skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The fact that dates in general are so screwed up is a great advantage for UNIX timestamps.

A single moment in time maps to a single UNIX timestamp and back again with almost no complications or exceptions (the only one I'm aware of being leap seconds, which is fairly minor). This makes it a great way to store and manipulate actual time.

It's then complicated, sometimes enormously complicated, to go from this simple representation to what humans would call a "date". But that's unavoidable, and by using something nice and simple like UNIX time in the backend, you ensure that all of the craziness when dealing with weird human systems stays at the front end where it belongs.

It's not always possible, of course. Some systems need to store "dates" in terms of what humans think they are, not actual moments in time. (For example, storing a birthday as UNIX time would be a bad idea.) But whenever you want an actual moment in time, UNIX time is great.
You’re not Agile unless you’re “agile”
I flew Ryan while getting lost between Poland and Portugal... luckily I knew someone there early on that hammered the necessary knowledge into my head about flying with Ryan - their rules... really was a life-saver in terms of price. Now, if something goes wrong with your flight, like due to weather, you are essentially (completely) left hanging, phucked. I love them, I hate them, but I would definitely use them again. What does that say about a company/product??? I dunno.
I've been to a couple of places that use these and I haven't seen any reduction in wait staff. One of my favorite hamburger places (Stacked) is new and is built on having ipad menus, even they have tons of waitresses on hand to help with people who have a hard time with the menu or to grab drink refills. They could easily do refills through the ipad but don't, I think on purpose so it forces interaction with the waiter. That will change over time I'd imagine but for now the hands on approach is probably ingrained enough in the customer base you have to people around.
> If it's as widespread as the author claims, aren't/shouldn't things like this be taught in your basic CS courses?

Its pretty much been covered in every introductory database book/course/etc. I've seen. The problem is that application developers (and this is by no means limited to web app developers, or application developers which in other domains have limited technical skills) often feel that they don't need to understand databases, and tutorials on application-side technologies that use databases often promote bad use of databases (and, often, ORMs go even further in making bad choices the path of least resistance.)
This comparison is just silly. Look (guess) at Apple's development budget for the iPhone. Look at Fairphone's (or again, just guess). Look at the size of Apple. Look at the size of the Fairphone team at the Waag Society. I don't think I need to say anything else. This is majorly impressive.
My bet is a device like google glasses (or contact lens) with a sleek headset that has mind controllable sensors. I don't want to type, or talk to control it. I just think of calling my friend and the phones dials, and I see her image. I am willing to carry the computing unit in my pocket so the glasses can remain light.

I bet that it is 5 years away. If it is like the cellphone, it won't be google that builds it because there is just too much technology that is not yet ready/affordable.
Manulife Asset Management - Boston, MA (full-time)

Looking for an Associate Portfolio Analyst to do interesting data science-y things related to asset management -- from the firm-level ($250B) down to the security-level, and everything in-between. R, Tableau, D3, PostgreSQL, Python.

If you are a creative technology person who is into finance, this is a cool job. (I am a finance person who is into technology.)

http://manulife.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang...
They can make it work in an iPad, why would all your arguments be any different in a Macbook? For a $130 premium option no less!
Kickstarting your design career
Simulating Waves in Javascript
LOL @ "they have the lead", you mean state protection. They don't need to care about Ryanair because of 49 U.S.C. §41703(c)
I'm not gonna be impressed until they hook it up to some drones to bring out the food from the kitchen.

;-)
Have had decent experiences with RyanAir to be honest; I think Wizzair is worse - not only this but they have much strayed from the concept of "low cost" that made them famous.

In many situations it is cheaper to just fly with BA, Lufthansa or other European companies.
One of the happiest moments for me when starting at my current job was the day I saw that all our servers were set to UTC as the default time zone. Leap seconds may cause some pain every 3 years or so, but a huge number of problems in system time accounting can be avoided by just keeping everything in UTC, and translating into a given timezone representation only at the highest possible level, just before displaying information to end users.
> This problem exists whether the Unix timestamp actually jumps or not.

No it doesn't. I can tell you authoritatively that the UNIX timestamp for 2023-01-01 00:00 UTC is 1672560000. That value is not dependent on future changes to the rotation of the Earth.

Now it is true that I cannot tell you precisely how many physical seconds there are between now and then, because I do not know how many leap seconds will be added in the meantime. But in practice I think this is less critical. Applications that care about this probably use a more specialized time scale anyway. But it would be strange to put an appointment in your calendar for midnight and find that later on it had flipped to being at 11:59pm the previous day.

> Again, and I already said this multiple times now, the idea is not to abolish the Unix timestamp and ignore whatever breaks. Instead I suggested to introduce a linear counter for apps that want it.

