skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
World timekeepers wrangle over scrapping leap second
Why? Because they made one mistake that affected this one couple? I can't imagine the pain they have but it sadly doesn't affect society much in of itself.

Cases of extremely high damages affects other doctors who didn't make such mistakes, which in turn affects their own patients. Runaway punitive damages affect society more than you may think, but you have to consider areas outside the medical field as well.

Tort reform is necessary in lots of ways but I would agree the $250,000 cap is a problem. If the cap is on punitive damages only then I would imagine a lawsuit would have taken the future medical expenses into account when deciding the payout. But since there's no potential huge punitive damages payout then apparently no lawyer is interested in taking on the case.

Seems to me that a great deal of the system falling apart failed this couple, not just some BS tort reform law.
Not sure if I agree with copying bit (I believe they should have carved a niche 2-3 years ago as THE Android keyboard phone to have), but indeed on the phones sold. 3.7M in a quarter? There were 5M iPhone 5 sales during its launch.
I immediately come up with an idea to patent stupidity, so no one is allowed to be stupid or they have to pay a fee.
I'm sure that's true but I also think there was an inflection point where people who had Blackberry's didn't have a better option right as Apple and Samsung were coming out with much more complete phones (great hardware, software, and robust app stores). A lot of these people switched over to Apple/Android and never went back. Now it is just a question of Apple or Android and Blackberry doesn't even enter the picture.

I had a Blackberry Tour that I got in 2009 and had until 2011. By the time the contract was up a key was missing and the software was archaic compared to what was on the market. From that time forward I had no interest in ever going back.

I think the same thing could be largely said about Dell. They didn't care about quality until competitors came along and ate their lunch. Now they are trying to reinvent themselves and claim back lost market share which is just a very, very difficult thing to do.
Our Seattle Startup weekend pitch – give us feedback?
Who are they? How are they different from me? Am I not a part of them? And if 60% of people say it's okay to kill the rest of the 40%, should the 40% submit?
the sleight-of-hand going on here is where (x)html5
is labeled as the "source", which creates "output".

of course, writers don't really write in (x)html5.

and editors don't really want to edit in (x)html5,
because dodging the brackets is a pain in the butt.

and when it comes to revision time, _nobody_ will
relish digging into the guts of an (x)html5 file.
(go look at their files; you will see i am right.)

this is an old story, one that has been told before.
let's ask the people who "future-proofed" their stuff
by putting it in (x)html2.1 how that worked for them.
("wait, there's no 'article' or 'section' tags here!")

in the last 5 years, o'reilly made a ton of money
off the publishing sector, pushing "xml-first" crap,
and .epub too. then they dropped their conferences,
and now they're reversing to yet another magic format.

sleight-of-hand, baby. it's a beautiful thing.

if you can get away with it, that is...

-bowerbird
You are correct.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Dzieka%C5%84ski_Taser_i...

The entire 10 minute cellphone video of the incident can be found on YouTube, if anyone is interested.
Patients don't deserve to be ruined, either.

Agreed

Risk from unfair lawsuits and misfires of civil law are something we all have to accept.

Not agreed. First of all, you give no reason why "it just has to be this way". Is there no compromise, no middle-ground? Second of all, it's awfully easy for the patient to decide the doctor should bear all the risk, eh?
Not yet. The guarding of our nuclear stockpile was, during the Cold War, excellent. I don't know how it is now. I hear not-so-good things. Damn kids, get off my lawn.
Huh? Is Apple running a fab in their backyard? What exactly do they own in terms of technology that others rely on?
I doubt it would have triggered a war. This was before the ICBM era was in full swing. The DEW line† would not have detected the expected armada of Soviet bombers coming over the pole. There would have been one missing B-52, known to be carrying, and probably one missing airbase (Seymour Johnson AFB, to which they were on approach for an emergency landing). I expect it would have been pretty obvious it was an accident.

