skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>but there are plenty of valid reasons to dislike it

The reason why I don't like SQL much, is not because of SQL itself, but because of its poor fit into the host programming language.

In PL-SQL, Oracle's own programming language, the SQL statements are simply part of the program. That is how it should be.

But in other languages (like Perl), the SQL is like code you need to `eval` at runtime. There is no syntax check until you actually run it. And that makes it cumbersome to work with. Plus, you often have to do optimizations (like to separate `prepare` from the rest of the code) by hand, which only makes it worse.

It's all just very low level.
Why aren’t the prices going to rise higher and higher? There is absolutely nothing that says they shouldn’t (or they should for that matter).

And how does someone lose money if the prices stagnate? The prices have to actually drop for someone to lose money.

Fundamentally this stuff is pretty simple:

I have an idea for a business, I need $1,000,000 in startup capital. I sell 1,000 shares costing $1,000 each.

After a year my business is profitable and valued at $2,000,000. The stock is now worth $2,000. That means everyone who bought my stock now earned $1,000.

Who lost on this? you can say that the consumers who paid my company (to make it worth more) lost, but a) these are not part of the stock market, and b) my product may actually have saved them more than they spent.
> Learning to trade or invest or code or build startups is just another skill.

Absolutely. I started with $2000 and doubled it many times over to pay for tuition. But I read everything I could and watched my stocks religiously.

I would buy and sell every few days or weeks to make use out of every 5% gain or loss in the stock's value.

Yes, the fees (etrade at $20 a trade) were ridiculous. They might have cost me 25% of my gains but at the end of the day my gains were still up there. It's much cheaper to trade now.

If you have the time to invest then I would learn foreign exchange instead. You can have much more leverage there without much initial capital. I would love to spend more time on trading my money but as you move on from school life just gets busier. So go read and make some money.

PS: I should say I lost my fair share initially as well.
Check out Monaco or Inconsolata using Mac OS X font renderer. I think it's very comfortable and clear to look at:

http://www.hashref.com/images/inconsolata.png
I was always thinking that the best recruitment grounds for open source game content are design/architecture/animation/mechanical engineering college and uni courses. The students can do their assignments plus have some fun playing with their own models in an open source game.

Why is that not happening??
I think this is actually an argument for more accessible markets. Retail investing was not offering vehicles to the average investor who wanted to invest believing that house prices would fall. I wondered to many professional and non-professional investors how t invest against the housing market to no avail. If people had understood how to "bet" against house prices then I am confident the bubble would have deflated more gently and earlier. The easiest retail position to take is a "long" purchase of an investment instrument. What is needed is the knowledge of and retail accessibility to bubble-deflating investments.

How far should this go? Anyone should be able to own and even construct derivatives. Such a market would bring along a host of educational material and means to understand the provenance of your derivatives and the counter-party risk. Obviously this accessibility and transparency would benefit professional derivative investors as the pool of clients, information, transparency, and alternative parties and views with which to trade expands.

But this is impossible as long as the notion of "qualified investor" exists. If Greenspan and traditional economics has any hope of being correct then what is needed is to enlarge the pool of "qualified investors" to simply everyone. We need not more regulation but less but for the requirement that the prospectus be accurate, intelligible, and anyone that sells "investments" must do business with anyone has the purchase price.

Taleb says market-based black swans are becoming more common. The question is: are they common enough to make a profitable business out of suppressing them?
Fascinating - thanks for the detailed response, and that does make a lot of sense.

It seems that if string comparisons are the major cost, you could speed up collision handling on the hash table quite a bit by storing additional metadata. Storing the size of the string, for example, would allow you to skip a lot of comparisons - you can do a simple size comparison prior to actually comparing characters. This would also allow you to do slightly more funky string comparisons, such as comparing characters from the end first, or even starting at the middle, to skip common prefixes.

Alternatively, instead of storing the size you could store the computed hash value for each string, which would allow you to compare hash values rather than full strings. The likelihood of a collision on a 32 bit hash value (say) is pretty low, so you'd mostly be avoiding extraneous string comparisons. This would also speed up growing/shrinking the table quite a bit. Have you tried these sorts of changes, and what (if any) difference do they make?

I can see that these optimisations merely reduce the cost of collisions rather than the baseline non-collision cost, and it definitely makes sense that tries require fewer operations. What I wonder is whether, as you scale up the trie to very large datasets, the superiority of the trie tails off due to the memory latency? Or are tries basically always superior in memory, due to their depth never getting all that large?

