skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked in the online booking industry for a couple of years, coincidentally I also live in Playa del Carmen now.

What most likely happened was this: Expedia and other big players buy wholesale room inventory from large hotel chains. Expedia might come up and say that they want to buy 30% of the rooms of a hotel for a certain period at a steeply discounted price.

This might be something that the hotel itself can't fill, so the happily sell to Expedia et al. To Expedia, selling these rooms might be something like 80% profit, against 25% for a small hotel such as the Luna Blue.

Expedia then promotes the hell out of the hotel through their website: they make it appear on top of search results, they "pimp" they profile of the hotel, and such. They are not allowed to undercut the price, because other retailers might ask for the same price.

Then, the office managers of Expedia Cancún are most likely on some sort of incentive to sell most of these wholesale rooms (travel is dominated by such economic incentives). The hack is is pretty clear: "closing" smaller hotels causes users to book another hotel, and it will most likely be one of these pimped out hotel profiles that provide much more profit than other hotels.

I'm guessing this is a regional issue, just some dim witted office managers at Cancún that are trying to game the system in order to get a big incentive.
Given the general negativity (often deserved) towards government by entrepreneurs it's important to acknowledge when they do positive things.

This is far more like undoing a negative thing. Relatively, it's positive, but it's starting from a bad position that was the result of the government's actions to begin with.
What will the implementation details of this be? Manually stemming text and adding values in a list like prior was far from ideal. In fact, when I full text index, I don't even want to have to think about stem lists, not to mention the performance penalty. How will this be used?
Meet some of the worlds shortest domain names
1) A foreign language. Maybe Spanish, but more likely French or German.

2) Perhaps how to drive. But I probably won't.

3) Modern CSS / HTML. I'm comfortable with static sites in HTML 4, but I'd like to learn about newer technology. I'm planning two sites in 2013 (one will be buying / receiving gifted Duplo, Lego, and StickleBrix to be cleaned, sorted, sterilised, and distributed to local not-wealthy children. That's easy enough for static. The other is the "alcohol awareness" game, where people have pictures of wine glasses and they have to "pour" either one unit, or pour a serving and guess how many units are in it. This is going to be lots of dynamic stuff.)

4) Enough about Linux to get a Raspberry Pi to boot in under 3 seconds. (http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/320/what-is-a...)

5) Child development for children 2.5 to 5 years old; mostly because that's my son's age but also because it's freaking fascinating.

6) How to YouTube, because I might set up a channel doing small youtubey type things.

7) How to correctly run encrypted partitions and password managers and all that other privacy stuff. 2013 is going to be my year of reclaiming my data and keeping it safer.
If you're a hotel dealing with one unhappy customer you only stand to lose the future business of that customer, and any negative PR (usually non-existent) that they can personally inflict upon you.

When you're dealing with a customer you get through a lucrative distribution channel you're liable to lose your standing on the distribution channel as a whole.

Negative reviews by that customer and customer service load on the distribution channel caused by you will impact your future business as a whole. This is true for all major distribution channels that I know of, such as Amazon.com, eBay and various OTA's.
Well that explains some of the weirdness I've seen for hotels that Expedia said were booked out where it didn't seem likely (dead season).
Planning: all the things I was supposed to learn in 2012..(2012 - [self age]).

Actually learning: whatever I feel like.

I am hoping to land:

1. Electrical Engineering

2. Smalltalk

3. Photography

4. Wood and metal craft

5. Higher math
Yes to more technical, no to people, alas. Despite which, the conflicts and resolutions were pretty good. But the science fiction is brilliant.

(Incandescence also had some neat ideas, and I don't regret reading it -- it showed a reasonable way much of general relativity could be discovered before newtonian physics; but the people stuff irritated me. There was eventually an in-story explanation for the implausible characters, but it wasn't enough.)
what if you want to have high quality search service? install even better search plugin in RoR?
It would be great if this blog post were picked up by a legit news organization, researched and fact checked, cross referenced with other stories (like the French one) and published more widely as an expose.

