skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Time is tricky but there is a simple fact: it exists such a thing as the number of actual seconds elapsed since 'time x' (typically the Unix epoch but anything else will do too). No leap seconds issues. No 25 hours-day issues. No 23 hours-day issues. No 59 seconds minutes issues. No 61 seconds minutes issues.

And all it takes to store a time like that is a 64-bit integer and it is very convenient. And a lot of software do precisely that. Most timestamps are just that: they don't care about "real world" details like leap-seconds, {23,24,25}hours per day, etc.

Because, in many case, you really don't give a flying shit about the "real-world" time.

What is your point? That a server that needs to open trade precisely at 9am has to take leap seconds into account? Sure. The article ain't disputing that.

But a lot of application basically only need timestamps and everything becomes much simpler when one starts to reason in milliseconds since the epoch instead of "real world" time.

Btw... Many of your "real issues" are due to programmers not realizing that they could have realized the exact same system but way more resilient had they knew to use timestamps instead of "real world" time.

There was an amazing paper by Google on the subject by the way, where they explained how they were reconciliating their hundreds of thousands of servers' time by allowing it to be "not correct" over x minutes / hours to dodge many issues.

And they clearly did emphasize that: a) these problems shouldn't have occured in the first place and were due to poorly designed programs (poorly designed in that they relied on real-world time instead of simply internally using milliseconds since the epoch) and b) most programs on earth do not give a flying ^^^^ if a time displayed to the user is one third of a second off...
Statistics in the land of Illusions
TSA to phase out Rapiscan 'naked scanners'
no, he lives in Singapore.

see e.g.: http://blog.makezine.com/2012/04/30/makes-exclusive-intervie...
UofA has done a lot of work on no limit, but it doesnt get as much publicity as their limit stuff
Important to note: The TSA will not phase out 'naked scanners', they will simply switch to 'naked scanners' where screening personnel will not see any nudity in default viewing mode. The use of 'naked scanner' will continue and therefore also the irradiation.
http://www.spideroak.com has been doing this for years. Nothing new to see here.
Your questions require buy in to a set of debatable premises. Your ideas are more appropriate for a blog post.

The way to avoid descent into a political discussion is to not post items likely to do so.
This is relevant: http://www.freakonomics.com/2013/01/17/who-owns-the-words-th...
The accepted answer to this question nailed it. Btw. this post should be labelled "Why a boss should not always listen to his junior programmers" :)
Hang on a second. Are you honestly saying that you think 350GBP/day is an unreasonably high goal for a contractor?

If my math is right, that works out to about $70/hr (USD), which is well on the low side for a 1 year contract, even assuming you're out in the sticks. That's closer to what you'd expect for a day rate as a salaried employee if you have any experience.

So no, you need to take on board that this is the sort of money you should be making. If you're not (and by assuming that only magical freelancers make that much, but only for a few weeks at a time, it sounds that way), you'd be well served to spend some effort getting your rate up where it belongs.

We'd actually all be better off were you to do so. As long as there are people willing to work for GBP65k/year, there will be companies taking advantage of them. But those same companies will happily pay market (as plenty of us can attest) if they have to.
Contracting doesn't pay as much as freelancing. Lots of people contract fulltime at companies and ignore the IR35 issues (even though they shouldn't) for around £350/day.

Freelancing is different. You have to deal with all of the issues you mention above, cost of sales etc (though, get yourself an accountant, seriously) but the reward is higher. You're doing things at your own pace and if you're good you can really focus to make solid profit.

Contracting is just a regular hourly wage (and as you rightly point out, not always as good as it looks on the tin).
Women in Makerspaces
File copy operations?

Surely the time required for this is dominated by the disk IO speed?
> Time is tricky but there is a simple fact: it exists such a thing as the number of actual seconds elapsed since 'time x'

Yes and no: it might just exist theoretically, but we have no way to get at it. The closest we have is TAI, which is only an approximation of the time elapsed at mean sea level on the earthly geoid, because clocks fall victim to gravitational time dilatation and compression.

