skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People also don't respond rationally when in shock. When SQ006 crashed there were reports of passengers sitting in their seats frozen instead of evacuating.

On normal flights you spend hours or days before of being in the mindset to keep your valuables, medicine, money and identification on you (or within sight) at all times. Life will be miserable when you don't have those. A few minutes after landing they would have to collect them, and make sure to not to leave any behind before facing immigration etc.

It is easy to see how in a state of shock, the instinct to what you have been doing and were concerned about kicks in. The cabin crew will shout at passengers to leave their stuff in an effort to overcome this. It should be noted that on this flight there are reports that some of the escape slides opened up inside the plane trapping the flight crew, hence there being fewer available at the beginning of the evacuation.

Shock is a very strange condition. No matter how cool, calm, rational and effective we all think we will be, it isn't a predictor of what we will do.
There's a lot to be learned from Recovery.gov, not all negative. In this case, the HHS CTO was referring to a change in the CMS itself, not the website(s) it controls. Getting code updated in the normal .gov contractor/sub-contractor model would generally take more time, both in terms of requirements and implementation.
Special treat: Putin speaking Enlish
A claim that has been explicitly denied by the companies in question. As serious as Snowden's leaks are, he has repeatedly made exaggerated claims regarding them, and I wish he would stop.
Sure. "Give me all your money or you die" is a guaranteed profit.
Fair enough. I admit I'm paranoid about my file integrity. :P

Although if the behavior that you describe is the typical user behavior, then that's not a good thing for Dropbox's attempts to convert free users to paying users.
Thanks for the link, this does look very interesting.

I believe filepicker.io have something along these lines as well, but haven't had a chance yet to look into the details of it.
This is not accurate. Jacob was let go several weeks ago. The website was changed the day of his termination to reflect this.

Also, you created an account just to throw this in?
> The entire reason for this acquisition was for the customers.

That's just obviously not true.

How does this acquisition in any way help customers?

The resolution offered is to migrate manually to Redis Cloud, something customers could do regardless.

Seems the acquisition resulted in the service being shut down far more abruptly than otherwise, unless the situation was so bad they couldn't afford a few more weeks of hosting.
I'd like to coin a modern update of Zawinski's Law[1]:

Every software company attempts to expand until it
offers a cloud-based platform API. Those companies
which cannot do so are replaced by ones which do.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski.27s_law...
No, they are not plausible. The whole idea of using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as the back end technology for a low-end smartphone is nuts. Even the best HTML rendering engines are CPU and memory hogs. CSS was never designed for and is nearly impossible to hardware accelerate, and JavaScript is notoriously difficult to optimize and even the best VMs run orders 3-10x slower than native code, while the JS VM takes up much more memory than the efficient dalvik.

All the early reviews of Firefox OS describe it as laggy and slow. For example this one from the verge:
"Lag is a major concern — apps took multiple seconds to load, to change toggles, and to make UI transitions"[1]

Or this one from CNET:
"unresponsive screen makes typing a laborious process requiring painstaking precision. Every action from swiping to tapping onscreen controls takes a beat until you see results, so using the phone for a prolonged period steals minutes of your time... Lag carries into the camera, which is slow to launch, snap, and reset."[2]

>"designed for documents, not UIs, was too handwavy" Not for anyone who's had to work with DOM for Web apps. We know all too well as its name suggests that it was never designed for apps and is well past its expiration date.

My 3yr old similarly spec'd SGS runs CM 10, Jellybean like a champ. My mom's worse spec'd 3GS is still smooth and fluid. Of course, a low end Android phone running the most resource intensive skin, TouchWiz, is going to perform poorly, but in my experience vanilla AOSP scales down quite nicely on low-end hardware.

So how does this phone benefit Joe User? It's an android kernel, but the user is cut off of the diverse android app ecosystem. The performance looks terrible, and the user is locked into the Firefox browser, like Safari on iOS.

