skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Getting accurate device time and time zone
I am building an iOS and blackberry app which needs to accurately capture the time of an event that occurs every 30-45 minutes in the background. I also need to correctly figure out the local time at which this event occurs so i can bucket the event by the correct day, after accounting for day light saving. i do not want to rely on device time to avoid the case in which the user has intentionally/unintentionally set the wrong time on the device.

(a) any suggestions on how i might be able to capture the accurate time when the event occurs? Should i be storing this in UTC or the local time (LT)?
(b) if the time in (a) above is stored in UTC, then i have come across 3 services which i can use to convert from UTC to LT based on the lat-long of the event: (i) geonames.org, (ii) earthtools.org, (iii) askgeo.com. Any experience with the above/pros-cons? Any other recommendations? I found the piece on stackoverflow useful: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/41504/timezone-lookup-from-latitude-longitude

Thanks for the help
N
Is it built on top of an existing "game check-in" service?
The question is whether Stanford dropped out because they weren't interested or because they were about to lose to Cornell.
That's pretty nice. My feedback:

* I use Conkeror (firefox with emacs keybindings), so the Esc key doesn't work right for the app. Probably some way around that, either with a custom page mode, or whatever.

* I'd want the ability to export my checklists.

* The biggest feature I've not been able to find in a checklist app is a) logging of completion, with b) new every X (day, click, week) checklists from a template. The old one should be logged for reference, but considered closed when a new one is created. That way, your (say) morning list is fresh each day, regardless of the state of yesterday's, without any extra step on your part.

I'm not saying you should add these features, I don't know how well they would fit with what you're trying to do, but that's what I'm looking for.
Coding for a cause: Benefits and Pitfalls
Just wondering, are opportunities like this for college grads fairly common? Either way, I love the idea.
I would argue the exact opposite: larger companies tend to have enough resources floating around to be able to perform research. e.g. Bell Labs, PARC, Watson, BBN...

VCs have their place, but they fund ideas with shorter runways. It's the opposite model to research.
SOPA is "weaponized censorship"
This IMO, far and above anything else, was the most important phrase in Anons release against SOPA. I'm asking a serious question here: How do we completely associate the term "weaponized censorship" with SOPA and bills like it. This is the sound-bite that the average person needs to hear to start making the right connections about this bill.

I'm asking for advice and help in changing the dialog to make this the message that those of us against SOPA use to help other people understand.

* Edit: Link to anonymous release:

http://thenextweb.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2011/12/xtjag.png
Unless there's really a huge difference in productivity between each other, I don't think think it's worth paying tens or even hundreds of dollars for each and every license when you're using taxpayer money.

It's probably why they've chosen Linux over Windows, and I assume the security/lack of viruses has something to do with it, too. Buying Macs for the Government because they're pretty would make even less sense.
Yes it is. Go read the list archives.
Could you expand on your reference to Sendgrid? What problem does that solve for your business? I have not experienced a lot of problems in the past with getting emails out to customers, but maybe you are referring to marketing emails? I know you have emphasized the conversion rates from marketing to email lists in the past. Thanks.
Crosswalk, resolve the Web with Java and Factual
Nest thermostat teardown
Here's a more detailed version of the example:

1. Single IRA ABCD worth $4 million dollars
2. IRA ABCD split into 4 1 million dollar IRAs: IRA A, IRA B, IRA C, IRA D

3. Investor converts IRA A, IRA B, IRA C, and IRA D to Roth IRAs in January 2012 (conversion counts again 2012 taxes)

4. Before April 15 2013, investor extends their tax return to October 15 2013

5. In October 2013 investor notices IRA B and IRA C had losses so they decide to recharacaterize their Roth IRA conversion (undo it)

6. Investor files their tax return by October 15 and only pays taxes on the conversion of IRA A and IRA B into Roth IRAs.

I think the "21 months" mentioned in the article is specific to this case. I believe recharacterization of a Roth conversion must occur before filing taxes for the conversion. So if the investor converted their traditional IRAs to Roth IRAs in December 2012, the conversion would count against 2012 taxes and they would still only have until October 15, 2013 (10 months).

There are multiple potential benefits from this, the most obvious one being that if the investor then converted IRA B and IRA C to Roth on October 16, 2013 they would owe less taxes since the values of those accounts has gone down.
The birds are a question of copyright, not trademark. And one doesn't lose that for failing to defend it.
Meh. It's an opt-in system.

If somebody is more concerned with something else there's nobody forcing them to focus on making money.
The "utilitarian" case for halting immigration is obvious to me. But utilitarian arguments are what the pro-immigration people use, too.

