skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I enjoy working with paper. My favorite notebooks are ISO A4 size because they give me a bit more vertical room and still fit well in my backpacks.

The issues that come up with regard to US Letter size paper seem to be:

1) It's not metric -- yes that's true, but A4 is 210mm x 297mm. These numbers seem completely arbitrary and don't take advantage of the metric system. I wish the US was on the metric system, but it's not so 8.5 in by 11 inches at least has the advantage that it is measured in simple numbers with respect to standard measures in the US.

2) It's easier to store and work with A4 because it is one half of an A3 sheet -- however, US Letter is one half of the US Tabloid/Ledger size. The ANSI (American National Standards Institute) paper sizes in inches are A (8.5 x 11), B (11 x 17), C (17 x 22), D (22 x 34), etc. and share this advantage with the ISO standard.

3) The aspect ratio is is approximately sqrt(2)/2 for all paper in the A series, the B series, and the C series. But why is having but one shape of paper an advantage? Sometimes it's useful to have choices depending on the content to be printed on the paper. Furthermore, the ANSI paper sizes simply have two aspect ratios alternating as one increases paper size.

It is argued that printing posters with corresponding flyers is easier with ISO paper sizes. But this is true with ANSI paper sizes: one would have to jump up two sizes from letter (ANSI A, 8.5 x 11 inches) to ANSI C (17 x 22 inches). So, for the case where one would like to print at ANSI B, the aspect ratio of the page is a bit different. Here we have, what appears to me, to be the first real advantage of ISO over ANSI paper, where we need to print a flyer at A4 and A5 (but not A6). However, this hasn't been a problem for me personally. I'm usually working with pages that have additional constraints. For example space for bindings or differences in margins between recto and verso sides of two sided printing. Whenever there are bindings involved the aspect ratio advantage goes out the window.

4) Every country uses ISO sizes, why not the US (and Canada and Mexico) -- well, this is oversimplifying things a bit. Take a look at the Wikipedia page for paper sizes. There are Japanese variants, German extensions, and Swedish extensions listed that deviate from the ISO standards. There are also Architectural sizes listed that are designed to have simple ratios for their aspect ratios.

The idea that we would somehow be better off with fewer choices (just one) really for aspect ratio really strikes me as wrong. I like all the variety available in paper.
Well if its any consolation I'm as guilty as you are, and you made plenty of sense to me.
>No, the design is not copied. Period

The even admitted to copying it. Go read TFA again. Period.

What it "looks like" to a non designer who can't tell copying from "similar design to catter similar needs", doesn't matter.
This reminded me of moxie's recent post about whether we've put the glasses from They Live on or taken them off[0].

In terms of the internet as a failed utopia, it seems to comes down to the choices we all make in deciding this for ourselves: what we participate in, what we work on, how we choose to spend our time, and especially whether or not we work to build positive alternatives.

It can be a useful exercise to ask oneself whether the work they're doing helps to control others or whether it positively enables people to live in the world they want to live in, and one way to respond to these types of concerns is for people to focus on building that world.

Sometimes that's the harder path, but sometimes the harder path is worth choosing.

[0] https://whispersystems.org/blog/they-live/
There has to be another way: my entry in the FP vs. OO debate
Makes it easy for the "large print" edition for people with eyesight issues.
A Second and Final Letter, Bill Gates (1976)
If you find container shipping interesting, and perhaps Maersk specifically, Markus Völter did an episode [1] on the topic on his Omega Tau podcast a while back. The episode also goes into some depth about how optimisation is applied to some of the processes in the industry. Full disclosure: I am one of the interviewees.

[1] http://omegataupodcast.net/2014/04/146-container-shipping/
I once ported Linux & U-boot to a proprietary ASIC, and then set up the rest of the stack, including writing my own "database" as a kernel driver, installing an embedded HTTP server, giving it an HTTP API and AJAX web pages.

Full-stack can mean whatever you want it to mean. Often it just means you're old.
A full stack developer starts out as a kid that is too poor to pay someone else to do the parts of an application they don't understand.

