skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Trivia questions, easily answered by programmers who appreciate the subtleties of time math:

1. If someone leaves Vancouver at 1 am and arrives in Seattle at 4 am on the same day, and you know the distance they travelled is 240 km, what was their average rate of speed? (Correct answer: 120 km/h, 80 km/h, or 60 km/h, depending on what day it is. UTC storage helps here.)

2. If it's noon in Vancouver, what time is it in London, England? (Correct answer: 7 pm, 8 pm, or 9 pm, depending on what day it is. Knowledge of regional DST schedule differences helps here.)

It's my experience that when the programmers get date math correct, they may still find themselves fielding "bug" reports from enterprise customers who should understand the concept but don't (particularly if their business is billing or rate calculation -- think of short term billing for hourly parking or CPU hours as an example).
The Daily Emotional Cycle of an Entrepreneur's Day
It could be considered an ad hominem attack on a study if OP had said "the source was funded by coffee sellers and therefore it's all false and incorrect". But that's not what's happening here anyway.
Thanks for the link though, Will start experimenting on my SO. :D
Seven in 10 UK Internet users happy to give away personal information
There's no time zone information in UTC either. People often mistake UTC for a time zone, but it isn't actually one.
i dont have kitkat yet, but are you serious? what good is a calendar without a month view?
Sure, drones and high-tech weapon systems. I can clearly see how hyper-tech weapons will function at -40C, with N meters of snow and covering distances where you need Nk-km to reach the closest village.

I don't really mean to sound caustic but you clearly have no idea what you are talking about. There are two big mistakes which are commonly made these days: 1) technology is overrated (vs nature) 2) as humans we think we are in control and only first hand experience would teach us otherwise.

Pull out a phone at -40, it won't even switch on. Circuitry won't work, batteries won't last. Russia is a harsh country, with harsh people which has first hand experience of a territory where western technology wouldn't simply stand a chance.
>>One partner suggested that LearnUp was a “ten on thirty”—ten million dollars should buy a third of the company, which would then be valued at forty million. “It’s more like ten on fifteen or twenty,” Horowitz said, cutting the company’s value in half. “Or six on twelve,” Andreessen said, whittling it further. Soon after the meeting, Ringwald turned LearnUp into an enterprise company.

Can somebody help explain how these calculations work according specifically to the article? The numbers make no sense to me if I use the article's explanation of this VC verbal shorthand.

"Ten on thirty" gives a $40M valuation? How? And how does "ten on fifteen" halve the valuation - according to the article paragraph above, wouldn't that double the valuation by investing $10M for just 15%, instead of 30%-33% equity stake?

EDIT: Thank you for the replies. I appreciate the responses.
I remember AltaVista :)
>If you need to save a future datatime which is not UTC, [...] a struct with an unambiguous, validated datetime and the timezone along with it.

It's less ambiguous but it's not 100% unambiguous because future policies of Daylight Saving Time and Time Zone / Time offset boundaries can be changed by governments.

Even if the struct had extra fields for flags such as "obey future DST changes" or "ignore present TZ if different from historic TZ at time of data entry", it's still ambiguous if geographic coordinates are not embedded within the struct. Then again, there's probably some more edge cases even with latitude/longitude coordinates. (E.g. should the future time be interpreted at lat/long of where he data-entered the datetime, or the lat/long of where he later experiences the datetime?!)

Dates specifying future events are very tricky++. Unless, it's a future date for something celestial such as a solar eclipse; in such cases, a future date as UTC is unambiguous.

++Because we all conflate concepts of "socially-constructed future datetime as shown on a wall clock" and "scientific future datetime". We stuff both concepts into the same data structures. Nevertheless, we write software that makes educated guesses about the user intentions for "future dates" and it works for 99% of the typical use cases. (e.g. "send smartphone notification for 12:30 lunch with Bob next week.)
For $19, this USB stick turns almost anything into a button
How we are using DNS fallback in our API clients for better resilience
very broad theorems like CAP (and e.g. The halting problem) are still very useful for proving things by reduction.
Instead of talking about nodes failing, you could talk about a network partition isolating just that one node (sure, the node might process some things on its own, without input, or not --because it crashed-- but for CAP that is totally out of scope, and part of the underlying algorithm).
Instead of talking about multi object transactions, it talks about anything that implements a register - which includes multi object transaction systems.