(To be clear, I don't mean to doubt your work on this subject, since you're clearly rather more knowledgeable than I am - I'm just interested :-) )
I would be too, but that's not a particularly classy comment.
Get well Steve.
"Who wants to shell out $30-50 for a dopey game title when you can download cool $1-5 games to your iPod touch on a regular basis or get rich, major games from big publishers for $6-12 on the iPad? They’re beautiful, wildly interactive, and are going to slay Nintendo and Sony in the portable gaming market. Nintendo’s boss says he doesn’t get the iPad. That’s executive speak for “I’m going down with the ship.” The correct answer was: “We’re creating iPad titles based on our beloved franchises as fast as we can.” Ya’ll are dead."

This is hilarious. Pretty good satire piece.
> Who lost on this?

Market players who didn't invest in your idea (you could call it "opportunity cost").

If the baseline strategy is "invest randomly", or "invest a little bit in everything", then those who deviated from it by way of not investing in your idea, lost.

It only makes sense to evaluate a market player's performance relative to some baseline strategy. I was trying to make this point elsewhere in this thread.
Turn Your Web-based Music Player into a Desktop App
Are those slots in the same rack auctioned or something? How does having an office in a nearby building help?
You've clearly never used Blender.
If a Cat has Catness Does a Cloud have Cloudness?
I would like to invest in this startup.
highly unlikely, unless you have a specific reason for thinking so?
Blenders interface is built by programmers. There wasn't a visually creative bone in the UI designers body.
You did notice this was written by curl's author? I only noticed after I read it and without that knowledge thought it was rather a pathetically biased article.

But you can't expect developers to be impartial about their own code and it was my fault for not noticing the disclaimer the first time. It reads completely different with that framing in mind, but still if I was looking for the definitive reason that one tool was recommended over another I'd consider the point of view of the developers as a starting point rather than an open and shut case.
The potential failure of Palm doesn't automatically make every single decision they made wrong, nor does the success of the iPhone make every decision that Apple made correct.
What's with the trend of so-called "infographics" that are just numbers and text? Considering this is done about a browser and by a web front-end specialist would it have been too much to ask for it to be done with HTML+CSS?

At the very least it would have made it easier for them to fix their WikiDidia typo.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_sum_game

zero-sum describes a situation in which a participant's gain or loss is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the other participant(s)
I'll call total bullshit on the idea that stocks provide positive returns over long time periods. (EDIT: note that you don't always get to pick the time period, life has that nasty habit of forcing the situation)

Over the last 25 years, including the recent meltdown, the best investment was long US treasuries.

My advice is to do your own research buy a small group of stocks you know very well, preferably that pay a dividend, and hold them. When they go down, if you are still a believer buy more.

Stay away from mutual funds, they are loaded with hidden fees, their managers are like cattle, and they typically do well only in bull markets when everyone does well.
The Ship analogy
Three Monitors For Every User
The fact is that very rarely new technology is killing the old one. Radio never killed newspapers. TV never killed Radio. TV never killed books. We see marketshare shifts, new niches are being created are we simply use more devices (radio while driving, TV on the evenings, books we read before we go to sleep etc.).

iPad is really interesting because touch interface is so much more natural for us then mouse or keyboard. We just have to wait and see how we will apply this new technology in our life...
>Wget requires no extra options to simply download a remote URL to a local file, while curl requires -o or -O. However trivial, this fact is often mentioned to me when people explain why they prefer downloading with wget.

Funny because that's exactly the reason I installed macports and then wget. It's stupidly trivial, but there you have it.
As far as I know this isn't just speculation, it's fact.

The US DoD required a 1500-mile crossrange capability on the Shuttle because they wanted to launch from Vandenberg into a polar orbit, immediately drop a satellite into orbit over the north pole, then land back at Vandenberg at the end of the same orbit, before the Soviets could track the shuttle's orbit by radar. (The earth would have turned ~1500 miles under the orbiter by that point, so it would have to be aerodynamic enough to fly those 1500 miles as a plane.)

This crossrange requirement was what required the Shuttle to use the unusual delta-wing configuration. The Vandenberg-polar-orbit flight profile has never been attempted.
Perhaps they could try making it more personal by changing it to "Talk to someone about this, call 1-800-273-8255" or something similar.

Near some bridges there are signs that say "There is hope, make the call".
I assumed someone internally bombed "Suicide: Read This First" (http://www.metanoia.org/suicide/) as it frequently appeared first in my morbid search history (e.g. "i want to die"). I guess that's Google doing what Google does best.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_ridicule
The author of the post draws a lot of his examples from a page at Omniglot. The table there (link below) shows variation for a number of languages. Spanish in particular offers both Greek and Chinese as "incomprehensible" languages. Portuguese also offers Greek and Chinese. Slovenian has "Spanish village" and Chinese. (That odd phrase - "Spanish village" - shows up in Macedonian, too.) Greek has Chinese and Arabic.

In the comments to the Language Log post, a few German speakers describe variation in German as regional, and that may be true for the differences above.

