skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Makes sense if your goal is to use some particular language (in this case Haskell). But a lot of us don't necessarily need yet another programming language, whereas adding to our theoretical knowledge can be beneficial no matter what environment we're programming in.
A Javascript WYSIWYG Editor That works on the iPad
Unfortunately it can't be avoided. I've always asked the question and most will say they work alone but then proceed to have team members do the work. It can become a big waste of time.
Ahh, my country doesn't allow this. Red means don't go, always. I haven't noticed cameras pointing anywhere other than mid-intersection to catch straight through offenses.
A lot of states differ on this; and I know a couple definitely have ways to get out of the points, essentially by paying money ("take this 'safe driving course'", etc.) I'm sure some states are stricter than others though.
Thanks we were pretty surprised as well, but we're really grateful for the encouragement
I thought it was intentional. Swedish chef style. I like it, but I'll need to go back and re-read to understand how I can use this on other pages than the homepage/demo page. I've nothing immediate to try it with right now. :)

Edit: I'll watch the video after work, probably will clear everything up for me.
And you could write an Appendable instance for them as well, it would just fly in the face of what the word "append" means to most people. (Nitpick, of course.)
Super helpful comment. Thanks. Definitely, the transition from calling public figures "vile idiots" to calling individual commenters on HN threads "vile idiots" is sure to produce a productive discussion.

I started this subthread by pointing out that 'bluecalm had weakened his argument by using the words "vile idiot". But 'bluecalm also made a bunch of testable and non-obvious observations in his comment; his writing had value. Whereas you just jumped in to call someone you disagreed with a name, and nothing else; your writing had no value.

Could you stop writing comments like that?
I never even considered this, as we can't do a left on red (we drive on the other side). Thanks.
It feels like it'd be hard to get work done that way too, unless you could somehow manage to forget that it was taking place. I can't really do much serious work when someone is standing behind me looking over my shoulder. If it's genuinely interactive or collaborative, sure: if they're looking over my shoulder because I'm showing them something, or they're helping me to do something, then sure. But standing behind me just "monitoring" me as I work solo? Sorta a creepy situation, and more than a bit distracting.
Three tips to Improve Attrition Rates in 2014
In order to improve our attrition rates this year, perhaps we need to dig more deeply and focus our attention on the less obvious answers, such as employee engagement, gamification, and visibility.
There is nothing wrong with STD or MAD. The real problem is a lot of people apply them without realizing the nature of their data and what kind of analysis they want to do.

In this case what matters in the end is the kind of impact deviation from mean has on the real world variable you have. I agree that in most Gaussian experiments MAD might be more useful than STD.

STD is more useful when the real world impact of the deviation increases exponentially with the magnitude of deviation and hence it is a good idea of magnify the (x-n) by squaring it. In many cases the impact is linear where MAD clearly works better. For example in cricket where n runs are n times better than 1 run. But in case of shooting. Hitting 9 targets out of 10 might be 100 times better than 1 out of 10 so there MAD will be misleading.
Well done on the product & solving a clear need! This is extremely useful for hackathons/prototyping. I also loved the live demo in the blog post and you did a wonderful job with the design/layout/colorscheme of the site.
Hi Ned,

Thanks for the note, just sent you an email!
I get what you're saying, but double parking is already illegal on those streets no matter how aggressively its enforced. Midtown has commercial parking zones (with their very own meters!). I would imagine the "right" thing to do is park there and "carry" load your goods on a handtruck or similar.
Ask HN: modern hardware with 80s era video (CGA or so)?
Can I get an otherwise modern computer (that can run *nix) that won't support showing images or video or will do it very poorly because of driver issues or just because the hardware can't do it. A CGA monitor would be fine. A monochrome monitor would be fine. I really liked that old amber text on black background. The idea is to make the computer less exciting and distracting.
This is excellent. Even it if doesn't work for scraping all sites, it simplifies the average use case so much that it's not even funny.

