skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I live down in the Pacific Beach area of San Diego and see a few rental Segways being ridden around every day. We have a perfect boardwalk both by the ocean and in the bay for people to safely and legally ride them on so it kind of makes sense down here.

Every time I see one though, I just think of GOB in Arrested Development and bust up laughing...
Fake Steve Jobs on Chrome OS
I would love to have a third party in the US Congress! However, a more traditional third party in congress is probably pretty much impossible, thanks to Duverger's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law).

My hope is that this idea is off-the-wall enough to circumvent the forces that keep America firmly entrenched in the two-party system.
Ask HN: two-factor authentication solutions?
Do any HN readers have experience/recommendations for two-factor authentication solutions? Speed and effort of implementation are important criteria.
Unfortunately, you could still read the code with a braille TTY.
Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales colludes with NY Times to suppress news?
20 Business Lessons Learned from Monty Python
And people will vote for each bill through the web? Doesn't that disenfranchise the many Americans without home internet access?

Running elections is hard -- you want to do it for each bill?
...and then he said 'ahhhh! I'm blind!'
There used to be a guy who would go zooming down Jamaica Ave on his segway. He was dressed in a suit and presumably on his way to work (no advertising, that I saw), but even when he was on a flat sidewalk (i.e. - no stairs or subways) it really pissed everyone off to have to move out of his way so quickly.
I'm beginning to take the notes that say "always wear safety glasses" on nearly every tool more seriously.
If these are the kinds of things you think will make you safer, why don't you always do this? Why wait for unsubstantiated rumors to come out before going into safe mode?
Even if it was up 48 hours before the vote, how many people are even able to understand 400 pages of legalese with amendments and appendices?

Bottom line is: Who is going to explain to constituents that the "Blue Skies Bill" is actually bad for the environment? Some Congressman may just be serving Big Oil, but at least they usually understand what it is they're voting on.
And now we have "cloud computing" and netbooks!
Dividends:  Common Structures
This is a perfect example of why Votesimple (or something similar) is necessary! Americans should be up in arms over the opaque, back-room nature of our legislative process.

We can easily design a system that results in a "no" vote on last-minute legislation, and in the meantime, I believe the public backlash for last-minute legislation would be much worse with a system like Votesimple in place. Net effect: more transparency in congress.
It's not the packaging, but Fabric (and Capistrano and friends) all look like shells scripts to me.
It didn't happen before because MS was able to defend its position. (e.g. Positioning IE, crippling java, etc)
I got modded down? Jeez you guys have no humor. Slashdot's way better
Conversely, people can stop working jobs that value economy over safety. I guess they must make enough money to not worry about the risk, which is somewhat sad.
Yes, I would like to read something more informative than the Daily Mail summary.
Assess, Decide, Do - A Life Management Framework
And I still can't read it on my kindle for free.
While not technically tab-completion, you could always evaluate "?Get" to see a list of all symbols beginning with Get, or "?Get*" too see all symbols containing "Get", etc. You can then click on any of these to see their documentation.
Review my weekend hack: A simple TV guide
I had problems where after a few seconds it would completely crash X, drawing garbage all over the framebuffer, but it turned out that it was just triggering some bug in Compiz+Nvidia on Ubuntu.
As previously discussed in other HN threads on this same issue:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biographies_of_living_persons

"Biographies of living persons must be written conservatively, with regard for the subject's privacy. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a tabloid paper; it is not our job to be sensationalist, or to be the primary vehicle for the spread of titillating claims about people's lives. The possibility of harm to living subjects is one of the important factors to be considered when exercising editorial judgment."
IDrive spammed my Gmail contacts
I worked in a machine shop for four years, and I can tell you that stuff happens no matter how good your gear is. There's always the odd bit of debris that bounces off your dust mask or something at just the right angle to make it under the small gap between your goggles and your face.
The tool he's missing that I end up using constantly is Memoize - http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~billm/memoize.html - enormously simplified my make processes, and works very well with Fabric and the others.
Google Chrome OS – it’s about paid content.
Why? With the host packaging system I get versioned packages, through host management tools I can control which packages my production, staging, and development hosts should have, and I can describe my dependencies on host libraries and software through the host system's own tools.

