skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Personally, I figure that if I stay at $BIGCORP I will have far less time to connect with my kids--over the long term--than if I work for myself. I might have to front-load the time a bit as I get set up but this is not a given, given the small hourly commitments possible.

But the "free" healthcare makes it a tough decision.
Serious question: why would you expect a serious technical discussion of HFT from Krugman? krugman : markets : hft :: djikstra : cisc architecture : cpu cache design.
Canonical also ships KDE/XFCE derivatives. I don't hear those camps whinging on about this.

Canonical packages the Linux kernel along with other F/OSS software and ships an ISO and some updated packages. It's not their responsibility to make other people's wishes come true.
Who is getting unfair information? Do you mean flash orders? Those no longer exist (for which I'm glad also). HFT in general though doesn't take advantage of unfair market information.
Rapportive (YC S10): 10% of your emails aren't from real people
seeing this has pushed me over the edge. i now want to join or start an effort to destroy or at least fix the idiocy that is the current US software patent system. we cannot let this bullshit continue!
Specifically, you set the mark at one corner (C-Space) and move the mark to the other corner. Then you can do rectangle editing with commands like kill (C-x r k), yank (C-x r y) or something to insert a string (C-x r t). These are hugely useful when moving blocks of Python code around, for fiddling with the indentation.
Isn't this why we used to write essays in school? Blogging is a self imposed homework schedule of essay writing, except rather than being graded by a teacher we get our grade from readership.
Writing is like exercise for the brain. Not all of us will write like Paul Graham, or anywhere even close to his level, but all of us can benefit from forcing ourselves to think more carefully about our ideas, and there are not many better ways to do so than to attempt to express them in some systematic written form.

Writing is also an iterative process. You write about something once and this causes you to focus upon what you are saying in ways that you had not done before. You re-visit the issue later and often derive more insights on the topic. You get comments and criticisms from others and this also causes you to examine your ideas more carefully. You also may find that, even if your ideas are reasonably well developed, your method of presenting them may be sub-standard. From experience, for example, you learn that it rarely if ever pays to take a cheap shot at someone and, when you get called on it, you learn to express yourself with more class the next time. So, you learn not only to express yourself intelligently but also in a manner that is appealing and that removes unnecessary barriers to understanding.

Do it often enough and you will improve and potentially make an impact. But, even if you don't, you will be better off for the exercise. And that is the main point of this fine piece, a point well worth making.
Hey, absolutely! Actually, I started learning chords prior to scales. And only wrote about scales because they seemed to be the meta-skill that many others are derived from.

I'm still figuring out how precisely the circle of fifths is useful, someone feel free to chime in.
There are no primitive variables in python. Even ints, strings, floats, etc point to a reference of an object. All nonlocal does is point the variables reference to a different object.

As to the advantages...

Well for one you can use the variables in closures...
I had a really great experience. I once pressed a series of buttons while at home in my underwear, giving a stranger enough cash for a nice night out or two. A few days later, I woke up at noon, drank some coffee, had a slightly fitful nap, and woke up 7000 kilometers away in the stratosphere. When I fell back down (softly), I spent a few days walking around a city whose inhabitants' ancestors had been utterly genetically and culturally decoupled from mine from 50,000 years ago until recently. Then I got bored and went home.

I'm pretty sure it was a good experience, because I keep reading books about how my trip usually takes months in transit living in your own filth, if you didn't bring your family you'd never see them again, and sometimes you'd die on the way. I had to pay $8 for a sandwich though.
Yes, but Lisp code and Python code aren't the same when program in the native idioms.

In Python if your function references are buried within each other deeply enough that this is even an issue you're already doing it wrong. This is not because Python is lacking power, but because you're not using the power Python actually has. With the generators, comprehensions, objects that implement __call_, bound method references, and all of the other tools available to you, you just shouldn't be defining functions in functions in functions. In Haskell where it's all functions everywhere, a function that is actually ten layer nested functions calling each other makes sense. (When using the "do" syntax sugar, every line that has <- is another nested function, so if you see ten <-s, you've got a ten-layer deep nested function. (Or eleven, if I've committed a fencepost error.))

If you're still fighting with Python by trying to jam functions in three layers deep, take a moment and try to learn to be more idiomatic. If you're in Haskell or Lisp and you never have functions three layers deep, take a moment and try to be more idiomatic. In practice, you do not need this in Python.
I quote:

"In an unstable economic environment, the only safe investment is... PORN" -- Avenue Q
I'm curious as to how you go about calming down and feeling reassured in going into the unknown. Specifically, what and if any self-talk you would engage in, any certain ritual/pre-game technique and what kind of frame of mind you get yourself into.
"activities that were worthless if not destructive from a social point of view."

