skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Theory vs Practice: Making algorithms claimed 'optimal', 10x faster.
"Would you believe me if I claimed that an algorithm that has been on the books as "optimal" for 46 years, which has been analyzed in excruciating detail by geniuses like Knuth and taught in all computer science courses in the world, can be optimized to run 10 times faster?"
Marriage is a lie. In America and much of Europe, just under half of marriages end in divorce. Any honest person would answer their vows with not "I do" but "probably". We like the idea of lifelong fidelity, but it simply isn't a practical reality for most people. We need to be honest with ourselves.

We're all smart people here. None of us would be so stupid as to sign a really bad VC agreement because we really liked the VC. Why do so many of us willingly sign bad contracts in our personal life? If someone here was signing an agreement with a startup cofounder that had no stock vesting clause and no provisions to secure IP, we'd be in like a shot to warn them. If someone here announced their engagement, I'm sure we'd all congratulate them. Marriage is objectively a terrible financial deal, particularly for the likes of us, but we ignore how bad a deal it is for purely sentimental reasons.
Really? I miss the good old days when Jedis and Jabba were on 7-11 glasses, in that case.

We don't have 7-11 here.... Let it be known that I pine for Super Nachos.
Well, how much karma has Larry Page racked up on HN??
The backspace on newer typewriters works by re-striking the character with a paper-colored correction tape. They do a pretty good job.
maximum recursion depth exceeded in line 1
I guess http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrogacy is better than marriage.
I recently got my PhD in CS at a European university, and I could directly translate many of the points from chemistry to the CS field. The article is 20+ years old, yet it somehow seems universal even today. I did a LOT of overtime, and often "just" to make a decent work that I wouldn't be ashamed to put my name on. I also met other grad students who wasted most of their time at the office on trivia (lunch, coffee, newspapers), people who rarely talked to their supervisors, people only superficially interested in their work, as well as people who did not really like what they were doing, yet they were striving to do their best. During my PhD years I learned at least as much about myself, academia and different kinds of people that I'm going to meet later in life, as about CS. One of the most important lessons was learning how to handle people who treat their work as a 9-5 chore instead of something to excel in.

--

Long time ago, while I was still an undergrad student, I asked one of the professors about grad studies. We had a long talk, from which I remember two things. 1: your PhD topic does not determine the rest of your scientific career (he shifted his area of interests a number of times). 2: whatever you do, always have a pen and small notebook with you. The latter has proven to be a golden piece of advice.
nothing ever truly dies. I was pretty sure the telegram had, but was surprised to read it still lives. crazy.

I wonder what technology will be added to this list next. Any guesses?
I'd love to see the "health-bar" implemented - reddit is absurdly secretive about what is going wrong behind the scenes and seemingly unwilling to allow users to help. The site has suffered for lack of transparency and community management.
Yes, cromulent indeed....
It sounds like the language I used to end essays with when I wasn't sure how to write an appropriate conclusion. In other words, mostly BS.
First: In Tetris nuking 4 rows at once gives you a greater score than nuking 1 row 4 times. (Same goes for 2 and 3 rows). As the guy learned the game he would have gone for optimizing his score rather than number of lines nuked. As he got better the habit would have stuck even though it wasn't strictly necessary to play it that way. The way to nuke 4 rows at once is to build up everything in 4 or more rows minus the slot that a 4x1 can fit into vertically (the longest piece in Tetris).

Second: Leaving a gap on the right or left rather than somewhere in the middle is the easiest way to accomplish this. If you can't see that, I'm sorry for you.

Third: This guy chose the right.
I never commented on whether it was good or bad. I merely pointed out a fact that isn't obvious at first glance to everyone when they encounter a story of this kind.
...I started Khush Inc., which makes an iPhone music application called LaDiDa. It’s a kind of reverse karaoke — it creates background music when people sing lyrics into a microphone...