I find it interesting that nobody ever talks about national solidarity anymore when discussing immigration. It seems taken for granted that the USA is not a real nation, a real "people". It's just some sort of bazaar for various people with nothing in common to do business, so let in the hordes to do business. No need to worry about literally millions of people coming here without strong loyalties and intent to fully and permanently assimilate.
Google spends way more than $100 million a year (estimates range from $500 million to $2 billion) on just advertising for Chrome.
Most African cultures have not completed the demographic transition. Until that happens somehow, those cultures will exceed the carrying capacity of any environment, and war over inadequate resources. With unlimited immigration, the billion in Africa would continue moving until America became equally inhospitable.

If anything, our population is already too high, verging on disposable "life is cheap" levels. We haven't learned to make a civilization that values individuals and treats them decently, except when they are scarce enough that resources are going underused (making it clear to everyone that we benefit from their presence).
The ctrl+up and down are system wide keyboard shortcuts for lion by default.

Also, I would love vim keybindings.
21st-century publishing builds on a healthy radical tradition
Brick and mortar or online, still basically a loan with a very high interest rate (~36% in this case) while also putting up collateral worth more than the loan.

Only use these services in the most dire of financial circumstances. If you're in a situation where you have to pawn valuables, it may be time to start thinking about getting a normal job to reassess and regroup.
Edit: there appears to be such a project, at least on the crawling side: http://www.commoncrawl.org/

I'd say there's a combination of factors, the first (and most important) being that Google is good enough for most people.

You'd need to coordinate crawling so as not to turn it into a giant DDoS machine; speed will be an issue due to geo distribution, variable hardware and result sets.

Validity and reliability of the data would also be issues, and would probably require several peers to "agree" to consistency, but in a way that does not allow easy gaming of results.

I suppose they're all solvable, though I think there would have to be a powerful incentive to do so. I imagine it'd be quite pricey too for the individual, though perhaps Gabriel Weinberg* could weigh in there.

[*] http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/
Thank you very much for your response. I will ASAP!
"Don't Touch My Junk" bag from Jessica Kagan Cushman
Scribd Protests SOPA By Making A Billion Pages On The Web Disappear
Agreed. My first response was a huge eye roll. Oh how will he ever survive?? This experiment only counts if he's also feeding, clothing, and housing three other people (two of whom will grow out of all their clothes 3 times a year). And if he randomly breaks expensive electronics in his house by squeezing an entire tube of GoGurt on them.
syntactic saccharin?
Hidromasajes - Hidroformas
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Fabrica de Hidromasajes y Bañeras
Cabinas de Ducha
Spa para Jardin
Columnas de Ducha

Hidroformas Hidromasajes Show Room:
Av Pte Perón 7130, Ituzaingo
Acceso Oeste (Colectora Capital) Puente Barcala
Tel: 011 5234 - 8532
Email: contacto@hidroformas.com
Web: http://www.hidroformas.com
> Very true. Our unwillingness to take on more refugees has resulted in thousands of people being tortured, raped and murdered. Are you advocating this policy?

If you advocate a general policy of unselfishness, please send all your money here: http://givewell.org/international/top-charities/AMF#Whatdoyo... Every 2000 dollars donated saves a human life.
New Year's Challenge - Try PaaS, Give to Red Cross, Win iPad(?)
Publish a sample "Hello Java in the Cloud" application on the CloudBees PaaS by January 16th, and we'll enter you to win an iPad 2. Just roll the sample code live (and maybe spice it up a bit), which is really, really easy. For every app created and tweeted under the #CloudBeesJava hashtag, we’ll donate $5 to the International Committee of the Red Cross. And for every RT of your app link with the hashtag #CloudBeesJava, we'll donate an additional $1.
Great idea. It seems that the program is more targeted to people with little programming experience/fresh grads/etc? (but I may be wrong since I skimmed through the initial post).

I was wondering if you have or are planning similar programs/incentives for developers with significant prior experience (eg 5+ years of development) but not in the ruby/rails world who are interested in moving towards ruby/rails development?
they have 20,000+ users http://idonethis.com/jobs/
Ask HN: Best games to play with Family and friends this holiday season?
What are the best games to play with Family and friends this holiday season? Something other than Monopoly.
Right. Seeing something like how to model the denotational semantics of the space of functions between two finite datatypes is easy to do in Haskell and really illuminating.

A long list of unmotivated definitions is not.
Piletas de fibra de vidrio - Skypool
Skypool - Las mejores piletas de fibra de vidrio
"Sorry baby, I won't do it again" is what I always think of when Facebook says something about privacy.
"45K in sales, 25K in profits from selling bingo cards on the Internet?"

