skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be honest, the U.S. really should have switched during the late 19thor very early 20th century before the benefits of the industrial revolution gave us so much stuff that needs to be converted. Even if we converted tomorrow, we'd still be dragging around imperial measures for decades, maybe a century.

I can't see cooking or property measurements making the transition within my grandchildren's lifetimes. In most countries that have metricized, property remains a very stubborn holdout.

Commercial products could convert much quicker, it's mostly a label change during the next minor packaging refresh, followed by the next major packaging refresh adjusting the size to make the unit look better. (1lb -> 453.592g -> 450g)

Paper might take decades, companies have significant investments into handling standard paper sizes, from production to clipboards to file rooms. Going paperless is probably more likely. My local mechanic is now almost entirely paperless for example, but the final bill is still printed out on 8.5x11 paper and a copy filed away.

I agree that manufactured goods should just set a date and switch on the next model year. Eventually the older imperial items will just rust away, with a few examples kept alive by very dedicated hobbyists.

But some niche craftsman fields will probably never switch. Printers still use points and picas despite trying to metricize for a long while. You end up with incredibly awkward metric units for these things when you try to convert, and lots of the handiness of customary units (easy fractional divisibility) comes into play.
YYYY-MM-DD is a much better choice. It sorts like a number, and it's unambiguous in standard usage.
I agree with you completely. We shouldn't live in the past and fail to embrace the present, but I think everyone would benefit from knowing what the past was like. Maybe it will make you develop quite a few healthy habits, after all :)
This seems high...I just went through a bunch of front end web developer interviews and nearly everyone I was asked some algorithm or data structure question. Maybe it's just NYC or maybe it's where I was applying.
America is like the fat kid who's the last to jump into the swimming pool; everyone else is shouting the water is fine, it's warm, it's fun, but you're sitting there worried about the consequences of being wet. As if you were the first person to ever get wet.

You don't need to be careful. Just look at everyone else who jumped in without injury and jump yourself.
"Kernel development is not supposed to be for everyone, it's hard."

Citation?

Given you've admitted to not working on kernel code, this seems like something you've determined out of reverence for the importance of the kernel, not something grounded in fact.

It's worth noting that the entire Linux project spawned from some "casual" development work by somebody doing it as a hobbyist project.
Why is this even on hn? Are you kidding me? I have some college projects too you know...
We (Scotland / UK) are metric for almost everything - science/engineering, medicine, quantities of food etc.

There are a few exceptions in more human measurements - beer is measured in pints, burgers and steaks in ounces, distances on roads in miles and personal dimensions in feet and inches, barleycorns and stones.
Amusingly, the areas where the most US Americans are familiar with SI are gun calibers and recreational drugs. [n] (OK, I may have a warped sense of humor, but it's true)

n. (not taught in schools)
This is something to be precise about. You won't find language in the USA PATRIOT Act that tells businesses they may not provide privacy and security tools for their customers. Similarly, CALEA requires access to carriers' networks and equipment providers must support "lawful intercept" of a certain percentage of traffic, but there is nothing that would prevent networks from providing easy tools for end to end encryption and web-of-trust.

The fact that nobody is doing that is a kind of probe. Do we really live in a free country, or is pervasive monitoring a condition being imposed on us, with no choice of services that would prevent it?
How to Use JMeter 5 more JMeter Functions (use cases)
Capistrano-bower for capistrano v3
Words aren't just words. They have context.

Sometimes a dongle as an adapter.
Sometimes it's a dick.

It's not hard to tell the difference.
This reminds me of a joke I heard in New Zealand:

A bank officer recently heard the following explanation for a farmer's financial trouble:

It all started back in 1966 when they changed from pounds to dollars. My bloody overdraft doubled.

Then they brought in kilograms instead of pounds, my bloody wool clip dropped by half.

Then they changed rain to millimetres and we haven't had an inch of rain since.

They bring in celsius and it never gets over 40 degrees. No wonder my bloody wheat won't grow.