To accurately measure time you'd need a clock sitting perfectly still in space, and all other clocks in the universe would slowly drift behind it.
"Teach yourself programming in ten years" by Peter Norvig for a hard cold reality check:

http://norvig.com/21-days.html

Some may do impressive things in a bit less than that but I wouldn't trust anyone with less than a few years of programming (or at least education related to programming).
Ugh, yeah, that's it. And we're not even based in Germany!
That's the first thing I thought of too, maybe combined with something like code bubbles http://www.andrewbragdon.com/codebubbles_site.asp
Good job on learning how to program and actually releasing something! Your site looks okay but it is kinda slow.

I suggest reading up on memcached (since you're using heroku).
Great to know, thanks. I've always had trouble dealing with Time zones and offsets, it's a headache dealing with time. Sign, I just don't got the time!
"Keep your eye on the clients who agree to short payment terms, forget the dreamers."

OK but then also maybe forget HN and entrepreneurship?
It's so sad to see that this post has been flagged many times.
I mean, it's unfair and against the guidelines because this is not the use that flagging was intended for (silencing what you don't want to be known/discussed, like anything having to do with Assange or Wikileaks).
But over all, the flagging of this kind of post is just sad.
I'm curious what the issue was. It's worth noting that the S3 runs Jelly Bean (4.1), not ICS (4.0), as well.
Although it seems unethical I'm not entirely sure why. They paid him to make sure a certain amount of work got done. It did. Does it really matter if he physically did it himself Vs supervising someone else doing it? Companies subcontract out work all the time.

That said, I wouldn't do it.

Maybe instead of firing him they should have put this Bob guy in charge of managing outsourced development and outsourced a bunch more stuff. Sounds like there is a pretty massive cost saving to be made there.
You're right, technically they're not doing anything groundbreaking. The difference is that they already have a huge fan base, ridiculous amounts of publicity, and much better UI and pricing than spideroak.
I'm getting nothing but a blank screen?
The oculus rift has optics that allow the eyes to focus at infinity, not the convergence point of the eyes.

Do you think that will help?
> How many car companies is an airplane company worth?

about one, apparently :)

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=capitalization+of+boein...
Players can try to be GTO, but limit is not solved, so they are simply guessing. This post (and many others across the web) seem to assume that we know GTO or that we can reason it, but twe cant as this isnt a solved game yet
> is this a bad idea?
Well, what do you bring to the table? Do Japanese people read HN or reddit, or are they hindered by the language barrier? If they are, then it's not.

Damn, ideas are never bad. As long as you do stuff, it's all good.
https://www.google.com/search?q=pools (browsing in Boston)

Besides search results and their default controls, I see:

- 3 advertisements up top

- 7 business recommendations after the first 3 result
s
- 8 "searches related to pools" on the bottom

and on the sidebar:

- 6 pool products from walmart

- a map showing where the 7 businesses are located

- 8 ads under that map

Just because some keywords aren't as densely utilized doesn't mean the space is wasted. And if they tried to fill up all available real estate, it dimishes the value of the links they're trying to push.
Yes and no. The problem is that most of the time the train of thought goes something like:

* we already have a working product

* we might aswell just add the features and visual polish we need and then launch as soon as possible

* we have too much work to do to rewrite it

* we can't refactor effectively because automated tests are mostly missing

This results in the project becoming increasingly burdened with technical debt, where it becomes impossible to add new features without breaking something. The next step after this is usually a rewrite (which, given the low quality of developers already in the company, since nobody sane will work on such bad code, is also likely to fail, unless IT is restaffed completely).

If the prototype is binned outright and the rewrite happens at the very start, I imagine that this can be avoided. Again, the trap here is that if the founder learned to write code in 6-12 months then they will be in that cute phase where they think that programming is easy and will not realise this.

