of GAE with language support for either RoR or Node? Heroku comes to mind, any others?
As an ex-academic type, your statement is both true and false. Some professors have large research grants, and indeed, their grants are what pay the salaries of grad students and post-docs.

Other professors (the vast majority) struggle to get appropriate funding. It's a horrible rat race to scrounge up enough money to continue your research. God forbid if you aren't tenured - your job literally depends on how much funding you can bring in (not enough papers = not enough funding = sacked for someone else).

That said, $25k is laughably small amount of money in research. At my old lab, I performed an experiment where I was easily blowing $1000 per week. And I was just a single technician in a lab. Hell, I spent more in supplies than I was paid in salary (probably by some multiple).
Useful Productivity Tools To Kick Start Your New Startup
It wasn't totally clear to me what tools you'd get if you joined. After a bunch of clicking I found this:

"The Windows Phone SDK 8.0 is a full-featured development environment to use for building apps and games for Windows Phone 8.0 and Windows Phone 7.5. The Windows Phone SDK provides a stand-alone Visual Studio Express 2012 edition for Windows Phone or works as an add-in to Visual Studio 2012 Professional, Premium or Ultimate editions. With the SDK, you can use your existing programming skills and code to build managed or native code apps. In addition, the SDK includes multiple emulators and additional tools for profiling and testing your Windows Phone app under real-world conditions."

Obviously you need Windows 8, too.
AFAIK the ClojureScript project is sort of a sideways approach to making Clojure-in-Clojure a reality.
Ian, thanks for the feedback. We do a lot of user testing and the problems you are experiencing are new to us. We pay $30 for a user test session, can you email me at info at smartasset dot com, so we can get something lined up. Thank you.

On the change in your income. When you buy a property there is an opportunity cost associated with the cash that you use to purchase the property (down payment + closing costs). This money would have accrued interest income had you continued to rent, hence the larger value for income in the rent scenario.
You say time per each script is limited to 10s, yes?

Can I call one webscript from another, for modularisation? And will that "lengthen" the timeout effectively, too?

If yes, then still everything is sequential, there's no possibility of parallelism, yes?

Is there any kind of versioning of the code, apart from the possiblity to load from github you mentioned on the site?
Wow, more crazy guys! (inside info: I'm more a MVim guy ;))
I made a $100 contribution (which gets the "talk science over a round of beer" reward) earlier this month. The researcher, Ethan Perlstein, is actually in the Bay Area at the moment... he reached out to me and we're having beers in Palo Alto this afternoon. If you've contributed to the project and are in Palo Alto feel free to join us for a chat / beers in the Science Exchange office (459 Hamilton Ave).
In the Carousel example... there is something very wrong with the header scrolling/timing. Click the arrows a couple of times and roll across the menu. It goes crazy.
You can make HTTP requests, so you can call another script from your script, but the calls are synchronous and won't increase your timeout, so the original script will still get killed after ten seconds.

No parallelism. What's the use case you have in mind? We didn't really intend for people to do anything CPU-intensive.

No, there's no versioning.

EDIT: s/called/killed, thanks
This site seems sort of ripped off from codepen.io :/
I found the answer in the above referenced blog post.

(http://chester.id.au/2012/06/27/a-not-sobrief-aside-on-reign...)
I really do not agree with what you say afterwards, but you introduce it in a really beautiful way - "we can only win against nature when we've won against ourselves" is a great question.

I do not have an answer, just a gut feeling that both can be done at the same time.
Ugh, why would anyone up-vote this comment? Some how this is the top comment, even though it doesn't address the content of the article. This happens all the time on HN and I find it very annoying.

It's not just that I don't want to scroll past this comment. These meta-comments may seem harmless, but when this is the top comment, it stifles the entire discussion about the article. Instead of people discussing the merits of the new GMail UI, there is an endless chain of replies burying all the topical comments.

I've said it before - I'd like to see a community guideline advising people not to make comments like this. These comments end up being easy ways to score points, entertaining for the people involved in the criticism, but harmful for the topical discussion. If it's a "Show HN" post about a hacker's new project, it seems topical to criticize the technology, but when it's a blog post, it seems so lame to criticize the blog software.

This kind of complaint belongs in its own thread - it should be a blogpost or something. The comment doesn't even apply to me - the page works perfectly and crisply for me.
I'm currently in the middle of a very similar situation. It's fine for dev, but throwing hundreds of queries at a single request just isn't going to scale.

