skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Probably a large fraction. Most people I went to high school with never leave the city we grew up in, let alone the time zone.

I didn't leave my timezone until after I had graduated college... and almost all of those times were to go to PAX .. which is now also on the east coast so I haven't even done that in 2 years.
Too bad the 99% will just see the billions and scream bloody murder.
If Congress wanted software patents to be legal, Congress would have made them legal in 1972 or 1973. They wouldn't have waited around for the Federal Circuit court to contradict previous Supreme Court opinions.
Agreed.

The argument about gaining or losing sleep has always struck me as a bit meaningless. What time do I go to bed? Between 11 PM and 7 AM ... depends on the day. What time do I wake up? Oh between 8 AM and 2 PM.

Am I some 18 year old without a job who doesn't need to perform? Nope, I do programming and go to the office 5 days a week, lead meetings, conduct interviews all that stuff. I don't take any drugs and am right around 30.

This is not just me too. I, and I think everyone I've ever talked to about this have no real substantial long term issues with 10 hours of sleep one night, 6 the next, 8 after that, etc. and having it occur at widely varied times.
Not all of the objects classed as galaxies feature a black hole at the center. Many of the objects classed as galaxies are mere bundles of stars compared to the "traditional" spiral galaxies. Where do galaxies end and globular clusters begin? It is arbitrary.

I'm in danger of veering into category theory/zen buddhism here, so I'll leave it at that.
A Doomsday Worm - The Sputnik of 2011
What do you study?
Makes a change from web programming, where the equivalent period seems to be about four months.
Who hates Bill Gates? I can understand some people not approving of Microsoft in general (and for me specifically Internet Explorer) but Bill Gates as a person has done amazing things-- both for technology and humanity.
Edit the link right away, please; it's showing a 404 error.

The correct link is

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/04/bad-scie...
Photovoltaic Installers
It's a big problem. We sometimes spend half the interview trying to figure out what the startup is doing. A lot of people are bad at explaining this type of thing. In fact I'd say most are.

The solution is to practice beforehand, preferably on people who will tell you candidly when you haven't yet explained yourself clearly.

The test of how well you've explained a startup idea is how accurately the listener could reproduce it from your description.
I respect Bill Gates a lot, he's a great businessman and he actually cares about the world - I'm honestly not sure if I would want to run a charity myself (I'd likely reinvest the money into new businesses).

On the topic of Windows: I've never had Windows crash since like 2004. ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7 - all stable and reliable. I DID have a lot of third party apps that make the hodge podge soup on my hard drive crash, and that can't be avoided since not everyone works for Microsoft.

P.S. Windows 98 crashed sometimes, though and I needed to restore the registry once a year - don't know what that was about, but switching to ME got rid of the issues.
The point though is that the argument that it saves energy is questionable at best. Frankly, any legitimate defense really hinges on the argument that people prefer it.
Maths and Computer Science
Ruby is also a bit of a contrived example. Ruby looks a lot like you could come to it from Java and know most of it, but metaprogramming actually takes a long time and a lot of work to really figure out.

Similarly, Ruby has many different little variants -- Rails, Rake, various sorts of DSLs -- and that adds significantly to the time to learn it.

Really learning Ruby is learning several similar languages, which makes two years a much harder number to achieve.

C++ could easily have been like that if it had different constellations of features that were routinely used in different ways by the same programmers. Imagine if there were a whole "C++ tools" subculture that used templates extensively but differently, along with one or two other nontrivial features (say, multiple inheritance and exceptions) used in specific ways with specific non-compiler-mandated rules.

You'd have to learn, in effect, about another programming language's worth of material to program fluently within that subculture.

Ruby has several of those.
Help white hat hacker Brad Smith
How to know if a development project is worth your time
What eight years of writing the Bad Science column have taught me
Jobs is relevant to this discussion, because the article is based around the following quote:

"Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology"

I've always considered charity to be a personal thing, and if Jobs didn't want to give it away, well that was his money, and his decision. However, attacking Gates for helping eradicate polio / malaria is simply unnecessary, and comes off as a childish retort.
Pv - Pipe Viewer - monitoring the progress of data through a pipeline
I think the bigger problem is 2.7m * .55 CPA * 7x ltv = a market oppty for THEM of $10.3 million if every bride in America signed up for their service, assuming knot.com and competitors don't try to copy them first. What's worse, they have to re-acquire their user base constantly. Weddings are like apartments or cars... It's totally point of need, and only one or two brands will be on people's minds.
We've had this trope before - Andrew Carnegie, for example. Gates is just copying the idea...

Honestly, the company he built makes some good stuff, and also makes a lot of trouble for everyone else. The Embrace/Extend/Extinguish methodology which was created under Gates is something that anyone working in infrastructure is going to be fighting for the next 30 years, and it's holding innovation back. Does anyone out there love IE6, or Active Directory? Both are primary examples of this.