Together with distribution systems like apt I can also significantly ease deployment.

I can see that executing some commands over a set of hosts at the same time could be useful, but doesn't sound like a killer feature for me.

As for deploying from staging to production servers, it sounds more tidy to build proper packages to deploy in staging and test before deploying the same packages to production.
Not at all, Atheists don't grant beliefs associated with religion special status.

To an atheist, the statement "a small pink elephant named wilson created the universe with a squeeky sneeze" and "God created the universe in 7 days" are equally likely to be true...

An atheist may not assign a probability of 1 to the truth of each of his/her beliefs, but he/she considers all absurd beliefs equally unlikely, and grants that science has allowed humanity to make educated estimates about many such probabilities.
How much is a Petabyte?
I'd stick with the serious point; it's not unique to politics and bureaucracies, though: just about anything can be justified by appealing to increasing shareholder value:

- paying generously above market rates? argue it is a morale-booster that leads to happier employees -> higher productivity -> higher profits -> higher shareholder value

- paying perilously below-market rates? argue the obvious cost-cutting line -> fatter margins -> higher profits -> higher shareholder value

...and the same with any other appeal to some vague metric of utility.

My serious point is that if you are arguing against "utilitarianism" (at that hoary level of abstraction) by saying:

- here's an example where 'utilitarianism' yields bad outcomes

...you're self-defeating, b/c your sole argument contra 'utilitarianism' hinges on a utilitarian-inspired argument (that the fact that one course of action yields better actions than another => taking the better course).

All you've accomplished is shown that you, too, seem to be a utilitarian, and all you're doing is pointing out a need to be careful in how you choose your utility metric. This doesn't make a convincing case against utilitarianism-the-abstraction and opens your specific 'corner case' to examination, which likely will not fare well if you pick a silly 'corner case' to try.
To be fair, most people running 4.3 are running 4.3 with RHEL back-patches or something similar. That's what distribution maintainers are for -- there's nothing less secure than trying to remember to patch all your individual programs yourself.
Great point! It wasn't long ago that Google was bidding on spectrum and battling net neutrality to ensure easy and unfettered access to the Internet and its online properties. The Telcos/cable companies/ISP's are just another gateway that Google has to work through.
I don't see the point, Android is using a Chrome version, so if you'll take Android remove Dalvik then you're getting a new OS?

By that definition I can remove all my apps from my Vista laptop except the browser and what do I get, an IE OS?

That's silly!!!
Beware: talks about the benefits of using utility code to solve subproblems without even a nod to the complexity introduced by adding dependencies to a project and the costs thereof. This always tells me I'm reading someone who views software development as writing code only, and doesn't spend much time maintaining old stuff. All the "hacker" verbiage notwithstanding, I think the author is missing some important points about what makes a good hack.

That said, I don't know a thing about any of these tools. They might be fantastically worth it for all I know. But talk about the tools, not about how they make you a great hacker.
Search has become a commodity in the eyes of most people who aren't power users. That is to say, as long as it works, one search engine is pretty much the same as the other.

If somebody is going to erode Google's hold on the market significantly, they are going to have to introduce entirely new features, or come up with a search that is orders-of-power better than Google. That is to say, the superiority has to be readily apparent to a human user and not just a slight improvement that can to be proven only by empirical testing.
The point was they have to be profit-seeking businesses not just hobby tax dodges.

If I spend $10K on improvements to my daily driver classic Mustangs, I shouldn't be able to deduct those expenses. If I was a business engaged in restoring them for re-sale, then those expenses should be deductible.

