skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Using the grammatically incorrect "their" in favour of randomly picking a gender pronoun

Talk to Jane Austin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Bernard Shaw, Lewis Carrol, The King James Bible, and Shakespeare if someone convinced you "They" isn't a valid singular pronoun for indeterminate sex. It is. Some stupid Latin-based grammar school teachers do not get to re-design our language by looking at Latin (where the odd anti-They crowd came from) and making us say He/She everywhere or sound like sexist assholes.

"They" is a valid third person singular, just like "you" is a valid second person singular.
To save HNers some time, I'd guess a lot of us will be in the 'software professional' occupation category.
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Lol thanks, although it's not that really an 'off the charts' type of salary. I think making this clearer would be much more helpful :)

Edit: One more little snag: I encountered 'Percentile: 73th' - just need to change the suffix cases :)
Depends. unixtime is for seconds, if you want to record 2 things that happen ¼ second apart, they might have the same value.

Also during leapseconds, unix time does funny things, like 2 second long 'seconds'. or it goes backwards to reset etc.
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Thanks, was looking for "programmer", "developer", "web developer". No go on all of them so I came back to the comments to see what everyone else had put!
I found this article extremely thought provoking.

The rhetoric is the design community has been content first design, and such a bold choice in CSS authoring would really support this idea.

I would love to try this out in a real project.
I've been running tomato for probably 4 years and never had it hang (on 3 wrt54g routers I'll be replacing soon)
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From a country with no software patents? IANAL either but I don't see how this could be stopped, especially in case of an app whose development had been funded via donations and which is distributed free of charge.
Get ready for another VRNG Pop
"The keyboard can measure the exact force exerted" We can finally have games which understand urgency :)
I'm planning on lowering it to about 0.01. but I don't want it to be spammed so to speak with miniature donations.
So this means that each core is running its own version of Red Hat or some other Linux? Does that mean that I can install my own software on those ah, tiny machines?

Someone may probably get mad or think I am stupid for asking this, but can I install node.js on each core?
You do realize that opinion pieces don't necessarily follow the traditional lede-plus-nut-graf formula, right? And that some pieces aren't meant to be skimmed?

> Furthermore, it's a magazine FOR MEN so most of the words were Anglo-Saxon and avoid the errors that Orwell rails against in "Politics and the English Language."

I don't even know what you're trying to say here. I mean, I can guess, but it makes me queasy.
I have the same opinion as many people in this thread:

The interface is clear, the results well presented, the process self-explaining. Great work.

As a criticism would be needed to balance all that positiveness, maybe the background is not up to the rest of the interface.
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> So here's a question for the peanut gallery: has there ever been a large-scale public investment program into science and engineering (that ISN'T based on destroying things in new and exciting ways) that has not proved to be a good investment in the long run?

Does the superconducting super collider fulfill your criterias (let's forget for a minute that it is about destroying particles in new and exciting ways) ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
AirBnB hit 10 million nights booked
Taxing external effects like pollution does nothing to ensure the taxes drive benefit toward the technology (renewables) the taxes were created to spur.

If you go looking for technology breakthrough by tax, you'll find nothing unless a particular technology breakthrough is able to be produced in said time and place. Which is why the approach doesn't inherently work, nothing guarantees a meaningful tech breakthrough is waiting in the wings, it might take 50 years for all you know.

On the negative effect side, by attaching the new pollution taxes, you're removing private capital that could have been put toward innovation.

Then to top it off, deciding how to measure and tax pollution and what should be or should not be defined as pollution, is rife with incredible disagreement (and that is not going to change). The games politicians start playing when you open that can of worms....

It's not in any way inherently a better way to go.
Seems like the tl;dr is: 50+ x86 cores with RAM and CPU soldered to PCIe boards.

In other words, a mix of CPU and GPU. A standard architecture, as opposed to GPU private architectures, many cores, and faster memory pipelines.

Now, where did I put that functional programming book..
Hmm, with bitcoin, how is this a problem?
Difficult question and even more so when you take a look at the Asse II desaster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schacht_Asse_II
I've always thought that the GNU date command captured this confusion well.

On Linux, if you run `info date` and go to "input date formats":

Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months,
are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make
coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had
some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to
make it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden
routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done
better than handing down our present system. It is like a set of
trapezoidal building blocks, with no vertical or horizontal
surfaces, like a language in which the simplest thought demands
ornate constructions, useless particles and lengthy
circumlocutions. Unlike the more successful patterns of language
and science, which enable us to face experience boldly or at least
level-headedly, our system of temporal calculation silently and
persistently encourages our terror of time.

