skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Please don't make stuff up. Cars have already failed, taken TG's advice, been back, been improved, and Top Gear have been more than happy to say so.

The outcome was not decided up front, you made that up. That is known as lying.

Problem now, is that Tesla kicked off accusing TG of being dishonest, and then completely lost in court. So why would TG want them back for a rematch? So they can sue again if they don't like the out come?

Tesla blew it. And very stupidly too as far as the UK is concerned. TG on side would have been a massive advantage for them. Tesla will get it right in the end, electric cars will be the future. Even TG know that, and would have been on side later down the line.
damn, I missed out on being a successful arbitrageur
Military Malware May Have Killed the iPhone Jailbreak
Keeping the fruit of your labor should be called saving, not hoarding.
Is Growth Hacking Marketing?
Yes all monetary value is ephemeral, intangible and based on the belief and good will of the market

That's an overly simplistic view of the value of money. If the value of money were only based on belief, then one would except sudden collapses of monetary value without any connection to the real economy quite regularly. In a sense, money would be like the cartoon character who defies gravity until he looks down.

In reality, the value of money is based on people's demand for money. This demand is largely circular (the store wants money in exchange for goods because that's what the suppliers demand, and the suppliers demand money because that's what their employees demand, who demand it because that's what the stores want, and so on).

However, there are two decidedly non-circular sources of the demand for money. One of these sources is taxation: If the government decides that you have to pay your taxes in currency X, then there will always be demand for that currency. Even if your employer pays you in Bitcoin, you will still have to pay your income tax in whatever the local fiat currency happens to be.

The other source is debt payment: If you are in debt, you have to make certain payments (under threat of losing your house etc.).

These two belief-free sources of demand for fiat currency are the "base case of induction" for why fiat currency has value. They ensure that the viability of fiat currency does not depend on belief.
In the other parts he is filming in public and is getting the same reactions.

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bT1ZfRtrJc
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHG9ouQ17-M

But I'm not sure it's the size of the camera. Most of the people are not bothered by big cameras hanging everywhere.

Maybe it's because they don't trust the intents of the guy who is filming.
This Tesla claim is quite fascinating: "At no point were the brakes of the first Roadster broken;"

"whereas what had actually failed was a fuse in the equipment providing power-assistance to the brake pedal"

It's a bit six of one, half a dozen of the other but Tesla do seem to 'have a way with facts'
Reserved Instance Price Reduction for EC2
I hope you're happy when you watch a superior open source project stagnate before it had a chance to grow.
That came up in the article:

"We think it's going to be better at remoting than X," Stone said, or at least it cannot be worse than X.

That is encouraging. I was worried that they were going to simply drop support for opening remote windows altogether. It looks like they've learned from the behavior of graphical networking outside of X.
Do you say, if some people think you and your friends cannot play with certain non-harmful objects (e.g. gold bricks), it is morally alright to force you to go to prison or kill you if you try to protect yourself?
> He claims exceptions are fast enough.

This is going to vary across languages. In cPython for instance (since I happen to know it), exceptions are at least as fast as looping through an iterator, since exiting from a loop is done via exceptions. He included a link to an article showing that exceptions are quite fast on the JVM. I am sure there are other languages where the implementation of exceptions is slow -- in these languages this is a valid objection to using exceptions for flow control. And I don't care how fast the code runs under a debugger. Perhaps you do, but really, I don't; we must have very different use cases.

> He claims that it's not hard to understand, but provides no support. [...] I don't see the advantage - he's doing it differently, but what's the point? What's he winning?

It ISN'T hard to understand if used in a consistent way... I don't need any further evidence of that than my own observations. But you are absolutely correct that the argument needs evidence of exceptions being clearer. Perhaps it would help to provide an example of a triple-nested loop with numerous boolean condition variables contrasted with the same loop using exceptions for exit. I don't think exceptions for flow control are more clear in all circumstances, or even in most circumstances, but I believe that they are in some circumstances, especially in cases where substantial work needs to be done in order to determine whether one should proceed: doing the work twice is inefficient, and splitting the function into part-A (everything before the decision point) and part-B (everything after it) can be much less readable than using an exception if part-A sets up variables and data structures used in part-B.

> All the way back to dijkstra's article on goto such control flow existed, it just wasn't called the same. And exceptions are essentially non-local goto's.

No, I think they are fundamentally different. The problem with GOTO, and with programming before structured programming was invented, was a problem with arbitrary ENTRY points; arbitrary EXIT points do not cause this problem. My more detailed thoughts on this can be found at http://mcherm.com/permalinks/1/in-defense-of-the-much-malign...

> Finally, he's doing an end run around the type system.

