skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The huge advantage of the metric system is not in its different choice of 1 unit of length, 1 unit of mass, etc. but in the relationships between all units. This is very useful to everyone, even to non-scientists. Illustration: https://i.imgur.com/iDOzAa5.jpg

Actually, unit conversion being complicated, makes a lot of problems complicated to calculate and so makes science appear difficult which only makes people not want to do science.

Using the American customary system of measurements is like using Roman numerals - everything is possible, but harder, so science and engineering progress slower.
I would love if I could set up one of these, a minimalist unix os, and a nice CRT.
Data-Driven Products (2014) [video]
> I couldn't even find how to integrate Kotlin files into a Java project without using IntelliJ.

I would suggest (and I'm not trying to bag on you with this) that this concern is more your unfamiliarity with the JVM than a failure of Kotlin, which is generally targeting Java and Scala developers. Kotlin operates pretty idiomatically in the Java universe and, as an experienced JVM developer who's comfortable with all of Maven, Gradle, and SBT, I dropped Kotlin into a Maven project, side-by-side with Java, with a cursory glance at the documentation--"oh, it's another pre-compile-step thing". (Which I then consume via IntelliJ, because IntelliJ imports Maven projects nicely, but Maven allows others to use their IDE of choice.)

The pre-compile-step thing sucks, I'll be the first to say that, and it's a problem with multi-language, multi-compiler projects that none of the major build systems on the JVM really handle admirably. I prefer to use multi-module Maven projects and separate out Java and Kotlin--or Scala, for that matter--code into separate ones. But that's a different beast entirely from the initial bootstrap when learning.
Tying the token to an IP address will largely ameliorate that issue. As always, there is a tradeoff of security and convenience. I've worked at facilities with no internet access, where hard drives were removed and put in safes at the end of the day, and that had "leper lights" which flashed when unsecure people like me were present. Very secure but hardly convenient. You always need to ask yourself what it is that you are securing.
> That principal is completely unscientific.

What do you mean by this? The principle as I understand it is about what is a good idea to do, not a statement of what will or will not happen in a given situation.

As such, I wouldn't expect it, or things that handle the same questions, to be scientific.

What would it mean for something that plays a similar role to be scientific? (or alternatively, to be not unscientific, if those aren't the same thing.)
It is a pretty comprehensive list of desirable (non-gaming) keyboards, but I'm not sure that many of them fit the description of "ergonomic" at all.

This keyboard is basically the ultimate version of what your list tries to compile:
* Ergonomic (split)
* Hackable (macros and programmable keys)
* Mechanical

https://ultimatehackingkeyboard.com/

It's not out yet, but you can pre-order one.
We all reap the benefits of cheap oil. We might not be individually responsible, but we all profit.
As someone that has used both systems, I have to say metric is much easier to use and more precise.

Typical daily usage includes cooking, ex "if I need 60g of sugar for 2l of water, how much sugar for half a liter?" Is really easy (60/4=15g), versus "if I need 2oz for 1 quart of water, how much sugar for 8floz?" Is annoying and frankly rather ridiculous: first you have to know that 1qrt=32floz (metric is of course always multiples of 10), then you get a result ½ ounce, that you can't convert to anything else and you're now dealing with fractions...
Was actually coming here to post that. :-)
Direction is also important, not just per capita abv
Any language can compile to the low level C dialect.
Yes... and so when it's going to be in the "teens" in centigrade, they tell you how many damn degrees they think it's going to be, rather than dicking you about by giving you a needlessly large range.

I bet the weather forecasters in America never tell you the temperature is going to be "positive, and in 2 digits".

Whatever next? Difficulty knowing how far away things are because miles are so large compared to km?
Jenny Diski’s ‘In Gratitude’
The EU takes pride in multilingualism. Bilingualism is said to be a core part of Canadian identity. Children are encouraged to learn multiple languages. Yet for some reason diversity in measurement systems is bad?