So they learn databases, linux, Photoshop (wait, if poor; then GIMP), Javascript, PHRUBYPY, and $100 of free adwords credits.

These poor, full-stack developers try writing their own legal terms, finding the best examples of good UI to copy, and setting up social media accounts for their projects.

They also have a friend that is good with Canon/RED cameras and can help record a promo video.
There's just a threshold of utility that has to be passed in order for a new standard to take hold. How much would the US really benefit from switching? How much would switching cost?

The efficiency gained wouldn't come near to the efficiency lost during the switch, and nobody really cares all that much about paper size.
I'm in a similar position as you, still in high school. I've applied before and did not need to convey anything special to be taken seriously.

Would love to talk sometime. Email is in my HN profile.
No. Try to layout a document on A4 while maintaining at least basic standard rules (e.g. lines of 8-12 words, a pretty text body layout, e.g. a "nice ratio" like 3/4 or 1/2, with standard margins, that is 1 on top, left and right and 2 on bottom). Since your font size will either be 11 or 12 pt on A4 because otherwise you use less than half of the paper or your font is really huge, you're not left with many options.
> With around 2175 road deaths in the UK in 2012, I truly believe driverless cars are the only way we will ever see a massive reduction in this fatality rate.

Uhh what? Road fatalities have been decreasing year upon year since at least 1940(!). Want to see a "massive" decrease: Road fatalities have fallen by wopping 81% since then.

In the 2000s most years had a 12% (!) reduction in car deaths in the UK compared to the previous year (admittedly 2010 didn't trend that way, and it flattened in 2012-2013).

1,713 is the 2013 figure. By comparison the UK's suicide rate in the same year was 5,981. 2,955 from "drug related poisonings" (i.e. overdoses).

I think it is laughable to suggest driverless cars are about safety primarily. Cars are relatively safe and only getting safer (e.g. radar cruise control, auto-breaking, partial side impact crush zones, etc).

The primary benefit of driverless cars is convenience. It is pretty darn convenient to get an extra 2 hours of usable time per day because you don't have to drive to or from work (and don't have to pay a third party to drive you).
Robotic Extrusion: 6-axis 3D printing
Not strictly true. I use Plex, and I've opted into watching movie previews before the movie I choose actually plays.

I get to control how many, what type they are (only for new movies, etc), when. It's nice.

These are ads for other movies. But that I'm watching a movie sort of indicates I am interested in watching more movies in the future.

These TVs were supposedly pausing a movie in the middle and rolling a Pepsi commercial. I already know about Pepsi. I do not like it. But assume I did... assume I did like it, how would I ever want to watch a Pepsi commercial?

And this is true of everyone. No one who buys a $1000 Samsung television is ignorant of the existence of Pepsi. And if the ad isn't trying to inform the ignorant of a new product, what exactly are they hoping to accomplish? They're hoping to brainwash us.

That's always unacceptable. But for Samsung to tell people that they no longer own their televisions, that they're no longer allowed to control them, that's bizarre.
EasyFold, an easy way to advertise
By then, of course, the sewer people will have risen up and reclaimed control of the overworld. A slippery slope.

Frightening.
I have no idea how knowing databases or HTML is going to help someone write embedded code for RC controlled drone. And I am mystified by the idea that knowing ARM asm is going to help but a website, MMO, or tax prep software.

At best full stack just means knowing one level deeper than necessary.
As another farmer and programmer, who isn't based in the US, I have found all of the most desirable features (like rainfall data) are not available. I have tried it out, but there is nothing that keeps me coming back. 20% of American row crop farmers is still fairly impressive, but it will be interesting to see how they try to approach the rest of world.
I'm an iOS Developer. For me going full stack looks like this...

* Develop the app. Let's say, swift + cocoa touch (front-end)

* Developing the backend services. Let's say, Django REST Framework (back-end)

* Setup and manage the PaaS. Let's say, Google App Engine or Heroku (infrastructure)
American English wore off some of English's bumpy bits because there was no Queen's English or aristocracy to claim social authority for the status quo or sufficient influence to dictate a conservative rate of change. The Norman Invasion set the tone for a millennium of language as an explicit social standing in the British Isles.

