skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeh this bit is bogus too:

"Bill Gates in his private jet flies with more personal space than does Joe Six-Pack when making a similar trip on a commercial jetliner. But unlike his 1970s counterpart, Joe routinely travels the same great distances in roughly the same time as do the world's wealthiest tycoons."

Completely ignores the convenience that a private jet can take off and land closer to destinations, less messing about with immigration and security which all add significantly to journey times.
> flexibility on dates ("mid July for 10 to 15 days")

Leave and return date flexibility exists within sites like Kayak, I use it all the time. Though it would be nice to make it more flexible, I agree, but this is not a new or killer feature.

> - broadness on destinations ("Southeast Asia", "Western Europe", "California")

Many people have this, usually powered by iffy geonames databases that are monolingual, out of date, or just plain wrong. These existing systems work fine for major destinations though. Best of luck doing the smaller ones and/or other languages better.

> - non-geographic searches ("Somewhere warm")

Iffy. Looks cute on advertising, but of dubious value given that everyone's definition is different. Example: Warm for a northern European or Canadian might be southern France in the European winter. At the same time, even further south and where it may be warmer in northern Africa, someone from LA or Sydney would not find it 'warm'.

> no-one else has succeeded in building a product like this

Major travel aggregators such as Qunar.com and Kayak.com are pretty ballpark. While you can definitely top their UIs in numerous small ways, you will have to make the net UI change valued enough to sway and keep users. Good luck with that.

I would go back to your target market and their use cases ... look at what they value ... un-tech-bias your judgements .. re-align your USP. (Suggestion: consider a range of 'cheapstake' to 'livin it fine' budget per day in a city/country and refocus on helping people to find new and innovative destinations they might like to visit but have never considered, by helping them to find destinations that meet their budget requirements. I know this is really a strong potential selling point for loads of weather-dissatisfied Londoners, and South America and Asia are strong potential regions for north Americans. Ditto south&SEA for Chinese, who are cashed to the hilt right now.)

OK, that's it for the free assistance ;)
Make your Filters Match: Faceting in Solr
In all humility I did not know who Carl Malamud was before reading this post and the comments, and still I had to look him up. As a former corporate attorney I used the SEC's EDGAR database regularly never realizing that if it were not for one persons efforts that system would not exist. But what speaks to me even more is his current effort with law.gov to bring online all primary legal materials (including legal codes and case law) for open public access.

It is eye opening to someone whose reality was subscriptions to westlaw and lexisnexis, that could be in the thousands of dollars, for access to case law, codes, statutes, rules and regulations (or in other words, public material). I am going to see if I can find some of his talks on YouTube, but it would be awesome to be able to interact with someone like this.
It's not, but high-skill immigration would certainly give the economy a boost. This boost to the economy would be good for everybody: lowering unemployment and increasing aggregate demand. And technically the US isn't even in a recession right now -- although the economy is still depressed.
I hope you accomplish your Mar. 31 goal.

Quick question: why is the US logo on plainsite.org rendered in Flash?
This seems to be awesome. I used XNA to build a Xbox 360 game for my dissertation. I really enjoyed working with XNA and this will allow me to build something that can run on mobile devices and Win8... awesome!

I guess games are the best choice... I can use all those cool algorithms that I've learned a long time ago (which don't really come as useful in web development) and at the end of the day I have a game which I can publish and who knows.. maybe make some beer money :D

Thank you for this!
I've been "using" the Android Facebook app for over a year, maybe two and it seems to have gotten worse over time, at least in the past year. The "new" version doesn't seem to be any better.

I was at talk trying to check for a message using the app with limited success yesterday, before I finally gave up and used the Android RealVNC app to remote connect to one of my home systems, open a web browser, and connect to Facebook that way.

I'm really unsure what the issue is here. Is it just really hard to make a decent app? Is Facebook not devoting enough resources to development? Is the development team really bad? Do they not know how terrible their app is? Are developers of the needed caliber in too short supply?
While you can definitely top their UIs in numerous small ways, you will have to make the net UI change valued enough to sway and keep users.

Yes.
You can't outsmart a pirate.

You should share that theory with the ones they put in prison and the many they've successfully sued.

It's literally irrelevant if you don't like their results, it's malicious if you encourage others to be ignorant.
> I've been "using" the Android Facebook app for over a year, maybe two and it's actually gotten worse over time

That sort of seems to be the "Facebook way" with everything, and has been as long as I can remember (since the college-only days)...

It's like they know they have to keep changing and evolving to stay relevant, but they have the faintest clue how, and so barrel ahead blindly at full-steam, constantly praying that nothing goes too wrong...
Well, this tech is derived from the project which was designed to meet specs of one of our clients.
We did propose ZRTP during design phase, to the client but they security analysts decided against it. They affirm that given the state the current state of art in speech recognition and synthesis ZRTP can be vulnerable on impersonation during short code validation phase for the attacker with sufficient resources.
I'm personally doubtful, but one thing i'm sure about, is that this client security experts have access to info and resources which are not available to me.
Profile running linux-programs
I'm in Germany here.

