skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No! Even better! "Metric time" - a minute has 100 seconds, an hour 100 minutes, a day is 10 hours (100,000 seconds). Makes perfect sense on a space station so we'll have to face it sooner or later.
...you could tell [that joke] no matter what the standards
of people at medical school, and no matter what the
difficulty of passing the examinations

My Mum (dying of refractory metastatic triple-negative breast cancer in her lungs) is being cared for by an oncologist who's a six. It isn't pretty.
If there really was a tool (whether that be hardware or software or a combination) that for a couple of thousand dollars would genuinely make you 10x more productive, you'd be an absolute fool not to run out now and buy it.

Since people aren't willing to do this it goes to show that the claims of the Lisp junkies are just pipe dreams.

If programming on an all Lisp environment really was 10x more productive even a ten thousand dollar price tag would be chicken feed.

Lisp fans like to talk it up about how great it is, but at the end of the day are unwilling to put their money where their mouths are.
Short answer: No.

After studying state estimation and control systems, I'm in no way surprised that there are this many lines of code in a system. I also am not scared of it.

This is how I think about it: Bugs in control systems code are often not visible until some super-weird edge case or some extreme condition is hit. In this case, it's probably too late for the software to really do anything to help you. If it does help, great, if it wasn't there, you'd be screwed anyway. Bugs that affect normal and slightly abnormal operations are very obvious. Essentially, I'm no more worried about the LOC count in my car than I am about a micro-fracture in a bolt that holds my brakes on.
USSR did exactly that, historically (there was one time; Moscow time).
Don't worry about the paraphrase, my original comment was probably too ambiguous.

Yes, I do believe that the government probably understands that health care is a huge problem for startups. What I don't believe (and this is the point of the Steve Blank blog post) is that the government can effectively prioritize what the biggest problems for startups are.

Now, lets talk about Startup America specifically. Going off the information available online ( e.g. http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/startup-america ), this program is more focused on things like access to capital, mentorship and education, partnerships with big business, federally funded grants and research.

I think these are all really great things to work on, but health care, #1 on my list, is not even mentioned on their list at all. Again, I believe they know it's a huge issue, but they may be shying away from it now because "we did that already and it's done" or "we'll lose elections in 2012 if we keep talking about it".
You simply have to present it to the Right in the way they can hear it.

"Are you gonna let a bunch of commies beat you in the modernization of time? We didn't land the first man on the moon just so we can be beaten out by savages with beet-powered potatoes!"
I agree, modulo s/dedicated/tailored/. You can make your splash page work as a landing page, provided you craft the splash page side-by-side with your text ads.
FYI: Matt, your "redacted" links on the 2008 and 2009 versions of this article still link to the site in question. The Twitter link on the 2009 article actually links to the Twitter account in question, too.
>Yes, Michaelchiasri raised this objection. He didn't bother to do the math, which showed that it has little effect.

It increased the figure from 10% to 15%. Why are you deliberately deflating the figure when it still appears to support your point after removing children?

>I'll give you a hint: 7.5 million is about 20% of 37.3 million.

That figure is the percentage of the poor who work or look for work for at least 27 weeks per year, not the percentage of the poor who do any work or look for work at all. Farm laborers for example could work 50 hour weeks May-October and only hit 25 weeks. And they would be poor.
Well, open access seems to be the third rail of telecom policy. Most liberal Democrats won't touch it when it comes to Internet access. This leaves net neutrality as the only politically viable option.

Please elaborate on your point about the smartphone market. I'm not sure what you're saying, but it seems interesting.
Sometimes it's because you are encountering someone with a cognitive style that is oriented towards precision of expression. This is an admirable trait that can expose hidden assumptions and lead to valuable insights.

