skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The baggage policy you agree to and pay for is basically, "if we lose your bag or smash it into very small pieces, we will pay you $20."

Are there no customer protection laws in the US? I'm pretty sure that in most of Europe, it doesn't work that way, and for a good reason.

And if it really is like that, is that prominently advertised, or is that in fine print written in 8pt in light grey font on white background? From the customer's perspective, that makes a huge difference.

I for one (though mostly travelling from and to Germany, not the US) have never been told "we might lose your bag, and you'll get $20 in that case).
https://www.google.com/settings/dashboard may be what you're looking for.
My experience of this is that the competition has been running long enough to make it tricky to get on the hill. It took me a while, but having established a foothold, I've got two in the top ten, and one just outside.

Can you do better? I'd love to be challenged to re-visit and improve my 'bots.
This makes a lot of sense especially if Apple wants to move Apple TV on. Lots of TV manufacturers like Samsung has gesture navigation implemented already.

This should be exciting.
This might be the last chance to get a developer unit [1]. Depends what Apple intends to do with the technology, I guess, but they usually seem to keep technologies for themselves. FingerWorks stopped selling immediately when Apple acquired them [2].

[1] http://www.primesense.com/developers/get-your-sensor/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingerworks
Another vote for Synology here. Have been using them for a good 6 years now. I think I might have had one of the first DSM setups.

Just solid NAS products.

Upgraded recently to the DS213 and the WD RED 3TB disks in RAID-1. Running all sorts of services from SMB, AFP, UPNP, Surveillance, Backups, Etc. Performs flawlessly. Incredibly fast, DSM is an elegant UI (and powerful) and just couldn't be happier for all my wireless/wired client.

I backup the Synology once a month to a standalone 3TB disk via eSATA for even more redundancy.
I think that blog could have done with another pair of eyes.
Bitcoin $500
Wow. The graph isn't working but that's 10% in the last 24 hours.
This whole article is predicated on the absurd straw man argument that there are legion pair programming evangelists ruining the software industry with their philosophy.

Not really. This is a guy who hates pair programming and believes it would make him unhappy. Full stop. Don't mistake his screed about how he'd quit programming if pairing were required with a belief that this is where the industry is going. That's merely language to show how much he really really really hates pair programming.

I am pretty tired of people saying "I'm an introvert," when what they mean is "I'm an asshole."

I think that's a bit harsh. Note that the article starts off with a warning that it's a rant: the author is admitting up-front that he's letting off some steam. Social interaction is a limited commodity for introverts. The author would likely prefer to spend his daily allotment of social interaction on what he'd consider more useful forms of workplace communication.
Bitcoins pass $500
Is this the home of the future? Lighting and sound, controlled via iPhones...
Incorrect. For example, the bonobo.
That does not prove any point, it's just a rant.

You do realize that the first line of the post is "this is a rant", right?
If you win in small claims court, what's the process to turn that win into an actual check from the company?
Why put words in the author's mouth? He's talking about one specific thing he doesn't like. He hasn't given us any indication of his feelings on reviews, so there are no conclusions you can draw.
MetaFilter has remained pleasant for years. Turns out $5 is a big enough hurdle to keep it sane.
The HLA version of Randall Hyde's book is OK, but you can still get the original version of his books in PDF that don't use HLA at all.
Well, it turns out you can't sandbox Python at the language level. So now each user's code is run (a) in a separate process (b) in a chroot jail (c) as user nobody (d) with umask set to 0 (e) with a time limit of 300ms.
My first thought went to http://aichallenge.org/ it's a shame there is still no new competition.
or the technophiles look up and everyone's using whatsapp while we're asking why google isn't using XMPP anymore. This meme needs to die. Sure, gmail rode the wave of the tech-in-crowd to success, but there are far more examples that didn't, or did but went nowhere. If we were actually a good crystal ball it would be a whole lot easier to invest in the market.
Depends on how narrow your definition of hacker is.