†http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_Early_Warning_Line
While Jony Ive sips on a glass of Hpnotiq with orange juice.
Yes; but if they want to release the BSD kernel as a whole under the FreeBSD license, then they already cannot incorporate code that has any other license whatsoever. For example, they wouldn't accept my patch under the hypothetical license "you can do whatever you want with this code except shoot bunnies". If they did, FreeBSD users couldn't use FreeBSD to shoot bunnies.

Am I missing something about the BSD kernel licensing social dynamic?
You do realize that when you look up the synonyms to misleading you get many of the same results, right?

I'm sorry that you feel the word disingenuous has too strong a negative connotation but I won't curb my speech because of your opinion. If I were to follow that line of thinking I'd have also used a word other than critique because many people foster the opinion that it too has a strictly negative connotation.
I keep hearing this. What are those 'secrets' that you are talking about (Any link which gives specific information?) Samsung has been making phones much before Apple has been. Are those secrets "Rounded phone corners", "icons in a grid", "Slide to Unlock", or "jumping scrollbar"?
I enjoy patio11's articles immensely but I wish it would be made more clear that this is one of several paths to building a successful software enterprise. Going in and automating stuff people have been using Excel for is a straightforward way to build software people will be willing to pay for, yes.

But let's not forget the unique privilege we have of living in 2013 where we're just starting to get desktop-class CPU and GPUs with radios in everyone's pockets. Let's not forget that the things computers are capable of now were barely visible even a decade ago and a dream a decade further. I firmly believe in using computers to solve real problems. But I also think that you need to look at the problems you're solving and think about how you can truly leverage the unique capabilities we have now to build transformative things.
What were the real problems then that led to their fall? Lack of technology innovation? badly run company and operations? lost touch with the consumer? All of the above?
If you look at the evidence, especially the Gini coefficient, Republicans are a lot more plutocratic than Democrats: http://www.zompist.com/liberalism.html
I bought the gold because it's easiest to distinguish from all the older devices (we have them all for business).
I understand this angle, but the harm described here has nothing to do with polygamy. It has to do with oppressive, criminal behaviour. A man could easily commit the same crime on a single woman, there's nothing inherent to polygamy that is more harmful than a monogamous relationship.
That they thought they could make money off of an airplane patent is proof that they understood that airplanes would be useful in their own right. Had they not done it, somebody else would have, with or without patents; it was inevitable. It might have taken a handful of more years, but it was inevitable.

A crude though reasonable way to estimate how inevitable a development was is to look at the period of time between when the prerequisites for an idea were created, and when the idea itself was created. Some ideas, such as the phonograph (which could have been created at least a few centuries earlier) have a very large span of time between these two things. These ideas could plausibly have been "missed" if circumstances didn't align. Other ideas were devised shortly after their prerequisites. Liquid fuel rockets burning LOX and LH2 were first considered by Tsiolkovsky just two years after hydrogen was first liquefied. Goddard did not know of Tsiolkovsky but that hardly mattered, that idea was inevitable. He, instead of Tsiolkovsky, went through with the idea.

In the case of the Wright brothers, powered controllable airplanes hit the scene quite shortly after suitable engines were feasible. They deserve credit for being the ones that actually did it, but there is really little reason to think that there was ever a risk of a future without planes.
There is absolutely no reason for this to be on Hacker News.
Even some people who profess to be computer programmers can't do fizzbuzz. How do you expect the general population, even those with skill in MS Excel, to be able to?
I thought upvotes and downvotes are for moderation. It's so childish to downvote someone just because you're not of the same opinion.
AuCTeX+LaTeX+Beamer
Bryan Cranston of this to promote the second half of the final season of Breaking Bad. It's set to some beautiful shots of the New Mexico desert.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3dpghfRBHE
>People think it's complicated because of all the FUD (c.f. the comments on this story), but the basic mechanics of how a modern exchange operates are remarkably simple.

