skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To retaliate against this, can't the EU threaten to kick Greece out of its system while force-converting all their EU-denominated assets into a newly setup Greek currency. (We can view this as the default of their agreement to support Greece--in response to the Greek refusal to pay off its debt.) The new currency will immediately weaken significantly, basically forcing austerity measures onto the whole economy. When the Greeks are on their own, without having EU as their sugar daddy, they will have to absorb (or receive) the direct consequences of their actions--whichever fiscal/monetary path they choose to follow.

The technical issues of force-conversion of currency their assets are denominated in are probably quite immense, but it is better than losing hundreds of billions of dollars. Moreover, if it can be done, all other troubled economies in Europe will have much greater incentives to follow any rules set up by the EU.
I don't want to tell it that though. I just want to enter things at a time, and have them stay at that time.
This is a really cool app and I agree that photographers could be a target market.

One thing I've always wanted to see from apps like this: you should be able to push a button that 'pins' the image in virtual space, and when you move the phone, it acts like a window on that image. This can be done using the various movement sensors on the phones.
This policy should make sense to anyone who has ever had any involvement with someone with an addiction. Generally the addiction is a symptom of other problems, often mental illness, that if treated appropriately would help prevent a slide back into addiction.

I would be interested to see a comparison of the total cost of this policy contrasted against, for example, the US style. Certainly I would expect the initial outlay to be greater in the Portuguese style system but as it gets people out of the system for good the lifetime cost should be lower. While I don't like to have everything measured with a monetary cost, social and moral duties are important, it would make it an easier sell to law makers and their constituents.
Computer-Hacking Group Targets Apple In Latest Attack
Indian Social Network bigadda.com turns into e-commerce portal.
I joined bigadda.com few years back when I heard it is a new indian social network by Reliance but I never used it as all my friends were using facebook/orkut/linkedin. Today I got a mail from them :

Dear Anuj,

We value and appreciate your long standing support for Bigadda.com. In the past few months we explored our potential as an ecommerce portal by providing branded products at profitable deals to you and have found immense success. We are reaching newer heights everyday and hence are planning an expansion in the same arena.

We request you to download all your personal collection of blogs, audio files, video files and images from Bigadda.com as we are scaling down our Social Networking services.

Please note that all your old personal data, uploaded on Bigadda.com, shall not be available after July 15 2011.

Log on to http://www.bigadda.com/frontpage/bigaddaHomepage/ now and download your personal files.

In case you have forgotten your password please click here to retrieve it.

Regards. BIGADDA.com Team
Ouch! You tried to bypass infrastructure? That isn't going to go well! :)

I know the feeling, though. I had a different position that had me strattelling the line between dev and ops. I reported to the dev side, but my team really need to control the servers we were deploying to because ops expected push-button deployments and didn't know much beyond Oracle.

That was the most painful position I've ever been in. It was also the position that ultimately pushed me away from development. Of course, now I'm leading a startup, so if code needs to be written, I'm slinging code. :)
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/?p=28237

Android has 38% install base vs 27% for iPhone.
Jipincs
Any calendar app either has to base its time zone on location or ask you to manually choose a zone. How would you propose changing this?
Len, you will be missed.

CP's may write code, but you were among the true believers who would run that code as well. I hope that you are somewhere at peace, writing happy code, and in charge of turning away hopeful former fedz arriving at the Pearly Gates. Your legacy will live on in polynomial time.

//Nonaht Leyte
I'm the author of LoseThos, http://www.losethos.com

Take a look at this:

http://wiki.osdev.org/Projects

Do a Google search for "64-bit operating system" and look at this:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=139584862753417

-----------------------------------------------

LoseThos is not a teaching OS. That's for Losers.

LoseThos is not for old hardware. Ditto.

LoseThos is for recreational programming. I know what makes programming fun. Worrying about absurd corner cases is "yeah, yeah yeah... not fun."

Bureaucracy where you have to update many streams as you program -- help, resources, multiple architectures etc. Sucks. LoseThos has graphics in source code and documentation is in the code for Man (WordStat).

Cheap read-neck thrills along the same line as "User=Loser" is fun. You have full access to everything.

Security is not fun. Who wants to fiddle with permissions.

Here's a summary of the LoseThos approach:
http://www.losethos.com/doc/Strategy.html
There are people who advocate subcritical reactors, but that's not how the LFTR works. Fissioning U-233 produces plenty of neutrons to keep a thorium reactor going. See the last couple paragraphs here: http://energyfromthorium.com/2006/04/28/whats-the-difference...
I already curse Objective-C for its verbosity, so that's not the right direction for me. Coffeescript is in the right ballpark, I'd just rather have a more explicitly structured syntax, perhaps closer to Ruby.
I think its a case of function over form. It could have a much cleaner, less cluttered, less shouty interface & takes ages to get anything done.