... It is as though architects had to measure length in feet,
width in meters and height in ells; as though basic instruction
manuals demanded a knowledge of five different languages. It is
no wonder then that we often look into our own immediate past or
future, last Tuesday or a week from Sunday, with feelings of
helpless confusion. ...

-- Robert Grudin, `Time and the Art of Living'.
Fab.com acquires UK startup Llustre
Details are pretty sparse right now... anyone seen a price?
If you haven't, you should read James Hamilton's paper on "On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services".

http://static.usenix.org/event/lisa07/tech/full_papers/hamil...
What do you mean by calling shenanigans? Blaming the PR people?

The thing is, the guys didn't get the same treatment... but my point was simply that the PR people were exposed to a certain pattern (someone is a girl => they aren't that experienced playing shoot em up video games) and it was repeatedly reinforced through subtle social feedback, that expecting them to just be good at the game was not producing great results for them or for your brand. And since the PR person wants to do their job and give a good impression of the game, they would just assume this girl was like the others, and offer to show her the best parts about the demo, so that she can write about them.
I love the app and recommended in on HN earlier this week. It is great for moving things into Xcode projects and Skype, two of my most common, screen hogging destinations.

I'd promote it then in European business users forums, and to iOS developers, as both of those people use the app a lot.
This article was posted in response to the outage in April 2011, but still the learnings are worth repeating.
Beauty != profit. If it makes people productive enough to offset the additional purchase cost (and then some), then I'm sure businesses would consider purchasing prettier devices.
@jerguismi Fair Point. I will consider removing it. Thanks for the Feedback.
Probably not, since it's not hosted at DocumentCloud.
While these are all valid issues, and good to be aware of, don't rush out and fix all your "broken" code. Plus, don't climb up on a pedestal and lecture your fellow developers on their "falsehoods" about time. Use your experience to know when exactness is important and when it's not.
But if they leave out alt="", then they won't validate. What are they supposed to do, force the user to enter text? Then you'll end up with alt="sldfjsjf".
Europe also brought us the air travel tax, which does target externalities and seems close to sparking a trade war because it covers all flights in the EU, not all EU-based airlines. It's difficult to do.
It's probably going to be a small RTOS in each core

Or like it's done in PS3, where you have one core scheduling the others

"but can I install node.js on each core?" maybe, but that's really not the idea
To everybody who thinks energy right now is too expensive.

A couple of friends and I built a bike generator station for five bikes. We are using DC-Motors as dynamos and lead batterys for buffering the output.

Five bikers in total can generate between 220W to 250W for an extended time. Let assume they bike at 200W for five hours. They then will have generated one kilowatthour of electricity, which costs 25ct. I'm pretty sure they will be happy with their five cent per person when they get off the bikes after five hours.

Energy is dirt cheap.
Interesting, thanks. A reference from that page - http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/may/10/crisis-... - suggests:

One thing that killed the SSC was an undeserved reputation for over-spending. There was even nonsense in the press about spending on potted plants for the corridors of the administration building. Projected costs did increase, but the main reason was that, year by year, Congress never supplied sufficient funds to keep to the planned rate of spending. This stretched out the time and hence the cost to complete the project. Even so, the SSC met all technical challenges, and could have been completed for about what has been spent on the LHC, and completed a decade earlier.

Leading one to believe that it was actually a good project that was stiffed by a congress in search of tax cuts. Who knows whether that's true, of course.
This could help the dire state of driving games on the PC.
To play a driving game properly you need at least a joypad (or ideally a dedicated wheel). Of course most people's PCs only have a keyboard and a mouse.

This is because you need to be able to give gradual controls for things like steering and throttle.
A keyboard that solves this problem would be great.
Especially trying to be efficient with the bag of hurt that's x86

Now, x86 instructions are very efficient in some ways, but for raw performance, you're wasting about 30% of your silicon dealing with them
Who cares about the games, think of all the pointy haired bosses who can impart the necessary urgency and importance in their Outlook emails and Powerpoint spreadsheets!
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"You can use all the applications that you're familiar with." (19:58)

