skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm the PM for a horoscopes app, and I much prefer to use relative dates (e.g. yesterday, today, tomorrow) instead of absolute ones (e.g. wednesday, thursday, friday).

The problem is that the app serves a worldwide audience, and I don't always know the locale of the user. By showing relative dates, everyone feels happy that they are seeing today's horoscope today. With absolute dates I'd get a lot complaints that they were seeing yesterday's horoscope for instance.
"More than one year ago" - Actual Facebook date.

What does this mean? Is this picture older or newer than the other picture, also labeled "More than one year ago"?
At this stage, I feel like the only way Apple can have another '...and one more thing' reveal that makes us go "wow!" is if they have something software related that they've kept under wraps.

A complete rethink of iTunes would be such a thing.
Amazon prepares to collect Calif. sales tax
But we also thought this was true before the iPod, and before the iPhone, and before the iPad . . .
$1200 is pretty sweet compared to $1800, but I am already concerned that someone making copies is already behind the curve compared to the original inventor in terms of the innovation I appreciate.

Cf. cheap PCs to the ones you specify in your business.

Consider which manufacturer is likely to come out with the next best model, and will upgrades be easily available or supported for your model?
I already wonder if a MakerBot will destroy itself soon after I build it, they all look a bit on the flimsy side.

I would probably be persuaded by better customer service, better support forums, and the knowledge that one provides jobs in the US would all work to overcome that price differential.

But it is a hell of a differential.
Please announce the jubilee ahead of time so I can stop being fiscally responsible.
But the stupidity is that you are taking away something for no good reason. You already know the date of the pin. You figure it's important to show this, but then you make it completely useless instead of providing the already useful piece of information you actually had.
I'm afraid not: Chrome21/Win7
Pile of poo breaks JSBin
I used to hang out at Dean's forum some 8 years ago. My cousin was doing a lot of drawing at the time, and he had a bunch of printouts of Dean's drawings, so that's how I learned about him. He had an animated movie project going on at one time, based on the same theme as the game, but I don't know if he's doing anything with that right now.
Depends where you're displaying it. There's a pretty big clutter-and-space consideration for a time stamp that's 3x longer.
I don't think they care about screenshots specifically, but they certainly do intend Twitter.com/.app to be the primary or only method that tweets are displayed, ever. To this end, relative dates are great.

You do have a good point that touches on the dilemma of the internet archivist, but this is certainly a problem easier to solve than the ones faced by people attempting to preserve software or video games, for example.
I'm an actual user who doesn't really care about machine-readable timestamps and I would prefer absolute dates. The gmail solution in post works for me too.
Ding ding ding. Machine readable and user-friendly.

If you're making your users' experience worse out of a fear of breaking the relative value of screenshots you might need to re-examine your priorities.
It is legal and right to clone it, manufacture it and sell it.
However, I do see a moral issue in asking MakerBot community to donate a lot of money for this.
Js-cloud-computing - SETIhome via website.
<time> is HTML5, which not everyone is on.
Udacity to Offer 4 New Courses
-Entrepreneurship: The Lean LaunchPad, How to Build a Startup (EP245)

-Making Math Matter: Differential Equations in Action (CS222)

-Software Debugging: Automating the Boring Tasks (CS259)

-Intro to Theoretical Computer Science: Dealing with Challenging Problems (CS313)
Is it because those services publish a CRUD-like APIs?
I don't think the similarity to the stock Android keyboard is coincidental. The authors of this previously made Blindtype which was purchased by Google.
I think the best reminder here is that it's tempting to "Show HN" your project's App Store homepage. But like his Bullseye Factory submission, you're going to get a couple comments at best.

Write about your hacking experiences, what you learned, and how others can avoid your mistakes and you'll have much more luck.
For desktop, probably only one, but who uses "desktop computers" any more?

Now that your phone, your music player, your computer, your notebook, your tablet, your game console(s), your television and your video playback device all need an OS, I'm guessing the number of operating systems people use on a daily basis is higher than you think.
The problem you are describing isn't a problem with relative dates. It is simply imprecision. You can make relative dates that are precise (e.g. 783 days and 4 hours ago), and you can make absolute dates that are imprecise (e.g. 2010).
Steve Blank's Lean Launchpad coming to Udacity
If you drop $600 off the price, many customers would see that this is better for their situation even with worse quality and no support.

