skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It sounds like they aren't very savvy business people, but when I'm looking to stay somewhere that does not matter. A 16 room boutique hotel is never going to get a ton of attention from a large travel agency, there's no profit in it. They'd be better off marketing directly to their target demographic and trying for word of mouth / repeat business.

I have had great luck with Hotwire (an Expedia subsidiary) and have discovered many neat hotels with it. I live in Florida and frequently book hotel room on the various beaches for easy short vacations, the only motivator is location and price (if nothing is available, I don't go). I have booked directly at some of the places I found, but if it weren't for their being on Hotwire I never would have found them.

Also, the cost savings with Hotwire is frequently massive (50% off is not uncommon)--I haven't been able to book directly for cheaper (the trick is Hotwire doesn't tell you the exact hotel before you book, so if you want to ensure the same property you need to direct book and pay more).
To give Lockheed some credit — their original goal was probably reliability over all else. In most cases their payloads are insanely expensive (ignoring opportunity cost — how much is having a surveillance satellite in place when needed worth?) and saving money on the launch is a false economy. Now they're having the fat pulled out of their contract (i.e. the launches where reliability isn't paramount but the cost structures were already established).

Whether SpaceX can establish itself as a mission critical alternative to ULA remains to be seen — 66 launches is no minor feat (but according to Wikipedia they have had at least TWO failed launches, is that 2/68 or 66 successes in a row or what?)
Not having Amazon Video is a pretty big deal for me. It's the only cross platform way to buy new movies and TV shows. I have a lot of purchased content on Amazon and not being able to watch that in bed would be unfortunate. But then again, it might very well work on the Nexus 7.
The Lindy Effect and Technology Survival Patterns
I agree, but I feel the wording of the article title is the issue here, I feel that while Photoshop is a great piece of software, there is room for improvement, if this program can achieve that, kudos to the developers.
Many companies start there, and then start competing against their licensees. Google is a great search engine for finding credit card deals, and they now recognize that and offer their own credit card aggregation engine: https://www.google.com/advisor/uscredit Looks a lot like all of the other aggregator sites (creditcard.com, etc.) out there, right? Now, compare to CreditKarma (http://www.creditkarma.com/) which attempts to change the process. Again, Google does great work, but I think they stop short at times when our industry really needs to be pushed. Startups can only do so much.

BTW, ITA released their "matrix" front end to the world (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/) around a year or so after Orbitz and others licensed it. The clicks still took you to externals to complete the purchases, but new filters and capabilities were often tested on the live ITA site before 3rd parties took advantage of them. The problem I always felt was that they were just new filters: fast, live-response, rapid return filters on very large and nasty data, to be fair, but still just filters. I enjoyed sites that added additional context to the flight experience, few though they have been.

Again, thanks to both Google for organizing hairy data, and startups for doing more with the data. Glad both have room to play.
Hey, this is stats. At least where I'm from, Stats is in the Math faculty. Same as the CS departement.
Well, they've stopped ignoring! Next will be attacking.
Adobe must die.

I set up a workflow for InDesign CS5.0 and everything worked. InDesign CS5.5 came out and they refused to sell me CS5.0. They introduced no new features, but the export as HTML option started producing random crashes. I spoke with their engineers and they said they would fix it in the next version.

We still experience a random crash in 1/30 automated jobs - which requires us to redo a large portion by hand. I don't know if they had fixed it, but I know they want thousands of dollars to upgrade to CS6.0.

Why did this problem happen? Because they released a new version called CS5.5 that introduced only bugs. Using Adobe software feels like you are being robbed.

Adobe must die.
I was going to reply with the same setup: a full power tablet with great docking to a very large monitor and bluetooth input devices.

A little off topic, but I just finished 23 days of travel up the Amazon River and my Android phone (Galaxy III S with 1280x720 screen) was the perfect combination of portability, Internet access, application access, taking pictures and video. Perhaps a smart phone instead of a tablet would work also? With a full power large format phone, you do give up a lot of ease of use with an on-screen keyboard.

I think the real change will come when we have living environments where screen displays are everywhere and we basically live in the interface. I just submitted a Leap Motion developers application yesterday and I can not help but hope for future living environments that have sharable flexible input and display devices that automatically link up with a super phone in my pocket so I still have all of my data always with me.
Locating interesting parts of an image
Have you heard of the Lindy effect? "The longer a technology has been around, the longer it’s likely to stay around."

Writing code by typing has been around for decades, so you'd expect it to be around decades from now. Likewise, I expect lots of people to continue using vi or emacs twenty years from now.

http://architects.dzone.com/articles/lindy-effect-and-techno...
Thanks for trying it out! I'll take a look into it.