I'm referring to market microstructure in terms of the complex interactions amongst exchanges, the impact of Reg NMS, etc. Obviously the underlying algorithms can be boiled down to simple components.

For those interested in learning something about market microstructure, I highly recommend "Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners" as an introduction to the basics:

http://www.amazon.com/Trading-Exchanges-Market-Microstructur...
> What's better about the FreeBSD userland?

For one example, take networking tasks:

Task / BSD / Linux

set ip / ifconfig / ifconfig or now "ip" which is confusing

wifi / ifconfig / iwconfig

speed / ifconfig / miitool or ethtool

duplex / ifconfig / miitool or ethtool

vlan / ifconfig / vlan

wol / ifconfig / miitool or ethtool

bridge / ifconfig / brctl

link aggregation / ifconfig / flags while loading module OR use distro network config scripts and restart all networking or reboot server

Want find out which nic is occupying ethX perhaps for tuning or scripting etc?

Linux = complicated, by distro/version

FreeBSD = nic by device eg em0
Superconducting Quantum Computer Beckons
Note: Maneesh runs the site he's promoting. See his submission history: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=maneesh
While I agree that 3+hrs of homework a day doesn't accomplish much true learning, I think that most of these "tricks" don't either.

The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted.

I would rather my child got interested in some areas and pursued them out of passion, getting mediocre grades; than followed these tricks to get good grades, but not have learned much else.
Pretty good idea.
Maybe your friends aren't that way (which is a good thing), but I can't imagine finding such hassling implausible. I mean, have you noticed how people have been about their phones for the last several years? It's ridiculous and the direction of the hassling goes both ways.

[minor edits]
Jungle mix[mp3]
It looks very pretty, but sadly my Macbook Air couldn't quite keep up with everything happening on the page. My ability to even scroll kind of stuttered to a stop.

Not sure why a loading bar needs to be so resource-intensive.

(Granted, I'm plugged into a high resolution display, but even so most sites I visit don't have issues like this.)
When Herb wrote his free lunch article, I was still a strong C++ believer and I thought C++ could solve the multicore problem. I considered Haskell a toy language. Then I saw how quickly Haskell moved into the multicore arena with STM, Repa, Accelerate, and how C++ kept stumbling in the dark. After the C++11 fiasco I realized that C++ was a blind alley. Multicore revolution did to C++ what the Chicxulub asteroid did to dinosaurs.
Read this and tell me what you think: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts. Remember, this is less than decade after ratification.
The only thing welcoming of landing at Arlanda is that my 3G data starts working again, and I have access to Eduroam. Arriving from ex-Schengen, especially at the non F-pier gates (due to the small passport control where you have to go up 3 flights of stairs and then down), isn't very welcoming at all.
>>Even Microsoft is failing at this. How much evidence does a company need to see that their strategy was doomed?

The BB, Nokia, HTC etc problem is one of cash /runaway. Nokia was almost broke and how many $950M loss quarters can BB take? Not that many. Microsoft can keep bankrolling Windows Phones for a decade waiting for iPhone and Android to make mistakes and no one will even question them.

Look at what they've done for xBox and Bing.
Under a true free market doctors as a group wouldn't be able to use political connections to cover themselves. Once a doctor makes a big enough mistake the free market would demand he be put out on the street to never practice medicine again. Most likely the hospital would dump the doctor because they wouldn't want their customers, the patients, going to a different hospital that doesn't have doctors that cut people up for little or no reason.

Make no mistake, what we have in this day and age is nowhere near what one would call a free market. Regardless of political leanings or party, once a government is involved enough within the economy it is no longer a free market. It eventually becomes crony capitalism, if it doesn't shift to a non-capitalistic system, which is what you see in the U.S. today.
Alas, Q10 does not compete with iOS from 6 years ago.
We push HTML through AJAX to keep all of our templating centralized and consistent.

