skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience, using Ruby or gems from your package manager leads to headaches down the line - I'd highly recommend using bundler to manage your gems at the very least, and rvm or rbenv to manage rubies.
Are detector vans real? I know the Post Office IT arm used to have a massive database of license payers and TV owners.

I was never sure whether the vans were more than an urban myth.
When scrolling the "Probeer MoneyMonk 14 dagen vrijblijvend!" button moves into the header but only for a very short time.

I don't think many poeple will actually click through the carrousel "Dit kan MoneyMonk voor jou betekenen..." so it might be better to condense it down a bit and make it into a long-form page.

Also, that the screenshots at the top move up is nice but I still can't see enough to figure out what they're actually saying...

But al met al zeker wel een mooie site...
Could you make these available for download, by any chance?
Best French Startup Nominees
I wouldn't have expected something as slow and clunky as an ATM to actually enlist in a distributed transaction - so it hardly surprises me that they might not.

There is a moderarely interesting article linked to in one of the comments that sort of sums my expectations up "Accountants Don't Use Erasers":

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/pathelland/archive/2007/06/14/accoun...
Did you do anything with the pictures, like post them online? Were men or women more likely to agree?
Red herring? I imagine the bank is still using transactions when it debits your account and credits some internal ATM-withdrawals account, and again when it reverses the process.
As for the detector vans: does anyone know if they actually exist?

Several times in the past I have looked up information on them, and all I find seems to be in the realm of urban legend -slash- marketing ploy.

What is the physical principle behind this tech? Does anyone have reliable information?
> What is a 'metasploit'?

Ruh roh.
This was discussed some days ago :
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4966363
"I just got a series of SMSes from my back"

Not bank?
Errr - that sounds a bit creepy to me.
Confirmed: Thieves Break Into Microsoft Offices, Steal Only iPads
OpenXava 4.6.1 released: Rapid Java Web Development
Hmm, I guess I was wrong you cannot read it ;) The button moves to the header to make sure a Call To Action button is always visible. The CTA in the header disappears if a CTA button on the website is visible.

Good point about the carrousel. I might want to track some events to see if people actually use it. But if it is a long form, doesn't that hurt the experience? On massive long page?

You are actually able to click on the screenshots, but I guess we could make that more clear? Thanks for the feedback! Much appreciated!
When I was backpacking through San Francisco I met a white-haired septugenarian in the hostel. He had a house in Connecticut that he rented out - and he'd spent the last 15 years of his life constantly travelling about the place on the proceeds. It wasn't opulence, but it was travel and he loved it.
I think this kind of makes sense. Think about it the other way, if it were to use transactions the flow would be like this:

[Assuming you've entered the PIN, and you've pressed the 2000 button to withdraw cash]

a) Check the cash dispenser has enough funds to withdraw 2000

b) Contact bank, reserve 2000

c) Tell cash dispenser to dispense 2000

d) Contact bank, commit 2000

Now for newer ATMs I'm assuming it is a bit different, but older ATMs used dial up modems which I'm guessing were pretty slow and unreliable. Ping times in the hundreds of milliseconds wouldn't have been uncommon. During the time taken to dispense it, you could even yank out the telephone cable. My point is, if the ATM failed to send the commit message, the bank would have just given out 2000 to someone for free.
> I certainly understand why it's a degree option. So that people can learn how to do it.

So nobody learned how to do it before it was a degree option?

What does a degree give you that an apprenticeship wouldn't?
Detector vans are a PR stunt to frighten people. Nobody has ever been prosecuted based on evidence gathered from a detector van. They can be used to get search warrants though.
No, it makes legitimate use harder. It makes things such as A/B testing of screen shots and tweaking of screen shots for marketing purposes harder. For example say you have an app which is a News aggregation app. You want to update the screen shots every now and then to show up to date news articles. Now you can't do that without a binary update.

What if Apple decides to lock down app Descriptions as well?
Now I can understand the state of PHP...
‘I have an idea for an app, and I’d like to talk to someone…. ‘
Rent and interest are both taxes on not being rich. I don't really see any reason one is intrinsically better than the other, but rent entails a lot less risk.
'Doomsday asteroid' Apophis much bigger than first thought
2013 Workout Program: Day 5, Falling off Track?
I'd rather wait 1 to 2 days for a quick screenshot review process than 2 weeks as it is now to submit a new binary (and waste the reviewers time for having to review a binary that is actually the same as the previous version) just to change my screenshots. Also, users will then see a pending update for the app, which they will then have to waste time downloading.
Defensive programming in this case would be to not use a general purpose de-serializer for a format that is explicitly designed to allow serialising arbitrary objects....
It was certainly possible to detect the operation of TVs once; the old-school CRT boxes had big oscillators in that emitted EM radiation. I don't know about modern TVs; for all I know they have a different method of operation now.

