skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
ISP doesn't have a year of gmail account content.
A more skeptical analysis by Phil Plait: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/10/17/di...
They make it seem like a walk in the park and that anyone can do it...
Surely this isn't constitutional?

The federal government could make it illegal to drive a taxi in Vancouver except while wearing a pink tutu and singing Christmas carols. The provincial government could make it illegal to charge taxi fares which are not a prime number of cents.

Yes, it's perfectly constitutional to set a minimum price for private hire cars. Whether a law is dumb is orthogonal to whether it is constitutional.
That's not true. If we knew for a fact that it would cause global extinction, we would throw everything at it.

We could blow it up with nukes.

We could put a relatively heavy space probe next to it and deflect its course.
Actual transaction happens in Paypal's page. Not for a complete e-commerce site, but for simple usages with few products i beleive this is a good solution.
I suspect that lawsuit insurance already exists, probably meant for businesses. I wonder how much convincing insurance companies would need to offer this to consumers. Maybe there is some reason they don't think it would be a very good deal for them, or maybe they simply haven't perceived a demand and haven't bothered offering/advertising it as a result. Perhaps worth looking into, if you have enough assets already that a lawsuit would present a large concern.
Interesting take, I'll provide a bit of extra clarification. All good points to raise though.

"The way that your article reads comes off as having a point to prove because you were rejected."

In order to prove a point, my understanding is that I would have to have been rejected or given negative feedback. If it was a positive response, everyone would be in alignment and I wouldn't have a point to prove.

"Your problem solving and decision making will now gravitate towards whatever bias that "chip on your shoulder" created."

The chip on my shoulder/bias is a pure desire to succeed. The rejection was an implicit statement that all the other companies appear to have a higher chance of success. I see this desire to succeed as a very good context to make decisions from.

"1) "... Investors look for it since it’s an indicator of persistance. When you’ve got something to prove, you’re more likely to blast your way to success. But how do you actually get this fire?"

Do investors really look for this? These statements come off like a confirmation bias."

Mark Suster wrote a whole article on it. http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2012/05/17/what-to-do-abo...

"2) "And with a chip on my shoulder, I find myself more focused, thinking more clearly and getting stuff done."
Can you quantify why?"

I don't track my time so I don't have any quantitative numbers. With that said, I find I'm able to fight distractions more effectively with an "I've got something to prove" mindset.
Yeah the prior probability of "fragmenting comet within 8000 km of Earth" seems kind of a lot lower than that of "dust in front of the telescope".
Was going to add this one as well. A comet of that size, that close, would have raised questions in other places. The point that we didn't have nearly the observational capacity a couple of hundred years ago that we have today is well made, we certainly might have dodged a bullet, we have seen two comments hit the bigger planets (Jupiter and Saturn) but we only noticed because we were looking.

So I share the skepticism that this was a Comet in 1883 but I don't doubt for a moment comets have come that close to the planet.
Supercharging PHP MySQL applications using the best API
Did anyone else expect one of the characters to immediately tragically die at some point in the story... or is it just me
I'm confused as to why this is coming up now, did they find some new evidence or residual rock from this comet? If not how do they now know that it was actually a comet and not simply a mistake on the astronomers part as they previously thought it was?
Likely not.

"Certificates must not replace or interfere with the requirement
that licensees charge Board-approved rates ..."

Source: http://www.th.gov.bc.ca/ptb/operational_policies.htm#V_5
Well if this is true I guess there is one more thing for us to be thankful for today!
Not everybody hates it, though many do, and many find it confusing. Microsoft is attempting to build a future forward system by making people transition to it now. Arguably they should have done the windows 8 style interface (aka the metro interface, but there were TM issues with that or something) as a secondary optional interface on PCs and the main interface for tablets, then built on the experience they got from early adopters, but they decided to try to force things on people and have users test it, then learn from their mistakes, as they did with Vista.
Thanks for the link and sorry about the offensive tone.
It's not a big deal. Just do a check on the backend. You can swap price tags in stores too, and they most certainly will not honor it if they realize.

