skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to like Alaska Airlines. If you are old enough, you'll remember they actually used to be proud of the food they served. These days you could swap the experience with any of the major airlines. They are more focused on squeezing every cent out of you than making it a pleasant experience. Extra charge for food, extra charge for checking bags, extra charge for in flight movie.

My last flight on Alaska I was seated near the rear of the plane, and they actually ran out of food before they got to my row. They are clearly so focused on saving a few dollars optimizing for not carrying too much food they are willing to risk a few passengers sitting hungry for 5 hours. And the sinks didn't work in the bathrooms which is gross. And I sent them feedback about it a couple weeks ago and haven't heard a thing back. So a big meh to Alaska Airlines..
HIV and cancer are particularly tricky.

HIV mutates incredibly quickly, which makes it incredibly hard to find a "vaccine", because something that works against one strain probably won't work against the others. The same goes for treatments - most HIV patients have to take a various combinations of drugs (the slang term is their "cocktail") which vary in effectiveness both per-patient and over time.

Cancer is difficult for a different reason altogether: it's the body's own cells. To oversimplify, it's (relatively) easy to find a medicine that can target foreign cells, but it's hard to find a medicine that will target cancerous cells and not be equally deadly (or more deadly) to healthy cells, because cancerous cells so closely resemble healthy ones.

Progress is being made - just look at Bill Gates and his campaign for eradicating polio.
That is a little harsh. What makes you think it's only one person monitoring the entire network? And even if it is, what's the problem with that as long as they do their job correctly?
Shilling hardware with affiliate links?
You've been told right. It was news to me that Germany had such a well-organized system of apprenticeships. It explains a lot.
NSF (NES sound file) player in pure JavaScript
Now I love that the company job board conveys the same type of ideals. http://www.shopify.com/careers?posting=ruby-developer. Nothing gets me more than founders saying "I didn't go to college and look how great I did" while requiring their employees to have a CS degree to even get an interview. I know this is more of a filtering tactic but it seems so disingenuous. The biggest take away from the article wasn't dont go to college, it was find an environment that suits your learning style! College isn't right for everyone especially with student loan debt just about to eclipse 1 trillion dollars.
Given that they use specially hardened CPUs in their rovers, one would imagine they have error correction on the flash memory too.
> Also - does he really have so much experience with that tech?

Well, I, for one, was fascinated with wearable computers for a time after reading an article about Steve Mann (in MIT Technology Review, IIRC). That was about fifteen years ago. Based on my memory of that article, I'd say that 20 years is a bit of an understatement.
I don't have the source for this, but I'm almost positive you are correct. I believe I remember an inductive proof that demonstrated this.
So there's this puzzle that people enjoy thinking about regarding space travel.

Say that it finally becomes possible to reach a planet of a nearby star. It's a new technology that enables it, and we can build a spaceship that will support several generations of people during the trip. Maybe it takes 500 years to get there.

Well, 500 years is a long time. It's not as if our technological development will stop in the meantime. In fact, given 100 years of development, we might be able to construct a new ship that will only take 300 years to get to that planet. Which would mean it would overtake the first, and beat it by a hundred years.

In which case, why build the first ship at all?

That's the objection I've heard most recently against building high-speed rail in the united states. For instance, in the context of self-driving cars that might be able to organize themselves into "trains" on the road, or fit conditions where they would qualify for a higher speed limit, etc. While it may be true that we need high-speed rail now, is it going to be as true by the time they would actually get built?
Thanks for the correction -- it is a bandwidth issue. Lightning has less capability than what it replaces. But hey -- it's reversible!

Good trade? No.
Brown unveils wireless brain sensor prototype
Robotic Dog looks like Imperial Walker
If hyperbole were a valid method of proof, I suppose the world would be a funnier place, perhaps even a less violent one. Maybe we could revisit the laws of rhetoric after we're done nerfing the Second Amendment.
Brain-to-brain interfaces have arrived, and they are absolutely mindblowing
As English, this stuff is totally incomprehensible and unusable. Absolutely nothing is conveyed to actual human English speakers by saying the word 'buffalo' 400 times in a row.