CAP therefore shows what real-life trade offs are feasible in the first place ( of course, there are still systems allowed by CAP that might be impossible for other reasons).
I have no idea how this ended up on HN, but as soon as a robot can be brought I want one. It will result in decades worth of free time and I will finally have a shiny home.
The Best-Paying IT Security Jobs of 2015
I'm afraid that fundamentally doesn't work (though at first glance it does). Email is not a forum - it's person to person. When someone emails me, I might not know anyone else who has also had a conversation with them.

In order for anyone to trust your key at all you need to make it available out of band.

This is because otherwise, your email provider could simply man-in-the-middle you (or them); and they have no way of working out.

The first time they email you, their key is already compromised. You then build up your trust for them; but you've trusted an attacker. The system is worse than useless.

This is worse than (say) TLS because TLS, you generally do not connect through a single access point. Email is far more centralised.

So, they need to get your key from outside the communication system, somehow.
I don't deny that Putin (like most state actors) has an army of commenters trying to shape discourse online, but I would be impressed if they were idiomatic and sophisticated enough to come up with a username like "murica_sux." Wouldn't you expect them to be more heavy handed? When the Chinese were caught doing this, they were laughably unsophisticated.
3. How many simultaneous "days" are active at any given time on Earth? (3; 11pm Wednesday on Baker Island is 11am Thursday in London and 1am Friday in Kiribati)
Although, back in the day, I think we would have called that icon a "grip" since it appears to have been styled after a grip floor. In fact, I still call that icon a grip because it looks more like a grip than a hamburger. I've never eaten a hamburger that has three floating equal layers.

https://www.google.com/search?q=grip+floor&source=lnms&tbm=i...
Flexport Wants to Be Uber of the Oceans
Yes you are right.

I'm thinking of having an accordion to reveal the discover for each checklist item. That was the prototype anyway. If I decide to sub-categorise as mentioned in these comments - will need to add a way to do that also. Rather than sub-sub-accordions. Will start to think of how to make more elegant.

Glad you found the Easter Egg too ;)
oh come on, circular dependencies are fun and you know it! ;)
I've got only downvoting as result. Pretty symptomatic.
Actually we don't want to be Uber of the oceans, but we like being compared to Uber nonetheless.
Loose Lips Sink Ships (Confidential Info Is Serious Business)
Note however the distiction between relationship websites like eharmony, and dating websites like tinder and TDR. And why you see different models. On relationship websites, you tend to pay cash money and exit either satisfied or unhappy.

On dating websites, it is a subscription model that enjoy keep playing and meeting more people.

Daters want to meet a lot of people over time. Relationshippers want to meet one quickly, and won't be patient paying a subscription fee for nothing.
Many of these computers don't even come with OS reinstallation media. They tend to have recovery partitions on the hard drives which will only restore the computer to its initial spyware-ridden state.

I downvoted your comment because of your implication that spyware wouldn't be a problem if only everyone were as sophisticated as you.
San Francisco, particularly, is adverse to building up ever since it was mostly flattened in an earthquake.

Policy probably hasn't quite caught up with modern architectural realities, but it isn't just based on desire for medium density.

This isn't unique to North America, look at the downtown core of Lisbon, for example.
Apparently, one of the Armatas broke down during the Parade, and one of the Buk missile launchers caught fire.