It comes from the rrright...

http://i.imgur.com/rlJA53d.jpg
An introduction to using pointers safely in the ATS programming language
A fascinating article about microcommerce in Kenya:
http://www.economist.com/news/christmas/21568592-day-economi...
I'm an obsessive compulsive email checker and what I'm doing about it
Bad responsive design compromises usability - good responsive design applies itself to the context and enhances usability.
As a long term user with no vested interest in Adioso, it's normally fairly quick (ie. a few seconds at most).
It's a great website - i've used it for a few years now - I think almost since day 1 :)
They care that you care? Why can't they not care that you care? Or is it the fact that they don't care that you care? Yet in that case then how can those who take the time to say "who cares?" say they don't care when they seem to care enough to ask who cares?

This is all very confusing.
How many trendy startups can travel search really support?
NSFW 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Whm_eIyRrxQ
Freelancing - One Year In
Fedora 18 Samba Standalone Server With tdbsam Backend
I can't seem to get it to work on Chrome(24) on a Mac :(
Any number until one gets it right.
> While you can definitely top their UIs in numerous small ways, you will have to make the net UI change valued enough to sway and keep users.

... also, complex enough to implement that the existing players can't just immediately emulate your changes (simultaneously letting all their users know about their great, new 'innovation', thus killing your only USP) should you actually gain any traction.

Not being negative, just realistic. Good luck.
I'd guess a non-profit project with such small, incidental, reverent-without-being-misleading image reuse can wait until they receive a souvenir cease-and-desist letter, if ever, before worrying about the rights issues.
A feature I miss with Skyscanner is to search for flights leaving say in the evening (e.g. Wednesday after work), and returning in the afternoon (e.g. Sunday afternoon). I normally have to search for the days I want (Wednesday to Sunday) and then use the sliders to get flights for the time of day that I want. However, this really throws off the part where they sort destination by price, since the time of day I want to depart seriously affects the price.
They literally have had to force staff to carry android devices to experience it first hand.

They have been shoving dog food down their employees mouths because they are aware of how bad it is.
> including various kinds of schema changes.

If you have several different software teams all with different apps against the same database, it's a struggle to coordinate a refactor.

Often there's problems just because of subtle differences in assumptions made about data that aren't covered by the sparse type system that relational databases offer.

These are very common problems for businesses that are growing beyond their "small business" stage.

> You did not offer an alternative

Here's some:

* services which offer synchronous lookups over HTTP.

* services which offer interaction by custom streaming protocol.

* pipelines of data along the lines of Drake, which was on the homepage yesterday. This is similar to the batch-processing approach that dominated the mainframe era.

Each of these have lend themselves to "grandfathering" APIs as stuff changes. So when you rely on them, your teams can be flexible in ways that aren't open to you when everyone is running against a shared schema.

Also, you can write those approaches in whatever language you like, rather than being restricted to the stored procedures combinations that your DB offer, which always have poor state handing and limited concurrency mechanisms, and generally have a quirky syntax as well.

> If the currently available SQL products don't allow
> you to stream data effectively, and that's what you
> need to do, then use something else.

Once you have people starting to use a database for message passing, you'll develop an ecosystem of platform-specific stored procedures and the like.

Databasese get chosen for messaging not because they're a good solution for it, but because it's the lazy option.

Think of all the systems that start off as an access database on someone's desk, and then evolve into SQL server. And then people write several apps against them and the business is locked into the platform.

By the time you need streaming often you've already made decisions that lock you out of it.

The business can't justify a rearchitect on period-by-period accounting. So the business hits the schema harder and harder until no work is getting done. You end up with a large team of cranky database admins, testers and developers. They work hard but generate little value. Their lives are dedicated to trying to slowly shuffle the blob forward. Your infrastructure costs are now huge.

> My point was what people are actually doing for IPC

I agreed with you on that from my open. And went on to make the point that - irrespective of that - it's a bad pattern.

There are things relational databases are effective solutions for. Messaging is not one of them. A schema should be owned and interacted with by one and only one codebase. Databases should not be used as ad hoc messaging systems.
Singapore!
Best damn country in the world.
If you use GNU Parallel instead of xargs, then you probably never need to make room in your brain for -print0. GNU Parallel separates on \n and deals correctly with files like: My brother's 12" records.ods
Same here (TL-WR1043ND). Plus it was really cheap. TP-Link Ethernet-over-powerline adaptors also performing awesomely as part of this setup.
Not just Expedia at all.

The progress indicator above the calendar chart shows that we hit Expedia, Cheapoair and Adioso's own Wingtip engine.