The world is not really changed by innovative, excellent things - the world is changed only when these things are made cheaply and accessible to the masses.
Wha? The UI needs to keep processing events to remain responsive. If you have a long-running (relatively speaking, say 10 milliseconds) process like uncompressing an image, you don't want your UI to lag for that long.

You could have the image decompressor look up every millisecond or so to see if there are any UI events to process, but that leads to the sort of spaghetti code that multithreading/multitasking was built to address.
Additionally, the more Makerbots/Makerbot-clones consumers have, the larger your potential market for future versions. Even if the Tangibots are equal to the Makerbots in terms of build quality, the Makerbot people presumably have a leg up when it comes to inventing the successor to both. If more people out there are using these style 3d printers than before, then the number of people who might buy the next should be larger.
The White House just open sourced their first Github repo
I had to look this up, so in case anyone else might need to: Michael Pollan said: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Pollan
A better product does not have to be on the native platform. There is financial risk involved in hiring a iOS/Android professional.
If you're looking at an email and it says "2 hours ago," how are you supposed to know if it's rounding the number or giving you an exact value? If it's currently 11:15am, was the email sent before or after your 9:00am phone call?

I actually find this pretty convenient. I don't remember days numbers. 5 days ago gives me a perspective. If I want the exact time, I'll just unfold the email tab. (I'm talking about the Gmail example he picked)
I'd say the same apply as for any other business. If something already exists then they could sue you to stop distributing your game and/or pay for royalties. So before starting the full development you should make sure that your version of the game is not a copy of an existing one. And changing one minor rule (going to both sides) or replacing terms like "hotel" becoming "skyscrappers" will look like complete copy.
Interesting times! It seems to be increasingly popular that developers are trying to raise money so they can start open source projects.

It's impossible to say how this trend will work long term but I suspect a lot of the open source software I love today wouldn't exist if it had relied upon raising $50k up front.. not only because of the likelihood of raising the cash but because the lesser extrinsic motivation suggests, perhaps, that there was more intrinsic motivation for developing and releasing those projects?

I think it's great if proven projects take donations or sponsorship to kick things up another notch or to support full time developers, but merely to start a project? I'm on the fence about that, and will be interested to see how it plays out as a model.
That's a good example about why there's no one-size-fits-all approach to displaying dates and/or date intervals. I care what day of the week I fly. I care if someone commented on my picture 2 minutes or two hours ago. I don't care about the local timezone of someone else's server.
There's a great jQuery plugin that we use at LayerVault to handle this called timeago: http://timeago.yarp.com/

If you're taking screenshots of things, that's your own prerogative.
Are they really at War?
Is it ironic that this blog post only includes the date when it was published, not the time? I wonder if it was before or after that 9am email.
I'll jump on this too; thanks a lot for this post because one line really changed my outlook on something that I am working on:

"Everyone knows that the last 20% takes 80% of the effort."

I guess I'm outside of "everyone" because that line is really going to make a difference for me. :)

Reading HN has changed my life as well - college student in the Appalachians and I get so little exposure to startup culture in my business education. I can sit in class all day and feel uninspired about corporate strategy, but seeing so many bootstrapped ventures and learning about how to make it all work is what is driving me these days.

As cliche as it may be, I'm developing a real passion for the startup culture and some of the companies I spend all day reading about. Between the app on my iPhone and browsing online, reading HN articles (and perhaps more importantly, the comments) is contributing to the best hours of learning I get all day.

Six months ago, I didn't know the first thing about entrepreneurship, startups, or bootstrapping a venture. Now, I'll be Show HN'ing my first project within a few weeks' time. Thanks so much to everyone here.
Gits - alternate commits when pair programming
Are you stating that contrary to Facebook's experience, web applications provide a superior user experience on mobile devices?
> The decision to manufacture in China has also raised eyebrows

I bet that pretty much everyone who has done so publicly has done so via a computer or other electronic device that is substantially or completely manufactured in China or at least is full of parts that were so manufactured.
Yea, with IE6, MS finally began focusing on complying with standards instead of adding vendor-specific features.
Given the current architecture, if UIWebkitView within an application can execute data, then the entire application can execute data.

So you could have a buffer overrun anywhere in the app. For example, if they are silly, you could go to the preferences for Facebook and enter a very, very, very long user name, overrun the name buffer, and have executable code.

