skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Cooking units are much better suited for the task than metric units.

No they are not. Measuring everything on the scale to a gram yields much better and consistent results than wondering if your dish will fail because some inexpedient was more tightly packed or if your spoons are the same spoons that someone else had.

And while a person could argue that ounce vs gram is moot, it is total nightmare for volume given stuff on dry ingredients.
Sweden switched from left side driving to right side driving as late as in 1967. So it is possible, but, like you said, not likely. Sweden isn't an island, so I can imagine the safety hazards when crossing a border. The UK/Ireland are islands of course, so there's more of a physical barrier. I guess this applies to the metric/imperial system, too. I think we can all agree that the metric system is more logical. But there just isn't enough incentive to make the switch.
On one hand it's backwards from the user experience POV. On the other hand it garantees consistency and resolves most of the weird edge cases of contacts syncing.

I think the common wisdom would be to put the burden on the engineers to find a solution that somewhat handles all the quircks. Personally I've had so many sync failure and weird behaviors from all the services tried until now that I would settle for a more reliable system, even it had severe usability limitations.

I envy organizations that can omit "obvious" features when they don't have a good enough solution to satisfy all the edge cases.
Clinging to customs is definitely a common human trait. I don't see anything special about the US doing it.

For example Europe clings to one of the most absurd customs of all: large numbers of unnecessary languages. Instead of standardizing, countries in Europe go out of their way to preserve extreme inefficiency in communication. So there's Europe, not a young world, desperately clinging to languages to hold on to tradition and supposedly culture.

If it's important to standardize measurement, it must be dramatically more important to standardize on language.

Why does Europe have three dozen major languages in use? Half of Europe shares no common language, with only 50% of people there speaking English. The only thing that would make sense, is to standardize on English, Spanish or perhaps Mandarin (it doesn't make as much sense as the other two for Europe).

I see non-stop talk about how the US should adopt the metric system, and I completely agree because it makes logical sense. And Europe should abandon all of their languages and adopt English - let's see which happens first.
Sony N.Y. Film Debut Canceled as Hackers Raise Threats
This shows nothing but one's ability to code-up a math formula. The blog post goes into much detail about how to solve the problem using matrices and memoization.

Edit: Looks like sillysaurus3 edited his comment.
I understand your point, but I believe some tradition must be put to rest at some point as we grow wiser. On the other hand, Wikipedia says the Lena image was remastered in 2013 so it may lose its historical significance if the remastered version is used from now on. (It's one of those moments where making something better actually makes it worse.)
You can always invent a name (and "light year" is nothing else, just not based on a "round" number of meters).

For example, since failure rates in safety engineering are usually pretty small and nobody wants to pronounce "something times ten to the minus eight" or similar, the term "fit" was invented to stand for 10^-9.

(Although I admit that "failure in time" is a stupid name for a dimensionless constant)

Similarly you could invent a "galactic length" or however you'd like to call it.
>Then you'd have to steel yourself against the howling, since if you actually put something like that out there you'd be a communist baby eating God hating liberal right winger Illuminati Satan worshipper who wants to poison us all with GMO from fracking wastewater and torture kittens and make us all take the mark of the beast, or something.

So, basically, you'd be me. Well, except for the Mark of the Beast thing: I think even wearing a logo on a T-shirt is a little too dehumanizing.
As a lefty who was forced to write with my right hand because of some superstitions, I won't look back. Never. I will always prefer the key before the pen.

Using a pen to write caused a trauma I tried to turn into something useful by learning to write with my left hand. It ended up nice. I have two different styles now but I'll never be as fast as with my right hand because there are not enough chances to train it in real life (and no, I'll never fill sheets of paper with pointless words just for the sake of it again!).

I think (and hope) we'll pass the point where we'll have to write at all and I see the touch screen example not really as a development. I haven't seen anybody use that feature. Most will just pop up the keyboard and type using their trained routine that is so much faster. And everybody can read it...The possibility to write on a touch pad is a salute to pen & paper. Signing is the only really advantage we get from it and that can be solved also. I think the future is in talk (how about eye tracking?) and further on in brain interfaces. Moving a pen will of course still be there then. Like people riding horses today. Maybe my semi-readable writing style will become art then...
Thanks for highlighting it, just downloaded... it's even free!

https://www.atlassian.com/software/sourcetree/overview
No, those stories are not nice, most of them are pretty dark.