This is bad for consumers and bad for hotels. I like small local hotels. I want them to succeed. I want an easier way to connect with them. They are hard to find on hotels.com, etc. and I always assumed it was because the owners didn't maintain the listing, but it seems it's because expedia doesn't care.
A simple system status page (like Heroku)
Maybe you could put the 'best of' in your list!
Because he likes to hear himself talk (well, read his own words) and show off superficial tangential knowledge (or fairly deep tangential knowledge about some humanities things, especially classics and lebanese culture).

It's kind of grating, but works for an audiobook in the car, where I might lose a few seconds due to temporary attention increase on the road. He'll reliably spend 3-4 minutes saying the same thing with minor variations when 20 seconds would do.
This is a pretty strong allegation, and requires evidence. Do you have any? For example, can you quote any IDF KIA stats that seem to include suicides?
>Israel suffers badly from a perception that they use modern military weapons against a civilian population

You mean it suffers badly from a reality of doing that.
dspguide.com it's old (BASIC examples...) but it is very good IMHO compared to other similar books.
1) Math, specifically calculus and linear algebra. I studied enough of it in college to pass the classes, completely forgot about it for 10 years, and now I'm finding myself needing it for some of my coding work. I'm hoping to work through MIT's OCW Scholar class on introductory calc as a refresher, then linear algebra, then maybe something harder on the calc side.

2) Japanese. I'm trying the "kanji-first" approach advocated by "Remembering the Kanji" with practice through Skritter[1]. I already know hiragana/katakana and basic pronunciation, so after I finish RtK I should be in a good position to tackle a couple books on grammar and start reading/watching/listening to less structured content.

3) A creative pursuit that doesn't involve (or at least center around) writing code. I love programming, but sometimes it feels like I'm missing something (everything?) by having my methods of creative expression so clustered together. I want to try writing fiction, drawing/sketching and possibly musical composition, and see what ends up staying with me.

4) HTML5, CSS3 and modern Javascript. At one point in my life, long ago, I would've introduced myself as a web designer. This was back when DHTML was a synonym for Javascript, anything more complex than hover effects seemed to require Flash or Java and every site had an unholy mess of framesets and tables for layout. Fortunately for everyone involved, all of those things (and many more) have changed in the past 10 years. Unfortunately for me, my front-end skills haven't. Hoping to get up to date with stuff like JS MVC frameworks, responsive design and Less/Sass.

5) Blogging, so that I can bore other people with stories about learning the things listed above.

[1]: http://www.skritter.com/
"Mastery" by Robert Greene.
"The Prince" by Niccolò Machiavelli.
"Gomorrah" by Roberto Saviano.
I don't see how they should have a better chance of adoption than Web.M which I havnt seen much support and usage since Google announced it.
I didn't want to use 5.5

I setup the work-flow and was ready to deploy. When I went to purchase the licenses, the adobe sales rep said it was their policy to only sell the CS5.5 version.

I feel betrayed because each new version of Adobe's product brings more bugs and no useful features. This is is a direct consequence of adobe's monopoly, which disregards the needs of its users in favor of push new versions down our throats. Reminds of Windows ME.
1. Learn agda and Coq, read Pierce's Softw. Foundations and Chlipala's book

2. Find a teacher for clarinet and/or cello; keep working through Well Tempered Klavier preludes
I learned how to program in Haskell. Although Haskell is hard, learning a language is still relatively easy compared to writing good 100KLOC+ sized software in whatever language.

In 2013 I hope I will figure out how to write good software in Haskell by writing good software in Haskell.
I suspect it'll mostly be crappy Farmville clones and big corporate pages trying to do "social marketing", but we can hope...
> Apparently our mid-grade is a 50/50 mix of regular and high-grade. I don't know if that makes sense, but that is what I've been told by 4-5 different people.

Yes, typically gas stations only have two tanks of gasoline: low-grade and high-grade. When you select mid-grade it's blended at the pump.
>The reason this is done is mostly to avoid attaching social stigma to the dead person's family, and for the country to give the parents something, because, you know, their son is dead.