Then they change acres to hectares and I end up with half the bloody land I had.

By this time I'd had it and decided to sell out. I just get the place in the agent's hands when they changed from miles to kilometres. Now I'm too bloody far out of town for anyone to buy the bloody place.
EclipseLink JPA provider for Liberty profile
> The difference between this and the old Atomics is that here, when a CAS fails due to contention, instead of spinning the CPU, the Adder will store the delta in an internal cell object allocated for that thread.

Wow man Java's still all in with it's terrible threading mechanism all the while C# has had async, await and parallelism for years, Go is well past version 1 to great acclaim, node.js and libuv are taking over, and Akka has gained enormous popularity and yet real coroutines in Java aren't even on the horizon. Even python 3 is getting coroutines.

Low level threads in Java are so goddamned awful and unavoidable that it makes me want to pull my hair out. And I otherwise love Java. Java would be so awesome with real, native coroutines. Like that should be only thing they should be working on right now.

Edit:

I'm guessing the people downvoting this have no idea what I'm talking about and don't know what coroutines are.

You know I'm starting to think there's maybe an entire generation of Java engineers who have no idea how much easier it is to write concurrent code with other tools and Java has ruined them. I love Java, but expand your horizons a bit.
Watch Detroit devolve over time on Google Streetview
It depends on the question asked.

Exactly. Subtle changes in the wording can bring about substantial differences in the poll outcome. Nuances are often important (and too often overlooked, imho).
People leaving for keyboard reasons are generally, and I hate the term, 'power users'. For 90% of the iOS customer base the keyboard works perfectly well, I'm not the biggest lover of it but I think it's reasonably solid for what it is and what it does.
Doesn't the notification center and control center basically take care of this? Notification center could be a lot better, but requiring a two-finger pinch is a non-starter.

Also, what's with this made-up title?

>UX/UI & Branding Architect

You're a designer.
"55% of employed Americans" != "55% of Americans are employed"
Replace "real" with "informative, easily interpretable, and intuitive". The point still stands.
Now isn't going to happen and later might be better. We're transitioning more and more to computers. The transition could be handled more easily if we have a generation of computer programs that can easily handle either. Pervasive language support for units would probably help.
Android is 1.6 equivalent with some of the syntactic sugar of Java 1.7, but none of the Java 7 or 8 APIs (NIO, new date library, optionals, lambdas, etc).

Unfortunately the legal fight between Oracle & Google has really made me doubt that the cool new language features will be coming any time soon to Android.
Could you explain that a little bit more? I'm using to Maybe from Haskell and am curious what might be missing from Java's Optional.
Copy.com Referrals Give Crazy Amounts of Free Cloud Storage Space
I think Elon looked extra uncomfortable inside the thing with the control panel in front of him. He seemed eager and relieved to get out. I got the impression he doesn't like confined spaces.
> I am deliberately not giving conversions to Fahrenheit

But I spent all that effort learning what temperature water boils at in Fahrenheit. Who the hell is going to remember what that temperature is in Celsius??
Poll: Do you have your own company?
Not just a poll for startup founders. More generally, if you are a consultant, take contract work, or are an independent contractor have you taken the step to incorporate or organize a LLC for legal protection, or any other reason? Please leave comments about your specific situation.
Yes - I have an INC or LLC for a Startup (high growth and/or intent for funding) I founded
Yes - I have an INC or LLC for my consulting or independent contractor work
No - I have a Startup project, do consulting or independent contractor work but function as a sole proprietorship (no legal entity apart from yourself)
No - I do not: have a Startup, do consulting or independent contractor work.
It's amazing how little propellant is needed for landing vs getting to orbit.
> John Kerry's challenge to Snowden to return and face trial is either disingenuous or simply ignorant that current prosecutions under the Espionage Act allow no distinction whatever between a patriotic whistleblower and a spy. Either way, nothing excuses Kerry's slanderous and despicable characterizations of a young man who, in my opinion, has done more than anyone in or out of government in this century to demonstrate his patriotism, moral courage and loyalty to the oath of office the three of us swore: to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

I admire both Ellsberg and Snowden for serious thinking about what that oath means. In contrast, the NSA seems to be practicing a policy of destroying the Constitution to save it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_had_to_destroy_the_village_...
I currently have a subset of one year's worth of all HN stories and comment trees, organized by story, but it's on my local machine. Where is a good place to post it? It's quite big, on the order of multiple GB.