[1]http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/24/4024530/ztes-open-is-the-f...

[2]http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/geeksphone-keon/4505-645...
Saying things like Moore law stopped gets a downvote from me. Moore law will stop, but it's not there yet.

NOTE: Moore's law is concerned with number of transistors on a chip. That number has climbed, it's just split into several cores.
For the population as a whole maybe. That doesn't take away the not insignificant risk to any one individual of being killed or crippled.

Biking "could" give you an increased life span of 5-10 years IF you don't replace it with other exercise. In exchange for this, you have a slightly increased chance of being crippled or killed far sooner. There are arguments to be made on both sides, but don't dismiss his argument as being unreasonable. It's not unreasonable at all. I can happily get the benefits on biking on a closed course or at a gym while not subjecting myself to the dangers of biking near people in cars that don't always pay enough attention.
> Some people have said (on HN as well as other places) that the TSA have never stopped weapons getting on board a plane and if they had they would have heavily publicised it

I believe the standard claim is that they have never discovered and apprehended a terrorist, preventing an attack. Everybody knows they steal shit from people who, although perhaps stupid, are not terrorists.
I don't know if other states do this, but at least in California hospitals report their prices (known as a chargemaster or master charge description file) online at OSHPD (http://www.oshpd.ca.gov/chargemaster/). Even looking through these you'd be surprised what prices there are.

This isn't a new controversy, but still quite problematic - for some fun try Googling "usual, customary and reasonable" (UCR charges).
What about the Box and Twilio conferences?
Have you looked at PiCloud? It looks like exactly the base you want to build on. They run AWS instances, but charge by the millisecond. You can run one up just for the 5-15 minutes it takes.

Or if you want to get fancier, try their queues [0], they've got an example of doing image processing to explain how it works. Essentially, you set up your processing pipeline attached to a queue. You then drop messages on the queue whenever you want to do work, and they spin up one or many machines (controllable by you) to process the data. Then after 20 seconds of nothing new appearing on the queue, they turn them all off.

They'll even give you 20 hours of compute time free, every month.

Edit - if you don't want to build it, drop me a message, I can do it.

[0] http://blog.picloud.com/2013/04/03/introducing-queues-creati...
I would guess that they're using Active Directory because they have Windows PCs to manage. AD, arguably, provides a _lot_ of value if you have any quantity of Windows-based PCs that you want to manage centrally.

I haven't seen any compelling third-party hosted offering to replace the SSO and Group Policy functionality in Windows client OS's that AD enables. Maybe when Samba4 reaches maturity that will change.
Guess what? Employers do weird shit during interviews, too. Cuts both ways.
...wow.

Maybe you shouldn't be driving.
To be fair, they're not regular law-abiding citizens if they're bringing a loaded gun into an airport and attempting to get on a plane with it.

As much as I would love to see the TSA disappear tomorrow, some might argue that carelessness should be punished more often than it actually is...
The Kamcord Story - Getting into Y Combinator [video]
Web servers Microsoft IIS and NGINX battle for second place
exactly...it is unlikely they would be interested in data storage being treated as the commodity it is.
I have no personal experience using redis-cloud, but their website[1] does give a good overview of their features. Currently, redis has no native clustering/sharding support AFAIK, but cloud based services like redis-cloud seem to be offering exactly that, in a very transparent way. It also seems to be taking care of monitoring, backups etc.

[1] - http://redis-cloud.com/redis/redis-comparison
Black boxes and mandatory cameras. Driving in the States is a "tragedy of the commons" issue without stricter enforcement.
> (only 10% of the people we stopped were even licensed to carry a handgun!)

That would only be a meaningful statement in some states.
This reads like the worst marketing mashup this year:

"We knew there were performance and reliability benefits from building the stack on HTML."

I know there are performance and reliability benefits from talking in English.

"You're just talking about content. There just needs to be one server. We're going to have two, with one for backup. That's a deduction of 30 servers"

I'm very happy the government decided to skimp on reliability for a public healthcare market.