Hm. Are applications sandboxed? That is, do I have to worry about running antivirus software on the device?
Appreciate the feedback. I'd definitely like to work on the background. The wood texture is a bit of a cop out really.
In the case of the US, a shockingly massive benefit. We import between $350b and $500b per year worth of petroleum products (depending on the price of oil).
I'm not really sure what you are talking about here but, uh, thanks? I think?
What screen resolution are you using right now?
It a interesting topic for all web developers / designers. Please give out your vote!
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Make it clear, then. Put "Date:" next to it, and y m d above it in small type.
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Wait until RFID prices drop under $0.50 then do it combined with a POS solution.
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It's not needed in WinRT mode, because WinRT apps can be installed from marketplace. You might wanna install AV for desktop mode though (in case of Win8Pro version).
It's been a while since this was done, but as well as the AQM and Byte Queue Limit support, a lot of work was done on minimising unaligned access traps (http://www.bufferbloat.net/issues/360). The Linux networking stack assumes that IP packets are word-aligned, but Ethernet headers are usually 14 bytes. The specific Atheros chipset used in the WNDR3700/WNDR3800 does not pad Ethernet packets and does not support misaligned DMA, and so a lot of misaligned access traps were triggered. Fixing that resulted in a 15% increase in speed for IPv4, and a doubling in speed for IPv6 (https://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2012-April...). As far as I can see, those patches did not get accepted into upstream OpenWRT, since these changes really should be made more generic and possibly pushed upstream. The patches would also hurt performance slightly in the case of properly-aligned packets.
Nice, I wish one will do the same with twitter-bootstrap.

JQuery+Backbone+TwitterBootstrap = Fun+Joy.
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Force exertion can really be another neat signal, We can probably make the confirmation boxes go away if delete is pressed with a lot of force.

This is really something which we expect out of natural input devices. I can't count the instances where I used to press the keys harder in fighting games just to hit the other person harder.
Would be nice to mention the whole effort, not only Turing. Like the fact that Poles were reading Enigma encrypted messages before the WW2, and send all information they aquired to France and Great Brittain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma#Pol...

I mean - Turing was brilliant, but why everybody only tell the story from the middle ?
Really helpful for web designers and developers
I'm also terrible at doing this, too. I think you're right though - it is easier to do it for someone else! But when you're in a confrontational situation that you haven't sought (unlike a salary negotiation, which you have probably sought), it's more about the "seat of your pants" type stuff, in which I tend to try to avoid escalation and/or the confrontation itself. Of course it's always easy to come up with "well I should have said x" or "I should have kicked him in the y" after it's over.
Say, they do distribute it this way and are found guilty of patent infringement. Would they then need to pay for each copy downloaded? I have no idea how this works, it would be really helpful if somebody with some knowledge could chime in.
That's really interesting. It sounds similar to the shu-ha-ri model of learning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shu_ha_ri
The difference between worker bees and cells in a body is that the cells in a body (call them "somatic cells") are 100% genetically identical to the cells that actually do the animal's reproduction - i.e. the cells that produce sperm or eggs. There's an automatic alignment of interests.

Now, in bee colonies there is not this perfect alignment between worker and queen, since the workers are only the queen's daughters, related to her by 50%. There's the potential for various types of conflict, between worker and queen, or between worker and worker...

For example, in many species the workers can in fact reproduce, favouring their own interests, but there's conflict between the workers to disallow this. [1] Naturally this conflict does have costs for the colony as a whole.

[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v342/n6251/abs/342796a0...
Or that Thread.sleep(x) is anywhere near x.
I don't think it's reasonable to count incidental benefits from projects, such as the WWW from CERN. The same basic problem of sharing information between scientists would still have existed without CERN, and who's to say it or something even better, with fewer of HTTP/HTML's limitations wouldn't have been developed if TBL had been working on a different project?

The space race argument is another old sore, it turns out many of the discoveries ascribed to it were actually developed independently, but then were used by NASA who ended up getting the credit. Teflon is often cited, but was actually discovered in 1938 and patented in 1945.

Yes a lot of great technologies were developed for Apollo and used in other areas, but many or perhaps all of them would have been developed eventually anyway.
Here's an article describing hands-on use: http://money.cnn.com/2012/06/18/technology/microsoft-surface...

FTFA:

Microsoft on Monday unveiled one of the most imaginative and intelligently designed PCs the world has ever seen. Or: Microsoft unveiled yet another iPad copycat, only with fewer apps and a lower screen resolution.

Which one is it? It's impossible to know. That's because it's not clear yet what Surface, Microsoft's self-designed tablet PC, truly wants to be.

This is problematic from a marketing and a product perspective. If you can't project the value of the device even when someone's using it, then it's hard to generate desire for it, and that spells trouble.
One thing I noticed here.
I'd actually like to have on of these but I'm not too psyched about running Windows on it.

Is it possible that MS is in fact better at hardware than they are at software? MS mice have certainly been popular over the years, also see the Xbox 360 control pad which beats any other pad I have ever used.
It is actually totally different.

