skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After the French Revolution, the Republic adopted a base-10 calendar. The number of months remained at 12, but a month's length was made uniform: each was divided into three weeks of 10 days.

The clock was modified accordingly: each day was divided into ten hours, each hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute had 100 decimal seconds.

The decimal clock was officially used in France in 1793-95. (I'd imagine that any remaining clocks from that era are highly valuable antiques nowadays.)
I find that impossible to believe. It would mean that these alleged nations made some kind of judgement between services that are useful for the state to provide and those that are essential.
I know the UK has had some pretty bad attacks on civil liberties in the last few years, but I reckon we still have free speech.

Quite frankly, as someone who has access to the NHS, I cannot believe how unethically the US handles health care. Surely even a single case of someone being financially ruined as a result of an illness is unacceptable, whether through being "uninsured" or the investigation department of your insurance company denying a claim?

As for efficiency of public vs private, here are some costs we don't incur: Marketing of drugs to patients. Claim management staff. Billing to patients. "Investigation departments" of insurance companies. (I'm sure there are more.)

Also, it sounds very time consuming to be caught up in the US health system. While we may have delays for non-acute procedures, acute health care is excellent and timely, and all you have to do is turn up at the appointed time.
> One argument is that a schema-less approach solves the issue of dealing with schema evolution.

That part's not new. I worked in a Notes shop back in the 1990s, and the inevitable result of this was that every database was littered with documents created and updated by so many different versions of the apps that not even the developers really knew whether any fields could be relied on and which features would work for a given document without unpredictable failures.
I think the comments on HackerNews are still a whole lot more interesting than the average YouTube/Facebook/Myspace-style "OMG lolololol!!1111"-type comments that one would find on most other websites.
Healthcare is not optional. Therefore leaving it to the markets is unwise.

Would you consider leaving policing to the private sector? Perhaps you could have a system where you have "civil protection" insurance policies, and the company protects you from crime? I'm sure that'd work really well.
Nokia 5610 Music Pink 
The slider mechanism reveals the keypad when initially it just looks like an mp3 player. The music controls are located right under the screen which means that play and pause are easy to press. The 2.2-Inch 16 million color-display shows all the menu options in great detail
I would probably be eligble for Nobel Prize if organisms spell that out! But, again, you never know -- it is evolution.
What? 64 is only divisible by 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32. By contrast, 100 is divisible by 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, and 50, while 60 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30.

64 is only useful if you're writing numbers with binary digits. Since humans don't do that very often, day-to-day, I disagree with you that 64 is a good choice.
Thanks for pointing this out. I have fixed it.
Well, your proposals sound to me like a recipe for a nightmare, but you must feel differently. So what do you think would happen?
The sexagesimal system for times and angles was already in use in Mesopotamia circa 2000 BC. It's probably even older than that because it's so widespread and well-established in Eurasian cultures.
Ask HN: Where are you from?
WARNING! Answering this question will turn HN into a social network!
The "useful fraction" reason is the same reason that all the units for every kind of measurement used to be based on 12s, 24s, 60s, and 360s: angle, length, volume, weight, time, etc.

And not just in ancient times. It's much nicer to do graphic design on paper broken into whole numbers of inches, with those inches broken up in to 6 picas of 12 points each, than it is to design for A4 (or A3 etc.) paper, made of √2-multiples of base-10 metric units. It's much nicer (day-to-day) to describe triangles in terms of easy whole-number angles, instead of radians (now that we have more sophisticated math radians are great), and base-10 angles would be awful. It's much nicer to count off days of 12 hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds than any base-10 alternative. Etc.

I think this article posted is completely missing the point. 12 wasn’t chosen because it could be made with a human hand; the particular way of counting on one hand was chosen because it matched the base-12/60 number system.
This post was downmodded and not replied to so i figured i would give an insight as to why i think this is very bad and emotionnaly stacked analysis of the situation.

The easiest part to dismantle is the part about the "lots of bands struggling to make money".

I am a semi professionnal musician, and as such i also know a lot of "bands struggling to make money" guys. There are already a plenty. Maybe 99,50 % of the musicians are struggling to make money, and it has been like that since a very long time.

And guess what, some of them make it and succesfully make a living out of it, and NONE of them depend on royalties to do so, because technically when you're a struggling musician you make approximately 90% of your income on gigs and 10% on publishing your music. And i'm being generous here.
Much more often, and it has been like that since the beginning of indie production, bands invest money into producing their CD, and they never make a net income on it. Except it's still interresting to do it, for the promotion of the band.
On the last year, with my band, we made approximately 25.000 € on gigs, and a whopping 800 € on vinyl/Cd releases.