A cogent explanation about how the technology behind a multi-billion pound industry affects pricing, distribution & product types - and how it means that certain market segments aren't served well… seems pretty darn on-topic to me ;)
Good design for a recreation of pokemon
I saw AI Challenge earlier! It looks really fun. I might steal one of their ideas and of put five or so teams of robots in a bigger map and see what happens.
On a related note, does anyone know if it is possible/how hard it is to get an accurate read on a handful of stars/pulsar in all weather/light conditions using a radio telescope? Or indeed what the state of the art is on "passive" computer/database assisted navigation?

I'd imagine with high accuracy clocks, much and high-precision information on celestial bodies, there should've been some advancements in this area? Or will the resolution (due to atmospheric effects etc) be too low for it to be useful?
Actually, I would argue that his opinion that tech is not racist is in the mainstream. It would not cause an eyebrow to be raised in the vast majority of tech offices I've worked in. That's the funny thing about a lot of these arguments against "political correctness"; the opinions most folks who use that term hold are the ones that white men have held for centuries. It's not at all surprising that there are still lots of white men that hold those opinions. And, given the incredible imbalance of white men in tech (even taking into account the Asian factor, the US tech industry is still a strikingly white and male industry), it is not difficult to hold those old positions without ever being questioned or challenged on them.

It's only because these views so rarely get challenged that it causes such a fierce response.

Source: I was one of those white guys who thought tech was a super great place where anyone with the skills could get ahead and there was no glass ceiling for women and their was no reason black folks couldn't do great in the industry if they just had an interest in tech. I recognize all this because I was there. I just wish I had a better way to help other people understand how their privileged position makes it very difficult for them to see and understand why the tech industry has both an extremely sexist and white supremacist culture.
> Although R has its quirks, I truly believe that at its heart it is an elegant and beautiful language. While R is a fairly mature language, we are still learning how to craft elegant R code: much code seen in the wild is written in haste to solve a pressing problem, and has not been rewritten to aid understanding.

First of all, what a great endeavor by Hadley...if "all" he had done was produce ggplot2 (and write a great book about it), that's enough to cement his elite status. However, what I don't get is...why R? After a few days of hacking, I was able to produce some nice graphics with ggplot2, but I have to say that it was by far the hardest high-level language I've had to learn as a programmer...I haven't used it enough to love, so I'm not at the stage that I am with JavaScript. That is, I know of JavaScript's problems but know of the strengths that sometimes derive from its weirdness...and of course, JS is too ubiquitous to just ignore. However, with R, it just seems some of its quirks are just bad.

I guess my question is aimed more at the angle of: how does R do the things it does so well? ggplot2 is great enough to learn R for it alone. And some of the data munging methods, such as `melt`, don't seem to have a well-supported port in all the other popular languages. I know that Python's pandas has one...Ruby does not. Is there something about R the language that makes it especially good at its data and statistical methods (in the way Matlab is geared toward matrix manipulation)? Or is it just that R was so heavily adopted by the stats community that, if they had picked another language, that language would have just as great as functionality as R does.

Note: I suffer from selection bias, though...a lot of the people I chat with are data scientists, where R is so ubiquitous. It may be that Python pandas is just as good as the R libraries, but I just know more R-users than Python-users.
I'd bet for the missing bigfoot, the Apple TV set (iTV or whatever they name it)
Enjoy the new and exciting professional community, Acopio
> but it's also a pretty reliable weathervane for where hot technology is heading in the next year or two

I have seen very little actual evidence of this, unless we're talking tautological, "all the predictions that came true came true, just ignore the rest", weathervanes. Still waiting on those social-network-based search engines to reign supreme...
How I make money
XKCD Substitutions Plus
Quick Apple Roll Bites Recipe
I learned this mantra from a jet-setting lawyer:

"Checked luggage is lost luggage."

