skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Is there a benefit of the standard system that I'm missing out on?

Yes, the benefit of not mandating the use of the metric system in the US is that about 300 million people can continue to go about their lives without needing to adapt to literally thousands of tedious changes.
It's not a real search warrant if the cops' boss's boss's boss signs it. A real warrant needs to come from a judge.
Ref link...
Well, the first part stems from not using the system on a day-to-day basis for the most part. We learn how the system works, learn how to convert, use it in science classes, etc., but don't necessarily know how to estimate how many kilograms we weigh, or how many meters tall we are, how many kilometers away something is, whether or not 38 degrees Celsius is a hot day or an average day, etc.

However, the second part is inexcusable and I'm curious to know which University it is that would accept students that hadn't been through at least one advanced science class in High School where metric would be used extensively and it would be very basic knowledge that 1 cm = 10mm...
> So choose to live your life in metric if you want.

Ummm... not really. I can't choose to have speed limits posted in kph. I can't choose to buy my gas in liters instead of gallons. I can't choose for highway signs to tell me how many km away the exit is.

I'm pretty sure that's the kind of thing people are talking about when they ask for metric.
Properly "teaching metric units" would be synonymous with using them consistently in all science/math/etc. classes throughout middle + high school. Doing this would mean that when entering college, students would have developed an intuitive sense for the metric system.

If what the schools do is just have a 1 hour class which can be boiled down to "Ok, 1 meter is 100 cm, 1000 g is 1 kg", then I wouldn't call that 'teaching'.

(Additionally, I think teaching a secondary language is a project of a completely different scope than teaching a unit system)
Editr - Self-hosted HTML, CSS and JavaScript playground
I program the way that I imagine I would sculpt. If I had to sculpt a head, I wouldn't start by sculpting the perfect ear, and then sculpting the perfect eye, etc, because who knows what will happen. Maybe in the course of sculpting the eye, I need to move the ear, and then all that work goes out of the door.

Instead, I would sculpt the entire piece of art roughly, almost unrecognizably, and then target large parts of the sculpture. Details like ears and eyes might even never get done, depending on how the requirements change for the sculpture.

I always approach writing software the same way, so the first iteration is just a hardcoded piece of software that just shows me that it will actually work, and then I iterate and start smoothing out all of the sharp edges, of which there are a ton.
yes, your modification is a lot more realistic.
How is that any different than cable/satellite?
Most probably have a functional understanding of it, but do not have an intuition. Is the teaching supposed to provide an intuitive sense of how big certain units are? What difference does it make?
Of all the things we need to spend Billions of dollars on, it isn't a move to change numbers on road signs and create mass confusion.

Like QWERTY, imperial units work fine enough for most people despite advantages of other systems.
I agree, I found this to be a very American response. Its not typical for the US government to mandate large changes like this and force people to do things a certain way. Its just part of the culture.
Flutterby: Single element pure CSS3 butterfly and animation
Yes, exactly. By writing pseudocode, I end up writing business code rather than implementation code, which inherently assumes the a high-level interface to the nitty-gritty details. This leads to an approach where the idea is expressed at a high level first, rather than getting stuck in the implementation details of some small piece of the problem.
Interesting and original-ish. But practical? Can't say.

Here's a suggestion I'm going to throw out there.
Instead of driving the wheel(s), use the propellers. When landing, at least two of the propellers pivot up and drive it around.

(You could also be clever and pivot the motors up about 60-degrees, so that there is forward force and an upwards force that 'lightens' the unit. And then you could drive the two stationary motors at slow speed to further 'lighten' the unit.)

That way, you don't need another motor to power it on land, and also you could put floats on it, so it would work in the water as well as on land.
Belief in black magic persists in Papua New Guinea
I can't scroll that website by pressing the space key. The article is not worth reaching for pgdn.
Ask HN: How do you choose the next place you want to work?
3 months ago I left my previous position as a systems engineer/sysadmin at a BigCo tech company. I wanted some time off to relax and work on some personal projects. Now I'm thinking about getting back into the game, perhaps another startup but I'm not really sure what kind of product I want to work on for the next 4-5 years.

When it comes time to move on to something new, how do you guys choose where you want to work? Do you look to the BigCo for stability? A startup for an adrenalin rush and payout? Or just whoever will hire you?
Trawling for Tor Hidden Services: Detection, Measurement, Deanonymization [pdf]
I suspect that I have a lot more energy and desire than my peers. But even so, I suffered similar burnout to the OP about 6 months ago. I attribute my burnout to trying to continue hard-driving my startup idea while simultaneously trying to juggle additional, optional life changes along with working a regular, full-time job. My optional life changes were: my wife and I decided to have our first kid and we wound up with twins, and started an overly painful re-fi process on the house, and spent 24 months trying to get a new job in town so I wouldn't have to travel as much for work.