If it is 'grammatical' then it is grammatical by virtue of conforming to some idealized grammar. But when this grammar is so far off not just from anything people say, but anything they can actually understand, it really only means that the idea that this grammar models real English has been reduced to total absurdity.
Programming Is Not for Everybody
The idea that in 20 years we'll have self-driving cars on any substantial scale is totally ridiculous. If I had to bet money, we won't even have a substantial electric car deployment by then, much less self-driving cars.

Also: the physics of high-speed cars makes the concept of cars traveling as fast as bullet trains totally ridiculous. The fact that a car is self-driving doesn't change the physics of tire/road friction.
SEEKING WORK - REMOTE or near Mountain View, CA (SF Bay Area)

I'm a full-stack developer looking for projects, both short-term and long-term. I'm mainly interested in node.js, Objective-C (OS X or iOS), REST + other web APIs, and working on PoCs. Available to start next week, on a daily rate or a project price.

http://amirmalik.net | https://github.com/ammmir | amir at pilvy dot com
Ask HN: Help me add to this list 'on-demand' startups
I'm compiling a list of specific marketplace, P2P and 'on-demand' startups that are changing the economy.

Ideally, I'm looking for companies where people can (relatively quickly) find earn revenue through offering services/products that they already have or can make.

AirBnB (rental/housing)
Lyft, Sidecar, ZipCar, GetAround, Uber (ride-sharing)
Task Rabbit (errand, services)
Craigslist, Ebay, Etsy (products)

What am I missing?
Australia's biggest bank shares its security fault tree
I'm definitely not one that thinks credentials / college matter for most software developers (or frankly, people in general) but setting that aside and looking at what options exist:

I think a big part of the problem is the irrationality of getting a degree in 'Computer Science' to be a programmer (aka 'Software Engineer'). My degree is in Electrical Engineering with a Computer Engineering focus and I would never have gone for an Electrical Physics degree. I wanted to build things, not be a research scientist.

So, why is the de facto degree for programmers Computer Science? How much do you actually learn about building software in a CS program? My experience indicates, not much. You learn a lot of computational science, great, most products have 1 or 2 difficult algorithms at their core, but they often represent an amazingly small % of overall development time, where is the training for everything else that needs to be done?

The biggest problem is that there seem to be no good Software Engineering programs. Software Engineering degrees do exist but they seem to be woefully outdated and only address a small subset of those people whom wish to 'build things' with software.
I've definitely spent too much time in Fairbanks (flying Alaska Airlines, natch), because when I read

The temperature that evening was a brain-numbing minus 16 degrees Fahrenheit

I thought, "Oh, 16 below isn't so bad. 40 below—now that's cold!" Fairbanks residents consider anything above -20 to be not so bad—and in fact elementary schools can hold recess outdoors down to that temperature—but even they will concede that -30 or -40 is too damn cold.

That said, it's not like I embrace the cold. I mean, I live in Pasadena, California. We have a parade with fresh flowers every year in the dead of winter just to show off how warm it is. But it has been an interesting experience learning that there is an unambiguous difference between how -20 and -40 feel; despite appearances, they aren't both simply "arbitrarily cold".
I didn't click on the email (risky). I did find Google search results labeled with Google authorship that I had not signed up for. So that is pretty much enough investigation. The "sign people up without telling them scam" is an old one (just saddened Google is stooping to it) and Google isn't an open source project that needs my donated time in building a bug report for them to ignore.
The point here is that the electrical design of Lightning doesn't have the bandwidth for 1080p. It runs at USB 2 speeds.