EDIT: It appears like Feedburner sometimes improperly links embedded images. I've fixed the issue on my end, though images may not appear consistently.
Also, many of the FDA's objections to safer forms of Nicotine consumption are that less deaths might lead to more use.
Given the general negativity (often deserved) towards government by entrepreneurs it's important to acknowledge when they do positive things.

It's important to also realize they aren't doing this because they're motivated to disrupt the military/industrial complex, they're doing it because Elon is a master of public relations and has promoted SpaceX heavily.
There are many people claiming that user's are not interested in this kind of stuff. I beg to differ. I find it fascinating how many apps on the Play Store require root permission and even more how many of them are in the Top 10 of their corresponding category.[0][1][2] With about 3.5M installations of Cyanogenmod[3] it still may only be a tiny fraction of the Android ecosystem and the mobile space in general, but it's certainly a large enough absolute number to care about.

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.koushikdut...

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.speedsoftw...

[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.noshufou.a...

[3] http://stats.cyanogenmod.com/
Sure, but keep in mind that my ideal would also involve discarding most what a POSIX compatibility layer would get you. Why cleanroom a nifty kernel and then turn it into something that's almost exactly like what already exists? If you want Unix, you know where to find it, as the wag said.
Have you actually read the PHP documentation page for nl2br? People are absolutely using it that way and not making any remark about safety or security. As an anecdote, when I started using PHP, I began to use nl2br to change the newlines in my HTML to <br> tags and output them. You can mark that up to me being a bad developer I guess but I literally got the idea from the PHP manual.

Also, your criticism of map() is kind of childish. It doesn't imply to a new learner that they will draw a map, nor does the documentation even hint at anything like that. In the Python documentation, they are given a clear use case and, if they are familiar with programming (or linguistics), understand that usage of the word map as a verb. Don't be obtuse about PHP's bad documentation.
Interface innovation is not the same thing as "innovation in solving a real problem". The best interface is "no interface" and command line is the best interface for many cases. One day we will automate all system administration (really?) and we will stay in the front of a super control panel for all our servers and services that run in "cloud" but meanwhile command line rules :)
Amazing.
I've been using Linux for years, but I realized I know almost anything: I don't know how to configure the network, I don't know awk or sed, I don't know to use chown/chmod correctly, etc.
Not using hotels.com is harder than you think. There are front entities pretending to be the hotel and are actually booking thru hotels.com.

Background...

We booked a hotel in Key West FL. Fair deal. Show up, no reservation. Turns out they gave us the wrong hotel info. It was super late and we couldn't resolve the mess with hotels' customer service over the phone so we just crashed where we arrived. Took months to get the charges for the other booking reversed.

People at hotel where we arrived said it happens all the time.

For our next trip, resolved to not use hotels.com ever again, I found hotel via the web. Called the number. Turns out both the website and phone number were SEO optimized front companies that book thru hotels.com. Which we did not discover until we arrived and there was a problem with the booking. We paid $40 extra per night for the privilege of being lied to.

Rant...

Personally, as a consumer, I'm very grumpy that I'm constantly being lied to. I work hard for my money. I try to be diligent about how I spend it. And I'm sick of being robbed by legal means. It seems to be getting worse (ISPs, banks, phone companies, mortgages, etc). I'm now more reluctant to spend money. Because now my transaction costs are getting too high. Too much friction.

If my wary consumer experience is widespread, it has to be dampening the economy.

Free market! Woot!
Did you actually use the software in the article?
Here's the explanation: http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/diplomania/idf-probe-of-anonymo...

This blogger, eishton, investigates suicides in general and in the IDF in particular. He claims that suicides are more common in the military than among civilians.

Anyway, Haaretz reports that the police has begun investigating him after receiving complaints from families of soldiers who had committed suicide that the blogger obtained private records pertaining to their loved ones' death. The military police wants to find out who the soldiers who leaked that sensitive, personal information are.

Because this is not an issue of national security, Haaretz chastises the IDF for using the police to exert pressure on a journalist so that they could find the leak.
Not wanting to be negative or anything but I'm a bit puzzled why this post is here. There's only six books, the descriptions are sourced from Amazon and there's no comment as to whether the books are good or not.

At the very least some reviews would be helpful.
The best strategy with flying I've found is to pick one Legacy carrier/alliance if you're a frequent traveler (because they treat their folks with status quite well, at the expense of everyone else). If you don't fly >25k miles/year, do what you do.
"I also found out that you could change your topcolor and immediately set it to #000000 so people would stop pestering me when they saw I was reading a hacker website."

Thank you!!
"The command line will never die. It's precise. It works. If you don't know how to use it, you're not a programmer. End of story."
This reminds me of my favorite joke:

Man has progressed to the point of rivalry with God. Man talks to God and brags about his accomplishments. God agrees that Man has accomplished a lot.

