skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is incredibly difficult to get "time" features right, especially recurring alarm/timer features. Daylight savings time only makes it much, much harder. All 3 companies I've worked for have had relatively serious issues with time, time zone, and DST. The most serious being patient monitoring devices that did the "wrong thing" with timezones. All other devices on the network had to account for the problem because years and years of work had gone into validation on the code for this device. Instead of fixing it at the source, the company spent years of developer time working around it at the other end.

Time is hard, so I'm not surprised Apple got it wrong. Thankfully, it's a relatively small usecase.
Yes, but you also see plenty of ads about how cool it is to drink alcohol. Do you think legal heroin would be any different?
"On GAE Mail just works. At the time of writing, Azure doesn't offer SMTP out so you need a 3rd party server. "

Eh, not really, since GAE IP addresses were abused by spammers, mails go out but how many of them hit the inbox?
And families being destroyed by alcohol is almost a stereotype.
Not just that, but the teenage rebellion factor goes way down with legalization.

I know quite a few people that stopped drinking so hard once they turned 21...
What's your email :) ?
AGI? Hmm, let's try Google:

AGI - Association for Geographic Information
AGI - Alliance Graphique Internationale
AGI - a leading global provider of packaging and creative services.
AGI - Aeronautical & General Instruments Limited
AGI - Adjusted Gross Income
AGI - Analytical Graphics, Inc.
AGI - an established international packaging company

Probably none of the above.

Something General Intelligence? Would an AGI be able to work it out?
I hate seeing EC2 compared to Azure or GAE - it really doesn't make sense. Do you want to manage your own instances or do you want to just push up an application? Make that decision and then decide between EC2/Rackspace or GAE/Azure

Also, Heroku is missing here - I would use that before Azure or GAE.
I love that you conducted A/B testing with different user profiles.
That makes you more attractive to geeks :-)
And even more quickly, since it takes a LOT more money, reduce their ability to bribe cops and judges.
Stop whining about not able to work remotely. If you can work remotely why don't you just go to India and work from there?
The student did not even complete the coursework. That alone should have prevented the PhD.
How I’ve Discovered Twitter Can Be a Resource, Not a Waste of Time
I love that there's a typo in the first sentence.
The fact that some drugs are legal certainly doesn't mean they're not as strong or powerful than ones that are illegal. Salvia is, apparently, one of the strongest hallucinogens there is. The difference between it and, say, LSD, is that the Salvia "trip" only lasts ten to twenty minutes. I have personally tried Salvia some years back and have had some seriously bizzare experiences. I'd rather not post them online, but if you're interested, send me an email.
I disagree. Outsourcing overshadows everything else when it comes to India. What everybody doesn't know is this. Just walk into any departmental shop and you will find more American brands than Indian (the only possible exception to this is fresh food and other food raw materials.) Only in the last few years have Indian consumer brands became well-known and competing against foreign brands. Take any category and the top 1-2 brands are probably American. India supplies a huge amount of consumers for American brands (for that matter any good quality products).
Android surges as most popular OS while iPhone most popular Phone
Dot syntax isn't so evil. Even the example of setting a property on a view's frame seems slightly contrived in that the compiler will give an error. It doesn't silently fail or do undefined things. The primary confusion there is, when you're new, wondering what in the world the strange error message means - but that's something you eventually get over as you learn more about the language and how it works.

Also, dot syntax is how you reference properties when you're doing KVC and KVO, so it wasn't without precedent.
I use prgmr & slicehost and just signed up for aws.

I intend to use s3 to lighten up to load on my bandwidth limits by hosting the largest static files (media files in my case) there, but plan on remaining with the VPSs for all the rest.
Do You Have the Right Traits to be a Great Boss?
No Plan Survives First Contact With A Customer – The 5.2 billion dollar mistake
Some unusual results:

- 3rd best scripting language: Bash (who uses Bash for anything serious?)

- Best Linux-Friendly Web Hosting Company: GoDaddy.com (isn't GoDaddy's core business domain names?)

- 3rd best VCS: cvs (in front of Mercurial and Bazaar?)
Judging by already legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco, the general trend in use has been downward for decades; for alcohol for over a century, except for Prohibition which caused an upward jiggle in the general trend. Before the first World War drunkeness was a major problem, and far more widespread than it is now.
Travel seems an obvious answer. For $8000, you could probably go just about anywhere on Earth for at least a week.
hal daume, who also wrote "yet another haskell tutorial", is an NLP researcher, and uses O'Caml, Haskell and C successfully:
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~hal/software.html

andrew mccallum, one of the originators of conditional random fields and also an NLPer, has recently been using scala:
http://code.google.com/p/factorie/
Anyone who has ever taken shrooms or LSD?
Travel far from home. I recommend nols.edu, for instance:

http://www.nols.edu/courses/locations/scandinavia/scandinavi...