Someone managed to make Microsoft SongSmith into something that doesn't suck?
This is great news for China. While the Silicon Valley gets rotten from inside, making this useless stuff, they will be buying bankrupt US chip companies and making their own microprocessors.
I feel embiggened with new knowledge. Thanks for the interesting story.
I think hipsters are responsible for keeping our cool old technology around.
I'm sure it's just an off-the-cuff remark.

The guy weighs in on the opposite side of something that is common knowledge, then says you should check what I'm saying because I could be fibbing, oh and I'm famous for having a bias against the side I've just disfavoured — and you reach that conclusion?

If I were a cynic I'd say both you and he were trolling, but I rather think he was just taking the mickey and it's turned into a rather droll black comedy.
My parents got divorced, and both had a bit of money and assets. They each hired a lawyer, split the assets, and that was that.

I think people are basing their decisions with respect to marriage and divorce on what they hear on TV (or social drama sites), rather than actual data. Oh well, HN readers are people too...

Also, the story this article is about would have ended the same way if he needed to sell the company to pay off some other arbitrary debt; margin call on a bad investment, the mortgage on his underwater home, anything. Divorce isn't relevant to the "life lesson". (Which is, "if you have to do something right now, you're not going to get a good price". I think I'll call it the "Best Buy" effect.)
And the funny thing is, Apple doesn't give a shit about gaming.
Is your assertion itself not bigoted?
I have no idea why you got down-voted for this. I've had this after marathon GTA sessions. I imagine it's disturbingly common. The desire fades after a while. I think you're post is in keeping with the theme of the discussion.

All in all, maybe marathon or prolonged gaming sessions aren't the healthiest thing in the world, mentally and physically. Say all you want about hand-eye coordination and I'm no Gaming or Net Nanny or anything but ...
Black-Scholes Option Pricing Model in Scheme
Married filing jointly shares liability. Married filing separately offers worse rates.
Ten Steps to Social Media Success
Not to mention: marriage is the number one cause of divorce ;)
What? No it isn't. http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Gravity_plating
The entire time I've spent in Italy -- not one espresso with any
trace of bitterness. Every cup of coffee was excellent to my taste."

Italian espresso is good because of consistent dosing. If you go in a coffee bar in Italy, chances are they don't have a grinder in house. They're using vacuum-sealed pre-ground coffee, and dosing very exactly before making espresso.

The industrial grinders they use to pre grind all of that espresso you were drinking give extremely consistent grinds, and the packaging lets it sit on shelves for months at a time. It's not even particularly high-quality coffee.

Don't take my word for it though:

In Italy, espresso is a mass consumption item, mostly made from
coffees of the same low quality as is found in supermarkets
everywhere. Since the aromas of such coffees are not all that
great, staling is of little consequence, while keeping doses
precise and yields high is of great consequence, since one
needs to extract every iota of caramel to make the shots
palatable. So the ground coffee sits in dosers going stale,
but is precisely dosed, 6.5 grams into single baskets, 13
into doubles.

http://www.coffeecuppers.com/Espresso.htm
I don't usually make that mistake; I might be losing a little off the top end of my English ability, since I'm living in Japan right now.

But you're correct. :)

And I also don't downvote anything except outright spam; everybody has the right to an opinion, whether or not I agree with it.
The Writer's Guild of America offers a registration service for written works. See http://www.wgawregistry.org/webrss/. It's ostensibly for screenplays, but they don't actually check the content of what is being registered. There is a modest fee. And whether or not registering with them will ever produce any actual benefit is IMHO highly questionable. But YMMV and all that.
I think it's important to note that this is an observation and not a correlation. It's a completely untestable hypothesis.

Besides, if the article is trying to contrast against technology, I don't think the development cost of recipes is anywhere close to that of semiconductors. I doubt it cost McDonald's eight figures to develop the egg mcmuffin.
After playing a lot of DDR, I saw arrows as moving up my field of vision.
Your comment would be funny if the author didn't explain this right in the first sentence:

At Velocity, I saw Adam Langley give a great presentation entitled Overclocking SSL.