God reminds Man that God made him from dirt. Man says "Oh, we mastered that long ago." God says he'd like to see that.

Man smiles, and reaches down for a handful of dirt.

God says "Ah, no, you go get your own dirt."
I'm not the original poster, but I would recommend The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams. It's an easy-to-read book for absolute beginners in design. You can easily finish the book in one sitting - it's brief and concise. It discusses four design principles:

- Proximity
- Alignment
- Repetition
- Contrast

Each principle is illustrated with before-and-after design examples, so you can understand how the principle works in practice. The book is very much about the layout of elements, rather than how to create an image from scratch.

The book also provides a basic introduction to understanding and using type. The type section is not as strong as the first section of the book that covers design principles, but still useful.

I'll repeat that this is an absolute beginner's book for non-designers. There are many topics it doesn't cover that you might find in a beginner's book on Graphic Design. However, it provides simple practical advice you can put to use immediately in documents. That's why I think it's useful for non-designers. Since it is a well-known and popular title, you should be able to find it in your local library.

(Note: my comments above refer to the first edition of the book published in 1994, but there have been subsequent editions which will have updated content.)
How can they handle anything if AWS-East goes down? Heroku is only using AWS-East.

Don't get me wrong, I wish they would use other AWS regions as well. As a European I really want them to utilize AWS Ireland. But currently there is no need to bitch about how they are handling AWS East outages as there is nothing to handle.
The Tech Superheroes You Most Want to Be
What the post is saying is that they also do a really good job filtering out the non-junk "non-chain" hotels, making life difficult for the independent hotelier.
For me, this is a news site, that I can come here to learn, expand my horizons and then most importantly, forget it all, leave and go back to my work is important to me - if I spent too long thinking about what I read here I wouldn't get any work done. Also, this is a 'news' site, except for recurring articles about events (such as the summer of endless Apple vs Samsung articles) news comes one day and goes as quickly.
Try Hipmunk.com.... best flight search I've seen. It the refers you to the airline's page to complete the booking. No sketchy third-party to buy from.

It's visualization of flights schedules is awesome!
Every time AWS, Heroku, GitHub, Twitter is down it gets posted here and this is exactly the discussion the takes place:

Commenter1: Well they should've never relied on X platform. Single point of failure, etc.

Replyers: It's not Platform X's fault, the engineers should've set up servers like XYZ. It's not like it's hard to do.

Then someone says their app is down, someone else says this sucks, some statistics on uptime get thrown about, and the exact same conversation ensues as the last time any other service went down.

So my honest and sincere question is this: why? Why do "Service X is down" posts get posted and upvoted to the front page? Why do we all have the same discussion each time it happens? It just seems like there's just nothing else to say about it and these sites have status pages where we can all find out for ourselves if they're down or not, so why are we repeating ourselves?
> The command line will never die. It's precise. It works. If you don't know how to use it, you're not a programmer. End of story.

Precision would match the input to the output. Why should the tool I use to make Python, JS etc ever produce something that's not parseable by the interpreter for those languages? Why should people ever miss a bracket? Especially when they're learning.

Vim has shortcuts for yankingaand deleting and putting lines and paragraphs, which have little meaning in programming. You can't delete a block, or a statement.
I hate when news sites publish an article that mentions a blog or website but then almost never give a link for it. Anyone know why?

Anyway, here is Google's English translated version of Eishton's blog--> http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=iw&tl...
Ideas for Raspberry Pi Projects
you really, really shouldn't introduce a concept with an bad example, and then add the caveat of " dont do this". It's like a double negative in speech, it's too confusing to parse.

so i got as far as the "int* a,b;" example.

C does not work that way, so OF COURSE that won't work. Why not build on that
These terms are understood in their context, or otherwise completely useless in real life.
> So much that Wikipedia devotes its own page to US serial killers.

Aside from any of this Wikipedia devotes a lot of pages to US-specific things because it has a lot of contributors in the US. You shouldn't draw any other conclusion from it than that. You'll see a lot of US-bias and US-specific coverage on any topic on the English Wikipedia.
Not exactly a new release, but 'Dissolution' by C.J. Sansom was without a doubt the best book I read this year. [1]

That aside, I reread the Dan Brown 'Angels & Demons' and 'The Da Vinci code' novels, worked my way through 'To kill a Mockingbird' for the first time since high school and read the 'Catechism of the Catholic Church' - to better understand the religion my girlfriend is choosing.

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dissolution-Shardlake-C-J-Sansom/dp/...
Battle of the Arch Spin-Offs
I actually wrote a research paper just last semester for my undergrad operating systems class on 'user interfaces in the year 2022', and although this wasn't my exact focus I'll share some things I noticed while researching as well as others papers on this topic.