That's not an exploit of UIWebkitView, it's an exploit of giving the application the permission it needs to have UIWebkitView use a JIT compiler for JS.
The Seductive Foolishness of a Facebook Phone
This has been a little crazy. Way more traffic than we anticipated!

We are working on loading our reserve profiles now!
Generate your changelogs with Git log
I'm afraid HN isn't very notable for good UX in general.
The WaSP was the one who was responsible for petitioning Netscape to cancel Mariner, leaving Netscape with nothing to compete with IE5.
Map of local financial impacts of Obama/Romney tax plans in the US
The arduino seems popular in prototyping and customer validation of commercial products(example: the fitbit), i think some low/medium volume products are using the arduino hw/sw(but you might not know it's there-why should the business owner tell you?), and for high volume products, standard development methods give cheaper products.
http://pastebin.com/Ld7FbEp8
Like to chat? PlanGrid is looking for a part-time support person.
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Freelancers and liability insurance
Hi, I've been freelancing for about a month and I'm thinking about getting liability insurance.

I'm wondering what freelancers here do about liability insurance. Also, is there some standard language for contracts that limits liability? An example contract would be great. Thanks.
Well, better now than never :)
He must hate the dates on Hacker News.
Top 50 Productivity Blogs of 2012 - Entrepreneur Blog
The "2012 days ago" is just a sub-optimal implementation of relative dates. It could be expressed as the more comprehensible but less precise "over 5 years ago" with the actual date either nearby or in the title=""
I doubt they're trying to audit behaviour, you can always write an app in Lua with an interpreter and they would have a hard time "auditing" the app statically.

The propblem is that if you allow executable memory you open aup a lot of exploit vectors. Now, that's true of Mobile Safari as well, but they trust their own team more than they trust you, and they have one app to watch instead of 100,000, and if an exploit os found they can push out a fix immediately, whereas 3rd party apps have a tortuous process for pushing out bug fixes.

Remember, it's part of their value proposition that apps from the app store appear to be relatively safe in comparison to the clusterfuck that is downloading random desktop apps, especially on Windows.
I'd have to second the poor documentation is the biggest pain.

Another would be not providing sample code in whatever particular language you might be working in.

In terms of programming against an API, it's having to worry about handling the situations that occur when an API call fails, for example retrying later. You can't assume that the API will always be available when talking about web service type API's.
As I was thinking - 'local' in values and principles, it doesn't have to mean 'local' in geography. :)
Jim Dalrymple hinted that there will be two separate events, so take that as you will (if you know him or are familiar with his infamous "Yep", then you should pretty much consider two separate events a guarantee.)
I like using http://timeago.yarp.com/ with the HTML5 time tag.
Ah, the study I was talking about was covering car commuting, only. Public transit has a different cost curve, clearly - one more related to how long you spend waiting than how long you spend riding.
The authors do not say that more people are buying cars and houses, but argue that there is greater "housing consumption"...

See table 1 & 2. Housing consumption is measured in terms of square footage, number of rooms, fraction of homes owning a car, and other similar objective properties.

I didn't claim housing was "more affordable" (whatever that means), I claimed people have more of it.
multi-threading is a must for every iOS app. If you are building a fully single threaded iOS you are going to have a bad time.
You're talking about abstraction in general and I'm talking about a specific implementation.
If you are worried about not knowing when the screenshot was taken couldn't you include in the actual file name the date the screenshot was taken in a "machine readable" format?
> If individuals are willing to accept tradeoffs where they have a certain probability of winding up less well off, versus a certain probability of becoming very wealthy, who is to tell them which choice they should make?

The problem is that most individuals have grossly incorrect beliefs when it comes to the probability of them becoming successful.
HN changed my life too! I went from soul-crushing job writing patents for Amazon to ruby hacker in NYC. [1] I'm a self-taught coder hacking RoR for Pivotal Labs. I used to hate my job, now I can't wait to go to work!

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3754917
yeah you'd think with the VC investment they'd be going for that
We just pushed the update. Thank you!
He explicitly takes the time to discuss correlation vs causation. But thanks! I'll take a look.
Send a usual absolute time stamp and let the client compute the relative time, hoping it is accurate.
The Software Engineering of Mathematica
If you're parsing from a real time feed, then that's fair enough. But if not $now isn't appropriate.
A little depressing, but generally true.
+1 -- he was my role model for the longest time.
What's surprising is that mainstream/orthodox economists have not really veered from the neoclassical position that private debt levels are essentially irrelevant from a macro perspective, on the basis that someone's debt is another person's asset and therefore any accumulation of debt is offset by an equal accumulation of savings supplying that debt.