We have a very old edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales and the stories are horrible. I used to read them at my grandparents house when I was around 10 or 12 and some really gave me the creeps (like that you have to set the changeling on a pot in a hot stove to kill it).
I love the idea but could you lay out the numbers (I'm a bit busy...)?
That's very impressive! Writing game in such short amount of time is hard. Great work in sticking it out for a year.
In my experience, chopsticks are better when you have food that has already been cut up into pieces, especially when you’re trying to pluck pieces of food out of soups (I can’t imagine eating hot pot with a fork). By contrast, forks are better when you want to hold down a big piece of meat to cut it with a knife, or when you need to use the side of the fork itself to cut something, or when you’re trying to pick up awkward slippery things that you can just stab instead (e.g. raw cherry tomatoes).

For some types of food and dining arrangements, ditching the silverware/individual plates and using a piece of flat bread or a handful of rice to pick up the food (as people do in South Asia, many parts of Africa, and parts of Latin America) is more effective.

Still other types of food is best eaten with hands alone (e.g. sushi, sandwiches, pizza [whatever Europeans might tell you]).

To call the fork “clearly more practical” betrays ignorance and lack of imagination about the broader world.
Well, half a pound of butter is two sticks (butter here is typically sold in four-stick packages weighing a pound; each stick being 4 oz) and half a quart of milk is a pint (also sold in grocery stores; it's also two cups).
Rockets are extremely weak in any direction other than straight up/down. The reinforcement to allow a Falcon 9 core to even lay on its side unpressurised would probably weigh more than the entire set of recovery hardware (legs, grid fins, extra rcs fuel, etc) to land vertically.
returning int(round(x)) could act as a bandaid for the slight error in the results.
I stumbled upon a very interesting short documentary about the metric system and the world's roundest object. Well worth 10 minutes of your break today. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMByI4s-D-Y
Does Hand Finishing Matter? A Collector’s View of Movement Decoration
Not that inconsistent; if you look up the scale, you'll see that most ratios are powers of two; sometimes there's an occasional 1/3, like the teaspoon to tablespoon ratio. What is convenient is that the ratios are small; as soon as you need a bigger amount, you just use bigger units. This not only keeps the math simpler, but also indicates the precision of the numbers; "1 cup" means you can err by a tablespoon, perhaps, but "16 tablespoons" (although formally equal to 1 cup) indicates much higher degree of precision.

In metric countries, however, you routinely see recipes like "140 g cornmeal" or hear people asking for "500 g meat" in a grocery store. Nobody really deals with these things in grams, but still somehow everybody uses grams here. The inventors of the metric system might think there would be decagrams or gectograms, but I've never heard of such units and even my spell checker just underlined them; somehow people using metric system ended up with kilograms and grams, units of 1:1000 ratio.
Factoring into powers of 2 seems to me like an unnecessary complication. It's possible to calculate an arbitrary power in O(log N) time without memoization.

def __get_matrix_power(self, M, p):
if p == 1:
return M
if p % 2 == 1: # odd power
return self.__multiply_matrices(M, self.__get_matrix_power(M, p - 1))
else: # even power
K = self.__get_matrix_power(M, int(p/2))
return self.__multiply_matrices(K, K)
Countries are always funny about making such huge switches though. For example Sweden still has Swedish as its official language, which makes absolutely no rational sense. They should obviously standardize on English. There's no good reason for a country of ten million people to have their own language, it's extraordinarily inefficient.

The counter argument to this is always: but 90% of Swedish people also speak English. Ok, so what's the point of maintaining Swedish then? It's like arguing it'd be ok for the US to keep / use / teach both metric and imperial - in reality there is no good reason for that, it would be backwards.
Thanks for the pointer, React-forms as well as React this looks very interesting, however I think the focus there is mostly on frontend, while we are trying to approach the problem both on the frotend and backend sides.

Otherwise there are some similarities between the projects.
If they have any clue, they rebuilt their entire server and deprecated the old one.
Well not your regular cows, they surely belong to a spacex farmer! :D http://www.spacex.com/careers/position/5749
I wasn't trying to one-up anyone. I thought it was interesting, so I figured others might find it interesting too. In particular, it was surprising to find that there's a closed-form solution for the Fibonacci sequence. Sorry.
> Case in point: android.permission.CALL_PHONE. You need it to initiate phone calls from your app, right?

This kind of thing is why I can't see myself switching to Android as my primary mobile OS any time soon. If anything, I can see a bright future for Microsoft. In spite of the fact Windows Phone exists, Android is very much the Windows of the mobile ecosystem.

Permissions on Android are horrendous for developers. But they are even worse for users. If a developer can't tell the difference between ACTION_CALL and ACTION_DIAL, what chance does the average end-user have?

And when every app requests at least half a dozen permissions, how many users are going to carefully review each and every permission and how many are just going to give up and grant all requested permissions to every app the way that everyone reflexively clicks "agree" to every online ToS? Even if Android actually had a working method to deny individuals permissions, nobody ever has any idea which permissions are essential to which classes of app and which should be treated with suspicion.

