skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow. I'd heard about this, but I had no idea it had made so much headway.

From the website: "The National Popular Vote law has been enacted by states possessing 132 electoral votes — 49% of the 270 electoral votes needed to activate it."

From Wikipedia, for additional explanation: "The agreement is to go into effect only when the participating states that have joined the compact together have an absolute majority in the Electoral College. . . . Until the compact is joined by states with a majority of electoral votes, all states will continue to award their electoral votes in their current manner."

I initially thought that the first quote was saying that the national popular vote had gotten to 49% of the 50% of the total pool of electoral votes needed to activate it, but no, that's not what it says. It currently has about 24.5% of the total pool of electoral votes.
I do exactly the same through Firebug in Firefox. :) I do actually have login for Quora, but when at times or on machines I'm not logged in, I just do that quickly to read the answers.
OFF-TOPIC: is there a good reason the sidebar repositions itself on every windows.scroll instead of just setting position:fixed in the CSS? It's jittery and distracting when scrolling.
It's fascinating that these kids are the opposite of the usual drug dealer stereotype. Based on my limited knowledge, drugs (in particular marijuana) trace back to either small individual growers, medical marijuana patients, or a gang or cartel. (As far as I know, LSD is very difficult to produce because of its highly regulated precursors. Only a few people in the world produce LSD, and they probably sell it to gangs to distribute.) Individual growers and patients aren't so bad, but for areas of the country where this is rare, gangs probably supply most of the marijuana. Gangs/cartels are known for having basically the opposite of the values of these "street kids." I wonder if these two demographics often come into contact for business purposes, "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels"-style.

Does anyone have any better, more specific information about the distribution chains for marijuana or LSD?

EDIT: clarifying first sentence
I think that's pretty obvious.

I wish determination was as easily spotted as the intelligence treshold.
If you intend to monetize, perhaps it might be best not to do it in a way that alienates or upsets your user base. That's the take away we should be looking at. Not that Ads are bad, not that monetization is bad, but:

If you want a service to grow and to be profitable you need to be aware of how your shift from growing the user base to monetizing the user base doesn't lose the user base.
Website Impounded
The halo was only around point sources of light at night. I happened to be driving a lot at night at the time, so it was more noticeable. It turned into just "star bursts" around lights, then went away.
All I can surmise from this video is the that old HipChat must have really sucked. I have no idea what this product is or why I should care, because the video and webpage don't explain any of this. Maybe someone can explain what HipChat even is...??
One major difference is that it maintains persistent state - so when I log back in I see all the history and conversations from when I was logged out.
Grails[1]

[1]: http://grails.org/
I love Tesla, and the Model S seems great, but having a rails app server on my luxury car seems capricious.

How does it get updated? An attacker can at least unlock the doors or drain the battery (lights & HVAC control), and possibly it is an entry point for something much worse (unlocking & starting, or disabling controls while enroute). Is this a major security flaw or am I just spreading FUD?
We hired someone new, so had to upgrade from Campfire's free plan. HipChat would have been the same price, so we decided to give it a try, and never turned back.

Things I like that I think made us stick:

- @ messaging people

- private messaging

- 1st party desktop app
Corporations and special interests gain much of their power by paying for political advertisements, directly or indirectly. They get a lot more bang for their buck because of the inequality in voting power. Not only do they have to reach fewer people but those people happen to be the ones that watch a lot more TV.
Not to nit pick, but uptown starts at 60th and above, and most people would consider midtown to be below that to 34th, then the no mans land, and the village to be downtown i.e. below 14th street. Maybe if you were being a jerk about it you'd say that the numbered streets were "uptown", which would make the line to be houston. What you are saying here is that the east village, lower east side, and soho aren't "downtown" which is crazy.

Lincoln tunnel though, clearly not downtown.
I had a somewhat similar experience last year.

The IRS sent me a letter saying that they found I had mis-stated income from one of my freelance gigs. They said their records show that I was paid $800,000 for the job but I only claimed $800. I now owe ~$450k in back taxes along with daily accrued interest and penalties, we have enclosed a envelope for you to mail a check, etc.

I checked my records and I was indeed only paid $800 for the job. I checked with the company to make sure they didn't make an error when they filed their takes, nope, $800 the whole way.

Within days I had IRS agents calling both mine and my wife phones, calling previous employers, showing up at my house looking to put me on a payment program.

Our state and federal tax returns were held up and applied toward the "debt".

I'm sure that if I had a bank account tied to my SSN that those would be locked out as well.

