skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People around SV might get the wrong idea of how bad airport car rentals are because the car rental center at SFO is probably the worst in the world.

I remember coming in on a delayed flight and riding the train out to the rental center, waiting in line half an hour, then finding the car parked in the space I was sent to was entirely different from what it was supposed to be (and the keys didn't work), going back and waiting in line again, getting a call from the satellite police station on my cell because my wife was wondering what happened to me, finally getting a car and remembering I never got a child seat but driving right out because I didn't want to wait in line again.

Sensible (unamerican) people just take the BART if they are going to SF. I didn't have that choice because we were going to San Luis Obispo.

I'll admit fueling can be a pain, but car rentals at other airports, even big ones, are nowhere near as bad.

At LAX, for instance, I reserved a Hertz car on Priceline, caught a shuttle bus to the car rental center, got the paperwork filled out quickly and drove off. On the way back they were handling a huge volume of returning automobiles but it was efficient, really a pleasure.

(I did make the mistake of thinking I could go north on the 405 at 5pm on a Friday... Had I known LA a little better, I'd have gone north on the surface streets which are easily accessible from the rental center.)
The discussion is over here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4815547
There's also the lovely and whimsical http://placekitten.com/
Earlier discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4815547
"Affiliate links" are just a commission based referral program.

Nonetheless , i was looking for an online accounting solution , so thank you sir.
In some specific cases it is the preferred system. For example editing a comment.
I have never seen such a website combine beauty, interesting, and code study together! I think I will soon be immersed in fun coding!
I would love to see a Scheme or Clojure version of the code. I posted an attempt at it in Haskell, the only functional programming language I know, but it isn't particularily beautiful.
I used to run my own mail server. The main problem is spam: even with aggressive filtering, my mail was still 90% spam. Getting SMTP working is trivial. Getting useful mail is significantly more difficult.
The USB/Wifi dongle is interesting. I don't know much about this flavor of adapter, were the drivers already in the kernel? Any problems getting it running?
EDIT: Someone else also pointed this. Apologies for multiple posting.

No. Opera Turbo was and is still a very desktop feature, and it does significantly speeds the browsing experience. They have moved this convenience/feature over to their mobile offerings.

Opera Mini is the pre-smartphone browser (Very good IMO)

Opera Mobile is their Android offering (Very good IMO)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742902

EDIT: This is a submission from a while ago that does, in fact, upvote itself.
How to Licence Apple Fonts for Web Usage
Link is down. Here's a Coral Cache version: http://scanlime.org.NYUD.NET/2012/11/hacking-my-vagina/
Whoa, did they just lift content directly off Stack?

I guess it's appropriate for an article on laziness.
Here's a functioning cache link, since the site is hammered for rather obvious reasons. http://scanlime.org.nyud.net/2012/11/hacking-my-vagina/
At least we can turn it off... for now. Does anyone know what happens to your unsigned apps when you upgrade from a pre-ML OS X to ML? Do the programs that used to work suddenly fail? If so, that is a terrible UX!
Free and Open Source Live Chat Support System
hammerin' hacked vaginas
Off-topic:

But I consider all those softwares you mentioned to be (still) bloody good at what they do too. So, why bother changing? ;-)
> context, failed experiments, shortcuts, optimizations, and so on.

I think commit messages are the appropriate place for this stuff; I use `git annotate` etc. to find the information when I need it. I often have a 50-line commit message accompanying a one-line code change -- a ratio that would obviously make the code unreadable if all the comments were in-line with the code itself.
You would have to define 'reasonable sized' but I suspect the answer is yes. If you mount the web files over the network (I use NFS v3) you can run a very nice Nginx web server instance and a full stack. Not surprisingly, one of the 'bottlenecks' in RasPi is the SD card so using network mounted files is quite a bit faster in my experience.
>You guys have the "Refrigerator Repairs" sign (or something like it) above your store, right?