Compare this to iOS, where you may occasionally get asked to grant an app access to contacts or location - this is a rare occurrence and you can choose deny every time with no negative consequences (except for restricting that functionality).

The comment by jbk illustrates just how big a mess permissions on Android are, beyond just being confusing. On top of that you've got custom intents, which while a great idea on paper, just pile more complexity on top of a broken foundation of complexity and obfuscation.

This IMO is the single biggest thing wrong with Android, which Google should prioritise fixing like Microsoft in 2002. Never mind signed-app stores like Play: the fundamentally broken security model is the reason why Android is the only mobile platform to have a problem with malware. It's also a brilliant case study in over-engineering with a complete failure to consider human psychology.
It would be impressive if you could derive or prove it, not if you'd just memorized it.
They are standardizing on English. I recently moved to the Netherlands and only speak English and 99% of people I've met speak English. Nearly all meetups and tech conferences in western Europe are also done in English.

Also almost the entire world uses metric, it would really suck if everyone in the entire world spoke English except for the country you grew up in.
Minor pedantry: the best proved bound for M(N) is O(N log N 8^(log* N)). You can easily pretend that log* N is constant, though...
This article claims Americans initially rejected the metric system because it was "too French", which is an inaccurate exaggeration.

Before the metric system was created, the US, which had recently won independence, was put in the position of selecting a standard system of weights and measures. Jefferson suggested a decimal system based off the seconds pendulum at 45° latitude. He did this in coordination with scientists in France with the direct goal of achieving a universal standard. Before congress could adopt this system, the French modified their standard:

Although French scientists working on a decimal system had originally supported using the seconds pendulum as a scientific basis, and Jefferson had deliberately matched his seconds pendulum proposal to the French one, based on a measurement at the latitude of Paris, the French decided to use the length of a meridian of the Earth instead of a seconds pendulum. This and other developments changed what had promised to be an internationally developed system into a strictly French project. Jefferson wrote, "The element of measure adopted by the National Assembly excludes, ipso facto, every nation on earth from a communion of measurement with them."

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

As a result the US wound up passing on Jefferson's system and eventually settling on US "customary" units.

The real benefit of adopting the metric system is to have a consistent, widespread system of units. The United States has had this for over 200 years and most sectors of the economy have been isolated enough from Europe and the rest of the world where adopting metric has not been worth it. Industries that are increasingly global (automotive, electronics, etc) have already effectively adopted metric.
Was the purpose of this post to help people prepare for interviews? Does code always have to show off one's ability? This code inspired me to learn about Binet's formula and for that reason I think it was valuable.
What the system it has to do with handy jobs? Nobody prevents anyone from having parts which are 12 or 60 cm wide and as easily divisible.
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I'm not speaking about the software I write - for that software, I strive for a way to ALWAYS recover, even from and hard crash, without getting mad. But even there the automatic recovery sometimes is not completely immediate (it may take a bit of time at startup), so a direct SIGKILL is still something I don't strive for.

But when I'm on my workstation, I need to kill other software as well. I have an UPS on my workstation, and the UPS is very close to the workstation, so the tripping is unlinkely :-)

And when hard crashes happen, sometimes I find some software in an incosinstent state, and I need to cleanup something manually.

Or maybe a remote endpoint for any software would like to be notified of me shutting down, something that's usually done with a clean exit, not with a SIGKILL. Or temporary files would be cleaned up immediately, rather than on a cron-based janitoring job.
A Proper End of the Year on Linux [Gaming]
Linus Torvalds on semaphores (1999)
Don't be sorry! I found your comment very interesting and was also surprised to find that there exists a closed-form solution.
> Can't speak to likelihood of discovering life on Europa

Honestly, me neither. I'm just a software engineer who is excited about space and hopes for the best. =)

> but it would be fucking awesome.

Wouldn't it? Holy hell, that would be wonderful. I hope it happens soon. Discovering life on Europa would be our generation's moon landing.

Thanks for the clarification. My knowledge of biology is limited, so I imagined each step (crude self-replicating molecules -> sophisticated DNA -> the cell -> etc.) being roughly as unlikely as the next. I had no idea eukaryotic cells were such a massive jump.

Earlier today I was watching a documentary about the Kepler telescope's search for exoplanets[0] that estimated the number of planets in our galaxy at 10^19. So many of those planets are unsuitable for any life, microbial or otherwise, but such a large number fills me with hope that the unlikely miracle of eukaryotic evolution could happen more than once. Then again, there are very plausible interpretations of the Drake equation[1] that pin the number of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy to less than 5...maybe even 1...so who knows?

