skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My experience: after about a month, they finally called and took my information over the phone. I then waited the 2 weeks for the information to "propagate" to Apple, tried to sign up, but it said something was off. It turns out they forgot to put in our website address. So I tried to sign up for their iUpdate account (which allows modification of your data), and apparently I missed one of the questions, so now I can't update it online, and the only choice is to mail in this paper form along with like 3 paper forms of identification, then wait for a few weeks for them to give me credentials to iUpdate, then make the single-field change, then wait another 2 weeks for it to propagate to Apple. I called to ask "since you were able to take all my other information over the phone, can you please just make this minor modification?" The answer was always "no." D&B is indubitably the worst "service" I have EVER worked with!
My girlfriend got a netbook for $199 in 2009. Where's the ultrabook in that price range?
I'm currently introducing my 10 year old niece to programming using ComputerCraft, a single player mod that introduces several programmable objects in to the Minecraft world. Installing is a bit of an exercise, because it requires Forge, but it is otherwise worth it. I recommend using MCPatcher to load Forge, then just drop the ComputerCraft zip in to the /mods folder inside your Minecraft data folder.

http://www.computercraft.info
Show HN: TypeScript to Google Closure
Instead of a measurement like 7/16 inches, we'd use something like say 11.1 millimetres (or a little more than a centimetre in everyday use)...

Maybe it's just that I'm so used to decimal measurements, but whenever I see plans that use fractions of inches, it looks confusing and imprecise... Coming from a decimal background, I don't really feel like using a fraction is ever better than using a smaller unit unless you're making an estimate (ie, "about half a kilometre").
Watch out for your proof. Q is constructed as a field with + and x only. The availability of the inverse operator is not well documented :-D
GMail is pretty infested with ads.
Our Interface
Huh. I wonder if it could handle ^Snarky\s(ass)?\s(Know\sIt\sall)?comment
For what I know the nautical mile change due to your position in the Earth...
More on the background behind this project: http://blog.bolinfest.com/2013/01/generating-google-closure-...
Your foot is much closer to a foot than to a meter. Your cup is more cup-sized than liter-sized. An average guy's thumb is about an inch across, not a centimeter. Having sizes of things that are more common and relateable is important.
> We Europeans have switched from our country's respective currency to the Euro not to please us personally but for the economic good of the whole European Union.

The behind-the-scenes motivation wasn't about the common good, it was about the French trying to gain formal influence on monetary policy. The Germans had to agree in exchange for the French consent to German reunification. (Before the Euro, the rest of Europe was more or less reduced to copying German monetary policy, or face devaluations.)
Actually, I think this is a great example of how you can get ahead of yourself regulating - I'm assuming you think the lesson should be that all gas stations should have generators? In some communities the gas station probably is a life and death concern, but in most it isn't - so requiring all gas station owners to invest in and maintain a generator is an expense (passed on to consumers, like all regulation) with a very low return. And we haven't even considered unintended consequences: When gas stations are critical infrastructure, having a generator in your garage (but no fuel stored) makes more sense, so you risk overloading the gasoline supply by shifting all energy consumption to it, thus causing it to become unavailable anyway.

Also, I'm not sure why making Jacques' gas station the preferred supplier would be a meaningful expected market response. He already stated that they turned over a month's fuel in two days, that should have made him a pretty good profit.
Nothing he describes there is terribly remarkable - all those ideas were widespread. His description lacks the key innovation that made Bitcoin better than its prececessors, which is that it doesn't rely on trusted centralized timestamping servers.
> Would your time really be better spent finding the most efficient sorting algorithm?

Probably not, but it is my nature to work with problems like these. Not necessarily to find best algorithms, but to come up with the most efficient implementation of the said algorithm. I don't mind counting cycles, going deep into memory cache models and pipeline depth and calculating branch probabilites to balance and research different implementation details. I would love that kind of stuff.