That said, it requires not just the equipment to do so, but also the competence and training, and whilst it's not impossible, licence inspectors are just whoever Capita managed to hire that month; maintaining a cadre of competent people to operate that equipment would be a headache and an expense that Capita simply aren't interested in.

Far, far cheaper to simply have that big list of addresses (I understand they've got a list of every address in the UK that ever had a TV licence associated with it) and just assume that every address on that list that doesn't currently have a TV licence is a licence-dodger. Every so often it presumably gets pruned for addresses that no longer exist, but otherwise the rate of false positive will be a minor annoyance in the scheme and certainly not worth the hassle and expense of more sophisticated methods. Threatening letters and intimidating adverts do the job.
Financially? Maybe. As a person? Doubt it.
Didn't we just learn that "investing" in real estate isn't always the best idea, either? Buying a house to live in on credit is part spending, part leveraged speculation.
I have a grandmother who can debug knitting patterns.

The patterns in the books are, apparently, sometimes wrong somehow. She debugs them when she knits.

I can only imagine every competent knitter can, if only because those books must sell to a huge number of them.
"Nothing is evaluated unless necessary

head (sort ls)

The list will only be sorted enough to find the minimum"

This may be technically true, but is a pretty bad example with much hand waving - what exactly does it mean to be "sorted enough to find the minimum" given that Haskell uses a merge sort implementation internally?

A better example of Haskell's lazy nature (taken from the Learn You A Haskell book) would be:

take 10 (repeat 5) - it's very easy to comprehend taking the first 10 elements of an infinitely long list without needing to compute the entire list.
But this isn't what Opera Mini does or wants to do. It wants to compress and otherwise alter the data flowing through it, so that you get a faster experience when browsing on the mobile. To do this it needs to see the HTML, JS etc going through it. A TCP relay wouldn't be able to do that.
The government ... can't do anything to "prop up" house prices

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_gearing_%28Australia%2...

Negative gearing is a preferential tax treatment that has caused the Australian housing market to become one of the most expensive in the world.
Maybe I didn't understand this article properly, but is it suggesting suppressing ALL filesystem related errors rather than handling them properly?

OK I get that PHP doesn't support atomic operations, but there are so many different errors that could happen when working with files. Say a permissions error, if the permissions of the file were changed between it being created and deleted that's an issue that needs resolving before your tmp folder fills up, it's easy enough to fix and should be reported as an error (be it to the front-end or to a backend logging service).

Surely there is a better way to handle these race conditions without just ignoring all filesystem related errors.
From Idea to Users in one month
Cool, but the "highlighted" images are anything but.
US spots $120M for lab to tackle rare earth shortages
I'm not against investing in real estate, but you have to be honest with yourself that that's what you're doing, and that it's not a risk-free investment, especially when you leverage it with debt.

The problem is that everyone casts it as an argument between renting and owning property fee simple. Actually, it's either an argument between renting housing and renting money, or it's an argument between having six to seven figures invested in residential real estate and having six to seven figures invested in anything else. Either way, it's not clear cut.
An aside: Why did thenextweb's editorial designer choose the image of a guy peering darkly through what looks like a M-mount Micro-4/3rds lens adapter to occupy this article's prime page real-estate?

Assuming that the illustrations' intent was to convey the notion of scrutiny (like with a jewlers' loop or somesuch) – even if the reader buys this premise, is it the Nokia system supposed to be what is doing the peering, or some unseen black-hat?... or is it, like, an admonishment for the reader to remain observant and unblinking in watchful monocular vigilance, not allowing a single encrypted TCP packet to escape our panoptic awareness?

But it doesn't actually look like a loupe, so that's giving thenextweb's art direction a bit too much – maybe this image was meant for a review of that new EVF-equipped Leica M-system, and was used here in an innocent mix-up?

Look, I realize that the zeitgeist of “publication design“ is whatever a Google Image search turns up for an articles' keywords, but this is indicative of the cloud of editorial apathy that hangs over online publications and thwarts the evolution of a distinct visual language for the web.

Normally I try to keep my HN comments within the scope of the postings' explicit subject, but this particularly vexing example is worth the tangental note.
Dave is not riding the bandwagon, he is one of the Go developers working mostly on the SSH package, the ARM platform and compiler optimizations. He is also core developer of Juju, software written in Go.
Actually they don't need to use transactions at all in accounting. All they need is a debit history and a credit history. Using transactions locally could be done but the resulting software would be far too complex for ATM hardware. Using transactions globally would be a huge performance sink considering their frequency over the world.

The only time I can think of that would involve a transaction (with a lock) would be when naming a credit movement or a debit movement for future reference (compensation for example), and even that can be "solved" using UUIDs with carefully chosen machine identifiers.

