skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think what people with your opinion are missing is that in a VCS without rebase/amend capabilities all that happens is people like me commit way less often. That is, I get everything working and fully tested and only then start checking in my code. With git I can commit almost immediately, before everything is tested and working. It allows me to start organizing the patches early and keep them up to date as I finish doing the task at hand. In that sense it is not rewriting history. I'm creating history. I don't push my code to the central repo until it's done and after that it doesn't get rebased.

Should I start committing every single version of the code I've ever saved so I can see all my false starts and typos? Maybe but there's not a lot of good information to be had there.
International is hard. I know from experience. That's where Tropo has one clear advantage over Twilio. Tropo is built on the Voxeo network, which has ten years of international experience, is deployed world-wide (seven data centers), and integrates directly with most of the carriers around the world.

I believe Twilio integrates directly with a single carrier (Level3). Last I checked they use/resell bandwidth.com for most of their calls.

-Jonathan (Voxeo CEO)
U know it just seems like security in the US is run by a crowd of amateurs and they haven't looked at what works and doesn't work in other countries that have faced similar terrorist threats. Vague alerts and warnings that almost seem designed to alarm and confuse the populace, either by intent or by incompetent.
Monads are a means of guaranteeing program sequentiality and maintaining state.
iOS has Opera Mini. Same company, very different browser than Opera Mobile. Opera Mobile would probably not be accepted into the App Store currently.

http://www.opera.com/mobile/specs/
What, no one is giving the standard answer of "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors?"

A category is something like a set, but combining the objects with allowed operations. (How very OOP!) The available functions are first-class citizens (called arrows). The objects are the domains and ranges of the arrows, and their internal structures are not exposed. Arrow composition is associative when it is defined. (You can only compose an arrow if the range of one is the domain of the next.)

A functor is just a (natural) function on categories mapping both objects and arrows in a compatible way. Endofunctors map to the same category.

As each object in this category of endofunctors is a function we want to compose, we have to be given a way to do that. This is what that the monoid here does -- it's a way to describe the allowed ways of combining natural transformations, including any systematic tweaks to be done during the combination.

(The classical definition of a monoid is just a set with an associative binary operation with an identity.)
Upvoted for excellent explanation. Thanks.
Thank you! We are working our actual and virtual asses of to make Tropo the best developer platform for all communications applications (not just voice and sms: also IM, Twitter, telephony-in-web-clients, etc). We are also working hard to get the word out!

-Jonathan (Voxeo/Tropo CEO)
My friend told me recently that he invented monads in Javascript:

result = monadicObj
.action1(arg)
.action2(arg2);

I told him that he needs variable binding operations for fully fledged monads:

result = monadicObj
. x <- action(arg)
. y <- action2(x,arg2)
. action3(x,y,arg3)
. return (x+y);

Otherwise, his invention is much more like Applicative, because we cannot pass values between actions.

So here it is: monads are just objects with overloaded and extended "." operator and with special function "return" that modifies object (in accordance with object meaning) and returns it's input value unchanged. That new operator allows us to bind return results if we want so. Overloading of "." allows us to implement various interesting operations - passing state, executing optional computations, executing non-deterministic computations, probabilistic computations, etc.

You incapsulate the meaning of computation inside object, so you can pass it to some evaluator without that evaluator knowing that you pass him non-deterministic computation instead of monte-carlo monad or vice-versa.
If those CS students pay attention in their algorithms class, they'll learn that the amortized cost of insertions and removals at the end of a load-based resizable array is still constant anyway. As you say, the overhead of a malloc tremendously dominates a few instruction's worth of logic for capacity checks.
How much to charge a big business?
My partner and I are having trouble determining pricing models for big businesses. We've gotten in touch with businesses that have expressed early interest and have annual revenues of ~10+ billion.

Does anyone on HN have big business customers or have any valuable experience behind dealing with them? We don't know how much to charge or how often to charge (monthly, annually, etc) we just have a good product that they have expressed slight interest in.

What are reasonable prices to charge these large entities? I know it depends on what service is being provided, but what is a good ballpark number for these large customers?

Edit: What we do in a nutshell: we are enabling businesses to better connect with their customers.
Can I in the strongest possible terms recommend that you not run Exim, and instead migrate posthaste to Postfix or qmail?