On the other hand, I am not a programmer because I wan't to create things. Creating something "cool" is irrelevant for me. It does not drive me. I am a programmer because I want to do creative problem solving. I want to come up with superior solutions to problems which require deep understanding of how the system and the environment works and operates. This, of course goes against how the progress happens - to ease things, to make everyone able to make everything.
Hmm, besides using pandoc for conversion, how does this break down against Sphinx (http://sphinx-doc.org)?
The author is clearly a good communicator, even then he can be frustrated by coworkers who dismiss what he has to say because of the stereotype that engineers are lousy communicators.
The 1930s railroad map is about the same as what you'd experience doing a road or rail trip today. It's air travel that has improved since then. Concerning air travel, the situation there regarding travel time hasn't improved much in the last 40 years or so ever since commercial jet service first appeared.

Costs have of course come way down.
CTIA and MobileCon merging in 2014, forming 'super mobile show'
It's frustrating that the same people who push weird systems (ounces, the old money in UK) instead of metric units and decimal money are comfortable doing all kinds of mental arithmetic, but freeze when as soon as you involve a decimal point.

People who have no trouble with the concept of "half of a third for four people taken out of this bag of potatoes" get stuck on "0.25".

For all the people who answered my post - I agree that metric and SI are the sensible way forward. I'm kind of relieved that some sections of US[1] industry are choosing to ignore the international market or to lumber themselves with extra costs for both systems.

[1] Because I'm not in the US; I'm European and I want our industry to do well.
What will it take for email, text messages, iMessages, etc. to all converge into one?
Olark - Palo Alto, CA; Ann Arbor, MI; remote ok - Full Time

### Who is Olark?

Simply, we're the people that put live chat on thousands of websites across the Internet.

More than that, we're helping businesses scale their personal touch to the Internet, as the lines between customer discovery, sales, and support blur.

### Who are we looking for? (details on http://www.olark.com/jobs)

- Ruby on Rails Engineer / Architect: you've worked before on an at-scale Rails app and love making it easier for our customers to use our app and make it easier for your fellow developers to contribute improvements.

- Graphic Designer: you'd like to apply your understanding of both functionality and aesthetic to improve our website and chat window.

- Marketing Communications: you'll help us educate the world about how the meaning of customer service is changing

### What's our culture like?

- Our all-hands retreat in August combined team outings (winery tours / biking / canoeing) with talking about the future of interacting with customers and how we were going to change it.

- Engaging with our customers! At conferences, answering e-mailed questions, and (of course) chatting with them on Olark. Interacting with our customers has repeatedly gave us insights that couldn't have come from simply writing code.

- We have project-based teams that shift (roughly) quarterly. We want to give our teams enough time to make sizable changes, but experience has taught us that iterations need an end date so we can collect feedback from real-world usage.

### How to apply

For more details and to contact us, check out http://www.olark.com/jobs
I'm very sorry you had trouble with yours.

I have a Cr-48, and the Camera has worked fine for me for doing Google Hangouts. I also can use my laptop to do Chrome Remote Desktop to another machine - but I cannot use Chrome Remote Desktop to drive the Chromebook.
They have those standards so that you know how much alcohol you are drinking. 1 pint 5% (0,5L)= ~20g alcohol = 2 glasses of anything else.

Wine 12% = 0,1L

Whiskey 40% = 0,035L

One glass is about 10g alcohol.
(Posted only in liters so it easy on people who are not used to it.)
People care for various temperatures:

- weather (Celcius has the advantage that just from the temperature you know if there will be snow and ice/will snow melt, or no) And you won't know the difference of 1 C anyway, so no point in having so small degrees.

- temperature of human body (are you sick or not - it's 36.6 C for healthy human, 40 C for dangerous temperature) - here Fahrenheit has slight advantage, because human body temperatures are near 100 F, IIUC.

- temperature for cooking (water boils in 100 C, you make tea with 80 C, most cakes bake at 220 C, etc) I think Fahrenheit is worse there.

