skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This annoys the hell out of me.

Metric is worse in almost every way for day to day tasks. Not everyone is a scientist doing complex calculations. For science, maths, engineering, sure use metric.

Imperial measurements are based on convenience. Why do we buy a dozen rolls from the baker and not 10? So we can divide them between 2,3,4,6 people.

Weights are similarly based on what is useful. Look at a recipe for cakes and you might see 1Lb of this, 1/2Lb of this. The metric equivalent? 100g of this, 200g of that. How is that more useful to me?

You can easily divide imperial weights by 2,4,8,16 to make smaller batches. Doing the same with metric is a pain.

Why do we ask for some 2 by 4 timber? Because it's easier than asking for some 48mm by 96mm timber.

If you're doing finer work, measuring things in divisions of an inch makes perfect sense. 16ths of an inch means you can subdivide with ease. Try dividing a cm into 8 equal parts sometime and tell me how you get on.

Why do we use shoe size numbers rather than specify the length of our feet in mm? Because shoe sizes are about the right precision.

In the UK, we also use stone to measure our weight. I'm 9 stone and a bit. Why is it more useful to be able to say I'm, 60kg. That's more precision than I want to tell someone my weight.

I know this is an unpopular view with geeks, but if someone could please explain what problem metric solves, I'm all ears (And please don't trot out the space shuttle imperial vs metric mix up FUD).
Torn makes a lot of money because it is an interesting online game. It is interesting because you can build your character and watch how it performs over time, not because it is about crime. Very similar to other online multiplayer games, e.g. Legends of Zork.

As far as I know, there isn't any statistically valid data in favor of the concept "letting people try it out in another reality decreases crime rate" or the opposite. I tend to think trying it out virtually does decrease crime rate. It has the same effect as an experience of a vaccine injection, where one gets an infection in low dose, which helps them gain immunity to it.
Why Steve Ballmer will resign from Microsoft in 2010
"My father helps me quite a lot and I will go to him for advice about the business side of things."

Yeah. Nothing to see here.
Ah, but now it's a lot harder to share anything that isn't simply coming out of a shared library; pre-cached computations, any code that isn't in a shared library (like Perl or other interpreted code), any expensive computation that must be done per-process, etc. Forking off children is virtually impossible to beat on the efficiency front; people tend to grossly overestimate the expense of a "fork".

The only way to win with the approach you suggest is if you have some sort of massively complicated server that you only ever need some small part of at any given point in time, allowing you to do a lot of swapping in and out of memory. I've never seen such a beast and can't really come up with a non-contrived use case. YMMV, but it certainly isn't a common case.

(Yes, Perl isn't exactly interpreted, but from this point of view it certainly isn't a shared binary library.)
When you have a numbering system based on 12, you have a few more factors to treat in a special way. Why stop there? We can go to a numbering system based on 60 or 72 or ...

Believe me, this is the wrong way. We should strive to avoid special cases, and not create new ones. Thus - for the sake of consistency - we should build our number system (and measurement units) on base 11. This way all (non-trivial) factors will be treated the same way.

Since you have to deal with repeating fractions anyway, you might as well make it the only case.

I rest my case.
I've been working at a major gaming studio in between startups and I have to agree with this - game programmers rock!

The only catch is that they tend to be obsessed with games. So if you want them to build something else make sure they are tired of the gaming world and want something new.

Anyone who can commit their software to a ROM disc has my respect.
django is a very tidy and pythonic code base. Ditto for twisted, but twisted might be more complicated than what you're trying to do (edit: or not). The recent Tornado server is of a an approachable size and from the look of it, very well engineered.
I routinely use discrete math in "everyday, consultingware". Computer Science, and by extension programming, is fundamentally a study of discrete math. Linear algebra is another field that I use a LOT, and not just in graphics systems. If you think math isn't useful for programming, it's because you don't know enough math. I'm with the OP on this one, I wish I knew more math. I'm certain it would make me a more efficient programmer.
still I dont't see why kiba should be down voted for not getting it, huh
A poignant example -- but I disagree as to its import.

