skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"...and so a true implementation in C with the right compiler optimizations would for sure be faster than the python code."

True. But this assumes that time is not a constraint.

I think you need to think of it this way (as a thought experiment): you start two programmers off, one in C and one in Python, both with a vague understanding of how to solve the problem and approximately the same skill level. Then after X hours, you stop both and see how far they've gotten.

I think the argument then is that you might find that the C programmer hasn't yet solved the problem, whereas the Python programmer might have a solution + a deeper understanding of where the slow parts are, and started optimizing those.

So in the end the C programmer may win, but perhaps it's not about winning in this sense but more about how fast you can get to a point where you can move on to the next thing.
Implementation notes about Henry Spencer's regex library
I'm trying a reverse strategy. The basic idea is to learn to do nothing at all. Really nothing, except breathing, eating, drinking water and sleeping.

The purpose is to filter out any activity that challenge breath, eat, drink and sleep. If one comes in any way, I just quickly put in the the trash.

That way when I reach a goal (if I had one at the time), I breathe better and so on... So step by step I create my world only on those 4 pillars.

There are so many things that trying to tweak those pillars, maybe the first one in your case is that battle against procrastination.

Avoid them and you will have so long to do who makes you breathe better...
but... but... it's an actual Yoda quote:

http://i.imgur.com/z0pkveG.gif
I sincerely doubt he thinks he has been doing the opposite.
Yikes, having attended a computer vision conference last week, that sort of apporach is actually starting to sound reasonable and intelligent!
SEEKING WORK - remote only

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I offer clients guaranteed flat rates on projects instead of hourly. Contact dan@machinepublishers.com
It astounds me that people are taken in by this. There are so many ways that Zuckerberg can manipulate this to his self-worshiping benefit that I can't even guess which ones he'll pick. Consider the type of charity Zuckerberg has previously favoured: totally monopolistic internet infrastructure in India. Sure, people get internet, but it'll Zuckernet from now until forever. Philanthropy is a broken system, because powerful philanthropists never really give away their money: they retain control of whatever the charity is used to build. When you have everything and it's not enough, that kind of control is worth a lot of dollars to you.
SEEKING WORK
-Location: Mumbai, India | Remote
-Remote: Yes
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-Available full-time, part-time
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-I have more than 6 year of software development experience which include working as employee for leading market research firm in their Newyork office for 3.5 years. I now live in India and seeking remote or freelance work.
The integration of Andrew Godwin's django channels [1] would be a big thing :)

[1] https://github.com/andrewgodwin/channels
For interservice calls a firewall is much more secure than any auth system, way less vectors of attack. Encrypted transport on public networks should be a given anyway, although if you have a private network then that is unnecessary also.

The only place auth is needed is for services that interact with users, and that works well in the microservice philosophy having an auth service which talks to all services as in user <-> service <-> auth

You can scale the auth system indirectly to the other services, and since auth is required almost everywhere means that you'll have a large part of your resources devoted to that.

Where it gets interesting is when you use external microservices for auth like stormpath - is it a good idea to talk to that directly, or use a mediation auth service of your own - I usually prefer the 2nd method since while there is an extra hop - it makes the api more static and allows you to swap out what your app uses for auth much more easily.
>Would you voluntarily give more taxes to your governments?

I already voluntarily pay more taxes than I need to. It's pretty easy to (legally) pay much less tax if you are running your own business.

Also, I and quite a few other people I know don't use GiftAid when giving to charity or buying things from charities (GiftAid basically lets the charity claim back the income tax that I've paid on that money) for the reason that the government is better placed to know what projects need money than I am. They are more likely to spend the money on 'unfashionable' things that don't trigger the same emotional response in people but are actually more effective uses of money.
Some of us like PayPal.
We did something similar at Optiver.

* boot a custom live cd (a la Knoppix) over PXE
* Live CD places node into database if it doesn't exist yet,
using dmidecode to find serialnumbers and such
* Live Cd keeps querying database for instructions
* Engineer adds a profile to the node in the database
* Live Cd slices up disk to match the profile
* Live Cd fetches a tarball of the base OS from an URL
and throws it on the metal. Runs grub setup. Reboots.

Tumblr did something like this with http://tumblr.github.io/collins/.
>simply because developers "don't like" or rather can be bothered with the wrestling matches needed

In all fairness, I'd say it's more like web application security is a huge field (larger than just SQLi) and a developer typically has their hands full wrestling the technologies they use on a daily basis.