Although I do actually like Paul Krugman's writings, and although I do have an opinion about the financial industry, whoever crowned Krugman "social evaluator" of the world? I mean, who is to say Krugman writing stuff on the internet, winning a fake Nobel for a (basically fake) discipline, and scribbling formulas on blackboards is constructive from a social point of view? I know people who would dispute that. In fact, let's not even go into this question for we might find out ugly things about our societies. If I were to put my own "social evaluator" hat on, I'd throw half the stuff I see on TV commercials out. [EDIT: In fact, I might throw the TV and all the associated junk itself out.] Economist Krugman may not like the result on the employment rate when we really introduce this sort of criterion into capitalism. I mean, seriously, who in our society really makes truly valuable or "constructive" stuff, from a social point of view. Isn't a huge chunk of our population involved in making consumer junk and industrial waste? How is a marketer who tickles the basest instincts of people to make them buy stuff they don't need by working harder at jobs they hate any better than a guy who spends his day doing HFT?
I finally just got a client to drop the idea of drop-downs beside the search bar. I wonder if they will got for a 'Load More" button instead of pagination.

Why are some people stuck in 2002?
From what I've read (which may be outdated), there was a system whereby high frequency traders could discover buyers limit prices by executing a series of small-volume "probe" trades at increasing dollar amounts. Then, once the limit is found, execute the trade at the buyer's limit price. Without HTF, the trade would be executed at a lower price. To me, that sort of asymetry seems unfair -- it's like knowing, in advance of a negotiation, the other person's exact willingness to pay.
I hadn't seen it before, I apologize and I really hate when that happens. I had been off HN for a while today and didn't realize this made the front page, if I saw this comment earlier I would have taken it down.
Considering the long term growth possibilities for China, this might be a good time to invest in YHOO.
Nokia was the first company to object inclusion of Theora and Vorbis in HTML5: http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/issues/24
Asking because I genuinely don't know: doesn't flash trading access (the quasi-"insider" stuff you're talking about) basically mechanize the same access that brokers/market makers already had by dint of serving as front-ends to the markets?

A lot of these concerns seem to be predicated on the notion of the markets as interactions between simple buyers and sellers, and since so few people really understand how the markets --- even in old open-outcry markets --- work, I wonder how much of this controversy is really a side effect of more people hearing about the fundamental structure of the market.
Do you mind telling what are the few things that you used clojure for ?
Revolt of the six-figure Wall Street coders
As far as I know, flash orders are still legal - just not being offered by most exchanges due to the public heat they received for a period.
It's not the same point: you would never have to explicitly tell the interpreter where the variable is (global, local or nonlocal). If you required all variable declarations to use var, the interpreter could automatically determine the scope of the variable when it is referenced or updated. This is cleaner IMO.
How is that the only way that my argument makes sense?

I'm defining a slightly different Python syntax, in which you always have to use "var" to declare new variables, otherwise the code breaks. That includes globals. With this structure, normal closure syntax is very clean:

var x = 0

def foo():
var x = 1
def blah():
x = 2
blah()
return x

print(foo()) # prints 2
And the ability to store and refer to it later.
I know what you mean. Often-times than not, playing basketball is not so much about shooting and driving-in perfect every-time but what you do but what you do after you make an airball or lose the ball during a drive. A good player would think about why his form was off, make a mental note how to correct it and then shrug it off and shoot/drive again.

Also basketball is an awesome sport to interacting with everyone from society. Ultimate Frisbee you get vegan hippies, Golf/Tennis/Squash you get yuppies, soccer you get a lot of European/Hispanics but basketball you get to interact with everybody.

Also, you don't realize how good you are and how bad everyone else is, because you tend to under-estimate yourself and over-estimate other people's ability. Just count the number of shots good BBall players make on the court versus your field goal percentage, and you'll see that most people on the playground probably consider you already a pro even if you yourself don't think so.
Again, you're describing a scheme that allows a firm to replace a series of other traders and firms in the spread. The only difference is that instead of a lot of little bites on its way to price discovery, the HFT-inhabited market takes one big one. Meanwhile, you still sell at whatever price you wanted to sell at, and buy at what you wanted to buy at.
It doesn't make a copy. It creates a special object (which you don't see unless you're digging in the internals) called a "cell" which holds a reference to the object for as long as the function exists. To see for yourself, look at `somefunc.func_closure` -- it'll be `None` on regular functions, and a tuple of cells on a closure function.
I agree that it's a bit dodgy but his evidence looks pretty sound and I'm happy I read this, as I had installed the other "Backgrounds" wallpaper application which apparently collects personal information.
At my firm, back office and trading are very, very different. I would advise you to stay away from back-office if you're not interested in that. YMMV
Because the nothing would ever be done.
Indeed. But the approach that I support is a maintenance & repair approach. We don't need to know how metabolism works, or how to modify it for it to work. We just need to understand the types of damage that accumulate in our bodies as we age (and there aren't that many kinds) and periodically repair it before it reaches a certain threshold.