The problem (if you want an easy scraper) is that the HN API limits you to 1k requests per hour. So it took me about 10 days of continuous running and restarting because of random crashes to get all the data.
your comment about having to use imperial in defense industry reminded me of working for the US Navy in the early 90s, where a standard unit of measure is a "kiloyard" (1000 yards) when measuring the range of sonars. Apparently a lot of the early testing had been done using yards as a unit. Since people often round to the nearest whole unit, they thought converting those historical measures to meters would introduce inaccuracy, so they continue to measure in yards, which yields big numbers with modern gear. Rather than use miles (1760 yards) as the ranges got long, they use kiloyards to record all data (presumably because dividing by 1000 is easier than dividing by 1760). Only in America...
There needs to be an Executive Stories of Note...(after Letters of Note)
Similarly I keep hearing about Netflix and the like commissioning shows.
Google Launches 'Right To Be Forgotten' Request Form
To me, the most interesting thing about that clip has nothing to do with tech, but with journalism - the show host is actually asking him some kind of tough questions and putting him on the spot instead of just giving him a stage to spew his talking points... I kind of remember when journalism worked that way, but it's jarring to see it in the context of modern "talking point regurgitation machine" journalism where the stories are written by corporate press secretaries and copy-pasted into media.
"people who don't recreate tend to blow things up really bad in the long run."

Including themselves.
Great find. From the host's reference to Excite's debut "a month ago", this must be from May 1996.

There was a window of time where Excite's in-house search results were noticeably the best, even without having the largest index. I think they had done something, with either inlink-anchor-text on inlink-counts, for the first time.

While the In The Plex anecdote makes Excite CEO Bell seem foolish, compared to the CNBC hosts Bell had a brilliant understanding of the opportunity. (And that's not to insult the CNBC hosts, either: they were just channeling the thoughts of their skeptical viewers.)
That's a hell of a sales tactic in a market where social ties matter. Kudos to you for figuring it out.
> The UK is certainly unique in the EU for its exceptions which include the use of miles per hour for speeds, miles for distances and, for example, 'pints' for beer.

Given that all official road signs for distances and speed limits in Britain are still in miles, I can't accept that it is a metric country.
> Arecibo is the only thing big enough right now.
Not entirely true. How did they control it in the 1970's?

They chose Aricebo because it allows them to use very low power antennas to communicate. The size of the dish makes up for the lower power transmission.

In the past, they used high-powered antenna arrays.
why not a seiki 39" 4k for $399?

http://www.amazon.com/Seiki-SE39UY04-39-Inch-Ultra-120Hz/dp/...
Personally I have formed an LLC for a energy drink business I started and a P.A. (professional service corporation) for my own law firm.
Only the one who reinvents the wheel learns how it really works. :)
Different strokes, I guess - I dread using my work Android phone's keyboard (or any of the 3rd party ones I've tried) whereas iOS's hit detection/autocorrection mostly feels like an extension of my brain/fingers.
Good point. There is definitely a challenge of knowing when a single-threaded collection or stream operation may be preferable to the parallel option. When my colleague wrote his summary of Java 8 [1], he wrote:

Returning to the concept of parallel streams, it's important to note that parallelism is not free. It's not free from a performance standpoint, and you can't simply swap out a sequential stream for a parallel one and expect the results to be identical without further thought. There are properties to consider about your stream, its operations, and the destination for its data before you can (or should) parallelize a stream. For instance: Does encounter order matter to me? Are my functions stateless? Is my stream large enough and are my operations complex enough to make parallelism worthwhile?