That doesn't mean they can't give aggregate data.
In our case the reviews were really great. One of the reasons we chose this place. We can't prove anything, but to put it mildly, I have a feeling not all reviews were genuine.
Ask HN: What tech/programming languages will continue to dominate in 2013?
Dropbox is still doing something seriously harmful and potentially misleading.

Hmm, what do you mean? Which Dropbox behaviors are you referring to?
The key to improve the noticeable latency is to improve our protocols to minimise the number of round trips; ie the packet latency is pretty much a physical quantity, but if we can reduce the number of times we incure it, we will improve our protocols.
I am in the same boat with my math knowledge. Thanks for the heads up about the MIT courses (and Merry Christmas! :)
These are the ones I remember, but not necessarily for being the best.

Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson. I thought it was interesting; an honest attempt at cataloguing the life of a fascinating and complex person.

How To Win Friends And Influence People - Dale Carnegie. I'd skimmed through it in high school, and decided it was full of obvious/cheesy platitudes, but was somehow convinced to take another look this year and I'm very glad I did. It is mostly full of very basic "don't be an ass" advice, but I needed it.

Never Eat Alone - Keith Ferrazzi. I'm not sure what to think of this one. It's pretty low on actionable advice, but it did help me (together with HTWFAIF, above) reframe the way I approach interpersonal relationships.

The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje. I haven't finished this one yet, but it's part of a recent concerted effort to read more fiction. I've always loved Ondaatje's work, and this latest novel is no different.

Freakonomics - Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner. I just started reading this last night, and I'm already 100 pages in. It's an addicting read, and is already causing me to re-evaluate the incentive systems that are everywhere.

Napoleon Bonaparte - Alan Schom. I've been reading this one slowly for a while (it's a hefty book). It's a very well written account of Napoleon's entire life story--highly recommended.

Crossing the Chasm - Geoffrey Moore. Just started this one last night as well (Christmas presents!) and so far it seems like it will live up to the hype.

The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg. This one, I can't recommend. As always, though, YMMV :)
I'd love to pay google or youtube for no ads.
I can understand why they would restrict it on free accounts, but why do Dropbox not allow multiple paid accounts on a single machine?
The Unschooled. Does an education matter?
I work in IT which is pretty removed from customer service, but if you send me some details at the E-Mail listed in my profile I could see if I could find someone to poke about this if needed. I'll be back at work on Thursday.
Unlimited to the capacity of the resources of the system.

Meaning they did not hardcode limits, and I assume had a O(1) or O(n) type scaling.
This seems like an argument for more manual management of state, less abstraction, and more human compiler. That isn't to say we shouldn't have that discussion, but it is part of that discussion.
> And the somewhat unique situation that the code can leak information back, which here allowed for the bypass of stack cookies

Information leaks are by far the most important class of bugs in modern exploitation. They're really common, and they generally nullify ASLR completely. The Array.reduceRight vulnerability in Firefox is a fantastic example of this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=664009 That bug can be used to leak info about JS objects, which gives you enough information to circumvent ASLR. The same bug also allows code execution using that info.
This is great point about a problem I've had in my early days of GUI programming.

I'd take the author's suggestion a bit further: in terms of MVC a Controller should always call the appropriate function on its Model but the Model should check for an appropriate state before performing the requested action.

Collecting state information in the Model would also make it easier for Views to adjust their appearance after a state change since there would only be one source of this information.
IMO, Mozilla has a better trust with people than Google.
It's a GPS tracking app for skiers (with running and biking skinned versions to come later). Sadly it's still in review with Microsoft, I was hoping it would get released by Christmas. Here are links to the Android and iOS versions:

Ski Tracker+ for Android - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thirtySout...

For iPhone - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ski-tracker-gps-tracking-for...