Software can't magically make hardware do things. It can create an illusion (like the Lightning adapter does), but the design has to support, for real, capabilities you want to properly provide.
Also: the physics of high-speed cars makes the concept of cars traveling as fast as bullet trains totally ridiculous. The fact that a car is self-driving doesn't change the physics of tire/road friction.

Friction losses aren't significant. These cars are limited by aerodynamic drag power -- this scales as speed^3, and dominates all other losses.
You're underestimating the value of basic coding skills to non-programmers. It's a little like saying programmers should never learn how to improve their social skills, because they'll never be have the determination to reach Bill Clinton's level of charisma.

I am decidedly not a programmer. I don't know what an object is. I haven't learned the first bit of CS. My code would probably make you want to gouge your eyes out. And yet, it's saved/earned companies millions of dollars.
Java Multithreading Steeplechase - Stopping Threads
Robot warriors: Lethal machines coming of age
Egypt is a dime on its side.

Turkey is about the best example in the region that has managed to deal relatively well with internal strife and yet to maintain some sense of progress. Now if only my country and the Germans could let go of their fears and integrate Turkey into the EU then we can lay the spectre of Turkey going the total opposite way to bed. And with each day the EU dilly-dallies that chance increases.

Even though some would argue the Turkey of 15 years ago was ahead of the one that's there today, I'd hope the Egyptians might take a leaf or two out of Turkeys book. I hope the country will not fall apart or into further disarray. Not all change is for the better, I think that from the perspective of the Egyptians trading Mubarak for a solution like the Turks have would be a big plus, some of the other alternatives not so much...

Time will tell.
Jeremy Hammond – 365 Days of Injustice
That's sort of my point. People without a computer science education often lack the awareness of the gaps in their knowledge. So they don't set out to write a "parser," because they don't know that word.

They're faced with the problem of parsing some custom text format. Maybe they'll try some terrible regex hack (see: http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454). Maybe they'll stumble onto recursive descent parsing. But if you've taken a class on compilers (or automata theory) you'll know when regular expressions are not up to a parsing task, and you'll know about parser generators and how to write a grammar for one.

How can these CRUD programmers avoid re-inventing the wheel if they've never been exposed to it?
Yes, yes, of course you are right. Except for the hardware video codecs that are necessary to make it work. A protocol requires a combination of software and hardware that can execute its specification.
But the argument for high-speed rail isn't that it will serve as a stopgap measure until we have self-driving cars, it is that a railroad train is vastly more efficient than any imaginable car technology.

Railroad trains are very energy-efficient, compared to cars driving along a road, or even trucks driving along a road. And if we suddenly had self-driving cars, packed close together and safer than the existing system, trains would still be more efficient.

The link below shows a table of transportation methods and efficiencies -- it shows railroad trains beating even motorcycles for efficiency.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transporta...
No, it is something that makes you do things that might end up with you in front of a firing squad or room&board for the rest of your life less.
You're arguing with something nobody ever said. The point isn't that using an anonymous VPN is a crime, but that people who use an anonymous/private VPN are more likely to have something to hide, which means you'll find a lot of people committing crime there.
I can think of Exec and Gazelle off the top of my head. There's a lot of them.
But a thin girl in a fat costume knows what it's like to be thin and socially active. It makes it more jarring to go from one extreme to the other (as it would be for an overweight person who was ignored to suddenly become the centre of attention).

By that same token, I don't know if Dr. Miele would notice much of it, because he has been isolated in public from such a young age.
If you are going to go for the $3k/mo CloudFlare plan, you are already nearing the ballpark of Akamai, and would do good to look at the many CDNs that sit in the middle of that scale (such as CDNetworks or EdgeCast).
I won't argue that 2030 will be the magic year, but self-driving is a far greater incentive for most people than being electric powered.
Do you know foxpro? The zero-friction to manipulate tables (and back them, nobody worry about the OOP impedance mismatch) the 0-necessity of use a ORM, the complete tooling to make a full app (with report engine included), the possibility to code store procedures in full foxpro (before become cool the idea of embed full languages inside db engines) and a lot of other things.