Admittedly, the Tank looks usable, but the question of the value of a completely new MBT is a really urgent one. Especially as the worth of armor diminishes more and more, as it already did once in the 60s. Modern ATGM are capable of smashing every modern MBT at the first hit, and the only protection are active protection systems as fitted to modern Israeli Merkavas. As long as the russians don't equip this Tank with one of those, its as big a casket as an old T-54.
Yes, our illegal secrets
Oxford's Influential Inklings
Optimize Indexing During Bulk Data Imports
It would seem to be a violation of the DMCA, as it is software preinstalled to allow the eventual side-stepping of the end-user's security measures (using an HTTPS-capable browser).

"It also criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...

EDIT: Considering the huge number of victims systematically targeted on an ongoing basis, perhaps RICO would apply too. Certainly RICO is brought to bear by prosecutors when trying to intimidate less resourced individuals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corru...
For me, the only place where Python truly excels versus the competition is Numpy. The easy python scaffolding gets you to the heart of a problem in a friendly and flexible way, and then you can interface easily to this big V8 of a compute engine (especially if you combine it with the MKL libraries). The ecosystem around Numpy is astronomically good.

I have fallen in love again with Python (2) for this reason. I tried 3 but I don't need all it's accountant-like seriousness. It's less fun to code in. When I need to design for servers or for performance I will do golang or ocaml. When I need simple scaffolding for numerical work, and scripting for prototyping integration of various systems, Python 2.7 is like an old, unfussy, friend, helping me along my long and winding data wrangling road with a minimum of cognitive tax. It just works. Long may it live.

In my view the Python powers should look at numerical / data science and throw all of Python's weight behind that, and forget about the web, where they've already lost.
This bit from Ian Mercer made my blood boil:

>>"One of the biggest issues today is that WU provides no way to promote a download to an end-user. We want to promote MM2 and WMP98 to end-users as something new and cool that they can get for Windows. Three lines of text describing it buried under "Windows XP" in a page that the user has to purposefully go find just isn’t good enough. Why can’t the WU client-side piece proactively display a bubble "Look! Cool, new features for Windows XP" and the option to display a much richer "advertisement" for the feature if the user wants to read more?"

If Windows Update did these types of pop-up promotions I would throw my computer out the window.
I'm not sure I understand the point of saving the offset:

"To avoid ambigiuty we also save a third piece of data: the UTC offset. Note that the UTC offset is only there for the rare cases when the timezone does not change, but when there is an ambiguity we know about at scheduling time - that will usually be when the timezone goes off of DST and a range of time (usually an hour) happens twice in autumn when clocks are set back. In this example though this third piece of data is not used for anything."

This doesn't make sense to me? Great read otherwise. I hadn't considered this edge case!
SOAP APIs tend to use POST even for readonly methods, and tend to use aggressively validated XML that's much harder to write by hand than typical "REST" JSON.
> So much that devs end up using float64 everywhere ...

Which makes complete sense given it's webscale enough for nodejs.
I have repelled (using Industrial Rope Access) off hundreds of multi-megawatt Wind Turbines on $1B+ wind farms around the world to inspect and repair the 13+ ton fiberglass blades and wanted to give my 2 cents. [A clarification: Wind Turbines generate electricity, Wind Mills mill flour. It's a small but important detail.]

Operation & Maintenance expense is my biggest issue with new technology. I have met many design engineers that have never been inside of a nacelle or even visited a wind farm. In the real world generators and blades break, hurricanes, lightning, shit happens. Cranes are extremely expensive and a 2MW "mast" that can compete with today's technology is going to be crazy tall. How to repair a lightning cable? Cranes are over $10k per day and cables take a few days to fix.

Today there is a 26 story ladder in the interior of the support tower that people climb up to fix hardware in the nacelle. To inspect the blades we then rig our anchors to the generator, pop out the top hatch and repel over the nose cone and down onto a blade in the "down" position. The only specialized hardware needed is anchors, carabiners, ropes, harness and helmet.

Vortex Bladeless would be impossible to inspect and repair using this method, yes drones are great for inspection, but what about repairing a stress crack on the tip? You would need a crazy tall crane that is even more expensive and with cranes the wind speeds need to be a fraction that of Industrial Rope Access. This means your available repair days are even less and the turbine has to be shut down for longer for the fix to occur.