Throw in massive immigration and indigenous languages within and along its borders rather than overseas and American English simply adapted to more varied use.
Ok, but that would only be true if I was going to spin up a new vm to join the load group / cluster but even then no one would do that unless behind a reverse proxy / waf load balancer so the attack vector angle is covered.

I'm not saying MirageOS doesn't sound neat, I'm just not yet convinced it has a general purpose use case.
HN effect killed the article, can't read it, have to estimate based on existing comments. Assuming they actually read it, of course.

Paperless office, checking in here. Our printer is only used for people screwing around doing non-work related projects, printing school essays for themselves or their kids, real estate MLS records, car insurance forms, stuff like that.
The language thing was basically one dedicated guy (Webster).
V guvax V zvffrq fbzrguvat, ubj qb lbh xabj vs lbh unir gb nqq be fhofgenpg gur qvssrerapr?

Sbe rkrzcyr: 3,X Pyhof, 8 Fcnqrf, 10 Qvnzbaqf, X Urnegf

Fb V erzbir "3 Pyhof" naq qvssrerapr vf 3 (fb V beqre gur erznvavat pneqf va gur guveq beqrevat beqre 213) ohg +3 naq -3 obgu tvir n ybjre inyhr guna X (3 be 10).
> if you have the resources to be great and different at the "backend" part of data work, you most definitely have the ability to not just borrow someone's design...as good data display often follows a bespoke understanding of the data itself.

Given the incredible popularity of "big data" startups, this assumption I believe is incorrect. There are many data-oriented startups who have put out questionable data visualizations in the name of "content marketing." (e.g. Mattermark, another YC company, has been fond of doing this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8090617 )
Are we ready for driverless cars?
The entire point of driverless cars is that the software of the car is superior to the wetware of the human. Humans cannot be trusted to determine what the car does, directly, under any circumstances, even an emergency.

So the answer is, you don't. The sort of fine-grained, always on surveillance necessary for driverless cars to work would be applied outside the cars as well as inside. Pedestrians are dangerous, with or without a gun, and as soon as you walk outside and attempt to interact with the urban environment without the safety of a self-driving car, someone would be alerted. Your identity will be confirmed, you will be tracked and every self-driving car for miles will know about it.

So in your scenario, the proper authorities have been called before you were even aware of his presence, simply because there was a human near traffic.
US Letter is shorter than A4, so it seems like they should fit fine? I guess it's 6mm wider but that is not much.
Why wouldn't it be? They say you have to agree to it to get access, so the copiers that made accounts agreed to it.

If you mean, "would be defended" or "could know about it", then probably not. It just adds more to the name and shame tactic they decided to do.
Erlang and Clojure don't seem to take off on github, despite being very visible in HN..

It seems that everybody speaks about these languages but then they don't use them.
How Moore's Law Made Google Possible
Thank you. I'm sure a lot of people will say you don't really know some of that stuff, and they're kind of right, but it's always helpful to have a buffer of stuff you "kind of know" around the stuff you really know. That way you don't get lost as soon as you hit the boundary. You know which way to turn, how to recognize what's still relevant (to your original problem) vs. what's not, what phrases to search for if you need to find out where the real experts hang out. If you've been in the space before, even briefly and superficially a long time ago, it can really help. Without that you can't even know what "full stack" really means.
I'm the author of this one.
The design type is known as a treemap: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treemapping
Show HN: Practicing Rails, a book about learning Rails without being overwhelmed
How to Become an Internet Marketer – 100% Coupon
1) A0 is 1m^2
Because the Imperial system of measurement is simplified, whether it's dividing an 8 foot wall into thirds or the ratio of flour to milk to make a bechemel sauce.
I think if you drive into London (from any direction) it is very safe to say you're tracked going in, and tracked going out.