The consequence of that is that musicians that make a substantial income in royalties doesn't need them to live/survive because when you're up to that point you also earn way enough money to survive with your live performances.

A lots of recent studies shows that people are definately not buying less music than before, and on the other hand getting it for free has never been so easy. Also the www and P2P has been fantastic opportunities to musicians insofar, to promote themselves and sell/give away their music, and hence get a much bigger audience than they had before, without needing to go through the very tight and controlled channel of major record companies.

You see a potential decrease in quality ? As a musican i see a very net increase. Making music and broadcasting it has never been so easy.

The movies industry is a different matter. Production prices are way higher, and potentially you could see it be much more impacted by the P2P sharing.
For a simple reason : Movie makers need their movie industry. Musicians don't, at least they don't need it for broadcasting and producing anymore.
Kindle, iPhone upgrades not worth the hefty price
Not talking about immutability at all when talking about CouchDB's (potential?) scaling ability is odd.

Even if immutability in DBs was no innovation from CouchDB itself, CouchDB will have raised the level of awareness for immutable DBs and probably drive further development in this area. IMO immutability is the very basis of creating scalable applications. So, when talking about CouchDB and scalability you should talk about why the current CouchDB implementation is not scalable in spite of immutability.

Disclaimer: I've only read about CouchDB and never actually used it. I'm not convinced of every feature of CouchDB, I don't think, for example, that it is a good approach to dump type-safety in dbs altogether, though, SQL and RDBMS are not the last word in databases and it is valueable to test other, new models of data storage.
I think it's pretty certain that you don't become a great hacker by trying to be a great hacker.
New book is tawdry account of how Facebook was founded
WOWPals - World of Warcraft location-based social network
WOWPals is a service that is at the forefront of connecting local communities of World of Warcraft players and takes this idea to a new level. WOWPals is dedicated to helping you find WOW players and guilds around your geographic area. WOWPals is a subsidiary of GamersFlux.
Tech Daily: Yes, MySpace can be saved
When Science Is a Siren Song
Food is not optional, Housing is not optional, Clothing & Protection from the Elements is not optional... Would you leave that to the markets?

Most people define government as a monopolization of force, so policing must fall under that category.
Well, yes, this is a particularly poor comment article, by someone who is probably quite heavily lobbied by special interests.

However, I'm not certain Obama will be able to force through a nice health bill. It could turn into a very disappointing failure, like the cap-and-trade bill did, which would be very sad.

I don't think medical R&D is actually under any kind of threat. Nationalised healthcare does work, like it (basically) does here in the UK, but you need the political will and the correct architecture (ours is ok, but not that good).
Why do emergency vehicles have different siren sounds?
"you don't become a great hacker by trying to be a great hacker"

for sufficient intensities of "try" I would have thought that is exactly how one becomes a great hacker. How else does one become a great hacker?
Most reasonably wealthy countries leave those things to the markets, with some guaranteed minimums for everyone, provided by the government.
How does tablet input feel like? You have to use a special stylys, don't you?

What is the CPU, is it LV or ULV and how is the battery life? This is the field where I find all of the existing notebooks lacking. I wish manufacturers have addressed this problem, at least used the existing ULV CPUs!

That said, I'm happy with my X60s, maybe it and the tablets are even the nicest pieces of kit ever, but they could have been made so much better!
"the rest of the world doesn't have free speech"

Wow! Only Americans have Free Speech(TM)! </sarcasm>

you seem to be using the UK's Hate Speech Laws to prove that the UK doesn't have "free speech". Every country that allows "free speech" sets limits. For example, in the United States,

"There are exceptions to the general protection of speech, however, including the Miller test for obscenity, child pornography laws, and regulation of commercial speech such as advertising. Other limitations on free speech often balance rights to free speech and other rights, such as property rights for authors and inventors (copyright), interests in "fair" political campaigns (Campaign finance laws), protection from imminent or potential violence against particular persons (restrictions on Hate speech or fighting words), or the use of untruths to harm others (slander). Distinctions are often made between speech and other acts which may have symbolic significance"

reference:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_United...

so, a definition of "free speech" has to be looser than "anyone can say anything he wants in any context with full impunity". No country in the world, including the United States, makes such an absolute guarantee. Most democracies (the real ones, not sham ones like in Iran) have "free speech" with boundaries depending on local culture and history.
The UK is not even close to having free speech:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASBO
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech#United_Kingdom
His album "Thriller" is the most sold album in the world, to this day. I don't think "mime" is a an apt description.
Well, 100k/month is only 1 view every 25 seconds, so while it sounds impressive in aggregate I wouldn't like to be around if you ever get Dugg. But I'm impressed you can run anything at all in 86M really. What is that, a single mongrel instance, nginx, and mysqld?
I can't find a good source right now, but I'm pretty sure koala meat is poisonous.
Prototype of solar-powered plane to eventually to fly around the world.
dudes, it's a dog-eat-dog world. The strong are supposed to subsume the weak.

