skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a problem close to my heart, thanks for pointing it out. I have a project up at http://commonwealth.io attempting the reduce the barrier to using data like this. Even when the data is accessible, it could be in any format and you have to load it into a DB to get any value.

The idea is to enable real SQL queries directly on data sets, so you don't need to worry about accessibility or how you'll query it. Not much data in it now, and it doesn't solve your immediate problem, but perhaps a better model for storing and representing this data.
Well, all kids are raised by machines, just usually machines called Mom and Dad. The question is whether the machines we could make to replace us as parents are better or worse. It's hard for us now to imagine artificial machines being better at it than we are, but, you know, so is relativistic spaceflight.
I like the way you're thinking, but that's a little too easy to game unfortunately.

Here is my proposal:

1. Require something like 40% of the prison guards to have four-year degrees from accredited institutions, preferably in the humanities and the science.

2. Offer the prison a bonus for the academic achievements of each inmate.

3. Tie the bonus to the magnitude of the educational achievement so that going from, say, a GED to a bachelor's is much greater than going from a bachelor's to another bachelor's or even a master's. Also, publication in academic journals is eligible for the bonus, as are patent awards.
Turkey PM Erdogan threatens to ban Facebook and YouTube
Yeah, that's an amazing story. You know things were bad when your landing kills a third of your passengers and you get a presidential commendation for saving that many.
Is there anything about Bitcoin that prevents the existence of fractional reserve?

Because otherwise, it's entirely possible for banks to "create debt/credit money through thin air"
Go:

func f() error {
var a, b, c *handle
var err error
if a, err = acquireHandle(0); err != nil {
return err
}
defer a.Close()
if a, err = acquireHandle(1); err != nil {
return err
}
defer b.Close()
if a, err = acquireHandle(2); err != nil {
return err
}
defer c.Close()
//use a, b, c
return nil
}
Then you are going to get a lot of "accidental" prison deaths. Because the prisons won't house an inmate that they don't think they can make money off of.
I wondered what Scheme dialect was F4. Epic!
العلم الروحانى و الجوهرة المصونة
For something with any interface you want, a tool being used incorrectly is a flaw in the tool itself. Unless you're going way out of your way to use it incorrectly.
Interesting, I left a note saying the dataset was unavailable. It looks like it was created 22-Apr-2010 so it is probably fairly stale at this point.
You are assuming a substantial fraction of prisoners are rehabilitatable. That's probably not true. We're talking about a lot of borderline retarded and very unhinged folks. You aren't going to run them through a class and find them jobs. I dare say you're naive about what the criminal underclass is really like.
To operate below 500ft AGL the area doesn't have to be unpopulated. As long as it is not a congested area (as in city center) and the pilot is stays 500 feet (distance) from any person, vehicle or structure that pilot is within legal regulations to operate below 500ft AGL.
> Like most things, the problem is how a tool is used, not the tool itself.

Yes, I absolutely agree with that, and should have said that in my earlier comment. Thanks for bringing that up.

My problem is with the presentations, not with the tool itself.

However, I've never actually seen somebody give a non-linear PowerPoint presentation. TBH, I don't think very many people know how to do this. (including me -- but thanks for pointing this out, I will definitely spend some time figuring out how to do it).

This makes me wonder whether the problem with PowerPoint is that it makes it easy for people to be lazy with their presentations.
I think it depends on the person. I never took notes in college, and doing so would have been distracting and difficult, nevermind that I would have been too lazy to ever look at my notes regardless.

In my case, it's probably not possible just in terms of the way my brain is wired to listen-comprehend and write at the same time (this isn't an exaggeration. As a separate example, I can't speak/listen at all while I'm playing videogames).
>Document markup is the one place XML is a no-brainer

That's only true for minimally formatted documents. For anything that approaches professional typesetting requirements, XML is a nightmare.

By far the biggest problem, it the requirement that inner elements must be closed before outer ones can be. This frequently means that the software must do a huge amount of read-ahead to figure out which aspect of the formatting changes first to make that formatting element innermost.