This seems to be a completely new argument and one which wasn't addressed. I am very interested, but somewhat confused. How does the use of exceptions undermine the type system? Is it because the type of the function, instead of being "Returns an Int" becomes "Returns an Int or raises an exception"? If that happens for all functions, how is it confusing? Can you give me an example of how things could go wrong?

> In a purely functional language with checked exceptions [...] if you use some nice monadic syntax sugar [...] the distinction between this approach and discriminated unions is very small. [...] why not just use discriminated unions in the first place?

I agree, as long as the language syntax supports doing it easily that is the better approach.
Exactly, and I'd like to point out that you having to explain this goes to show we aren't teaching economics properly (or at all) in school. The school systems focus on make sure our children are well rounded in every way except financially.
Two QCs on Tesla's side as well....
But github does support other VCS!
I think this is exactly what the article author was pointing out, actually.
Why did the author, Jonathan Corbet, and HN submitter, "iso-8859-1",
decide to revive the slashdot troll meme of "BSD is Dying" here on HN
which is running FreeBSD?
exceptions usually happen because of one of two reasons: 1) bugs 2) system failures.

bugs you can't recover from, you need to fix them.

system failures can sometimes be recovered from, but often they need manual intervention. usually it's best to just report them and let someone fix the problem rather than spending a bunch of resources trying to code some way around the problem (which introduces more bugs).

there are situations where it might be appropriate to try to recover. If an HTTP call fails, no reason not to retry a few times. But if your DB is down - sorry you are F'ed. Alert it - make it visible.
The first one that seemed removed was actually moved to a thread talking about 2fa. It seems it's more a matter of consolidating multiple threads on the same topic into a single thread. Which makes sense.

If anything, it's a failure to use a 301 moved permanently header.
Not when it's also the medium of exchange, and not when its got a fixed supply.
Keep rsync from removing unfinished source files (2008 - Aaron Swartz)
Satellite Pictures Of Chinese Ghost Cities
I've posted that on HN because Bitcoin is not just some commodity, but a useful technology that allows you to do many interesting things besides payments. See http://blog.oleganza.com/post/42262765318/direct-use-value-o...
Ha, I saw Meng post this on facebook, nice to see it appear here too :)

I agree that writing these things down is very useful, even if just for yourself. In the interaction design course I'm taking at university, I don't have to hand in anything for a couple of weeks, and yet I'm writing all my thoughts down - just to have them organised, and because I know that once I write them down, I make sense of them, find flaws in them and get better ideas through them.
Tried it just now. http://flisea.com was confused when I entered "San Francisco" as the destination; I had to enter "SFO" when what I really wanted was "SFO | SJC | OAK" and it never returned any flights. Adioso has room to improve their price search but the user interface is just what I want to use - no error messages, just does the best it can with what you give it.
Agreed, I have worked for technical and non-technical bosses. On one disastrous occasion we the department director was a promoted IT teacher whose main qualification was a certificate of competence from the British Computer Society. She stayed for a couple of years, I lasted a year under her confused leadership before I quit over the directors incompetence. The first time I have quit for more than just job progression.
My microwave sucks at making toast. It's not a problem though.
Those who are complaining that Ubuntu is diverging from most other Linux distros forget that this is the nature of open source software and competition.

Part of the success of open source software is that it's highly evolutionary. Good successful projects attract a following and get better. For this to happen, you have to have choice and diversity. There has to be competing flavors, libraries, and distros all vying for market share.

What Ubuntu is doing is great for us all. Providing more alternatives in the Linux ecosystem than just relying on X/Wayland/Whatever.
You'd probably enjoy reading about condition systems such as can be found in languages like Common Lisp and Dylan:

http://xach.com/rpw3/articles/0dudnfoyYfsNu8vanZ2dnUVZ_sKqnZ...

http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Condition-Handling-2001.h...

http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/m...

An early version of the Dylan manual had a good chapter on this subject:

http://jim.studt.net/dirm/interim-66.html

And Dylan has some material available as well:

http://opendylan.org/books/dpg/exceptions.html

http://opendylan.org/books/drm/Conditions_Background

http://opendylan.org/documentation/intro-dylan/conditions.ht...
Design Pattern Automation
Why is this downvoted? It voices an honest concern! Linux has often been compared to living in a house full of carpenters, where your bed might disappear at night while you sleep.

If this observation is incorrect, write a comment so the rest of us can understand WHY it's incorrect, if it's correct then upvote it, but there's no excuse to downvote!
One of the reciprocal outcomes of this could be method(s) to mathematically prove the 'correctness' of a computer program...

Although, perhaps this is verging on philosophy: is such a process even possible? Do current (or future) computer programs involve leaps of intuition, and abstractions that cannot be mathematically codified?
The Roadster cost what, £90k whereas the car it was based on (Lotus Elise) was £30k or so? The proportion of any demographic that has £90k to spend on a "fun" car is always going to be tiny, but there's a reasonable chance that those people watch Top Gear along with everyone else.