I understand what you are saying. I'm just saying that your proposal trades one surprise for another. An app author might think "oh yes, a monotonic time sounds nice" and start using it, only to find that they are broken later because they were surprised that a minute could be 61 seconds long.
I find your application form absolutely insulting
Man, Machine And How They Relate To APIs
Show HN: I'm building a Bitcoin exchange simulator
I understand where the author is coming from but
I disagree completely.

Imagine trying to build a smartphone 15 years ago,
that would be really hard. You need a decent screen
you need a good cpu etc.

All of that is off the shelf now. Anyone can buy it
and its cheap. (esp in volume)

In a market in China (I dont remember the name) there
are vendors upon vendors who sell all sorts of electrical
parts, gadgets etc. You can literally walk down the isles
and pick the parts you want in your new smartphone.

So hardware wise, now is a good time. Sure you wont get
as polished as the big players right away, but prototypes
or a limited set sure.

Now software. There is quite a bit of software that will run
on the arm board. With all the hacking on the android platform
(sadly a lot more than on the Windows or Apples phones), you can (if you want) at least create a very customized different Android based OS if you want. (would make updates a bitch).

But you can also get some version of linux working and I am sure some other strange os.

But there has never been a time when it was easier to get
some dev boards, and start writing the next mobile OS.

Its something you can get started on at home now for less
than $1000.

As far as the cloud services and integration that has
never been nearly as easy. We have all sorts of providers
with stable and "open" APIs.

Providers like MS azure provides a full stack.
Database, Data storage, device sync, messaging,
computation etc. and they are not the only ones.

I cant think of how much building and setting up
all that cloud stuff would have cost in itself.
Its out there now, and if you are tesing and writing
your app, or have it deployed with low values its
very cheap. Sure you wont have your own Music store
right away (but licensing is the biggest issue there)
but you can piggy back Amazon mp3.

So we have good access to cheap hardware.
We have development tools, boards and compilers.
We have excellent possibilities cloud sync, integration, etc.
We have open source operating systems we can hack at,
learn from and understand how things work.

As others have pointed out the future is probably
pure data phones. That is a great market to attack
right now. Forget the 1984 "phone" part and the
nobody really uses anymore SMS.
> Organising something like this in a controlled area like a campus must be a few orders of magnitude simpler than organising something like this across the US.

Not necessarily. When a new address comes up, a human operator might takes a look at a satellite image of the address and give the drone an appropriate location to land on the property. That data would then be stored. 15 seconds with a human, one time only, is all it would take to make this easy in most neighborhoods.
I didn't really get what the author was referring to with "those final four words" either, this hardly seems like pedantry to me.
Yeah, I guess, although it makes for the possibility of broken cadences, which is everybody's least favorite thing ever. I imagine that this isn't going to happen until film is dead as a presentation medium for a variety of reasons (tooling, as you note).
I don't see how it could possibly be "nitpicking" to discuss this stuff in detail. The conversation started out with the question of why some vaccines are not given to certain people, and why that does not mean that these vaccines are dangerous to other people. We then diverted to the question of dangers in infants, but understanding exactly what the dangers are and why certain vaccines have certain dangers is hardly "nitpicking".

And to be honest, no, I did not read the end of your post. I stopped at the moment I got to that completely ludicrous statement that an allergic reaction qualifies as an immune system compromise. This is not some obscure detail, this is an extremely basic fact about how the immune system works.
My office is small? Good point, though.
It does not matter, because leap seconds do not affect the UNIX timestamp <-> UTC mapping. That is the whole point of what I am saying.

The UNIX timestamp for 2023-01-01 00:00 UTC is 1672560000. I can tell you that right now even though I do not know how many leap seconds will be added between now and then.
Curious that the article doesn't mention the word "patents" once. That's what stops you from even starting to build a Smartphone of your own - you'd violate dozens of patents and be sued into oblivion. The only reason manufacturers are able to do it now is because they all have portfolios of their own and are in a state of cold war with everyone else.
Elementary, Worldly Wisdom
How Do Users Really Hold Mobile Devices?
Unified and side by side diffs were never really meant for diffing documents. If you do go the route of introducing line breaks to improve readability and/or editing, you really need to use a different diffing algorithm. What I've found useful is the Google diff match and patch library.

http://code.google.com/p/google-diff-match-patch/

Its extremely easy to integrate as well. You can see how it handles a markdown diff at:

http://ny.testdrive.gitsense.com/index?#pid=23&cid=27&trail=
"...and if he had been, he wouldn't be as of this morning:
to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun
on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered
would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent.
On the one hand, it seems ridiculous (absurd, perhaps) to
fire someone over a pronoun -- but to characterize it that
way would be a gross oversimplification: it's not the use of
the gendered pronoun that's at issue (that's just sloppy),
but rather the insistence that pronouns should in fact be
gendered. To me, that insistence can only come from one
place: that gender—specifically, masculinity—is inextricably
linked to software, and that's not an attitude that Joyent
tolerates."