Sometimes, that's simply not possible to arrange and so you have to close a whole bunch of elements and then reopen all but one of them.

All this because a constraint of the format.

Ideal formats, such as used by typesetting systems that don't use XML, allow you to say: keep this formatting trait on until it's switched off. There is no concept of every element needing to be a subset of its encompassing element.
That's nonsense - for thousands of years human civilisations have got on quite well without democracy or human rights. If there was a pressing need for equality and educating the Romans used to say, it would have happened by now.

We can always take the wrong path, and find it hard or impossible to get back.

We may see an end to a single globally compatible internet in our working lives, we may see an end to strong encryption on devices not years old. Any legal action against these ends is surely something to celebrate?
Show HN: Restroom Rater. We take our crap seriously.
I'd initially submitted as "Try downloading this Highlighted dataset"
The various pointer types are about keeping the ownership and lifetime of your objects clear.
I will always regret not becoming a military pilot when I was young enough. When I was a kid, nobody ever told me how to pursue that career and I didn't have a clue. In my 30s, I became an Army officer and had a great time but always wish I could have gone the flight route.

My son is almost 2 and you can bet that I'll tell him what he needs to do to achieve this. [1]

[1] - To be a USAF pilot, your best bet is to bust your ass in high school and be both a student and an athlete and secure one of the coveted congressional endorsements to the U.S. Air Force Academy, where you must bust your ass and hope for a flight slot. Similar route for the Navy and USMC: U.S. Naval Academy.

The process to become a U.S. Army helicopter or fixed-wing pilot is a lot easier. Pursue a slot as an Aviation warrant officer. Successfully complete basic training, WOCS, and flight school. You don't need a college degree but it helps. The key is age: the doors close at around 32, so you have to start early.
Stylistic side note for C#: If you're nesting using blocks like that you can leave out the braces in all but the deepest instance which reads a little nicer, imho:

using (handle a = new handle(0))
using (handle b = new handle(1))
using (handle c = new handle(2)) {
// use a, b, c
}
In aviation there is also a law of diminishing returns because there are certain parts of the flight profile that are flown well below maximum speed. Even if you could do Mach 20 at altitude, you're still going to spend about 30-40 minutes between climbout (keep it under 250 below 10k!), descent, pattern entry, and approach.
Prisons could choose which inmates they take in. That is, prisons wouldn't be forced to house inmates who they don't believe have rehabilitation potential.
For me, I found the best was when I had the notes printed out before class. I would annotate them with extra thoughts as I watched the lecture. This kept me engaged, but not so busy writing that I couldn't actually think about the lecture.
> Yes, with Perl::Tidy and one keyboard shortcut bound to it. With Python I have to manually and very carefully block-indent the pasted fragment and then figure out how it fits into existing code.

No need to do it carefully or manually. The indentation within the fragment will be internally consistent, as will the indentation in the existing code you're pasting it into. So you just have to figure out the difference in indentation level between the two and use whatever keyboard command your editor has (e.g. C-c < and C-c > in Emacs) to shift the whole fragment.

> Even if there were a proper Python code formatter (hint: there isn't anything even close in functionality to Perl::Tidy) it wouldn't be able to figure out the code, since whitespace is significant. No such thing in Perl -- paste, tidy, rinse and repeat.

Right, but in Python there is no such thing as reformatting. The information about the structure is already encoded in the indentation, so it's neither possible nor necessary to reconstruct it from other formatting characters.