I don't hate Gates. I just think that he did a great job of making money at the expense of others, and in ways that still hurt the industry today.

Paying penance after the fact doesn't excuse the original actions.
Agreed, I do not believe the rape accusations were politically motivated but the international warrant obviously was. It is probably the first time ever sexual misconduct with weak evidence has resulted in an international arrest warrant.
I read from the comments below that you are studying computer science.

My advice is bias.

You probably aren't in the last 2 and a half years of the program yet where you do coding projects. I find that I don't have to be at every class ( although I go anyway ) to do well in those because a lot of it is coding and completing projects. (Binary Tree, Hash Tables, Disjoint Sets, Linux File Systems, Building an Operating System).

Whats my advice?

Suck it up. You will convince yourself you love to learn from people you have paid to listen to that you don't fully respect (you didn't fully respect your teachers in high school from the sound of it), you love to learn computer science because you love how close it is to pure creation (in my opinion). You love the fact that with the foundation that you pick up you will be able to build wonderful applications for millions of people to use.

There is no secret, listen to what your lecturers have to say, take notes, and just do it.

High school is easy, college is easy, computer science is not. You can't allow yourself to get use to that 'selective' hearing bullshit. But I have faith in you, life is all about effort and if you actually put the effort in you won't struggle in the long run.

Or maybe the major isn't for you. My 2 cents.
I have Perian but quicktime lacks VLC's hotkeys for jumping forward/backward and has much worse control over playback speed.

Quicktime 7 also, FWIW, lies about what playback speed it is using. You can drag the slider and then time it and it doesn't play at the speed it's supposed to.
Short Choppy Haircut Perfect Ideas
Why stop there? Abolish time zones. Everyone should be using UTC directly.

This would solve more problems than it causes.
I hope this has been posted at the top of HN before... if it hasn't it really should.
This hearkens back to what one of my professors used to tell us- "Always draw a conclusion (from your data)".

Don't just routinely foist gobs of data off onto others; you were hired for your brain. Use it.
There's no personal guarantee on that loan. If the company fails, you don't pay it back. They are not especially onerous terms and it's the same amount of cash that YC gives for the same equity.
The point which I believe is an attack on Assange is the international arrest warrant. I do not think that if it had been someone else a warrant would have been issued. It seems quite obvious to me that strings were pulled to use the rape allegations as much as possible.
I didn't see it mentioned, but I give a ton of credit to Bill Gates for convincing Warren Buffett (who he plays bridge with) to give his money to charity in his lifetime.

AD isn't as bad as IE6, either. And I no longer blame MSFT for IE6 now... it's kept alive by bad, outdated corporate policies.
Improving Your Web Search Results
Am I the only one who at least subjectively likes DST? I hate waking up in the dark, which DST doesn't help with, but the alternative, namely moving clocks one hour ahead the whole year through (effectively bumping up a time zone) would make me feel downright miserable. Also, I just love being able to sit outside in the sun until 11 P.M. in the summer.

That said, I did just miss a meeting this morning because the EU switches to winter time at the end of October whereas the US switches early in November. Makes it even more confusing.
Are you summing the article up as an attack on one quote? Okay, if you like Bill, you can say that Jobs once said something that was wrong. Great. Next question.

Or you can agree with Jobs but say that the world is still a better place for what Bill has done. Also great, next question.

Either way, why waste time worrying about something a dead man said? Jobs is maggot-food now. Gates is here with us.

Decide for yourself whether you like or dislike Gates. I can easily do so without worrying whether Jobs liked him or not. And I can easily decide to admire what Jobs did or didn’t accomplish without worrying whether he had anything of value to say outside of his field of expertise.

Anyways, like I said, I’m supportive of people admiring what Mr. Gates is doing with his life today. And really, what he did with his life (past tense) is done, finished, no way to unwind it, so why worry about it. All I’m saying is, worrying about how it compares to Jobs or what Jobs said... This is not the best way to think about Mr. Gates, who deserves to be judged for his contribution just the way it is.
There's no point in making comparisons like these. On the other hand it's interesting to compare some of the IT-made billionaires to the traditional billionaires. Bill Gates was not born into money* but ended up drowning in them. He probably sees both the diminishing marginal utility of exorbitant wealth and the tendency of profits to accumulate exponentially. As a nerd, he's probably unable to give into a lavish lifestyle anyway, so he does the best thing of giving back. He can hope to be remembered in history for that, because, after all, how many rich people made history just for being rich?

[*] he wasn't poor, probably more than middle class; in any case, there's no doubt he's self-made
Womens Green Bailey Button Triplet 1873
The change in culture and mindset that WikiLeaks helped bring about will outlast the organisation itself.
additionally, the goal with all development is to only sit down and write code when it's extremely unlikely it's going to change.