It's not as if all the other high-end manufacturers are refusing to let Top Gear put their cars on the track is it?
Your average 40 year career stockbroker knows there's some young nerds from the physics, math, and CS departments who were hired into the mostly B-school grad company, but he doesn't work with them or hang out with them or have anything to do with them other than maybe 3 or 4 levels up the org chart they share a boss. So for an upper level manager HFT is a "new thing" in the biz but not so much a broker. And from an upper level manager perspective they're not totally new so much as basically expensive automated hyperactive daytraders.

Yes I'm sure there exist rare individual exceptions but very few experienced brokers pivoted out of sales and human trading/consulting into algorithm design.
Oh sorry, I didn't mean I find them redundant per say - I think they show a flaw in the main point. The main point seems to be that all the work many developers do to get better isn't working. But this statement was based on a study that encompasses many fields, while it already stated that people in most other professions don't work so hard to get better as developers do. So it makes sense that overall, people don't get better. That doesn't mean developers don't either.
Large bloom filters have exactly the same problem. And since they're fixed size, you'd need a potentially huge bloom filter to avoid huge numbers of false positives; more likely you'd need to periodically regenerate it based on the original data.

This is a really tricky optimization because on a positive hit you've introduced more random I/O! After all, you've got the bloom filter and then the hash table lookup. False positives are also bad - so you only save something on true negatives. Is it worth it? Only if you get the tuning just right.
The underlying issue here seems to be that electric cars are not the same as petrol ones. Yes, car users need to change their expectations of what a car will be in the future if it is not gasoline powered. However, when paying double or triple the price for a new version of an existing product, we expect some improvement in the experience, not potentially crippling and extreme inconvenience. If Tesla hadn't done similar tests in their validation programme as the ones done on Top Gear and then said to themselves "How could this look bad on Top Gear?" then they are foolish.

I'm not really liking Tesla's approach to PR here, they could be engaging in a much more positive way instead of lashing out at the media. Somewhat of an own goal on this one.

Slightly irrelevant video of a Ferrari test driver destroying an engine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La03k7FzlZA
Bitcoin does not violate Mises' regression theorem because Mises never assumed objective definition of "utility". It is always subjective. And as such, Bitcoin was useful and fun for very early miners, then people started seeing that you can do much more with it, than just exchange.

See also: http://blog.oleganza.com/post/42262765318/direct-use-value-o...
Thanks for replying, I can't read the links however I have a question: Is buying a domain from namecheap considered internal commerce? Also many other items bought with Bitcoins would be external to your country.

Surely you can buy a wordpress account with USD without being arrested? What makes buying wordpress / namecheap with Bitcoin any different? Or maybe i'm misunderstanding something. (Honest I probably am missing something, this happens to me a lot :)
You missed my point. Of course there are subjective qualities to code. That's irrelevant to my point.

Which was that a stockbroker is a bad analogy because he can be 10x better than he was in his 20's and bad luck can negate all his skill and effort.

That doesn't happen with programming. There's not that luck factor. Even to the subjective aspects.
Or my comment elsewhere in this thread about condition systems in Common Lisp and Dylan.
What would you suggest instead? Integrating with airlines directly?
As for the size of the federal government, the number of federal workers has been more or less static for the last 40+ years

I love how you twisted the previous poster's point of "size of the federal government" into number of employees. Them's weasel words right there. We all know that the important factor of size is the budget, which has grown by any measure you care to discuss.

Probably the best measure is in terms of a percentage of the GDP. We're up over 24% of GDP now vs historical 18% or so, no time to Google, but I think that's pretty close.

Twisting people's arguments is a sad way to have a discussion about important topics.
Having to step on the brakes harder is not nearly the same as having broken brakes. And a fuse is exactly where a system should break, if it's going to.
I've had it on my nexus 7, very cool interface
Yes but totally irrelevant to my point.
Are you asserting that the main reason people work long hours is because of performance enhancing drugs? And if you're not asserting that, what are you asserting?
TG was being dishonest. They use hyperbole everywhere so Tesla is by no means getting special treatment in that regard. I've seen them trash perfectly good cars because of stupid names and/or because the company CEO looks funny, but in this instance they took an up and coming (read: promising alternative) and kicked it to the curb :

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/22/bbc_top_gear_tesla/

...according to the Top Gear spokeswoman, the tested Tesla was filmed being pushed into the shed in order to
show what would happen if the Roadster had run out of charge

Edit: Straight from the horse's mouth...

http://transmission.blogs.topgear.com/2011/04/02/tesla-vs-to...

