felixc

Not just European: Montreal, Canada has this too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bixi

Interestingly enough, vandalism seems to be much lower, though still significant: "...one in five bikes have been damaged and 15% of bike racks are defective..."

That's probably taking it a bit too far; but if you fund yourself by borrowing from someone who will cut off your right hand if you fail to pay him back, you just may work harder to make that money.

This is an old idea. From the Art of War: "At the critical moment, the leader of an army acts like one who has climbed up a height and then kicks away the ladder behind him. He carries his men deep into hostile territory before he shows his hand. ... He burns his boats and breaks his cooking-pots."

I'm going to recommend Douglas Crockford's "JavaScript: The Good Parts". It will really show you how to get the most out of the language and avoid the nasty pitfalls.

As a side note, I attended a talk by him last night on this topic, and wrote up a summary. For a preview of the book, you may be interested in checking out http://www.felixcrux.com/posts/douglas-crockford-talk-waterl...

Oh, that's a really interesting case! I hadn't seen any like that when I posted, but that's definitely something to consider. I think you could work around whenever you get multiple "perfect" fits like that by comparing a) whether they are non-blank, or, more sophisticated, b) are there continuous edges across the boundary.

This looks trivial to defeat by simply comparing the top and bottom edges of each image, and picking the combination with the best fit. The faces might fare a little better under that test, but the logos and colourful shapes would likely be successfully matched every single time.

I don't understand why instant-typing-display was implemented in the first place. Or rather, I understand that it's supposed to speed up communication, but the drawbacks to it seem so huge in comparison to the tiny benefit that it really just feels like engineering-porn; i.e. a "cool" feature that does more to showcase technical brilliance than to serve any real need.

Though the comments here so far seem positive, there has also been a lot of negative backlash, primarily out of privacy concerns.

Elliot Murphy posted a comment on LWN clarifying his message (comment here: http://lwn.net/Articles/356947/ attached to parent http://lwn.net/Articles/356911/). The most relevant part is this: "It seems I was overenthusiastic when sending that email to the couchdb dev list, and left out an important word: 'can' be replicated :)"

In other words, this is an optional service that you can choose to use -- no default install is going to send your info to Canonical.

Certainly the Geneva Convention doesn't have legal force in this case, but I like to think that one can aspire to high standards of behaviour without the threat of legal sanction. In other words, do we obey Geneva Convention rules because we're forced to, or because it's right?

The University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) also has one of these. I'm not sure when it was introduced, but I think it was at the start of this term. Thankfully, it is cheaper than off-the-shelf books (at least the two or three titles I looked at were).

I'm going to guess it's our awful wireless operators, who charge higher data rates than any other place I know of in the world (a few years ago it was 3 to 10 times as much as the second most expensive location).

As mentioned in the comments on that page, this is a different issue. You can opt out of sending the information to Google, but you have no say in the matter regarding Palm.

It's both! It's recently started to appear on its own, without the text, in some promo material, and in that context it's just referred to as the "Amazon smile."

Incredible. If you think paying over a million dollars for "mood boards" is a good investment, I have some Albertan seal-hunt licenses I'd like to sell you. This is a prime example of the advantages startups enjoy: your competitors spend a million bucks on something you can replicate in an afternoon.

Stick with it, for now. It's not so much that it's a very valuable experience, it's that without it you will be locked out of so many other things that really are worthwhile. I know that two more years feels like an eternity right now, but trust me, it's not.

Try to find things to keep you enthused while you still have to be there, like clubs/societies, especially if they're in fields that you're not too comfortable with at the moment. For example (I don't know if this will apply to you, since your post is quite articulate), I went into the debating society in high school with very little knowledge of public speaking and a lot of nerves about presenting in front of people. Two years later I was competing at the national level, and people still think I'm a good speaker when I just wing presentations without preparation. You have a lot of free time right now (maybe it doesn't feel that way, but it's a lot compared to what you'll have later!), so make use of it in a way that pushes your boundaries and expands your skills.

I hate these kinds of summaries. I am sorry to be picking on yours specifically right now, which is no worse than any of the others that are posted to every article longer than three paragraphs, but I just have to say something.

These sarcastic little snippet summaries take all the meaning and value out of the stories. What you wrote is factually correct, but completely misses the point. Much writing is not about the information you extract from it, but the process of telling the story.

People like me (and I assume you too) who have technical backgrounds often miss this, because we're so used to a reducible world where the value of an expression is simply the output it evaluates to. Biography and fiction do not work that way, and that doesn't mean they're less valuable.

You can learn much more about human nature, the thought processes of great minds, or different world-views and cultures (to name just a few examples) by observing how they reach their conclusions and how they tell their stories than you can from the mere factual outcomes of the stories themselves.

In short, these summaries miss the point and are nothing but aggravating because they make the mistake of thinking that the article is about the facts of his life. I don't know this guy, and I don't care about how he made it through high school. I do, however, care about his experiences, thought processes, value conflicts, and the world view of someone in a situation like his. Your summary has taken the meat of the story out and left us with a dried out bone, lacking even the marrow of the context.