Feature proposal: deal with pagination.
Interesting point. But I have too much faith in human ingenuity to believe that without a common carrier telephone system we wouldn't have an internet right now. Maybe the path and details would differ.
Anonymous Yelp reviewers must be outed, US court rules
Huh, survival bias? Why would he look at companies that didn't survive when writing about success?
It's also easy to chalk up thousands of perfectly legitimate parking tickets to a few incompetent/corrupt parking authorities that you have no evidence exist except anecdotal experiences.

I’ve now read a half a dozen comments in this thread that I can sum up as "I once got a parking ticket that I shouldn't have, all parking authorities are incompetent and corrupt." No one's telling you that you shouldn't be allowed to challenge a ticket or to address the issue with your locally elected official.
Would be recommending this to the QA folks at work. Thanks for sharing!
If it changes the format significantly, the scraper will break, so for now you'll have to use the tool to rebuild. You will see on your API status page that it's down. As for robots.txt, we do respect it... for now we're leaving that to the user, but we're trying to implement a proactive way of checking for disallows and stopping those scrapers from being built.
Nope, none planned. (We don't have any engineers based there.) I'd be open to a community-organized event if someone's excited about hosting though — ping me at gdb@stripe.com.
It all depends. What if it's three o'clock in the morning and you've been waiting at a light for five minutes and its not turning and you can see that no one's coming in the other direction?
http://blog.motorists.org/6-cities-that-were-caught-shorteni...

Not only does it create the incentive to shorten the red light, it's practically the only way to make them profitable for cities in many places.
How (if at all) does this run on javascript heavy sites?
> virtual machines and cloud computing cannot be ultimately safe

Can somebody with more expertise comment on this? I was under the impression that virtualization software (Xen etc) was deemed safe?
What a ridiculous assertion. Category Theory and Chomsky Hierarchy are two easy to understand and key theories of Computer Science. If you don't have any understanding of these, you're not a professional programmer. Maybe it's "even abstract for mathematicians" should be "too abstract for detail oriented math nerds, but pretty easy to comprehend at a basic level"
Why do you need to raise money if you already have customers lining up to pay?

It sounds a bit like you are on the verge of making money from what you know how to do and instead of just doing that, you're trying to do something you don't know how to do first.

What is wrong with bootstrapping for now, focusing on delivery, and fundraising (or not) later?

The end goal of any business is not fundraising, but cashflow.
I'm not familiar with VirtualGL so correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't look like it supports reattaching to a still-running program after detaching or getting disconnected, which is the main purpose/advantage of xpra.
We Hacked North Korea With Balloons and USB Drives
The ironic thing is if they had written FarmVille, they'd have raised $4Bn. VC priorities are crazy.
First, more reading: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/browser/trunk/docs/ab...

> You need to run special gateway servers

You don't _need_ to, each peer can run its own gateway on localhost. Gateway servers are useful if you're on a computer where you can't install anything.

> I don't think it uses transparent encryption

I'm not sure what you mean by that, but if it means you need to manually encrypt things before storing it in tahoe-lafs, you're wrong. The whole point of Tahoe-LAFS is to push your files to it, and it will automatically encrypt, erasure-encode and distribute it to all nodes in the swarm you're in. All you need to care about are URIs returned by Tahoe-LAFS, and which contain all you need to use files (no need for extra password or keys, in fact they're contained in the URIs)

> there isn't a global namespace

Tahoe-LAFS swarms are defined by their introducers, the central piece that ties all storage nodes and potential clients together, kind of like a bittorrent tracker. There are no namespaces because swarms are not globally defined (although a node can take part in multiple swarms, this is completely invisible from Tahoe-LAFS users. Exactly like bittorrent).
My proposition was to build a world-level swarm, where anybody could register and participate in the swarm. If you wonder about the reliability of a central introducer, there is work in the pipes for creating decentralized introducers.
Where are you getting the 404s? We will check into it now
>The fact that this isn't precisely what Homunculiheaded said is also why I posted

Ah. I misread the following...