This was published when Tesla first sued. And accrording to Andy Wilman, the executive producer :

"Just so you understand there’s nothing devious going on, you need to know how this filming business works. When you film a car review, the reviewer is only the tip of the iceberg. Behind the lens is a film crew, and only a day’s worth of light to shoot the eight minute film. This means we have to prepare in advance a treatment – a rough draft of a script so that the director and film crew can get to work right away, knowing what shots they will need to capture. It will contain the facts about a car, and what we think of its looks and so on, but how well the car actually drives is added on the day. If we’ve driven it ahead of filming, as we do with most cars, we will also have an idea how it feels to drive. But, and this is crucial, as we uncover fresh information about a car whilst filming it, it is entirely normal for the treatment to be modified as the day unfolds. Jeremy is always tweaking the scripts to reflect what his driving experience has actually been on the day."
"Bitcoin exchanges violate the critical know-your-customer rule"

Not any more. Bitcoin-central.net in France already has all the licenses for exchange and knows its customers. MtGox is moving USD operations to US with Coinlab.
Do you know what I miss about these explanations?

Technical people can't go straight to the point. They go around, around, around, going into corners, etc

(not only on explanations, mind you)

For example, math has some very high-level/generic explanations, and curiously, I find them more understandable.

So, I've given up on understanding Monads (or at least Haskell ones), I'll probably understand them when I come up with a similar problem and think about how to solve them.
I don't think it's as bad as you think.

While there is luck involved with the stock market, those trading in it are not machines trading randomly (which would make it truly gambling) - they are thinking humans trying to make the best decisions they can. It's very easy to spent years playing in the market - but not focusing on improving yourself as a player. The same is true for poker (which is my background).

I'm pretty new to code, but I would think that it's possible to reach that level after a few years. Building things that are easy for you and not pushing to deepen your knowledge.

You get me bro?
Eclipse RAP 2.0 Released - Same Acronym, Different Name
A way to bring back the single-page site
"(...) there are very few feedback comments so far. I particularly like the idea of a smaller, more tight-knit group of HNers giving each other feedback (...)"

This is one of the reasons behind my Google+ community for and about Internet Startups [1] - currently the largest one about this topic - where you can post under the "Introduce your startup" category and get precious feedback.

[1] https://plus.google.com/communities/100445483815501942968
I think the average Tesla buyer would more likely than not be in the "Top Gear demographic" - although the sample size of Tesla buyers might be too small to say much about averages. But Top Gear is surely watched by car enthusiasts.

I'd say your response to a bad Top Gear review should be to go back home, think of something funny, impressive and outrageous, and offer that for a re-run. It'd make a lot more sense than an appeal which just shows you to be dull. Who wants a lawyer car?
Ouch: Two QCs, original case and the appeal? That's going to have cost £millions. What a colossal waste of money.

edit: QC = Queen's Counsel. You pretty much have to have one if you're going to plead a case in the High Court IIRC.
Objective-C Repeats as TIOBE Index Top Programming Language in 2012
This is the fundamental characteristic of bitcoin that puzzles me. Most currencies are inflationary, which in low doses is a good thing: it disincentivizes keeping the money under the mattress, maintaining a healthy flow of currency. Bitcoin is by design deflationary: it's value increases over time.

Deflation is destructive to the economy, so if bitcoin is deflationary by design, it can't ever be a primary currency, and thus it's expansion in usage is constrained from the get go.

Now, if you assume the market is smart, then there must be some other motive, other than usage, for appreciation. I suspect an artificial bubble.
I've been involved in north of 50-60 servers running OpenBSD since 2001, and I've never seen, nor even heard, of anybody running OpenBSD on the desktop. It's never been relevant on that platform and serves no useful function as a Desktop Environment beyond the core developer and OpenBSD Hobbyist community. Not to suggest that they aren't an important community - but they are fully capable of taking care of their own needs. The rest of the world uses OpenBSD as a firewall/routing/networking/reliable-appliance platform.
Ask HN: How To Get Users?
I'm thinking of making an app but for that to work i need users close to the user using the app (in location not next to them), if there are not enough users near by it won't work,it's easy for a company with millions of users to get users, but for a start how can i get enough users to make it function?
Tesla loses appeal over Jeremy Clarkson review
It should be noted that other countries at the time had similar currency restrictions yet they didn't have the bank runs and depressions that the US had. Economists like Eugene White believe there were other, possibly even more influential, factors in those panics, like the branching restrictions, which made banks more fragile.

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/04/eugene_white_on.htm...
I'd regard a completely lack of power assistance to the brakes as being 'broken' on a car I intended to put on the track personally. I don't know about anyone else.
In the context of the comment, anti-science was correctly used. There was nothing scientific about it.

> Is debate allowed about in science anymore?

Of the type we are discussing? It's never been allowed. It's always been discouraged. You can see similar types of debates when people talk about teaching the controversy.

In fact, science is not about debate. It's about presenting facts in support of an argument. Merely arguing is pointless.
And this is an okay practice in your eyes?