To a point. But as a general rule, I don't agree. The goal should be to write code that's both loosely coupled and highly cohesive enough that you can defer as many changes or decisions as possible to the latest point possible. While this might involve spending more time in planning, the process of developing will itself impact the overall design (in most, but not all, cases).
Mobile Security and Lack thereof
Further!

greetABunchOfPeople List<String> people
pers:people
println pers.sayHello
Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything

If Bill never invented anything, I'm not sure Jobs did either. Sure, Jobs dreamt up the iPod and the iPhone, but telling engineers what to do is not the same as inventing.
Sure, but Jobs himself says this and invites comparisons in the very article that this HN post points to:

>“Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology

That does seem like a cheap dig to me against someone that is doing very important work in the third world. I guess Bill Gates gets a bigger thrill saving a hundred thousand of the poorest 10% of the world from suffering with AIDS or dying from malaria or starvation rather than sell an extra ten million phones or tablets to the richest 10% of the world.

http://www.newser.com/story/130728/bill-gates-aids-program-s...

>Am I to think more of him if he gave away more money than Steve Jobs? What a ridiculous notion. If you buy that argument, I ask you to think less of him because he spent fewer of the limited number of hours of his lifetime on philanthropy than some of the people who inherited a fortune and spend their lives on charitable causes. Or less of him because he didn’t minister to the sick and needy in Calcutta’s slums.

I think that when it comes to a human quality like selflessness and empathy there's nothing wrong with thinking more of people like Mother Teresa, and next billionaires who contribute a lot of their money or time to charitable contributions. You don't need to think of less of anyone to respect good qualities in others.

Even Jobs took the help of philanthropic causes like the Hare Rama Hare Krishna temple's free meals to the poor.

From his Standford commencement address:

>It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it.
--
>Stanford Commencement Address, 12 Jun 2005

Anyway my personal theory is that Bill Gates had enough being on top of the world in the late 1990s and early 2000s that me moved on to bigger things, eradicating preventable diseases like malaria/AIDS and helping the poorest of the poor and felt it was a better use of his time and money for a higher ideal in life.

Jobs had to prove himself after coming back to Apple and Apple is just now taking off under his stewardship and he's still too involved in Apple's day to day operations. I definitely believe he would have had the time and inclination to do better for the third world in his later years after leading success to Apple if he had survived his totally unfortunate cancer that cut his life short. He simply didn't have enough time.
this thign for real ? jeez
I am pretty sure they did release the entire video too. And personally I would say the editorialization was mostly harmful to their cause in my case since the real video gave an even stronger picture. Without the cutting it felt much more real and horrible.
No, they said something a bit like that in their PR. They walked away because of cold hard decision making, economic forecasts, risk assessment, Apple demanding too high a price for iPhones, etc, nothing fluffy.
People bash over ie6 just because it was revolutionary at that time and some people are still using it. Yeah, it's a pain to deal with as it's a pain to deal with any old technologies. Try to support Netscape 2.0 for fun.
ShortForm shows the full potential of Google TV’s new channels
ahem, Bill Gates parents probably did not pay for Harvard with fake money
When Microsoft was at its peak, I gather most everyone equated the business to the man, as if it was an extension of himself.
'Dump Your Bank Day' appears to catch on
A bit of confusion: when I said 'fast with the fire extinguisher', I wasn't talking about users but about Apple. Malware is only practical if you can infect hundreds if not thousands of machines. If Apple can effectively kill malware that is discovered, then it ruins the economics behind it. So to apply my somewhat lacking analogy, even though the systems are horribly vulnerable and there is nothing a user can or should do if a fire starts, nobody is out there going around starting fires because they get put out by Apple quickly, with some cost to them and before the fire is useful.
Wigwamm - fixing renting, without killing agents
Apple Security Chief 'retires' after lost iPhone 4S fiasco
AD is much worse than IE6, but unless you're doing ops work that has to deal with it you probably wouldn't realize this.

MS broke or eliminated other authentication modes from Windows, so companies were forced to use AD (with the associated DNS and other infrastructure).

12 years after introduction, there are no stable/viable alternatives. Competition really was exterminated in this case.
I wasn't sure about flatline's post, but I'm sure about yours: You should read the PDF I posted. You certainly aren't disagreeing with me (or Lockheart).
I'm not certain of this, but I don't think Harvard has always cost an arm, a leg, and twelve kidneys.
"the real cause of their death is the loss of their moral credibility because of Julian Assange, his decisions in managing the project and his behavior in his personal life."