Unfortunately, attacking the form rather than the content of a position can also be an effective tactic for undermining an opposing view without having to risk justifying oneself. It consumes energy without contributing anything constructive. If there's a genuine ambiguity and a desire to work together to learn something, there are usually ways to clarify your opponent's position that help both people reach understanding.
I work in a French administration. We have a special day, the "journée des nouveaux arrivants" ("newcomers' day") for new hires, where we are taught the history of the service and learn about the different departments. The only problem is, since there are few new hires and organizing it requires the animators to be here, that this event takes place about twice a year.

I was lucky, my manager thought about it and managed to get me to do it after a bit less than a year. Some people have been working here for years without the "new hire day" (in all fairness you don't learn a lot of practical things, but still...).
I have a lot of respect for Google and perhaps I am just misunderstanding your point. Are you trying to say "People brave enough to face battalions of armed police while protesting against a totalitarian regime are very common in Google"?

I hope that is the case but it would be hard to provide objective proof of that.

I think there is another, better justification for naming Google in this story and that is - they risked acting against their self interest by creating the call-to-tweet tool for the protesters in Egypt. It used to be accepted practice for corporations to 'stay out' of foreign issues that don't directly impact them and Google had the cojones to side-step accepted practice in favor of what is right. Then again, Twitter and Facebook have taken similar actions in the past.

This is not to minimize the positive contributions these companies made, but it is not the same as facing armed police at great personal risk.
It really depends what your looking to do. I use Rails and php depending on the project. I would say actually its best to focus on frameworks and Rails is probably one of the better ones out there these days. Django is also interesting. Php frameworks are going through alot of changes right now with no clear winner. So youll have to spend extra time even trying to figure out which one to use whereas with Rails its pretty much the dominant one so all the support in the community goes to it.

There are only a few ways you can pass data from one web page to another. Get and Post. Get sends it in the url whereas Post sends it in sort of a hidden way. In the old days post was preferred for more sensitive data so the user wouldnt see things in the url. Also post was and is used to keep the urls cleaner. However with the advent of web services the uses of these have changed somewhat.
two interesting bits:

"38.5 percent of women-owned firms relied on personal equity, and 41.1 percent relied on outsider debt to start their businesses. In contrast, 31.6 percent of male-owned firms relied on personal equity, 29.9 percent on outsider debt, and 26.1 percent were provided outside equity. The percentage of outside equity given to women-owned businesses was so negligible it wasn't even published."

and is it their fault?

"Are women to blame for getting in their own way? Sometimes. According to a study from the University of New Mexico Anderson School of Management, women managers are three times more likely to underrate their bosses' opinions of themselves. Men slightly overestimated how their bosses viewed them, and women underestimated others' positive opinions. Maybe this is a reason why it's tough for women to get funding."
You make it sound so easy. Leaving aside the complicated legal question for determining what is and isn't considered pornography* , how would you go about actually doing it? Is internet filtering perfectly reliable? Would hiring several extra library employees specifically to watch the internet stations suffice? Library staff are already trying to prevent people from viewing pornography on the public computers, working within the resources available. Sheesh.

* At the library system I worked at, it was a matter of staff judgement.
Not really. On *nixes, there's a library called zoneinfo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database) that has the list of rules about "if you're in living in California, then DST starts on March 23" or whatever. When a country changes the law about when DST is, that data needs to be updated.

For example, last year Chile gave a month's notice that daylight savings time was changing. (http://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/chile-extends-dst-2010....)

That can cause headaches, if you have a mission critical system that needs to be updated, otherwise it may do something important an hour early, or an hour late. For example, Postgres has to be rebooted when the timezone information is changed.
So a foreign car gets blamed when old people stand on the gas instead of the brake - and a bunch of lawyers and politicians jump on the bandwagon.

That couldn't have been forseen - it hasn't happened for a generation.
> having one time zone for a country approximately the same size as Canada (5,000km wide) seems silly

Why?

In America, people already get up at 7am (insert your own time here, obviously) regardless of what the local sunrise actually is - which varies based on how far north or south you live.