The author of the linked InfoQ article (OP) cites that same dilemma by explaining the potential for context-switching overhead to counter the advantage of splitting the work.

Abstracting it away with rough heuristics might be possible, but doing so with consistent success could be challenging. In other words, you could elect to use the serial algorithm for small collections, or when the CPU contention at the start of the sort operation is low. But if the comparison operator is expensive, CPU contention is volatile, or if operating on a stream of unknown length, the abstraction may choose poorly. Ultimately, I like the option to choose for myself, but like you, I wouldn't mind having a third option that defers that choice to some heuristic.

[1] http://www.techempower.com/blog/2013/03/26/everything-about-...
Thanks a lot for the feedback!

1) Thanks, I will fix that; I agree it is not clear. We accept pptx, ppt, and pdf.

2) With early users, we found that content creation of Word documents can happen relatively easily outside of Word; this is not the case with PowerPoint. There are a couple of great online Word processors, and GDocs does a good job of annotating text. PowerPoint is different because it is still the ubiquitous way to make a presentation, a piece of software which has few alternatives, and currently no decent solution exists for this pain-point.

3.) That's a good idea. We did boxes first of all, because it's a one-size-fits-all approach and we wanted to keep it simple. We will be adding more specific annotations (text, shapes, graphs, etc.) in the future.

Thanks again for reaching out -- and feel free to email me (leo@kivo.com) if you have any more questions!
Something that is often overlooked: in the EU a dozen countries switched to a different currency overnight. Everything. Accounting and banking, shops big and small, the entire value system was redone.

But after more than a decade I still find myself converting back to the old currency in my head from time to time. Only to remind myself that inflation has made that exercise pointless. The older generation has trouble with it, though.
You touched on what I see as the biggest most long term piece to transition, American tool and die companies, foundries and fabricators. A lot of these companies are based around giant machines with 20 or thirty year life cycles. Switching to metric would be a factory's worst nightmare short of blowing the place up.
Etsy also has a thin layer of revenues.

$1B in revenues if you count them the way GRPN does, and approx $35M if you count net revenues.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-12/etsy-tops-1-billion...
Create Cool Text Effects Using Online Generators
Build professional looking logos or text effects using free tools available online.
That maybe used to be true, but these days that's absolute incorrect. A lot of non-Web developers are becoming "web developers", because such a large percentage of new software is written for the Web.
I think (maybe) you misunderstood, I do use Bootstrap with a 24 column grid as I compile it myself with less (I also change a bunch of other stuff to improve table appearance etc).
Ah but your different opinion/use of measurement does highlight how gradual these kinds of change can be - similar to changes to word meanings over time. I didn't say everyone does.

Milk is still sold multiples of pints, with the litre value listed.

Laptop screens are measured in inches.
Douglas Adams would have enjoyed that story. Success and the wonder of hindsight needs naysayers to dismiss things, whether it is those great authors and their rejection letters or something like this.

The thinking - 'it is too good' - actually persists with dating websites where hooking someone up with someone is a nightmare - it means no more subscription revenue. Maybe it is time for Google to do a dating website with some 'don't be evil' thinking behind it.

Google's early success was probably due to a) having a better product and b) word of mouth. I certainly remember sharing the tip with colleagues in the days before they had the text-only adverts. If I remember correctly they did not know how to monetize it then. But again, they might have known all along but pretended otherwise for the purposes of the legend.
Snowden email undercuts whistleblower status
Java – How to pass parameters to anonymous class?
Perhaps not as nice, but there's also Bootply[0]

[0] http://www.bootply.com/
New CFPB database: 227 million Americans' SSNs, entire credit history
Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud CEO Steps Down
Reminds me of a funny comment on Stack Overflow:

> This continual creation/termination/destruction of threads is done so often that I wonder where the idea came from. I presume some poisonous textbook is responsible. Sometimes, it seems that the whole SO is riddled with threads that add two integers and then terminate, just so that the 'main' thread can wait with 'join'. God help us :(

I hope parallelSort() just calls sort() if the array is smaller than some threshold.
The idea for this came to us after a long night of drinking in which it was determined that if the Linux kernel was to survive, it would need new programmers to fix all of the bugs that were recently added after a long night of drinking.