The result is a very asynchroneous, very distributed and eventually "consistent-enough" logging system. Just pick the right time to do your reporting (end of the month, end of the year etc), and accept that some figures won't reflect exactly the reality of the balance, since some compensations are done immediately (automatically) while others are performed, manually, days or week later.

The whole system makes it very hard to catch transactional events with certitude, that's the main drawback, since nothing proves that a given transaction was "real" and won't be compensated later on.
I think it depends on the sites in questions. If they're unethically filling every pixel of screen size with adds, overlapping adds etc, then I think some addblock is just what the doctor prescribed.

Site owners need to have some common sense when it comes to advertising
I don't believe it's possible to run Plex Media Center on it yet, though there are forum discussions on porting it to the Pi.
But I do know that it can run XBMC quite well and that is why I ordered mine a couple of days ago. I'm gonna turn it into a sweet little XBMC machine which will be hidden behind the tv.
Just Google "Raspberry Pi XBMC", there are a lot of reviews and tutorials showing how it's done.
Data.gov.uk is opening up government data
I was wondering about how it would work actually. I don't think B&W TVs have SCART inputs, so I suppose there are still settop boxes out there that can output a PAL antenna signal?
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HTML5 shootout game
Oculus Rift VR Headset Brings Virtual Reality Gaming Alive And Real
Systemd, Two Years Later
It's really interesting to play with this stuff!
Eric Brewer[1] describes why ATMs are not designed for consistency[2] at [3] (scroll down to the last two sub-headings).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Brewer_%28scientist%29

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem

[3] http://www.infoq.com/articles/cap-twelve-years-later-how-the...
To stop all the letters. I had no TV for a couple of years and we would get letters all the time. Even when told the inspectors would still try and come round. They even faked who they were once, pretended they were here to deliver a package.
FDA Approves Magnetic Helmet For Treating Depression
Me too. And I think there is a marketing angle to it. When their green energy output rises to the point of their search infrastrucutre consumption level, they can use that as marketing ammunition. Would you rather search on carbon-powered search engine or green-powered Google search? At their scale, even a tiny percentage point rise / defended in market share will add up over time to recoup (part of) the investment.
The physical principle is that they detect the leakage from the local oscillator in the superheterodyne receiver circuit.

I very much doubt that they exist now, if they ever did. It just isn't cost efficient compared to sending out letters and low paid inspectors who peer through windows looking for people watching TV.
Who says it'd be 1 to 2 days for a screenshot review process? I can't see Apple dedicating a team to it, they'd probably dump it in the same queue as app submissions, and whilst a screenshot is significantly easier to test ("Does it look like the app? Yes. Done"), it's still going to not be a one day turn around.

It's a crappy solution to a crappy situation basically.
Virtual Keyboard On Any Flat Surface: Magic Cube
I think the OP was being a tad sarcastic.
Working with Exception Handling in C++
> 1. Mortgage rates are lower than rental prices in many places

When this is true, this actually is a very convincing argument. Not only that, but you can effectively arbitrage yourself into a lot of wealth this way. You buy a house and move into it for awhile, but then you buy a new house, move into the new house, and rent out the old house. (You get better mortgage terms that way.) Rinse and repeat whenever you can afford to do so and you eventually end up with a large portfolio of profitable properties.

Of course, it's arbitrage--if enough people do it, it stops working. You can keep it going with more money, if you can make larger down payments, since at that point you're turning a one time lump sum into an ongoing cash flow. But eventually you have to have more money to make money, so not even this might be workable.
Follow ForrestN's commentary from the top. It's difficult to see why you would point a finger.
Oh, I didn't know that. It's probably a weird choice of words, then.
مباراة مصر وغانا مباشر الودية
If I understand Buddhism correctly, then since everything (including you) is really just ultimately nothing, going to college is unimportant, unless it helps you in realizing that everything is nothing. Debt is bad, because it will enslave you, and likely lead you to think that money, etc. is actually something. College is may also be unhelpful, because it may lead you to think that an Education is not nothing. If you truly understand that everything is nothing, then the only logical choice is to spend your life helping others escape their enslavement of thinking that they truly exist. College may not be useful for that.

On the other hand, if you think that we do actually exist and that college might actually be worth something, then I don't think Buddhist philosophy is going to be helpful.
> we're here to figure out why we're here

Turns out we're here to work.

Seriously, I don't know about you, but I have a list a million pages long of problems I'd like to see solved by the human race, and I'm pretty sure everyone can chip in on at least one of them. Navel-gazing doesn't get anyone very far.
Doing params.fetch(:password_reset_nonce) would get you out of that nil issue. Doing fetch is generally good practice, especially on params, as often without the right params you can't do anything anyway and should be bailing out with a 404 or another error code.
I'm sure banks do use transactions, just not in a distributed system. It's hardly possible to use transactions when multiple entities are involved and you wouldn't want to anyway because you want a record of the failure, and that money actually moved.