I've done a mid 5 figure number of transactions through PayPal for digital goods, and I don't use the encrypted links (mainly because Flash doesn't support them). There have been a remarkably small number of fraud attempts (<0.1%).

One guy bought a game for $0.01, then initiated a chargeback when it didn't arrive. I raised my eyebrows, issued a refund, and the matter was over.

Not being able to trust the client is intrinsic to JS shopping carts, but I don't think this is a critical flaw.

Although I don't see what prevents merging the JS cart with a web based cart on the checkout page. Send the contents, and the page with the big 'click to charge card' button is generated server side.
Checking visited links? Can I do that? Most probably the user has facebook account and he always visit there. If this is what you mean, wow this will work. And yes, there may be more than one sessions for each user which makes it difficult.
In the US they have (recently unsuccessfully, thank god) gone after people who did not upload but merely "made available" for upload. The idea being that even if you didn't upload, but there was the possibility that you could have, they still will come after you.

How can this work in the context of bittorrent? Well, imagine an unpopular file with say 5 seeders, all with 100% of the file, and no leachers. You fire up the torrent, download the file from 5 different people, "seed" for a few minutes with no takers because you were off making dinner, then return to your computer and close your torrent client. You have just "made available" for 5 minutes, even though you never distributed anything.

Yeah, this crap has been thrown out recently, but that won't stop them from sending you "pre-litigation letters" demanding money, or from even hauling you off to court and forcing you to defend yourself.
If you'd like to prove your "experience" -- an exceptionally weighty assertion, given I don't know you from Adam, and you know nothing about my product -- I'd be happy to read that writeup.
What is bad about the OP'd suggest benchmark?
yes, you got it almost right, but my above comment does not actually involve any "xenophobism" or "arrogance", rather it is "disgust". I am not arab, but somewhat closely related.

I was just wondering when children are dying in a place that is not very far from their main land, but their goverment is busy tagging their women -- I think they should focus on more "important" issue. Hope you got my point.
What steps are you taking to mitigate spam and bias in summaries created by people?

I know if I wrote a summary of a Microsoft Surface article (I have one), it'd be very different from someone who loves it -- or is even an MS employee.

And spam... big issue there.

(disclaimer - I have your plugin and have tried it, summaries seem way too short.)
Baseless speculation is one thing, when the original post actually contains information which contradicts you, it's just a sign of laziness.
Yes, I read the whole article, and the article about how he doesn't like being his mom's guardian. He views it more along the lines of "stupid government" rather than "women are not property."
When did Hacker News become "Spam my Stuff" news?

Isn't it possible to discuss the merits of the product provided in the opening post without one-line nonsense posts spamming your own thing?

JEEZUZ.
Summer Coding Contest results (finally) | Raspberry Pi
> A biometric system is cheaper than RFID readers?
Not by a long shot.

Aren't thumbprint scanners commodity hardware now-a-days? Say a school has 700 students. It's 700 RFIDs vs may be 20 thumbprint scanners.

> The simple reason they don't have kids swipe in and out is because they simply won't do it. You can get employees to do it because they are paid. Not only that, but it would create foot-traffic jams at exits.

As for kids not doing it, doesn't US schools have any attendance norms? Schools in India have generally a 75% attendance norm.

I used to work in an office with a headcount of 20000. Though people came in at different times, I am pretty sure the number of people who came in at 9 is greater than number of students in an average school. Swiping in and out didn't create any jams.

> RFID is just a better solution that is equivalent, from a data gathering standpoint, to the solutions you put forward.

Data gathering is what I am, and looks like the student is opposed to. I see anything more than ensuring that the student came in is a serious violation of privacy. The solution I proposed was in response to school's excuse of ensuring attendance to get funding. Ensuring attendance and tracking at all times are two very different things.
As an onion headline, it would have been hilarious. As a real story, it's scary as hell.
> One mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter

People say this a lot, but actually one mans terrorist is another mans terrorist. Legitimizing targeting civilians as "freedom fighting" is horrible.