We've ended up with stuff like:

class Meta(SomeResource.Meta):
cls = Challenge

select_related_fields = [
'category', 'owner', 'company', 'bonus', 'reward',
]
prefetch_related_fields = [
'specialities', 'countries',
'companies', 'products',
'groups',
]

queryset = (cls.objects
.select_related(*select_related_fields)
.prefetch_related(*prefetch_related_fields)
.all())

which takes some of the pain away, but going through and profiling exactly which prefetches & joins help is a major hassle.

Resources with relations with full=True are also brutal. Manually stuffing only the required extra data speeds things up greatly, but there's too much boilerplate for my liking. Having some level in-between 'full' and 'resource-uri only' would be nice, but I haven't seen any nice way to do it.
Not just anyone can start a blog and become famous for it. People have to want to read your blog.
You can go with GetSatisfaction, Salesforce Ideas, or a similar app. The most important thing is to let your customers know that their opinion is heard, even if you don't implement what they want. If other customers want the same thing, it may be important enough for you to add it. If they don't, then you can justify that it is an isolated request.
Yes, Dev Center is where you publish and manage your applications for WP/W8.
Ask HN: Review my startup - elephrame.com
Hi guys,

I created Elephrame to help people exchange ideas as thoroughly and effectively as possible. The concept is that while you would go to a place like Wikipedia to get information about a topic like Mitt Romney, you would come to Elephrame to find out what people think and believe about Mitt Romney.

With that in mind, I'd like to know what you think about the concept and the site itself. I'm interested specifically in three questions:

1. Does the landing page compel you to look around, sign up and/or contribute?
2. Is it easy to understand what Elephrame can help you do?
3. It is easy to understand how to actually use the site (i.e. make a claim, etc.)?

Beyond that, any other feedback - positive, negative, in-between - would be very helpful and appreciated. Elephrame's hit a difficult barrier when it comes to user conversion and I'm eager to know how everyone thinks the network can get over it.

URL: www.elephrame.com
Unless there's something better than HiPE that I'm not aware of (which may very well be the case, I am far from an erlang expert).
> do you want first responders checking to see if you can pay your bills before treating you, when literally moments can make the difference between life and death?

You know, for some people, the answer to that is "Actions have consequences. If you were more responsible, you wouldn't be in that mess in the first place. Not my problem."
Summly (http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/12/17/meet-the-16-year-old-w...) does exactly this... It was created by a 16-year-old and generated tons of press, getting VC funding and all...

It's worth noting that the app website is down and it's not available on the App Store anymore; however, according to their Twitter feed, a new version is supposed to be released soon...
Physicist here. NegativeK is correct. Bell's theorem is the key to understanding why your explanation doesn't work. Bell's theorem, and the associated experimental demonstration, has been called the most profound discover of science. It's well worth a few hours of your time to try to understand it. You don't need to know any quantum mechanics or advanced math to do so.

Incidentally, I'll mention that your argument is essentially what Einstein et al were arguing for in their famous EPR paper. The fact that it's even possible to rule out local hidden variable theories is highly surprising, and is what makes Bell's discovery (30 years after EPR framed the problem) so monumental.
What distro are you running that's got current Puppet/Chef releases in its archives?

The story may be better for puppet, but with chef, it's pretty much "off to the racetrack" to get the latest and greatest Ruby, Chef, and other deps installed.
Exactly - I feel guilty citing Gladwell on a forum because it smells factual when in reality it's merely persuasive.
The Case of the Unexplained FTP Connections
Exactly, we humans try to learn new things by relating to what we already know. This leads to trouble when we encounter new subjects that have no connection to previous experiences, because we have a hard time relating to it. However, the problem with people finding QM esoteric and weird is a bit more nuanced than that.

In most of the other areas of knowledge we can make progress because they do resemble reality in ways that we are familiar with. For example rotation in classical mechanics or special relativity can be somewhat confusing to a beginner, but if we think a little bit deeper than what we are used to then we can see that the results make sense and match what we experience. And also this experience is consistent at different scales. Now you move to QM and the first thing that hits you is that reality "breaks" after some point in the size scale, beyond that everything is different, with uncertainties, probabilities and a bunch of other odd properties. Learning QM is an exercise in mind-stretching, even for the most capable of us. For me the problem is not that it is different, but why is different. Why do we have such a gap between the large scale and the small scale? That is what baffles me.
"Don't fork with me"
Cool thanks :) Looks I can get rid of a lot of code of mine...
You just launched today? The site has a lot of functionality already! I'm really impressed.
Only DNA improvements.
I pay $25/month per a single hosted FogBugz user. I believe you can build in reasonable disaster recovery procedures at "reasonable cost" given these kinds of price points. I don't see any technical obstacles — in fact I think Fog Creek used to write about how they have hot backups (replication, I'd assume) in various geographical locations.

