skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Steve Allen is one of the more vocal proponents of leap seconds and knows much more than I do about the issue. However the general thesis that "Discontinuing leap seconds would require many observatories and other organizations to procure new hardware and rewrite software that deals with time and the earth's rotation" has always left something to be desired. I have never understood why the needs of a small minority (astronomers) should be the deciding factor for society as a whole. The argument for leap seconds would be a lot stronger if it did not seem like a tyranny of the minority.
Are you saying it's sad that he preferred that, or sad that his wishes won't be respected?
> a perfect KTH scheme would be undetectable

And would be at least powerful enough to solve the halting problem.

There's nothing to doubt. A 'perfect' KTH virus is impossible.
There are many different explanations floating around. The one I like the most is that it is actually US and that U is placed on top of the S. That's why there are often two vertical lines.
After ~60 minutes of random debugging in production. If anyone noticed any weirdness(like a lot of repeated streams / streams disappearing) -- we're sorry. Looks like everything should work now.

Just a bit of technical details for curious: twitch streams are painful to deal with. Twitch channel != youtube channel. Twitch channel is akin youtube video(or stream) but with offline/online status. Mapping "online/offline" statuses into proper upcoming/live/completed statuses isn't straightforward. Differentiating between different "streams" is also difficult(i.e. user streams twice on two different days, but the link stays the same).

Also, twitch api often returns 5XX errors.

Bug reports are welcome here: avp-13@yandex.ru

Also, if you want to be notified about upcoming streams, then you can subscribe to subreddit(http://www.reddit.com/r/WatchPeopleCode), subscribe on the website, or follow https://twitter.com/WatchPeopleCode.
You can't decide your app price in iTunes (Apple)
Why is my app out of the App Store for more than a month? As I've been told, they've removed my app because I increased the price too much. If I want to sell the app at that price I need to submit it again for review because my app may not worth it, at least that's what they said.

The agreement doesn't say so (iOS Schedule 2 v21):

"You may change the price tier for any Licensed Application at any time, at Your discretion, in accordance with the pricing schedule set forth on that Exhibit C as updated from time to time, using tools provided on the iTunes Connect site. As Your agent and/or commissionaire, Apple shall be solely responsible for the collection of all prices payable by end-users for Licensed Applications acquired by those end-users under this Schedule 2."

Full Story: https://medium.com/@marcmasat/apple-itunes-support-aa2fb0f9c4c
I'm German but spend a lot of time in the US. I don't mind Nazi/WW2 jokes (even though I've heard all of them a hundred times), I don't mind that as soon as I mention that I'm from Germany someone will eventually bring up the Nazis/WW2 in conversation, I don't even mind that (very few) people think I'm a Nazi.
What gets me every time though is how many people think that it could have happened only in Germany because the US is somehow different (as you said "genetically"). It's really unsettling.
Shield Tablet with Tegra X1 Coming Soon
Receiving RDS with the RTL-SDR
Isn't it better to prefer the one with the most evidence supporting it?
If there wasn't demand for Bitcoin (no matter how misguided you might think that demand is), Bitcoin would not be worth anything, and so mining it would be pointless as it would get you something that is not worth anything.
Here's an addon that allows you to sandbox sites like Facebook.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/priv8/
The article delved into the forces and influence at work, mentioning Bismarck's genocide, Ataturk's national identity, as well as the Reich being a solid part of the colonial era (if the English can run India, why can't Germany march over Eastern Europe?)

> high monetary inflation, economic problems with a lack of jobs, a lack of self esteem combined with a "we're the best country' form of nationalism. etc.

I agree with some of your critiques of the US (mostly the propaganda stuff), however you're reaching pretty hard on these comparisons. Lack of national self esteem? Laughable if you're comparing it to post WWI Germany. Inflation? That's outright wrong, inflation has been flat ever since the financial crisis. And jobs are back.
What stream were/are you watching? Also, what is your OS/browser? I checked "Instruction Set Development - Part 5" and there is full screen button(Mac OS X, chrome/firefox).
There's often much more embarrassing stuff written right here, on HN, than in any of the Gawker sites.
I go to the gym 4 times per week for an hour. I make the time for it. Healthy body, healthy mind. There needs to be period of times which you escape reality, as in no connection to the working world, no phones, nothing. The gym is that time for me.
I was thinking this comment sounds a bit alarmist and paranoid, and Alex Jones came to mind. Lo and behold, you mentioned von Mises. Racism and fascism are not equivalent to the holocaust. Even apartheid era South Africa was not equivalent to the holocaust. There are many degrees of shit between happy and holocaust.
Why do people insist on developing for walled gardens? This basic story - arbitrary problems with the owner of a walled garden - has cropped up so many times on Hacker News.