The burnout I suffered seemed cataclysmic for my startup idea. I started to question it and myself, why wasn't I making progress? All this stuff I have to manage is too much, I wish I was 25 again with no responsibility. I just turned 39!! I'm getting old, now with kids; I'll never be able to make anything out of this thing, I waited too long... My yard is a mess, my desk is a heap of papers. :( Blah blah, that's all just stinkin' thinkin', as someone else said.

My depression came from my not acknowledging that I was already at a diminished capacity with the twins' arrival, and then I stupidly decided to ratchet up the job search AND re-fi my house! What was I thinking?? There is a limit, and I wasn't being realistic about what I could manage.

The good news (for me at least) is, the tidal wave of burnout-inducing extra responsibilities has receded and my new, local day job is so undemanding and steady. I find myself ending the day with some spare energy and I have gradually started to reconnect with my startup project by taking on some low energy improvements that I could feel proud of. Just last night, on looking at my pages render out just so, I got that feeling of secret pride for the first time in so long. I was back to making a quality product again.

I think the OP is feeling burnt by all the failures and false starts and that's creating a negative spiral. Butch up, OP. You're a systems programmer coming out of the video games biz like me. You can cogitate about systems in ways that many cannot. Take some pride in that. Husband your resources. When you're feeling strong again, make some wise decisions and get back in the game.
You cant roll out a Hulu from scratch. It is basically a venture between content providers. How much TV content does Yahoo produce ? none. It is a huge mistake to buy Hulu. I dont know how much they'll be paying for this but it is worth 0 money, just like Tumblr.
If anyone tells you that they can get you a stable 6-8% per year over the next 12 to 15 years, you should run away immediately.

Interest rates all go down as stability goes up. Typically, buying government bonds gives the best stability, but current 10 year US bond rates are paying under 2%.

The more risk you are willing to take, the more you may earn, but then the more you could lose.

Only you know how much risk you are willing to take, but younger people tend to be able to take more risks, because, over time, the ups and downs of the market flatten out. And if you have 40+ years to leave the money, then the better chance you have of being in the market for good times as well as bad (Oh yeah, timing the markets - to only get the good times - never works over time either).

One absolute certainty though is to make sure you pay as little to the people managing the money as possible. If you buy a mutual fund, the difference between 0.2% annual fee and 1.2% annual fee is astronomical over time.

I have a bunch of money tied up in the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund which tracks the total stock market and charges 0.17% per year. This type of fund, again, over time, beats out almost all actively managed funds. Managed funds will try and bamboozle you with how they beat the market last year, but if you didn't invest the year before, that doesn't matter.

One technique I also use with extra cash is to buy shares of companies I personally have good experience with - e.g. Apple, Starbucks, Amazon. This is much riskier, but can payoff quite well.

I am not a financial advisor!

(Oh yeh, in the US, you could setup a Self Employed Pension plan to save your money tax free, but this has restrictions on when you get access to the money, but it's something to think about to turbo charge your savings)

Good Luck
Canada switched to metric between the mid 70s and mid 80s. I was born in 1977. Things like my height and weight I only know customary units. Food is still advertised in customary units even though it is sold in metric. Pop cans are still 12 fl oz but labelled as 355 ml. My grandfather worked in a mill, and he said after metrification a sheet of plywood still measured 4'x8' but got slightly thinner. Speed and temperature I know in metric because that's the way they are signed / reported. I don't think metrification will ever be completed, we seem stuck in a half way point that works well enough.
I dunno, one thing I notice about Apple maps is that although it's very pretty, it feels sooooo much less functional, and less "integrated" than Google maps. Google maps seems to just have everything you want there, lightweight and easily available, whereas Apple maps is basically just ... a map.

It's true that Apple maps also has problems with poor-quality underlying map/search/image data, but that's by no means its only issue.
I still can't get used to the US system, after living here for more than 13 years...

Some years ago, one very smart american coworker told me why the US chose the non-metric system. Back in the days people had to divide things - land, materials, lots of things equally between people. If your system is "12" based, then you can divide by 2, 3, 4 and 6 (well 4 and 6 are obvious), but if it's metric then it's only by 2 and 5.

Not that you can't divide by 2 and 5, but you'll get rational numbers, not integer.

Not sure how true this story is, but even if it's not, it's still amazing :)

(Another story I've heard from him was why cities around Los Angeles were named after saints - San Diego, Santa Monica, etc. - All of them were connected by a day run with a monkey - this way creating a support for the established christian missionary settlements - something like it).
I don't think in that context it represents an apology or even empathy. It means "allow me to politely tell you that you are full of shit!"