Add the plane ticket for under $8000. That's a month he'll never forget.
Is an existential crisis behind a spate of nuclear blunders?
>The University of Manitoba's disability services office last year registered 136 students who have medical certification that they suffer exam anxiety and must be accommodated with some other form of evaluation.

Doesn't everyone get some sort of "exam anxiety". Isn't ability in exam like situations part of what is being tested?

Does anyone have info about what the alternate testing methods are. They should be elective in any case to provide equal opportunity. For example if the alternative is a extended project and viva then any student should be allowed to take the alternative. Also the degree transcript should make it clear how the degree was achieved so that an employer doesn't wrongly assume a skill (working under [exam] pressure) that the applicant doesn't have.
I wonder if they'll enforce the ugly requirement to 'Stop the the beautiful people from wrecking it'. I can just see their next headline about someone being kicked off the site for being too hot.
People who use shrooms and LSD.
The most interesting thing in this article was the Math professor himself.

He received his PhD at age 20.
He forced Air Canada to change it's policy that claimed the airline wasn't responsible for lost luggage.
He's standing up for the integrity of his profession.
And he's only 27.

I hope he continues to contribute to society outside of the domain of theoretical maths.
Worth noting and remembering: "No business plan survives first contact with a customer."
You made the normal looking guy sound like a douche?

That was after I concluded his test with a normal-sounding profile.
Come on, making heroin "as legal as" tobacco is a straw man. Even the Netherlands, well-known for their liberal drug policy, have rather severe restrictions even on marijuana use.
Apple is now suing the company that invented the cell phone. Granted, those original patents would be long expired by now, but I'm sure that Motorola still has lots of patents a lot more fundamental than the ones Apple has, so this is probably just a form of negotiation via nuclear weapon.

But it really does bother me. It just feels so offensive that a company that makes a cell phone thinks it's reasonable to sue the company that invented the cell phone. How can anybody argue that this is fair or reasonable? Apple's not only standing on the shoulders of giants like Motorola, but now they're kicking these giants in the face.
I'm not hiring, but people have founds posts about my site helpful in previous threads.

I run One Day, One Job: http://www.onedayonejob.com/

The focus is on entry level jobs, but the content consists of company profiles, so it's useful to pretty much anyone looking for a job at at any level.

Here are all of the companies that we've featured with positions in Web Development: http://www.onedayonejob.com/entry-level-jobs/web-development...

And in Software Development (lots of overlap): http://www.onedayonejob.com/entry-level-jobs/software-develo...

We feature tons of non-technical stuff too. There are over 1,000 company profiles—all editorial.
This doesn't work in Firefox (3.6.9, OS X 10.6).
Potheads warning about the dangers of tobacco smoking always struck me as a bit disingenuous. At least tobacco doesn't turn you into asocial slug.

(also, pot burning still produces tar)
Biggest Browser Share Gain In October Goes To Chrome
I find that the goals I set for the furthest time in the future are the goals I'm most determined to complete. So for me, the further you set a goal, the more likely it will come true.
Well, nothing says "memorable" like a full-torso tattoo. $8K should just about cover it.

I'd recommend a couple of months of living someplace unique, I've always been partial to the Caribbean. You could live for almost a year on $8000, and get to see places and meet people that would likely have a lasting impact.

Or, lease/rent an RV and drive across the country to experience different regions.
And you may well be a very competent programmer, and deserve that recognition.

But the recognition of a PhD is something altogether different. It's not something that any person has a right to. And it seems to me that the only way to get one ought to be to prove that one has earned it, and deserves it. To have a shortcut that says "he could have earned it but for this disability" changes the degree from one of recognizing achievement to a (subjective) judgment of potential.
At my university, the CS department requires students to pass both the homework/project portions of the class and the exam portion. If you get a 95 on the final and don't do any of the projects, you fail. It's not exactly a 50/50 grading scale, but the idea is similar.

It's worth noting that the CS department is the only department at this university that applies this grading requirement- I'm a little surprised the other engineering programs haven't picked it up.
Given that navigation isn't working for me on Firefox 3.6, can we retitle this to "CSS3 - An Impractical Introduction"?
It's really hard to do lean satellite development. There's a set of constraints that prevent this type of problem from being developed and deployed iteratively.

Except for identifying the fact that the opportunity has been missed and closing shop earlier, I can't really think of what I would have done differently.

What do you suggest? How would you lean the process?
Community Rights and Wrongs
Awesome bud, that helped a lot more than you can imagine !!
Take care of the pennies, Yahoo…
or live with it.

