DanielStraight

I can create a hotel reservation system in the amount of time it takes me to walk to the supply room and grab a calendar and a pen.

I could also work full time for the rest of my life on one.

It all depends on the requirements. No one is going to be able to tell you how long it will take for your particular system.

That said, the person you should be talking to is whoever is supervising your internship. Let them know what your school requires and ask them what you can do to meet that requirement. Then talk to your school and ask if what the company proposed meets your credit requirement. Then continue going back and forth until you find a mutually satisfactory arrangement. Maybe the model of the system could count as a finished project for your school. The only people who know are the people you have access to and we do not, so we can't answer this question for you.

The ID consists of a timestamp to millisecond precision and a random value. Since the timestamp only offers millisecond precision, two IDs generated in the same millisecond could be out of order depending on the random value because the timestamps will be the same. In order to prevent that, if two IDs are generated in the same millisecond, instead of generating a new random value, they take the random value from last time and add 1. This ensures that even though the timestamp of the second ID is the same as the first one, it will sort after the first one.

What you're looking for is commonly called a tour. Since it's web-based, it will be implemented in JavaScript. Searched HN for those terms, found this:

http://usablica.github.io/intro.js/

You can use "label:xyz" in the search field.

You mock, but this kind of tinkering is basically the foundation of mathematics.

I suggest reading Lockhart's Lament, linked on this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematician%27s_Lament

Relevant quote:

> For example, if I’m in the mood to think about shapes— and I often am— I might imagine a triangle inside a rectangular box. I wonder how much of the box the triangle takes up? Two-thirds maybe? The important thing to understand is that I’m not talking about this drawing of a triangle in a box. Nor am I talking about some metal triangle forming part of a girder system for a bridge. There’s no ulterior practical purpose here. I’m just playing. That’s what math is— wondering, playing, amusing yourself with your imagination.

If you're in the US, they have this already:

https://www.spotify.com/us/family/

It launched a few months ago.

Good call. I totally forgot Malay.

> He reduces the need to save languages to the need to save cultures

I don't see that at all. He has two arguments. The first is that a common, and distinct, language helps a culture maintain its cohesion and continuity. It's worth noting that many writers from colonized areas have commented on the irony of writing about their experience using the colonizer's language. It's also worth noting the efforts in many areas to distinguish a group's own language from other nearby languages, even mutually intelligible ones. Why would these issues come up if language didn't matter on a cultural level? To many people, loss of language and loss of culture are related. Obviously this doesn't go for everyone, and some people willingly give up their native or cultural language, but no one should ever be forced to, no more than anyone should be forced to give up their religion, way of thinking, or way of life.

The second argument is basically that languages are data points. Studying languages, especially more isolated languages that tend to be in more danger of extinction, helps us better understand linguistics and human communication. If you only know one programming language, it's much harder to learn a new one than if you've already studied 50 programming languages. This increased linguistic understanding helps us study ancient cultures. It also helps us understand language acquisition, which in turn helps us encourage the language abilities of people with linguistic difficulties. It helps us build natural language processing tools. It even helps us develop patience when dealing with people who talk about things in a significantly different way. Something that may sound blunt or crude or inappropriate can be seen in a different light if you understand that different people communicate differently.

And... if you want to get a little "out there"... If humans ever encounter intelligent extraterrestrial life, we will be much more likely to be able to decipher their communication if we've studied 6000 languages already than if we've only studied 60. Even 60 is looking somewhat ambitious for the future of language. It's not hard to imagine a time when the only remaining languages are from a handful of language families: Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo, Sino-Tibetan, Japonic, Koreanic, and Turkic.

And if that does happen, the languages that remain will also likely be significantly simplified as languages tend to be when they become widespread. That may simplify communication, but it will make it harder to study communication and how it works.

The author of this piece (John McWhorter) has written a number of truly excellent books about languages. I would strongly encourage anyone with even a passing interest in linguistics to read any of his books that strike your fancy.

There are many more appropriate places on the internet to ask this question. Here are two:

http://programmers.stackexchange.com

http://www.reddit.com/r/git/

Please keep HN for news and other topics of broad interest.