Kinda like saying "have a nice day" to somebody who was just rude to you.
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved
from a simple system that worked.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%27s_law
Not really.
But I'd say that it has been ripped off any semblance of sanity by Apple and such.
I came to know it's meaning as made cleverly to work just as needed/expected, not "OH SHINY, but a bit lacking in usability here and there, still, SHINY"
Ummm... "hate"?! Give me a break. Sensationalist headline.

According to the article, one 15-year-old girl said she "hated" it. Otherwise, the majority complained about adults, negative interactions and oversharing -- none of which really has anything to do with Facebook, but rather the specific friends they've added, or the concept of a social network in general.
I have worked on projects which are developed against stupid deadlines where getting the code out is all that matters. These projects are always doomed to maintenance overheads and cost.

I agree with the comments below that state code the simplest solution to make your tests pass but learn the best approach to tackle given problems so they are second nature.

My experience has shown me that learning various principles and pattens results in smaller code bases that make maintenance and refactoring easy. In turn you are able to deliver quicker.

That being said, its not always so easy to achieve with established code bases.
Using Dropbox as your database backup space
Putting your name on a list with a mouse click is a fairly empty contribution to our democracy; why would you expect anything other than a fairly empty response?

There are other ways to make things happen, but truth be the important things almost always involve a lot of energy, time, and money.
This is what I was thinking. The speed limits and other "official" things must be changed by the government if they want to take a real step into metric system. There is no self choice anymore here. We are bound by the government's choices.
Most likely will depend on what smartcard you get but here is how I do it with my Gemalto card:

I use the Minidriver manager tool from:
http://www.gemalto.com/products/dotnet_card/resources/develo... although you could use something like pkcs11-tool.

Generating a RSA keypair is as simple as right clicking on an empty container, selecting OBKG Container and filling this out:

http://i.imgur.com/uMY53OD.png

It will display the public key but it is in hex and uses Microsoft's PublicKeyBlob structure. OpenSSL will convert this to PEM for you though, which is what you want for SSH authentication. Something like:

openssl rsa -pubin -inform MSPUBLICKEYBLOB -in "C:\path\to\my\publickey" -outform PEM -out "C:\path\to\my\publickey.pem"

Open this new file in a text editor and get rid of the begin and end public key lines and just smack it all on one line with "ssh-rsa " (note the space) in front of it. You can then add this to your server's authorized_keys file.

OpenSSH can use a pkcs11 library for authentication (-I option), which is also avaliable from Gemalto's website (these are generally specific to the smartcard), and on Windows there is a version of PuTTY called PuTTY SC that will also let you use the pkcs11 library.
Sadly that does not work in enterprise multi-site projects with outsourcing across several companies.
Calling our units imperial is inaccurate and not proper. Our system is called customary. Our measurements were based on British units before they were standardized into imperial units.
Two words: back catalog. My Netflix queue doesn't go shorter, no matter how I try (both DVD and streaming). Sometimes I feel like a kind in a candy store, when drilling down their recommendations.
That is what the US is about, and the citizens have spoken through this petition that we want it changed.

Responding to petitions by telling the petitioners to petition harder is kind of pointless.
I'd like to think that's try since I'm not in Silicon Valley. But sometimes it does feel like most of the deals that are made are due to personal connections - people who are running into each other at events, parties, coffee shops, etc.
> Quite frankly scaling is about the nicest problem to have if you're a startup.

I'm certain I stole it from someone here on HN years ago (whoever it was, I owe you a beer!), but I've always called this a "Maserati Problem". That is, it's something I can think about while I'm driving down the road in my Maserati that I've purchased with money my startup has made already.

Scaling, in most cases, is a problem very much like "where am I going to store all this money that's pouring in?!" If you have it, you've already won.
There's a strip of road just east of Santa Fe around Glorieta which has signage in metric. I always figured it existed solely for the purpose of being brought up in discussions like these. A really odd and pointless thing.
It would be great to switch and use metric exclusively, but think of how cost prohibitive it would be. In the transportation industry alone you are talking about replacing all signage (speed limit signs, mile marker signs, distance to X signs), swapping units on cars and trucks by default, converting gas stations to use liters, and of course re-writing all traffic laws that are speed related.
When you really look at what it would take to switch, I think the only real barrier is more cash than anyone would be willing to spend.
The upside of a complete changeover would be the incredibly lucrative consulting gigs to assist all involved.
I'm by no means a pure functional programmer, but I've found some of the mantra from that paradigm helps when building the early blocks of a program as it allows you to break down your application into core problems which can be tackled individually. Plus it allows your application to scale easier and makes it easier to rip out and replace code as you start to add complexity.

But of course, before starting any major project, the first thing any developer should do is map out at least a basic mental design of the program - even if that map isn't written in pseudo-code or in a form of a flow chart.
This is already done.