Wingtip has most low-cost airlines across most of the world. See http://adioso.com/help/coverage
I think a lot of people will be more productive under basic income by working on things they're actually passionate about rather than compromising (with a 9-5 office job where they're paid mostly to show up and play the game of appearances) to pay the bills.
I blog about things that I work on (mostly Android, iOS and jQuery) : http://pulkitgoyal.in/
"As long as you can exchange bitcoins for drugs delivered to your front door in first-class packages, it will be fairly trivial to exchange bitcoins for cash if you really need to."

Sure, but having it declared illegal would definitely restrict the growth potential of the currency. At the moment its proponents envision/fantasize about it becoming huge and general-purpose, with a presence in the physical world (see bitpay etc). If a large nation like the US were to declare it illegal would certainly put a dent in that.

I disagree with a lot about BTC, in terms of the economic choices made in its model rather than the technical ones, but I find it continually fascinating to watch it as a phenomenon.
Dolci di Carnevale: chiacchiere fritte e al forno
Just ban it and prosecute any businesses found accepting it.

The US government hasn't killed online gambling, but they've certainly put a huge dent in it.
It almost made it out way back when, but was cancelled at the last minute. There’s an interview with one of the developers about it on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBg6L4H7WdE
Why would I need a facebook app?

It's a web page and I have a browser....
Not being negative, just realistic. Good luck.

Heh, you're just being that guy :)

Believe me, we've put a bit of thought into what we're doing.

Thanks for the interest, seriously.
Things I learn what not to discuss in healthy discussions :)
A lot more than "social" really, since there's a concrete business model behind them and nobody dominates the space.
Works great! Seems to have issues with IE 9 though.
Facebook is the most popular example of a bad app, but it's far from the only one...

Try the Grindr app sometime. It'll kill your battery life like nothing else, and it has some sort of blocking bug that interrupts music when it is refreshing your location. --I haven't encountered any other app that does that!
Ohh... shiny!

Can we also get Elastic tabstops? http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/
The Skype and Netflix apps are also awful custom homebrewed garbage. Netflix constantly freezes and becomes unresponsive, and Skype doesn't background itself anymore since the recent "Windows 8" overhaul on it. Also, why does Netflix try to download every poster for every movie ever as soon as I open it? I only have 300 KB/s internet, that takes forever!
A dynamic search suggest feature would be a very useful to show what natural-language variants are actually possible.
Backgrid: A featureful grid UI for Backbone.js
There's a higher fee for "Card not present" transactions.
Well, the City of Munich has briefly answered to this study which microsoft has not made public and hence is difficult for the city to make concrete statements about:
(GERMAN)
http://www.muenchen.info/pia/RSS/015.pdf [page 8]

Summary:
They comment that the study did not incorporate costs for licensing the microsoft products, which would have cost additional 7 million Euros. The city comment that it would not have been possible to keep the Microsoft products without upgrading to newer versions as stated otherwise in the study, because microsoft at the time of decision announced to discontinue the product-line of Windows-NT. They also deny the statement that the LiMux-client is 10 years old and hence outdated. The LiMux-Client has undergone many improvements and upgrades over the past years and can today stand a direct comparison with Windows 7. Also they say that not only 75%, but 87% (13000 out of 15000) of the workstations are running the Linux-Client as of today. The statement of the study that all of the specialized processes cannot be migrated to Linux is also wrong, but it is true that not all of those processes can be migrated.
It turns out that I don't know my left from my right.
Porting is a mess. For starters, the list of employers willing to deal with your visa is limited (most startups are too small and moving too fast). Second, you can't quite your job, without having secured a visa transfer first. I mean of course you can but you must leave the country immediately (looking for job after quitting and before leaving the country is technically a violation of the law). While not 100% preventing moving between companies, it definitely puts higher pressure on job security.
Awesome - Well done!
are android devices really that unpopular there? even amongst the people coding the android app?
Amazon aren't making any profits because they are pumping all of their margins into new facilities and other infrastructure investments. If they stopped expanding and just squeezed profit out of their existing business, then they would be very profitable.

Not sure if they can ever stop, maybe slow down but they will still need to buy companies. And, Amazon needs to make $5+ Billion in profit with this valuation, something missing

After Walmart destroyed the mom and pop store they didn't incrase prices

Well they "forced" companies to lower the prices Walmart paid http://www.fastcompany.com/47593/wal-mart-you-dont-know so the net is more or less the same.
My mother is currently unemployed after Wells Fargo went on a shutdown spree of old Wachovia locations, and spends her time knitting and sewing. I told her she should seriously consider making custom pony plushes full time because they sell at such an absurd scarcity markup. I've heard of them selling for over a thousand dollars for $10 worth of materials and 4 hours of time.
Around that time, companies were relaxed enough to have employees care for ports if they wanted to. Unreal and Unreal Tournament had great ports that - to my knowledge - were produced in off-hours.