Seriously? You're attributing this insistence to malice without considering another viewpoint: This could be simple grammar nazism from someone who takes a prescriptionist (as opposed to a descriptionist) viewpoint on English grammar. For a very long time, gendered pronouns have been considered the grammatically correct form. Acceptance of gender neutral form is relatively new, maybe one to three decades old in common use. There are other possibilities than this being a case of active overt sexism. At the end of the day, you need to remember that we are in an industry where we all rubberneck at a huge debate over the proper use of the semicolon in Javascript to cite one example.

Gendered pronouns becoming an issue of sexism entered the discussion the same way that the concepts of double negatives entered the English language. Someone simple decided to make a stink about it until everyone believed it. I don't know who was responsible for making gendered pronouns a sexism issue in English, but in the case of double negatives, you can attribute that popular language change to Bishop Robert Lowth, when he published A Short Introduction to English Grammar with Critical Notes in 1762.

At the end of the day most romance languages are inextricably linked to a linguistic concept of gender, but you don't see any speakers of those languages making a big issue about the political correctness of their mother tongue. Why? Because linguistic gender and sexual gender are extremely weakly related and they are only strongly related in English because a strong relationship has been argued for by people with nothing better to do until it is a popular concept.
Why I Don’t Recommend Auto-Renewable Subscriptions
>"Did they actually ship on time?"

Nope. I'm an "early-bird" backer of this. The last update on shipping says they've pushed to January.

Apparently, there were complications sourcing the 3G modems they intended to use.

From the update:

"Unfortunately, we live in a world where small, African, tech companies don't have the influence to get global component suppliers to meet our delivery deadlines. In particular, we have been unable to secure a timely supply of the 3G modems that are specified for the BRCK. Although it would seem straightforward to simply switch to another modem, the implications of this change effect mechanical design, board layout, and certification - all things that require time to adjust. We are now working with multiple suppliers to find a suitable alternative that we can source in sufficient supply to meet our production demands."
Can we discuss it here?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6837713
Why even submit this when the title attributes the story to someone else?

http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304...
Only 4% of languages are used online
I'm one of the BRCK team and I use the Karma when in the US traveling around. I initially bought it for testing and think it's a really well done device. What you should know about it is that it's only really good in US cities, as it uses WiMax backhaul. It's got decent battery as well. Their social mechanism for getting others to signup and get you free Mb really works (pro tip: Keep it on in the airport).

The BRCK was designed for a different use case. It's designed to allow more connections and to have failovers for poor power and internet connectivity. It also allows you to extend it with both hardware and software of your own making.
The part below is pretty terrible. So all these big guys with the resources to fight back like Newegg did instead keeled over and paid up...

"Target had a website; Target got sued by TQP. It got out of the case by paying $40,000.

Some paid less than that—but most paid more.

Dodge & Cox, a mutual fund, paid a bit more than $25,000. Pentagon Credit Union paid $65,000. QVC paid $75,000. MLB Advanced Media paid $85,000. PetSmart paid $150,000. PMC paid $400,000. Cigna paid $425,000. Bank of America paid $450,000. First National paid $450,000. Visa paid $500,000. Amazon, Newegg's much larger competitor, paid $500,000. UPS paid $525,000.

IBM paid $750,000. Allianz Insurance paid $950,000. Microsoft paid $1,000,000."
This is almost exactly how I felt when I saw that Google was "taking on death".

Some of these SV companies are better than others at this kind of thing. Amazon, Google, and Apple have this ability to make otherwise skeptical journalists just turn their brains off...Google's "death stunt" was the cover of Newsweek for god's sake.
If you like Esports and believe in bitcoin, you'll like this
How to scale Django: Finding the Bottleneck
There's nothing that says std::map has to be implemented as a red-black tree. And using an abstract data type that's implemented with a tree is not the same thing as making your own tree for your own purposes.
Good point. I'll see what we can do to make that more visible, the features are too hidden right now.
Effective Usenet Tradecraft: Survival in an Extremely Adversarial Environment
Why Amazon's appearance on 60 Minutes was more about Cyber Monday than drones.
Most things needed to make a smartphone is covered by FRAND patents. Software patents are of course a problem for anyone working in the software industry, so that's not limited to smartphones.
Interesting! Thanks. It sounds like a different take on the same rewriting-is-necessary principle, rather than slowly writing a perfect first draft.
I think that's mainly a problem with apps using a wall clock time (e.g. System.currentTimeMillis() in Java) when what they really want is a monotonic clock based on a hardware counter of some kind (like System.nanoTime()).

I'm not too familiar with what the clock situation is like for languages outside C/C++/Java.
Yeah, the "Features" section of the home page has some mystery meat navigation. Lots of useful information hidden behind 9 click/hovers.
Are you sure? In his obituary, it says two drafts. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-obit.h...
Actually in this particular case it seems to be an issue with the concept of jury by peers.