The numbers increase each year when I read your new year-in-review, but
the above thought remains the same, or better said, the thought is
always a shock. Patrick, your yearly reports always tell me -- very
clearly -- that there is something about both business and your
customers that I may never comprehend. It's wonderful to see, and I
really appreciate you sharing the information. Thank you.

Edit: (sigh) I quoted the full numbers from the summary, not just the BCC numbers.
Kendall Jenner: the center of attention for the show Kendell's Sweet 16.
According to this wiki site, the iPhone 4 has 326ppi, the Galaxy Nexus 316ppi and the Rezound 342ppi. But I don't think that's the problem.

Also there is something about PenTileTechnology standing there, which the Nexus uses.

So in the end, it seems this is the reason the iPhone 4 produces a better picture than the Nexus.

But I don't know what the HTC problem is. Maybe the display technology?
But a
The 9 Facebook employees with the shortest vanity URLs
Do you have a link for the Anon release? It would be easier for anyone reading this to understand what you're talking about.
Dharmesh Shah actually has covered this topic in much more depth than I could. Basically, for a SaaS business, cost of customer acquisition is going to put you into the red for each customer for the first X amount of time of their customer life. My CoCA for "a small number of self service accounts per time period" is very, very low. My CoCA for "a scalable number of enterprise accounts" would be very, very high. The Take Over The World From Hollowed-Out Volcano Lair plan would likely involve hiring a team of sales reps to get accounts with LTVs in the 6 figure region. I don't have their salaries in my back pocket.

The math for getting to a modest, profitable business with $N0k of monthly revenue, on the other hand, is fairly similar to BCC with radically higher per-customer values. Work on SEO and paid traffic acquisition strategies, convert people in a scalable fashion, business supports approximately 1 employee at full wages per 125 paying accounts, gradually hire out things that don't increase number of accounts added per time period so I can focus on things that do, optionally go after a few low-hanging-fruit enterprise sales.

(n.b. There exist enterprise deals in this space where I could literally just be "The company that provides reminder services for $ONE_PARTICULAR_CUSTOMER" and that would support a very profitable company with a modest number of employees.)
tl;dr: If you think that

var output = Sugarless(input)(
sanitize
, trim
, truncate, "", 200
);

is more readable than

var output = truncate(trim(sanitize(input)), 200)

than you may be interested in Sugarless. Call me old school, but I prefer the latter.
SilasX, it would be great to hear your comments of this bootcamp.

These programs are awesome. I got accepted to devbootcamp but because I just moved out to SF(OCT) I don't have enough funds to do it in Feb-Mar(hopefully this summer). The Hungry Academy is an awesome idea which I would totally do if it wasn't in DC. Why are more companies not doing something similar?
Jeff Bezos Defends the Kindle Fire
Have You Tried This Popular Email Acquisition Trick?
Keeping Pace in a Shifting IT Ops Landscape
> But as I contemplated every purchase I realized that each one would pull me further and further away from the common experience of my fellow human beings. I would be operating in the world of Paris Hilton ("What’s Walmart, do they sell like wall stuff?”) instead of the world of grime, dirt, and soot inhabited by the vast majority of humanity.

As a person living in a very wealthy city in the united states you already operate far removed from the grim, dirt, and soot (not to mention the disease and starvation) inhabited by the rest of humanity.

I suggest joining the peace core.
Kaspersky Internet Security Memory Corruption Vulnerability
I second the idea that this doesn't sound like machine learning. I wouldn't be surprised if there were no machine learning or data mining algorithms involved in Facebook mapping EXIF-embedded geographic coordinates in digital photographs and suggesting locations for an album based on points-of-interest near those coordinates.

Maybe some neat work with GIS enabled this, but I don't see anything that strongly indicates machine learning.
I think he is seriously missing out on one thing both the rich and poor need - "a goal". Without that, people tend to go around in circles.
I wondered if he would be able to disclose his AR numbers considering the types of businesses he could easily end up dealing with, so while I'm sad he can't disclose them, I'm not surprised. Though I would not have guessed one of his reasons would be to take funding.
TIPS MENCARI BACKLINK | CARA CARI BACKLINK | Waloetz Go Blogg
If you've taken the time to actually read the article you would've noticed that he talks about laptops used by EU officials not all laptops in Europe. This aside: Yes, laptops of german officials should use LibreOffice/OpenOffice too.
Yeah, that looks confusing as heck.

Also, if I can't tell the difference between a comma and a period on your _improved language syntax_ homepage, then you're doing something wrong.
I mess with $0 from Perl programs to show the status of batch processes:

http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2011/12/track-app-progress...
Joe Heller

True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter island.
I said, "Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel 'Cach-22'
has earned in its entire history?"
And Joe said, "I've got something he can never have."
And I said, "What on earth could that be, Joe?"
And Joe said, "The knowledge that I've got enough."
Not bad! Rest in peace!