In the past the governments and the companies gave a shit about public opinion. Government money was used to research and build the nuclear industry. The electricity companies were huge monopolies. Currently we have four huge electricity producers which nicely divide the market into four regions. Competition? Zero. Government support? Max.
That brought us huge coal power plants whic brought a lot of environmental problems and a fleet of very expensive nuclear power plants.

Keep in mind that Germany is a relatively small country with little resources (mainly coal) and more than 80 million people.

Several decades ago the green movement was started to be a lobby against this block of politics and industry.

They stopped the expansion of nuclear power and the build up of even more powerful monopolies. They also stopped much of the coal power plants from polluting the country.

The voters brought the green party into power. First they were in regional parliaments, then in the Bundestag and eventually they were even part of the Bundesregierung (Schroeder/Fischer). The latest coup was that they lead the government in one of the Bundesländer where actually is one of the hearts of the German industry.

This happened because the voter placed them there. Over time also the conservative, right wing party, the CDU and its sister CSU, learned to support environmental policies. Part of their conservative ideology is the love to the country and to preserve its nature ('Wertkondervative'). Chancellor Merkel herself has a Dr. in Quantum Chemistry and she was responsible some years ago for the ministry which is concerned with environment and reactor safety. She is an expert on these topics.

What the voter now wants is to put more market, more competition into the energy landscape with a preference for renewable energy. You can see who is the opposition: the four huge electicity producers.

But now you can see the results. Renewable energy is up from 6% in 2000 to now over 20% share in electricity production.

But more important half of the new energy projects is privately owned or locally owned. We are bringing democracy and the local market to the energy system.

Before the grid was tightly controlled and only the big companies had access to it.

Now everyone can demand that his energy will be fed into the grid.

We tax energy use very high. This gives an added incentive to use less electricity and investing in modern technology pays back - if it uses less energy.

The 'Energiewende' is not a government project. It's the opposite. It took several decades of hard work of many citizens, a new party, ... to actually get the governments to support it.

It means lots of research, new industries, new companies, ... some will survive, some won't.

Much of the investment into new energy infrastructure is necessary anyway - because some of the infrastrucute is getting old - we direct more investments into renewable energy, than we had done in the past.
There's probably an advantage to having a company set up already. With that taken care of, there's less to deal with if you decide a side project is ready to launch for real.

And, perhaps, if you set the company up first, you won't rush it and possibly screw something up, in the hurry to get your side project on the market.

Of course, the visa thing would be an obstacle to this.
Richard Stallman talking in the UK
36b. Britain uses GMT. Not true, we use BST (British Summer Time) during the summer.
Friendfeed web technology?
What are the existing technologies in friendfeed?
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Sure, it's the right thing to do, that doesn't make it easy. And saying "well, you should have done this" when it's quite difficult to do is moving the responsibility for how the situation progressed to the victim.

The fact that these situations occur frequently in tech circles is indicative that things still need to be done about embedding the issues into the general consciousness of people in tech circles. If it were a one-off situation, and everyone were horrified by it, it would be easier to say "well, it was just that one guy". But the fact that it still happens frequently, and reading the comments here and elsewhere that shift the blame of the outcome to the victim... makes me think that we haven't quite got to that stage yet. Sadly.
You may want to try out Edubuntu [1], which contains many open source educational applications. You can try it online, and download it if you like it. I recommend installing it in a VM. If you are already running Linux, you can simply install the packages that you want [2].

[1] http://www.edubuntu.org/

[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Edubuntu/AppGuide
Really - wtf. that list is so full of .. something

1-7 : try going to school.

8-18 : if server time is not absolute, shoot yourself in the face, client time should never matter

19 : doesn't matter

20 : epoch64bit will be there everywhere before 2020, if you run unupdated 20 year old OS's you deserve bugs anyway.

21-25 : Expect bugs in every new shiny toy, like virt

26-27 : The smallest unit of time is one clock cycle, the rest doesn't exist

27-28 : see 8-18

29 : timestamps should never be anything else than integers, the only acceptable formats are 32/64bit epoch (+ 32/64bit subsecond), and handling data without knowing what it is ... is dumb, so of course it fails

30-31 : If you like mixing data, I can give you a binary string to mix with your 32bit epochs

32 : A timestamp with sufficient precision (1cycle) based on UTC taken after a sync with a time server, is unique per processor / core / thread - any non-uniqueness of a timestamp is directly related to an implementation mistake - it is indeed possible to have perfectly unique timestamps (not 32bit epoch of course)

33 : whatever

34 : noone cares about human stuff.

Note: Unsurprisingly the author is a webdev and not a programmer.