If you actually fight for freedom, then freedom is the goal. But the goal of a terrorist is killing.
Help us Test the Social API with Facebook Messenger for Firefox
Have you heard of Pianoteq? http://www.pianoteq.com/
What do people do to each other?

Or was that a joke?
Your point is not academic... there is this new thing called WalMart, er, Asda. Ever hear about it? Cheap stuff for people with bad taste. Oh, and with a side of live-video-surveillance-with-active-facial-recognition feeding a worldwide db which has implicit (subpoena or court order... or not in cases of foreign nationals) access by the NSA / FBI / CIA. Um, and people are cool with it why? Because its all on VHS and has been going on since the 80's. I believe that is what you were saying...
Correct me if I'm wrong but Mexico City is not in Canada.
It's not Hollywood, it's ballistics.
I worked for a company www.quintiq.com that implemented a declarative programming language. They have a propagator that does much of what prolog does. However the syntax is more imperative. Very interesting.
Very interesting point, the major differences in philosophy between OS X & iOS vs Windows & Android. Although I think Android still leans more towards the Apple side of things.

It will be interesting to see how the Windows App store evolves on both Windows 8 and Windows phone. Because that percentage of apps being free definitely won't be extremely profitable for developers. Especially if that's what users grow to expect.

In the iOS app store people spend a lot of time talking about the race to the bottom and how 99 cent apps are detrimental to people trying to make livings as independent developers. Imagine how much more difficult it could be when the race was to free.
Does anyone have something like this for Clojure?
The case for YouTube dislikes
Bad Pharma: A Manifesto to Fix the Pharmaceutical Industry
Those are good points, it's not a black and white issue.

I wasn't referring to buying oil however, I was referring to aid, both in terms of charity as well as foreign and domestic intelligence and setting up the entire technological apparatus required to maintain an oppressive regime in the modern day.

There is no ethical argument that can be made that this is anyone other than equivalent to oppressing people yourself.

> And doing think the Saudi government as it is now is the worst thing imaginable?

Worst imaginable? Certainly worse than the bloody alternative you paint, yes. Americans who agree with their own founding principles certainly should think so. The argument in favour of the Saudi regime is that there would be too much violence if the people were not repressed by a totalitarian feudal theocracy? Stability over liberty? Which side you would have been on in the revolutionary war?

You are also completely glossing over the fact that the majority of the anti-american sentiment in the middle east is strongly tied to the fact that the US has military bases in Holy Land specifically to defend a feudal theocracy that oppresses the very people who are angry. No need for the bases if you stop supporting them. It's a few too many CIA backed oppressive regimes to expect things to change overnight but if you actually care about the amount of anti-western hate in the middle east the first step is probably to stop siding with the people oppressing them.

I'm not convinced by the holiest sites in Islam under threat to "western-backed" fighters narrative. They are currently not under threat, but under the literal control of western backed armies. Between the Saudi's and Israel and the current american controlled government in Iraq all major holy sites in Islam (Sunni and Shia) are controlled by American backed powers. "Under threat" would be an improvement.

Also the current policy is unapologetically expansionist, not stonewalling at all.
With early enough detection, even a slight change in it's trajectory can make the asteroid veer off course enough to save earth.
Remind anyone else of Terry' Gilliam's Brazil?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay0TDQuq7XI
This is unfortunately turning into an example of "you can't fight City Hall".

In a city like SF, where the taxi cab service is the worst I've ever experienced (empty taxis just driving past you, or never honoring a commitment to pick you up even if you call in), Uber is something that is necessary. But the status quo's long term experience with enforcing a monopoly through laws/regulations, etc, will make it really hard for Uber. Uber will need to spend a great deal of time and energy trying to get those laws to change, which will likely be at a glacial pace, if ever.