Based on this article: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/jury-newegg-infri...

From further down this conversation
True — I didn't mean to slight Ayn Rand or her books. But if there ever was an airline where the passenger's success (super-cheap flight versus being horrifically screwed over) is the direct measure of his or her individual skill, effort, and creativity, it's Ryanair.
Good points. We'll rework some of the messaging.
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” - George Orwell
This exists, though it's rare to see any software that uses it. DJB's daemontools do, somewhat unsurprisingly.

It's called TAI, International Atomic Time [0], and it's effectively just UTC minus the leap seconds. It's (close to) the actual time being measured by CPUs all about and it's a pain in the ass to convert to and from it due to leap seconds and such, but if you want to just make time somebody else's problem entirely then using TAI will keep you accurate at least.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time
>Same reason /s4s/ is still there - it's the board where people go to shitpost so that the other boards don't have to be filled with it.

No, no, no. 4chan is still full of shitposting, and /s4s/'s own shitposting has steadily been leaking into other boards. Moot has no idea how to manage and build a community. His answer to troublemakers (spammers, shitposters, idiots) is to give them their own place, hoping they'll just stay there and leave everyone else alone. The racists, the misogynists, the ponyfuckers, you name it. Then when they have established a presence (thanks in no small part to his retarded policy) and people still complain about them, he says now he can't get rid of their board, or they'd spill out into the others. This kind of approach is, at best, horribly naive, and at worst, downright stupid. The site has been hemorrhaging quality posters for years and creating abominations like /s4s/ won't help to reverse the trend.
They can now. Before we had (and on iPhone still have?) different models to handle different carriers. That's not a good UX for customers, especially as computers are still not at the commodity level that phones and tablets are (refresh purchases are 3+ years apart).
If you banned everything that could possibly be unsafe, we'd still be running around in the African Savannah.

This article is troll-bait.
I'm pretty sure ebooks haven't crashed and killed anyone and landing isn't the only problem.
Luckily the grid tends to infinite resistance in the limit.

Also interesting ->

Infinite grid of capacitors (tends to 0 at infinity):

http://arxiv.org/pdf/0905.0054.pdf

Infinite sphere resistance (tends to infinity):

http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/48439/resistance-...
I think it is.

There are cases in which it may be ... very specific. You're looking for feedback from a select group / highly refined community. Though this also presents issues -- see discussions of "the problem with mathematics" where there might be a half-dozen people who are capable of even following, let alone assessing, an argument or theorem.

Where you're working in a system without any selection, you're not dealing with an evolutionary system (or you've misidentified the selection process).
The original comment missed the point of the chart in the article you link: the increased pixel density is useless __at TV viewing distances__. When you go down to about 2 feet from the screen, 4k is pretty apparent on a 30 inch screen.

A clearer chart is at [1], and the Carlton Bale's original article even has a handy calculator that lets you verify this [2].

1: http://s3.carltonbale.com/resolution_chart.html
2: http://carltonbale.com/does-4k-resolution-matter/
They still mean something in those countries, because carriers there still have agendas, marketing budgets, partnerships and retail stores even though they may not dictate cell phone features.
NASA waiting on Google for a ride up to the moon...C'MON MAN
This is correct (and thanks for being a backer). We had some issues with the modem supplier and had to redesign the comms board to work with the new modem. This was after going around in circles with the original supplier and losing valuable time. It sucks being small when dealing with some of these large organizations, but we did eventually find a great modem and have been testing it out this month.

I am sorry we had to delay the production, we all so badly wanted to get it out on time...
Mass transport should be bike (or it's advanced-tech equivalent) friendly. Not just 1 or 2 spots on a bus/train, but many or all spots should allow bikes.

Then it won't be a question of mass transit vs. bikes but both together - that'd make a bunch of more commute options workable for me.
They shipped different models to handle different carriers and only recently are they shipping unified models for multiple carriers. As I said in another reply, that's bad UX for a device that's not quite at commodity level prices. You could always get a dongle or pair it up (still options), which prevents the computer from becoming obsoleted by changing network affiliations or protocols.
Likely it means scheduled.
I came here to say exactly that. Southwest feels reasonably mainstream to me these days. (And Spirit is terrible.)
Hardly seems to address the problem stated in the article, as a search for "BP" on duckduckgo contains _only_ investment-related information, nothing about the oil spill. At DDG you are in a filter bubble, it's just not _your_ filter bubble. It's someone else's filter, presumably the collective bubble of the engineers at DDG's incredibly lackadaisical and tragically understaffed search quality department.
I realized after reading other posts that I did, in fact, hear a whoosh earlier.
It's not human nature, because I'm basically asking examples of a software project or application that has been rewritten to the point of rote reimplementation.