I suspect they do use transactions when, for instance, inserting two rows in a double-entry register.
"Moderately interesting"? This article is a gold mine on the subject!

I'd like to read his take on idempotency in logging system, as this has always been among the harder problems to solve when designing IT architectures for me.

Edit: Here are two more papers from the author, Pat Helland.

* Building on Quicksand - more about eventual consistency - http://www-db.cs.wisc.edu/cidr/cidr2009/Paper_133.pdf

* Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate’s Opinion - http://www.cidrdb.org/cidr2007/papers/cidr07p15.pdf
Audio5js - HTML5 Audio Compatibility Layer with Flash Fallbak
Are all film critics snobby gits? They sure sound that way from the quotes.
Booty - Simple, distributed app config management for node.js backed by S3.
Blind people who still like to listen to television may be a significant cause of this. They receive a 50% discount on both colour and b&w licenses, so from their point of view there's probably little reason to upgrade from a black and white television.
I knew the tech exists, I just wondered if it was ever implemented.

I remember asking my Elec Eng lecturer at Uni whether they could tell between a colour and B&W TV, and he thought not.
I'm pretty sure SCART outputs include composite video - which older BW TVs might accept using a SCART to phone cable.
ARE YOU SURE Your SOCIAL LISTENING DATA DOESN’T SUCK?
Infographic – Social Media Statistics for 2013
No, I think the author knows the issues behind this muting - you just need to be smart about how you apply it. In the case of filemtime, it appears the only failure condition is a file not existing so we can safely ignore the E_WARNING it emits; it wouldn't be sensible to apply this everywhere (I hadn't thought about the permissions case myself).

The best/real solution is probably implementing flock so that it can issue real filesystem locks, rather than relying on a file resource.
I got those letters while in University. They are nasty. The people manning the phones aren't much better.

As an English speaking international student, most of the ESL international students brought their letters to me and they were quite scared by them. I had to explain that everything was fine, we just needed to call the company and tell them that they didn't have a TV.

That being said, most of the money from the TV license goes to the BBC, and since I'm 50/50 iPlayer and lovefilm, I don't mind paying that TV license. I'd rather better BBC shows than having to fork out for, say, Sky.
It should work at any place where activesupport has been loaded.
I have had the same (well, better) results using Varnish. It's free, too.

TL;DR: Use Varnish.
This is not how transaction work, that's exactly the type of failure they protect against. In fact, the behavior you describe is possible now, without transactions (it even happened to me a few times).
Bill Clinton Turns Samsung Speech Into Cry for Gun Control
If pg then perhaps it was (or stems from) this: Programming Bottom-Up - http://www.paulgraham.com/progbot.html
Feeding the 9 Billion: The tragedy of waste
The only means I know of for one to reliably detect the image on the screen would be TEMPEST style attacks [1]. I doubt that Capita can afford to buy the necessary equipment, or even views it as economically viable given the volume of letters they sent out - 56 million letters were sent in 2009, for example [2].

I'm not sure if modern TVs will even emit anything obvious since the connection from the decoder to the panel is covered in EMI shielding.

[1] : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename)
[2] : http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/about/foi-administering-the-tv-...
It's always a pleasure to see a hard thing being done well by someone who really cares about the craft.

But at the same time pinball is... not very fun. And expensive. I fully expect it to go the way of the music hall, and on a larger scale I'm happy about that.

But I'm also sad to see a craft disappear. Not sure what to think.
I've pretty much stopped watching "action" films because they're too blurry to make out anything. A clear not-blurry image actually helps my suspension of disbelief.
Ask HN: A career involving Computer Science and Film
I love programming and I love film. For a school project, I am to present my future career. I definitely know my future career will involve computer science but since I also have a passion for film, I don't want to lose that passion. So I was wondering if there is a career out there that involves Comp Sci and film and if there is, what is it?
precisely. they create a generation of 'smart' analysts.
Essentially, their model is to assume that anyone without a TV is lying, and does have a TV.

This is not strictly true. I've had no TV license for several years; after the first letter, I filled in the "declaration of no live TV signal" form (or whatever it's called) on their website, and since then, they haven't bothered me once. This is despite having a TV clearly visible through my living-room window (that I use exclusively for games and DVDs). Maybe I'm just lucky.

That said, I feel it slightly ridiculous that you need a TV license (which is for funding the BBC) to watch live TV, even if you never watch any BBC channels -- but you don't need one to listen to BBC radio stations, or use their website, or even stream BBC shows on iPlayer after broadcast. If I didn't suspect it'd pave the way for the government to cannibalise their funding, I'd say it'd make much more sense for the BBC to be funded through general taxation instead of the current horribly over-engineered TV license system.