But it works, I can manage hundreds of domains with it.
That's a pretty knee-jerk reaction given the reason those terms were added. If you are going to provide a service that publishes content for other people, you better have the right to publish that content.

And sharing your folder or document to somebody else on the web is Dropbox publishing your content for you.

There are lots of reasons to drop your Dropbox account. This is not one of them.
It's only 0 as far as statisticians and cheap calculators are concerned. The number of N-digit numbers without 9s in them is much higher than the number of similar (N-1)-digit numbers, it's just the proportion that falls. The probability isn't 0, it just asymptotically approaches 0, as the number of non-9-containing numbers approaches infinity.

In essence, the cardinality of the set of all numbers that do not contain 9 is infinity; the cardinality of the set of all numbers is infinitier. This despite the fact that both sets are countably infinite.
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work.

-- John Gall
Even if it does, so what?

There is a potentially infinite number of actions one has to do right, in order to succeed with the next big thing. Facebook have had, and still have, some competitors.

It might be that it is actually harder to create a company that way. By definition, the next big thing is not fully understood, what increases the probability of screwing up badly.

And, it's not that obvious whether such model yields the highest returns, to put aside the risk reward equation. We still don't know whether Groupon or Facebook will become long-term profitable companies.

Also, in so fuzzy environment, it's extremely hard to get the timing, and assets, right. The idea of consumer cloud, as syncing the data automatically between many dummy clients, was obvious since 70s, and it actually took enormous efforts from Apple, like iPhone and iPad.

On a much broader perspective, I remain unconvinced that the next big thing is what gives the society the most innovative fruits. The idea of tablet was so cliche everyone gave up, and I'd say that iPad itself is worth much more than the Apple's cloud.
I like Dropbox, and I can tolerate Dave. But why this is important?
> UTC (which is an arbitrary human invention)

Hmm, i wouldn't call it totally arbitrary. UTC = TAI + LS, such that |UTC - UT1| < 1 second, where:

* LS are leap seconds,

* TAI is "physicist" time, based on the ticking of atomic clocks at mean sea level. The length of a second is constant.

* UT1 is "astronomer" time, the rotation angle of the Earth with respect to the quasar reference frame. The length of a second is not constant.

The Earth's rotation is slowing down, so UT1 is gradually drifting away from TAI. UTC is a pretty natural scheme to reconcile these two systems.
just to add to the examples here: last week i was writing code to handle calibration data from seismic detectors. these are connected to GPS receivers and so have pretty accurate times. yet when i triggered a calibration it would start 1 minute in the past. somehow the receiver was moving back in time before starting the calibration....

...or ntpd on the test computer had failed and the machine was a minute fast :o) so the code to search for data now looks backwards in time as well as forwards.

incidentally, does anyone know of a really good API for time (including calendars etc)? python's (which is largely a thin layer over C) is a horrible mess, for example.
I imagine something like this would would have happened if the unabomber was really into maths.

I love the idea of this book and its humour, but it is quite hard to comprehend. I can actually see maths' popularity increasing as people begin to see it as a useful hobby, especially those who are learning programming.

I would willing to pay for lessons if learning maths didn't have to involve a dense textbook, but instead could graphically demonstrate the theory (think 3D modelling, moving sine waves etc.) and explain all the underlying concepts that were glossed over in formal education.

Videos or apps like this would be a great help to me, especially if it managed to retain this author's irreverence, Sal Khan's presentation style, but placing more importance on rehearsed & polished lessons, 3d animation and beautifully set typography.

Anyone know any resources that are along these lines?
Ugh, I feel that this is one of the single poorest time-related pratices—from a UX perspective—short of not displaying the time at all. Please don’t follow this advice. It makes it really easy for the developer because there’s no need to deal with time zones and things like DST. However, showing a relative time in many situations is completely opaque. If something happened ‘14 hours ago’, did it happen at lunch time or 3 PM? A lot of times people want to know the time of day something happened, not just how long ago it occurred. Here you can do some arithmetic in your head to figure it out, but that’s a major annoyance. And once the relative time flips over to ‘X days ago’ the time information is completely lost. Similarly if it says ‘About 3 months ago’ it’s impossible to know if that means March 15 or April 1 or April 15 or anywhere in between, never mind the time of day. At the very least the full date and time should be displayed in a tooltip so that it’s available if needed. Ideally relative times shouldn’t be used alone except in situations where the relative time is absolutely, unarguably the only information that could ever need to be known.
Facebook Friend Exporter

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ficlccidpkaiepnnbo...
How so?
If copyright didn't exist, books would come with point of sell contracts(think software EULAs today) that would be much worse than current copyright. Fair use would be a crazy idea invented by RMS at that point.
You have to tell it a time zone or else the calendar app will not know what time you mean (and really, time without a time zone is meaningless). What you are doing is using your current time zone as the default so when you enter appointments from another time zone you're actually entering them incorrectly.

