skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 99.9% of which suck goats though.

The past decade has seen immense improvements, though. JodaTime is pretty neat and JSR-310 seems to be an improvement on that (haven't used it though).

> And then, there's the problem of correctly syncing time display with internal representation [..] leap second is provided with 6 months of advance, DST/GST changes may be provided with far less (to say nothing of timezone changes).

Since the time zone issue is the larger one anyway, this provides a solid (copyright trolling aside) framework for distributing this information: a database distributed and maintained as part of the OS.

> Well this is a human time mapping [..] contextual mappings

I agree, but it's the context that's hard. You need some way for your abstraction to capture the fact that a "minute" can sometime consist of 61 seconds. Consider an application that monitors the number of foos per minute where the developer perfectly reasonable uses the "minute" abstraction. This might then exhibit faulty behaviour when there's a leap second inserted - suddenly there's 1/60th more foos reported in a minute.

Depending on the application, that might be statistically insignificant and can safely be ignored, or it might be a red flag that triggers someones pager to go off (or worse).
I agree, there was a whole lot of "citation needed" in that article. The underlying assumption with that statement, is that women do not work best in rigid structure. Now we have 2 pieces of really dubious information. There's no data for either.

And wasn't 9-5 a banker thing? There are a lot of professions that don't work 9-5 that were established a long time ago, like farming. They don't start at 9am, they start when it's light out so they can stop when it gets hot and resume later.

And the 2 weeks notice? That's because it's reasonable to find a McD's employee in 2 weeks after they post a "Help Wanted" sign. I hear tech employees can and will give longer notice in order to ease transitions.
Is 9 - 5 (9-17 for me) common?

Are lunch and breaks included in that?

9 - 5 is 8 hours and a normal workday is 8 hours?
Anandtech: Samsung Galaxy Nexus & Ice Cream Sandwich Review
Same as why everyone is using QWERTY keyboard when there's no scientific evidence that this particular keyboard setup is king.

The benefit of everyone using Qwerty, though, is apparent.

So same with 9am starts. So that the team is together at around the same time, for example. This can be overcome with proper communication channels as in a remote worker setup, but that's a special case.

Sometimes the effects can justify the means.
Can anyone back up his comment about recycling with any indisputable or at least convincing evidence/statistics?

"Even if you, your neighbors, and everyone you've ever met recycled everything and reduced your waste output to zero, it wouldn't even make an observable impact on overall waste production in the world. Household waste and garden residue account for less than 3% of all waste produced in the US. That's less than the average statistical margin of error, and most people don't even come close to producing zero waste."

I've always suspected that this is correct, but I'd like to be able to back that up with some evidence.
Switching silicon chips on and off using light
Interesting article - I agree with a lot of what you say.

>> YCombinator has made it a successful business model to take founders and virtually catapult them far away from their idea reach, and succeed anyway through a combination of exceptional founder selection and world-class mentoring

Actually, I think what Y Combinator is very good at is recruiting decent hackers. They're then encouraged to build prototypes very quickly within what you call their "idea reach" and talk to users to iterate & improve. In fact, almost all the YC companies that spring to mind are very much within the "idea reach" of the founders. Both the "success stories" (Airbnb, Dropbox, Heroku) and the more recent ones - (Codecademy, Parse, Mongo HQ, Verbling etc etc) all fit this mold.

Non-technical founders are very occasionally accepted, but almost always required to find a technical co-founder to extend their idea reach to including something software-focussed.
Download Portable TechSmith SnagIt v10.0.2.21 | Andra Little Notes
Jon Stewart on SOPA
Top 25 Online Project Management Software, Compared (Infographic)
I never said anything about giving up, my strategy for improving my life is not to change the government. It's largely pointless.
Another case of author trying to gain article agreement through use of perceived truths.

Usually means the article is link bait and not based on facts throughout. It's Forbes, so the new content strategy they have in place would align with this conclusion.
I love the concept, but the tutorial somewhat puts me off (admission: I only read the first third).

I mean, using an "element from a finite set" to index a vector? Back home, we use natural numbers for that. Idris also has natural numbers, but somehow we still have to, essentially, use the "finite set of values we don't care about, but that we can order if we want to since, after all, the set has a finite number of elements" concept for what's essentially an array lookup.

Why can't there be a type of "natural numbers under N"?

Or am I all misunderstanding things, and is the "finite set" exactly that type, just explained in a very not straight forward way?

Also, impressively, the author claims it has C-style speed. Does that mean that looking up a value in a vector by means of an element in a finite set is actually translated to a single *(vect+index)? (in C-terms)
Visual Studio Achievements, now a reality
Regardless of what you think of him and his articles this one simply deserves to be here. It makes a lot of sense and IMO he hit the nail on the head with what he is proposing.