I survived a month in Europe shortly after with carry-ons. It was doable, pleasant even, but I had to make some sacrifices: one pair of shoes, no laptop, no heavy jacket. It's obviously not ideal and possibly not feasible for someone traveling with a non-ticketed baby to travel this way.
I remember being Google very proud about the fact that they don't need your real name in order to track you with ads, a few years ago. But somewhere along the way, Google caught a lot of Facebook envy, also influenced hard by the media who kept saying Google will die if it doesn't create its own social network, and once Facebook creates its own search engine, it's game over for Google. Of course that was silly, because Google's search engine doesn't work just through social media signals, which is why Facebook's search engine could never have been as good as Google.

But anyway, the point is they caught this Facebook envy, and they wanted the real name policy, too.
>Capri is not really small enough or appropriate for phones, since you tend to gesture with your phone rather than at it.

How about gesturing with your iWatch?

Just sayin'
"I haven't used it enough to love, so I'm not at the stage that I am with JavaScript. That is, I know of JavaScript's problems but know of the strengths that sometimes derive from its weirdness."

I'll take a risk and ask: what are these strengths you're talking about that JS has?
I used to travel a lot and if you choose to make an enemy out of an airline over a lost bag, it won't take long until all the airlines are your enemy ... then you'll either quit flying or pay your enemy.

Here are a few tips:

- Travel lighter! I was very careful to keep track of what I did and didn't use on each trip. There were very few things that went back into the suitcase if they weren't used (a brief-case umbrella and a tiny sewing kit are all I can think of).

- If you're traveling for several weeks, pack 5-7 days of clothes. Often they can be worn more than once without washing, and most hotels have laundry services.

- Traveling with kids is hard (I have four) ... especially infants. If you paid for a ticket for your child, they get a carry-on and a personal item too - even if they can't carry it.

- Rollie's are great but you can make them better. You can strap the handles together so that a whole set of rollies can be pulled via one handle. Some matching sets of luggage include these straps.

- If you do check a bag, make sure you can afford to lose what's in the bag. You will NEVER get the value of that bags contents back from the airline, so keep the value low.

- Keep your toothbrush, deodorant and at least a set of underwear in your laptop/personal bag (unless you also carry on your allowed piece of baggage.

Finally, the whole travel process can be irritating. Ticketing can earn an enemy quickly if they can't deal with missed flights, delays and cancellations in a reasonable way. So the real tip here is to not stress about it too much (hard for type A personalities). If you let a poor travel experience ruin your trip, you've lost more than a bag.
I think you're missing the point of the article. The core of it is essentially: "being happy is one of the most important things in my life, and pair programming would make me unhappy; therefore I will not do it."

Yes, he does try to rationalize a little bit here and there, but overall I think that's it.

I don't at all believe that pair programming necessarily gives you a better end product. I think it can, but I think it depends a lot on the project and individuals involved. Personally I'm not a fan. I'm not quite the hater that the OP is, but I, too, would likely look for a new job if my company suddenly required regular pair programming of everyone.

I think I'm pretty damn good at what I do. That's obviously a subjective statement, but I could back it up with some facts that would seem to indicate I know what I'm doing. If I paired with someone on certain projects, would it create a better outcome? I'm not sure. Maybe it would. Maybe it wouldn't. But I really don't care, because I'm certain I wouldn't enjoy the process. Does that potentially limit my greatness as a developer? Maybe. Maybe not. But that's where the happiness thing comes in. If pairing truly could make me a better developer, and there's nothing else that could, then I'm honestly totally fine not being the best developer I could be, because I wouldn't be happy while practicing my craft.

As an aside: I'm talking about two peers of roughly the same skill pairing. I'd be happy to pair with a junior dev for the purposes of mentorship or knowledge transfer. Actually, I think pairing with anyone for the purpose of knowledge transfer is probably a good thing. I just wouldn't enjoy pairing as a fundamental part of working on a project.
Is it possible to ship stuff (laptops, cellphone maybe) via FedEX or UPS, internationally, and have it arrive at or near the same time/place as your destination w/o having to wait for it to clear customs?

I had considered this but eliminated it as a dependable method because I assume that most countries have their own customs procedures for items shipped via FedEx/UPS and in some cases items might be tied up for days or weeks.
The OP was flying to/from Europe, so European law applies

http://ec.europa.eu/consumers/ecc/consumer_topics/air_travel...