In other words, whereas in Perl and C-like languages you would 1) edit the braces so that they're correct and then 2) automatically reconstruct the indentation to match the braces, in Python you simply 1) edit the indentation so that it's correct.
I guess it comes down to the much more fundamental dichotomy between dynamic and static typing. I think most programmers would agree that having a function that accepts strings, lists, and dicts into the same argument (and thus sends them all through the exact same code path) is usually a bad idea. In Rails, I often find myself calling `to_i` or `to_s` just so that I can safely reason about that variable in the subsequent code.
Did you? Have you got anything to say other that an attack on the person rather than an exposition of fact?
One wonders what kind of appointee the president is.
Indeed. XML gets a lot of hate because it's so difficult to use. It would be fine if you could use it without having to care about the 100 features you don't care about and just use the ones you need, but pretty much every library I've seen makes parsing (or generating) a document a huge and complicated task, and most of it is completely irrelevant to the problem I'm trying to solve.

And because of this almost no-one bothers to actually handle it properly so you often can't actually use the advanced features even if you wanted to.
In my opinion -- and I know this is subjective -- that's a linear presentation. And so I would say no, that's not the kind of presentation I'm looking for. The content is arranged in a line, in some arbitrary order.

The "vertical slides" add a bit of hierarchy, but again, I don't feel that they add any non-linearity to the presentation.

Now, if say the 15th slide referred back to some content in the 8th, or if the 3rd-6th slides were all interrelated -- and this structure was reflected in the structure of the presentation -- then I would be enthusiastic.

So tl,dr; I agree with you -- I dislike these presentations.
Risk analysis for FlowingMail
A revised risk analysis for FlowingMail has been published.
Comments & suggestions are welcomed, insults are also considered (but please be kind)
Uh oh, somebody didn't read the article!

> At the end of the hearing, Cousins said he would be issuing a ruling in EFF's favor. However, he largely won't address the First Amendment and privacy issues brought up by EFF's motion. To Cousins, a simple issue of timing was paramount.
A team of us are working on the Big Data pipeline for Hadoop and Streaming Technologies.

We are a team of 5 working on it now and looking for other people looking to work on things like Nginx, Yarn/Hadoop, Kafka and Presto

If your interested email me at steve@demandcube.com

https://github.com/DemandCube/NeverwinterDP
https://github.com/DemandCube/Sparkngin
https://github.com/DemandCube/Scribengin
Don't forget: get pilot's license at 17, and for at least senior year of high school, attend a military academy prep school.
"I don't really care what I see"

And while I don't have a good way to express it yet, if they demur you can point out the above, and that quite to the contrary of whatever they're worrying about, they'll have to pay you good money to seriously examine their code (and then work on it) ^_^.
> "minimum payload size" (whatever that is)

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say he got his terms wrong. The IPv6 RFC states that IPv6 requires a minimum MTU of 1280 bytes. I guess that's what he meant.

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2460.txt

Packet Size Issues

IPv6 requires that every link in the internet have an MTU of 1280 octets or greater. On any link that cannot convey a 1280-octet packet in one piece, link-specific fragmentation and reassembly must be provided at a layer below IPv6.
In Race to Find Tech Talent, Piazza Opens College Homework Site to Recruiters
Yes indeed, and in fact, I've given presentations from hyperlinked HTML documents before.

What I liked about this approach was that you start out from your main content -- perhaps it's a summary or overview -- then you go off into a sub-topic, and then you come back to the overview so how the sub-topic is related to the whole is constantly being reminded to the viewers.

So yes, that kind of thing is what I'm going for (but I'm no expert -- I would love to hear more ideas!)
Top Web Frameworks Available
That's a bit too broad. Someone holds a screwdriver incorrectly when screwing in a screw. The screw is slightly crooked because of the improper technique. Is the screwdriver fundamentally flawed because it allows the wielder to mess up? It's difficult for me to conceive something as portable, usable, cheap, and effective as the screwdriver, that does the same thing, and does not allow me to mess up. You have to make a sacrifice in some important category to get that. Programming languages can be pretty similar. Some are designed to make it harder to shoot yourself in the foot, but are far less popular (ADA is the example I'd use).
My friend posted this on our behalf. I'm one of the developers. Happy to answer questions, etc.
I wonder who the world is in debt to and if words like global debt crisis are used to foster a sense of impending doom in people cuz it lets governments control them better?
For whatever it is worth, while obviously a part of the military-industrial complex, the SR-71 was built to spy, not kill.