It's not productive to discriminate against someone simply because he is known to publish controversial stuff.

ps: I submitted this and I'm not a reddit user ;)
Idea Dump 5
S.Korea approves sale of first allogenic stem cell drug
Yesterday's blackout was simply incredible. When I woke up and saw all of the sites that were protesting I got chills down my spine.
someone has been there and done that and can offer better advice?

He has 60 months of savings. Take a vacation until you feel better...
I think the counter-argument is the United State's resistance to metric, despite the obvious superiority to the system.
School Textbooks Change Forever Starting Today: Wikitextbooks
thanks. Retweets is just one rule. Pretty much like google uses back links as an indicator, but has 200-300 other rules, we use retweets as an indicator but have 100+ rules probably. or around. These rules are spread across metadata analysis (language based, response type, location based filtering etc), statistical analysis(no of retweets, recency based scoring etc) and linguistic/textual analysis (syntactical construction, use of spammy words, characters etc)
Maddox is a polemicist. He actively enjoys and cultivates such a persona and to what end? It seems to me his goal is to play devil's advocate as a kind of link bait. What I've seen of his work is pointedly provocative in an intentionally non-PC way. However I don't feel that simply being clever, and holding points of view that are seemingly diametrically opposed to the mainstream, is actually an effective way to effect change.

For instance, in this particular article, Maddox claims that we need a "spark to light the lazy tinder". There is here an implicated false dichotomy where either some draconian legislation passes, e.g. SOPA, and everyone "wakes up" or no other efforts will prove progressive. I don't buy it. In fact, I don't buy any argument that makes the claim that due to the current state of political economy we are unable to see the kinds of changes we want without total and complete revolution. I feel it's absurd to dismiss efforts such as yesterday's which net results that include some 13 new senators opposing the bills.
There's no real hostility between Hollywood the industry and the Republicans, just Hollywood the media spectacle. High-profile actors tend to be more liberal, but the Hollywood executives (the ones who actually "run" it) are typically moderate business-conservative type people, the same as most other places in big business. In fact they literally are the same people due to CEO churn, and definitely from the same social circles; e.g. NBC Universal's CEO was formerly Comcast's CEO, and is a personal friend of JPMorgan Chase's CEO.

The RIAA types are even more welcome in the Republican Party traditionally, due in part to Nashville as you mentioned, and in part due to the significant influence of first Sonny Bono and now his widow Mary in Congress.

If this is a regression to the mean, when was the mean ever in effect? In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan maintained strong ties with Hollywood (even with people like Lew Wasserman who were active in the Democratic Party) and promoted their interests; in the 1990s, the GOP led the charge for the DMCA and Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act. Arguably there was strong hostility in the 1950s-70s, when Joseph McCarthy thought Hollywood was full of Communists, and Nixon complained about it being controlled by Jewish Democrats, but that was a while ago, and for reasons (paranoia about Jews and Communists) that hopefully aren't going to recur.
Experts agree with this.

See http://www.tomscott.com/warnings/
I liked this article. A lot of what I see encouraged by incubators and investors is "swing for the fences" type startups where they try to expand your sights to aim for as broad and as lucrative a market as possible. These are a horrible idea for most first time founders, especially those attempting to escape the shackles of a corporate job. Founders that set their sights lower and have a crystal clear plan of how to achieve profitability are much more likely to succeed.
>>This is a brilliant idea, and after you explore it (using, for example, the lean methods which only evolved 10 years later, because you're a visionary), you decide that this is worth pursuing, it has a lot of market potential.

I do hope that was tongue in cheek... Those "lean methods" have been around forever; What's happened in the last 10 years is that they've been packaged and sold.
World’s Largest Garment Made From Golden Spider Silk Goes on Display
... Unless raising awareness in one problem makes people start giving a shit, in which case caring about orphaned baby seals in Chile, does help recycling efforts in Omaha.
I love that you have a problem with people calling copyright infringement "stealing", but no qualms at all about calling it "piracy" instead, which is an entirely different affair.

Certainly the last time I downloaded a TV program I did using BitTorrent, rather than boarding the content producer's boat and taking it with force.
> Increase the average income of residents of your community.

Let's aim for raising the median income instead
Be Consistent
Because you can't really own an idea 100%. That's why "intellectual property" is a misnomer, and it's not actual property. And that's why there are time limits for patents and there "used to be" time limits for copyright, too, which now are pretty much gone, thanks to Disney and others.
I've seen some estimates saying that the total percentage of waste coming from households can be as lows as 2%, depending on how you count. For example, this cites an EPA study: http://www.zerowasteamerica.org/Statistics.htm

The same page mentions a higher bound of 20%, but in any case it seems reasonably well established that the vast majority of the waste produced (at least in the US) comes from the manufacturing/industrial process itself, not from households.