Google Street Maps view:

(https://maps.google.com/maps?q=+Our+address+is+1299+Cambridg...)
> "A pretty good job" (not so pretty when you are waiting in-line for an hour) is not enough.

You can bet the leading companies have already invested huge amounts seeking out efficiency savings and ways to improve customer satisfaction.

Slow moving and bogged down in bureaucracy they may be, but if there were a simple way to avoid common customer complaints (e.g. long queues) without hurting the bottom line, they would already be doing it.

> You also missed the picture of car sharing.

I can't think of anyone I know who would even consider sharing their car. It's just an absolute minefield. It might just about work on a small scale, where you know and trust the people you are sharing with, but that kind of thing doesn't scale.
Asked to choose a programming language for a beginner
Mud is applied to a soldier’s face as part of a training session about camouflage.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/09/09/sunday-review...
>> I guess there's only one way to find out: try.

I like the lending library / coffee shop notion as well, and if you don't have a lot of runway to try this, you might be able to put out a signup sheet asking people to pre-commit to a multi-month membership up front - if there's not enough interest there to keep you afloat (or get you close), try something else. Should serve to at least get baseline validation on the concept before you sink any real time / money / effort into it.
Fighting Sandy debris-removal crooks: There's an app for that
Start your own blog... today
Backed Or Whacked: NFC Reader/Writer For iOS Developer Hacking
I've taken a few courses through coursera, udacity, racked up points in khan and I've watched some videos from the MIT open source libraries, so the answer to "But what will that mean for traditional institutions?" is they will (hopefully) change dramatically.

Imagine having 5,000 students all wanting a MSCS, each student writes out a check for only $20,000 ($5,000 year). So you have $100 million dollars at your disposal for the complete education... what sort of 'online system' could you create for $100 million? Not just video, not just lectures, hell you could make games, interactive puzzles, you could pay to tape some of the brightest minds in the field... and you could change it --every year--.

You could offer a better experience for a fraction of the price that students pay today.

edit: fixed confusion over 20k
Most interesting part of that article is Linus' view on the security industry - haven't really heard much discussion on that from him before. I don't think it's as bad as all that - most security researchers are pretty good at contacting companies first to fix bugs before going along with the whole conference thing. At the heart of it he's right though, the whole IT security industry is basically just about profiting off the mistakes made by coders. That's pretty different from the real world security industry where you take something and actually secure it, rather than patching up the mistakes of others and claiming credit...
I think I would have done better at school if there had been a camera at the back of the class and ability to download the videos later.

Firstly, people tend to talk a lot in class. This is distracting and makes it difficult to hear what is being said. Perhaps if there was a recoding nobody would want their rude behaviour documented.

When listening to a class it is also very easy for your concentration to wander for long enough that you have trouble keeping up with the rest of the lecture because you missed something. A video trivially allows your to rewind those minutes.
"I don't like my tech articles biased by hormones"; is the most sexist thing I've read in this thread.
I think in a common Content Management System (CMS) while editing content this is a very good interaction model. In that case you have bunch of fields but you only need to edit one or two.
"Wah Wah Wah horrendous sexual remarks Wah Wah Wah closet feminist Wah"

I think this about sums up the comment. You mentioned cute women in HR as ones who are cute and don't know about the job to properly hire.

The next avenue to attack is "denigrating" booth 'people' because we are not allowed to hilight the obvious sexuality of the (shudder) women.
But that again is just a convention, and before western music converged on some kind of well tempered or chromatic tunings, there were quite some experiments with keyboards featuring both flat and sharp keys, see http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:Cembalo_univ... or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archicembalo
Ask HN: Interesting video learning resources
I often like to put something on tv while I am eating a meal, but I really don't care much for the types of things Netflix/Hulu/etc offers (i.e. popular tv shows and movies).

I like the concept of MIT OpenCourseWare video lectures, but those are real college classes that take significant active learning outside watching some videos to get much out of them.