The weak link was the fragile database engine, but more important, the kill of the tool by MS.

The mix of a language, db engine, gui toolkit, and other things (similar, but far better than Acces) make it a tool truly made for this area of CRUD.

Plus, you could work in their REPL, and do commands as BROWSE and see the full data in a editable grid to use as you wish. I can't describe in words how functional the whole thing is. Is similar in the power of smalltalk, but instead of have a full reloadable code you have the full data at your hands.

Check http://books.google.com.co/books?id=k8fN2KMF1j4C&pg=PA54... for a idea of the tool.

A modern version of foxpro is something I wish for, but without the coupled GUI toolkit and a better syntax
Is it an historical anomaly that gauges were/are used to display car information (velocity, rpm, remaining fuel, mpg)?
Interesting (somewhat related) side note about the Virtual Console games: they are emulation shells around the original ROMs.

There are toolkits out there that will let you peel them apart and see / replace the resources inside. I used this to swap out one ROM for another so I could play the Nintendo NES version of Tetris on my Wii.
Probably not -- they know full well that people take trains to avoid the TSA and that they would have substantially reduced ticket revenue if they put people through that nonsense.
You are easily baffled, then. Apple doesn't just change the connector design. It also performs authentication/identification/verification on the objects it is connecting to.

If you're Apple and you want to make lots of money from your very popular products, one of the ways you can do that is to make them incompatible with the competitive markets for standardized accessories. You can come up with your own connectors, and you can use patents, litigation, and trade secrets to ensure that you have no competition, and that your users have no choice but to buy high profit accessories from a single source.

I trust you are unbaffled!
It looks a lot like the Ticket to Ride board http://nightmaremode.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/ticket1....
Infrastructure technology progresses extremely slowly, in a way I think is hard for people used to the progress in computer technology to understand. Most electricity in the U.S. is still produced by coal power, in plants that usually aren't dramatically more efficient than they were a century ago. 2050 is 37 years from now. 37 years ago was 1976. Most of the transit infrastructure we use today was already built by 1976, down to the physical rail cars used on Amtrak today. On the train line I take to work every morning, they're just now replacing 1970's train cars with ones built in the 2000's.

Holding infrastructure development hostage to starry-eyed visions of what we might have in the future is just foolish. The fundamental building blocks of society--power, water, transit, etc, have been pretty much unchanged since the 1960's. It's unlikely that they will do so in a dramatic way by the time HSR gets built.
Haskell, and BoS, i think, are both special cases. First, Haskell is actually pretty old. There are changes, of course, but the core language is '98. IIRC, Brian O'Sullivan wrote a high performance parsing library, attoparsec.

In general, I think i agree with the article. In this specific case, it's a fantastic example of leveraging your strengths to do something amazing.
The whole point of a pipe is to have concurrent input and output. If so, and if you open the same file for input and output, you risk erasing the file by opening and deleting the file on the output side before reading it on the input side.

If the pipe is an unfulfilled promise (no concurrency) then there's no problem. But if the pipe does what it's designed to do, you will lose the file.
About two years ago, some clever techies used the OkCupid subreddit to "hack" the OkCupid frontend. If I remember correctly, they used Javascript to display the number of messages someone received per day and how many they replied to (among other things). Eventually OkCupid came across the info and started putting everything server-side.
I'm not convinced this one is even grammatical. At minimum, omitting the semicolon should make it a run-on sentence.
> Going into engineering or computer programing is a much surer route to financial success.

It wasn't 12 years ago...
Maybe in my quest to be a smartarse, I'm the one missing it... but why can't you just use > in both those cases?