I don't think the traditional keyboard and mouse will completely go away. We will see improvements in both, but for productivity means there's no highly-productive and intuitive interface on the horizon to replace them altogether.

I think we'll see a huge improvement in touch-screen interfaces. I never realized just how bad our touch-screens were before researching this, but I'd expect to see a huge jump in the next 10 years. This includes increased haptic feedback and the introduction of dynamic buttons [1].

[1] http://www.tactustechnology.com/technology.html
I think a lot of the evils in the world continue because of your sort of attitude. Merry Christmas!
Correct. There are times when you do want the anti-inflammatory properties of acetaminophen. Using only opioids for inflammatory pain, or muscle aches requires a higher dosage than if it was mixed with acetaminophen.

I usually take muscle relaxants (Soma) with Naproxen for back pain, and avoid the opioid pain meds or acetaminophen.
Living from a PSD to Wordpress business
Hi all,

I'm new here. I've been designing and developing websites for clients for about 5 years (as a one man army) so far so good. However, dealing with clients is difficult, since everyone is different. I do everything, from wireframes, design and development.

Lately I was thinking it would be good idea to focus on just doing website implementation CSS/HTML slicing since is the part of the process in which you deal the least with a client and depends mostly on your time and your ability.

I've done some research and yes, I know there are a lot of websites that offer this service. Do you guys think there's market for one more? Is this a profitable business?

Thanks a lot!
I got the idea from hiring. Look at what was being advertised for; what I was competing against.. But I live in Florida. What area of the country are you?
I remember what I learn more if it's relevant to work I'm actually doing.

So if, for example, I'm thinking about landing pages and I read some links on HN about building better landing pages then it gets lodged in my brain and I learn something worthwhile.

If on the other hand I'm just procrastinating I don't remember much or extract much value from being here.

One of the best uses I've found for HN is searching for past links related to what I'm working on; there's a lot of value in the old comment threads.
Univariate Distribution Relationship Chart (nice visualization)
My understanding is he obtained unclassified information that he shouldn't have been able to obtain (probably privacy concerns). The prosecution is because the government doesn't like to be challenged (see how the US government is suing illegal wiretapping whistleblowers). Also, blogger != journalist, at least legally.

Another issue here is that he didn't "play by the rules" - usually you don't talk about suicides in the press because there's a certain social stigma attached to the family, and it's a small country where everyone knows everyone. He published full names of several people who committed suicide, while most regular journalists would leave it at the initials level.
I would recommend against this.

This is a book that gives you a collection of techniques. Without the knowledge of why you should be using these techniques, you'll end up with weird designs that feel wrong intuitively but are correct technique-wise.
Investigative journalism is quite common, and quite effective in Israel. Almost every official in every branch of the government has been subjected to it at one time or another. Often some official lies are exposed, and sometimes, hot-headed officials who don't know any better, would try to use the police to find the leaks in their department. This rarely leads anywhere.

But a blog investigating a relatively minor -- though very important -- issue of soldier suicides, might expose some establishment lies or cover-ups, but hardly tries to expose "the IDF propaganda", whatever that means.
Full disclosure, I work for an OTA and CRS (central reservation service) specializing in boutique hotels.

1. Often the hotels themselves charge the customer, and pay the OTA commission on a monthly basis.

2. Many contracts between hotels and availability services mandate that the hotel provide the lowest rate to the OTA, and that if they use several that the rates are in parity with each other. If you find a lower rate by going to the hotel directly, there's a chance that they are breaching contract.

3. The OTA can only be as accurate as the hotelier providing it with information. If the customer is not satisfied, we get a partial refund or credits for future bookings. For our more remote hotels, sometimes they have to throw up a satellite transmitter once a week and update the information they are telling the world about themselves. If they are on a good CRS, it will fan-out that information to many online sites.

The OTA I'm at does provide the hotel with the customer's information, and requires that all communications between the hotel and customer are CC'd to them. This is because when the customer calls our customer service with a problem, we want to know what the back-and-forth between them and the hotel was so we can address the issue more objectively.

Third party websites yield value to people who feel like being backed by the OTA's brand to ensure that they receive the experience they paid for. They offer comfort insurance, and will go through the hassle of fixing problems with the hotel for you. For hotels, the agency may also forward their information to google and bid on ad placement. The one I'm at also guarantees certain perks to people who book through us, and offer a membership program for travelers to receive champagne on arrival, breakfast, transportation, etc... It sounds like you've really been burned by the lower end OTA's. Sorry for the blatant spam, but maybe you'd be interested in TabletHotels.com
I don't know why you say this. Changing your cost structure is extremely hard for businesses. Particularly if, as with Lockheed and Boeing, your cost structure is distributed through a web of other businesses (ie subcontractors) who are all going to be inclined to push back.