If you don't like it, I suggest you change Human Nature. Good luck with that.
I am right in thinking that even in the US, no-one will be left to starve or without basic accommodation?

If I'm right about that, what's so different about healthcare? In the UK, the government provides the basic healthcare, and then you're free to top it up with private health insurance should you want the bells and whistles.

Also, since the private health insurance is competing with good healthcare provided for free at point of delivery, they have a wonderful incentive to provide really good value for money.
Forklifts, Rip and Replace, and Other IT Fairy Tales
Wanna be startin something? http://bit.ly/aYDXm R.I.P Michael
Also, http://www.chunkhost.com is, AFAIK, still running a Beta deal where you can get 512mb chunk for $15/mo, which is pretty sick. Hell, for the Beta period it costs nothing.

Hello, permanent screen session and homepage!
Mathematicians are artists. They don't want to type a bunch of obscure computer codes and then fiddle with them until they get something that looks pretty. Mathematicians want to dash their thoughts down before they flee with the dawn mist, and then move on to the next shattering lightning bolt of genius.
Innovation, Disruption and the Future of the Web
Detailed web page performance test
The Bar Code, Which Changed Retailing, Turns 35
From the reading I've done, people tend to go off it when external factors make it difficult to adhere to such a rigid nap schedule, e.g. every four hours on the dot, rain or shine. As with any habit that requires discipline, like being vegan or practicing the violin 6 hours a day, it's not necessarily a life-long thing.

But people commonly say things like "I did it for a year; best year of my life". Apparently you can literally go for a year getting a total of 2 hours of sleep in each 24-hour period. After a week of forcing it on yourself, if you're brave, determined, and a little lucky, a switch flips in your brain.

If that's a fact, in spite of the nay-sayers, then that's really something. I intend to find out for myself.
Seeing as how you're watching this discussion, I'll throw out an unrelated question:

It seems that jQuery has gained a lot of momentum lately. What are your thoughts on it and prototype? I'm just an 'end user' and try not to do too awfully much with JS, and they all seem like nice work to me... I'm just curious which way the wind's blowing.
Cocaine prices around the world
>>> Titanic (1997) Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) The Abyss (1989) Aliens (1986) The Terminator (1984)

>> Not the sort of person I'd expect to suddenly turn around and release a good movie.

> I've seen a few of the movies on that list.

Well, why didn't you comment on the movies themselves then, instead of saying something that made it look like you were only making guesses as to the nature of James Cameron as a director based on seeing a list of movies he's made? :p

Yep, Titanic was what it was, but as such, not a particularly poor performance either.

Terminator 2, on the other hand, is one of the most epic movies ever made. You should have seen it in a movie theater when you were 14 years old.
Chuck and Eddie's Used Auto Parts
Advance Auto Parts Super DIRTcar Series and the Beatles marketing machine continues to put out new things, ...in chuck and eddie's business
Look at Guy Kawasaki's information on presenting and Tufte for ideas on how to present information effectively.

One of the more interesting ideas that I've come across recently is that a presentation should tell a story. Which is what the pop-science books (see fburnaby's post) are doing.
Web slows after Jackson's death
The moonwalk was at best an exploit as it was a well known move in the popping scene at that point. MJ just took it into the mainstream.

The shoes though appear to be a fresh concept.
I consider IT to be the systems maintenance and administration role

Even programmers often consider the sysadmin/DBA/network admins to be "mere technicians". Infrastructure is a) at least as complex as software and b) if we screw up we don't have legions of QA to catch it 6 months before ship date, it takes the system or the site down there and then.
It's not as if it's now a universal constant, that can never change, is it?

I'd be willing to bet a large amount of money that it will never change.

..just checked the best selling albums list:

Best seller of 90s: 42 million copies
Best seller of 00s: 24 million copies
Thriller: 100+ million copies
And there was I thinking it was just me. I have just sat down to write some .NET framework code to access COBOL indexed sequential files so that an existing web based application can access a "New" package that will be installed over the next couple of months.
Military Members to Donate Their Brains to Science
Tirgu Mures, Romania
Well many of us around the world have been running '"fully capable, no-compromises" computers' on mobile networks for years and so far Armageddon hasn't happened.
on the 10,001st hour epiphany BEGINS at least according to http://kottke.org/09/05/giving-110-in-defense-of-sports-inte...
Internet Anonymity: A Right of the Past?
It doesn't have to even be near enterprisey before having solid schemas and relations are indispensable...