A perennial business strategy is to create commercial means for satisfying needs that commerce creates -- of the creation of scarcity out of abundance, be it food, education, health, etc. So it goes with software as well. On one side there is "opportunity"; on the other, exploitation.

I don't know how this relates to Miguel & Richard, though; their issue seems to be the classic "radical vs liberal" split.
The "it exists, lets regulate it" mentality scares me. Here are the likely results of this move:

1. Yet another step away from laws made by elected law makers. Over time, the accumulation of these can threaten democracies. (Of course, each one in isolation is "no big deal".)

2. Another cost of doing business for companies providing freebies. Another junior lawyer on the payroll.

3. A few bloggers will be singled out and ruined federal style, while the vast majority will skate on by living with the low but present risk of being among the unlucky hanging over there head.

My wife had lunch with a guy who works at the FCC on Saturday. You know what the big issue they are battling internally is? On Friday they banned accessing Hulu.com because so many people were streaming instead of working that it was killing the bandwidth for all. Is this who gets to tell society if a blogger is on the level or not? Why am I as a blog reader less trusted than an FCC/FTC/Any Other Agency employee?

I'm reading YCombinator at work because it pays to be educated and up to date. This is where the smart people are so this is what I read. I doubt watching "Glee" at work provides FCC employees the same benefit.
The VC Gender Gap: Are VCs Sexist?
Why do we "still" use binary / hex for computers?

The answer is that a decimal system of notation isn't a pure win in every endeavor.

As a woodworker, there's a lot that I like about Imperial (I like doing metalworking in metric, though, and I have one metalworking lathe calibrated in each system).

In woodworking, an inch is about the width of my thumb pressed flat. I can quickly measure things that way. The foot is a convenient size for the work that I do. Meters are a bit too big. Centimeters are too small. Imperial drill bits are available in sizes related by n/2. I can go from a 1" bit to a 1/2" to 1/4" to 1/8", etc. Or, I can add 50%, going from 1/8" to 3/16".

See also ISO preferred numbers (ISO 3:1973)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferred_number

http://www.sizes.com/numbers/preferred_numbers.htm
There are still western liberals?

Mind you, compared to the rest of the world, I guess.
While I share a lot of respect for game devs I'm curious about this quote from the article....
What do you mean by "While web developers have been whining for years and have been stuck in their despair"
> What's in the core of a unix system is pretty much what needs to be there.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=linux+bloat
It's a compromise intended to stimulate the provisioning of public goods, to borrow some terms from economics, by creating artificial scarcity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#Possible_solutions
In the great conversation-that-is-the-internet, why is what anyone says not important, merely for a lack of notoriety?
If my memory is correct something very similar happened also during the testing of the first 'Star Wars' missiles. The given cost is pure bull. Autocad has a facility where one can convert from metric to imperial dimensions. It would not cost that much to re-design the software to carry out the conversions automatically, including re-selection of standard components. (Except if NASA is still using rotring pens and tracing paper).

One issue that would crop up though is some very odd looking sizes. Assume a rod of 1". This will translate to 25.4 mm, no sane Engineer in the rest of the world would specify a size like this, but would go for 25.0 mm.

Having studied both systems I can assure you that the Imperial System adds easily 6 months to an Engineer's training.
Ask HN: Where do you find talent to work on one-off tech problems?
I've used 99designs for graphics design and I like it. But now I have a programming problem that is beyond my own skill and simply not practical for me to spend many hours trying to figure out. Where would you go to hire someone to solve a one-off problem in as direct a way as possible? I know of eLance but I haven't heard the best things.