Anyhow, the Omniglot table is here:

http://www.omniglot.com/language/idioms/incomprehensible.php
Stay Safe on the Net
I presume the only thing I would like to check out on FreeBSD is dtrace. The 2nd thing would be perhaps something related to ZFS.
Apple's Intro into Tablets May Mirror Same Path as Smartphones
I use curl for almost everything. Especially for debugging caching and whatnot, using curl -D - -o /dev/null http://example.net/ makes it extremely simple to see the headers the server is sending for a certain file.

Not only that, but curl is installed standard on Mac OS X whereas wget is not, also, most attacks that attack PHP tend to use wget to download further files to the target system, which means that when wget is not available no extra files are downloaded and it generally stops the exploit cold in its track as the attacker does not try again.
I've wanted to use EC2 for some projects, however I don't like using Linux, so if FreeBSD would work on EC2 it would certainly help get me using Amazon's services.

However because I am currently unemployed I do not have any money to put into development, and all my projects that require a positive cash flow have been put on the backburner.
It's not a matter of aesthetics; it's a matter of power. If each table transformation is a function, the language becomes considerably more flexible. Consider the following syntax:

users where(u => u.login = "foo" and u.passwd = SHA1("secret" + u.salt))

Since "where" is a function, we can isolate just this transformation:

authenticate(login, password) :=
where(u => u.login = login and u.passwd = SHA1(password + u.salt))

Now "authenticate" is a table transformation as well:

users authenticate("foo", "secret")

This is a trivial example, but this could just as easily apply to more complex queries. One could construct functions to manage "nested set" tables, or create custom aggregation functions. Everything that is currently difficult or impossible under SQL.

Because SQL is so limited in what you can abstract, there's very little room to factor out common code. Views, stored procedures and even T-SQL functions just operator on set tables. With a more flexible syntax, one could have third-party libraries containing more complex table transformations.

Personally, I wonder whether we need a separate language for database queries at all. It would be nice if there were a just a library we could use to create our own database server inline, using whatever language we wish.
Around 20.
Fund managers: it is even worse. Because customers will choose the fund with the best tack record, managers have an incentive to take high risks when the time to report comes near. If they win, they win big, if they lose, they lose just their bonus.

What i haven't understood yet is why index funds are supposed to be so great. At least if everybody would just buy undex funds, it wouldn't work. Also, who picks the stocks in the index? Why would index funds be better than just buying some random stocks?
‘Whiteness’ workshop helps expose your inner racist
You mention funding for development. What amount would cover it and what is a meaningful amount?

I'm one of those people that bugged you on the AWS forums about this :). I run FreeBSD on my servers but have had to compromise on EC2 (running Ubuntu now).
Does the script hide this item from the front page as well? Hmmmm....
MXF Video Converter - How to convert mxf file with simple MXF File Converter
Very flame-bait but a fun read nevertheless. Let the wars begin!
Does anyone knows how to mirror a site using wget or curl, and get all the assets? (specially images linked on stylesheets).
This is supposed to be the definitive book on the subject: This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (http://www.amazon.com/This-Time-Different-Centuries-Financia...).

Barons: "A tour de force of quantitative analysis covering financial crises affecting 66 countries over the past 800 years, the book identifies pre-crisis patterns that recur with eerie consistency."
Personally, I think shell scripts should start with "#! /bin/sh", not going for some specific shell. If I need more than the standard Bourne shell, I should probably be using something else.

More or less sane systems have something like this (Ubuntu 9.10):

$ ls -l /bin/*sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 917960 2009-09-14 06:08 /bin/bash
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 101608 2009-09-21 00:49 /bin/dash
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 2009-10-29 19:25 /bin/rbash -> bash
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 2009-05-17 19:57 /bin/sh -> dash
I'm not criticizing, but wouldn't a simple alias be easier?

alias co='curl -O'
Sometimes I feel people writing this type of article decided to see the world through their window and ignore what goes around it.

I get the ways the iPad can be detrimental to software development and the perception of what constitutes legitimate use of a device, just as the iPhone was/is. However, to place it as an anti-creativity agent infiltrating our lives is either disingenious or misinformed.

There's no doubt different interests are at stake here, and that old media is trying desperately to feel in control again. But media consumption is but an use case for this and similar devices. To reduce it to that and ignore the amazing things people have been doing with their post-iPhone mobiles is to dumbly state only the issue of content distribution (written content, mostly) is relevant in this discussion.

Look at Everyday Looper, the many drawing apps, the games. You can argue any way you want about how it isn't an IDEAL situation, but there's vibrance in the community of developers, and a growing number of things users can achieve. I am not a musician, and I have been working beats. My drawing frustrates me a lot, but on my phone I feel free to sketch, and it allows me to spend my time in more creative ways than I would have a couple of years ago. And maybe, just maybe, all that arises from the perceived stability of the platform as opposed to Android (and its many versions): people can target it in code, people can use it and know it will be a thought trampoline, and that different trampolines will come out soon.