The YF-12 was to kill however.
> Is there anything about Bitcoin that prevents the existence of fractional reserve?

Fractional reserve itself is not impossible (a bank offering BTC denominated accounts could lend out some of the BTC and not retain enough on hand to cover all deposits.)

But because of the supply characteristics of bitcoin, you'd probably have to charge depositors to store money rather than giving them low-to-zero interest, and give loans at zero-to-low interest compared to typical major fiat currency rates for otherwise similar loans, and then why would depositors pay to store with you rather than keep coins in their own wallet?

So, fractional reserve is possible, but it may be tricky to make a viable business model out of it.
Got to see one of these in person along with the engines and external starter engines at Seattle's Museum of Flight.

UNREAL especially for 1960 era technology.
The only password you'll ever need
Aside from the other problems that have been pointed out, this would provide an incentive for prisons to favor groups that have been statistically linked to lower recidism rates -- not only could it create some kind of favoritism, it would also probably favor those who perpetrated more serious crimes (thieves have by far the highest recidivism rates, much higher than, say, murderers [1]).

The American penitentiary system is fundamentally flawed and is in need of a deep reform; the real shocker to me is that stuff like this can happen before trial:

> Nazario first went to Rikers at 16, after an arrest on an assault charge. Before leaving at 19, he says, he had spent more than 300 days in solitary confinement — all before being convicted of a crime.

(on a side note, I was surprised to learn Rikers is actually a jail and not a prison)

[1] http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=1134
Wasn't this the same idea that made George a millionaire on the reunion episode of Seinfeld?
> "stack variables that go out of scope are deallocated"

That's all it is.

But, it guarantees that a given piece of code (an object's destructor) is always executed when execution leaves the current scope, either through normal execution, by calling `return`, or by throwing an exception.

In fact, RAII is the thing that allows exceptions to be remotely usable in C++; the lack of RAII in Obj-C is the reason why exceptions are not common in Obj-C.

It's used for regular memory management, but it's also used for managing access to other resources, such as files, mutexes, etc. E.g., you can use it ensure that a file handle is automatically closed when you leave scope.
View every music event published on Facebook – worldwide party search engine
because, awesome
If they meet FCC regulations then yes you can assume that. If they don't meet FCC regulations then they're illegal. I don't know how much policing goes on for that though.
Ask HN: how would you supercharge the humble browser textarea?
the simple humble web-browser textarea...

i'm typing in one, right now...

we seem to be "stuck" with it. for now.
and maybe for a long time into the future.

so let's think how to make the best of it.

what if we supercharge it, and pair it with
a nice div that displays formatted output,
treating the textarea text as light-markup?

the paired-div display part is really simple
-- almost every markdown editor does that --
but how would _you_ "supercharge" the textarea?

first, you have to accept what it can't do,
which is to display text of different sizes,
different colors, or with different styling.

anything else -- everything else! -- is open.

oh, and we're not even trying to do wysiwyg.
your focus must be the "semantic" structure.

a look at medium's editor shows buttons for:
bold, italics, headers, lists, blockquotes,
rules, and links. it also supports embeds,
in addition to the standard .html image-tag.
and it has a word-counter. because #whynot.

not included are what could be valuable things
like find-and-replace, to mention the obvious.

plus -- as we go to the 2-pane interface --
(a) auto table-of-contents with active links,
and (b) sync of the text and display fields
_when_ a user wants but free-float when not,
and (c) and (d) and (e) and (f) and...

i could go on. but i'm asking _you_ instead.

if you wanna post a comment in response, great;
i can appreciate a good think-piece just fine.

but if you really want to get a lot of respect,
code the javascript to make your thoughts real.

could be an fun weekend project, yes? :+)

if this draws any interest, i will upload my
work thus far. so if you'd like a head-start
with some actual code, you can wait for that.

otherwise, jump in without my preconceptions.

because, as we're stuck with this textarea shit,
we might as well turn it into a shit sandwich.