All iPhone - https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/30-south-llc/id331245760

All Android - https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=30+South
1) CFA Level 1 and start CFA Level 2

2) Skiing

3) Improve my knowledge of stochastic Calculus as used in finance
Where I live, a few of the "76" stations advertise very loudly that they don't add ethanol to their fuel. They don't seem to be much more expensive than the E10 stations either.
Whatever the motivations, if Musk can actually deliver at the prices he's aiming for it will be very disruptive.
Korea's amazing writing system
The article didn't include a Y.
Tell HN: Merry Christmas!
merry xmas suckers!
This is an interesting piece of information, thanks! Up in Canada I have heard of stories where debt collectors will call a "John Smith", ask them for their DOB, and SIN, type that information into their debt file (which does not have this information) and make them pay. I wonder if there's similar legislation in Canada.
To be fair, your flight being late is something that your travel insurance company should deal with. If airlines and travel industries had to subsidise late flights and erratic weather patterns they may go out of business. Get travel insurance, it's affordable (but read the fine print, some may have over $100 excess which makes such incidents not claimable).
Cloud Atlas, little scifi in it. Good writer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Atlas_(novel)
http://www.amazon.com/Cloud-Atlas-Novel-David-Mitchell/dp/03...
My usual response to this is to suggest that people get "The Art of Electronics" and "The Art of Electronics Student Manual", and then some cheap equipment and components, and then work through both books.

Some of the books are severely out of date, but much of it is still useful and they're great introductions for smart people to electronics.

And nowadays you don't even need real equipment, you can probably find excellent simulations and virtual equipment.

Along side that you probably want to learn to solder well. (http://www.astro.umd.edu/~harris/docs/WellerSoldering.pdf) is a guide from Weller. This is a bit old, because it doesn't cover no-clean solders, or low-lead solders.

Hopefully other people have some more up-to-date information.
Español - Estoy aprendiendo hace 3 meses con los websites Duolingo.com, italki.com, anki y otros. Espero que en un año puedo tener buenas conversaciónen con hablantes fluidos.

There are some really interesting emerging ways to learn a foreign language also an emerging community of language learners and polyglots on the internet.
I really don't like these articles where the author provides a list of commands without actually understanding what some of them do. "sudo sync; sync" for instance. This is on par with copy-paste programming.
The term "Self-Made" is repulsive. If you're not acquainted with the term "survivorship bias" get to know it well before you read any success story.

Just after the end of the 90's boom, I was taking care of the storage of my [insert name of any large luxury item] and on the other side of the counter was a guy about my age and disposition who said, "hey what do you do for a living?" I gave him a minimal description and he soon responded with "Wow that's nice, my (tech-related) business went bust and now I work here behind the counter and live upstairs, trying to get back on my feet."

There wasn't the remotest possibility that there was a thousand-fold gap between us in any entrepreneurially-related skill category yet Lady Luck had placed us on opposite side of the service counter that day.

Always be humble. Life is not wholly deterministic.
Well. Chrome and Firefox won't let you log in to GMail, for instance. IE at least allows you to continue if you really want.

It's a common thing on school/university computers, where for various reasons, system time is always wrong and it requires Administrator privilenges to change it (I can't understand why).
>I setup the work-flow and was ready to deploy. When I went to purchase the licenses, the adobe sales rep said it was their policy to only sell the CS5.5 version.

That's bad. Adobe does tend to screw their customers in similar business ways.

>I feel betrayed because each new version of Adobe's product brings more bugs and no useful features.

Well, I don't know about InDesign much, but this is not true for: Photoshop, Lightroom and Premiere.
Calculating Your FU Money Amount
The Gift Of Online Privacy
Agile Software Development Terminology
It amazes me that something happening locally (in the ~10ms range, say a database query) is even in the same scale as something traveling halfway around the world. The internet wouldn't really work without this fact, but I'm very thankful for it. Simply incredible.
More details:
http://wiki.xiph.org/Daala
The Ten Creative Genius Thinking Tools (EVERY DAY AN EASY A)