In short, having a senior developer on board (at the very least as a consultant) from the very start appears to be mandatory for long term success and minimisation of headaches. It's just what I've seen in the real world. Companies which went for quality from the very start grew rapidly. Those which attempted to minimise development costs at the expense of quality did not reach the heights.
The most underrated Objective-C Class
Creating a startup: what's more important, design or technology?
Love it. +1.

But wouldn't an obvious answer to this be to use a background full of swirl, then add people onto it, then swirl again (so the background swirl is swirled twice).

Then when you'd be "deswirling" with you code, you'll be finding something always swirled?

maybe even use a background who's "swirled right" and then "swirl left" the "backgroung + people" (or nyan cat or whatever)?
Personally, I can't wait for this. Yes, I have a Dropbox account and have for years, but I like the ideology behind this, and lately the US government doesn't seem to be all that concerned about the liberties of its citizens - or citizens of any country.

I'm just wondering if it has a desktop sync like Dropbox. Now that would be MEGA.
Definitely. Anyone coming to me with an idea I say that's great, just follow the lean principles to develop a non-technical MVP, and I'm in. Haven't had anyone come back with a proven MVP yet : P
anti GMO ideological leader changes his mind.
Add to home screen
Treatments that Doctors would avoid
No more so than finding security vulnerabilities. Captchas that are trivial to break are going to be broken no matter what, so it's better for someone non-malicious to break it and make it well known, so that people don't use the captcha, than for it to go unnoticed.
This is a strange argument, you say that top players are not fully human, maybe 80% human and 20% machine, for example, implying that this makes them better than being fully human, and yet suggest something that is 100% machine could not beat it. How is this so?
><spring:message text="" code="${param['message']}"> </spring:message>. what did you expect will happen?

I expect ${param['message']} to be evaluated to a string, then the string to be used to look up a message. What I don't expect is the string to be evaluated again... Why would I?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5053370 previous discussion few days ago.
I'd also like to thank HN. I find out about many great things through this site, including the new job I just got in San Francisco!
Hey cool :) it was me asking that question on LTU. I was never converted myself, but I did recently meet a pro Haskell hacker at TechMesh who said he'd been inspired to learn Haskell from that LTU discussion so it would seem that good explanations were made.
I think it really comes down to the initial monetary investment of the idea guy. For the idea guy to approach a developer with a $200 software package and $8/mo web hosting they've got very little vested. Asking the developer to invest what amounts to anywhere from $60-$150/hr of development hours is unreasonable. Now if the idea guy has invested thousands into data, a nice piece of co-located hardware, exclusive partnerships with reputable advertisers, etc. we might have something. The idea is worth very little in terms of investment. I think the equity breakdown can be broken down as such: 5% for the idea and the dollar for dollar investment by each party.
A Method for Applying Jobs-to-Be-Done to Product and Service Design
Having your Facebook account locked is the gift that keeps on giving.

It gives you a legitimate excuse not to use Facebook that all your friends must accept unquestioningly, and if the reason is because you sent the Zuck messages he didn't want to receive then you get an awful lot of hipster cred as well.
Funny I read the title and thought: TVM but then realized it was the age old quest for time keeping and dreaming of ways to track it with reasonable sanity.. :-)

Bonus points for anyone who knows what I mean by TVM and can describe why every programmer should know about it..
I already have a degree and don't have patience to get another. I am wondering what to do with a university beside trying to get a degree.
Things do indeed become much simpler when you reason in milliseconds since the epoch. So why is it so rare to do so? UNIX time is not milliseconds since the epoch. It's milliseconds since the epoch, plus the leap seconds that have accumulated over that period. The only widely used timebase that's pure milliseconds since the epoch that I'm aware of is GPS time, and basically everything adds in the leap seconds before actually using that number.
Taryn Simon and Aaron Swartz's Experiment with Images
Amarok 2.7 "A Minor Tune" released
Which ultimately doesn't matter, because

head . (:[])

doesn't behave differently from (\x -> x) no matter what the input is. The only possible variation on the id function is in how efficient it is, from fastest to never terminating.
looks good, I'm going to have one account here. Keep up good work.
I appreciate that resources are always tight in these situations so I would recommend that you hire an experienced developer to review your code. It's cheaper than hiring someone full time and you should still be able to get a lot of value out of it. They will know about nuances and gotchas that only years of working on code can teach. Addressing those early rather than late is probably a good idea.