"You can put Wordpress into Amazon but then you'll have problems; it wasn't designed to be a cloud application."

Wait wait wait Wordpress isn't a cloud app? Fuck, someone go tell Hostgator that--apparently it can't be done!

"Notably, the HHS team has been using feedback to drive design choices from the beginning, applying the 'lean startup' model to development."

Wow, even the lean startup namedrop.

I'd be a lot happier if, instead of putting the Obama webdev team on the gravy train, they spent that same money--you know--actually fixing healthcare. As it is they seem to be just doing free advertising and lead generation on the public dime for the insurance companies.
One possibility: Interstates are big roads that make it faster to get somewhere you could get on another road if you didn't mind going slower. Some (esp. rural) roads with 45+mph speed limits are the only way to get somewhere, therefor bikes need access. Anyway I'm also just waxing; I don't know the exact laws and surely there are exceptions- generally speaking "all but Interstate" seems like a reasonable thumbrule.
And now French union sues Booking.com, etc for price fixing
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/10155558/French-hotels-take-on-online-booking-firms.html

and the monopoly driven bullying doesn't stop at hotels, see:

http://blogs.perl.org/users/bookingemployee/2012/03/truth-about-bookingcom.html
Dart doesn't exist in a mainstream browser yet. My guess, that some of those problems probably persist in Dart or maybe new, unforeseen ones are introduced.
All this is of course due to political circumstances: medicine is just too profitable.

No. Medicine in inelastic. There is no such thing as a rational demand side, as you don't get to choose if you need healthcare or not. When demand is inelastic, and supply is limited, prices will rise accordingly with no relief in sight.

The solution? Either set market prices (at the cost of stifling supply) or flood the market with supply (using technology to both drive down costs and replace what people do).
I went to 2 of the Winter Gamefests during my time at UCSD and they were both awesome. Last one I went to they had professional SC2 commentators and giant screens for the games. It was like being at a Korean stadium.

If Zhu and Wu can throw events like that on a meager public education budget, I can't wait to see LANHAMMER crush some faces with the backing of Readyforce. Blood for the Blood God, skulls for the skull throne!
The image is also on this page but without the date stamp. (http://blog.tsa.gov/2013/06/tsa-week-in-review-tsa-week-in-r...)

Here's the URL. (http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-SysR15uPqBM/Uc4NPpBKBMI/AAAAAAAADH...)

Maybe they took it off for the blog post, or maybe Instagram put it on because 1990 is, uh, retro?
In many places, none of these suggestions would help someone who realizes he is carrying a handgun.

1) There are guidelines for how the firearm must be shipped; simply sliding it into your checked baggage will not work.

2) Handguns are generally prohibited from being mailed via the USPS.

3) The person seeing you off may not be properly licensed to transport the handgun.

4) Storing a valuable object in a vehicle which is in long-term parking sounds like a bad idea. Municipalities which have strict theft-reporting requirements do not have exceptions for "I was out of town and didn't know that my car had been burgled."
Either centrally controlled prices or a free market could work.

Government regulations about not advertising prices blind consumers to the costs of procedures, so hospitals have little reason to lower prices.

It's another case where a small dose of regulation is worse than strict regulation or no regulation.
Prepare for change This is not your father’s database industry
Their price for a procedure I had in 2000, today, is half of what I paid out-of-pocket back then. Wow.

This is great, and I hope it's a sign of a trend.
However, this isn't a bicycle problem: it's an urban planning problem. If you design for cars (multi-lane high-speed roads), this is what you get. Unfortunately, riders and pedestrians will suffer for now.

Hint: Mount a retractable side flag to your bicycle and hang a sharp, metal object at the end where the reflector is. Leave it hanging on a long enough string (10-15cm) so as to allow it to move around easily. That should keep car drivers away, at least those who appreciate the paintwork on their cars.
The site was updated to a somewhat better 2.5 weeks to shutdown. It now says "Not quite sure what we were thinking on that one!"