It took 6 months and $3500 for a tax attorney to go back and forth with them over every single dollar on every 1099. They would literally go down the list and say "Thank you for bringing '$1099' into compliance, but we have found a discrepancy with '$1099 + 1', please submit a payment of $payment along with daily accrued interest and penalties".
Netflix Queue: Data migration for a high volume web application
This is only accessed directly via library, so CSRF isn't a factor. Also, everything is happening over SSL.
It doesn't seem like the service involves virality at all, they just provide an affiliate network to serve videos on for a fee. Like a video version of AdSense. Am I missing something?
I think this sort of thing expresses the wrong attitude. It's like saying "I can do anything in assembly, so I have no interest in your fancy 'compilers' and 'scripting languages' and 'programmer methodologies'".

The issue is NOT Excel vs Numbers, just like software engineering is not a fight about whether Java is better than Ruby.
The issue IS how can we use what we do know about making professional programming safer and more productive (limited though it may be) to make amateur programming in Excel safer and more productive.

And yeah, some of that WILL involve modifying the current wild and crazy world where anything goes for a world of more discipline. But you are not helping anyone if you are the guy screaming "keep your stupid for loops and your structured basic blocks --- I want the power to use goto whenever I want for whatever reason I want".
We send all these messages into hipchat. I have it set so I don't get notified for messages, only for messages directed to me (using "@pbiggar")
This would be less funny to me if I wasn't sitting in the dark with two IDEs open in my pyjamas.
The community edition of this vendor's product allows for 18TB capacity without the purchase of a license: http://www.nexentastor.org/projects/site/wiki/CommunityEditi...

I personally love this product.
If the House is "proportionately representative" then how did Democrats win substantially in the popular vote in congressional races, while Republicans won the house by a solid margin?
> Language is technology, clothing is technology, vegetables are technology, houses are technology.

That argument can be made, but not convincingly. Instead, why not define "technology" as something man-made that most people find incomprehensible?
The reviewer already said exactly how much he charged it up at each charging stop and why, so it's hard to really accuse him of lying about that. (Also, there's apparently no temperature control dial to turn at all, just software buttons on a huge center-console touchscreen with no tactile feedback.)
I spent a summer taking DOB once. I would certainly recommend it, in the right environment and once you know what you're taking.

However, this particular DOB was distributed in pill form, so people believed that it was ecstasy, so I saw a lot of bad things happen to people from it.

Its a really interesting psychedelic (in my opinion) but definitely needs to be handled with care. You need at least 48 hours after taking any appreciable dose to return to "normality" so if you are taking it, make sure that you have at least two days free.
Use https://onetimesecret.com/ instead.
At some point you need to draw a logical line, lest you arrive at Linus Torvalds inventing ChromeOS since he wrote the kernel for it way back in the early 1990s.

I have no knowledge of ChromeOS history other than what has been published here, but from my reading of these things it does seem pretty disingenuous for Jeff Nelson to claim to have 'invented the Chromebook'.
You are absolutely correct about the photos. Explicit photos were going both ways on chats. We were working on a solution to that, and had licensed some pretty cool tech from a small firm in DC.

re: the notion that _you_ would have known about a creep online, that's awesome. It's great that you were so self aware. Not every child can say the same. A favorite quote of mine applies here. No matter how you cut the math, and no matter how much you don't like the answer, 50% of the population is below average intelligence.

All of the content on our site explicitly suggested to parents that they should talk to their children _before_ installing our software. Talk about why they were installing it, and show them how it works. Every kid hated it. Of course they did. I would have. Unfortunately, kids have plenty of time to think about ways to circumvent protections their parents put in place. Parents have jobs, multiple kids, schedules to maintain, etc, and in general were outgunned on the technology front. They are all screaming for help, or suffering in silence, throwing up their hands because they cannot solve the problems for themselves.

When we started IMSafer, we were all in our late 20s or very early 30s. We were all hacker types. We also had young kids. One of our advisors was a police officer (personal friend) who spent a ton of time with us talking about the realities of the bad people out there. It's not Chris Hanson crazy, but there are really, really bad people out there. More often than not, related to the harmed minor.
The spirit of pedantry is clearly alive and well on this forum.

The commenter here is guilty of forcing his impressions on the situation in the same way Broder seems to be forcing a slant on the Tesla story. How far you walk is completely irrelevant. I know people who run marathons. They don't spin around a 100 car lot many times.

If the temperature setting in the thermostat increased when he said he decreased it, which is the actual claim, that could be a smoking gun. The only innocent explanation could be that he couldn't see what he was doing while he was driving.

However, there are FAR too many BIG screw-ups and coincidences here for that to make sense. How could a professional journalist be so damn incompetent to:

1. mistake "50" for "90".
2. increase the temperature when he meant to decrease it.
3. start each leg of the journey with less and less energy after filling each time.
4. leave the car unplugged for a good part of the time he claimed to be charging it.