It's pretty arbitrary. But one time zone at least makes the arbitraryness easier on coders.
CN could start by helping reddit sell their banner ad inventory... it's got to be less than 1% of the time that I see a real ad, rather than reddit self-promotions or something for another CN property running in that slot.
They have over 30 million more males than females. The Chinese may have equality, but that's a lot of sexually frustrated men that's going to contribute to unrest.
Thanks for this link. I always thought wikipedia should sell Annual Wikipedia DVD's. Something like a brittanica.

EDIT: typo
Scaling up personal customer service - lessons from WePay (YC S09)
I think it would be interesting to chop a *macs into an operating system. I would approach it in an iterative fashion with these initial goals:

- Replace elisp with Common Lisp

- Build os-level threading support

- Build a hardware abstraction layer / target a 'bare' machine.

That gets someone a 'ways' towards a traditional Lisp OS.

I think one of the big questions that arises in for a modern Lisp system is the design of of multiple processes and multiple users.
It's a wiki, if there is information you see is incorrect, please fix it.
Dalvik ported to MeeGo, promising instant Android app compatibility
I'm perfectly happy with staff judgement. If they need it then I vote we pay them for their extra time or another resource to help (well I'm Canadian so my vote only counts up here).

Didn't mean to say it was easy, jus worthwhile.
I thought this article was going to be about the controversial theory of crowdsourcing in the wider sense--not just design. With these deceiving headlines, you attract a lot of people like me who rain on your parade and unfortunately, think your article is a snooze.
Be careful extrapolating success scaling in one domain to success scaling in another.

I've also done the 40 GB/day of NYSE TAQ data financial analysis thing, and the 1000+ trades/second real-time financial analytics thing. And I work on Google Search, and have a passing familiarity with how other Google products scale.

The scaling challenges of batch financial models vs. real-time financial processing vs. information retrieval vs. email vs. social products are very different. Even going from a model of the web where it's static and changes every few months (like Google of 2004) to one where sites get update every few minutes and users expect to see the updates immediately in search results (like Google of today) requires vastly different technology.

The main thing about scaling that I've learned from working at a couple places that require it is to go into it with a fresh mind each time, and really pay attention to what the requirements are and what you can cut corners on. There're some general principles you should know (eg. Jeff Dean's "Numbers you should know", memory is much faster than disk, cut out layers of abstraction that you don't need), but in order to apply them effectively, you really need to pay attention to the details of your problem domain.

If you think you can solve Twitter's scaling problems, they're hiring, they're pre-IPO, and they're probably giving out decent chunks of stock.
For some reason that, and even overall size seems way lower than it should be.
> Foot binding?

One unequivocally positive outcome of the communists winning over the nationalists that even an ardent anti-communist like Jung Chang will attest to was their gender equality reforms. The first and most symbolic act was a serious crackdown on foot binding.
I'd rather say that they are changing their time zone from UTC+3 to UTC+4. It's not that they will have permanent DST, but rather standard time is now UTC+3 and will be UTC+4.
As Readers Flee, Gawker Backtracks on Big Redesign
Gas pedals, drivers blamed for out of control Toyotas
Reddit is down half the time because people flocked to it when Digg went south. Any team would struggle to keep up with that kind of growth.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com+reddit.com/

A sudden influx of 100k people overnight is not easy to manage.

The number on the visits graph is even more substantial.
I would be interested to know how he failed to keep his anonymity when he claims he was anonymous yet Egyptian police arrested him.
The problem is, if you ever need to deal with events before the Big Switchover to 24-hour time, you'd still need to have all the knowledge of previous zone boundaries, offsets and seasonal rules. Any 24 hour time still has to handle leap years and leap seconds.