A cheaper (no money but more time spent) alternative is to use forums and IRC channels to get advice. There are plenty of knowledgable people who are more than willing to help if you ask.

Some basics which are vitally important to cover are ensuring that the object model and database schema are solid and extensible, that there are automated tests in place (especially for business critical functionality), that everything is documented (otherwise you will waste inordinate amounts of time explaining how things work to any developers you hire in the future and/or relearning parts of your own code after forgetting what it does) and that everything is backed up to multiple locations. Addressing those concerns puts you well ahead of the pack.
It's Limit Texas Hold'em. (of course)

Limit Texas Hold'em and No-Limit Texas Hold'em, are two entirely different game. They happen to share a few things in common but from a game theory they're two wholly different beast.

They're as different that, basically, limit Texas Hold'em is a solved problem: good bots can rival with the best professional players (playing Limit Hold'em for money online is risky: you can be playing vs a bot or vs someone entering the moves of a bot).

But No-Limit Texas Hold'em? There are players who've won several major tournaments. The psychological element is very, very important.

And unless we make amazing AI discoveries, it's going to be very difficult to write bots able to beat good players at No-Limit Texas Hold'em.

But you can find bots online, even for NLHE, able to beat beginners and the rake at very low limits (called the nanostakes and the micro-stakes, but not above).

Another thing: there's so much money to be made (as in millions of $) by writing a bot able to beat mid-stakes and high-stakes online no-limit Texas Hold'em that the last thing someone who'd write such would do would be to publish it online.

Major sites like PokerStars do pro-actively look out for bots: the EULA states that they have the right to scan the entire memory of your computer and your entire hard disk. And you can't install such a software without giving the root/admin password of your system. And you cannot legally use a VPN: if they detect one you're out (you still technically can if you manage to fly 100% below the radar). And you can't use remote desktops. It's overall very restrictive.

They're regularly busting bot-rings and chinese-colluders rings and confiscating their money (and redistributing it to other players).

And if they suspect an account of multi-accounting, they'll do tricky things like moving and resizing all the poker tables at once, while simultaneously showing a captcha.

If you fail to enter it, you'll have a hard time convincing the site to not confiscate your money...

But back in the wild wild west days, it was amazing: some people had "war rooms" made of tens of PCs, all playing online poker and making very very big money. It was a big business.

But games got tougher, poker "black friday" hit the US hard, bot detection has vastly improved, etc.

So the "gold rush" is over for most botters.
It sounds very much to me like she is lying through her teeth.
Dribbble - Warlock by Kevin Granger
How Forks Gave Us Overbites and Pots Saved the Toothless
I think you mean that unix time is seconds since the epoch minus leap seconds.
Dribbble - Soldier by Kevin Granger
Also, with spot pricing you could run a micro instance for 18 months for the price of a Pi and you don't need to wait for it to be shipped to you. :)
Bummer. I hope that the author reads your comment, because it's otherwise a very useful page. I'd love to have a reference like the OP's about time and everything a programmer needs to know about it without problems like the one you're subscribing. This one's almost there.

Thanks for clarifying!
Ask HN: Does a 324 error mean my IP is banned?
Getting this through wifi, on all browsers. It says "Error 324 (net::ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE): The server closed the connection without sending any data."

If this is the case, how long does it last and what exactly did I do to warrant this haha? Posting over LTE seems to work.
> You can do this with any functor.

Not to be pedantic, but being a functor has little to do with the fact that you can add and remove elements from lists.