> If your registered luggage is lost, damaged or delayed, you may be entitled to compensation from the airline, up to about €1,220

Far higher than $20.
In a lot of countries (but oddly not the US), there are people at the baggage claim exits checking claim tags with bags to prevent precisely this scenario of bags taken by mistake.
Can anyone help me understand why the price is rising so rapidly? It was like $50 a while back. Now its 10x that. Is it because the difficulty to mine is rising exponentially? Or am I missing something?
You mean sue Heathrow? AA fulfilled their duty to get the bags to the baggage carousel. Not their fault that most airports rely on the honor system.
iPad mini with Retina Display has worse gamut than Nexus 7
Kochan 'Programming in C': http://www.amazon.com/dp/0672326663

Edit: Most resources on the Internet are too confusing for beginners. As a matter of fact, people who know C are usually unable to teach C to novices. Good introductory resources for C are rare - which corresponds to C's elitist nimbus.
I just checked out the side. Didn't know it before. I found some interesting content. It's now part of my feedly. Thanks for the hint man.
I have written yet another chrome extension inspired by xkcd.com/1288 [xkcd:Substitutions] - http://goo.gl/pp9oj2 .
I did this since I couldn't find one that let you to edit the list of substitutions.

Since I'm a Java developer I'm aware to the fact that my js code have no style and is most probably bad :) , I'll be glad hear constructive comments!
Interviewing Chuck Croll, An active member of the Official Blogger Forum
1.2 million miles (hey hey lifetime gold!) and I have issues with them all the time.
Some are hilarious:
the flight attendant that threw the peanut packs from the galley to everyone in first class on a LAX-LAS seg;
not packing enough main course meals so that flagship first class passengers between Japan and the continental US have a choice of meals.

others not even close:
moving departure times by two hours (forward) and not bothering to call, email or text to inform.
closing the door then sitting at the gate for 3 hours so that you can say we departed "on time". Twice.
fun and games around rescheduling people on delayed flights: no, it's not acceptable to wait 39 hours for a flight between a major focus city and your home hub because you have mechanical issues with your aircraft.
IMHO, gesture navigation suck. It's much more expensive for your body to move your arm+hands around compared to one single click of a finger.

If you are playing a game, it's fine, you want to move around depending on the game style. But once you're looking for relaxing activities, like flipping over channels, is stressful.
A Platform as a services list (PAAS) - Hacker's Box
YouTube Comment Ranking Is Broken
Only if the phone was off when it was stolen, or it was on, and you absolutely trust the security of the screen lock, which I'd be wary of.
He has an earlier blog post on how he designs his slides. Not extremely informative but csn give you couple of tips on how to get that zach holman look. Iirc it was in response to the how github uses github to build github talk.
There are consumer protection laws in the US. That's why it's illegal to buy a bicycle without a bunch of useless reflectors stuck to it, for example, and why you have to file the "lawyer lips" off the front fork to have a working quick release mechanism.
8K Monitor Right Around The Corner – A Massive 7680×4320 Resolution
Well now it must definitely be too late to invest. Don't even think about it guys. It's a ponzi scheme slash not real money slash libertarian wet dream. I'd rather trust helicopter Ben with my savings than some obscure open source software that eats 10Gb of my disk space.
I don't see how the procedure you described is at all humiliating. You were sent a programming challenge and asked to complete it. How is that humiliating?
Yeah, but that last thing holds for nearly everything – whenever I read an article on, say, physics, I cannot help but wonder whether the articles on (e.g.) the war in Iraq were produced with the same complete disregard of correctness.
I think you missed the point of the post - it's not about losing a bag, it's about the customer service failure that ensued. I had bags lost on a couple of occasions, and usually they are delivered on the same day or the next to the address I stay at. If I'd had such an experience, I wouldn't be flying the same airline either.
Its 470$ on bitstamp, please ignore mtgox rate, that site is unusable
Only The Paranoid Survive By Andrew S. Grove
Besides the Stockholm Syndrome?...I think you have me there. It's not that JS doesn't have strengths, it's whether some of its widely derided flaws resulted in happy tradeoffs? I'm banging my head thinking of something specifically (and widely agreed on) but it's early. I guess the same question could be asked of JavaScript...does its exclusively great libraries, such as D3, exist in JS purely because JS is the most popular language for interactivity, rather than because JS was well-suited for such libraries? Probably the former.
Do you have a source for the Ko Phi Phi claim (reason I ask is genuine curisoity: I had a long conversation with a Thai bar owner a couple of years ago where he observed that one of the attractions of Phi Phi is that unlike Phuket or Samui, it wasn't mafia run). The mafia "protected" parts of the Thai tourist industry still employ lots of working class Thais, not to mention the Burmese diaspora.