Time is a pain in the ass.
Indeed. It can also be explained as a matter of simple efficiency: Currently when synchronising something, two pieces of information must be known (the time, and the timezone). If using a single timezone, only one is required (whether it's night or day at either end is inconsequential, only the party at that end really needs to worry about it and can provide a range of hours suitable to them).
You should attribute the quotes you use. Anatole France.
Was it ever established how the Egyptian policed determined that he had started the Facebook page?
Firstly, I thought the official term for this was "crapware".

Secondly, there is a technological solution to the crapware menace. It's called a Linux installation CD (or USB drive).
Galois (a haskell shop) has recently released a port of the GHC Haskell runtime to Xen (http://halvm.org/wiki/). This seems like a promising approach to build single task images with the high level abstraction of a functional language but the low level access to the machine.
For the record, I check my sanity daily and always get the same result: Yes, I'm crazy, but not completely.
The Shrinking American Cubicle
Ask HN: What did you have when you applied to YCombinator?
As the new ycom round approaches I was wondering what people actually apply with. That being said, I was curious if anyone would mind sharing the following:

1. What did you have when you applied in previous rounds? Sketches? Prototype? Business plan? Just an idea?

2. Did you get accepted (optional)?
MyMediaLite is a lightweight, multi-purpose library of recommender algo...
Planting Memories, One Moment at a Time
He had it right. A share of the rewards is a gamble that there will be rewards, but the outcome is unknown when the promise of rewards are given. She only knew that if the company did well that she would also do well.
fib a b 1 = 1
fib a b 0 = 0
fib a b n = (fib a b (n - 1)) + (fib a b (n -2))

Where do I send my CV (I always loved London).
She obviously either took a risk or didn't need the money back then. Many people refuse to take stock instead of a salary.
When all you own fits in a boat... a liveaboard's secret to happiness (VIDEO)
>The one who takes initiative and washes the whole sink as opposed to just his own is looked at as a leader, someone responsible and trustworthy, not necessarily a dishes bitch

A leadership lesson for you :

The one who takes initiative and organizes those multiple people to wash the whole sink is looked at as a leader.
Actually I would think the US version would be a nice watch. The article seems to stress that it is a status indicator for business purposes.
First, most humans are extremly reluctant to any changes. You see, US are still using imperial units and Fahrenheit scale.

Second, timezones are used for globally-recognizable time of a day. No matter where you are on Earth, 08:00 (by 24-hour scale) is certainly in the morning, and 20:00 is evening.
HN Review my 4 hour hack project: Secret Mentions
I hacked something last night, the idea is simple: Allow people to send secret messages to people on twitter.

URL: http://secret-mention.appspot.com/

How it works:

-> Tell us the recipient of the message, write your message

-> We create a webpage containing your message

-> And send the recipient a mention with the link

-> We don't know who you are, so your identity will be secret

Please let me know what you think, feedback, ideas and of course if you think there could be a pitfall or risk let me know.

Thanks HN!
I cannot agree with this more! I'm constantly suprised by the amount of Ruby vs Python arguments I see. There's only about 3 or 4 actual differences between the two.

(I started to list them, then realised I'd have to do more research to explain properly - and left it for now.)
Well while we're at it, what's the fetish with 10? We should use powers of 2 for everything :)
Once he was arrested, I assume it made a lot of sense both for him and his family/friends to 'out' him(self) as a senior executive at Google. This may have even saved his life.

This assumes the Egyptian police hadn't already found out his identity from some other source before or after the arrest.
With the one exception being when developers are given the same horrible machine that the end users will have so it wont be a mad rush at the end to try to optimize it.
You're simultaneously believing the hype about Facebook's valuation while discounting its revenue potential. With different assumptions I suppose one could arrive at a different conclusion.
wepay rulesssssss
How Great Entrepreneurs Think
Cool idea, could be fun in the office.

clickable:
http://secret-mention.appspot.com
This is only the case if productivity is your only concern. There are also considerations such as support, security, and familiarity.
The floormats are pretty obvious and that has happened before. Given that, how hard is it then, if your car doesn't stop accelerating, to simply push the clutch down or switch to neutral, depending on your type of transmission?
I understand exactly what you're going through. Over the year, I tend to "put all my eggs in a basket" so-to-speak on one project or another. It becomes overwhelming at time because most problems I try to solve are (at least to me) complex.