Dave Barry has a very humorous example where he intentionally makes the same mistake:

I'm told that Dostoyevsky wrote "The Brothers Karamazov" to raise the question of whether there is a God. So why didn't he just come right out and say: "Is there a God? It sure beats the heck out of me." Other famous works could easily have been summarized in a few words:

* "Moby Dick" -- Don't mess around with large whales because they symbolize nature and will kill you.

* "A Tale of Two Cities" -- French people are crazy.

Yes, completely different.

Proof by contradiction means that you start by assuming the opposite of what you wish to prove, and then logically arriving at a contradiction. The existence of a contradiction implies that your premises were false, and since your premise was the opposite of what you wanted to prove, what you wished to prove must be true.

Proof by induction works by showing that a particular case (usually the first/smallest case) is true, and then showing that the fact that one case is true implies that the next case is also true. In other words, prove that your statement is true for n=1, and then prove that if the statement is true for m, it is also true for m+1. Since it's true for n=1, that implies it's true for n+1=2, and since it's true for n=2, that implies it's true for n+1=3, and so on, and thus you have proven that it's true for all n larger than your original case. Of course, it doesn't have to be that n implies n+1 -- it can be n-1, or any other variant, the point is that it chains up and leads to all values being proven.

I actually blogged about that specific argument a little while ago here: http://felixcrux.com/posts/mind-gap/

I am curious about some of the statements you made, because I am not aware of the data supporting them, and yet they could change my analysis completely. Specifically, why do you say that "the cost to lay cable in the US is higher by several orders of magnitude?" Is there a valid reason for why US prices are so much higher, and are they really?

In terms of areas with higher population density having different prices -- I'm not sure that it's entirely true that they can't do that, since here in Canada it's fairly standard practice to vary prices for Internet service by postal code.

Python: I am sick and tired of these mother----ing snakes on this mother----ing plane!

I just had to, OK?

As much as I sympathize with your sentiment, I'd just like to point out that the real benefit of a larger-than-necessary paycheque is being able to actually save money for when you are too old or technically outdated to continue working.

It's certainly enjoyable to switch on and off from work and live off savings, but then you eventually get to the point where you can't find a job to switch back on to, and your savings are all gone...

What you describe is the intended, valid use of the metric. What I am complaining about is people who care on a personal level about what their own karma is, and who do things just to inflate that number. Facebook/Myspace "friends" whom you don't actually know? "Vote up if *" posts? Lolcat or comic or whatever posts? I know HN is (mostly) blissfully free of these things, but they are a direct consequence of the karma system.

If people would just stop caring about meaningless numbers displayed next to your username, the world would be a better place. Specifically, the world of community-moderated sites wouldn't have to put up with crap submissions that exist solely to gather up-votes.

The idea behind it is one that has an obvious demand, so good for you if you find a way to make money off it.

However, there are a couple of things I don't like about the site design itself:

- The "skip to navigation menu and content" link at the top seems extraneous to me -- I'm not sure of how it looks on lower resolutions, but I can already see those parts of the page.

- Using images for your titles. It's not just an accessibility problem, it's lame. If you browse with a little zoom, compression artifacts are clearly visible, and your "Register FREE" becomes "Register FR."

- The gradient bars are -- to be blunt -- ugly.

Best of luck!

I usually don't like to engage in the "this doesn't belong on HN" game, but the fact is that most of us who enjoy XKCD already read it, thanks to the magic of RSS or knowing what day of the week it is. So basically, if you like XKCD, this is old news, and if you don't, this is boring news. Summation: this doesn't belong on HN.

"Learning" Catcher in the Rye? What about just reading it because it is a damn fine piece of literature? Maybe this person didn't get the book because she "learned" it, rather than appreciated it for what it is. How do you learn a piece of fiction, anyway?

Gosh, I wish I got that kind of service from Bell Canada. It took me two weeks of calling them at least once per day before they sent a tech.

I always get a laugh out of the "Income Tax For Canadians (for Dummies)" whenever I am at the bookstore. It's just a regional version of a generic book, but the "for Dummies" part is in a pretty small font.

That's a very cool system, and yes, I would use it for certain things.

However, I would take a little more time to review the text on the pages. There were a number of phrases that struck me as... infelicitous. Most notably: "Each time somebody sees the ads on you site, a partner site will be display your ad."

Those little blurbs are the first impression people get from the service, and the difference between sounding like "just some random site" and "a really cool, professional ad service" will make a difference in adoption rates. Best of luck!

I'm waiting for people to sort out the little quirks of getting Ubuntu on it, at which point I will likely cough up for one. This Linpus thing that comes on it looks awful, but the device itself is rather appealing.

Fantastic to hear about these kinds of things. I wish more companies would "get" the idea that happy employees work better, and therefore making them happy is an investment, not a cost.

Then again, if they did that, maybe I wouldn't be so damn determined to make it independently!

A decent read, but I much prefer his "Personal Observations on the reliability of the Shuttle" http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/d....

It's of a lot of interest beyond simply the direct information about the space shuttle, mainly because of its discussion of reasonable risk taking, how to measure very remote probabilities, and the potential for a large disconnect between engineering and management with regards to safety measurement. And then of course it's about the space shuttle, so that's awesome.