I am the most senior developer here in a team of 6 and we all know just the most basic facts about SQLi (use stored procedures), XSS (use sanitizing libraries) and it ends right at CRSF. Of the OWASP top 10, we have an eye on the top 4 and I wouldn't wager a high bet we have them nailed down.

It feels bad, but considering the resources we'd need to pour into getting one of our better devs trained in all the facets of web app security, it's unlikely to change any time soon.
My Biggest Mistake So Far
Another great article highlighting how often software gets it wrong is here: http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma.html
Do you think your comments apply to Bill Gates?
> once I had a decent algorithm, I could turn to Cython to tighten up the bottlenecks and make it fast.

What are your preferred ways to profile Python code? Coming recently from PHP, where we have XDebug/KCachegrind, the excellent Facebook-sponsored Xhprof, https://blackfire.io and https://tideways.io, it's felt a step backwards.

I've tried line_profiler, and used memory_profiler and cProfile with pyprof2calltree and KCachegrind. I've found the cProfile output confusing when it crosses the Python-C barrier for numpy, sklearn etc.
Google sheep view
Delta encoding is the more general technique you're describing. It's used by most latency-sensitive networked games today, first made popular in Quake 3 I believe. The general idea is to keep resending all changes in state since the most recent ACK.
I'm all for rich people giving their mass fortunes to charity but they sure do seem to take a long time to do it. Bill Gates is STILL the richest person on the planet in 2015 and his wealth GREW $3.2 billion last year. Can we save the praise for giving away $44 billion until he actually gives it away?

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2015/03/02/inside-th...
> The upside of this is that none of them have been able to break the basic blockchain mechanism and profit from doing so. That's an impressive achievement in computer security.

Not really. Merkle trees aren't exactly new, and neither is the transaction signing mechanism used in Bitcoin. Bitcoin didn't achieve anything novel here.

The major new idea Bitcoin brought to the table was proof of work. However, Satoshi couldn't predict mining pools, which has led to the situation Bitcoin is essentially controlled by a small cabal of miners and core devs. This is not the decentralized system Satoshi envisioned.

In fact, there have been cases in the past where a single pool actually had >50% of mining power for short periods of time. Since ownership of pools is not exactly transparent, we have no way of knowing if any pool out there is currently at 50%, or if there are multiple pools colluding. The classic argument is that there is no incentive for a 50%+ miner to hurt the network, but then you're trusting a random pool owner with your money, which goes against everything that Bitcoin set out to do.

Moreover, a large pool has been known to game satoshi dice by including a double-spend in its next block if it lost, and thus denying the original transaction to go through. Other games like selfish mining can be played as well.

Your statement that Bitcoin remains unbroken is not really true. A double spend has been demonstrated during the first big fork (around version 0.8, if memory serves me). It was announced with proof on Bitcointalk. I guess hat since the guy was a white-hat, and returned the money, you're still technically correct in that he did not profit from it.

Bitcoin is also notoriously vulnerable to DDOS attacks. We had several big DDOS events this year with Bitcoin transactions being backed up for hours, even days. In one case a company was 'stress testing' the system by filling up the blocks with dust transactions, and in another an attacker found a way to very cheaply fill up blocks with certain types of transactions (sigops).

Finally, Bitcoin simply does not scale very well because it's a massively replicated system that records and distributes transactions to every node in the network. This does not scale in number of nodes (network diameter, end-to-end latency) or in number of transactions (bandwidth, blockchain size).

All in all, calling Bitcoin an impressive achievement in computer security is a bit of a stretch imho.
But the whole Tolkien thing? 19th century writers?

Some of the books which most influenced my world view are English; Dawkins (game theory, other writers criticize religion better) and Orwell ("Down and Out in Paris and London", partly also "Animal farm" etc).

You can't generalize millions of people. For a more extreme example of that:

The majority of my intellectual (for lack of a better word) "idols" are probably from USA -- but quite a few people that moved there claims the US average levels of general education is abysmal (except for the specific subject someone studied).