The US uses two measurement systems. As a practical matter, those who need to use metric do so. Many sporting events are metric. Much commerce is metric. Food labels are metric.

I have never seen why this is a problem. Most other folks don't either, which is why we haven't chosen to do stupid stuff like run around and change road signs or insist that people use particular measurements.

Oh, and the story about how the spacecraft crashed does not make a convincing case. Any aerospace contractor worth its salt would check all its units of measure. Being entirely metric does nothing to alleviate this burden. Reporting a measure in centimeters rather than meters will get you the same problem. Units of measure must be labeled, period.
Wow. Please conserve and write down what you have. Pivotal piece of computing history.
>cancel them out

Do you mean destructive interference? because the photons don't go anywhere, they don't disappear, the energy of the wave function and hence the photons remains the same.

Other than a photon being absorbed there is no way to "cancel out" a photon, you also don't really have a way to cancel out light with destructive interference because some where else there will be a constructive interference, if we could just "cancel out" light we would have cloaking devices by now ;)
> I just don't see the value of metric for everyday purposes.

But this is only because you have learned it first.

Here we have learned just metric units and we don't see the value of imperial for everyday purposes
How Search Works
The problem of codifying reality with words and rules is an old one, as old as the law, and no one has come up with a good solution yet. The edge cases seem to be infinite.
Ah, Kerberos :-)
I'm thinking of client machines. People balk at installing Java these days. Is there a way to get the JVM without Java?

Is Kotlin not capable of being a client application?
Am I correct in thinking that a smart contract has to be open source? Because there might be good reasons to keep the arbitration oracle's source code secret.
> Reporting a measure in centimeters rather than meters will get you the same problem. Units of measure must be labeled, period.

cm to meter is not the same that feet to meter
Not much of the internet as we know it would exist if it weren't for the motivation of money. And not all of the internet is bad.
Unless you're doing JavaFX or something like that.
privilege and good fortune.
At the ripe age of 105, IBM seeks to reinvent itself – again
Qwory the low-cost lead generation tool for small and medium businesses
I don't understand why we're reading this. Was it leaked? Pretty much every big tech firm does this twice a year, but nobody releases the reports.
Drug tests present major hurdle for employers
The US system isn't bad because it's not base 10, it's bad because it's horribly inconsistent. Quick - how many inches in 1.25 miles?
> If you're rich then you should make yourself a safety net and chase a high risk-reward strategy with the rest of your money.

If you're rich you don't need to chase rewards, certainly not risky ones; you've already won and can relax and do whatever you want without worrying about whether it rewards or not. That is the point of being rich, getting to do what you want rather than what other people want.
A Real War Story, in Drawings
This is a beautifully written article.
When it comes to grocery shopping the US system is bad.
Take for example ground beef: There's a few brands, both with the same labels: grass fed, no hormones .etc etc.

What's the most important then? The price tag. But each unit of ground beef isn't always the same size: 1.08 lbs, or 1.23 lbs ,etc.

Fortunately vendors are required to put a price PER unit of weight.
In metric system countries it would be : Brand A is 7€/kg, Brand B is 5€/kg , (and for the sake of the argument, Brand C is 0.65c per gram, but usually it's always per kg.)
Which one is the cheapest? Easy answer. Brand B < Brand C < Brand A

In the US? One is $5/lbs , the other is 35c per Oz. Which one is the cheapest? In this base 10 world, It's a bit tricky to make base 16 conversion by head

Same with liquids: fl oz, gal, etc.
with the Metric system? €/cl , €/l , they could even write €/ml, multiplying/dividing by 10, 100, or 1000 doesn't' requires a calculator.
Even if you only have the price per unit, for the same brand: 1 bottle of 2L is $3, 6 bottle of 500ml is $3, here buying the 6 pack is better. (Usually the bigger the bottle, the cheaper per unit of volume, but not always, especially in the US)

In the US? 1 gallon is $3, but a 6 pack of 16 fl oz is $3, which one is the cheapest?
6*16 = 96. but 1 gallon is 128 floz, so the 6 pack is 75% of a gallon, so the gallon is cheaper here
From my memory and understanding, this reads similar in a lot of ways to the WorldCom anti-wiretapping stance and the resulting hyper-aggressive federal prosecution
Do you actually need to convert units a lot in your daily life? Or compare things to the freezing/boiling point of water?