-the problem--

I want a working demo of using Adobe's BlazeDS with their JavaScript libraries and a ColdFusion CFC on the backend.
Tell HN: Your Submissions as RSS (using Yahoo Pipes)
I wanted to feed my friendfeed's stream with my HM submissions. So instead of posting "ask pg:when would we have rss feed per user" I decided to create this using yahoo pipes.

You can clone it and simply change the fetch page's URL to your id e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=YOUR_ID

Grab it at

http://pipes.yahoo.com/tzuryby/hnsubmissions
The output of a system and the system itself are two different things. It doesn't matter if the code powering that government website is open or not, you can't access that code.

You're arguing two different things here.
Criminalizing everyone - Needed: A 'clean line' to determine lawfulness
> Why do we ask for some 2 by 4 timber? Because it's easier than asking for some 48mm by 96mm timber.

Only, you wouldn't. For the same reason you do not buy 2.11337642 pints [0] of milk. The metric system is convenient enough to work in daily life. (But the historical baggage it contains annoys me. For example the we should get rid of the Kelvin and use a unit of temperature that makes the Boltzmann constant have a numerical value of 1. Also the Mol should make way for a sensible unit of number of atoms, like 1. Oh, and the speed of light should be made some simple number, too.)

I guess with the advent of computers the difficulties of calculation with imperial units should not matter any longer. So imperial units are just not inconvenient enough to warrant a change. Like SI units are not inconvenient enough to warrant a change to something even simpler.

On the subject of choosing dimensions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferred_number has some interesting things to say.

[0] 1 Liter = 2.11337642 Pints
What does learning mean if we understand the biological processes that underlie it?

The same thing it has always meant? It's not like understanding addition grants us some brilliant revelation that changes the "meaning" of multiplication. I fail to understand why the meaning of learning would suddenly change because we understood how it worked.

(Side note: I'm not entirely certain about how you're using the word "meaning" here; are we talking about "meaning" as in "definition of", or "meaning" as in "metaphysical significance or purpose", or something else entirely? Eh, in either of the first two cases at least, my opinion's the same.)
What a nonsense story.

Women are less risk taking than men, VC = venture capital, aka as advanced gambling with some ability to tilt the table.

Women start-ups are less frequent for exactly those reasons.

It's also why you won't see a 50/50 split in race car drivers and high speed car accidents.

The most practical result of that is that young males tend to take risks that they probably shouldn't be taking, which won't stop a few of them to get huge pay-offs.
Recession Relapse as Small Business Struggles to Recover?
If rms or someone like him had never been born and the free software movement had never been started, with what would you have written your "equivalent software"? Borland C++?
I may be cynical, but whoever (e.g. Miguel de Icaza) aligns with Microsoft should be careful about their http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish marketing strategy.
"I have no idea how one writes tests when doing exploratory coding."

You're probably already writing tests, especially when you're doing exploratory coding. How much code do you really write before you check to see if something works? You're almost certainly doing something. Maybe it's just a small main program where you validate that some methods are giving you the output you expected, or maybe it's a simple web form that you populate with mock data to verify it's persisting to a database. Unless you wait until the entire functionality is ready before a trial run (and if you're doing exploratory coding, there's no such thing as "ready" anyway), you are writing something to test during iterations.

Instead of throwing these tests away, keep them somewhere and run them periodically. If they break, figure out why - and either fix the code, or change the test. When you're done, you'll have a bunch of unit tests.

(just a quick note - the process I described above works extremely well for some situations, but poorly for others. Some frameworks make it a real hassle to write unit tests. The process I described also is not TDD, it's more of a write a little, test a little approach, which feels more natural to me. I also don't really like to use TDD, especially for exploratory coding).
You missed my point though... People use 2x4 timber because it's a useful size of timber to use. And they use inches because they're useful in describing that. mm/cm/m are less useful for that use case.
If you would like to read a fantastic book about the history of Fiber Optics, what Charles Kao worked on, I would suggest this book: http://www.amazon.com/City-Light-Story-Optics-Technology/dp/...