The funniest variant of this was when an old student friend pointed out that his many Americans friends knew more about European history than the average European. (He was active in SCA.)
Facebook is the message
What are the alternatives that work well internationally? Only Bitcoin comes to my mind, but it's a mess to buy, conversation rates fluctuate wildly and is far from easy to use.
When we try things like #2, we run into politics. There's no shortage of such scandals from any sufficiently large political party.
And it has neither Windows nor WP client. Oh, and you can't send all kinds of files over it.
And that's not including the discussions of open offices not linked to this specific article.
I've been in multiple open office plans in my short career and there is a definite divide between open office. My current office is spacious, lot's of cupboards in between work places and has a ton of meeting rooms (which can't be reserved but are used "ad-hoc").

My previous open office plan was a fully booked, over crowded space with too little meeting rooms. This means that 1. There are more people in the same amount of space and 2. meetings happen at desks because there is no place to go to talk privately.

If you use an open office to create more communication in the office whilst at the same time putting the workers comfort first it is an amazing tool. But it's misused to put more people in smaller spaces.
I'm surprised everyone is still installing to disk. In 2008/2009, we had a POC where we ran the OS from memory after booting over PXE.

* boot a live image into memory
* point LXD/RKT/Docker to /containers
* ...
* profit!
Beating procrastination is about changing a lot of small habits. The first change I'd recommend is to focus on one baby step at a time: http://www.maxims.us/take-baby-steps/

Once that becomes habitual, you may find the other Maxims on productivity to be relevant: http://www.maxims.us/topics/productivity/
It's less clear cut with Gates because he has a quite different personality to Zuckerberg. Gates has a genuine desire to understand and fix things, although that is amongst his more positive traits. Zuckerberg/Facebook, on the other hand, has well-documented antisocial and indeed malicious behaviour.
IncludeOS: C++ unikernel now free and open source
I'm not saying Google deliberately handed data over to the NSA. I'm saying the NSA (and others) are try getting to it one way other other. It's not necessarily that Google is untrustworthy, but that if the data does get out, however that happens, it will be quite devastating.

> And you have chosen not to believe a statement made in the strongest possible terms.

A) It's not in the "strongest possible term". Quite a bit of weasel-wording there IMO.

B) How does a statement's strength validate it? I can strongly say any lie I want.

> Indeed, and we can't do that because it would invalidate the very security that you want.

I agree. And I would like a solution to this. There's just not a good way for me to trust cloud providers.

> The easy solution here is to not keep any of that data in de-anonymised form for longer than is necessary, but then people don't want to believe the privacy policies which say this is happening...

> The easy solution here is to not keep any of that data in de-anonymised form for longer than is necessary, but then people don't want to believe the privacy policies which say this is happening...

I don't see how that's at all relevant.

A) Just because one asshole on the internet doesn't believe the policy doesn't mean Google should just give up on it.

B) That doesn't address my point. Tomorrow-Google will still get access to my data, unknown to me. I can't verify the "trustworthiness" of a company every day.
That's exactly how we should think of things too; mechanically. Even if the FBI today were morally ideal and responded to serious requests within the limits of their bureaucratic ability without stonewalling, that's not something we should depend on.

We should depend on levers and mechanisms.
Making 3-D imaging 1,000 times better
Presto wasn't released until 2003.

In the late '90s, the time frame this thread is about, it was well known that the layout engines at the time were not dynamic: they could not in general reflow only parts of the page. Everything else I mentioned in the post that triggered this subthread is obvious simply based on browser engine and OS history.
> My conclusion is that the open office versus closed office depends a ton on culture more than the actual office.

Your comment seems to indicate that at best an open office "isn't bad" if it's basically used like a closed office without walls. That doesn't sound like "open office versus closed office depends a ton on culture", it sounds like "open office being a workable option at all depends on culture", with closed offices always being at least equivalent and usually being superior.
ΖΗΤΗΣΤΕ+ΠΡΟΣΦΟΡΑ+-+SEO+|+WEB+DESIGN
I've been to the open office at Pivotal in SF and it's ridiculously loud. It amazes me paired programmers can consistently focus on work with that much noise.
Also prevented by escaping input.
Yup, I don't know what GP is talking about. English literature would still be the most amazing national literature in scope and depth and popularity even if it didn't have Shakespeare.

But it does.
XCOM game in Excel
IMO the worst offenders are image shrinking features in many applications. Open this in your favorite browser/image viewer then shrink it to 50%:

http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma-1.0-or-2.2.png

I tested it right now in chromium 46 and it still doesn't scale it correctly. Last time I checked Firefox doesn't do it better.