As you can see, he named his article "Overclocking mod_ssl" because the other guy named his talk "Overclocking SSL". Reading comprehension. A good thing to get before writing.
Some sci-fi has cylindrical ships or space stations spun for gravity, but in Star Trek they have "gravity plating", so the ships don't have to spin. A convenient plot device to cover the fact that they didn't have the budget to shoot every episode aboard the vomit comet.
Have a look at JODConverter - http://www.artofsolving.com/opensource/jodconverter

I have used it in the past from my Java applications in the same way you intend to. Here is a list of supported formats of conversion: http://www.artofsolving.com/opensource/jodconverter/guide/su...
You get to run experiments on a huge number of users. Do a split test and get a significant result in an hour. Figure out a way to make it just 1% stickier and suddenly you created value worth millions to the company. It sounds fascinating and I could easily imagine working there.
I am in the "things were different a few years ago" camp. Joomla was a very fair CMS choice at the time, in particular for more static sites, when compared with Wordpress. If something didn't merit the learning curve and other headaches of Drupal (again, especially a few years back) and was more cumbersome than was possible with WP at the time, Joomla was a fair way to go about doing it. At the time I did a few projects for myself and others using it.

Now, though, the templating system and everything else feels rather archaic to me, and I am much quicker to just turn to Wordpress for almost any "quick out of the box" projects I would ever need to do -- WP just works and is so extensible and easy to use, and so easy to skin as I need it. For some instances I could see wanting something more but nowadays Joomla doesn't have as much to offer for me or, I think, many others.
The front page says, "A distributed key-value database for modern web applications".

The heading of this HN submission is "Yet Another Distributed Scalable Key/Value? (answer: no way!)"

The schizophrenia continues on the home page. "Does the world really need another NoSQL database?"

This deliberate confusion is beyond idiotic.
Marriage is the sanction of two people's private agreement by a religious institution or a government. Who needs that?

Both religious groups and governments have bigoted policies about who may marry. There is really no defense of it. It's a crude, outdated custom, and any relationship is only as strong as the commitment of the people in it, no more so, no less.
I'm curious to read more about Membase, their current homepage is rather sparse and lacking in content, but one of the things that really intrigues me about Membase is how they are adding a persistence layer on top of Memcached that gradually moves less used data down the stack to progressively slower and more expansive storage hardware, starting from ram, going to ssds, then down to hard drives.

One thing that they make a big deal about is ease of use in installing, saying:

"Start storing data in five minutes, or less. Membase is a single-package install. It is easy to get, install, configure and begin using. We consider it a failure if it takes more than five minutes to get up and running."

While I appreciate ease of use and their dedication to that, if I'm looking for something to handle 500,000+ requests per second, then getting it up and running initially within 5 minutes is not something I concerned with.

But that's just a nit pick. I'm intrigued to hear more, and I like that they are building this on top of Memcached while utilizing the existing client API.
In the AMA, she linked to her IQ test comment[1], where she made an interesting point about the relationship between higher IQ and night owls[2]. We recently had a discussion about this.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/aj9xf/by_request_i_hav...

[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/aj9xf/by_request_i_hav...
I can't believe I forgot about his place, as a kid we used to tell each oher scary stories about the place when we passing through the area.
I can sympathize but I also see those with a need for the stability that comes with long term support. Django has reached a level of acceptance like Debian, or CentOS where intensive refactors are unacceptable. Maybe it's up to someone else to fork Django.
The potential of this is astounding, across Google web, Android, and Chromium.
Problem is, how is this different than something else: the days when you can claim to be fast, scalable, distributed etc. and get some traction are over. These terms are so overused and overhyped that they have lost all meaning to potential users. In the database world, "scalable" is the new "object-oriented".
I've always preferred the taste of Coke out of a can to any other cola. Pepsi is too sweet, and it has a slightly different aftertaste; Coke on the otherhand, tastes pretty consistent throughout, making it an excellent choice as a mixer. I don't know how people can like Coke out of a glass bottle though... it has always tasted too flat for me.