For a while we used templates for the container page, and then backbone and js templating for certain elements on the page. It can become the 2013 equivalent of spaghetti code if you're not careful.

Now, with HTML via AJAX, you have a clear separation of concerns. For example: the designer doesn't need a dev to make an HTML change, and the dev knows that there will be one place that controls how pages are rendered.
What you defined is not market microstructure, but the platonic ideal of a matching engine. The microstructure of a market is defined (by a Wikipedia source) as: "the study of the process and outcomes of exchanging assets under a specific set of rules. While much of economics abstracts from the mechanics of trading, microstructure theory focuses on how specific trading mechanisms affect the price formation process.”[0]

That is fantastically complicated. As you say, anyone can write a matching engine.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_microstructure
I have done something similar at a little scale. At small load, it is great. The larger you get, real problems start to arise.

The bottleneck with this implementation is ImageMagick. ImageMagick leaks a lot of memory and is generally very inefficient with resizing operations. GraphicsMagick is not much better. Under high load, this will crush your CPUs and max out your Nginx threads much faster than it is worth. You will almost definitely need to use something like OpenCV on the GPU for this to scale.

Although caching is referenced briefly in this article, it is crucial for this system to work. A good CDN with fast invalidation and a low eviction rate would be ideal.
That's quite disingenuous... He was tasered and restrained because he had become unruly and destructive.

Certainly the situation could have (and should have) been handled better, and the RCMP should have only tasered him once, but to call it murder, and specifically to say it's because he didn't speak english, is a blatant falsehood.
There were a few key parts to this (and lots more that I'm missing).

1] OS felt dated. Failure to come closer to what customers wanted on a timely basis.

2] Poor app developer experience.

3] A lot of different hardware specs against which to develop apps.

4] Not enough apps. Missing key apps.

5] Slow to innovate after settling on major patent case. The company became very lawyer focused which slowed innovation to a crawl.

I'm sure I'm missing tons of stuff and this would be a great case study, but as a former employee this is coming from my perspective.
In a democratic society, "they" are the majority. You are a part of them, but you get your one vote and no more. They can bind you without your explicit consent, because at the end of the day they are the ones who protect you from the dangers of other nations, anarchy, etc.
To add on, it does not help that BlackBerry makes the application submission process difficult. I submit and update our 30+ mobile applications on Apple, Google Play, Amazon and BlackBerry. No experience with Windows yet. However, compared to those listed stores that I have experience with, BlackBerry is my least favorite.

I use the same binary build that I submit with ease for Google and Amazon, but BlackBerry tends to deny our application every once in awhile. Just figuring out how to navigate the application web portal to figure out why it was denied is a challenge. Why is it so hard to wrap the "Denied" text with a direct link to the reason as to why it was denied? Instead I need to crawl the page to find the reason.

Another trouble that comes to mind more recently is that they added some sort of additional min-os requirement for a config/manifest file with a cryptic error message that needed resolving before the binary was allowed to be submitted.

I would have thought it would be far easier to get apps through BlackBerry since they want more apps for their devices. Instead, I personally find getting apps for BB discouraging. Windows in the same space even approached and offered to pay us to develop an app for their store.
This is frustrating - I agree that they've finally gotten their act together, particularly with 10.2. The writing has been on the wall for a while - I stopped building apps for them earlier this year.

I've tried Android and iPhone and don't particularly want to return to either one. The former because of too many apps that want all the permissions under the sun while the OS offers a complete lack of fine-grained controls of them[1], and a subpar UI experience (subjective, I know). The latter due to lack of control without rooting it. My windows 8 desktop experience has spoiled that OS for me on a phone, fairly or otherwise.

But it begins to look like I will have no choice very soon. I hope they manage to pull out of this - they're still releasing a new flagship, and have other irons in the fire - but it's not looking good.