The problem is, almost nobody is working on that approach. It's all gerontology or geriatry, trying to squeeze out a year or two out of someone already frail and sick, or to mess with metabolism, something that will take way too long and might never be completely successful.

The third approach - aka the engineering approach - has a chance to work in our lifetimes IF we do the hard work and stop looking the other way. And few things are more worthwhile to support; if we bring forward these therapies by even 1 week, that's over a million lives saved.

If you want to know more about the biology of this, I recommend that you read this (and the papers cited): http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthrough...

If you need more details, you can easily contact the SENS foundation or the authors of this book directly (they usually answer emails really quickly). This info should be enough to help you make up your mind about the feasibility of this kind of project. And if you need the latest science, there's a scientific journal called Rejuvenation Research that contains the most recent studies.
On that note, offices that have the air conditioning turned down to extremely low temperatures. Even in the summer, when the cooling bills must be horrendous.

I suspect that the thermostats in many places are controlled by fat men in heavy suits.
A very large amount of labor is socially unnecessary. But its not simply making 'consumer junk'. It is by making duplicate products with different packaging, but also all the labor wasted on all forms of advertising and these activities like HFT. What if the economy was run democratically and everyone worked a socially necessary job 4 hours a day! Now that sounds like a better way to go...
Hey, I like some of these comebacks ;)

> If nobody reads it, no one will think it's ridiculous.

Ok, you got me here. Still, if you have a blog and there's tens and tens of entries and nary a comment to be seen, doesn't that look sad somehow?
Work at a prop shop that values programmers. You will feel valued.
That should not be that hard. Steve Jobs is the single largest shareholder of Disney and on Disney's board.
Good point. Though defaulting to any sort of variable declaration could be problematic. You might be creating a new variable when you think you're updating one. I like AndyKelley's crash-on-default proposal best. This would also help the compiler in optimizing.
The Fail Whale is cute enough that I actually don't mind when Twitter goes down. If I used Twitter more, I might feel differently.
The studios feel the need to constantly up production values to avoid small-fry competition and spend truckloads on marketing. While this effectively creates barriers to entry at least as fast as technology is tearing them down, it also forces the studios to go bigger. As you go bigger, you become more risk averse and lose creativity.

In fact, Hollywood movie studios have exactly the same problem as most large companies - how do scale agility and risk-willingness and creativity up to billion-dollar companies?
Actually, I found more and better solutions in blogs than in official documentation and books.
Especially the topic of edge cases or documentation that doesn't work as advertised or error messages that don't mean what they think they mean.

No official install guide will say "But if you are running this on Ubuntu 8.0.4, it will throw off a spurious error message about wrong xpong version. you can ignore it and everything will be fine or you can fix this by running the install with --xpong-compatible", but bloggers say things like that all the time.

I try to blog every time I run into misleading documentation and every time I run into an error and there are no useful results when googling for that error message. The error messages and install guides are probably the biggest traffic generators for my blog.
My point is that XBox has for a freakin long time been occupying the perfect real estate for the "digital hub!" If Microsoft could execute on decent "me too" offerings, they should have been able to murder Apple from that position. They had the fortified high ground with the heavy artillery and troops sitting on it, and they still let Apple surround and bypass them. C'mon! Zune + Plays for Sure. Vista. Kin.

Microsoft Home Server is a potential gold mine! Inkskein/Courier could have revolutionized personal computing in deeper ways than iPad. Singularity could have leapfrogged OS X, leaving it hopelessly in the dust.

Clearly, Microsoft has been dysfunctional and could not execute.
That's pretty handy. I had just turned off Rapportive because of how many people it was unable to find. It just wasn't very useful (given the types of people I regularly communicate with).
insightful.
Yeah, you are right. Got a bit too enthusiastic about Scott Pilgrim, there. Looks to be an awesome movie, though.

As far as I am concerned there are only four or five movies worth watching (in the cinema, anyway) any year, as far as I am concerned there aren’t good movie years and bad movie years, rather just good movies and bad movies.
Interview with Orbiter Sim creator Martin Schweiger
That seems like a pretty indirect answer to me. ;)
OMG, Twitter is suggesting people to follow?
this guys explanation was way easier to understand: http://www.rubyinside.com/google-pagerank-in-five-lines-of-r...
Olin Shivers, my most bookmarked and least read writer.
Regarding your point that if it's all in the process why publish? consider that publishing makes the writing happen.

You might already be familiar with Penny Arcade (http://www.penny-arcade.com). If not, it's a videogame themed webcomic that's been around for about 12 years now. They're successful - in fact, they have defined what "success" means for a webcomic.