I like to learn things, and my interests are vast. What other things are out there that you like to watch?
They work just fine. The signing check is performed exactly once for new software. Once allowed, it's never checked again. As nothing on an upgraded system is "new", it works without ever showing a Gatekeeper prompt.

It's basically identical to the "You just downloaded this file from the web, are you sure you want to run it?" check built into Safari - the file quarantine system http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3662?viewlocale=en_US&loca.... However, this defaults to "No" for unsigned code, and "Yes" for signed code.
Note that there is a elephant in the room that the answers fail to reflect on. The questioner asks:

How can this paradigm be used to build predictable software that works as intended when we have no guarantee when and where an expression will be evaluated?

While it is true that this will not lead to unexpected computations in a pure language, it may lead to excessive memory use. For instance, consider the definition of Data.Map.Lazy.Map:

http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/contai...

The Map data type is spine-strict and key strict in Weak Head Normal Form (WHNF). However, it is not strict in its values, and values may be thunks (unevaluated expressions). This may result the memory usage of the values to be much larger than when they are fully evaluated.

There is now also a variant of Data.Map that is value-strict, but only in WHNF, so only the outermost constructors may have been evaluated, and you'd have to evaluate the data further to have thunks replaced by actual values.

Thunk leaks are something that every new Haskell programmer will bump into and is something that makes programs less predictable if you are not yet comfortably reason about strictness and laziness.

Edward Yang wrote a nice explanation of such leaks:

http://blog.ezyang.com/2011/05/anatomy-of-a-thunk-leak/

I very much enjoy Haskell, but I think that the benefits of laziness are much overstated. Strict languages are often easier to reason about and laziness can often be emulated when necessary. That said, Haskell has many other attractions ;).
The article puzzled me. I moved from Belarus in 2006, but back then Opera was just as marginal as anywhere else in the world.

I asked a bunch of my friends (IT professionals mostly), and it doesn't seem anything has changed. At this point I don't know what to think.
> "You should move it to the trash."

I can hear the UNIX bits weeping in shame just below this layer of... stuff.

I'll ping localhost to acknowledge their suffering.
Has a Briton ever been punished for paying a blackmail in a foreign country? Seems unlikely.
There's a mirror of it here for UK readers:

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s4/sh/9cac8469-887f-40fd-9401...
This hacker-girl has an amazing portfolio (note she's 26 years old).

See her resume at http://scanlime.org/resume/
ICANN reveals objections to proposed top level domains
I'd consider becoming a publisher, branding the store as an intellectual space of a particular sort (you decide). Have events, become a hub. Publishing is wide open, jump in.
As the author and technology theorist Ian Bogost argued earlier this year, "if the lecture was such a bad format in the industrial age, why does it suddenly get celebrated once digitized and streamed into a web browser in the information age?"

A good analogy would be newspapers vs news websites. In the end, it is still the same news, but online it is more up-to-date, globally accessible, and more convenient to access. Lectures suck when they're at 8am and if you miss them they're gone forever. They also can't be paused or fast-forwarded. But most importantly, they only happen in one location. Putting them online puts them in the hands of students across the globe, and gives them the ability to watch them at any time, at their own pace.
Spam, proper source is http://blog.instagram.com/post/36359968655/thanksgiving-day-...
I support that "Perhaps we could look into creating a CONTRIBUTING Bootstrap as a default template for writing your GitHub contribution guidelines".
I am a new developer who have been using github for only a few month. At the beginning, I even don't know how to use the "git" to manage my repository. It really takes me some days to learn it.
I actually first found Ruby Monk by searching for "Perl Monk for ruby", so in a way, the name works to their advantage. I know that this site kept coming up on HN radar frequently (in the last year at least) on various occasions, and I am finally glad it has found its own steam at last. :-)

I found Sidu Ponnappa (the guy behind this) to be quite active on many areas/forums/discussion topics (Wonder where/how he finds the time (-: I mean it in a nice way). His blog has some very interesting writings/discussions as well. He's also very vocal about the ongoing state of Indian tech. entrepreneurship, which is quite rare in the current IT ecosystem in India.