Sound thinking.
Proton's magnetism measured with greatest precision yet
I remember back when it was so easy to "game" Excite and get your site to rank really well. The site certainly sent a lot of traffic back then...
Northerners! Anything below 20 is Winter; put on a jumper.
Yes we know bootply it's great.
So where you live, the weather never changes during the day?

I don't use weather widgets, but "looking outside" is hardly an effective way of seeing if you need an umbrella, especially now in the Spring.
On iOS you can do 3 out of the 4 without even unlocking the phone.

For weather and calendar, swipe down from the top to show the notification center.

For music control, swipe up from the bottom to show control center.

Tube status... sorry, you'll need to open an app.
vs Samsung U28D590D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0YzTJheuFs (4:48)
OpenGL Is Broken
Or a non-profit search engine as a public good service --like Wikipedia, or the Internet Archive.

Obviously storage and networking costs would make it impossible today, but it might be feasible in the not-so-distant future. Either way, sooner or later people will realize the absurdity from a public-interest point of view of having "all the world's information" in the hands of a single corporation whose sole legal purpose is maximize its owners' profit --like it happened with other media in the
past, like broadcast news.
The definition of "advert" is something that you paid for.

If you're asking how does Google know if a link was paid? It has some algorithmic ways, and it also relies on paid link reports from competing webmasters.
Jetstrap is awesome tool, maybe we can talk more about this market?
This is very cool. It's nice to have a tool palette for the set of controls ready to be placed on the page.

Congrat on the great work.
Given the guys programming in Javascript and not using arbitrary precision arithmetic, he's always using 64 bits and representing his numbers as floating point, so I don't think you are reasoning correctly about the asympototic complexity here. I mean, if you really want to argue this, then to quote Leibniz: "Calculemus!"

The javascript solution presented does everything in O(n) arithmetic operations, and the SICP way does it in O(ln(n)) arithmetic operations (actually, there are a lot of ways to do it in O(ln(n)) operations).
Any active Clojure bindings?

clj-spark seems to be abandoned (last commit was a year ago)...
100°C , that should be simple enough :)
Why do you advocate punishing the average case?
>'I'm sure there are some exceptions among HN readers, but among the very few people in my circles on Android, all cite screen size as their main reason.'

I do some work with an org that offers a choice among iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Blackberry for thousands of company phones.

I find that 'normal' people are barely aware of any difference between iOS and Android. They care about screen size as you note and really practical things like battery life and reception. The only time OS becomes relevant is when someone wants to switch and worries about losing stuff in the transition.

Personally, what locks me into Android is the keyboard. Having used Swype for years now means that I can't even consider iOS until it has an equivalent.
Read the fine print. ;)
It's likely an artifact of the jobs you're applying for but also consider that they're might be asking those questions now because in the past there were too many applicants who weren't qualified. It's only been fairly recently that front-end development has been taken more seriously as an engineering discipline.
Wow, so much hate here.

I like the re-design. Yes, he makes it readable by reducing some information. But it's a lot easier to read. Sometimes that's a good trade-off.
It's probably better to have a larger screen further away, particularly for older people who can't focus close up any more. That occurs some time in your 40's for you youngsters who may think "older" means quit a few more years than that.
US already has many "slightly dissimilar" paper sizes, this Letter, Legal, etc... so at least for A4, one more couldn't hurt right?
If I may ask, what is your motivation for transitioning from embedded to cloud/web?
I knew I was setting myself up a hostage to fortune and as soon as I did it someone would spot new typos :-) Thanks, fixed.