Give the Gift that Keeps Giving: Elementary School, High School, College, and Graduate School
100% of Students Are College Ready
EVERY DAY AN EASY A
http://www.studyskills4success.com
Something straight from the horse's mouth: Christopher Alexander himself, the keynote address at 1996 ACM OOPSLA. A good read and a taste of how much of Alexander's work you are missing if you stop at the GoF book:

http://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/ieee/ieeetext.htm
Liddell Hart's The German Generals Talk (http://www.amazon.com/German-Generals-Talk-Basil-Liddell/dp/...), originally published in England as The Other Side of the Hill. Probably the most interesting book I've ever read about WW II. I'm surprised it's not better known.
Ten Thinking Tools of Creative Genius (EVERY DAY AN EASY A)

Give the Gift that Keeps Giving: Elementary School, High School, College, and Graduate School
100% of Students Are College Ready
EVERY DAY AN EASY A
http://www.studyskills4success.com
I think it can beat h.264 in the same way h.264 beat DivX and others. We will soon have to switch to a new, more efficient codec anyway, and why not switch to a free and open source one like Daala or VP9, especially if they end up better than h.265?

h.264 won over VP8 because VP8 came too late, and it was unfinished and not even that good when Google bought it. By the time Google made it on par with h.264, h.264 already won the format war. But with a new format war coming up soon, and with other codecs like Daala and VP9 being ready to compete (hopefully) from day one, h.265 might not be the default option as h.264 was.

Also I think all new chips that came out this year had hardware acceleration support for VP8, and most media players support it now, too, as well as WebRTC. So even if h.265 wins again, hardware manufacturers may also support at least one of these open source codecs in the future, alongside h.265.
1) It's a very silly hypothetical question.

2) Obvious the answer is no, seeing that every time you DO ran into limits.
Ten Thinking Tools of Creative Genius EVERY DAY AN EASY A
For drawing, I've been reading "Drawing on the right side of the brain" by Betty Edwards. There's a lot of text but the ideas and exercises do seem to work. I haven't gone through the whole book but so far it's OK.
Can you expand in "The Art of Learning"?
For drawing, I strongly recommend Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. And you DO have all the skills you need to get started as long as you have remotely decent eye-sight and the ability to wield a pencil. The important thing is to force yourself to let go of iconic representations and look at the lines that are actually there. It will be uncomfortable, but once you do that, your progress will really begin.
"Wildwood" and "Under Wildwood" by Colin Meloy (the guy from the Decemberists) and Carson Ellis. Written for older kids but I enjoyed them too. I don't usually read fantasy books but these are different.
Well as I just bought IntelliJ IDEA in the JetBrains dooms day sale Java (and Android) is number 1 on my list. Along with a bit of C++11 later in the year. I think I will also learn the basics (maybe a little bit more) of Python as well as I have been putting it off for a couple of years now.

In general I want to move away from Windows and more towards Linux as my development environment as much as possible. I have no real problem with Windows but I would like to feel as comfortable in the Linux desktop world as I am on Windows.
Tutorial in AutoIt
This autoit tutorial fucuses on how you can use autoit to create small programs, or how you can automate the mouse and keyboard in windows.
Matt Cutts goes crazy
You just compared full countries to a densely populated city which is surrounded by Burroughs with notorious ghettos (in parts of the Bronx, Harlem, Brooklyn, Queens and in New Jersey).

Not only that, but Manhattan is the entertainment center for the surrounding Burroughs and cities, where a lot of violence happens.

This is true in Toronto as well, our "club district" has one of the highest murder rates from people visiting who don't live in the club district.

I don't think Manhattan makes a fair comparison and doesn't disprove the OP's comment.
Congress, at Last Minute, Drops Requirement to Obtain Warrant to Monitor Email
Its a great timing for SpaceX as all government agencies are looking to reduce their costs with fiscal cliff and all.
I think the conversion to ms in the rightmost column is off by an order of 10
meh, i've long switched to elasticsearch (http://www.elasticsearch.org/) for document stores.
Thanks avar. Just sent you an email. It's rather encouraging to see someone from IT stepping in to defend their company. It shows a lot about the company. Still hoping for a positive resolution on this one.
Since H.265 doesn't (?) have hardware decoders yet, maybe Daala will have a fair chance competing.