I wish him all the very best with all his endeavours.

EDIT: Not associated with them in any way, although the founder appears collaboration worthy IMO ;-)
Body Dysmorphia - Using Kinect to render yourself as fat or skinny in real time
Like I mentioned earlier: I actually first found Ruby Monk by searching for "Perl Monks for ruby", so in a way, the name works to their advantage.
It is probably a good thing that the US has a strong security community, especially since they write a good chunk of the software that takes up most of the CPU time.

The other option would be government funded hackers in places like China finding security holes in US made software and ensuring they remain undisclosed (to anyone outside Chinese govt) to maintain an advantage.

Not meaning to pick on China in particular here, would it be any better if the US govt was the only ones to know this stuff?
This Note 10.1 video is pretty inspiring about how kids could learn in the future through games. I really like this idea of learning through games. I think it could be very effective.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0krCDFLjdA&feature=plcp
It's linked, but my link color probably should be more obvious, sorry about that!
Full blog post here:
http://www.flight404.com/blog/?p=472
At the end of the post, the advice is "Just pick something and see how far you can get with it."

I have to disagree. I wouldn't point anyone who is non technical towards a language that is not memory managed, nor would I point them to a non mainstream language.

Why point them to a language where they have to worry about memory allocation. While it is important to understand eventually, for most beginners it is a needless complication and chance to shoot yourself in the foot.

Why point them to a non mainstream language whe the number of tutorials, forums and ore resources for help are plentiful with a more popular language. There is tremendous value in learning languages that are wildly different, but for starters, one with lots of support is the best option. Here's a nice post about programming language popularity: http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2012/09/12/language-rankings-9-12.... The languages I would recommend would be in the upper right corner of the graph.

Finally, and most important, what did the beginner want to do? If they wanted to write an excel plugin, steering them to objective C would be a disservice, and if they wanted to build a webpage, choosing something like vb would be a bad idea as well.
>I don't see how this particular response was arguing in favor of laziness.

In a referentially transparent language, you don't care about order of evaluation because whatever the order you will always end up with exactly the same result. Thus, losing control of it through laziness doesn't matter.

However, IMHO, the initial argument is kind of wrong. Laziness doesn't really make you lose control of order of evaluation. You know when expressions are going to be evaluated : when they are going to be needed. Obviously, when you use a lot of abstraction you didn't write like in Haskell, it becomes tricky. But, if you perfectly know how your data structures are processed by the compiler, you can safely use side effects with laziness. Not that you should, but you can.
Ask HN: How do you write great sentences, paragraphs, or articles?
Writing advice often reiterates the same general rules: active voice, economy of expression, favour the concrete over the abstract.

These broad suggestions come at the expense of advice on micro- and macrostructure. We're missing a trick here. In particular, I believe great non-fiction writing out-punches the good because it manages not only to articulate ideas succinctly and clearly, but to show how they overlap and interconnect.

In business, while a good product is essential, it is almost always not enough. The product has to be presented to the consumer in an intuitive and sensible way. Often a product will have more than one USP, and its success hinges on which USP you chose to emphasise.

The same might be said of ideas. An argument---or point---will be convincing only insofar as it is presented to the reader in a coherent way.