Grandparent's point was if husband makes a ton of money at his day job, that his wife shouldn't be able to call their hobbies of sailboating or horses or their vacation house that they rent out to friends one weekend a year as "businesses" that lose money and as a result make those expenses payable with untaxed income.
If you beleave there is a 99/100 or a 1 in 100 billion chance there is a god of some sort you are an Agnostic. If you beleve there is zero chance there is a god you are an Atheist.

Ok, an agnostic is more likely to say I have no idea what the odds of a god are nor is there anyway to determine them.

PS: Let's say our universe was created by Ted. And you ask him, who created your universe and he says "I have no idea".
Designing useful mobile services for Africa
In most jurisdictions, necessity is a justification for violating most laws. Necessity is defined as something along the lines of having a reasonable belief that the results of not violating the law would be worse than the harm done by violating the law. The actual outcome is not usually relevant; it's about what a reasonable person would expect.
I don't want to continue this thread indefinitely, but you misunderstand the example. The redhead analogy is not demonstrating a result of lower social utility. It is demonstrating a clearly unjust and immoral result to the individuals involved.

Here's a serious example:

As it so happens, statistical research demonstrates that increased gun ownership generally reduces incidences of home invasion and violent crime. But if you believe fundamentally in the right of peaceful individuals to defend themselves, their families, and to own firearms, then this is just a happy coincidence. The right of peaceful people to generally do as they please is more important than the impact on some vague notion of social utility.
Walking is better exercise and more healthy in a country in which obesity is a major health problem. And walking is more adaptable to varied terrain, and doesn't leave you with something to park.
You mean heresy. Hearsay is information you learned from a friend. :)
Why Hulu Succeeded As Other Video Sites Failed
You need to appear extraordinarily legitimate. On the website you need to refer to backers. As is, this scares me. If I had an agenda, I would pay India and a proxy to setup accounts and vote, vote, vote.

Simple is good, especially for marketing purposes, but complexity can be good too.
My understanding was that in order to avoid the "hobby" classification you have to make money in 2 out of 5 years (this ratio might be different from what I remember).
I think the general idea is very good.

Hardware is "hard", but it's hard for the competition too - if you're good in that area that should be what you want. The social network / web app market has few barriers to entry - the programming is not difficult enough to prevent average programmers with great marketing and design skills from entering. Not good if your strongest asset is your technical ability and you hope go head-to-head with web 2.0 hipsters on there terms.

If you can handle something that requires math, physics, hardware knowledge, big initial investment, etc, why not look into ways of monetizing it? It's tough but you'd have a smaller pool of competitors than if you decided to try and make the next Flcker/Facebook/Twitter/etc. That more people aren't doing this leads me to believe I'm overlooking something, but it's surprising so many geeks are drawn to (and succeeding at) startups that seem to be the antithesis of geekiness (social networks, advertising, etc).
Good point. Votesimple has gone as far as it can go on an after-hours shoestring; to take the next steps (backers, detailed plans, some fundraising) I need to start dedicating a significant amount of time and money to the project.
Perhaps, but I find it odd that there is so much anti-Scientology and anti-Mormonism out there. Mainstream religions are trying to paint them both as cults, etc., and atheists are the unwitting pawns in the larger sectarian battle.

Few criticisms of Scientology focus only on the possibly disturbing aspects... most tend to scoff at the theology as well and accuse the faithful of being victims of brainwashing!
Think of them as shell-script frameworks. They include commonly used tasks/libraries that are useful for deployment and build tasks. Yes, you could use shell script, but these frameworks gives you a more convenient environment. They are also easier to set up and are more portable, since they have fewer external dependencies.
Running elections is hard, but it's getting easier. If web, phone, and (limited/proxied) snail mail voting mechanisms were in place, we could reach out to far more Americans than a traditional congressperson ever does.
There are definitely legitimate uses of such tools... I myself occasionally use jslint, to minimize the chances of obscure browser compatibility issues.