Which is exactly what he's doing. He could have let the original infringement slip quietly by, but instead he's using it to make a political point. Everybody loses short term, but he's hoping for long term gains.
That's some pretty interesting research, although that's looking at per user rather than per-use - I'm guessing that there's a difference if you adjusted for number of hits (I'm assuming the average smoker smokes a lot more cigarettes than the average ecstasy user pops pills).
The divorce rate is now at 40% and declining according to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce#United_States
I'm from the UK with an iPhone 4 and my alarm went off fine this morning.

I haven't upgraded to 4.1 yet though, perhaps this is where the bug manifests itself
Wow. I covered the telephony industry for a while, and had no idea that Iridium's ambitions had once been this great. When I spoke with them a year or two ago, they were selling themselves as a last-ditch backup, trying to penetrate the enterprise market by saying, "Hey, we're expensive but you don't have to use us until you need us!"

Satellite rates are incredibly high relatively speaking, and it's just amazing to see how this company, which comes off as an 80s relic, actually came to be.
I actually sent my resume in to work on this when I was a young coder.

It's interesting to see them as part of the present-day satphone network: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_phone#Satellite_phone...
Actually, crime went up a lot during the Prohibition period. Why would one illegal good differ so much from another?

EDIT: removed fragment: "This is extremely well known". I disagree with the parent, but let's keep the debate as civil as possible. My apologies.
Actually, a social network without 1) growth and 2) preferential attachment is not a scale-free social network.
Travel does seem obvious. I'm hoping for more specific answers, though.

He lives in Ontario, Canada. He's already been to Great Britain and France.
Wrong, Ph.D. candidates get a lot of pressure to be associated with an idea, or a set of related projects, and they can get a lot of flak if they deviate a little because when you apply for an academic or industrial job, "you want to be known for an idea, not for your degree" (disclaimer: i'm a ph.d. candidate)
Study: Alcohol 'most harmful drug,' followed by crack and heroin - CNN.com
Introducing Swinger: Capybara driver swapping on RSpec
Graduate unemployment in the UK highest level for 17 years
Smarthome (http://bit.ly/aetInd) has good starter kits for home automation.
I'll do my best to clarify what GNUGuitarINUX is in a few words,
Regarding the name, what is wrong with it, is it hard to pronounce?
I just wanted to honor the GNU project and the linux project.
I would be more than happy if I could come up with a name that has GNU, Linux, Debian and guitar in it :)
I know they're different, but I can see that being ambiguous since I didn't use three nouns and a serial comma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_comma#Ambiguity). I meant that to read like, "AFAIK, X, Y, and Z don't magically appear...".

That's what I get for posting just before bed, I guess - too much ambiguous phrasing.
Dr Telle Whitney, CEO Anita Borg,on Success & Technical Women PtII
Build your own Startup Death Clock
There must be something else at stake here. This kind of thing happens all the time and now all of a sudden some professor decides to stand up. This is definitely not the full story.
A lot of PhD recipients are judged by their project, in that they continue to do research in and explore the area of their research. Building something and releasing it as an open source project, for example, says something about an individual. It doesn't necessarily say everything you need to know. The same goes for someone with a PhD or any academic degree. Both are useful in judging the worthwhileness of an individual.
The Human Network Protocol
Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), which Nutt used, is a tool for decision making, not something "sophisticated" to generate scientific evidence! It cannot estimate a drug's harm. Alcohol is wide-spread and deserves a discussion for that reason alone, but Nutt is not presenting "evidence" or anything new. MCDA is heavily prone to selection bias in picking criteria and weights. It is an extremely subjective process and is used when two or more decisions closely compete to give some pseudo-quantitative separation. When you structure the problem in which one alternative scores very high, the analysis didn't add a single ounce of value.

Here is the original paper:

http://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/opus1714/Estimating_drug_h...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-criteria_decision_analysi...
Report from the BBC, and much dicussion here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1855713
It's the logical extension of classroom inclusion (and mainstreaming) policies for students with learning disabilities.

Expect to see more of it as it gained traction among in US colleges of education about 20 years ago - particularly in primary education departments.

On the bright side, at least it's not an MD.

Edit: I believe that in general mainstreaming and inclusion are a good public policy concept with a really thorny ethical issue attached. The thorny issue is, at what point you tell the student, "We were only kidding. You're not really smart enough to continue on the academic path with your classmates."

In the US its rise coincided with that of facilitated communication in the classroom for autistic individuals.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitated_communication

Both ideas gained a lot of traction in primary education departments in the early 90's [US]. Primary educators loved Mainstreaming because they were able to pretend the thorny issue didn't exist and let it be dealt with at the secondary level.