Walled gardens are morally wrong in proportion to the strength of their walls, and suffer from several very significant technical problems.

This sort of thing shouldn't be news to any HN reader.
Don't mean to offend anyone, but there are more issues with units in the US ;)

[0] http://www.joeydevilla.com/2008/08/13/countries-that-dont-us...
I'm not on Linux, but don't they allow you to create shortcuts with command line options like Windows?
This is how we write it in French (3.14€ instead of €3.14).
The leap seconds in the UTC aren't making any problem if the operating systems wouldn't do "unexpected" things with them, as described by Kuhn. Specifically, the software "clocks" for "humans," those that are bound to the calendar time, should just have 86400 seconds in a day. (2) When the atomic clocks signal them the "leap" second they should just "smooth" it. We can have that with some updates of our favourite operating systems. It's a pure software thing.

The solution (UTC-SLS) is simple and good enough for most of the uses, including Google's synchronisation needs of the millions of their computers.

The UTC is still just the to-the-second approximation of the UT1 (1) which is by definition bound to the Earth rotation ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Time ). Steve Allen just tries to make people understand that the UTC is by definition "the human calendar time" (like: year, month, day, hour, minute, second) sent over the radio clocks.

For the time less dependent on Earth TAI also exists ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time ). So we already have the time reference that "just counts the atomic seconds."

Had there been less confusion among the programmers regarding the leap second handling on the common systems we'd already all use the UTC-SLS solution and we wouldn't have to care about the leap seconds unless we really need TAI.

---

1) Watch out for http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/conferences/wrc/2015/Pages/defau... (2 to 27 November 2015) if that changes.

2) POSIX already specifies that every day has exactly 86400 seconds for "Seconds Since the Epoch" and the current code relies on that: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_...
Hrm. At one point on the internets, I read that it was just the letters 'U' and 'S' (for United States) overlaid on top of each other. And over time, we lost the round pipe at the bottom, and one of the lines.

It seemed like a plausible story, and because I wasn't doing hardcore research, I didn't look into it further. Now, I always wonder if some fun fact I have in my head is actually true or not.

Reminds me of that quote about Abe Lincoln and the internet.
I read the comment as "open source doesn't ensure trustable" rather than "open source is inherently worse than closed".

It's that even OS would not be sufficient.
Except $ is also the symbol for the peso. More evidence is necessary to track the first introduction of the symbol.
The evolution of the £ (pound) symbol has a similar, fascinating history behind it too. It was recently discussed on a 99% Invisible podcast [1].

[1] http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/octothorpe/
I think people would pay good money to learn from great programmers over something like Webex where you could follow along and also ask questions.
How many laws did Apple break?
F*watch – open electronic watch with GPS
http://highscalability.com/ can give examples of some of the best software architectures
How Do I Ask You for Your Kidney?
I'd love to use that Python script, mind pasting it up somewhere?
I could see that.

Even if they weren't a natural, sparrow-like expert, they may have developed numerous skills... but one or two keystone skills lie hidden in an otherwise trite book that everyone else gets already and a long time...

that makes it seem like that trite book is the most important one.. but it's just the last one.. :)
> Most people disabled or uninstalled Java

I think this needs data. From my foot in the enterprise world, this doesn't seem even close to true; random SSL VPNs and the like require Java. If anything, most people are running an out-of-date version of Java because corporate IT hasn't approved the one that fixes ten exploits yet.

> and Flash was only required for some video and animation sites.

Due, largely, to (EME-free) HTML5 video and other HTML5 features. EME is not replacing HTML5 video, nor is anyone talking about using EME to replace Flash-played videos that weren't using DRM inside Flash.

There's a lot of implication running around that Flash is being replaced with EME video. It isn't. The vast majority of Flash is being replaced with non-EME HTML5 features. A fraction that was previously implementing DRM in Flash is now implementing DRM in EME.

NPAPI plugin usage, specifically Flash video, was going to continue to be a thing for Flash videos that were using DRM. (You could make the argument that these things would just drop DRM if it were too hard, but given how long Flash stuck around until there was a high-quality replacement that was objectively better than Flash from the content-publisher's side, it's a hard argument to make.)
Is DRM really inevitable for streaming video ? I can listen to my music as much as I want, unrestricted, without DRM, through deezer. And that's a premium service. They seem to be doing just fine.