Just a note: On your website, numpad keystrokes are rejected as not numbers.

Win7, FF32

I do not think this is a fair characterization. Lots of valuable comments don't get a lot of votes.

Giving feedback on a less popular "Show HN" is a good example. In most cases, you'll just get one vote, from the person who posted the story. Sometimes they don't even bother giving a vote, so you'll get nothing. If they ask a follow-up question and you reply, you probably won't get any votes at all because your comment won't be generally useful, just useful to the person with the question. For example, this series of comments, for which I received not a single vote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8009176

It also goes the other way... here's a comment where I received 13 points for doing arithmetic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7720950 (Actually, I didn't even do the arithmetic, Wolfram Alpha did.)

This is pretty much the definitive answer as far as I'm concerned:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

I used a pretty specific category for picking images (old fashioned style with a particular place name mentioned) and... it actually seemed to figure that out. I was impressed.

Actually, the agents don't see anything unless the machine detects a "potential threat item", then they see the generic outline. See: http://www.tsa.gov/ait-how-it-works

...because then the dose would be equivalent to about a day of natural background radiation.

I think "nobody would notice" is a pretty accurate description of what would happen in that case.

So apparently the TSA says: "Each full body scan produces less than 10 microrem of emission, the equivalent to the exposure each person receives in about 2 minutes of airplane flight at altitude."

And the author says the dose is really 14.76 microrem, but doesn't dispute the equivalence to flight time. So really it's equivalent to 3 minutes of flight, not just 2.

50% of trivial is still trivial.

Oh, and the author says that the margin of error on these measurements is large. So perhaps the TSA didn't lie at all, they just measured 10 microrem. Even if the margin of error is 1000% the result is still trivial.

So... basically this is non-news about a technology which isn't even in use anymore. The TSA now uses millimeter wave technology as the author is aware ("these backscatter x-rays are decommissioned and sitting in a warehouse").

There are a lot of good reasons to be concerned about the TSA's use of imaging technology. This is not one of them.

Or for that matter, the English word cornmeal.

Correction: They're going to keep doing exactly what they were doing before except instead of saying "Windows Phone" they're going to just say "Windows" and they aren't going to say "Nokia" anymore.

Not news.

This is not an appropriate use of HN. I suggest http://ux.stackexchange.com/

When you need to cover your ass, providing feedback for rejection is always a bad idea. If you're dealing with a pushy sales person and you give them a reason why you're saying no, you've given them something to work with. They can debate whether your reason is legitimate. They can promise to meet that criteria, then you have no reason to say no. The same can apply in ending or rejecting a romantic relationship. If you give a reason, it can create an expectation that when the reason changes, the rejection will change as well.

Put this in a legal context and giving a reason for rejection is just asking for trouble. First of all, the rejected candidate could argue that your reason was illegal. Second, they could argue you were misinformed, so the reason is not legitimate. Finally, they could argue they've changed, so you have to reconsider them, since your stated reason no longer applies.

In all these cases, it's easiest to provide no reason whatsoever. (See also Miss Manners, who frequently has advised repeating a meaningless, "No, because I can't; I can't because I won't be able to" type response until the other person gives up.) Giving a reason creates a focus for an argument. No reason, no argument, just the other person incessantly begging for a reason, which is never going to make them look good.

This really isn't such a horrible comment. It illustrates nicely that "common sense" is often wrong. There was a similar reaction when radioactive material was stolen in Mexico. People said it should have been escorted with armed guards. But in truth, shipping radioactive material is extremely common. Three million packages of radioactive materials are shipped each year in the U.S. alone. So while it seems like radioactive shipments should have armed guards, it isn't actually practical.

In this case, the truth is that anyone who has the capability to disrupt these cables already knows where they are. But that isn't necessarily intuitively obvious. This is a reminder to all of us that we shouldn't blindly trust intuition, but should try to find numbers or other hard data to back it up.