As with any bureaucracy, secondary educators have an incentive to continue to pass the buck and little to gain by kicking the mayor's autistic nephew out of AP calculus (so to speak).
Becoming first world seems inevitable, but westernized? Not necessarily.
Truth is not democratic. Highly-politicized issues like this should not be decided by polling.

And you'll need a better argument than "well, that's just their opinion" to sway me.
Perhaps the name of the University

Not likely. To be fair, if I was to name and shame I may as well pack my bags and leave the country.

All I'll say is that these are red-brick Uni's in the UK.

A close friend highlighted the issue through a discovery he made whilst developing plagarism detection software for a private organisation that worked closely with a certain collective of Universities, I recognised one of the names of the people he mentioned and I know for a fact, due to my own personal connection with the individual that she never attended or would even come close to qualifying for the PhD she claims to have been awarded.

Another Swedish gentleman who I became very good friends with during my travels in NZ eventually disclosed how he achieved his PhD through certain 'investments' and has since used said qualification to leverage his residency application to stay in NZ permanently.
Agra (site of the Taj Mahal)? Giza (site of the pyramids)?

I think it would depend greatly on his particular interests. I don't think anyone can tell you, or him, what would be most memorable to him. What has he always wanted to do? Where did he dream about as a child?
It's a tough question, but I think the key is "customer development." Lock in users and use cases with contracts before launching the satellites, and map out what could be emerging threats. With the mobility space, it was already rapidly, rapidly changing, and I think their customers were more this imaginary, high-flying James Bond-style business executive.

How many people really need a phone that covers them in "middle of the Arctic
Ocean to the jungles of Africa to the remote mountain peaks of the Himalayas"? The answer is: "Not a sustainable market."
Safer is a broad term.

In terms of lethal dose they would be safer. By the author's scale they are safer.

Premature death would be a difficult one to study - as I don't know if there are as many regular users of shrooms/lsd as there are with steroids/tobacco.
The way universities are pumping out PhDs it's not surprising that a whole bunch of requirement are simply being swept under the rug. Universities figured out a long time ago that graduate students are basically slave labor and they accept way too many students that fumble their way through the program without really accomplishing anything. So get off your high horse and put the blame where it should be placed.
I generally hear about Iridium as a second-generation success. The fact that the company that currently owns it is looking at putting up a new network (at a cost of perhaps $3 billion) shows that the idea wasn't a foolish one.

But like some great ideas it takes a trailblazer to burn themselves up in the trailblazing process.

Another example in this context is the Panama canal. Or various railways companies. Or possibly the Segway (still waiting for the second generation owner on that one).
Yes. I think nobody here argues that heroin should be legalized. But for lighter drugs legalization should clearly include ban on their advertisement (or, in fact, provision that tax revenue from their sale be spent on anti-advertisement)
So you worked at a growing company for 6 years and never asked for or was given greater responsibility or significant pay raises? It sounds to me like the core of the problem here is you don't know how to stand up for yourself.

Intern or not, you blew a great opportunity.
Nokia Taking Less-Flashy Road to Growth
I've seen a lot of postings like this but I've also seen several lately where Python is the primary requirement. For example, I've seen several openings recently for people in the financial industry with no hard requirements beyond Python experience.
I seem to recall this pivoting was one of the topics at the very first Startup School (in 2005, IIRC). It related to flikr, which started as some kind of social-type site for young girls (IIRC), then evolved to a gaming site, and then to "flikr". Originally, what we know as flikr was just a simple way for people playing the game to share photos online, then the photo sharing part got way more traction than the game part.

The basic lesson at the time was a version of "release early, release often", react to user experiences, and if you have money in the bank, keep throwing ideas against the wall until something sticks.

So, I don't think there is a whole lot to "learn" from similar sites, other than pay attention to your users and try new things. One thing to keep in mind is that a user base of any appreciable size can be very valuable, so if you do pivot, try to make it fluid enough that you can somehow carry existing users along with you.

If your sites are stagnant to the tune of a couple dozen users and monthly traffic that barely registers, IMO you are not pivoting, you are starting over.
Ask HN: Should we seek funding?
I co-founded a consulting company that is at a turning point. We're fairly successful and have just under $1mm in revenue a year, of which we could consider $200k profit.

We've been developing a product for the past 12-18 months that is finally ready to launch. It is a SaaS product that will cost $50-75 per month. The market we are in is very competitive, but also very fragmented. I can honestly say that our product is great and it has been very well received while in beta.

This is a first company for the founders, so there there are no cash reserves beyond what the consulting company generates. We suspect we could raise $250-500k from small investors should we really try. We're bootstrappers by nature and would rather have our first business be a strong base hit than aim for the fences.

Should we accelerate the product with financing? Wait and do that later? Or continue on the 37Signals path?

To us, this is as much a life choice as it is a business one.