A book that goes into quite a bit of detail about this is "Gone tomorrow" by Heather Rogers.
In Norway the standard hours are 8-16 (8am/4pm) which includes half an hour lunch. I believe that in Sweden it's 8-17 (8 hours work, 1 hour lunch).

It's also normal to have three months of notice (and it's not optional for the worker). It's not uncommon that they'll let you leave with a shorter notice if you ask for it, unless they really need you during that time (for e.g. training new staff).
It's also not just about internal communication it's about other companies and partners you deal with being available at the same time. While email can allow people to offset communication due to its asynchronous nature, a lot of businesses are still run primarily over the phone.

If you're a service provider, there's a big advantage in being available at the same times as your clients.
> Who decided 14 days is the proper amount of annual vacation time?

Worth noting that this is a fairly uniquely American standard and would be illegal in most of Europe.
A Note on Bravery
If my only options for what to do with my digital works are to keep them to myself, or release them unhindered into the public domain, then in some cases I would not release at all.

I do not want music I have composed to be used in risqué films; I do not want software that I released under the GPL to be assimilated into proprietary products; etc. If by releasing my work to the public I relinquish all control, then I can do nothing to enforce my wishes.

Is it better for the public that I do not release anything that I am not willing to let be used in any fashion whatsoever? Or is it better that I do release, but assert copyright restrictions on how the public may use my works (which they wouldn't have at all if I kept them to myself)?
عروض كارفور السعوديه المميزة جميع منتجات العرض
Never once had the same problem as you. Actually this is the first I hear of anyone using the offline activation methods. Yeah 54 digit codes suck. But 54 digits ain't 100 digits. And it would not justify, for me, going pirate. Unless you're sitting there installing stuff all day long every day.
I highly doute it. Im from Switzerland and we do alot of recycling. In our 3 person household we probebly reduce garbage produced by more then 50%. Switzerland is small but if everybody did this spezially ameria it would make much more then a statisticall margin error.

Of all the daily garbage we seperate out:
paper
carton
organic stuff (compost)
batteries
cans
Plastic bottle
glas

Edit: Most buissnesses do this too.
And yes, about geo location, that is built in. But if you match neither the city nor the country, then it takes you to a global default.
Stealing a cake is definitely theft, then.
That is indeed exactly what Fin is. The first n natural numbers is a finite set of n elements after all. I'll elaborate a bit in the tutorial. I guess the trouble with writing a tutorial when you're completely familiar with a language is that it's hard to know what will and won't make sense!

There'd also be nothing wrong to use a natural number, along with a proof that it's bounded by the length, to index the vector.

I don't think I've claimed it has C-style speed anywhere. At least, not in general - we have observed it in some cases though, and it is a goal to make it as efficient as possible. Dependent types plus partial evaluation gives you some nice opportunities for optimisation. Early days yet...
While "bug-free" laws may be impossible to write, I do not excuse legislation that is this sloppy. Turar (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3482567) was able to write it as such.

And the idea that I have to retain a lawyer to check for precedent on the terms of service of a mass-consumer-product is simply absurd, and if that is the world in which we live I will take whatever humble measures I can to change it as the opportunities may arise.
From what you say, you seem to hint that we will never be able to produce a human-perfect unsupervised learning rule that can handle all modalities we perceive and make inferences. As far as classical machine learning is concerned, many learning rules are domain specific and training/learning heuristics changes with modalities. However, we are seeing an emergence of neuroscience informed machine learning, which is slowly uncovering importance of vital structure within the brain such as hierarchies within the visual cortex and its actual impact on learning. As far as consciousness is concerned, it is again tied with the problem of solving learning.
AMD replaces spinning drives with WhipTail solid state arrays
"The same could be said about DMCA, when it was passing. It just made everyone used to even more abuse."

Bingo.

Stopping legislation before it gets passed is the way to go. It's extremely difficult to get laws rescinded or overridden.

And what would make anyone think a few websites getting taken down by the Feds would cause some sort of massive street protest? Our government has done some awful things in the last ten years involving war, torture and civil liberties and most people couldn't care less. Even when there were massive protests over Iraq, they were ignored.
Vancouver before Montreal? Does not make any sense :-)
Actually this is something that I've ran into with my girlfriend.
We both work in multinationals that have offices close to each other so we leave and come together.

Her boss is in another country and doesn't enforce a starting hour for her schedule. But I'm having trouble convincing her to start earlier (I want 8 AM) in order to leave at 5 PM. Her reason: she doesn't want that the other girls in her department (Recruitment) mistakenly consider her a slacker behind her back. She thinks that sometime down the road, when asked, somebody will answer that she doesn't work hard enough because she's leaving earlier than 6 PM without mentioning that she's coming in earlier.
This is not really circular at all, merely self-referential; the Constitution also provides a process for it to be amended, so any and all of it's provisions could be repealed or rewritten without having to get a foreign government involved in the equation at all.