Anyone ever notice how Subway (chain restaurant) always has a different tasting Coke than what you're used to? I could never figure out why they consistently screw up the mix.
In terms of userbase, GMail is still third behind Hotmail and Yahoo. I would bet that current Farmville users overlap less with GMail than other email services too.
As much as I generally like George Carlin, this seemed to reduce down to unsubstantiated claims.
I hate to say it for fear of giving aid and comfort to my Gender Studies professors, but I think a major portion of the reason why Blizzard et al get geek cred and FarmVille does not is because FarmVille is played by women.
Python is probably a better option than Ruby. If your main interest is the web tech scene, you should probably devote some time to JavaScript.
It is a well-written and interesting article. So unlike some of the comments below, I wouldn't chalk this up to some sort of discrimination (in favor of women)

It is true that her history/accomplishments aren't necessarily extraordinary. A few years ago, in a salaried job, she was "was on track to be earning six figures within three years." Now, she has one iPhone app that is doing well in the app store (the app never made it to the top 3 in the Music category, but it is currently at #7 in Music)

I think that her accomplishments not being extra-ordinary may make the story more interesting to a lot of people. The fact that it is #5 on HN is a testament to the story's relevance. Kudos to Prerna Gupta for a well-written article, for generating positive PR for her company and also for taking the risk of leaving her salaried job to take up entrepreneurship.

She shares the last attribute with many of us on HN :)
I don't know what's better... the Coke vs Pepsi story in the article, or the fact that this entire website is dedicated to mechanical pencils.
That reminds me of "provide liquidity"
Ask HN: As a hacker, do you watch the World Cup?
Trying to learn more about different behaviors within groups in relation to watching the world cup (related to my company). Would love to just hear how many of you guys really follow it, or would like to follow it!

Let me know =)

btw: who do you want to win?
Ask HN: Have you used a pass-through agency?
I'm currently working through an agency that found me and charges their customer god know how much for my services. Yes, they have the inside track on the available positions at this company and have its trust. But is it really worth as much as they charge, which I assume is more than it should be or it wouldn't be a secret.

One is probably better off marketing to companies directly. What's the best way to do this?

Do you have any insights on doing contract work w/ pass-through agency that handles all the taxes, insurance, etc?
Wikileaks website to be abandoned
This pretty much sums up spectator sports in general, and football/soccer in particular:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN1WN0YMWZU
Ask HN: What programming languages to teach kids under 12 years old?
What programming languages would be beneficial for kids under 12 years old?

Links to resources would be greatly appreciated.
I think pretty much anybody from Europe follows at least a little
This is an entirely money-centric view of things. This is like saying going to a movie is a bad deal because you spent $15, 2 hours of time, and ended up with nothing financially useful at the end. Marriages are not usually primarily financial contracts, VC contracts primarily are.

Money is an abstraction, a means to an end, not the end. For many (most?) people, that intended end is a happy, healthy, safe family, which is hard to do without marriage.
One problem for Django and similar projects is that many hosted systems, etc., still only run 2.3 or 2.4, and they don’t want to cut those people off for as long as they can. As far as I know it’s rather difficult to write code that works on both 2.3/2.4 and 3.x, since the 2to3 tool assumes a recent 2.x version.... so my understanding is that they’re phasing out one python version or so each release, with the hopes of eventually getting to a 2.6+/3.x release.

I don’t think they’re really “ignoring” Py3k.

Then again, I’m not really an expert.
Schema Design for Riak
And that is exactly where he streches it too far. There is no support for that. Non zero nada nilsch. He just takes one semantic interpretation and applies it to another. But qm isn't about semantics. Our interpretation isn't qm, qm is mathematical and experimental. Every interpretation we choose to put on top, only relates to what happens in the qm world and that is by no metrics what happens in the physical, let alone semantic world.