For me, the major advantage of the imperial units is that they're all approximately human-scale. My foot is about a foot, my stride is about a yard, and it's surprising if I encounter weather outside 0-100F. A pint is a big drink; a cup is small one.

I'm a scientist, and all this goes out the window in the lab, of course. Even there though, a lot of the useful conversions do need some arbitrary constant (e.g. density, molarity) and the SI prefixes are not incredibly useful. I've literally never heard anyone measure something in deci/decameters. In practice, we tend to pick a unit that's approximately the right size and and stick with it--tiny things might be between 0.05µm and 2,500 µm, for example.
Last I time I tried it... not really. Their KDE packaging was about .2 versions behind mainstream[1]. Admittedly this was about 2-3(?) years ago.

It was a terrible experience.

[1] IIRC, for various technical reasons due to having to maintain upgradability between stable versions of Debian. If you don't totally embrace RR as a distro, you are consigned to these bizarre situations where you try to be RR, but can't really because you have a secondary distro which requires release-to-release "upgradability".
Lag spikes -- yes, definitely, and they're annoying. But are you sure the 'input lag' you're referring to isn't the small (by design) delay between moving the mouse and the snake moving?
That depends entirely on your use case. If your use is easy division that may include denominators of multiples of 3, or 4, then the imperial measurements might be more useful. If your use case is being able to easily scale numbers and keep a handle in your mind of how they relate, then metric is more useful.

How many miles is 154,631 feet? How many kilometers is 724,642 meters?

How many inches in one sixth of a foot? How many centimeters in one sixth of a meter? (in case you don't think there's much gain in the imperial unit, try using 16 and 2/3 centimeters in your calculations,and it quickly becomes more cumbersome)
It would be an 8-bit processor with no virtual memory. Why not a Raspberry Pi or something more powerful?
From the article:

"So I right away asked if it was different in Colorado, say, or Washington, D.C. where [marijuana] has been legalized. And was told no, it’s really no different. And the thing is, if you’re an employer, say, in Colorado, where recreational use is legal, you still – it does not affect your company policies. You can still say you have to take a drug test to be hired. And you might be randomly tested while you’re here."
"Our systems and our customers’ information were never at risk.", their pr team is clueless. Security is not binary.
Another non-american here. That doesn't help much.

How often do you try to describe something a sixth of the length of your foot? I'm trying to think of an example where it matters either way, but the only thing I can come up with is that there is only one measurement in metric distance: the meter. A centimeter is a hundredth of that, a milli- is a thousandth. In the American system I have to know the relation between inches, feet, miles and probably more (isn't yard also part of it? I don't even know).
And yet there are 3 feet to a yard, 16 ounces to a pound, 32 fluid ounces to a quart, and so on. Yes it would be lovely if our number system were base 12 but it isn't that's not going to change any time soon. Realistically we need to work with the number system we've got, and at the very least be consistent.e
Johnston 100: A New Typeface for the Underground
While I agree that it probably matters most whatever you were brought up with, Fahrenheit is a smaller unit of measure, and, as a result, more precise. Metric is more logical in every other case I can think of, but most people in the US can think in 'standard' measurements. It's really cultural, for the most part.
> How often do you try to describe something a sixth of the length of your foot?

It happens all the time. There's a very popular piece of wood known as a 'two by four' which is 2 inches by 4 inches.
How is the battery usage?
Then I'll copy a very impactful line that's only in that story:

> FedEx says it repeatedly asked the government to supply a list of shippers it considered illicit so that it could cut off service, but that the government refused; the Department of Justice contends that circumstantial evidence should have been enough to alert the package shipment company.
The fact that they had a specific team test their security is already evidence they aren't clueless.