For me, it was a great first trip to Linux-Land - I was in my gaming-and-hacking phase, so I hacked together a Linux that could actually run UT :).
there is something in our nature that stirs at a call to arms despite our civilisation.
http://phandroid.com/2012/11/27/facebook-employees-android/
Err, why use VNC instead of just using a local browser in desktop mode?
Who ever said it did ?

I am just saying is it important to consider when evaluating databases.
Towards information storage in synthesized DNA
please can anyone upload a video stream of this?
Well, while a step in the right direction, it definitely does not answer most serious questions. The points that stand out for me:

* High bureaucracy levels while dealing with it, which means cost, which means most small companies won't do it.

* You can't just quit your job and live in the US for a while, while looking for another one (or not). IT salaries make it absolutely possible to take a year off if you feel like it.

* No cleaning of the path to greencard. It's possible, especially when you come from a country with a large number of applicants, like India, that you won't receive a greencard before your second visa expires and you have to go back "home" for a year.

* Just like above, the limit of 2 applications.

Overall a very mellow step, which does not make me any more inclined to come and work in the states. Greetings from the beautiful city of Cape Town, where immigration procedures took me a few days and 60 euros.

Cheers,
fijal
Counterpoint: forced real names did not improve quality of comments.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/29/surprisingly-good-evidence-...
I'll just leave this right here:
http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Second-...
Ill bite.

An app can provide notifications, integration and speed. An app can do a lot more caching than the app, and will never have to reload a version of its own code. There's places were apps are appropriate, and this is one of them.
We keep smoking when we know it is unhealthy, we keep drinking and driving, we vote on politicians based on one liners and the amount of media attention they get, we believe that the evolution theory is 'just a theory', we get in huge debt because of loans we cannot pay and we keep posting things on Facebook despite knowing better.

We are stupid in the sense that we do very stupid things even though we, in many cases (should), know better. It is the task of 'us' (people who know about internet privacy) to protect other people around us from being stupid with Facebook just as I would like to be protected by others in the things I am stupid at.
Just another way to make sure your are felon.

Unless you knowingly launder drug money in a major bank chain, then you are fine and no-one will go to prison, you'll only lost a month of profit and everyone is fine.
already discussed here if you want : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5114314
Psychologists have a concept known as "self-complexity" (wiki it). Basically, it's our view of ourselves, in terms of the many attributes, relationships, skills, deficiencies, etc. we possess. Someone who thinks of themselves in broad terms, filling many roles and with many aspects, is said to have a high self-complexity. Someone who thinks of themselves in terms of only a single aspect has low self-complexity. Think of "I'm a world-class kernel C hacker" vs. "I'm an awesome C programmer" vs. "I'm a good programmer" vs. "I'm a decent human being".

By itself, self-complexity is neither good nor bad, but it does have consequences. High self-complexity buffers you against negative events or negative appraisals of those aspects you identify with. Someone who's devoted their life to low-level kernel hacking is going to take it more personally when you say C is obsolete and only a fool would be involved in OS design in 2013. Someone who also sees themselves as a husband and a father and a good friend and a church leader and not all that bad at Javascript web programming either is probably going to let it roll off them; they may think you're wrong, but they'll just shrug and say "Whatever; you're entitled to your opinion" and not bother to argue the point.

So no, it's not bad for new activities to become part of your identity. It can be bad for them to become your whole identity, because it leaves you really vulnerable to outside attacks on your self-conception.

(On a side note, it seems to me that a lot of the Silicon Valley startup mythology is focused on encouraging low self-complexity and an obsessive focus on external success. Now that I re-read some of PG's early essays, several of them seem actively harmful to one's mental health. The YC application used to ask you "How are you an 'animal'?", in reference to an early essay where he suggested that successful startup founders often act like caged animals - as if denying your humanity is "success".)
> but I think that use of it is foolish.

Why foolish? Risky, but not necessarily foolish. The bitcoin exchange rate has been going up all the time. Even with simple strategies such as dollar-cost averaging you would probably have done pretty well within the last couple of years.
The same day as this article is published. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/six-year-old-danc...
I just want amazon to take on airfair. Delicious low margin ticket prices can't only exist in my dreams...
p.s.

http://youtu.be/y9zOeLRmGVA?t=8m
Now we can expect huge unopenable packaging, price hikes, overheating and zero support from Linksys!

Belkin here in the UK used to sell 2m ethernet cables for £20 ( ~ $31).

For anyone who wants to bail out and get some decent kit, try Draytek: http://www.draytek.com/
They made my weekend
A strange thing legalese. The more words in the document, the less clear its intent.

Its like approaching a theoretical limit. A lawyer's dream contract. A document that contains all words, in all combinations, and means absolutely nothing.