>>This is actually what I expected to read:

as agreement ("This is actually what I expected to read."). My mistake.

>Unfortunately, rather more science takes place in the second domain than the first.

As I said to Homunculiheaded, this is because of the relative utility of the models, which we understand--and even those that do not understand it do not make the tool's use invalid.

What are we bemoaning, here, but actual misunderstanding itself?

And really, what's the point of that?
Kinda off-topic, but I also have to say "appendable" is a terrible choice. It would mean that those objects (or variables, or whatever) support efficient appending operation, which is usually not the case.

(Sorry, I couldn't get over the fact that appending a character to a string (or a list) is O(N) operation in Haskell.)

Now, if you named them "prependable", then maybe...
Failure as well.

You can't fail if you don't try. Sounds stupid, but not every opportunity is worth it. Risk can and will bite. You don't get an INC cover story by ruining your personal life though.

More drastically, use the Omaha Beach landing, as depicted in Saving Private Ryan, as an example:
All soldiers were equally equipped, motivated, trained. But then a grenade falls from the sky and hits your landing vessel. Completely outside of your control, but still you're fucked and die.

Happens to the best, to this day, SEAL, DEVGRU or not.
Bad luck is bad luck.

Same in business.
Do everything right and still fail.
Luck is underrated.

There is Risk Management, I wonder if Luck Management is something that will arise in the future. Chance works both ways.
I keep facebook only to keep in touch with friends (be able to send message or email once every year, in case they change it without letting me know).

I frankly don't like to read about what friends are doing because often, the friends are posting about happy moments/things/experiences. While I am very happy my friends are having good time/life, I ask myself, why am I NOT enjoying life as much as they are.

It's like as if people used to be envious of Hollywood stars in the past. People would read/watch about them and feel envy. Now that any facebook user can broadcast themselves, my friends are turning into mini-hollywood-stars.
"I’ll hop off my projects with deadlines and build something that I know probably won’t ever even get finished, but that I’m just excited to build."

That's sooo me... I always tell myself and my wife that these keep me sane.

PS: I don't drink coffee or mt dew though...
He misses one point: live and fund your company in US. There are more successful Internet companies in US than abroad.
5 Costly Construction Mistakes To Avoid In 2014
25-34 is definitely the most conspicuous group to me, simply because Facebook was brand-new, red-hot, & in vogue when the younger end of this demographic was in college (the original target market).
It looks like there are around 400,000 row crop farmers in the US. 20,000 users, plus who knows how many worldwide, is quite impressive given the nature of the business. I do wonder how they are driving so much traffic? As a farmer myself, I've never heard of the service outside of HN circles.
Opposition to speed-limit cameras exposes the absurdity of most speed-limit laws: it's a law so bad many (most?) people are opposed to having it strictly enforced. If that's not a bad law, then I don't know what is.
JS-heavy sites can be tricky. We position it so it should execute after most of the on-page JS, so it handles a lot of cases. There are still sites that break it though.... we're trying to tackle these guys one by one right now, as we try to generalize a broader solution
Indeed, but Tahoe-LAFS is not a replacement for your filesystem, rather a virtual place to backup and share files. Common use would be to have all files local, and a copy on your Tahoe-LAFS swarm.
Why, indeed:

http://youarenotsosmart.com/2013/05/23/survivorship-bias/

(Taken from reply below)
I also think that there's a clash of naming conventions going on. Programmers are used to name types for their values are, as in "4 is an Int", or even abstractly, "4 is Serializable". Haskell conforms to this convention with type and class names like "Int", "String", or "Num". But classes with names like Monoid don't conform to that, as 4 is not "a Monoid". The set of integers with + is a monoid, but that's a property of the type itself, not of its values. (Edit: And don't get me started about "IO". What's "an IO" even supposed to be?)
We don't support logging in yet, but it's a feature we're working on adding. Scripting will also be cool, but it's right now further down our feature queue
My Personal Investment Thesis - 2014
Funny that they mention Bitcoin when Stripe doesn't publicly deal with bitcoin yet...
Now imagine if your family relied on you having this job? How awful would that be.
Very nice job. What about scraping data from password-protected pages?
Quite contrary, the point of the book is that it is very difficult to differentiate between skill and luck when random odds influence events.