I found it fascinating and shows the development from first concept through research phases to practical/commercial use.
Physics is nothing but modeling phenomena found in the world. Usually physicists use mathematical functions as their preferred class of models but they are free to use whatever they please. I don't believe there is a 'fundamental' science since it's all just modeling. Maybe the science of modeling is the most fundamental. Computer science, however, does seem to come closer to the 'study of models' then physics.
That makes sense; put differently it would be roughly karma^2/comments^1

And right now the settings are karma^1/comments^0

To generalize, one way or the other you have karma^x/comments^y which looks strikingly similar to points^x/time^y

Why not tinker with different variations until you get a couple of (probably non-integer) exponents that generate a leaderboard you think best represents the ideal character of the site, the same way you tinker with time gravity to alter the frontpage and comment pages?
I interned there as well, and not only did I find plenty of intelligent people there, (including you, what's new Mark? ;) but I also found a hotbed of innovation and unique ideas. I think it's annoying how so many of my peers treat the company like it's a collective of unimaginative, unintelligent sellouts.
Precisely, but my respect for him isn't even because of hacking ability or the software that he wrote. It's because of his ideology and his willingness to dedicate his life to it so that other people may have freedom.

Hackers nowadays take free software for granted, but without rms, it may well never have happened. If we (developers who rely on open source software) can afford to compromise and parlay with the enemy now (and make no mistake, before rms got pissed at the path software development was taking and took it upon himself to start a one-man war on behalf of all of us, proprietary software was an enemy), it is because the movement has gained sufficient momentum and become too strong to destroy.

I mean, imagine the reaction of a pragmatic person to the decline of the hacker culture at MIT's AI lab, where it all started. Shrug, move on to whichever job paid the highest/offered the most interesting work, continue living life. If every hacker were pragmatic, then open source would never have gotten started. It took someone who was willing to do it when it didn't make sense to do it to get the entire movement started. I think rms was not only important, he, or someone like him was necessary at the time. He was the snowflake that started the avalanche. Come the moment, come the man, as they say, and rms was that man.

Oh well, I doubt I will convince anyone who is unable or unwilling to imagine how difficult it is to give up personal advancement for the sake of others that rms deserves respect, if not gratitude, but there it is. I think it needed to be said.

On a tangential note, is anyone else going to FOSS.my 2009 at KL? If so, are you planning to attack rms as a ninja? :)
reminds me of an old 'net meme :

Step 1) Make [Facebook game | iPhone app | social network]

Step 2) ????????????????????

Step 3) Profit !
As Click discusses in his Google tech talk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uljtqyBLxI) Intel could implement a hardware read-barrier and radically change the GC performance picture for commodity systems.
I cant quite get behind them yet because they refuse to reveal the source of the data - to anyone.

That smells illegal to me.
You're right: I write a little, do a test run of the code to see what comes back, fix it if it doesn't work, write a bit more and so forth. And I see how saving those little tests could be useful.
You just said, "No one forces you to use their proprietary software." and I gave an example. Of course, it is not forcing, you can stay not opening the attachment, suppress the curiosity.

Yes, file formats /can/ be seen as a different issue, but its often the reason I end up using proprietary programs.

One can have a closed program with a open file format, but not an open program with a proprietary file format, why? Doesn't it suggest an interesting link between proprietary programs and proprietary file formats? Do you still think they are really independent issues?
From the perspective of someone living in some magical country were metric is used all the time your argument sounds very strange.

I do get that it is costly to convert. I cannot, until today, grasp any imperial unit intuitively. Every time I encounter one of those strange things I have to convert (painful even with Google) or else I wouldn't get it. Imperial units are just gibberish to me. I guess this would be the same if it were the other way round.

I don't get your point about convenience. Sure, there might be some minor things that work a bit better in imperial (or not, I don't think your examples are that convincing), but compared to the cost of learning two systems (you have to, for school and science - that must be a pain, I'm happy I never had to do this) this is minor stuff. Also: I don't really know, but I would think that science class would be much harder if you are unable to intuitively grasp the units.