"If you need help with Hacker News, email hn@ycombinator.com."

http://www.ycombinator.com/contact/

To point number 1, I tend to think of flow as helpful but not necessary. For some tasks, I'm not really sure flow applies at all. I mean, I'm pretty damn good at tying my shoes. I do it without even thinking about it. I don't think flow was involved in learning that; it's just muscle memory. That's a trivial example of course, but there are other factors than flow which influence the effectiveness of practice. I don't think we should just give up if we can't have flow.

To point 2, you're right of course, but we can't be world-class at more than 1 or 2 things anyway. There's still benefit to being pretty good at something. A great phrase I stole from a blog called All Japanese All The Time is "You can have, do or be anything, but you can't have, do and be everything." If you want to commit your whole life to being say... the greatest chainsaw juggler in history, that's probably achievable. But you aren't also going to be fluent in 10 languages, an expert computer programmer, a world-class guitarist, and a grandmaster in chess.

I'm alright with only being an expert in things I'm able to devote full-time efforts to. But I'd also like to be pretty good in other stuff. How can I take bits and pieces of time here and there to achieve that? That's what I'd like to see some research (formal or informal) on.

I guess I took it a different way. My interpretation was basically... once you get to a certain point in your life, the amount of time required for your responsibilities is significantly higher than it was in your youth. Four hours per day is probably achievable for the average college student but incredibly unlikely for the average "adult", for lack of a better term.

It's interesting you didn't mention family at all. Having kids is a huge commitment of time.

I think a good take-away from your rant (plus the consideration of family) is that we need to be talking more about making time for things. Too often we talk a great deal about what can be done in a few hours a day, but when it comes to making that time, we just say, "If it's important to you, you'll make the time."

We should be looking at ways to maximize the use of very small chunks of time. I may not be able to commit even a single hour of dedicated time per day... but I can certainly do something for a few minutes here and there throughout the day which adds up to an hour. How can we make that kind of practice more effective?

The Pareto principle is that 80% of result comes from 20% of the effort. So 80% of the 10k hours worth of skill (8k) comes from 20% of the actual time (2k). If you continue multiplying the hours worth of skill by 0.8 and the actual hours involved by 0.2, you get 5120 hours worth of skill in 80 actual hours of practice.

Of course, if you keep going, you get the first 800 hours worth of skill in less than a second (and the first 300 in a mere millisecond), so I'm not sure the repeated application is justified.

I even did an HN search, but I didn't think to look for "fonts" instead of "font".

Strangely, it seems the HN search will exact match on the initial search and then prefix match after that. Compare URLs:

  Initial search
  https://hn.algolia.com/?q=input%20font#!/story/forever/0/input%20font

  Add an 's' then remove it
  https://hn.algolia.com/?q=input%20font#!/story/forever/prefix/0/input%20font

Same search term shows in the box, but the results are different.

I've submitted an issue on GitHub to address this: https://github.com/algolia/hn-search/issues/41

Judging simply by the fact that another 10 no-flys have been issued today alone (per that website), I doubt this is really news.

Digging deeper, if you read the details provided, this was done to ensure law enforcement had access to that airspace, presumably so they can fly police helicopters in it. Given that reason, I would assume this is standard operating procedure during any ongoing law enforcement effort.

"Sounds like news but isn't" is a category we could use a lot less of on HN. Please do not post stuff like this. It sounds dramatic, it gets attention, but it ultimately means very little. It certainly doesn't affect anyone here personally (because it likely doesn't affect anyone at all... how many people are actually flying in this space anyway?). And it also provokes no intellectual discussion of any kind. What is there really to say about this aside from "yep, it's happening"?

The info page provides an overview of why this is significant:

http://input.fontbureau.com/info/

There is also a live demo on the preview page:

http://input.fontbureau.com/preview/

Basically it is a family of fonts (sans, serif, and mono) all designed for code. The creator included features from monospace programming fonts (prominent punctuation, distinct shapes on easily confused letters, etc) on all styles. There is also a high degree of customizability from the wide range of weights and alternate characters available.

Overall a quite impressive project. I highly recommend spending some time with the interactive demo.

I suspect you do not have WebGL support. When working correctly, the site has dice to select and a clear "Throw" button to roll them.