For instance if you asked 1000 people to guess coin flips, on average one half will be wrong on each flip. So on the first flip you'd drop to 500, then 250, then 125, then 65, then 32, then 16, then 8, then 4, then 2, then you'd -- in a perfectly ideal scenario -- have one person left. A person that remarkably, "against all odds", guessed 10 coin flips in a row right! Surely they must be some sort of magician or seer, right? Yet their probability of guessing the next coin flip is no better than the people eliminated in the first round.

But that is exactly what we do with things like exceptional events: We find the person who was right about a set of events, among a collection of people guessing almost everything, and assume they've cracked the code. Even outside of financial situations (like being a guy who happened to have a portfolio that did great during an extreme black swan on October 19th, 1987, even if that same portfolio generally did terribly), just look at what happened with 9/11: Of all of the millions of scenarios that people concocted for fiction or just postulating, anyone who talked about a plane hitting the WTC suddenly became prophetic.

It's actually a pretty good book, as an aside.
I don't think Sam is claiming the opposite here. All he's doing out is pointing out some correlations he's observed.
I think Combinable is more appropriate as 'append' pertains to only one of many associative binary operations.
Can Google track me if I use Google Web Fonts?
It depends. In my city (a mid-sized city in the Midwest), being over the meter is a $25 ticket and that's the cheapest I've seen. Parking for too long in a 3-hr spot is $75. And if your car is towed it will be at least $125 to get it back (in addition to the parking ticket).
Grandma and Grandpa seem to be more than compensating for lost teens.

A couple other #s surprised me:

- NY's 100+% growth. I would have thought NYC would be an early adopter. Why so different than Chicago? Chicago's 2011 # seems very close to NYC, so perhaps Chicago was an earlier adopter? Same with LA.

- The dropoff in College is interesting too, but not amongst alums. It's almost like Facebook is more useful to people who are more scattered from their old friends.
The UX is great and a journalists everywhere will thank you.

But outside of government websites I don't see how a lot of this is even legal, per se?
I'm using HFS+. It's a last-last gen filesystem if ever there was one.

It's the only FS I've ever had silent corruption on, and it used to happen (10.4? 10.5? 10.6?) all the time.

I'd kill to have Apple just buy a license to NTFS.
> If red light cameras were there for safety, they would ding your driving record, not just be monetary fines.

In lots of countries, they do.
At least in NY, you can only get rid of 4 points with the course and you can only take the course so often. If you're committing enough offenses to be in danger of losing your license, it ain't really gonna help much.
Snow emergency tickets are perhaps an order of magnitude worse that your standard parking ticket because not only do you have to pay a hefty fine (AFAIK, not possible to contest), but also have to deal with the fact that you have no car until you pay through the nose to the mobster tow yard as well.

True story: it was the first night of the so called snow emergency (that never came). I was awoken to the sound of a tow truck at 3AM. Running outside (in my underwear) I yelled at the driver, WTF are you doing? There's no snow! He laughed and drove off with my car.

Went to the tow yard the next day and paid the ridiculous fine to get my car back. Pissed off, but whatever, move on.

The next night, same deal, no snow, but the car is towed again! This time, enraged, I walked down to the tow yard (30 minutes away); waited for the right moment (when one of the tow trucks was pulling out to go tow another car), jumped in my car, gunned the engine, and hauled ass out of the yard...and back to my place in the same dry parking spot -- total coup d'etat.

Nothing happened, tow yard probably didn't even know they had my car in the first place.

Moral of the story: ignore reality (i.e. the weather), if the state declares a snow emergency, find off street parking.
> However, I can tell you that Rust's type system is not strong enough to obviate bounds checking.