Clueless would be refusing to have teams test your security.
Again this is a 'I'm personally used to this, so it must make sense to everyone' category of claim.

Here in AU we use metric widely. There are some older generation types that drop to imperial measurements for some things, particularly when talking about human height.

A foot is about 30cm (or 300mm) - so if you're talking about working in 1/12, 1/6, 1/3, 1/4, or 1/2 of something around that size, it's not something that blocks us for very long: the calculating of fractions of 30 (or 300) units.

Typically I work with metres (and subsets of) - 1000mm - which your 1/4 and 1/2 are, obviously, easy to apply and still get this enviable 'round number' that you speak of. 1/3 of a metre is 333mm (or close enough to) and it's rare that my pencil is sharp enough (or my care high enough) to denote a third of a millimetre. Similarly 1/6th (I don't recall ever needing to divide a length of anything into 1/6ths - perhaps I'm atypical).

I think the most compelling evidence against any claim that 'it's easier to work in base 12' (or similar) is that our machines, our houses, our infrastructure ... don't all fail to fit together, or fall apart, because their components were measured in metric.

When I say 'our' I mean the 95% of the world's population that isn't the USA.
What usual misunderstanding of |this| are you referring to?
The narrative for the last few years, at least in the mainstream media, is that Google Facebook Twitter Microsoft et al. are too big for anyone else to replace them. It's the old "inevitability" argument - if your new thing gets too big, they'll just buy you up.

Let's hope people continue to try to create services that a big percentage of people use and then resist to sell to the big data companies.
Ah, now you want to talk about discovery! It so happens that I'm building a search engine for the Wayback Machine. But it's true that discovery for it is never going to be that great until the search engines that people commonly use index the Wayback, which is probably never.
See, especially, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_1 - the USSR being famous for its use of the US Customary system.
>Energy carried in massless form, including in a wire, has the same force of (power / c).

What?
> It's also much easier to package stuff than in Arch. So easy a user that is savvy enough to use either distribution can commit missing packages with minimal work. But they have plenty of stuff.

It's not that they don't have plenty of stuff -- it's that when I last tried they didn't have the stuff that I want.

(Incidentally, I think the Nix approach kind of retards adoption of "new things" because it lets old stuff "just keep working" despite old dependencies. I'm sure what the security implications are, but I think they might be quite severe. However, this is just an aside.)
You should really specify landing a man on the moon. Many countries, including Russia and Japan have been to the moon with probes and rovers.
Is your claim that an inability to align with world standards was a necessary requirement to access the moon?
Perfect Product Screen For Ecommerce App
> the western legal system dates back far longer than just a few hundred years (over a millennium).

But not western democracy. Notable mentions are Greece and Rome, but those cultures also became history.
In terms of first order importance, efficiency in language is even more important than efficiency in measurement systems, it's fascinating how that's ignored (as you noted, it's artificially excused away using culture or nationalism). The EU absorbs a massive cost by maintaining dozens of unnecessary languages. In fact it's so bad that a full 1/2 of all the people in the EU are unable to communicate with each other properly: they speak no common language. It's one of the more obvious weaknesses in their economic competitiveness.
Because they make money on revocation and validation (OV/EV in particular)
I don't think this is true. Timing attacks are only really useful if you can change a single piece of data and analyze the time difference until you find the right value, over and over again. Like comparing a password.

The unknown data in the signature creating function is a key. The output is a hash. If you were trying to capture the key you would need to guess what the key was to get the correct hash. Each byte you change results in a cascade of changes in the output. You can't get information about the key from a timing attack on a hash function. I think.
Is there one, solid as in time tested example of a smart contract working? Sorry in advance for my total naivete
> your unfamiliarity with the JVM

Correct!