-bowerbird
It's perhaps worth knowing, although it will hopefully never be relevant, that at least in GCC a longjmp will not run destructors.
Hahaha, George was definitely an inspiration
I find it hilarious that those people are old enough to be locked into box, but can not legally drink or have a sex.
> Journalists always have a choice and they constantly keep stuff out of the public.

Sure. And while I disagree with giving away the guy's address (or information that would lead directly to that), I don't see any other reason why Newsweek shouldn't have tried to track down Bitcoin's creator.

Certainly that's a more compelling story than the normal drivel that hits the media nowadays, so it's hard to argue that Newsweek was filled with higher-value stories that they had to shove aside for this one.

This is an actual attempt at investigative journalism, even if the person they decided to investigate wasn't to your personal liking. Any other news story and people would be claiming "the people have a right to know".

If you take away revealing his personal location (though even that would hardly be difficult to find) I don't see the problem here. The enigmatic Sakamoto was a figure of wide publicity before this story, which is why Newsweek spent money to track to track down his location. And as the creator of a market now worth probably a billion+ (if not more) it's hard to argue that the public has no moral right to investigate more.
I've sort of lost track of what this debate is about... Assuming you don't have a schema definition, it seems to me that you can just as easily parse `{ "salary": "1e999" }` with application-encoded semantics as `<salary>1e999</salary>` with (again) application-encoded semantics. Maybe having a formal schema definition is a win, though.
Oh, maybe. Weren't aware of that, but we haven't found any other apps which do it.
The greatest battle of our time
I don't know. I like the warm sound of older (vintage) linux kernel versions. These would probably ruin it for me.

https://lwn.net/Articles/542664/
I think the landing page needs more work.

Show me how to integrate it with a simple code snippet on the front page (and if it's not simple.. it needs to be). Honestly my eyes glazed over a little bit looking at the implementation details. Clearly it's not that hard, but the second thing is motivation which leads to..

Show me a video on the front page of how simple it is for users to login, and how any server can act is the authentication provider. It's too hard to understand the need.

I guess these are just personal suggestions but I think UX is the only thing holding Persona back.
Why is one not able to tweet "Get Better"?
Chris Anderson, Curator of TED Talks, Builds his Brand
Or:

<customer>
<custid>496F3AB</custid>
<accounts>
<account>
<type>Personal</type>
...
</account>
<account>
<type>Business</type>
...
</account>
</accounts>
</customer>
"And as people have said, without RAII it's impossible to write exception-safe code."

Assuming that's hyperbole, I agree with the sentiment. It's possible to write exception safe code with try & catch - it's just almost as ugly as checking exit statuses and easier to miss something.
There's a lot of nice things about this UI, well done! The difference between "animation" and "design" modes isn't quite obvious at first glance. The switch doesn't tell you anything, so you have to experiment to find out what it means.

I'm happy to see that you're using Canvas for the published animation. It's the only way to go for artistic animation where content needs to update at every frame -- CSS just isn't enough for that.

Some three years ago, I made a HTML5 animation tool that outputs to Canvas + video:
http://radiapp.com

Despite all the hours I put in, I never managed to figure out a way to turn it into a real product. I think you will fare better :)
You haven't explain why he and his family should be anymore paranoid by fear than any other moderately wealthy people. Why don't all your mafia people just watch CNBC?
I think that for any travel there is some critical time when it doesn't matter how long it is as long it is < 24h and more than a long commute. You are wasting a whole day for that leg of the trip anyway no matter if the flight is 4 or 10 hours. So why waste money.
Working on an application aimed to make college housing a helluva good time.
Stack: Rails
Link: https://github.com/mikeadeleke/domimvp
New features: https://gist.github.com/mikeadeleke/9406134
What is a corrective upvote and who gives it to you?