- temperature for science/engineering (Kelvin rules here, but Celcius is just Kelvin - 273.15, so conversion is much easier than Fahrenheit, differences are same in K and C).
We need a demo/example :)
As much as I'm pleased* to see this, I don't think "without a major advertising campaign" is fair. There are no end of Google ads in the Underground at the moment, featuring Chromebooks front and centre, and I assume that's not the only place.

*disclaimer: I work for Google, so I may not be totally unbiased on this point.
Ah, Yes! Sorry, that translation was literal :)
Great post. I am currently doing something very similar and documenting the process :) I'd recommend chef librarian over soloist though.
Hmm, so what you need is a credit card with an extremely short billing cycle (i.e. settled daily using your debit card) and limited to a single "class" of expenses (car rental). I've spend some time thinking how a kind of Twilio for credit cards would work - an API to generate an instant card number with the exact terms you need. The main use case I considered was a card for online shopping that would only be good for use with one single merchant - then I can shop without worrying what will happen if they haven't secured their database correctly.
Derek Sivers has another good article on this: http://sivers.org/qlq

I think the general 10,000 hours theory suggests that for the first ~2,000 hours of a new skill, all practice is deep practice (exact # of hours depends on the skill, of course.) That means that for the first few years, quantity of practice is more important than anything else. You'll eventually hit a plateau and need to practice in a different way to continue improving, but that will only ever apply to a few skills throughout your lifetime.
Does Luck Matter More Than Skill?
It's far from crap, it's my standard day to day laptop now, has been since November.

I still have my lenovo laptop for when I need it, but that's pretty rare
Windows laptops have many different brands and models, and even Macbooks have been around long enough that there's different types, but there's basically just 2 Chromebooks.
This means they might only be a tiny fraction of PC sales, but still out come as the #1 specific product.
Using MagicLauncher[1] makes it much easier.

1: http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/939149-launcher-magic-la...
Dude, Where's My Flying Car?
You failed to mention that the iOS Safari market share is the same as Android's, which makes sense considering they have about equal installed bases right now (although the Android one is growing much quicker).
Shorten excessive copyright terms
Podcast WinMacSofts, épisode 8
I create applications from scratch and use them as portfolio material. For instance I have a custom iOS app that shows my experience working with video, images, audio, shaders, face detection, HLS, networking, etc. I show this to them when we meet and if they want to see the code I'll invite them to my git repo and we can go over it together.
Right, it's certainly exacerbated by the condition. I mentioned the unpleasantness of some of the drugs to help one understand why a person would suddenly stop taking them under a "supposedly rational" state.
He's not running his dev environment in a VM. Just automating the setup of an OS X box for development.

It's worth noting that most of these recipes can be easily modified for use on Ubuntu.
Nice slides. You should check out https://github.com/twitter/algebird - we've implemented a number of streaming algorithms (HyperLogLog, Count Min Sketch, along with stuff like minhash and bloom filters) in Scala as Monoid typeclasses. Love to hear your thoughts or get your contributions.
How to find and do work you love
Data quality crucial to email marketing success
Functional Programming in the Small
Form Rendering Sucks, Don't You Agree?
Bukkit plugins require running a separate server and giving the kids access to the server. Doesn't seem as practical as a client mod if you're trying to make it kid friendly.
>EC2 is great for "quick and dirty" temporary solutions, batch jobs or handling peaks that last less than about 6-8 hours a day, and I use it now and again for that reason. But the moment your instances are up more than about 8 hours a day, and you have more than a few of them, it will quickly start costing you more than the alternatives.

I think Adrian Cockcroft & Jedberg may disagree with this statement.

Netflix has made a point (and a business model) of pushing all their infrastructure costs for their streaming service to AWS for many reasons.

They clearly have a HUGE amount of traffic across their service, and they are very successful in keeping a lean team on staff that has a focused skillset while not needing all the IT ops folks on staff. The HW costs to support their service would be very large as well as the distribution of that HW across the [nation|globe] to support their userbase.