I'm sure there's a huge amount of interest for this in SF, and taxi service is so bad, you might even be able to make this an election issue. But other cities like Vancouver I'm sure don't have as bad of an issue, so it might be harder to make it an issue that politicians will take notice of.
Ugh. After The Social Network I can't think of anybody worse to be doing any movie about startups and tech.
> That's literally what the "public" part in "public transportation" means

That's not really true. There are counter-examples of privately-owned public transportation systems. Tokyo's subways for one. Greyhound bus lines for another.

The "public" in "public transportation" really just means that it serves the general public. In the same way that you're "in public" even when you're in a privately-owned shopping mall.
You might check out the book "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks" which has a chapter on Clojure (and Scala, Ruby, Io, Prolog, Erlang and Haskell too). I took a class that used it and I thought the format was quite good.
Like most movies...
His point is that unregulated taxis are scary.
When faced with impending doom, optimism and pessimism are both equally fine sentiments. The caveat is that only one of them accurately reflects reality, not that it matters at that point.

I also suppose that industriousness would be helpful for taking one's mind away from the reality of that impending doom.

But hell, nukes to deflect a comet? Sure, we may as well try it -- but I only suggest doing this if we are 100% certain that the comet will both hit us and destroy us. We could conceivably cause our own extinction via a false positive provided by some faulty monitoring device - wait, did that already happen? Nevermind.
Most common is fare scams (driving in circles, pricing scams and various types of extortion), assault and sexual assault.

Then you have things like all the types of discrimination you can think of as well as safety issues (having seatbelts, having tires with tread on them) and so on.
Stream of crawled sites from the Internet Archive (somewhat NSFW)
Yes, I have been in taxis in Mexico City at night. Many times in many different parts of the city I have procured the services of taxis of all kinds for decades. All of my experiences have been fine and I've never been terrified, scared, concerned, attacked, robbed, worried, or kidnapped in any way.

I have been overcharged, though. It happens less now that I speak the language fluently but I can't change the fact that I'm an obvious foreigner. The city does not regulate nighttime fares.

If you are concerned, get a "sitio" taxi from one of the thousands of convenient taxi stands that check on and track their drivers and cars. It costs a little more but provides rock solid security.

You should never have any trouble with Mexico City transit of any kind except personal cars; driving yourself is insane in a city of 24 million. The transit system, from taxis to subways, is clean, cheap, innovative, reliable, and efficient with an excellent worldwide reputation.

That is accomplished with a network of private regulations (taxi sitios), fully public systems (subway, bus rapid transit), minimal public regulation (taxi licensing), cooperatives of private contractors (minibuses), privatized toll roads, and public streets. As an operators, you can choose the level of regulation you want to operate under and then operate the corresponding kind of transit you want your business or career to involve. Diversity works much better than monopoly of the type being mandated in Vancouver or NYC.
> a big advantage of an electric plane is that it can fly at much higher altitudes since it doesn't burn atmospheric oxygen like normal jets.

My understanding is that air is still the medium they use for propulsion so I'm not sure how big this benefit will be (like how a jetski jet doesn't work out of water).
Right. And the attitude that results in a taxi passenger bill of rights (http://www.taxirights.gov.bc.ca/) is what makes Canada so clearly not Mexico City.
Do not agree on anything below 90k in SV. Factor in some other types of compensation (food, insurance etc.) into complete picture of the total income you'll have. Other than that +-10K does not matter much if you get experience you like.
Try submit a post :)
It doesn't matter because we wouldn't be here thinking about it. On the other hand, the extinction event would have been a gold mine for the future archaeologists that would have evolved on Earth in the next 100 million years.
Do they need to? I'd like to know who supports what he says other than the people who are already considered part of that fringe. I don't. I don't know anybody who does.

It should not be necessary for any group to distance itself from extremists if it's fairly self-evident that the extremists are not considered part of the mainstream. The best is to let lunatics be. If you get into a mudfight with a pig, only the pig has fun, right?