We all have our biases, and too easily frame situations as if our version of inside baseball were paramount to the fate of the world. While we do it, people will keep churning great ideas wherever they feel enabled to do so. Apple is kind of like New York, or Berlin, or Paris in that sense: there's much to dislike about it, but it provides enough of a cushion for creatives (including programmers), enough inspiration in the form of the works of others, to help make great things.
http://mcsquare.me is one of probably more than 20 Domains I own.
A Night On The Town
David loosened his tie as the train pulled into Kings Cross station. His company was sending him into London on yet another business trip.
Six coders can do anything and there is nothing six coders can't do.
Are you sure? Maybe it is not as ill intentioned as that, but merely his opinion.
It occurs to me, typing on this iPad in landscape, that this thing would be perfect to implement something like Microsoft's Courier concept or it's MS Research ancestor, Inkskein. Now let me see what Evernote is up to...
2010: A Year of Change for the Security Industry
Two for myself (one it in the "will I follow through?" stage), several for a business that my father is trying to put together (nature (as in geology) is currently being uncooperative).
Does 99designs have superstars like Tiger Woods?
Some time ago I filed a bug report because of the stylesheet images. So it still isn't fixed? It's simply a bug.

I have tried and liked pavuk in the past, don't know if it supports stylesheet images.
True, much simpler. I guess a larger reason would be that 7+ years of using wget has wired me to its commandline. I'm so used to typing `wget -c "<middle-click>"` or something on the command line, that I just never considered creating aliases for alternatives.
While this article seems pretty strong on economics(can't really judge , not an economist) , it fails to mention technology's impact , and the fact that today we have many industries being disrupted which was never the situation before the internet.

They give as an example the fact that intel is growing. but what happen if ARM wins in the processor battle in the next few years ? won't it change who is importing and who is exporting ? and at what price?
The same can be said about Hollywood. they are under immense pressure from free/ad-based online video. this kinds of pressure gives an advantage to content that's cheaper to produce. this isn't very good for the u.s. industry.

So while this article is very optimistic about the exporting more, it would be a major challenge.
Another stupidly trivial reason:

I can type 'wget' and then do command-V entirely with my left hand, keeping my right hand on the mouse. Having to type 'curl' would require me to move my hand back and forth, slowing me down.
Breast Cancer Risks
A good idea, but won't work in reality. 1) You'd need a directory of such numbers from every country. 2) For those where you have the number, IP-based country location does not work, so some people would get a wrong number.
So is German the Java of natural languages?
SEO Company
Search Eccentric a SEO Company offers Website Optimization solutions such as SEO, SMO and PPC services to clients in USA, UK, Australia, Canada and Europe
I'm pretty sure awk is Turing Complete while grep isn't.
I’m quite tired of those grandiose declarations of what the iPad will achieve myself but I have to correct your history a bit.

We know of examples were new technology of delivering media killed old technology. CDs killed LPs, DVDs killed VHS tapes. (In the same way in which cars killed horse carriages – there are still some out there but they don’t really matter.) Other technologies fundamentally changed just how we use media. DVRs did that to TV.

So just why do we see certain change but not other kinds of change? My personal little theory is that certain modes of consuming media will pretty much always be useful, independent of the available technology.

Delivering just text will in certain situations probably always be cheaper than delivering visuals and audio (no need to produce expensive visuals or hire a speaker), I also think that it just might be more effective to take in certain information by reading rather than any other way. Consequently something like newspapers and books will always exist (with or without the text being printed on dead trees). You can make a very similar argument for Radio.

The big thing about computers has always been that they can potentially deliver everything. Just text. Just audio. Just visuals. Or all that in any combination you wish. So, sure, computers (and that includes the iPad) might just be able to kill newspapers, radio, TV, books. But just as we know them. There will probably always be devices which allow us to read text, listen to something or watch and listen to something.
I use HTTrack, usually handles the job just fine.
The Creative Essay
Writing a creative essay would be an uphill task if you have a topic that is dull, common and totally uninspiring. On the other hand, find a topic that is thought-provoking and all your creative antenna start perking up like never before.
Interesting. How many words is your corpus?

Right now I'm playing with a way to tokenize text in an unsupervised, language-independent manner - my current line of thought is "try to predict the next letter from n-grams, if the model has no idea then it's a word boundary".
Comodo BuyerTrust Builds Shoppers Trust and Increases Conversions for Merchants 
BuyerTrust Boosts Shopper Trust on Merchant Websites. The Free eVouch Protects Purchases to Create a Worry Free Shopping Experience.
Can anyone tell me the benefits of freebsd over popular Linux server distros (Ubuntu/centos/rhel)?
With not enough food, children learn to eat mud
He would have convinced me if the iPad didn’t include a kick ass web browser :)
Any good videos/books ?

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumi...