skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Not everyone has the privilege of being able to work remotely on his/her macbook from the comforts of home; some people need their cars for work. You try lugging several hundred pounds of cement, lawn-mowing equipment, a mattress, etc. through your local subway.

Of course, but most work for the poor (to put it bluntly), does not include carrying things through the subway. It includes showing up on work on-time and working hard—whether that's laying bricks or washing dishes. If your car breaks down, you're out a job. If the subway breaks down (much less likely), your employer or four other employees just might have been on that subway, too.

> And SF has BART, caltrain, and MUNI, and while they all smell like urine, they do pretty much get you exactly where you want to go.

If usage increased, I dare say they would get cleaned up (public trains in former Eastern European countries are even non-smelly). I don't live in SF, though, so I have no experience to back up my hunch.
I'm not usually interested in reading idle musings about what the commenter was doing today, and I tend to downvote those.

I feel like HN users increasingly treat the comments as a place to just spit out whatever is on their mind. That's great in a regular conversation, but I don't want the comments section to turn into a place for conversations. I'd rather see fewer, more informative comments.
There will come a day when the proverbial walled garden becomes a literal walled garden, and we'll all get to say "we told you so!"

It won't be particularly satisfying, but in that dystopian near-future, it will be one of life's few remaining pleasures.
Ask HN: How to deliberately practice life-long learning?
> Student loans are a thing, unfortunately.

Average student loan debt is $29,400. For what most developers make, that should be easy to pay off within a year or two.
$8 or so.
Where do you live that you have to go to court to pay a traffic ticket?
Agreed. If there were a scenario where one had to use those expenses for years, I'd expect them to relocate to a lower COL area (ie. not SF) and adopt a somewhat humbler lifestyle. $100k would last a long time in that situation, and it should be well within the ability of most HNers to save up $100k before they're 30.
They should require you to create an account online which you must login too and enter a code found on the K-cup in order to get your coffee.

That will show those pesky people wanting to use your rather expensive machine with slightly less expensive however still a ripe off single serving coffee pods.
The title is a bit sensationalist - An airfoil that will never stall, no matter the angle of attack. They did CFD simulations that shows their wing not stalling at extreme angles of attack (not at any angle).

Also, they are talking about a wing. An airfoil is a wing section not the actual wing.
I don't understand how literally printing the password on the cup would be more effective, unless the coffee maker is internet-connected and each code is revoked after usage.

It harkens back to having to call Microsoft because you've replaced your motherboard except now it's Keurig and even less pleasant because you can't have your coffee while you're on hold.
It was almost certainly privately run.
Cars are not so much expensive to operate as much as they are very risky to operate. From accident deductibles to accidentally taking a right on red because you missed the sign to stuff like getting towed because you didn't catch the no parking sign. I've spent most of my adult life without a car and it's amazing how much stuff is set up to extract income from car owners. Life without a car provides a lot less "accidental fees" as I call them. Things that you can't insure against but could cost you unexpected expense.
They'll be willing to go through all that trouble for the convenience of only having to push a button to get their coffee!
The prototypical HNer is probably trying to start a business or passionately underpaid at a starup and making a fraction of what they would get paid working a normal job. Yeah, trivial.
You don't want to fight a tow truck driver.
Imagery from DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-3 – Now Live on Mapbox Satellite
And the problem is the current system design forces all people to take on the risk of owning a car—many of whom are exhausted and working multiple jobs just to live from day to day, not the greatest for being alert behind the wheel.
Girl hitting her head on a door once a day for 19 days (TIMELAPSE)
> I really don't understand why the laws are such that they can just keep your car, adding fees, until you pay.

In the city where I live, this is mainly because the towing people are given contracts saying they can do just that by the City Council. Of course, a couple of people on the City Council are pretty close to owners of said towing companies.

Seems like the way to reform this would be to expose these kinds of ties, and get normal people to recognize the viciously corrupt cycle that enables them. Unfortunately, politics like this is seen as the preserve of older, richer people, and most others just go about their jobs and accept it as an unfortunate "fact of life".
There are no people who are driving and parking their cars in SF so that they can attend their job washing dishes. none.
A port of Bret Victors Drawing Dynamic Visualizations tool
Nice. It seems perfect for books or other tasks with predefined progress points. Hooking it up to Coursera would be pretty awesome as well.
Note that you can sign up for a Google account without signing up for GMail. Just click the "I prefer to use my current email address" link underneath the username box in the signup flow.
A Notary Protocol for the Blockchain
Exactly. Techcrunch writes about interesting events sometimes, but boy do they have room for improvement when it comes to quality.
Every time I see LADOT towing a car it's on a flatbed, they don't literally tow it behind some other car. I imagine it's cheaper to use a flatbed if you are in this business.
It's a walled garden. Why do people keep developing for walled gardens then acting hurt when they're summarily evicted?
Yep, that was also excellent. Some confirmation from the highest places:

Former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt recounts that he never read the BND reports, because anything they wrote was tainted. He just asked other world leaders directly instead.

http://www.zeit.de/2013/45/nsa-abhoeraffaere-gelassenheit
What, you think that's bad??

You can also be charged fees for being a defendant in criminal court, and for being in jail. And can be sent (back) to jail for not (being able to) pay(ing) those fees.

I found out about jail fees a while back from an election website for one of our local politicians... but I don't recall if they wanted to lower the fees because they're unjust and hard on the poor, or raise them to help pay for things.

.

A few relevant search results:

http://www.npr.org/2014/05/19/312158516/increasing-court-fee...

http://nation.time.com/2013/08/21/welcome-to-prison-will-you...

http://www.mccrackencountyjailer.com/$_fees.htm

http://www.co.langlade.wi.us/sheriffjailfees.htm
I find comments like this funny. If this is the case why not go out and make those millions?

True, you do just say anyone can make something better, so perhaps it's a labour cost but then your comment doesn't make sense since the vendor is not overpaid.

The reality is these systems are huge, often not re-usable between institutions and you are vastly under estimating their complexity.

These students are usually just improving a very small part of very large system.

Which is cool, API everything and let students make better parts of systems where it counts. That would be my lesson.
Could something like this eventually replace the postman? I'm thinking of something on top of your roof that could be an aerial target for the device to drop stuff onto.
Programming is really fun and cool. But there are other fun and cool things that are not programming. I'm sure sculptors also take brakes from hammering rocks.
> at Amazon the drone program would start with .. the customer experience ... and you'd work backwards to the technology solution. At Google the technology precedes the customer experience.

Speaking of false dichotomies.
Bytecoin falls in the scam, yes. But the Monero community fixed this quite fast.
Hello. Thank you so much for the book and the pioneering model that you have published it with. All the best on the platform for distribution.

Please don't take the advice to downplay rspec. I think in chapter 8 you update the User model. It was so incredibly nice that, having been a week or so since I was able to work on the project, I was confident that the introduced changes did not break any functionality of the app. It is very easy to not see the benefit of testing when learning, only to curse your luck when you look at code later.

I have recently read a good article using your test suite as an example of how to improve tests. The author criticized the terse nature of your tests, with subject and nested describes. He felt that you write once and read often, so there is great benefit to making the tests verbose. It is, in effect, a contract that any User model must satisfy to be a valid user model. Going DRY and code golf on it only helps to frustrate the person looking to acclimate themselves to a project rather than saving a few minutes during test creation.

Again all the best and thanks for the wonderful tutorial and interesting distribution network.
Ask HN: What would you tweak in C to make it a nicer language?
If you could tweak C without adding huge new features (like OO or changing paradigm), what would your changes be?

examples:
Zero initialized memory.
Improved function pointer syntax.
Remove '->' and replace with '.'.
Array bounds checking.
Standard inline assembly syntax.
etc. etc.
(There are probably a lot I haven't thought about)
Here in Ohio towing fees are regulated by state law. Some towing companies were trying to get around the maximum fees they could charge by tacking on an extra "administrative fee" just because. Fortunately a judge recently ruled that the idea that these fees were legal was "ludicrous." [1]

Even still, tens of thousands of people were charged these fees and many of them will probably never see their money back. Not to mention the fact that having to pay these fees invariably screwed over some fraction of the victims and led to them losing their jobs. Just getting their money back won't fix that.

Luckily the towing fees here in Ohio seem pretty cheap compared to the Bay Area. I had my car towed once (illegally) and it came out to around $130. But towing companies here aren't required to accept credit cards or checks, so they don't. It is cash only and they don't make change, which is especially aggravating given that the total always works out to some odd amount like $134.72. That's perhaps the sleaziest part of that sleazy business.

Fortunately a bill was recently passed aiming to reduce predatory towing practices. [2] Among the changes it's going to bring is to provide a streamlined process to dispute towing charges; victims of illegal towing can collect double the towing fees. Victims of towing will now also be able to retrieve items from there car without needing to pay a fee. And the bill will now (at last) require that towing companies accept credit cards.

[1] http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2014/04/10/two...

[2] http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2014/03/20/hou...
Show HN: Hamburger-button
Is it really that hard to get a coffee presser and some ground coffee?
Second everything here. Mark, also an entrepenuer, built a website [1] for his application. After each interview, he produced another piece of content to illustrate his ideas as a follow-up. This dedication certainly played a big factor in joining our team.

[1] http://www.hithinkfulimmark.com/
Granted, original, 1970, flavor Pascal on the CDC Cyber was very limited. I'm curious, though, what is it that Turbo Pascal 5.0 and above would prevent you from doing?

It's been a while, but if I really have to, I could cast a pointer to a long, increment it by sizeof in a loop, and cast it back to a pointer in Pascal to do pointer arithmetic in a tight loop.

I can use procedural types anywhere a function pointer in C would be used.

I can make complex constants (tables) just like a pre-initialized array of structs in C.

There is an extension to return in the middle of a function/procedure rather than toggling flags to pinball-style drop to the end of the routine.

I can set compiler pragmas to allow/force me to check for error codes after every memory and I/O call (at the risk of accidentally stumbling on to cause secondary damage), rather than just failing with a line number.

I can nest functions inside of other functions, and reference the enclosing variables, just like in GNU C (oh, wait, that's a non-standard GNU extension), even if I can't return such a function as a "use it later", honest to God closure.

What are the shackles? (I'm probably in for a face palm, oh, that, moment when I get the answer, but I'm drawing a blank at the moment)
I'm curious: is the pro-Russian perspective that the civilian airliner that was shot down NOT by pro-Russian forces?
Here is the difference:

Dropbox: you spend $9.99 no matter whether you use up the 1TB or not.

Glacier: you spend $10.24 only if you use up the 1TB, of course there is extra cost on data transfer-in/out.
The machine could add each code to an internal blacklist after each use. It doesn't prevent the same code being used with another machine, but it would prevent coffee vendors from providing boxes of K-cups that are all printed with a single code.
Why does it bother you that others wish to make some task more convenient? And BTW, there are bio-degradable (compostable) cups that one can buy, if that was part of your concern. The office manager at my company says they are actually cheaper, too.
Using any computer in any fashion is technically programming that computer.
Worked so well for Sim City!
That's a lot of ideas accumulated over years of experience. Is there one in particular that you'd like to read more about?
Probably a legit macro system.
DeCent-IT Framework Whitepaper to Improve SMB IT
Unreal Tournament Running on Pandora [ExaGear Tech]
>it makes little sense to me why the investment has not been made in the USA

The investments were made, and then the fruits of those investments were systematically destroyed over about a decade, sixty years ago.

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

As for why nothing is happening now: the only thing the public can seem to agree on is putting people in prison and defense spending. So that's why.
Show HN: Velocity
Does this do what you need?
https://www.entropay.com/
I like the idea suggested in the article. I'd like an IoT device that broadcasts my breaking and acceleration pattern to nearby drivers to help dissipate the jamiton.
Any ideas on how it should look? Perhaps there are good examples in non lisp languages which have good systems, though i haven't tried them to know which is good.
If you know more than nothing, the best choice is often still random -- just with different weights applied to the various options, which I hear can be calculated with something called game theory.
I knew this worked in practice, now I understand how it works in theory.
Solvable by releasing a second app that only has the normal map interaction design without the public transit options.
I don't have much experience with it but Rust's seems to be pretty good.
This is such a beautiful, earnest response I read it aloud to my wife. Thank you for eloquently describing your experience of a kind of helplessness in the crevasse between the lucky few and the needy many. I am touched by your writing.

Thanks
Labor Board. Report it.
Those vendors could acquire new codes as easily as making a trip to the store. Heck, they could even incentivize customers to snap a photo of an authentic K-cup's code and tweet it to them, maybe for a coupon or imaginary internet points. As long as they had enough codes to make sure any given pallet didn't have any duplicates, they could be 99% certain a customer wouldn't get repeats, especially if they retired codes after a certain number of printings.
They seem to offer clues of their isolated existence and bloodline but not their extinction. Or am I missing something?
It doesn't bother me that people want to make certain things convenient what bothers me is the commoditization of every last thing in our consumer driven culture. Is your life really going to be so much better if you can make your coffee in 1 minute instead of 2 minutes? I really don't see any other convenience with ready-made coffee other than the time component. If that convenience comes at the cost of locked down devices for making coffee then it is really short-sighted of people to buy into that "convenience".
If you'd like to learn about databases (at least RMDBs anyways), there's a paid course at Harvard's Extension School. It's offered online for graduate credit at $2k a pop.

Link : http://www.extension.harvard.edu/courses/database-systems
Updating to Meteor 0.9.0: What You Need to Know
It's convenience at the expense of money and flavor. It also increases waste.
Start fixing defects. Nothing major, but it will certainly help you understand how and why things are ticking the way they are.
> The prototypical HNer is probably trying to start a business or passionately underpaid at a starup and making a fraction of what they would get paid working a normal job. Yeah, trivial.

I myself work at an early stage startup which I'm very passionate about. I still expect to get paid competitively. If you're the prototypical HNer (read: good developer) and you're getting paid under $100k, then you're messing things up.