They recently put out a anniversary book to celebrate how long they've been around. In an interview, the two guys responsible for the comic are asked how they've kept up with a Monday, Wednesday, Friday comic schedule for over a decade. How does that deadline impact their work?

Both the writer and the artists are clear on the idea that the deadlines are necessary. The writer compares the deadlines to a beast that must be fed. He goes on to state that the deadlines make the comic. Without the deadlines, there would be no comic.

Similarly, I was talking to a physics friend a bit ago, and mentioned I was working towards a conference submission deadline. Her field doesn't have hard deadlines for papers, and she envied having a date at which you had to just say "It's done."
It looks like you forgot to rescale the binomial distribution.

If X_i is a series of independent, identically distributed random variables with mean m and variance v, then X_1 + X_2 + ... + X_n is approximately a normal variable with mean nm and variance vn. Therefore

(X_1 + X_2 + ... + X_n - nm)/sqrt(vn)

is approximately a standard normal.

If you draw that graph, visually the two lines should lie right on top of each other. To see the problem you need to zoom in on the tail and blow it up, and only then will you see the issues with the convergence.
Just make sure you use org-mode to take your notes: it's both more powerful than your current note-taking app, and it stores files as readable plain text. No proprietary lock-in, and no fear of data corruption in case of bugs. :)
I use IRC every day. I use it to work with others on opensource projects and many of my past interns and I use it to stay in touch daily, creating a very helpful network. My current interns can get help from not only ne, but people who used to work for me. It's a great networking tool.
Good suggestion....will try to add that as well.
iPhone lasts just as long if you use it as little as old Nokias.

iPhone has 300h standby and 7-14 hours of talk time. These Nokias had 300-350h of standby time and only 3-4 hours of talk time.

I've tried to use Samsung featurephone as smartphone, and it could handle 45 minutes of video playback on one charge.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "using references for normally primitive variables." Nonlocal doesn't change whether variables are references or not, only the semantics of assignment. By default, all assignments take place in the local scope; if you've indicated that a variable is nonlocal, then instead of creating a new variable in that scope you assign instead to the variable of that name in the nearest enclosing scope. All variables in Python are references to objects, so there is no such thing as a "primitive" type, but that was true even before the nonlocal keyword was introduced, so it's not relevant here.

Lisp has had proper support for lexical scoping and closures for ages, and nobody has ever accused it of being a leaky abstraction there, either. The Scheme example of the same program would be

(define (make-counter)
(let ((n 0))
(lambda ()
(let ((temp n))
(set! n (+ n 1))
temp))))

All that's happening here is that let is creating a new variable, and set! is looking for the nearest enclosing scope--which turns out to be the let--and assigning to that one. (Okay, there are minor semantic differences, because let creates a new scope instead of creating a new variable in the local scope, but that's not really relevant to the discussion at hand.)
For shame! It makes perfect sense if you've read "Stranger in a Strange Land"
Air New Zealand's outage last fall
We find that the coverage varies a lot -- some users get a great experience, for others very little is found. We really want to improve that, and covering those 10% of emails which come from organisations is a first step.

Would this be sufficient to make you turn Rapportive on again? :)
The QB recently passed the telepresence equivalent of the Turing Test. Anybots and YC are in the same building, so these things are always driving around. I was recently talking to Trevor, who was using one, and asked if he wanted to come over to our house that night for dinner. I assumed he was in the back of the building. He said he couldn't make it because he was actually in Hawaii.
Glasgow Startup Weekend (27th to 29th August)
In that case - Uranium from seawater!
So I was under the impression that "product/market fit" meant adapting your product to an existing market as early as possible, so you don't get stuck building the wrong thing.

For example, IMVU started out with the founders writing 40k lines of code or so to make plugins for AIM/MSN/etc chat clients. They then found out nobody wanted it, and did the market research and saw that people did want something else that was related. Then they built that and made lots of money. They hadn't worked on the product/market fit early enough. Perhaps I've got the wrong definition in my head about this "product/market fit".
And from the designers perspective

http://000fff.org/design-discussion-principles-how-to-get-yo...
Telepresence is one of those things that hasn't even scratched the surface of what's possible. Cab drivers in foreign countries, remote surgery, robot road assistance...

It's one of those fields where SF meets reality in the most concrete way, and I don't think it will be long before each and everyone of us will have been interacting with one of these or will have been in the drivers seat in one form or another.

The biggest stumbling blocks to wide acceptance will be legal ones.
This is a grand idea. Any clues to as who are the investors?

As for the site, here is some constructive criticism:

- Check your formatting on the pages. Wordpress can be a bitch sometimes. Try Shift-Enter for line breaks.

- Think about segmenting the copy on the about page into maybe a couple of different sections, say investors, pitchers, About Us . Segmenting helps readers with text overload.

Other than that, site looks good.

As a fellow Toronto resident, I am looking forward to seeing how far you get with this.