Also, I do not think you're properly accounting for all the design and support considerations.

In a large infrastructure implementation you're going to need quite a few ops specialties: (in smaller orgs, these roles can be collapsed, in very large orgs they are discreet. Your ops costs get high fast in large infrastructure deployments)

Architect

Network

Server

Support (deployment, ops, maintenance etc..)

With the need for 24/7/365 ops coverage - especially if you have multiple regions/internationally deployed infrastructure... you can see how this can get expensive.

So, I think there are a few sweet spots that can be looked at.

Finally, there is also the hybrid model, where you have your own base-line infrastructure which scales out to AWS to support larger load (CDN model)
I well realize that now. Many of us worked with metric in the sciences for our university career, as well as prior high/middle/ele school teachings of metrication. Some of the lesser known units of imperial measure throw us off.

I asked him to please explain this unfamiliar unit to us. He was rather surprised we hadn't heard of it prior. One very good thing about metric is that it is precise in the definitions of the units. Hence the distinction between kg and N.

Added note: even though pound may be technically a force measurement, it at first confused the hell out of me how a pascal( N/m^2) could be converted to lbs/in^2. I did wonder what exactly a pound was, but soon didn't really care. After all, we didn't really use imperial much, with exception of general "consumer measurements".
Not everyone has a say in the environment they use at work, and some people prefer using OSX for certain things. OSX has some decent tools for actually doing the coding in, for example.

Regarding your point about just using Linux. Even if I did run Linux as my desktop machine, I'd still use VMs and Vagrant because it allows me to have an (almost) identical setup to production. It's also much easier to spin up virtual machines running different version of software using this method. Just change one line of config, wait two minutes to spin up and you're good to go. You also don't have all kinds of crap from other projects polluting your environment too.
The website afritech.org looks like a ripoff of hacker news as well.
"that was effectively stymied by the US auto industry."

Do you have a source for that? Not implying its false.

Ironically if you've worked on an auto built from the 90's (maybe even 80's (man I'm old)) onward, you'll find a confusing mix of standard and metric fasteners often within the same components - doors, etc.
Some of your examples are good, but many aren't based in reality for the US consumer. A lot of consumer goods are manufactured overseas, then imported to the US. The manufacturers of these goods rarely create custom versions that rely on inch-based hardware. The ISO nomenclature isn't very common, but 16mm wrenches are very common. Pretty much any US resident who wants to work on their car or assemble products without using the supplied stamped wrenches has to have both imperial and and metric tools. I've got a whole tool chest full of that mix in wrenches, sockets, and hex drivers.

When it comes to highways and tape measures, you're right though. A tape measure is most commonly used in carpentry, which is almost entirely imperial. Our cars all have speedometers that display MPH in large type, so I don't see that changing without some mandate.
My Most Successful Tips For Waking Up In The Morning
That's not true. The author is setting up his development environment on the host machine (OSX)
I'm running ubuntu on my ARM Chromebook; it runs well. (Or at lesst, better than an atom will)
[\s\S]*

Doesn't this match every possible character, 0 to infinity times?
A few months ago my friend saw an ad in his university newspaper for a hackathon that was scheduled to start the next day. I happened to not have anything scheduled that weekend, and he asked me if I could team up with him to participate.

The thing was, he lives in California, and I live in Washington. He found one last remaining seat on the last flight headed out that night and bought a ticket for me. By 9 PM, I was stepping off an airplane roughly 1600 miles from home. When I woke up that morning, I had no idea I'd sleep on a couch in a dorm room at SJSU.

We seriously live in the future.
Lessons in Narcissism
A small anecdote. My father was very accurate and fast to measure distance in meters using his steps. Very useful in construction. You would not use centimeters in this use case.
> ultrabooks are essentially a new name for netbooks.

The raison d'être of netbooks was not portability, it was the ridiculously low price.