[1] as in 'yes, let the app get to GPS, but no do not let it get to my personal data or phone info'. Something BBOS legacy offered, and BB10 only slightly less - when you make an app you were expected to plan for the user to deny functionality and degrade nicely.
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No, the lack of interest from hosting providers wasn't why ruby failed. It's due mostly to performance issues, some of which are due to its design and some of which are due to its implementation.
> Is there no compromise, no middle-ground?

A civil lawsuit system with proof requirements for damages but full exposure to at least all actual damages is the middle ground (or at least one of them.)

Patient bears all or disproportionate risk (as is the case with damage caps or not having a liability system at all) is an extreme, as would be doctor bears disproportionate risk (which would be the case with something less than the usual civil standard of proof, or a presumption of guilt that had to be rebutted). You can't really get "doctor bears all risk", because no matter how easy it is to punish the doctor, or how extreme the punishments are, the patient is still going to bear the risk of non-compensable injury or death from medical malpractice.

> Second of all, it's awfully easy for the patient to decide the doctor should bear all the risk, eh?

That's not even a possible option (much less a fair description of anything on the table), so while it might be easy for someone to decide it in the abstract, its not really relevant to the issue at hand.
They own a customer base willing to pay them billions of dollars per quarter.
Yup. I'd throw in the camera as well. And no other phone has the Touch ID. It feels to me like "best hardware" was code for "biggest screen".
Aren't they losing money on Bing, and are basically break even on Xbox? I predict Microsoft will eventually give up on Windows Phone and probably the consumer market in general. The momentum is overwhelmingly against them, but of course they'll go down with the ship almost all the way. What they should probably do is maintain an Android fork.
Both let and const are supported in IE11 as well!
That's an interesting kneejerk response that one hears variations of whenever anybody brings up any smartphone OS that is not their One True OS. Do you have particular things that it doesn't do that iOS of six years ago did?
Indie movie guy here. It will be fine. Existing pro and semi pro cameras that offer slo-mo functionality as a fringe benefit typically do so with compromised resolution (eg with a RED Scarlet you have o drop drom 4k to 2k to shhot at 60FPS and down to 1k for 120FPS, IIRC). It's a fact of life and editors are used to dealing with it, you just have to be selective about how much you use, your composition and so on. There are also ways to address shortcomings in post-processing with super-resolution plugins and so forth. 700fps at 720k is more than acceptable for many purposes (especially when you lay a breathless narrator saying 'shot with a special camera...', because this will get used more in documentary and newsgathering than in narrative.

The more advanced frame rates will only be useful in science labs due to the increasingly poor resolution, but they'll still be useful - there was a consumer camera from Casio that did something similar at much lower resolutions but it had a fixed lens which severely limited its application. However, it became quite popular with amateur filmmakers and in high-school science labs.

I like that this is just a head that goes out to a computer. I don't think every director of photography will have one, but that some people will specialize in setting up and shooting this and then rent themselves and their gear out to productions for special effects shots etc. They'll make their target comfortably.
If any new phone wants a decent market share they have to start with the developers - they are the ones who will carry it along until enough 2 year contracts expire to grow the user base. Blackberry simply failed on this front so it's no wonder they are struggling. They followed Microsoft's path of screwing developers which clearly was a bad move.

There is always room for new devices, though. If FF or Ubuntu develop the repertoire with the developers first they have a fighting chance. There are pretty much no companies left that can sell just on their history and existing fan-base alone.
I first thought of "Watchmen" by Alan Moore.
Best in class products from Apple which companies use include the iPhone, iPad and their laptops. If you're just pointing out that Apple isn't a component maker, I'm not sure what the point is other than trivia.
> No discrimination against religious beliefs. What constitutes a belief shouldn't be up to the Government to dictate, unless that belief may cause harm to an individual or those around them.

So police and government officials shouldn't be able to identify someone wearing a Niqab? Hiding one's identity is a safety issue, and harm could follow...

I fully agree with the rest BTW, but you do need to realize, there are unsavoury practices around the world that are justified by 'religious' belief...