Besides, spotify uses flash for their webplayer, probably for DRM as well. Yet there exists an open source spotify client, despotify, that probably would make it very easy to download the music as MP3.

In the end, DRM just means making your client's life a pain.
I'm trying to get this kind of thing going at the company I work for. Was this system already in place before you joined? I'm hoping you can speak more to some ways that will persuade management to support this effort. Thanks!
> I attribute it to the fact that they were natural experts

I agree that professors often choose books poorly, but disagree with the idea of a "natural expert." No human is born with a mathematical understanding of flight dynamics. There may be people who grasp it relatively quickly, although in my experience that's usually because they're relatively quick learners in general, and because they're building on a very strong foundation. Yes, there are people who are just smarter than the rest of us. But there are just as many people, if not more, who put in tremendous effort to become experts at which point they may appear as naturals. (Furthermore, some may downplay these effort and cultivate this idea that they're a "natural" to impress their colleagues and students.) It's not always obvious what sacrifices they made along the way.
Years are another one like dollars, though: C20 is sometimes used for "20th Century" and it's not uncommon to see a year written as AD2015.
But then the 4h means nothing! Any communication that can technically be eavesdropped is "onbjectively" not private. So where is there a legal expectation of privacy?
Great to hear. Do you have any suggestions on how a freelancer could do more of this work?
"I don't know how to do that. But I know how to do X and Y, and can be productive using that by Z date. Is that an acceptable starting time for your project?"

That said, I don't consult or contract anymore, I work FT instead. As a FT employee, seeking a fit requires a greater investment of time on both sides, and a slight misalignment can prove valuable to both parties.
The impossibility of perfect forgeries?
That seems like an anti-unixism (operating with multiple EUIDs in a single process group), though I'm not too sure what the equivalent unixism would be—maybe something with a daemon and a spool directory? Or a user-writable FIFO, redirected to the correct file by the elevated user in a separate command?
> That's because they are, in fact, insanely profitable.

They're really not: http://dailycaller.com/2013/02/15/does-cable-really-have-a-9... ("Comcast, supposedly the greatest cable monopolist, has averaged just a 4.5% ROIC over the last five years. Time Warner Cable’s 5-year average is -1.3%. Compare those with Apple (32%) or Google (16.1%).")

The operating margin of Verizon's wireline division is only 4.4% in this past quarter's report: http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/01/verizon-nears-the-en.... That's lower than Target's at 5%, a far less capital-intensive business!

> That's easy. Because it allows them to convert 50 years worth of future profits into an immediate payday. Which is only possible because their wireline network is worth billions of dollars, otherwise nobody would be willing to pay them that much for it.

That's an absurd argument. By that reasoning, every profitable business would have a strong incentive to sell.

Look at the numbers of the recent Verizon deal with Frontier. Yes, it's $10 billion, but Verizon paid $65 billion for GTE in 2000. The states that are part of the deal with Frontier--California, Texas, and Florida, are the biggest chunks of the former GTE territory.

More importantly, look at the valuation of the deal on a per-customer basis. Verizon is selling 2.2 million high-speed data customers and 1.6 million FiOS customers. Assuming the 3.7 million voice customers are worth nothing, that's about $2,600 per data customer. The estimated cost of building, deploying, and marketing FiOS is close to $3,900 per customer. In other words, the deal doesn't come close to valuing each customer high enough where it'd be worthwhile to build FiOS out to the DSL customers.

> Their business model is defective. The vast majority of their costs come from providing fast data service.

But the vast majority of their revenues comes from TV service, because customers won't pay enough for internet service by itself to justify the capital investment. And if they lose the TV service to internet companies, they'll just divest the wireline network business and double-down on media (like Comcast is doing with NBC/Hulu) or wireless (as Verizon is doing).

Google Fiber is actually the cable company business model updated for 2015. What Fiber deployment shows is that the only companies that can justify building that expensive infrastructure (at scale) are the ones that can make money off the content/services side. It's really worth asking what'd happen to Google Fiber if, hypothetically, Google lost its online services dominance to someone else. If 90% of Google Fiber customers were using it to access Yahoo! online services, would Google have the same incentive to invest in their network to improve its competitors' experience?
Walled gardens are where the users are, and where users are willing to spend money?
LD_NOT_PRELOADED_FOR_REAL
Experiment: Using Flexbox Today
Both Naziism and Stalinism died long ago, but only one of those ideologies died with Western soldiers [and journalists] marching in to liberate the death camps. And only one of them emerged from a developed democracy.
Isn't it a reasonable difference that a director who publicly support Pinochet would be "blacklisted" in that people would shun him and it would be unpopular to work with him? There would not be a show trial and an official state sponsored blacklist for him or her to go on, it wouldn't be systematic and rife with corruption.