An other good article about this problem:
http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma.html

There are other areas where this becomes apparent, such as physical lighting models where it only makes sense to use a linear colorspace. Is there a type safe library to handle colors well (like having separate types for "compressed" and "linear" color values)? I think that could mitigate most of these problems caused by naive implementations.
They were actually doing pretty well at New-Yahoo, except for when they removed Google login support and I ended up with 2x Yahoo accounts and can't move my Flickr amongst them.
Why blurring sensitive information is a bad idea
Implementing a Supercollider external in Rust
You make a very good point. Currently, the largest threat to long and happy life is a destroyed habitat.
Look at the history of the rail network and see how cities were made (or undone) by where rail stations were placed.
Keep in mind that the levels of caches increase the latency of a cache miss. So basically you want enough cache for the cachable bits and as little cache as possible for the non cachable bits.

So higher bandwidth and many uses cases that involve streaming (like say 4k video or writing triangles from the GPU to the frame buffer) it makes sense to get rid of the L3 and upgrade the bandwidth to 50GB/sec.

Hopefully Intel will match the bandwidth with their next generation. So far Intel's taken the easy route and added an off chip, but inside package cache for their highest end GPUs (Iris Pro) but left the memory bandwidth the same (128 bit @ DDR4 speeds around 25GB/sec.)
"He has informed us that he plans to sell or gift no more than $1 billion of Facebook stock each year for the next three years and that he intends to retain his majority voting position in our stock for the foreseeable future."

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/0001326801150...

What an amazing donation! But not for the foreseeable future. I don't care how multiplicative his voting shares are. If there is no plans to sell them in the foreseeable future, this is a pledge spread out across a generation, decades, while real problems are affecting us every year. Every year where he just capped himself at 1 billion dollars in donations.

Why are you applauding this?
Show HN: Mobile Deep Linking Server Driving Engagement
How is any of that stuff bad, though? Seems like a good trade. You put $45B into improving the world, we'll sing your praises.

What's the difference between it being all done in vanity and it being all done in goodwill? It's literally the same thing to the rest of the world, the only difference is some internal chemical state in his brain.
Problem is our work as software developper isn't uni-dimensional. We sometimes need brainstorming, fostering ideas, imagination moments, and we sometimes need ultra-focus "flow" moments. I'm working at home, and i sometimes turn on the music, and watch outside for inspiration. I sometime call or meet friends for social interaction, and i sometimes am so focused that i forget everything around me and code for hours straight.

You can't reasonnably assume that 10 people in a room will be in sync all the time.
Actually it is. Every cache hit increases the available bandwidth for the CPU. So generally the larger the caches the less bandwidth and the less sensitive you are to memory latency.
It's actually quite hard to give away money faster than you get it above a certain level of wealth. I suspect this reflects more the performance of the investments Bill has than the level of charitable investment.
It does if you hit the submit button, but not if you just hit Enter.
+1 for copy/pasting your old comment[1] when the same discussion pops up yet again within 30 days. I suppose there's really nothing new to say here.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10514904
How dare he donate only $1 billion each year? He's literally Hitler.
yes, downvote instead of answering the question.
Kill yourself, you fucking idiot.
What could dark matter be
Bu..but he clearly knows how to put billions of dollars to better use than the guy who earned said billions of dollars.
An open office isn't ever an issue for me because of being interrupted or blocked. It's simply that an office full of people, with the requisite fashionable foosball/ping pong table, is loud and distracting. There's no getting around the fact that if you need to concentrate, you need to be able to do so while listening to music, because you're not going to get a moment of quiet during the work day. Alternatively, you can work late and do your thinking after most people go home. Both of these options are less than optimal, and I find it frustrating at times. Of course, offices with doors are not remotely realistic for a startup in San Francisco, so this is a sacrifice we make.
Ya, I came here to talk about that line as well. The whole article was interesting, but that line stood out as a pretty surprising hack for 2015.
Maybe I do not know some important details, but why DSF (Django Software Foundation), does not do Django consulting in the first place. They very highly likely can do the best Django consulting in the world.

Secondly, maybe DSF could bake some great products for/from Django? The first ideas I have is Django specific, and user friendly:

- PaaS;

- analytics (as in 'new relic');

- crash and performance logging (as in 'sentry' and/or 'opbeat')

- CI;

DSF can just simply make business, by making great infrastructure stack around Django.