-- Kurt Vonnegut

Patrick, thanks for being an inspiration for this philosophy.
Google maps is immensely helped by it's placement on Google whenever a location is searched, compared to say, sites like MapQuest. This is akin to Microsoft's placement of IE in Windows against Netscape.

You can argue that Google Maps is superior to MapQuest, but back in the day IE was indeed superior to Netscape. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
Yeah, the lighting was what struck me. My kudos to your video team!
Clearing up MP3 licensing confusion for Flash/HTML5 games
Munchkin :)
USPTO: $50K in prizes for better patent-examination software aids
I think you should read the names of posters, but I am more than happy to take the position you stated so we'll call it good.

I think what you are leaving out of your analysis is that, in this scenario, there is no compulsion to help the beggars. Thus, if everyone actually is helping they are doing for their own reasons: that it is good, that it is right, that they want to help. I find it hard to imagine that a significant number doing so would then take advantage of the same system in the manner that you describe.

"But", you say "it is ridiculous to even assume that everyone is going to willfully give as such in the first place." This much is obvious, so trying to comment on the above utopian ideal has its limits. I am inclined to believe, however, that if everyone who actually would be willing to help beggars of their own accord to make things better did help that it is likely that this would only be done in such numbers that the beggars could be helped but not such that it would become such a lucrative market as posters have described.
Basically, I'm the world's most overpaid sysadmin for doing stupid commodity work like making sure postmaster stays up and email gets delivered. Email costs me $80 a month. Stuff lands in inboxes. Time spent worrying about configurations / RBLs / etc: zero.

One might also note that this lets me trivially spin up does-not-share-trust-metrics-with-me-or-my-other-customers system on behalf of a high-volume enterprise client if that were hypothetically a requirement.
What's the point? What's the difference between a stream of messages, and a stream of bytes? Nothing.
In Memory Data Grid Technologies
Google Search Launches New Yorker-esque Cartoon Caption Challenge
I'd be interested in seeing the breakdown of work-related vs non-work related immigrants.

Even so... my point above (about the RAND study) is that objective research shows that Americans are avoiding STEM graduate degrees for rational, market-driven reasons. While it's wonderful that high skill immigrants are innovating, patenting, and starting new firms, that may simply reflect the declining appeal of STEM fields to people who have a wider choice of career paths (ie., if we make it easier for smart immigrants to come here as STEM workers than as lawyers, it's not surprising that immigrants show a higher activity in STEM than in law).

The US may be locking itself into a vicious cycle - the appeal of STEM careers declines, so Americans begin to choose other fields. This creates a shortage, which leads to an increased call for more visas. This provides a stopgap measure that prevents the market correction that would might make STEM more appealing (relative to law, medicine, etc), causing even more Americans (well, anyone with choice) to avoid the field, which leads to calls for even more visas...

In many ways, I hate making this argument, because on a personal (moral) level, I feel immensely welcoming to immigrants, especially well educated immigrants who make a wonderful contribution. And as a matter of policy, yeah, it'd be nuts to refuse entry to such a remarkably productive workforce - the US is in trouble economically, and the fact that so many top people still want to come here is one of our best cards! But at the same time, when I set aside my emotions and take a cold, rational look at this, I do think that the emphasis on STEM immigration may very well be deterring young Americans (or, again, anyone here with the ability to choose a profession over STEM) from entering the field. And I believe that this could be dangerous to the US in the long term - sure, it's stupid to turn away our top graduate students, but shouldn't we see it as a crisis that so few of our graduate students in STEM fields are coming up through the ranks of our own educational system?

I hope you can tell I feel a lot of ambivalence about this. I don't ask people to agree with me, I just ask that people recognize that this issue is complex, and absolutely is not a "no-brainer"
More like 1.2 billion, or are you including China?
Kids build great things.
How do you think he would react if you hired an operations manager or director, who was responsible for tasking him with work?

This would free your time up to grow profits, help keep him productive, and also protect the friendship by having someone else evaluate him.
IndexTank is now open source
I agree, I always end up hitting my 4GB limit with a VM open and Chrome with 12 tabs. Upgrading will be the next thing that I ask from the boss.
WIPO's Proposed Treaty a Copyright Troll's Dream-come-true
A slightly more sophisticated approach would be to use the all /other/ data they have on her to predict what hospital she is likely to choose. Why stop with just her hometown?
Or that species of insect only lives in Costa Rica.

Kidding! If it was that good, I really would be shocked.