The wider issue with buying stuff off Cambodian street urchins is that you really don't want to encourage a state of affairs where the most aggressive child beggars/vendors earn far more than their parents... and then need kids of their own once they hit their mid-teens and no longer appeal to tourists' sympathies.
Honestly can't tell if that's satire. Might be a symptom of approaching senility.
ah crap totally forgot about that: I spent a fair whack of points to send my partner back to the US in style. My non-us credit card was declined and they cancelled the booking only notifying us when we showed up at their airport and they told us that there was no ticket and couldn't issue a boarding pass. But then they took the points as a "penalty" for forfeiting the ticket because he didn't fly....
You can report this stuff to Google by installing Google Report extension in your chrome browser. Through that you can say your problem easily and I am sure about that in the next algorithm update, they are going to take care of it.
I put a C2D CPU, SSD, and 4GB RAM in an old 2006 iMac - My most fun upgrade ever
In other words: exactly what the much maligned Yahoo did when integrating acquired services into Yahoo. They may have done a lot of things right, but they did that part right.

You kept your original identity, and the single sign-on was a private matter, you didn't get publicly "outed" as Yahoo user FirstName LastName.
Lustano ! Please do not put scam sites in HN
It depends on a lot of things (climate, specific personal requirements, etc). My wife & I took our two young children -- 2 and 4 -- to California & Hawaii this summer without checking any bags. It was a 17 day trip. This is way more challenging on business trips when you usually need to pack nicer clothing.
I thought pypy had a sandboxed mode, did you get to experiment with it? if you did, what did you think?
How, please?
> "One problem is that almost all of them are language-specific."

Shameless plug: I built a platform [0] like this - but language-agnostic - for use during hackathons at the local TU's department of CS / software engineering. By language-agnostic I mean both bots and engines can be written in any programming language one prefers, as long as that language can encode/decode JSON. Three game engines are ready, one more (called Trapdoor Reversi) is in the planning stages. I've already gotten enthusiastic feedback from a group of sophomores at a recent hackathon.

If anyone finds it interesting, please star the repo.

[0] https://github.com/rosedu/I.GameBot
The sad and unfortunate thing is that this doesn't only occur with American Airlines. It's basically the same with most airlines. I've had a similar issue with the customer service with Delta airlines. I know a co-worker that struggled to find a lost bag from US Airways. If you search "baggage lost" on twitter, you'll see plenty of people in the same boat. I'm surprised no one has attempted to fix this problem... huge market opportunity right here...
I'm at the end of a 3.5 week trip across Japan and South Korea. One carry-on suitcase, one satchel as my day bag. I can't imagine carrying anything more (though, like you, no kids).

I spent five weeks in India for work last year, one of my coworkers brought an entire suitcase of shoes. He was nothing compared to the guy who brought two overweight suitcases. Our company policy would paid for extra bag fees but not overweight fees. He was pretty pissed when he got hit with those fees by Lufthansa. North of $300 each way out of his own pocket. For the life of me I don't know why he needed so much.
Looks like the Chinese market is driving the prices up.

http://money.cnn.com/2013/11/12/investing/bitcoin-record-hig...