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD6QHP9ouuU
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
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The closed form is just the diagonalized version of the matrix power, though.
Abstract things are harder to optimize than concrete things. A package for a concrete problem can be more optimized than a generic/abstract package.

I don't mean that the manually specialized version is faster than automatically specialized template. Rather that this encourages to not write abstract data-types, but rather concrete types that solve a real world problem - editor.Buffer vs. gap.Buffer. Once you have a real world problem it can optimized much better for that use case.
What are you even trying to say?

The appeals to authority are not always used in a fallacious way (like the informal logical fallacy). But I don't personally like it, and I think it is intellectually lazy. It's better to let the product itself stand or fall on its own merit.
> If anything, I can see a bright future for Microsoft.

I have both Android and Windows Phones.

The Windows Phone is actually quite good and from developer point of view, a pleasure compared with Android tooling and APIs.

Just the way Microsoft behaved with the customers has made many look elsewhere.
The countries in Europe with a high % of English language use, are simultaneously maintaining their old languages. For example the Netherlands are keeping Dutch, and Sweden is keeping Swedish.

It'd be like arguing the US is standardizing on metric, while still commonly using imperial, keeping both would be extremely inefficient and pointless. I believe language standardization is more important than measurement standardization, and yet, again, half of Europe has no common language. Somehow language gets treated with special kid gloves, because it's supposedly an important tie to culture. I completely reject that claim as being any more valid than trying to claim imperial is an important tie to culture and thus should be preserved.

Only about 35% of people in France speak English; for Italy it's sub 30%; Spain is only 22% or so. And this isn't fluency, it's the % of people with any meaningful knowledge of English. The rate of moderate fluency would be far lower.
The whole book is pretty fascinating, "Mathematics for Computer Science" by Lehman and Leighton: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spring10/cos433/...

The formula came from section 17.3.2, which goes into detail about how to derive it.
End-to-End: OpenPGP Chrome extension from Google
Didn't you get the memo?

Software development on the 21st century is pop culture driven.

What counts is whatever everyone else is using this week on "top of the charts", not how technical good it is.
An if you care for performance, you shouldn't use jquery. It is very slow:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11503534/jquery-vs-docume...
Verizon's New, Encrypted Calling App Plays Nice with the NSA
Baidu confirms its strategic investment in Uber
I always forget how giant the Saturn V was.

Also I appreciate Atlas-Centaur being one centaur.
Oops, forgot the O() inside the exponential. Fixed, thanks.
> A solution to the Fermi Paradox has to explain why that event has never happened

How do you know that it has not? I'm not seriously asserting that it has, mind you. Just noting that there could be a swarm of radio-silent probes in the Kuiper Belt, in which case we would have no clue whatsoever.
Humans are given earth and they polluted it, destroyed its environment in the name of development and now going after Mars or Venus...etc.

There may be some entities with good intentions in exploration but over a period of time, entities with evil intentions may join and story will be same like on earth, only timeline, tools, people, circumstances, places will be different.
There are many great questions here! And some great ones about questioning what you know and your beliefs, and ensuring for everything else, you apply the same logic or reasoning while analyzing the facts and whether or not those have somehow been distorted by a social "telephone game", or manipulated to fill a talking point, before you make a judgement. It's really nice to see others asking the same questions as that.

I have one question to add. I learned this while studying philosophy, from Emmanuel Kant on ethics, kantian ethics. Something along the lines of:

"Is what I'm about to do right now, something that I would want everybody else in the world to do?". For ethical and moral self or organizational regulation. Should I throw this wrapper out of the window. Should I yell at this barista for screwing up my venti caramel frappuccino. Should we disclose this... you get the idea.
The closed form solution is not that difficult to derive at all if you put the problem as a reoccurrence equation with boundary conditions.
Although the article is great, the title should somehow contain the word "game", so it is clear that this is about Linux games.

When clicking on the HN entry, I was expecting something like the latest kernel improvements, or a summary of security fixes compared to other OSes, or something like that.

BTW, is boilingsteam.com a gamer site that "one should know", or is it merely a marketing platform for Valve?
> Parsecs are not metric. Heck, light years are not metric; and look at how rich the unit is, it tells you a lot about the distance. Try to express the distance to Alpha Centauri in metric units and comprehend it.

The distance to Alpha Centauri is so mind-bogglingly huge that the human mind can not comprehend it. This has to do with the scale of things, and has absolutely nothing to do with the unit.

I can define the distance to Alpha Centauri to be 1 Alce. 1 is a really nice number that you can grasp, but it still helps you no further in understanding that distance.