How could a founder not think about what will happen to customers if they shut their servers down with three days notice? Seems like more than just not "thinking." Defies my attempts at understanding.

Anyhow, hopefully no one is taken down too hard by this.
Being open and readable is also a check on this. Compare for instance the HTTP spec or JSON or XML files to binary file formats of applications. If it is hidden from sight things get ugly fast. Case in point the PSD file format and any Office file format (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html). Binary formats are usually only a good idea on the onset, with change it becomes a pile. Binary formats only really work well when you control both endpoints (even then they get crufty), for exchanging information being unreadable leads to many bad things and it a great step backwards.

I work in game development and application development and the former really loves binary formats (slowly changing away from that with server and editable needs). In many bugs or crashes the root of the problem is some offset in a binary file or some incorrect custom binary file format node that breaks everything after it. Readable, keyed and debuggable formats are so much better at their root (they can be binary, base64'd, compressed after but at the root they should be standard in some way and able to change without breaking the whole thing).
This is something I've been thinking about recently. If you boil down the 'news problem,' the dominant solutions are traditional news channels (TV networks, newspapers) and sites like Reddit and Digg. I would categorize bloggers as very small-scale traditional news sources, and RSS feeds as a way to combine these traditional and nontraditional sources.

The strength of traditional news is partly cultural, but also due to the nature of its content as being curated and vetted by some (hopefully) informed party prior to publication. Whatever is there, can very generally be expected to be of a higher quality than any random given 'social news' post on the same subject. The drawback, of course, is that the only news available is that which the source determines is 'newsworthy,' which is a very subjective and questionable standard.

Conversely, the strength of 'social news' sources such as Reddit is in their inherent chaos. The crowd decides what floats to the top, with no real vetting process or curation except within the most strictly moderated subcommunities. This ensures that the most socially relevant topics get 'published' to the front page and into the public eye, but those stories have little to no quality control. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of the "Eternal September," there has been an established trend wherein as the size of a loosely controlled network grows, the quality and content increasingly caters to the lowest common denominator, driving the more invested (and usually the more intellectual) users out, and eroding the value of the network. This has been seen over and over on Reddit, as the mainstream subreddits get overrun with a colossal stream of new users, and any niche interests get sidelined and marginalized.

I would propose a hybrid approach. Why not create a news source - whatever category you decide to label it - that publishes content that is vetted for quality (bias, sensationalism, thoroughness, etc.) but not subject area; in other words, where the articles are all good, and any subject is fair game? Layered on this could be some categorized and 'social' voting algorithm, much like Reddit with subreddits, and users could subscribe to those channels which they cared most strongly for, thereby creating their own high quality news source.

This is just a thought I had today. It's obviously not fully baked yet. What do you think?
I don't know if there is an imbalance either, I do know that in certain circles it's culturally unaccepted. Many people I know consider online dating to be something for losers.

Interestingly, this can easily be turned around: cherry pick applicants, make it invite-only, or make it exclusive in any other way. When 50 "cool kids" are in, the rest will be lining up.
> What you're proposing up here would mean banning bicycles on all but specially marked bicycle paths.

Well, think about it this way. Why are pedestrians banned from walking on roads, even when there are no nearby sidewalks? The answer, I believe, is that it's extremely dangerous, both to the pedestrian and to automobile drivers, and that it would cause massive inefficiency in the flow of traffic. The reality is that bicycles, like pedestrians, necessarily behave very different than automobiles, and most of our roads and traffic laws are designed around automobiles. Similarly, bicycles are not allowed on certain types of roads (many bridges, freeways, etc.) Obviously, its a continuum, and bicycles can fit in with automobiles better than pedestrians. The question is simply where to draw the line.
I feel like I am the only person on this thread that thinks the scenario that someone just happened to "damn, went to the airport and forgot that I had a gun in my bag while going through airport security" is pretty far-fetched.