Naturally, when problem gets harder, it's easy to let your mind wander and it's much more difficult to get things done. This year, I am approaching things a bit differently. I plan to work on a few smaller projects at a time instead of focusing on one big project that never gets done and spirit-draining. It will at least cure my "mind wandering" issue for the time being.

I don't think there's any negative side to working on multiple projects at the same time. As a one-man band, you can definitely work on different phases of projects to keep your mind sharp and interested.

I am actively coding one project, designing for another and thinking about/planning another project :P
Great post by Dan Martell of Flowtown about their new product Timely.is
I'm with you on most of that, but I think this point is a little dangerous:

> Avoid bad habits of sloth,

Willingness to pitch in when hard work really is called for is a necessary and valuable trait, of course. However, working hard when you don't have to is wasteful, and too many people confuse the two.

Sometimes, a natural inclination to be "lazy" is a lot like trying to avoid unnecessary work by being smart. I would rather work for the boss who identified the problem and bought a dishwasher.
it's a shame design and code gets judged based on the almighty pageview. can't fewer pageviews be better for users? they're certainly worse for advertisers, who still rely on this old stupid metric. sites like gawker are slaves to it. how else can we measure the success of a site, in a way that measures quality for the user and quality for the advertiser?
Why are they annoying? Don't you want to be able to acquire customers who originally had no intention of joining/buying/etc.? To do this, you'd be well-advised to at least take non-customers' opinions at face value without rejecting them out of hand. Reasons why people won't give you business can be just as useful as reasons why they will. Perhaps more.
From Brain to Stuxnet: 25 Years of Computer Viruses
Only 39% are honest about cursing at their computer: survey
From what I understand, he admitted he did. http://www.newsweek.com/2011/02/08/google-executive-wael-gho...
Or, "this is why I don't know anyone smart that works at Avis".

No offense, but the day I have to work as a bank teller is the day I stop working for a bank.
Anyone interested in 3 months of free Internet marketing
I've got 5 e commerce sites that depend on organic search traffic to feed sales. However, in my 2.5 years of working on SEO for my sites I've learned a lot about internet marketing in general.

I'm interested to trying to build traction for your startup; in exchange I would just like some transparency about the results of my work. This way if I am successful I could take on clients.

This would just be testing the waters and won't cost you anything. Blast me an email if you are interested.
That's ok provided that you have a local library. In the UK at present there is a concerted campaign on behalf of the government and local councils to shut libraries down.
I suspect we can make a sensible distinction between being harassed by the police for being homeless and not being able to look at porn in a public library.
Short answer: Yes.

The car industry is going more and more towards closed systems that your local mechanic can't repair without getting licensed and buying specialised readers to understand the car systems.

One possibility is that companies could make cars cheaper with poor quality code. This has higher maintenance costs and they get more from licensing/tools sold to repair. The consumer won't realise the extra burden until after purchase or reviews.
E-mail address in fullsail111@yahoo.com
Bluetooth headset?

I'm not sure about the iPhone, but a lot of tasks on Android can be done with (albeit still inaccurate in my experience) voice control. Combine that with a text-to-speech program, and you can theoretically use most of your smartphone's functions without having to even touch the thing.

</rambling>
Ask HN: Passenger_WSGI or FastCGI?
I'm hosting my site on Dreamhost, and I'm having difficulties using both Passenger and FastCGI. I write in Python using Flask which means I use VirtualEnv, I've followed through all of the Dreamhost tutorials and Wiki pages, nothing seems to work. Any suggestions?
Doesn't that just lead to bad, untrained customer support? I'd rather speak to someone who knew how to answer a question.