Any calendar app should allow the entry of appointments with time zone.
I wonder about storing the timestamp in a varchar field of sufficient size to avoid all of these headaches? Although I guess 64 bit will suffice for a very long time.
Australia has never defaulted.
i think what is being suggested is something like storing it as a string and raising the alarm when the string matches the current local time. so it's "time in whatever time zone i am local to when it matches the time".

(which has problems with uniqueness, but does seem like an intuitive "dwim" high level interface).
How To Defeat Kolrami
Exactly. I will put a little more PF (political fiction) to make it a little bit more interesting:
How about if your "friend" is a drinker and gambler, but happens to have a big fortune, say islands, nature, ancient temples. So you find his girlfriend and start lending her drinking money out of your heart's "goodness" without managing your loan when it is small, just let it grow... Of course your friend gets drinking money and thanks his lucky stars and all his friends for lending him just to have the pleasure of his charm.... Of course you politely ask him to spend half of that money to buy submarines and fighter aircrafts from your shop. Then one day you go and tell him, "you know your debt is so big, me and everybody else were so surprised by the size of your debt, and really you have been only drinking and womanizing, haven't you... So we decided we will not lend you anymore. From now on you are not allowed to drink, but neither to eat, unless of course you sell to us your telecommunication industry at the amount of the next round of drinks, so what do you say?"
It works like a charm, your friend starts getting depressed, and gives in...
But then maybe he says, "Look I am grateful for all these drinks and all but you can't in your good sense expect me to sell my property so cheaply just because you were giving gifts to my girlfriend right. I will stop drinking, please stop giving gifts to my girlfriend and wait for a while I will give them back to you. Also I noticed you borrow money for 1% and you lend it to me for 5.2%, that is too much for "friends" isn't it, please be a sport and let me repay it to you with 1.5%."
What then?

[EDIT] Disclaimer, I am Greek, I have no illusions about the management abilities of my country (sometimes I think we are born without the part of brain responsible for financial planning ;-), but I have strong opinions about the economy of debt, the way it is manipulated by the "market" and it's implications on the life of people. My opinion is biased, of course.
Cartoon: Google Plus-or-Minus
looks like its using the hunch.com api
"yabba dabba doo" - Fred Flintstone
There were some severe problems with our infrastructure team, I felt like I had no choice but to bypass them. I also felt that they should treat me as their client, much like I treated the business. It didn't go very well. :)

Things go way faster in a startup -- really the pinnacle of productivity.
There's no mechanism, so it would probably need some sort of vote. This would take too long, and the plan would probably leak, so the Greeks would have time to cash out all their EU assets.
Sounds a lot like Google Propaganda to prop up The Android Market.
Actually, Ted Kaczynski was a mathematician.
Watch,transformers,dark of the moon,online,megavideo
watch,transformers,dark of the moon,online,megavideo
First of all - you can watch the Transformers: Dark of the Moon is surrounded by the comfort of your family online,
Why Google+ Will Take Half of the Social Networking Market from Facebook
man 3p time suggests using time_t to "ease the eventual fix".
Google is not in nuclear energy business.

It would be better for all of us if Google stays focused in software development.
I agree. Seems a little impetuous given what we know at this point, but maybe I'm naive in my tendency to trust the Dropbox leadership thus far.
The apocrypha from early facebook employees is "not great". Then again, the same was said of Larry and Sergei. Just goes to show that you only need to be "good enough" to ship a popular product, and have the wherewithal to hire better coders once you need to scale.
The Dropbox case is an excellent learning opportunity.

They have created a long needed seamless service, approaching quickly a huge number of people praising them nearly religiously, as well as exceptionally good press. Then, surprisingly, it took them few months to revert their perception completely.

To put aside whether they should receive so harsh words now, I think that all startup founders, and managers, should try to understand what happened, in order to avoid similar mistakes.

I do not have a clear answer but I do not think it is only a matter of unclear Terms of Service, or blog posts. If I would have to guess, they have overpromised hugely.

For everyone with a basic understanding of security, it's obvious that no remote storage can be both extremely secure and so easy to use on so many channels. The idea of managing encryption private keys is beyond regular users' intuition.

If I'm right, the best thing they could have done was stating clearly, from the beggining, that the data is as secure as possile, and they do their best to ensure (as I'm sure they do), but it will not be a military grade. The latest authentication bug did not help, too.

With the previous bold security statements, likely slightly misunderstood by a less tech savvy folks, it's not a suprirse that some of their users feel angry and feel somehow cheated.