The commenter doth protest too much.
"Like a video version of AdSense"

No...I think you got it's value pretty dead-on there.
Booze and drugs helps a lot.
Agreed. The air app was great, but had a lot of limitations. The mac beta doesn't have quite all the features the air app does yet, but its fast and supports retina so I'm happy.
And that is of course not true, probably just a coincidence.
Here's one thing I don't understand. Geeks love Smalltalk image-based persistence. Geeks hate Excel documents. [1] Don't they have the same problems? How is the program state in a Smalltalk image version-controlled? Is that even a sensible question?

[1] generalization, do not take too seriously.
There's a difference between a new beta and an app that has been in closed beta for months already and only today has been made available to the public. Just because it's 'beta' doesn't mean there should be obvious trivial bugs present.

Just to run off a few issues we found within literally minutes of using the app:

1. Resizing window to a small size then making it large again causes the entire chat view to become very narrow.

2. Messages sent by one user, often get displayed next to another person's username (so it looks like someone else wrote the message).

3. Notification popups appears even when the app is actively being viewed.

4. If you go away from keyboard, the app sets you as idle, but when you return, the idle indicator doesn't get removed

I could go on and on...
>"Stating that it's the point of the Senate does not make it desirable"

However, the country is "The United States," not "The United Population."

The U.S. Constitution was version 2.0, the MVP for the U.S. were the Articles of Confederation. [And to push the bad startup analogy further, the Declaration of Independence was when the founders quit their jobs and the Revolutionary War was the period when they burned through cash to develop traction.]
"You can break trust exactly once."

That's nonsense.
From your own page, with options, it can be configured to be more than $101,000. Its likely that they would have a fully loaded demo car, so this is probably right.
An open letter to T-Mobile about being charged an early term fee
Hi T-Mobile,

At the beginning of this year, I had 3 lines on my family plan. My sister, who goes to school in Weatherford, OK finally decided to switch providers b/c she could not get any service while in Weatherford. She was relegated to texting instead of calling because of the poor service coverage. The most important reason she decided to leave of course, was safety. She left our plan on Jan, 5 2013. Recently, I noticed I was charged a $200 contract termination fee. I cannot begin to explain how upset this makes me. The only reason she left t-mobile was because she couldn’t get a signal and we were worried about her safety.

When I called in today, a customer service rep told me that I was charged because the third line was included in my contract. I was absolutely not told about this change when the contract was extended in August. It was my understanding that the first 2 lines were held to the contract and any add-on lines could move with no penalty. I’ve been a happy customer with T-Mobile for over 10 years until today. My request is that you waive the $200 fee. I don’t mind paying for the service for the remainder of the month of January but I absolutely do not think its just to charge me the $200 fee, especially when she left the plan b/c of coverage issues.

I told the CSR that this was seriously making me consider moving to another carrier. It is my opinion that if you aren’t concerned/loyal to the customers that have been with you for such a long time, then as a customer, I should have no qualms in reciprocating that sentiment.

Please renew my faith in T-Mobile.
Stealth on the part of misrepresenting their origin as endorsed by the site owner, not stealth as in hidden from the site owner (an understandable mistake, given that both are at issue here).

I am not a disqus user, therefore I have no idea 'recommended content' is their term for paid adverts. I sometimes read jacquesm's site, therefore I could reasonably mistake something[1] with that title to
be recommended by him. He dislikes that this should happen without his explicit opting-in to such a system.

He's allowed to be pissed. Is principle so rare to you that you're mistaking it for entitlement?

[1] if disqus wasn't blocked by Ghostery, anyway
Best parties I've been to were a healthy blend of web folks, hippies, anarchists, engineers, and discordians.

I did observe that despite having fairly good classical training and historical knowledge--more than I had, certainly!--there did not seem to be a lot of self-educated people who knew physics and hard-sciences beyond a somewhat populist level. I suggest that this may be due theoretical physics and whatnot requiring a sounder grounding in mathematics than is easy to pick up on your own.
I have to admit that I love stories like this as well as the Tesla refutation of that NYT review.

I think my interest in the nature and impact of our reliance upon human testaments first developed when I became engaged in theological discussions.

Here we are with all our instant access to information, our pictures, our videos, our blogs from the man on the street, our DNA samples, etc., and we can't figure out if one guy got legitimately stranded by his electric car or if another guy created a new Operating System -- yet you can go to church on Sunday and listen to lots of people who will swear all day long that a woman was impregnated by the sole deity of the universe two thousand years ago. This knowledge is based upon a translation of a story written many years after the supposed event took place.