Really? Besides allegation I have not seen anything. Looks more like a perfectly oiled (and highly successful) smear campaign against him.
I 'm not sure how any rational account of Gates' legacy can be negative. He helped make computers affordable internationally, paving the way for their explosive mass adoption. Even with internet explorer, it introduced the internet to thousands of people. Computers (windows computers) have increased productivity dramatically since the 80s, so much that the cost of having to modify HTML for IE6 is relatively negligible.
Seriously, I was thinking, WTF? Increased verbosity and then it isn't even a full word like "define", it's verbose and then abbreviated. Are they just trying to make Javathon at any price?
Agreed. As I've written here previously:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2303548

A longer explanation:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2851446
We're doomed.
OBD2 Connector - OBD1 to OBD2 - Wholesale OBD Connector
You'd use an underscore to form a partially applied function:

foo.Sort(x.compare _)

And Scala's getters and setters are essentially equivalent to C#'s properties:

class A {
private var _x = 0
def x = _x
def x_=(value: Int) { _x = value }
}

val a = new A
a.x = 5
println(a.x)
Seriously? How arbitrary is this article. You cannot post ambiguous numbers to a crowd of data-junkies.

Maybe the system is broken and needs fixing? Maybe the endless series of funding model doesn't work? Or maybe the financial markets in general are broken and crowd sourcing via pension schemes self-selecting may be an option once regulators stop forcing money into the public equity and debt markets, which are nothing more than an elaborate closed shop.
At the time of Windows 98/ME, I really hated Bill Gates. We had no viable alternative for an OS and the current state of things wasn't likely to change for a long time. Now over a decade later, Windows is much better, up to a point that I no longer feel ashamed to use it.
Sorry, I don't want to defend what they did with breaking compatibility with any product other than their own (IE, AD, Office, IIS killed Corel, Netscape... and so many other companies). I just don't see AD as a terrible standalone product. But you're right, I don't have a deep understanding of its shortcomings vs, say, OpenLDAP (though I'd love to learn something!).
The difference is Hitler would have to start one hell of a charity to make up for the roughly 50 million soldiers who lost their lives in Europe during World War II, not to mention the 6 million Jewish executed.
If you admire Mr. Gates’s current life choices, so do I, we should probably leave it at that.

If you don’t admire Mr. Jobs in whole or in part, that’s entirely a personal affair, how can I argue with the shape of your soul?

If you want to argue with Mr. Jobs because you disagree with something he said about Mr. Gates, well, you missed your chance. He’s dead.

I am personally far more interested in the things either man said that were insightful or otherwise useful for you and I to move forward and accomplish the things we think are important. I’m not convinced that worrying about their foibles is on the road from where I am today to where I want to be tomorrow, so, I must beg to take your leave.
Jobs is right. Gates gave up and lost interest. He lifted his head up and realized he needn't work ever again and didn't get any satisfaction from working. So why not give away the money you made since you couldn't possibly give enough away in your lifetime. Gates couldn't even make a dent in his lifestyle at the rate he's going.

As for Steve Jobs. He kept his head down and kept working. And when you talk about CEOs you're talking about 24 hours a day working. No time to start funds and foundations.

But where did Job's money go? He apparently lived very simply. Is his family just really filthy rich? It seems odd. Maybe it was a strange thing where he ignored that he had money and didn't want to think about? Maybe he was stockpiling it because he was poor or sick.

Just a bunch of speculation.
Best approach for self-taught developer looking for job?
I have a degree in social sciences and after several years of unfullfilling employment at various jobs I started learning some programming and found I really enjoyed it. I taught myself some basic python and django and have been getting some freelance work to pay the bills however I would much rather get a full time programmer job. I have been applying but have not been having any success. I have a github account and developed a site however I do not seem to be gaining any traction. What technologies/skillset should I focus on to get an entry level job? What is the best way to demonstrate proficiency in a technology? Any help would be much appreciated.
If "IE6 Lameness" was indeed discussed prior to starting work, well that's just bad planning on the clients part. You just want to be sure IE6 support wasn't implied in the contract...
Regardless of his intentions, now that the questions have been asked, are there any answers to them?
Wait, you're saying that because his family couldn't afford a Mac, obviously he was upper class?

I suppose I must be better off than I thought. I can't afford a Ferrari, so I must be doing really well for myself.
The time of sunrise/sunset is dependent on the latitude you're at. For those living closer to the equator the time differences don't have much of an impact.
StarTechConf
StarTechConf is a large conference that brings together worldwide stars in software development and local experts in technologies to talk about HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Ruby, Java, Python, Open Data, and more.

Engineers from Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Mozilla and Adobe, together with other web experts will complete two days of talks and deep working sessions. About 1000 developers, designers, investors and entrepreneurs from around the world will show their demos and exchange some ideas.

It will be two days of intense learning and knowledge sharing which you won't want to miss.

Rey Bango, Charles Nutter, Paul Irish, Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis, Jonathan Snook, Obie Fernández, Greg Rewis, Mark Ramm, Caridy Patiño, Robert Nyman, Mike Hostetler, Tom Preston-Werner