EDIT -- after tinkering around with the console, I see. I'm wiping the file out by writing to it (>) before it's finished reading (<). Neat, TIL!
MongoDB: First Steps: Installation, Configuration and Authentication
Is there any significance to the fact that both major launches had problems but did not hinder a successful mission? Is that a common occurrence as far as missions go to fail (or have failures) while still gracefully completing?
See also Toronto mayor Rob Ford for further brilliance on bicycles as an obstacle to transportation http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/10/03/mayor-ford-defends-s...
There is actually a bit more to this line of argument than the idiotic one the lawmaker takes.

The primary thing that makes a bicycle more efficient than a car is that it weighs around an order of magnitude less than the passenger, rather than the other way around. The second most important factor is that it travels at (and is optimized to travel at) relatively low speeds.

The fact that it's powered, essentially, by food calories is actually one of its least efficient aspects (raw food vegan locavores potentially excepted).

The cool thing is that means you can power a small electric vehicle essentially for free (both financially and environmentally). So people who are unwilling or unable to work up a sweat on the way to work can still take part in most of the benefits of cycling.
There is always some amount of risk that a new technology will make all your investment worthless. The most extant example of this is the US telephone system: billions invested to have a copper wire in every home which is pretty much useless now (and appears to be a reason why US operators charge such high rates). Countries like India and many African states are bypassing this investment in infrastructure by going directly with mobile phones. Does that mean that the US should not have invested all that money? No! The system was very useful while it lasted; there was a demand which it satisfied. It made its owner ATT immensely profitable, and gave it enough legroom to start a research lab where eccentric geniuses could hack away on projects that would be so much more useful than what anyone could have ever imagined
Another problem with cancer is that is not a single illness, but a family of diseases covered with a single name. Bone cancer is very different of pancreatic cancer that is very different from lung cancer that is very different from colon cancer that is very different from ... Some cure approaches work with all of them, but other approaches are more specific. Trying to eradicate all forms of cancers is like trying to eradicate all bacterial diseases at once.
I think my biggest ergonomic complaint was the earpiece speaker aperture. If I didn't hold it within about 0.001 degree of the sweet spot, I couldn't hear what the caller was saying. (I could go off on a rant about how there was a very good reason why telephones fed a small sample of the caller's voice back to the earpiece as a sidetone for 100 years, but it would apply to all cell phones, not just the iPhone.)

I was (and am) fine with no physical keyboard, but omitting a GPS chip was just plain goofy, considering how nice the Maps application was. Others were complaining about the first iPhone's lack of cut and paste functionality relative to some other phones, the inability to replace the battery or add external storage, the inability to use third-party applications, and the substandard camera.

Bug-wise, if you could get Safari to avoid crashing back to the desktop for more than 30 seconds at a time, you were way ahead of me.

All of this stuff got better in the next generation. It was Apple's dedication to fixing the phone's shortcomings that really made me a dedicated iPhone user.
The article, however, actually states that the expectation should be for the rule to do nothing, as the packets in question were much larger than the maximum packet size. You thereby have to examine this as some kind of rushed "let's try something, anything" reaction to a situation where an engineer didn't actually understand what was happening enough to make such a call: it is not surprising that the result was that they ended up landing squarely in "something even more confusing has now happened and everything is offline" territory.
This is just silly, based upon only 5,000 peoples "expectations".
That's pretty cool.

Not mentioned: the locations of the shitload of surveillance cameras. Guess we'll have to add those ourselves.

Also not mentioned: street dimensions, so you can sue assholes like E&T Towing or Lincoln Towing for illegally seizing your car from public property.
WriteLaTeX API - Instantly compile your LaTeX documents online
I am handicapped and so are my sons. We are "normal" to each other. I forget how impaired my oldest son is. When he runs into something which trips him up, I am often jarringly reminded. The article suggests Dr. Miele likely experiences a "normal" home life and is sensitive to the detail of wanting to be known for the right reasons. He may not be painfully aware of how strangers react, because he is used to it. Or it might be like a constant annoyance which grates all the more for having gone on so long. It would be interesting to hear his take on it.