However elsewhere in the UK it is much less common in general. There are entire counties where I'm yet to see a ANPR camera, just your regular old fashioned speed cameras.
Very well-factored C#/F# projects such as EF7 and F# compiler may look "monolithic" due to type safety and packaging.
I book I've found that helped me get a historical sense for morality and its place in politics, religion, and personal success is Karen Armstrong's Fields of Blood.

http://www.amazon.com/Fields-Blood-Religion-History-Violence...
Spark streaming will handle 0.5 second batches.
If you deeply care about sub-second latency, JVM in general is not where you want to be.
To expand on your analogy, it seems to me he's saying that someone who embezzles money and goes to jail for it shouldn't be able to get a job handling money when he's released from jail. And I'd agree with that sentiment.
yes yes sure it is.. NO.. its very relevant in a thread where editors are compared.
I've been developing professionally for 20 years and never encountered the term full-stack until it was used to describe a web developer who could implement design (not necessarily do the original design work), implement the front-end, and implement the backend. It seems to have now grown in scope to include mobile app development in at least one mobile platform as well as fully client-side frameworks like Angular, Ember, or React (which weren't in widespread usage when the term began to be used much more frequently, as I recall.)

This definition including hardware down to the transistor is just silly, and its the equivalent of non-web devs chiming in with a "Hey we matter too!"
What is going on with Haskell site?
Practically, the number of people who need to ever use a paper size other than letter/A4 is minimal. So any elegance is pretty much lost.
I have met both kinds.
I decided to stop donating to EFF and instead donate to the ACLU when the EFF decided its time was better spent on re-litigating apartheid[1].

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/eff-files-amicus-brief...
Java developer learning Django and playing with Node, React and Angular. 3/3.
Thanks, this is a lot better than writing this (even if the formatting worked here):

```
(?xi)
\b
( # Capture 1: entire matched URL
(?:
[a-z][\w-]+: # URL protocol and colon
(?:
/{1,3} # 1-3 slashes
| # or
[a-z0-9%] # Single letter or digit or '%'
# (Trying not to match e.g. "URI::Escape")
)
| # or
www\d{0,3}[.] # "www.", "www1.", "www2." … "www999."
| # or
[a-z0-9.\-]+[.][a-z]{2,4}/ # looks like domain name followed by a slash
)
(?: # One or more:
[^\s()<>]+ # Run of non-space, non-()<>
| # or
\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))\) # balanced parens, up to 2 levels
)+
(?: # End with:
\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))\) # balanced parens, up to 2 levels
| # or
[^\s`!()\[\]{};:'".,<>?«»“”‘’] # not a space or one of these punct chars
)
)
```
keep in mind that the goal of criminalizing a substance..is to help people function in whatever society their in

In 2015, I'm not so sure about that. The roots of America's cannabis prohibition are firmly rooted in bald-faced racism, for instance, with a side order of not wanting to annoy textile manufacturers.

I sincerely think that more harm is caused by any attempt to bring the justice system to bear on what people choose to put into their own body. Any objective analysis would come to the same conclusion - the fact that it hasn't suggests ulterior motives.
It's a reasonable request. The job is purely functional in the computation on its incoming data. That means you don't need to worry about persistent state management, which is a problem if you want to easily move jobs around a distributed system. The job (or part of the job) can still send metrics about what its doing to some other service, and still remain functional with respect to the data it's processing.
Of course 297/210 isn't (and can't be) exactly sqrt(2). But it's very close (4 s.f.), and the important property works: 420/297 is again not exactly 297/210, but it's well within the tolerance for most use cases.

(I can't load the page to check what it's doing with this simplification).
Whoops. You are right. I don't know how to edit my comment...
You shouldn't have said "You appear not to understand the actual utility behind the page width/height ratio used in ISO/DIN page sizes." Turing_Machine wasn't talking about utility at that point. Ve had misunderstood something confusing that you had said, and you basically straight up said "you're dumb".
Because of inertia. We have a lot of things we need to do and running up a huge bill to change something as fundamental as unit of measure is just not an economical idea.