I would guess that you are locked into your system. Leaving it would be costly, even if having only one system for everything would clearly be an advantage.
Some math seems to be able to describe physics, but all math is implemented in physics (assuming thinking is material and not supernatural, something I do assume), so physics is primary. :)
Dear all,

I find it quite fascinating that using "u" in place of "you" in this short, quick and simple to the point comment would cause such an issue to the HN conscientia.

If indeed you are calling out the style police on this and/or me then I feel it only fair for that i summon the snob police in return ;-)

PG wept!

yours Barry
But this guy actually has a revenue stream tied to the game.
Yahoo Obtains U.S. Patent For Human-Aided Search Ranking Method
When a VC comes calling with $4.5m in cash
Am I the only one who thinks that this comparison is a bit pointless?
I was surprised to hear that most of the 40,000 users are happy to pay £3/month to the creator in exchange for small bonuses in what seems to be a very niche (and I say niche because it's text-only, online) game.

I wonder what the retention rate for new users is, and whether the experience will deteriorate as more people sign up to try it out and it moves from a friendly 'niche' community towards something more reflective of the wider internet (youtube comments anyone?)... or whether the fact that it is a text-only roleplaying game will pose a sufficient barrier to entry to those that wouldn't hesitate to act like trolls, and they'll rapidly lose interest, thereby preserving the atmosphere?
I used both at school, mainly metric. Since then though I use metric for science and imperial for day to day things... "Pint, Mile, Inch, Stone, Pound" etc
All the same, here's a quote about him (lifted from wikipedia) that I agree with.

There's something comforting about Stallman's intransigence. Win or lose, Stallman will never give up. He'll be the stubbornest mule on the farm until the day he dies. Call it fixity of purpose, or just plain cussedness, his single-minded commitment and brutal honesty are refreshing in a world of spin-meisters and multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns.

—Leonard, Andrew, Salon.com
What about the people who'll come back and say that all physics is just the result of the universe computing itself?
Math is a language, not a science. To quote Einstein "Math deals with the relation between concepts. Physics deals with the relation between concepts and reality."
Ask HN: Why this submission has been killed/disappeared?
I just saw this submission (Is employment essentially a form of slavery?) and read it with great interest. Few minutes later, it disappeared from index. Fortunately I had the link (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=864095) which shows that topic is suddenly dead.

Can anybody explain the reason?
There's definitely some bureaucratic self-serving in the response. But this particular bit seems to raise some questions about the original article RE his college and home-school courses: Credit will only be awarded if the student completes the college course.

Given that the district isn't allowed to just come out and give specifics about a student's test scores or grades, that line certainly casts the parent's claims in a new light.

While the district likely doesn't have any capability to properly serve truly extraordinary kids, I'm beginning to think the kid in question probably isn't.

And I'm not sure that the public school system ought to be required to serve such kids. At best, they just need a method to recommend a gifted student to the appropriate private or secondary educators who are capable and possibly work out some revenue agreement where state/federal funds for that student can be applied to the institution that does take that child.
Yeah, step (2) is apparently quite well defined :)
Holy, holy 2 by 4. Nobody touch the 2 by 4.

We build our houses with stones. Not stupid trees ;-)
What I really want to know is, where in the constitution does it say they can do this? I know where it says they can't, but they seem to have found some way to twist that so as to get away with it.
Older workers retiring early or working more?
I believe the original poster simply deleted his submission.
Nerdkit - an electronics kit for hackers
solving NP-Complete problems in polynomial time on the size of the problem input is either possible in our physical universe, or it is not

I'd bet that it is.
Mathematical Logic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_logic
The fact is though most people don't care about open source vs closed source. And they never will. No one side will ever win.

Comparing closed source with slavery is pretty insane though.