To that end, do people have any tips, book suggestions, or exercises that will help writers improve their articles' unity, coherent, flow, logical structure, etc?
Github and Stackoverflow programming language popularity
Same here - just a little more geeky, with a transparent box. ;-)

For me it's running a couple small utilities and a tincd based network, connecting various machines of my brother and me. Mostly - it's a small always-on playground machine.
Why should anyone have to set this themseleves anyway? I thought carriers pushed these settings through some kind of magic "carrier settings" text message? I don't understand why his carrier can't sort this out for him? I'm pretty sure they can change the APN remotely because I found a way to tether my laptop to my sony erricson way back when it had unlimited data (because WAP was so crap that no-one used much data). My memory may be wrong but I think they changed the APN for WAP access to one which actually had a password by sending out one of these, then shut off the APN people were using for surfing the web on their laptops through a tethered phone.
hmm ... I still have full access to the APN settings ( Unlocked iPhone 4s from the US, German carrier). Is this just a problem in the US? I guess it depends on the carrier doesn't it?
NaNoWriMo and what it means to be a ‘real’ writer
Something weird is going on with the favicon for me (Chrome 25.0.1323.1 dev-m). It's kind of flashing/glitching. Anyone else?
Haha. I agree. I mentioned it on my comment too before scrolling down and reading yours. :-)
I also thought that line was unfair. Sure, one can go and get a 4 year degree to run your machines, at their own personal cost of $100,000 to $150,000.

It's not just about "fair wage" at that point - enough to have a place to live, a car, food in your belly... but that "fair rate" also includes being paid enough to afford the $500-1,000/month student loan payment that is the outcome of getting such a degree.
Do you think NSA and CIA doesn't do the same? They even buy zero day exploits from hackers so they can use them themselves against other countries. How do you think they made Flame work? And these guys are "Government sponsored hackers" too. In fact they are even hiring for this right now.
Kill long meetings
This is probably not a Apple thing, but a carrier thing saying if you buy a phone from me it's locked to me so no APN for you.

I have full access to those options, but someone else I know on a different carrier does not.
The Mexican drug war and the US war on drugs are completely different things... In the Mexican drug war, rival drug warlords massacre dozens of civilians because they think they'll be used as mules by the other side; the government then come in force to try to re-establish order in the region. It's more of a civil war, or a war against bandit warlords, or a war against corruption that buys off entire police departments. It's almost a civil war.

The US drug war is mostly an unnecessary but lucrative obsession with jailing people for minor marijuana offenses, at least domestically speaking.
"Implementing your own version of laziness" makes it sound error-prone and difficult. In fact it's this pattern:

def move(board, position, player):
"""
board is a 11-character string which is 3 lengths of 3 of the characters
X, O or _, separated by newlines
turn is either X or O, depending on who moves
"""
return board[:position] + player + board[position+1:]

def getNextStates(board, player):
spaces = [ i for i,c in enumerate(board) if c == '_' ]
return [ move(board, i, player) for i in spaces ]

>>> print board
X_O
_OX
X_O

>>> for state in getNextStates(board, 'O'):
... print state
... print
...
XOO
_OX
X_O

X_O
OOX
X_O

X_O
_OX
XOO

I doubt most programmers exposed only to imperative programming would even notice that there was a pattern in what they were implementing, let alone identify it as laziness.
it's fine for most people, allowing for only signed applications in an app store is a good thing for, you know, people like my siste or mom aka 99% of users. having some accountability and being able to trace an application back to a users/organization signing it is a long term win.
Who wants to enter a one-to-two-year unpaid training program for the privilege of getting a $10-15/hr position that's probably going to be gone in five years?
It is like the apochryphal caged monkeys experiment. People learn that corruption is then only way to get ahead, and who wants to be a martyr? One person can't change the system, some sort of massive coordinated action would be needed-- but how? Hence, rebel groups and freedom fighters and whatnot, but those have their own problems.
When applying for programmers I'll refuse to hand in a résumé without being able to demonstrate my skills and provide sample work first.

The hiring process that most companies use is backwards, and I think mostly due to people that go to school to learn HR and taught this impractical approach.
I saw that, and was a bit confused as well. Seeing as I pay my licence fee (to watch any tv, but it only funds the BBC) its a bit annoying that I then cant see other BBC content.
You don't seem to provide any context about what the circle of fifths is, or even what a fifth is for, thus I have no idea why I should care, and in general it makes it very hard to assimilate the article in a useful way.