If we were going to do something as big as change UoM, why not go with the engineering estimate of 1 ft is now the time light takes to travel 1 nanosecond in a vacuum (about 11.8 inches)? It is sure better than "the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second". We could even base the new units of volume and weight off of the new cubic foot instead of 1/10 the unit of length. While we are at it, a national standard that all units of memory will be sold in base 2 would be a nice touch.

// apply sarcasm as needed
I don't hate you
I echo this sentiment. Full-stack means that you can support all aspects of the stack, and here's the key, that need to be supported by a dedicated person.

For example, most people "out source" their network / system administration to a company like Rackspace or Amazon. I would still consider someone utilizing their services to deliver a product "full-stack".
That's it, I've had it. I'm going to set my router to take all traffic from the MAC address of my TV and route it to 127.0.0.1. I'll disable the redirect when I want to check for firmware updates, but that's it.
DataDog Acquires Mortar Data to Tie Analytics to Monitoring
Not every European is/was happy with the A series of paper formats. Jan Tschichold (1902—1974), arguably one of the most influential typographers of all time, strived against it, arguing it was unpleasant for office use (comments by jgrahamc and johnchristopher go into this direction) and downright unsuitable for book use.

I can't seem to find an English-language version of his A series rant (found in Erfreuliche Drucksachen, p. 111), but for anyone interested in traditional book layout, this (English-language) essay is a goldmine: http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/faculty/reese/classes/artistsbooks/... (pp. 39 f. touch on the A series).
Having to deal with emails lately, I feel the pain and would most definitely had needed something like so to ease that pain. I'm really not an email guy and coming up with a table button so it renders correctly on Outlook and it's damn Word rendering engine was just a total waste of time. And that's only one of the thousands of pitfalls and crap you have to deal with. I'll definitely try it out next time I'm on duty for emails!
> No user would opt-in to commercials, ever. I don't believe for a second this system was designed with opt-in in mind.

The occidental mindset is heavily geared against advertising. If you got free rebate coupons, gifts, etc. as rewards for opting in, would you still refuse it?

I'm trying to say that we don't necessarily see the whole picture, and the article doesn't give hints about the purpose of that "feature".
upvoted.
Denial-of-service attack takes out Dutch government websites
I don't have experience with any "smart" TVs, but my "DVD player" is running U-Boot and linux. If you download a "firmware upgrade" and run xxd or "strings" on it, it becomes pretty clear what OS is running.

I strongly suspect many/most "smart" TVs are running linux. (My fairly ancient DVD+VCR player runs VxWorks.)
It will be interesting to see what happens to the world of work when those (ex-)drivers who have a significant commute are able to perform some work during that commute.

It would be great if employers would be open-minded enough to allow employees to work during their commute and shorten their time at the workplace while keeping the same total hours.

This would effectively nullify the 'dead time' of the commute and allow more time outside work. I know a commute can be a relaxing time for some, but we'd still be able to relax during the same hours, while having a choice of venue rather than having to be stuck in a car.

Sadly, I can imagine many employers pushing for employees to keep the same hours at the workplace while perhaps pressurising them to work 'from car'.
I'm not a lawyer, but I tend to think that it would not be a clear-cut argument. On the one hand, it is a TOS, which is a contract. On the other, people don't read TOSes online, and I have no idea what the current case law has to say about that. Even if they did read it, it could be argued that a "signup for free" button that is generally available, without an approval cycle behind it is an implicit written permission for anyone to access the services.

Again, IANAL, but I certainly would not make any decisions on the validity of this without consulting one.
Oh man I can't wait for ES6 to be stable and widely adapted.
Traveling Ruby 20150210: smaller, supports Ruby 2.2, Windows
U.S. Letter size predates the European standard. The U.S. Letter size apparently originates with vellum sizes and was originally intended for handwriting not typography[1].

However, there are some good ways to use 8.5 x 11 [2] that might look odd on narrower and taller paper.

[1] http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/09/why...

[2] http://retinart.net/graphic-design/secret-law-of-page-harmon...