Bizarre.
They are stealthy because of how they are not labelled as ads.
That's an interesting definition of "level".
Who the fuck pays for anything anymore.
From the Federalist Papers 62:

"In this spirit it may be remarked, that the equal vote allowed to each State is at once a constitutional recognition of the portion of sovereignty remaining in the individual States, and an instrument for preserving that residuary sovereignty. So far the equality ought to be no less acceptable to the large than to the small States; since they are not less solicitous to guard, by every possible expedient, against an improper consolidation of the States into one simple republic.

Another advantage accruing from this ingredient in the constitution of the Senate is, the additional impediment it must prove against improper acts of legislation. No law or resolution can now be passed without the concurrence, first, of a majority of the people, and then, of a majority of the States. It must be acknowledged that this complicated check on legislation may in some instances be injurious as well as beneficial; and that the peculiar defense which it involves in favor of the smaller States, would be more rational, if any interests common to them, and distinct from those of the other States, would otherwise be exposed to peculiar danger."

http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/fed/blfed62.htm
I am open to new technologies and learning new things but there is nothing I hate and despise more than anything with the word "java" in it.
I wouldn't say it's obvious. A lot of people have self-doubt. I for one don't know if I would be able to build something like Dropbox, for instance. But I guess the key here is to try anyway and learn along the process. Paul Buchheit said he wasn't qualified to build Gmail when they asked him to.
And so you have set up Nagios and whatever to always include the appropriate recipients in the messages? Where do you centralize the information about who should be @-mentioned? Edit: Seems like a lot of noise if there are a lot of recipients (some of our apps or libs have 8+ people).
I also read the article.
Nosing around the live_help_counter function in site.js explained it.

$.get(url, function(data) {
max_help_count = parseInt(data);
help_count = max_help_count - 5000;

and the url it seems to point to is: http://helpjuice.com/live-help-counter
No landing pad in civilian life for the Shooter
Related: "flammable" and "inflammable". Either means that the object in question can be set on fire. The second word is an abomination that should never, ever, ever appear on warning labels. However minor an abomination it may be, it is an abomination all the same.
We had a business model. We knew when we would start charging. We were already testing pricing when the VC round was underway.

We did not get the D&O. That was as much a legal representation screw up than my own failing. I was the CEO, so the ultimate blame lays at my feet.

Term sheets don't matter, but one thing that is getting lost in all of this is that we had definitive docs. We had been given keys to the VC office to take up positions as residents until we had office space. Money from other investors was already in escrow. It's not like we got a signed termsheet and moved. We signed the termsheet in Sept, moved through definitive docs until Nov, and it all fell apart in mid-late Nov. It sucked.
also remember that the tesla dashboard is basically a tablet, and it has charger locations on its maps UI
Honestly? You don't care about your side projects. You care about the puzzles that make up your side projects. If you want this to stop, you need to find a side project you care about.
I'm surprised this article made no mention of the affiliate nexus laws that have been passed over the past few years. The law was first passed in New York requiring Amazon to collect sales tax from NY customers. NY claimed Amazon's NY "associates", affiliates earning commissions for sending customers to Amazon, represented a physical nexus. Amazon agreed to collect the tax in this case, but it opted not to collect tax in other states who enacted a similar law. Instead Amazon effectively "fired" all of the affiliates living in those states. In one case Fat Wallet, a major player in the online affiliate industry, moved their company out of Illinois because they lost many of their affiliate partners. Illinois didn't gain anything and lost a source of income tax. This has been a major issue in the affiliate industry as it cuts off huge sources of revenue for affected affiliates. Amazon is pushing for the federal government to step in partly because they don't want to lose their online marketers. Secondly, they don't want to maintain a database of tens of thousands of tax jurisdictions across the country.
I'm originally from Illinois (Non chicago) and I would agree with that sentiment. In fact, where I'm from, everyone called it the People's Republic of Chicago and the rest of the state as Kentucky proper . (As a joke of course) On a more serious note though it is frustrating from a political perspective when Chicago dominates stae politics so much. For example, the city of Chicago sued my town, because there was an obscure provision on our books that allowed a certain tract of land to be Section 8 housing. So the state jacked up our taxes to build cheap apartments and then literally bused people from Caprini Green (A project) to our sleepy little town. This was all done in the name of lowering Chicago's crime, not by fixing it, but simply moving it outside the city. I'm sure it had something to do with their failed olympic bid. (Another issue our town had to deal with)
Exactly. If the whole point of the app is that the email is deleted as far as the recipient is concerned why not delete it from the server too? If you're never going to serve it again, delete it. Then you definitely can't accidentally serve it (or nobody can compel you to provide access to it).

The wording could be more precise.
List of English Stop Words
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade#New_World_...
Out of curiosity, anyone have a good alternative? I'd like to investigate alternative comment boxes for static content (even if I have to host them elsewhere myself, eg. open source solutions).