Knowing that a particular type is an instance of `Functor` tells you only one thing about that type: that you can `fmap` functions over its contents. But look at `fmap`'s type:

fmap :: Functor f => (a -> b) -> f a -> f b

There is no function with that type which can extract values from a functor, nor insert new ones. `fmap` can only modify the values already contained by the functor, leaving them in the container.

Extraction of contained values from a wrapper and lifting/insertion of values into a wrapper require pattern matching and constructor application respectively, which means the type must have exposed constructors, a property independent of whether that type is a functor.
I like the logical chess game that Dotcom is playing here. Even if everybody knows that some of the storage will be used for copyrighted material, it can't be proven that ANY of it is. There are many legitimate reasons why people want secure, encrypted and private storage, so innocent until proven guilty (which can't be proven!)
6 Tips to Improve Your Exception Handling
TomEE Maven Plugin: finer configuration for updates
Who was the genius who decided that unix time should handle leap seconds? It seems like such an obviously bad idea. The biggest advantage of unix time has always been that it is monotonically increasing and that it is precisely defined as seconds since the epoch, period. And then all of that is now broken because of this decision.

Also, does the problem that the leap second solves actually warrant all of the problems that it causes?
As a guy specialising on developing MVPs for people with ideas, here is the general list of rules I use before taking on a project:

1. Are you willing to pay my normal rate?

2. If so, can you convince me the market is there and you know how to address it.

3. Can you convince me _you_ are the guy who's going to be able to bring it all together?

I know that after rule 1 I shouldn't care, but with so many potential projects out there, I like working on ones I think will amount to something rather than spending two months coding and then having it all thrown away. Call it a personal satisfaction thing.

Fundamentally, the rules amount to equity isn't tasty.
> Time is tricky but there is a simple fact: it exists such a thing as the number of actual seconds elapsed since 'time x' (typically the Unix epoch but anything else will do too).

Yeah. Hmm.
Clearly an opinion expressed without either reading, comprehension, or experience.

Why would I say that? Well, consider your statement about "actual seconds elapsed since epoch". Leaving aside the fact that Unix Time enumerates no such thing (and it was Unix Time I was discussing), there are such things as time frames and relativistic effects which come into play when doing fine scientific measurement, astronomical work, and ground satellite communications.

There are levels to dealing with time and the linked article makes a decent first order stab at climbing the ladder, even ground based programmers need to be wary of the leap seconds issue and the plethora of time standards with minute but significant (in some context or another) issues.

When you've cooled down a little consider the title "What every programmer should know ...". Had it been "What most programmers can skate by on" I probably wouldn't have bothered to comment.

I agree there are many good papers on the subject, going back decades, I'm betting the google paper you speak of references a classic one on time stamps and relativity as some times local event order trumps universal order (and in fact the paper pivots on the observation that universal order doesn't really exist, just effective order).
> near complete control of the "news" media...State-run news media

What are you talking about?
Here's a video:

http://www.intuitivesurgical.com/products/davinci_surgical_s...
If you are a Django developer, there is a similar approach:

http://djangogigs.com/
Erik Naggum's "Long Painful History of Time" (http://www.scribd.com/doc/93991574/Erik-Naggum—ALongPainfulH...) is well worth reading, too.
> but I like the ideology behind this, and lately the US government doesn't seem to be all that concerned about the liberties of its citizens

Definitely a case of "no such thing as bad publicity". At this point, he probably has better name recognition than dropbox, before the product is even out.
Senator John Cornyn Asks Eric Holder To Explain DOJ Prosecution Of Aaron Swartz
They hired him as a FTE, and not as a 1099. So, employment fraud.
Absolutely! Cheers from Vienna Austria, the birthplace of libertarianism!
He did the opposite in fact, bullying his team mates on USPS into doping as well
Why trees can't grow taller than around 100 metres
The relativistic warping of space-time forbids standardization of time measurements
I'm curious if anybody has insight into NSCache's caching algorithm? It would be nice to know the details.