> a problem with multi-language, multi-compiler projects that none of the major build systems on the JVM really handle admirably

A bummer to hear – though I'm glad it's not just me. I tried using Kotlin with the Play Framework and did not have a great time. The hot-reloading features of Play didn't work with Kotlin at all, even with my attempts to `touch` a Java file whenever my Kotlin file changed (presumably they're recompiling more intelligently than I was).

Perhaps having SomeController.java and SomeController.kt in parallel, where the former imports the latter, and receives a `touch` or similar whenever the Kotlin file changes, might work? Or would you recon such a project to be a fool's errand?
79,200. Why would you need to know that?

Edit: This made me think about the scale of things you're measuring. Roads are generally best measured in miles, not yards, feet, or inches. Some things are better measured in yards (like football fields or concrete (cubic yards)). Some things are best measured in feet, and some things in inches.

The avoirdupois system is human sized. The metric system is based on some inaccurate 18th century French calculation of the circumference of the earth, IIRC. Why would you care what your height is in relationship to the circumference of the earth? That never made sense to me.

Rarely does it matter if you can convert from one unit to the other. The only exception I can think of is when doubling or halving a recipe - going from teaspoons to tablespoons or liquid ounces can be a pain.
Well, damn, I hadn't checked in a year or two (or three), but last time I checked Exherbo was actively user-unfriendly... so I didn't bother checking again. I'm not being hyperbolic here, btw, it explicitly had a statement to the effect of: "If you're not a developer, don't even try to install Exherbo".[1]

I am a developer, but why would I want to support such a negative position?

[1] The general messaging seems to have improved. Still source-based, which I now don't tend to like. I want to save some electricity for the benefit of the world.
Only five individual nations out of 196 have done so. I wouldn't call that many.
And that's with no vacations and no slow days.
I think part of the deal with (and joy of) joining the world of metric is that you stop buying and selling 2x4's.
I've only scanned the paper quickly (and it does look a bit unusual for a physics paper) but I think there is an obvious answer to that: it's not perfect destructive interference. You can imagine two photons with opposite polarization starting out together and propagating in almost exactly the same direction. As they go along their merry way, they diverge. Eventually, far away, you have two well-separated, ordinary photons. But close to the source, you have near-perfect cancellation, and so negligible interaction with the cavity walls, as the authors would have it.
Sam Altman Kicked Out of Ritz Carlton for Violating Dress Code
> But contracts can never define the totality of the law that applies to a given situation, even if the parties swear up and down that that is their intent.

I think this is true, and this is probably all you had to say.

> Can code both embody and replace law for the exact function for which it is set up?

Sure, yeah. 99.9999% of people in rich code-enforced transactional systems like EVE Online and the NASDAQ order book are content with how code has replaced and embodied the "law" (or more broadly, "how things work"), despite the fact that people win and lose at this video game and in the real stock market all the time. It's clearly not just about people being mad and losing a ton of their money, because that happens in the stock market all the time but losers rarely sue NASDAQ.

It's just when people do sue NASDAQ, hilariously, it's when there's bugs in the order book / exchange code, or shutdowns of the market due to technical errors. Do you see how that is different? What matters isn't whether or not a "contract is a contract," but whether or not there are bugs.

A bug is a concrete thing. It's not something you can abstract away into your bigger point about "human relations" and a "system of laws."

You can write a test for nearly all kinds of bugs and show very confidently that whatever the issue was, it won't happen again. There's no such thing as unit tests for laws, unless you get so abstract as to lose everything essential about unit tests. You can reproduce bugs in code infinitely, but you don't get to re-adjudicate disagreements in contracts infinitely. There's so much that's different between disagreements over legal interpretations and a software bug that you're missing why people view the fork as relatively uncontroversial.

There was a bug in the code which led to an exploit. It isn't a refutation of law being embodied in code. It's just a refutation that this particular exciting contract system wasn't treated like the multi-hundred-million dollar software product it turned out to be. The story is smaller than you make it to be.
I loved the web in the early mid-2000s. Web 2.0 so many startups, so many ideas, so many failures. It was great. Lots more hope than what is out there right now.