As for starting a business, by far the most viable path is to do it in your free time until it either: (a) generates revenue you could live off or (b) has enough traction for meaningful VC.
Show HN: Ruby-bookmarks
Jailbreaking your iPhone is so 2010, now the cool kids are jailbreaking their Keurigs.
This journalist is upset his car was towed even though he was at fault... While getting your car towed is a terrible experience and impound lots are a massive PITA, I think it's out of line to invoke "inequality" and especially bringing up Michael Brown's death.
Dedication and focused practice. I'm going to leave this here, several of the same principles can transfer. Purpose, living with intention and not living life running on auto-pilot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggYF7JeH1Tw
US, EU, Russia?
I don't know why this is being downvoted. It's a very good point. For being one of the most heavily-armed societies on Earth, Americans are awfully resigned to their lot.
Quantum Gravity Expert Says "Philosophical Superficiality" Has Harmed Physics
Towing costs money. From the towing's company point of view towing a car is an investment they are hoping to recover with some margin. When they have your car as a collateral the chances of a successful recovery are much higher than when they just give you the car back. If they had been forced to do the later they'd have to increase the fees to offset the increased risk of losing their money.
This could be due to the momentum of thinking anxiously, or in a forced way in general, throughout the day. If you are able to think at a natural pace throughout the day, your thoughts will be calm, or at least, come to you at a natural pace, at bedtime / nap-time, too.
Looking at the data, I don't think the author did anything with it than see initial numbers matched her feelings, and then called on people to undertake a massive, actual study because she just know this is it.

I certainly think that there are problems with gender in society in virtually every place we could examine, and that we have a long way to go before things are what anyone could call ideal.

I just have trouble with a lot of the statistics used in these discussions, and find that they're very often 20+ years out of date (ie, from or before 1994-1995), don't control for confounding influences, make misleading comparisons, etc.

I would take posts like this much more seriously if she posted the dataset, but I'm not sure how she could do this without revealing personal details or editing the text (which likely would bias the choice of recipients further, or could introduce a new bias). I would even settle for the details of how she did the bucketing, correlations between words and numbers of entries per person, etc.

The short answer to why I think that this article isn't a real source of data is that the study in it has about the statistical power of just asking everyone who's a friend of a friend on Facebook for people with a moderate number of friends.

Everyone already knows that there's a problem with gender in tech. This article does nothing about saying where it is and doesn't really contribute anything to the topic.
> A patrolman would've been more than sufficient for this

In this case, according to the report at Ars, the 911 caller claimed to be a worker there who has shot two coworkers already and was holding the rest hostage.

That's a bit much for a patrolman to deal with.
Some potential parallels there.

Blatant lies: "Our coffee machines just can't support other companies' k-cups."

Empty promises: "Buy our new coffee machine and it'll enable us to make a lot of new and exciting flavors!" First new flavors out of the gate are durian and Mountain Dew.

I'm looking forward to the inevitable half-hearted apology, which will of course have still more empty promises. Not long after that they'll announce the v3 model, which will have an incompatible DRM to v2, forcing their customers to either upgrade or use off-brand companies' k-cups.
China has eleven times the population of Japan and five times the habitable area.

Not far in from the coast, China turns into 2500m+ mountains with Siberian winters and few flat places. Then comes Tibet, the Mongolian desert, and the Gobi desert. None of those places will support cities, and most are dominated by non-Chinese people like Uigurs, Tibetans, Mongolians, and such. The vast majority of China on the map will never be Chinese and never support a major city.
There's evidence that some of the Paleo-Eskimos/Dorset people survived until 1903:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadlermiut
Sorry, but this article is just about displaying a "progress bar", it's not really about Gamification. In other words, Gamification is so much more than progress bars...
I didn't downmod you, I thought the point about bacteria was good.

But you went rather too far in assuming what's true for bacteria is true for mites.

Plus the immune system actively works with bacteria to cultivate specific species. So you should not extrapolate to all bacteria either.
I have a student loan to pay off that's around that amount, and I was employed at a web startup right out of school making a whopping $42,000/yr after taxes. California rent is $1,000/mo. If I paid the whole loan off in a year, I'd be in the negative after interest.

For what it's worth, I did quit; partially because the pay was so low for the 55 hours of week they expected developers to put in.

I know this is only anecdotal, but shit does indeed happen.
It would be depressing if a Kuerig were the only way you could obtain coffee.
The enormous amount of waste? And I question how bio-degradable those cups are, unless you mean in the sense that everything biodegrades... eventually. Plus the expense. Prices seem to be about 50c/cup [1:3] which is just awful; you can get really good coffee for that much money with just a bit of work. Keurig coffee generally tastes pretty bad imo.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/San-Francisco-Bay-Coffee-Breakfast/dp/...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Grove-Square-Cappuccino-Vanilla-24-Cou...

[3] http://www.amazon.com/Keurig-Original-Donut-K-Cup-Regular/dp...