Of course, all of the parties involved (President, Senators, etc.) have sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution.
Grooveshark is hunting an anonymous commenter
Secunia sets six-month deadline for vulnerability disclosures
I prefer WikiDroyd (https://market.android.com/details?id=com.osa.android.wikidr...) for one reason: you can search for articles offline. You download Wikipedia to your device (or the top 10% of Wikipedia - I've never needed the rest surprisingly).

The official app wins in terms of presentation though.
This is the best piece of writing about SOPA so far.
Perhaps this is more of an indictment on the obscene volumes of waste produced by the US (and others).
No--really sloppy article. I'm not sure when and how the "9 to 5" phrase entered the lexicon but, wherever I've worked, the "official" workday has always been 8-5 or 8:30-5 with an hour or half-hour respectively for lunch.
97% of waste is industrial? That's pretty shocking to me. I wonder what part of this waste is from production of our cherished technological gadgets and computer equipment, replacing the gadgets of yester-year. Which are generally still working fine, but are replaced by something incrementally better...
The reason I said it's one is from the perspective that the software is a combination of spiking potentials and chemical reactions. If you haven't read "On Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins, you should. Though his results/theory may not even be close to the real explanation behind our brain, it sets a good stage for the topic.
I haven't read the tutorial at all, but in dependently typed languages the type (Fin N) is exactly the type of "natural numbers under N", and I expect that is what Edwin is using in the tutorial.

As for compiling to that pointer access: from what I know of Idris, yes it will. Since you know statically that the array access cannot be out of bounds, you can omit the usual out-of-bounds checks.
When there is less noise on Facebook, Twitter, email and blogs?
Any one out side the US down load that to watch it?
On morality: given how widespread the piracy is, we probably shouldn't assert that the moral side of the things is obvious here.

Regarding the law, that's one way to look at that. Another way is that the role of copyright is about to change, and disobeying the law en masse might be one way to help that change.

(Disclaimer: I'm not much of a pirate myself, I have a US iTunes Store account despite living in Russia just to be able to buy music legally. Also I'm earning money by writing software. But being able to copyright music and software is not a given, it's just how things work today, and as the world changes, this concept will also evolve.)
That's true of every issue that has succeeded without the backing of a powerful lobby. The same thing can happen here.
Montreal is up in the next release.
I agree. To counter his point, we laid low for the Patriot Act and the masses didn't suddenly awaken.
Necessary but not sufficient right? I alluded to the same point in my comment above, successful entrepreneurs get shit done and don't make excuses (ie. if something is a true problem then the find another angle).

However there's a significant selection bias at work in believe that tenacity always wins. In reality there are no doubt many people who simply do not have what it takes. Granted most of them do quit rather than spending an entire life trying, but I'm sure they're out there, you just haven't heard of them.
I wish, I work for the government on contract by day, which by definition is insane.
At Artemy Lebedevs Design Studio work starts at noon.
I'm sort of looking for statistics rather than anecdotes. As far as I can see, the figures for America look reasonably accurate. No idea about Switzerland though...
I first came across xmission.com back in 2004. I was immediately struck by his writing style. I always aspire to be as fearless and concise as Maddox is. Just look at his range of knowledge, he is able to write well on a variety of topics. (Applause)
Congrats EdgeCase!
If the game starts right away, maybe it's the best way to guarantee all images are loaded.
Actually, internally it was 'copied' across a network from one computer to another. This is indisputable. Computers do this well so you're correct that it's not just a 'nice' imitation, it's a 'perfect' imitation.

Now we've corrected your choice of words from 'took' to 'copied', can you please make your argument again but this time using the correct word?

I just wished to point out that you were deluding yourself with semantics.

I'm not for or against piracy.

On a personal level, I am for being able to pirate other people's work, but against my own work being pirated. That's not hypocritical: I value increasing my capital.

But on a non-personal level, my belief is that a file is the medium of ideas and that when this is copied it (a) strengthens the ideas by increasing their cheap supply in a culture, and that (b) due to the increased supply the demand at high price points has the potential to shift down, while the demand at low price points has the potential to shift up because of increased cultural interest.
"There really is no difference between successful entrepreneurs and unsuccessful ones except for the decision to do it."

Huh? Both already decided to 'do it', and the there's still a distinction which you're making yourself in the wording - "successful" and "unsuccessful". There's some other difference besides deciding to "do it". I've known a number of unsuccessful entrepreneurs who "did it", but didn't succeed. Some of that non-success was related to them directly, some was timing, some was poor idea, etc. But they still 'did it' and weren't successful.
In Denmark it's 9-17 with 30 minutes break. Also three months notice is the norm.