However some poeple run these "code quality" measures as part of a regular test suite, so if you write a method that has more than 3 lines you get a warning or failure.

In my opinion this leads to less readable code, as methods are prematurely refactored simply for size, and coders tend to do things like putting a hash literal on a single long line rather than formatting it for maximum readability.

This is just my opinion... I don't hold it against someone to use them, I just think they can make code less readable, not more.
Nice. I particularly appreciate the concise explanation of why the memristor was clearly a "missing" component (see paragraphs 5-7).
How about posting something not behind a pay wall?

http://www.t-mobilemytouch.com/

http://news.google.com/news?um=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=...
That's really interesting, and I'm surprised.

My new position, if I was going to argue for adoption of GPS-based speed governors, would be that there could be an override switch that required a service appointment to reset, a small EZ-Pass-style transponder, and a hefty fine for getting caught disabling your governor.

Now the .001% of drivers that need to make emergency runs to the hospital can do so with no interference, and minimal after-the-fact overhead to comply with the enforcement system. I'd probably still keep the 5mph buffer and the minute-long burst, since you can't hit a switch in a driving emergency.
The weird thing is that the article was not behind a pay wall when I posted it.
I guess I'm not going to become an officer in the Swedish army. I only passed one part of the test.
It's common for people to see something they don't think directly benefits them and decide it's a waste of the licence fee.

Perhaps you're not tied down to older browsers, so Glow has no benefit compared to other libraries, for you personally.

I'm a fan of the Radio 4 programme "More or Less", a review of stats in news stories. It's audience would seem insignificant compared to reality TV shows and soap operas, should the BBC scrap "More or Less" and reassign its budget to reality TV?

Would you say it's wrong that we support screen reader users, even though their numbers are small? Is time spent helping these users a waste of their licence fee?

No, we're happy to cater for minority users even if it means being behind other libraries. I wouldn't want other libraries to do the same, as they can be the choice for people who don't need the support of old browsers, and they can perhaps be faster and leaner for it.
I can't imagine why bikes would make it harder to get around, I live in a country where people use bikes when there's decimeters of unplowed snow outside. The only thing that's hard to do while riding a bike is getting up stairs but it's only a tiny bit of a trip.
Crossing fingers for XBox Live.
True. For some reason, this way of thinking just isn't natural to me. It proves to be a great problem solving approach when it is applied though.
That is, quite literally, one of the better things on the Internet.
So, that actually works by establishing a base value and a derivation step... i.e., it defines N(0), then it expresses N(n) in terms of N(n - 1).

If you try to do the same thing for Fibonacci numbers, you would need to express F(n) in terms of earlier values, not in terms of F(n). What cperciva is jokingly proposing is the equivalent of:

naturals = naturals

which is hardly helpful for computing the values. Lazy languages would not help you there.
On windows and mac, your point about Flash 10 being faster than JS is probably true. However, Flash 10 on Linux is BUGGERALL SLOW. Fullscreen Youtube videos are jerky and slow on my 2.2ghz processor. JS is much faster on Linux than Flash.
Its called a danger premium. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't object to being paid 400k as a programmer in the Green Zone in Iraq. Or maybe you would, depending on your appetite for risk.
Like many road-safety campaigners, Lines is very persuasive with his argument. "There are 200 people killed and 2,500 seriously injured on London's roads each year, and it costs £1.2 billion [about $1.9 billion]," he said.

This argument is not persuasive at all. Lines offers no evidence that regulating speed by GPS would produce a net decrease in traffic fatalities, injuries or economic damage. It is reasonable to assume that if all vehicles were required to equip such a device, some of each of the following (in unknown proportions) would occur:

* Some crashes caused in whole or in part by excess speed would not occur.

* Some crashes that could have been avoided by accelerating suddenly and briefly exceeding the speed limit would occur.