That's a bummer. It seems doable, but maybe it is too complex.

> avoids bounds checking on arithmetic by guaranteeing that fixed-sized integers will wrap on overflow (which is gross, but might be changed to fail-on-overflow if it doesn't hurt performance too much).

That would be nice as a default, but I'd be afraid it would hurt performance too much for numerical code. You'd definitely want a way to express arithmetic should be allowed to overflow (ie. that omits the check).

On a related note, one thing that is sorely missing in C and C++ is a way to test whether a value will overflow when converted to a different type (I wrote a blog article about this point: http://blog.reverberate.org/2012/12/testing-for-integer-over...)
It's a great suggestion, thanks! ... image extraction would be cool, and it's on our shortlist of features to build next
or http://brahma.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest
Cool, it'll be a good learning experience. The ones I mention in the blog post are a good start — revealing more than that would be telling, though!
"The company itself will be based in Switzerland due to that country's strict privacy rules."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/15/encrypted_blackphone...
That's still a perverse incentive; more money in the department who owns that parking budget.
No. He draws no conclusions from Gladwell's analysis; he brings Gladwell into the discussion only to show a well-publicized comparison between what Gladwell believed to be two opposing views of how risk works in the markets. He then tries to demonstrate that Niederhoffer's approach outperformed Taleb's, not because Gladwell said so, but because the empirically available facts of how the funds operated appear to demonstrate it.

Gladwell plays into the comparison about as much as the editors of Cosmopolitan would play into it if Niederhoffer and Taleb had shared the cover of an issue of Cosmo.
Sure. Word selection aside, we'd be better off without this forced stupidity that's become common here.
Yes, very much.

But at least with Elance and their tracker, any time not accounted for with a screenshot doesn't have to be paid.
I've written more web scraping code than I care to admit. A lot of the apps that ran on chumby devices used scraping to get their data (usually(!) with the consent of the website being scraped) since the device wasn't capable of rendering html (it eventually did get a port of Qt/WebKit, but that was right before it died and it wasn't well integrated with the rest of the chumby app ecosystem).

This service looks great, good work! But since you seem to host the APIs created how do you plan to get around the centralized access issues? Like on the chumby we had to do a lot of web scraping on the device itself (even though doing string processing operations needed for scraping required a lot of hoop jumping optimization to run well in ActionScript 2 on a slow ARMv5 chip with 64mb total RAM) to avoid all the requests coming from the same set of chumby-server IP addresses, because companies tend to notice lots of requests coming from the same server block really quick and will often rate limit the hell out of you, which could result in a situation where one heavy-usage scraper destroys access for every other client trying to scrape from that same source.
If cities complain about Uber and AirBnB, I can't imagine them not raising hell about this. Even if it's perfectly legal, cities will fight like rabid wolverines to protect their revenue sources, especially ones that they don't have to refer to as a dreaded "tax".
Because if you notice a trend in successful companies (Aha! They all have employees!), you need to cross-check and make sure this is something unique to successful companies (or at least over-represented), and not something both successful and unsuccessful companies share in equal parts. (Gee, it seems all the failures had employees too...)
Office Hours with Jason Santa Maria
I presume you're familiar with Finch (the console-based Pidgin equivalent - still uses libpurple), but I figured I'd mention it as another good way to get jabber/aim remotely.
>extra taxes for providing service to rural subscribers

Extra taxes /if/ they provide service to rural subscribers, or extra taxes /unless/ they provide service to rural subscribers?

Seems to be the latter would actually be a /humongous/ win for the customer. And might actually make these bozos build out some decent last-mile infrastructure (like they were supposed to do over a decade ago, and never ended up doing).
Most red-light cameras (at least in the US) are outsourced, and they lower the yellow light times, sometimes dangerously below any reasonable measure.

http://www.motorists.org/red-light-cameras/yellow-lights

This in turn has actually increased accidents.
http://www.motorists.org/red-light-cameras/studies

(i'm citing this mainly for the links, they are clearly a biased site).