And I do not want to host FogBugz myself, in fact I'm paying exactly for the comfort of not having to plan for failures in the case of FogBugz.

Incidentally, we run a SaaS company. Our disaster recovery worst-case scenario means recreating our services from scratch in any Amazon AWS datacenter on Earth in less than 4 hours. Yes, we have an easier job, because we do not store a lot of transactional user data. But our service is also way, way cheaper than FogBugz.
For some reason this app seems to miss a lot of its advertised functionality in Germany, or maybe just on my phone.
The image search results aren't displayed in a scrolling slideshow at all, instead each result links to the desktop version of a typical image search result, showing the preview and information in a sidebar and the embedding web page on the left.

Yes, the voice recognition is very fast, but then again, most questions only work in English, no chance to get anything useful in German or other languages.
That's not really competition to Siri in this department.
I hate this trend. Why should I develop a native app for _ platform? On my startup, our initial approach of both iOS/Android right at the start proved to be dooming simply because there was way too much to juggle between platforms for us to iterate on features. This is why we chose to focus on iOS for the next iteration, at least till we found market fit.

As a developer, or even as a startup, why should I give a shit about Windows Phone 8 platform? More work for a remarkably small market share. Unless all I'm looking for is to be a platform leader, but that's another story by itself.
Heavily considering Android now after this.
That's still indoctrination. I'm not sure why that's hard to understand. You can make all the assertions you like; you're still indoctrinating a particular value system.
In what way? I think this is a completely different project for a completely different purpose.
Why would this be down voted when the blog post suggests you should do this?
No it didn't. But with that logic codepen.io ripped off jsfiddle which ripped off jsbin which ripped off pastebin.com
I'm counting beans because you've made so many stunning logical errors it just makes sense to call you on them.

For example:

> Let's grant that you're more civil than I am. Does that make you RIGHT? Does that make you BETTER THAN ME? What is your payoff for that? Are you going to Heaven and I'm going to Hell?

Well, no. There's no relationship between civility and being better/worse/heaven/hell/correct/incorrect. Why would you even ask that unless you're casting about for a strawman?

> "NEENER NEENER I'M MORE CIVIL THAN YOU!" Congratu-fucking-lations. That's really not much of an accomplishment is it?

A worthy accomplishment would be a more rational discussion, which might be easier to find if there was less bile to wade through. Are you sure you speak to people in real life like this?
I think they should add a maximize button to this window.
Sometimes you just want to edit one email in full screen, and I don't think you should have to revert to the previous interface to do that.
That text says "To implement this warm backup feature, I wrote a SQL mirroring application that implements transaction log shipping: ..... Right now, we’re log shipping twice a day, so you might lose a day of work if an entire city blew up, but in a couple of weeks, we’ll implement a system that does more continuous backups, and we expect that the warm backups will never get more than 15 minutes behind."

What happened to that? Was it turned off? How long did it last?

I also wonder how long FogCreek will still maintain the for-your-server version of FogBugz? Will it still be available next year?
"Caring for our Planet" - Intel's factory on refugees' land
I can't really understand the idea of installing "monster" software onto tiny machines. I wouldn't be totally puzzled if this post came from some hobbyist, but it is released by Basho itself. So what's the idea?
Willow Garage Introduces Velo 2G Adaptive Gripper
Disney to Acquire Lucasfilm Ltd.
Nice, you actually made me laugh.
Why magnified mode OS X apps look worse on retina screens than on normal screens
Agreed. I'm running an iPhone 4. The speech recognition almost keeps up to my speech in real time. The results are typical Google.

This application gave me one of those "sufficiently advanced technology" moments. Magic.
Disney Buys Lucasfilm for $4 Billion
Windows Phone Store developer registration to $8 (from $99) for eight days
This is nonsense. Notice how the top of the hurricane is cut off.

You can make almost anything vaguely spiral shaped look like the Fibonacci spiral by overlaying that graphic and cropping & rotating until the curves are close enough.

This doesn't belong on the front page.
Why not choose the mundane and least astonishing explanation?

If an object A is moving (with a known momentum) and hits a stationary object B, we can measure the momentum of either A or B and instantly know the momentum of the other object without having to measure it. The two objects are somehow "connected"; their state (momentum) is "entangled".

Why is quantum entanglement different?
Hurricane Sandy Barrels Region, Leaving Battered Path