A pocketknife from a fishing trip? Understandable. Being forgetful about having a gun in your bag? While going through airport security to get on an airplane? Not so much.
Denormalizing our data helped us scale
Filepicker is a API across remote storage as a service and everything goes through the FilePicker servers. There's no library to use directly.

RemoteStorage is specification primarily, but it's very much about their JavaScript library that you use directly to communicate to the remote storage.
It's possible. The given reason for our rejection was the market size for our product. Really, we were caught heavily off guard by having to explain why it would be useful. We thought, "It's an RFS, so they already know it could be huge!" and spent zero time thinking about it.

Full disclosure: Our demo and Altair BASIC was a way to develop native iPhone apps in the cloud. We wanted to expand to Android apps, and eventually be a general cloud compile/debug/run service.
I believe it's up to the airline to have a go-around policy for unstabilized approaches. Westjet, for example, requires the approach to be stabilized by 1000 feet. An unstabilized approach is a major causal factor in the majority of landing accidents (according to IATA research). I know which airline I would rather fly on.
Show HN: Simplifying your business travel and expense needs
> Contrast this with the east coast where a car will stop...

You've seen cars stop on the east coast?!? Not me...
The LEAP keys are supposed to be under the space bar, so that they are easily held down while your fingers are in the home position. Try it, it's surprisingly comfortable.

I would pay good money (a few hundred dollars, easily) for a mechanical keyboard that had those two additional keys under the space bar, as well as a vertical F-key cluster left of the main typing area, as seen on old IBM PC/AT keyboards.
Aren't you already inside the security checkpoint when the carry on is checked for? How can one leave items at the car by then?
Seems CG to me :D
> I have to wonder how many of the firearms they stop are just regular law-abiding concealed handgun license bearers who, in their rush to get to the airport, forgot that they keep a loaded firearm in their purse, briefcase, or backpack.

I'm sure this accounts for the majority of weapon seizures, but this doesn't make them invalid. I would not be comfortable with improperly stored loaded weapons bouncing around an overhead storage bin.
Well, of course, if you could make it better - sure, go ahead. Do you think I like driving 30 mins twice a day? I'd rather spend the same time in a bus reading a book. But I don't have such option and do not foresee it happening anytime soon. You can say "we should" as many times as you like, but in reality it's not happening - and I'm not sure it's even feasible to cover an area of San Jose size with adequate public transport and keep the costs reasonable. But if you know how to do it - sure, let your plan be known to the San Jose city council, I support it a lot. I'm sure amount of cars would decrease once you pull it off - I'd gladly give up my daily commute if I had an alternative. But not before the alternative is there.
Things have changed in 30 years. Unix designers didn't have the time or resources to write elaborate tools, nor the need for complicated software. Back then you would use telnet to browse Gopher or send your mail. Things are different now. I dare you to read a 3KB JSON file without a parser. Base64 was a hack for text-based protocols. Tool support will make it a lot nicer than no support.
Its interesting that many of my post-college friends are finding content on Facebook increasingly less relatable, and therefore using it less. I think part of Facebook's appeal to those still in school is that it acts to reinforce the social bonds that are formed through physical encounters. Once those physical encounters die out, Facebook's use is also diminished.
Nothing done at that level of scale is trivial. Also, the founders are in pretty rare company given the success of dropbox - definitely something to aspire to.
How do you explain the fact that healthcare expenditures in the US are twice as high as in the rest of the Western world, and life expectancy is comparable?
Can you call transparent pricing a "revolution" when the status quo is purposefully obfuscated and archaic in order to nickle and dime you? It seems more like just doing the right thing.
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3810785)
Aggregate essentials (food, shelter) are generally inelastic. You don't choose if you need food or not. Being able to select what food you buy (based on price, etc) forces the prices to be competitive.

Not being able to select healthcare based on price means nothing checks rising prices. Regulations have made healthcare into a cartel where members won't compete to be affordable.