That has, in my mind, been the main reason it was considered a "travesty".
But how useful is comparing sum(revenue_per_session) when you want to test significance of one batch to the other? Aren't you then just comparing 2 values and seeing which is greater?

If you compare the 2 batches of revenue/session distributions using a monte-carlo simulation you can calculate the probability that one is significantly different than the other. This generalizes beyond the 2 sample t-test because those underlying distributions are non-normal.

Please let me know if I'm thinking of this correctly (or not)
Voice communications among common people have never been encrypted, yet have been the major class of privacy-protected communications for the 20th century.
It is... surprising.. that C programmers, of all people, would have the nerve to make fun of PHP.
Have we found the key to eternal youth?.#Posted at http://snip.ly/Hmex
Pcc – portable C compiler
Just like healthcare.gov, the reality is you start with an absolutely trivial problem and turn it into a nightmare.

I wouldn't call hc.gov "trivial" -- it started with all the fun of a massive-scale website, added X12 EDI workflow, then finished up with real-time communications with high-security government systems never meant to be interoperated with and at least a few of which probably can't communicate over red-black networks. Then they started adding complexity to it.

Admittedly, some of those added complexities caused major headache, such as the requirement to use ORCL IDM (which, if the hotwashes are correct, proved a constant Achilles' heel to the ops side -- who the hell put that requirement in the spec?), but the project started out high-risk.

The problem with government projects by the way, isn't with "project managers and engineers;" it's with the dozens of agency stakeholders, half of whom are political appointees and the other half of whom are waging bureaucratic turf wars against everyone else. With high-profile projects like hc.gov, you also get politicians involved, so everyone starts freaking out about things like the fear that some illegal immigrant working in a Kansas poultry slaughterhouse could accidentally qualify for health insurance and end up as the lead story on FOX News. And, of course, even though the seventh floor (and, in this case, the Oval Office!) gives lip service about how critical it is that the tech works perfectly, you'll never see an appointee or an SES employee actually try to keep the ship upright.

After that, add in large-scale government contractors that operate on a high-risk version of waterfall that requires every single piece to come together perfectly, on time, without errors, and for the internal specs and contracts to not shift at all -- well, it's a recipe for a massive clusterfuck, every single time. There's a reason Medicare is still running on mainframes and FERS has never gotten off paper -- the risks of failure are just overwhelming.
The chemistry is interesting, you're making bbq charcoal out of (yard) waste. You can also make town gas with some water and the waste (steam reformed carbon monoxide).

The characterization of temperamental is an understatement, but given experience and a pile of tireless microcontrollers they're going to have better luck.

WRT biochar if you go for town gas production you have no biochar output anymore. Also there is little difference between biochar and cooking charcoal so depending on local conditions it gets burned as fuel. Still carbon neutral.

You can get quite a bit of process heat off a gassifier.

The engineering tends to scale pretty well with size, so if you have functioning transport and economy you tend toward the American model of a very large charcoal production plant. Its interesting seeing the tech applied elsewhere. The forest idea is pretty cool, you could run a local sawmill off scrap and cutoffs and ship down the lighter boards instead of entire trees.
Please vote if you want to convince Microsoft to provide a modern API for WinRT
'market position' is a red herring -- it's a proxy for Developer Will. Developers care about the market share of what platform they write for, and they care about it more than principle.

You might as well say, if the developer community got its act together and stood on principle, no company could caputure 'market share' without their consent.

The problem is not the Mozilla non-profit knuckling under -- it is developers failing to have an institution similar to other professions, such as the Bar or AMA, giving them principles.
Whenever I think about it, I find it quite fascinating that a pound literally used to be a pound of silver. Another aspect is the age of the Lsd system, and how long it was held onto.
It's not clear to me at all from that quote - I want to know that my communication is encrypted end-to-end, not that it may be encrypted. The rest of their statement is marketing speak.

(Not negative toward you, of course; you're just quoting)
Design Kit: The Course for Human-Centered Design
You can also watch folks code with Floobits:

https://floobits.com/active
I hate to be that guy, but I find the formatting very off putting -- especially with respect to the internal links. Compare to https://github.com/sarabander/sicp-pdf , which I find visually pleasant.