I am all for new technology and crowd financing, but there are many practical obstacles this team needs to overcome in the design phase to build a product that can actually scale in the real world.

Also, feel free to AMA if you have specific wind turbine questions.
Python is still over shadowed by R in data science.

I stopped using Python for data science and use R and it really worked out great for me. R has gained a lot of momentum and I think that Pandas with Wes leaving isn't being developed as quickly. (Most of it is re-doing what R has done). I am amazed at all the FUD I was told to not use R and just use Python but after hitting so many walls I tired it and I am so glad I did. Your millage may vary.
Interview questions for R's statistical suite
> I don't like it. This article looks to me like an ad piece. It has very little substance.

If this is true, and given the piece is in the New Yorker, it definitely speaks volumes about how much money AH spends on PR.
The Man Who Built Catan (2014)
Hear hear, another Mises fan.

*fixed, thank you kind sir
Ten on Thirty means $10M invested in a company currently being valued at $30M (before their investment, or pre-money valuation), so the whole company is valued at $30M + $10M = $40M after the investment.

Ten on Fifteen/Twenty means $10M invested in a company currently being valued at $15M/$20M, so the valuation after the investment would be $25M/$30M.
What I'm confused about is why anyone needs another human to explain to them that watching the same woman repeating the same verbatim speech in reaction to every user action is stupid.
Ask HN: Why did my post drop 31 spots and fall off the main page?
My post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9525234

went from 9th, w/ 6 upvotes at 52 minutes to 40th w/ 7 upvotes at 53 minutes. What causes this type of bounce?
Disagree. Use a date/time library and datatypes. Don't use integers, unix timestamps, or any other naive representation of time.

As with cryptography, don't attempt to write your own date/time code. You will get it wrong. Use the datatypes and library functions in your language or database.
Wind engineers: why isn't "save the birds" as simple as a ring-enclosed sandwich of mesh screen, blades, mesh screen?
The smart freelancer’s guide to avoiding burning out
Bill mellowed out as he got older. He used to be infamous for cursing during meetings. Joel Spolsky has an amusing story about it:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html
Highly intelligent and successful people who hold weird beliefs
Trichloroethylene, acrylamide, and many more including pesticides like Aldrin, Dieldrin, Chlordane and Heptachlor.
http://rmurphey.com/blog/2015/03/23/a-baseline-for-front-end... covers it better than I could.
I was looking for just this app.
"Mostly for financial reasons, Cubans didn’t test Cimavax that way at all."

This sounds great, but it seems like the Cuban government just gave it out to people with little regard for the consequences. I know their health care system has been seen by some as better than ours in the US, but if this is actually going on, I can't imagine what other policies they have regarding human testing.
I work first hand in a research community and I've never seen a meta analysis published that was based solely on unpublished works. However, most of the good ones consist of a mix of published and unpublished works to ascertain whether there's a real effect or whether there's been a publishing bias that doesn't reflect the total body of research. A good meta analysis will take the time to discuss their methods for selecting published works and any efforts they made to solicit unpublished works such as contacting prominent authors in the field, getting on mailing lists, etc. The good ones also tend to discuss how they analyzed the papers for selection, discuss the paper stats (i.e. we started with 200 published papers and 20 unpublished ones, after winnowing this got reduced to 130 published and 10 unpublished), and how they collapsed results to calculate effect sizes etc.

Meta analyses should include as much of the published literature as possible for the research question they're attempting to answer AND they should seek out unpublished works. The meta analysis will consist primarily of published works, the unpublished works are collected to counter the presence of positive result publishing bias. This provides a fuller picture of the research field than simply relying on published works. After they've collected the articles, the researchers analyze the collected works to ascertain which ones actually address the research question(s) they're attempting to answer, they toss everything else.
Basing it on the statement from the article this is how I read it:

10/30 gives 33%(1/3rd) at a valuation of 40 million

10 + 30 = 40

So $40 million valuation for $10 million investment which gives them 33% of the company.