It's simply pseudo science.
When I was younger, I really didn't understand the game. But now I see that it's like watching a game of chess - same principles, but just a bit more exciting.
I don't, but the cafeteria at work (Nvidia) is packed during games, and a guy on my team said he could hear the cheers from upstairs.
It's true, I'm amazed how huge soccer/football is in every other country other than the U.S.
haha, if you could discern one cheer from another, you'd basically know the results ;)
I kind of like mom-and-pop places having websites. Not necessarily the honest to god mom-and-pop's in the middle of nowhere, but it's handy that more than just the chains, franchises and giants have web pages.
I don't but my entire office does in Canada (mostly made of people from outside of Canada)
I think Gabriel Weinberg has the best practical blog for startups www.gabrielweinberg.com/.
You're right, cheating is not something to live by as an absolute philosophy. But no doubt people lie or cheat often and many may get away with it.

> I'm looking at it closely, and I still really don't see all of these cheaters you are talking about. Do you have some examples?

Nope. In fact, I don't even have anecdotal evidence. But my belief is that many people will get away with one or two instances of cheating here and there. Sure cheating will catch up to people, but it does so slowly (unless you constantly cheat). Not everyone does it because they are sociopathic. Some people do it because they think the end justifies the means. And because I think a lot of people believe (or at least tolerate it) in that mantra, I think a lot of them will justify cheating to get ahead slightly (perhaps to get what they think they deserve). Plus, I'm hearing all the time about how kids at MIT and what not cheat. Do I think they will get screwed in life for doing it once in a while? No, because they probably don't believe it's a good way of life. Do I care? No. Why do I not care? Well I'd only care if I can prove that someone's cheating directly adversely affected me. Otherwise, they can do whatever they want and the natural forces of cause and effect will balance it all out. That is, if it affects someone else directly, it's up to them to decide to care or not.

But I absolutely agree with you that constant cheating is not sustainable. In fact, in general, any actions which might piss other people off is not sustainable and takes more effort to maintain. But I think there's a lot of people doing occasional cheating/lying, mainly justified because they believe the end justifies the means. And these instances of cheating and lying may not in the end matter because "catching up" takes a long time, or because whatever they did just happened to be practically justified by the end result.

I personally don't believe in the end justifying the means, which is why I refuse to cheat or lie. If I can't get good grades then either something is wrong with the education system or I'm retarded. I'd rather believe the former. But the last thing I'd do is to pretend there is not problem with the education system (hypothetically speaking).
I'd expect Mafia Wars to have mostly male players, and I'd put it in the same category as Farmville, i.e. time sinks with virtually no skill or strategy components.
I believe there are "aliens" of some sort out there. At least some kind of life. What kind of life, I'm not too sure, but there's just too many possibilities for there NOT to be any life. Who knows really how big our galaxy is? How many galaxies there are? And what's beyond that? If we exist somehow, there's gotta be more.
I'm an American living in the UK. And to be honest, although I loathed spectator sports in the states - I really like watching football here (not American football!). I was trying to figure out why - and decided that it must be the advertisements. In the states with any sport - there is about 5 minutes of action and then a 3 minute commercial slot. The beauty of football is that they show 45 minutes of action, break for a halftime, and then show the second 45 minutes. And its great. You become much more invested in the game when you are not bombarded by chevy and bud every time you blink, and can appreciate the athleticism much more.

So to answer your question - throwing a world cup final party at my place tonight with my projector and a wall that has about 120" screen :)
I downloaded and it looks like I can put all my session data into it instead of MySQL
I'm curious. How many have better bandwidth at work than home, especially for games and porn?

At work we have 9 Mbit up and down. At home on Comcast I get typically 10-20 down (regardless of speedboost or whatever they call it) and 2 or 3 up. Of course work has an SLA so in theory should have less downtime, but they have actually been not too different (an SLA really means you will get generous credits for outages, not that you won't have them!)

Overall I'd have to say that home wins.