No one teaches chemistry or physics using slugs and ounces.
I can relate to this. There is a real risk in freezing up when you attempt for your first writing of code to be the fully architected solution.

I would still go one step further and at least apply the strategy pattern/polymorphism when you have a large if/else/case block going beyond 2 or 3 conditions in a controller or model or something. (assuming MVC web apps)

The fact is you can write out some ugly code directly in a controller where it might get some code working fast and prevent the freeze up of your output, but once working you should immediately move it to the appropriate place like a model or library, and apply a basic OO strategy pattern (perhaps not with factory/interfaces etc until needed later) where appropriate to cut down on spaghetti/nested conditionals.

This really does not take much more time than stopping at working code that is ugly, and is a good middle ground where it is not painful to return to later.

There is still no good excuse for "taking a dump in the corner" of your code base just to get a marginal gain in output.
Screen and tmux both have shared sessions, and even though screen isn't really under active development anymore it is solid.

Does this offer anything that other more widely used pieces of software don't already provide (and provide well)?

Edit: Ahhh, I didn't realize from the git page that it would let you use different editors on different ends of the shared session.
As a security professional as well as developer, I agree with the OP. Simply put, you're going to screw things up no matter what you do. Be smart about it, plan for the worst, and seek outside feedback into your security processes; you're never going to find all the edge cases, even if that's your day job.
It was quite the opposite way for me. Almost all of my engineering courses were in metric. In fact, most of us considered it a 'trick' when english units were used.

Conversions for the metric system seemed much more intuitive for me in math. However english units seemed much more noticeable since they are mostly unique (didn't miss a 0 in a conversion).

Lastly, I agree with a comment below that this is largely a problem of getting rusty. After living both in Europe and the US for significant portions of time, I still have trouble between Celsius and Fahrenheit.
Exactly. It’s why I hope people will see this not so much as a new frontier of telecommunication nor telecommuting, but “telepresence”.

It’s not a medium; it’s a physical proxy.

I hope people will see it as more than a convenience for working remotely.
The response said they're working on changing the regulations to allow businesses to only label in metric if they prefer (today, mostly they can choose between either traditional-only, or dual-labeling, aside from things like pharmaceutical dosages and nutritional content labeling, which are already metric-only (dosages are in milligrams, liquid dosages are often dual fluid ounces and cubic centimeters, nutrition is grams of fat/protein/carbs, milligrams of salt, etc.)).

I remember in the 1970s, when highway signs were getting converted to show both miles and kilometers; I think that got stopped because of the costs (the signs have to be bigger, they may confuse people, etc.).
See http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html
pay close attention to section 4.4
The other thing about teens is that there are always a new bunch every year. So a social network displacing Facebook could start with the influx of new users who aren't committed to Facebook (or anything else) yet.
I will note that neither ggreer nor myself commented in the other thread (ie, the Floobits team). For that matter, we don't have any ill will towards CoVim or the Etherpad Vim plugin; I personally hope they succeed and the number of people who pair program on a daily basis increases.

Floobits is also currently free and the plugins at least are open sourced. It takes a significant amount of time to develop this software- hopefully users will find the value we add commensurate with the investment on our part and we can make a business out of it.

Finally, we are left in a strange position with users on why the Vim plugin behaves so strangely. Ideally, users wouldn't have to change their behavior at all; everything would just magically work. Unfortunately, Vim is purposefully designed to make things like collaborative editing impossible (it has no event loop and async actions are impossible). Vim is by design a text editor and not an IDE. We should probably communicate the limitations of the platform better to end users.
Disclaimer: I am European living in Canada and I wish metric system to be the only system everywhere and hate to use imperial system.

Having said that I have to recognize that it is a matter of habit. I am pretty sure there are people for whom metric system looks stupid.

There is a logic behind imperial system. In it, units are duodecimal (base-12) as opposed to decimal units of metric system. The rationale for that is that 12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6, whereas 10 is divisible only by 2 and 5. Apparently dividing things into 3 and 4 parts was very important when people were not educated enough to understand the concept of fractional numbers. Babylonian numerals were base-60, there are still special names for numbers 11 and 12 in many languages, and day is split into 24 (12*2) hours and hour is 60 minutes and minute is 60 seconds.
Democracy is ruling by the people. And the government has to give the people easy way to express itself. We shouldn't have to "mobilize" and "invest ourselves" heavily to change something in this new connected world. Electronic voting is one great thing, Petition through internet is another great thing if it really had an impact.
No. Single line if syntax is good. Gratuitous curlies make the code longer and ultimately harder to read (since you can't fit as much on a page). Being able to see your whole function/algorithm at once is more important that almost any other consideration.
A perspective on the issue of metric from "The Oatmeal" - http://theoatmeal.com/pl/senior_year/science