But it's entirely obvious that the household debt overhang from the financial crisis is entirely what is holding demand/consumption back. We have had a historic buildup in HHold leverage for the last 30 years as consumers used debt as a substitute for stagnant wages, and after the housing crisis all this debt is no longer underpinned by adequate collateral.

Head in the sand.
Okay, but how is Feb 19, 2007 relevant information to you? If you were trying to schedule something based on your HN Join date, then i suppose you want the actual date. In the general case though, the date on your profile is only used by other members (or maybe moderators) to get a rough idea of how long you've been a member for. I can look at your profile, see 2012 days, and understand immediately that you've been an HN member for a long time. I've learned everything i need to know, and i've learned it quicker than i would have by reading a full date and subtracting it from today's date.

sometimes you need a relative date. sometimes you need an absolute date. saying one is always bad and the other is always good is stupid, it all depends on the context.
pretty much every iOS app uses multi-threading (if they don't they should). GDC makes it pretty easy to implement, its defiantly not over-engineering. I highly recommend any new iOS programer to learn GDC when building their first app.
Facebook app lost 100% of their iOS dev team when joe hewitt stopped developing for them. They decided to let interns in charge of native libraries like Three20 (which has become a mess since then) and let web people in charge. It took them to hire someone from Apple to get their things together and do something valid on that platform.
What's crazy is that nobody around them was able to tell them that mobile constraints makes it a entirely different think than the web. You just need to code one "hello world" with one button using phonegap to realize that uiwebview isn't anywhere close to native sdk.
On the other side,the fact that Apple decided not to update UIWebView to nitro was probably a big matter for them...
"Unknown or expired link"
I've read McDougall, it's what started me on veganism after 20 years of vegetarianism. And I have a copy of the book you mentioned.
They average 500% growth. If revenue also scales like that then they are well on their way to profitability.
>Actually taking the Kin to product launch instead of killing it off internally and refocusing efforts at a time when Windows Mobile was losing market share.

The Kin is a case study in everything that's wrong with Microsoft as a company.

In-fighting and turf wars, discarding products they bought up (e.g., Danger) to shoehorn in Microsoft technologies while failing to leverage their own technologies in places where they'd make sense, lack of a cohesive corporate vision, the list goes on.

Ars had a pretty decent post-mortem of the project.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/07/a-post...
> Twitter has since stopped using relative dates on their tweet pages, and instead just shows the full date now.

This part made me feel the argument is suffering from confirmation bias. Twitter has only removed the relative date from the page where a tweet is accessed directly, not in the timeline where the relative timestamp is absolutely relevant.
If you buy a Makerbot what do you get other than the device itself? There needs to be some sort of value-add when you sell opensource products otherwise anyone with a better production infrastructure can undercut you.
Just because you disagree with his opinion doesn't mean he is wrong.
Not really. The water company is raising prices on everyone because we're not using as much, but they still have same overhead. If the whole community hadn't conserved, we'd have gotten more water for the same or lower cost.
Never read hacker news before dinner
PhotonVPS - $7.67/mo OVZ 512M 20G 1000G
> “I’m disappointed that you’ve chose to knock off/copy a respected industry leader, and undercutting them, therefore starting a race to the bottom.”

I sincerely hope we do get a "race to the bottom" on 3d printer prices, the same way we've had one for microprocessors and bandwidth.

We all benefit immensely from that kind of competition.
I've never seen the name "Obama" and "licensed under GPL v2 or later" in the same document before -- cool.
I'm well aware that in app purchases exist. And absolutely nothing is stopping you from offering payments from a website in a UIWebView.

So not really sure what your point is ?
App.net terms of service
Until fast-charge batteries are a reality (such as the carbon-laced Li-ion discussed previously here), people very much will mind their car being at 20% charge. That means they don't get to drive until the next day, except 5-7pm is key commuting time, when they need to drive now.
The China Study is supposed to have taken a more comprehensive view. I've not read any criticism of it (which is why I asked for some). But he cites more than one study that demonstrated the ability to "turn on and off" cancer growth in rats exposed to a particular carcinogen by raising and lowering their animal protein intake. That seems like pretty damning evidence against that particular protein.

(Edit: Assuming of course, said studies are accurately being described to me. I haven't read the actual data.)