* Some people would be exposed to dangerous situations, such as criminal assault that they may have been able to flee in an unrestricted car. It is probably safe to assume that some criminals will figure out how to bypass the devices on their own cars.

* Some people requiring urgent medical care will suffer increased harm or death because they could not reach a hospital as quickly.

And I'm probably forgetting a few things. Without some analysis of the likely changes in these outcomes, it's impossible to say whether the harms cited by Lines support the introduction of such devices.
> In 2010, votesimple will run for one congressional seat in one district in the United States. If elected, we will establish a website where all Americans can read, analyze, discuss, ... each bill that comes before congress.

Cool.

> ... and vote on .... If the American people vote "yes" on a bill, our congressional representative will vote yes; if they vote "no", our congressional representative will vote no.

Not so cool. There are good reasons for having a representative democracy, as opposed to a direct one. I'd prefer not to head in that direction.
Webkit is LGPL, Chrome is based on Webkit, and the entire OS is built around Chrome. It's also speculated that their "new window system" is built on DirectFB which is LGPL.
SlickMap CSS
Yes. And while I can't flag this article as another misleading duplicate, I can point out that this simply isn't news: there's a huge amount of "true information" that is surpressed from WP every day based on WP's policies about what they do and don't want in the encyclopedia.

I think part of the disconnect is that people see WP as a news source (it is not), the Hitchhiker's Guide (it is not), and a general-purpose lessaiz-faire commons for sharing information of all sorts (it is not). WP is a community effort to build an encyclopedia. That's all.
Fuzzgrind: an automatic fuzzing tool
Yeah, that reminds me of the "Assault Rifle Ban" in my home state of NH, which actually had nothing to do with assault weapons.
Why didn't they take down the IRS?
Seems like the perfect screening test for the military. The objective is apparently to see who is willing to submit to an order to perform an endless series of seemingly pointless tasks using cool looking but over-engineered and awkward technology.
Can your programming language do this?
Presumably because they have their hands full. But obviously they're holding the phone, so I guess they can't type one-handed. In that case, though, might as well simply record a voice memo.
http://www.govtrack.us/ isn't doing anything similar but it is still something that might inspire a few additional lessons.
I find it quite amazing that the photographer even bothered to 'shop the photo. It seems to me as irrationality on his or his editors' part.

In this case, I don't think the doctoring of the photo affects the substance of the article. However, that said, this is certainly an ethical lapse that should be soundly rejected by the New York Times' readership.
The last time I heard anything about this, the bottleneck on the voxel side was problems with surface texturing. That was some time ago though, and I'm not sure what progress has been made on that front.
If they had proper customer service it might have been caught and dealt with. Now instead it's on the frontpage of Hackernews.
Thoughts on the whole XHTML/HTML5 affair
IBM: Reflating the Corporate Bubble, GE-Style
In this case I think Wales probably did the right thing, however there are two lessons in this article:

The claim that the Internet -- and Wikipedia in particular -- inevitably routes around censorship is wrong.

Wikipedia won't publish damaging information about you if Wales is on your side, but otherwise beware.
Correct. The "fake" effects have limitations and you can break them under certain circumstances, so raytracing is always a good choice when you aren't sure how the materials will be used and under what conditions they will be rendered.
My favorite bit (even though I, myself, find it a bit silly):

Which brings me to the reason why I use XHTML: The validator enforces my preferred coding standards for HTML – lowercase elements, quoted attributes and closed elements. That’s it. Not much really. I know it’s marketing XHTML rather than technical XHTML. I don’t care. Or rather I do care, I just make a conscious pragmatic decision based on a small personal advantage. I’m both pedantic and like having a tool chain which enforces that, XHTML suits my style.
The Swedish Army has not actually fought a war since 1809, so they've had two hundred years to hone their Flash design skills to perfection...

A very solid game-like web experience. Despite all the talk, it's going to be a while until HTML 5's <video> and <canvas> can deliver something like this.
Guess I'm the only one that finds this not very funny.