Amen! Some operations necessary on our site would be so slow as to make it unusable were it not for stored procedures and multiple indices per table. It would also be incredibly slow were it not for a well-configured PostgreSQL install. And all we do is aggregate ticket listings.

I've seen people fight with barebones MySQL installs over even more data than I deal with and it's simply depressing. Sometimes "stupid schemas and bad code" have nothing to do with it; you just need to process a lot of damn data. And for that, if using an RDMS, you need one that is mature, rock solid, and has a sufficient feature stack.

End PostgreSQL advertisement.
How to hack your body: Can you get fit in six minutes a week
That's a discipline issue. Nothing stops people from writing their apps to do data migration on update. That is, have their model classes fill in any missing attributes with default values etc. before saving it back. The difference is that you can do it selectively.

Nothing stops people from creating retarded schemas for RDBMS's either.
AFAIK, nobody yet supplies an Android handset designed for hacking itself. I think they're targeting slightly different markets (which do overlap in some areas).
> Although, your writing leaves room for interpretation, you may also be speaking about a different economical model, in wich case i agree with you.

We are in agreement then :-) That was what I meant to say.
Facebook Click Fraud 101
Instant remote git repository
Create a remote git repository in under a minute
Or, if you wish to go further down the cheapness route, check out http://www.gandi.net/hosting/proposal/ (they offer really much bandwith plus extras like Gandi Flex) and http://prgmr.com/xen/ (much RAM) which both seem solid.

Going further down the cheapness route, you arrive to http://www.lowendbox.com/ which specifically lists providers that offer VPS for under $7, plus there are how-to's like this:

"Yes, You Can Run 18 Static Sites on a 64MB Link-1 VPS" http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/yes-you-can-run-18-static-site...
Yeh ok your right - struggling bands was a poor statement (my Brother is actually a musician so I do have an insight into it).

Also what I actually said was:
> a decline in published music quality

Music will have to be published on the cheap = bad quality. Yes there will be lots of great music online (there already is) but no one will sieze it and market in the same way. In the future I think there will be lots of user-centric acts who get little coverage outside their sites and genre's.

So this is the thing: your pitching promotion on a free-ish model potentially awash with thousands of good artists. It could be argued a large percentage of the gig attendance was from people who listened to your CD's - and again it's not a huge stretch to say that in many cases they were driven to the CD by advertising (especially for bands who are relativewly "unknown") - by advertising I include radio plays (which are often prompted by press releases etc.) and other hype. It is in the interest of the producers to sell the CD's so they invest in marketing the bands. In a free model there isnt any point in marketing the band - so the vast majority will never achieve the critical mass to make live gigs worthwhile.

I could well be wrong - but then again I think it's more a case of a "bit of both". I suspect we will see a decline in large music publishers, and will see a lot less "global bands".

So yes it was an emotional reaction (it's hot and the office has 20 computers in it compounding the issue :D) Im just somewhat fed up of the many people who keep bemoaning the media industry despite huge leaps forwards in the last 18 months - it's getting their slowly but is constantly hampered (as I see it) by those who just want something for nothing (and argument I just havent had sold to me yet :P).

Im not saying a free model cannot work (im sure it can). I just argue that some of the main exponents of the model consider it their right to access media for free on their terms - again something I personally strongly disagree with. Copyright is broken: but no protection at all? That's just wrong IMO.
"Armageddon," in this case, is more about price gouging and control than anything. They're not worried what people will do to their shitty network, they're worried about the bottom line.

What if everybody ran an app that allowed you to SMS people for not 10¢ a message?
He also inspired a number of dancers.
Here's a clip of DoKnock (of Battle Monkeys, he's a famous breaker, I guess most people would know him cause he won American Idol I think) who grew up dancing along to MJ stuff:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYaIXi1cNc0
Also, linode has a chat that often has a very good level of discourse, even no members of the staff are present. Sometimes I ask a question there, and sometimes just listen :)
Do they give you private IP's to connect non-publicly accessible nodes? (Linode does) Other way, you'd be using up your traffic limit on this.

How much traffic do your slices use?
Always has been, always will be:

"For of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a law of their nature wherever they can rule, they will"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melian_dialogue
Google Voice: Cloud Meets Cell
Simon Peyton Jones (of Haskell/GHC fame) works for Microsoft Research, too.
Best scripts collection of CSS and jQuery for interactive Webdesign
Do we have two category theorists here, or has the unlikely happened and commutative diagrams found an application in the real world?
For some reason, they only allow beta testers in the U.S. (checked by credit card)

To think of it, I'm not sure I want to trust my credit card number to new and unknown company on the internet (they only allow paying by card directly).