If people considered a fringe guy to be mainstream, then that's a different situation. Then I'd step up and clarify. But I don't see that happening.
Something super trivial, but I can see the down arrow on the Items toggle button seep through... On Chrome 23.0.1271.64

Nice little library though. Interesting comments regarding changing prices.. Curious how paypal handles things like that (since on Paypal's side you don't really create "products" do you?)
Reading seems like one of those areas where being taught is far more efficient than figuring out for ones self, and even being taught is difficult.
We could argue about the way in which we teach it, in which case I generally agree that our current model is far to extrinsic. In the particular case of reading, I am not sure how to avoid it, as (with my limited knowledge of neruology) I believe there is a massive advantage to learning the skill early in your brains development, so we would want to learn it before we nessasarily have the reasoning skills to know why we need to spends so much time learning it.
If you don't write code I'm sorry to disappoint you, but in real life one cannot "rotate" and "zoom in" certain parts of an algorithm.
Who actually sees these pages on Google? Seriously, who is the intended audience? I'm not knocking the page or the messages, I just don't understand the target? Do people browse Google? I see this stuff only via HN. I'm curious how others find it.
If there is a significant chance that a comet will hit and destroy us, it makes sense to do everything we can to prevent it from doing so. Given the stakes, .1% chance should be more than enough for us to take it seriously. It does not seem plausible that we could harm ourselves much by nuking a comet that wasn't going to hit us anyway.
I started to run my own experiment of this. Here are the results so far, not 40 countries yet, but we'll see

http://goo.gl/xtWw8
Actually they fixed the perf, which was the main complaint from those videos.
How does this compare to the number of tablet-specific apps for Android?
In context, if we look at the current state of humanity; sure some of our great minds have helped some (not all) of us to live pretty nice lives here on Earth. But on the whole, we're pretty good at screwing up basic things. Non-basic things, like for example having a Mars orbiter not crash into the planet, yeah, we screw those up too.

Anyway, I thought the OPs comment was likely more facetious than anything. Only in Hollywood can we expect a perfect ending.
Ugh, I see. Thanks.
yeah, you covered it, but you glanced over it very cursorily while matt maroon addresses the issue much more in depth and in a much clearer way.
Thanks a lot for recommendations, the book looks very interesting. I have Patrick's podcasts in queue, and just realized that ahoyhere is Amy Hoy who was a guest on one of the episodes. =)
Convert Workbook Objects to Image, Extract & Recognize Text from Image
There might be a scenario where developers want to convert workbook elements to images using Saaspose.Cells and extract text from the images using Saaspose.OCR. Saaspose.Cells is a REST API that helps you create, manipulate and convert spreadsheets in the cloud whereas Saaspose.OCR is a REST API for optical character recognition and document scanning. Let’s have a look at how you can use these two REST APIs together to work with spreadsheets and text recognition.
With the recent Windows release I am shocked by the lengths that companies go to make their interfaces more accessible. I dream of the day when users will REVOLT.
Arab nationalism didn't take off as much in Saudi Arabia as it did in Jordan, Syria, and Egypt. The religious and conservative nature of Saudi's traditional nomadic tribes, the location of Mecca and Medina, these have more to do with the traditional low status of women in the region.
This doesn't apply to me but this is absolutely fantastic. It's great to see people with kind souls doing nice things.

Happy Thanksgiving.
With game-like interface.
Thumbprint scanners are inaccurate unless you get into the high-end range. If there is a commodity fingerprint scanner for that many students, they could install a single button and get equivalent data.
I'll give you some US Prices. US, PA: Small coffee shop with State College, (Websters) 2$ for a single cup, good coffee.

Shrewsbury, PA (Browns) 1.5 for a cup with refills. Very good.

Scranton, PA - $3 dollars at Crimson Lion. (Hoookah Bar and coffee shop.)

Other coffee shops can be as high as 4-5 dollars a cup. W/o much if any increase in quality. Specialty drinks are insanely priced.