What is very odd, the security itself was never Dropbox's the most important feature. The easy to use interface, and seamless synchronization between on many channels, was.
if they do, it won't be for quite a while. these things take time.
Clickable:
[link redacted]

Something about the design made me think I landed on a domain squatting site. Normally, I'd like to give more specific feedback, but the UI just isn't sitting well with me. The "Signup for Free" button and "Building responsive and engaged followings!" text aren't vertical aligned (too much bottom padding)..the icons are big and cheap...dunno.

Perhaps more constructive criticism:

I found the basic upgrade concept confusing. I'd dump that column, and simply add another "Feature" row, called "Upgrade to premium" and a value of $5/contest in basic, and n/a in the other two.

Why are the premium and media agency sign-up button gray and the basic and basic upgrade green?
There's an Australian economist called "Steve Keen", who uses mathematics (stuff like dynamic PDEs, not the crap econometricians use) to model this kind of stuff.

I think he tends to agree with Keynes, in broad terms - austerity measures are a crock, because they come at a time when the government would otherwise be the only bastion of stability. But we didn't think about this when we subjected African (and other third world) economies to the IMF's demands.

What is needed is long-term measures. Gradually raising the pension age, gradually cutting pensions, freezing spending, and so on.

Also, government reform (i.e. better transparency, whistle-blower protection, ombudsmen and auditors) is needed, not just "cutting costs".
FB 2003 -> 2011: 500M
One nice side effect of having digital textbooks (in college) is it deals with the pesky second market for used books. One course, one book, one non-transferable license for the quarter. Sweet no more beer money after finals.
Those of you down-voting this comment should read up on conditional probabilities and Bayes's theorem. (Hint: there are only seven billion people alive, and very few of them have their chromosomes counted.)
>This is the kind of thinking that lets people write bad code. "Unreasonable" is subjective here and lets people be very thin-skinned and defensive about their code.

Indeed, in my experience the very best producers are those who are toughest on themselves. No one is ever likely to be as insulting to me as I am to myself when I catch a mistake. Which is part of the reason for what neilk wrote above: "Some of the biggest jerks are also the best contributors." Because they are tough on themselves and their own work and are less willing to help others lie to themselves about what they have produced.
Installing Android x86 in VirtualBox
Yes, the information that is public is public. And searchable. Just like the rest of the Internet.

What doesn't happen, is Facebook "selling data": taking money in exchange for ("selling") information you wouldn't otherwise have. It doesn't happen, and never has.
However it's Yuri's name that comes to mind first, but how many would immediately remember Sergey Korolyov?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Korolyov
The idea of presenting calculus visually is certainly a good one, but this is useless for anyone other than the author. The point of illustrations is to enhance the material and this is just plain unreadable.

Here is an interesting project that is far more successful at math illustration and shows some promise:

http://worrydream.com/KillMath/
Why is there so much discussion about what might be the success or failure of Google+? it's all noise.

In 12 months (even less), there will be enough data to argue definitively, so what is the reason for having an opinion now. I'm not bashing you for your opinion, the whole argument is immature. Lets wait a little before psychoanalyze everything about this.
'Something awesome' awaits Facebook users
Long term measures are impossible in government. You cannot bind the actions of future legislators. Legislators will agree to austerity measures which harm the constituents of future legislators, and then future legislators will undo it.

The only reliable way of binding the actions of future legislators is to create a politically powerful class of dependents (e.g. old people, government unions) who will fight to protect their cash cow. Unfortunately, that's what got Greece into this mess to begin with.
I encrypt anything important before I upload it to Dropbox, and I didn't have to read their terms of service to take that precaution. It's always good to be paranoid about your data, but it's idiotic to suggest that anyone discontinue use of Dropbox because they _might_ scan your files someday to provide you with targeted advertising.

The article is definitely fear mongering bullshit. IMO Dropbox is doing a great job. It's simply one the most useful FREE apps out there, and my only feedback for Dropbox is "thank you".
Erik Naggum's paper The Long, Painful History of Time is a must-read: http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html
The GitHub API uses the Link header for that.

$ curl https://api.github.com/repos/github/gollum/issues -i
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json
Link: <https://api.github.com/repos/github/gollum/issues?page=2>; rel="next", <https://api.github.com/repos/github/gollum/issues?page=3>; rel="last"
"The system clock can, and will, jump backwards and forwards in time due to things outside of your control. Your program should be designed to survive this."

This is one of my favorite go-to test cases. I've found some really fantastically interesting, catastrophic network halting badness with this really simple test.
I don't know, the anthropomorphic lemon saying "easy peasy" enhanced it greatly for me.

(Seriously, there's a certain great charm to these sorts of things that make them strangely appealing to certain people, like me. It might not be great for learning, but it's awesome as entertainment.)
This was posted 4 days ago; http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2709834 and has 138 comments.
Oh Dropbox, We Loved You Once...