10/15 would imply 33%(1/3) at a valuation of 10+15 = 25

$25 million dollars is close to $20 million which is half of the original $40 million.

Marc's 6/12 implies 6 million investment at 18 million valuation for 50% of the company.
Multiple-port knocking Netfilter/IPtables only implementation
You get or give funny looks when some one says they are a libertarian?

Your post doesn't make sense to me at all. What is this about levels of being an anarchist? I'm an anarcho-capitalist, basically, which is quite different than the typical leftist "anarchists".

>Seriously libertarians have no idea of the history of the political movement they are involved in.

Kind of a pointless remark don't you think? I'm pretty well-versed in the history of libertarian anarchism and lest-"anarchism".
> One counter argument that is invalid: I am pretty sure the go team cares about semantic. :-) All programmers do breath semantic. Of course there are different tastes.

I put up with whatever semantics are necessary to get the CPU to do the right thing, but I'm more excited about CPUs than semantics.
1, 2, and 4 are pretty strong arguments.

I've written a handful of go generate utilities to do everything from CRUD boilerplate to produce Python clients. Generally, I have found the current approach simple enough and don't have any motivation to change. I would like to see more definition in terms of best practices as defined by the core authors (perhaps release a few more of those internal tools). They have done a little to try to coax the community into their way of thinking, but I think we need more. Coming from C/C++, your motives aren't unreasonable, but I also fear the innovation might encourage sprawl well beyond the original concept definition. That restraint is pretty common in the history of the language and a way of thinking that I like.

As with so many that desire generics, maybe the solution is simpler: Go might not be the right language for you.
Remember when moderate consumption of alcohol also reduced cardiovascular risk?
For myself, I'd love to make the world a better place. I'd also love to have the resources to do it. I could skip the bit where I need resources and go directly to applying an extra human's worth of work to problems that have successfully resisted many human's worth of work... or I could gather resources and bring much more than just me to bear.

Right now? Apps are a decent way to gather resources.
As a Python developer myself, I think that the community is very "pragmatic engineering" oriented (explicit better than implicit, get things done, simplicity, maintainability, etc)

The focus is on getting things done, today and tomorrow; not be trendy or be on the first page of HN or disrupt the language space using a new paradigm.

Python is "silently?" used A LOT. Not only on web development (which has more the spotlight on the Internet) but in areas like systems scripting, data analysis or science research. I think that is a great language with a lot of opportunities (including career opportunities) that is still growing.

Yes, it's not the new kid in town. I think of it more as an advantage, really.
Recent interview with the author of this piece http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/05/michael_ohare_o.htm...
The Wonderful and Terrifying Implications of Computers That Can Learn
22 most memorable quotes from the new Elon Musk book
A tech school with no degrees, no tuition, and soaring popularity
I find myself thinking (hoping) this is the case too. In fact, writing the post to talk about Python at this level was indirectly inspired by a talk I heard at Code Genius (http://code.genius.com/), put on by the Ruby-based Rap Genius Engineering team.

With respect to metrics, I think having the baseline is important, and you're right. I also found myself looking for more granular metrics then what I was able to find. I really want to be able to answer questions like

- "Within Python, how is usage shifting between web apps, scientific work (both research prototyping and in practice), open source, machine learning, etc.?"
- "How are the 'frameworks on top of frameworks' like Flask-RESTful and Django Rest Framework changing in adoption over time?"
- "Is anyone actually adopting Python 3 as their default yet?"

I wasn't quite able to find that data, but if anyone has ideas for first steps in getting there, I'd be happy to contribute (email in profile).
The mathematical limits of genetic prediction for complex chronic disease
Show HN: Build free 404, 500-level, and maintenance pages in 60 seconds
Happy Birthday Edsger W. Dijkstra