> I don't think the netbook has failed; it's just been subsumed

No. Netbooks were new, trendy, selling well and overall successful. Everybody and their dog had them, bought them and would have kept buying replacements if they werent panically removed from the market and replaced with subnotebooks/ultrabooks at 2-4 times the initial netbook price.
I'm currently writing a book. I think it'll take a while til it's online, but I've often thought about a boilerplate where I can just start to write a book and don't have to care about all the other formats.

So, no.. unfortunately there's no demo :( Just try it out :)
> I've been a zipcar user for several years. I hope they have some more affordable rates coming up after this.

Why would they lower their rates? Avis isn't a charity; they're in the business of making money. They know how much people are willing to pay for flexible car rental: at least $850 per month. No reason to lower the prices as long as people are still willing to pay.
I used to think in stone. But I don't need to know my weight very often and when I do it's usually for ski bindings at european resorts - so now I find myself thinking in kilograms.

The only non-metric unit that I think in now is miles - and there are obvious safety/legal problems in switching our speed limit road signs to kilometers.
I can give you that. Google Plus Hangouts isn't exactly intuitive in any way. I am sure Google would love to hear from you what they can do to improve Hangouts though. Any thoughts?
> For example, in Section 1.1 you explain how to go about solving the equation x^2 - 4 = 45, a topic which (I would venture) most 16 year olds should be comfortable with.

> Then in Section 1.2 you, out of nowhere, introduce set-theoretical ideas and notation.

Is there any decent "crowd editing" solution? Or at least, "crowd suggested edits" solution?

Smart people know the math and the grammar and can correct those errors, or improve diagrams, or tweak the wording. People with weak math can say where they get confused; where things ramp up too quickly or where things take too long to get going.

Errors in a book like this are especially dangerous for someone like me. Dunning Kruger and all that - I wont know enough to know what I don't know, or to know what I've learnt is not quite correct.
Yeah, never understood the "problem" with Fahrenheit. When I ask people to tell me why Celsius is better, many will tell me because its "decimal", and then I point out to them it is no more decimal than Fahrenheit, there are no "kilodegrees". They will then point out the water freezing/boiling, as if they regularly have to set that temperature to accomplish that (you don't, you just put water in the freezer or a kettle on the stove). Celcius is annoying from a practical perspective because you have less degrees to deal with in every day temperatures, and in Fahrenheit 0 is "cold" and 100 is "hot" (vs like -20 to 40).
Fundamentals of communication
It is often claimed that Leonardo da Vinci was an all-round genius. In the areas that I can judge he was an amateur at best (mathematics, physics and engineering). He did not contribute anything new to mathematics and physics, and I don't see any evidence that he even understood any mathematics or physics of his time. Hardly any of his "engineering" actually worked (he was an excellent illustrator however). Whether he was a good artist is of course subjective.
Still not as impressive as Davinci whom had very exact sketches of anotomy almost second to none during his time. Not to mention his sketches of flying machines. You need multiple artists and engineers to match all of Davinci's talents.
I can see the CEO of startup "X" printing this article and showing to their "whiny" developers so they stop asking for a better work environment where their boss doesn't try to micro-manage them all the time and distract them.

It seems like he doesn't care about when he works, but he has long uninterrupted work times, which is great, and it's what most developers ask for.
They should throw some money at making adfs a better product
Interesting war story around Imperial to Metric conversion errors.

Relevant to the discussion...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
A Science Fiction Halo Rests Slantedly Over Isaac Asimov’s Amiable Head
It's like github gists and instagram at the same time, because it let's you apply "filters" to your code (which are color palettes).

It's a funny idea, I like it!
Or if you happen to ask anyone who works on a vehicle that isn't from one of the American manufacturers. My Toyota used all metric, AFAIK, and all of my motorcycles have used metric. I can't say I've ever even used the standard set of tools that came with my toolset (which had both metric and standard).