Exim is lumped in with Postfix and qmail as one of the "next-gen" MTAs written in response to the 1990s Sendmail security debacle. But it's really not; Exim is a last-gen design very closely reminiscent of SMail, which is basically Sendmail but with far less security attention.

It has been a constant annoyance going on 15 years for me now to see people recommending Exim as a secure alternative to Sendmail. It may be many good things, but high-assurance software is not one of them. In 2010, who has time to worry about whether their mail server is handing their internal network over to attackers?

Not for nothing, but, a silent patch to a remote code execution flaw (from 2008!) is a major breach. You want an example of the kinds of things that turn vulnerability researchers into raving assholes: there's a good one right there.
Head of Design at Facebook: How Her Team Uses Data To Make Decisions
There's a famous Twilight Zone episode about a time-traveling assassin who kills baby Adolf Hitler. The episode concludes that nothing really changes, as another child growing up in that environment becomes just as bad as an adult.

I'm not sure if I believe it, but it's an interesting argument. There almost certainly would have been people in most of those positions, though perhaps not with the same quirks.
If Tropo can do anything to help you in China please let us know. Asia is a key market for Voxeo/Tropo. We have two data centers there (Singapore and Hong Kong), as well as an R&D, support, and sales team with about a dozen people in Beijing. Feel free to email me at jtaylor at voxeo dot com.
"asymptotically" means that it never actually reaches $0.
Thank you for a great summary of Tropo advantages!

-Jonathan (CEO, Voxeo)
in first world countries Cloudvox/Twilio/Tropo can all receive inbound SMS and post the contents to your endpoint. Outside of the first world the costs increase significantly, and I believe both Orange and Clickatel become options to consider.

Cheapest option? You get an unlimited SMS plan on a cellphone that you can download SMS onto a computer from, keep the phone cabled to the computer and process the inbound SMS that what.

That's what we did (basically) before we had HTTP/SIP/SMPP SMS gateways in the cloud.
Ah yes. Etacts it is. Thanks!
I'm making the argument that Linux (with a larger developer base) is capable of matching any feature in BSD, while still having cycles to spare for improving its own base in terms of speed, reliability, web pages served etc.

I didn't realise this was still controversial, my impression was that benchmarks had shown back in 2006 (or earlier) that Linux had caught up to BSD, and since at that time it had a faster rate of change, I assumed that would continue, and extrapolated the trend.

It has been so long since I saw a serious discussion about whether Linux or BSD was better that I assumed it was a moot point by now. If that is _not_ actually the case, then mad props to the BSD devs for doing more with less. I don't follow Linux development trends, if the number of kernel developers has fallen off in the last couple of years that would be a shame, but perhaps not surprising, as a lot of dev work gets moved behind closed doors (cough Google and other 'cloud' companies uncough) or you might argue that once Linux gets to a certain percentage of 'perfection' that there are fewer and fewer 'itches to scratch', and less urgency to scratch them (as a kludgy workaround may present itself)
Not at your local library.
Taskjuggler supports durations http://www.taskjuggler.org/
Each time is half, but it's not always the same half. I think it's a 50/50 chance each time, so after 2 it's about 75%, 3 is about 88%, etc.
Are you taking out their garbage every night, or are you enabling them to be a better business?
I think it does look good; nice clean sleek black finish.
It all depends on what you use git for. git is a great tool for revision control, but it is also a great tool for managing your own work, where it becomes closer to being an editor function than a revision control tool.

When I wrote an essay at school, I was taught to write a draft first, and sometimes a second draft. I typically wasn't expected to hand the drafts in.

When I write code in an editor, I don't save a history of every keystroke, yet I do commit often. In a way, I formalise the undo function of my editor slightly, but it becomes logical-change centric rather than keystroke-centric.

If you treat git as a tool to develop your own work as well as to manage the project revision history, then it makes perfect sense to draw the line somewhere. For work before that line (eg. experimental commits or reworking a patch for upstream submission), use rebase. For things on the other side of the line, use merge. Ruling out one side of this line entirely is just counter-productive.

Another example: git was written for open source projects. It is typically expected in these environments that patch submissions are coherent and complete. Nobody wants to see the mistakes that you correct and then fixed; they want to see patches that make sense and are easy to review. Rebasing is great for this.
You may want to have a payment processor as a backup solution, they will provide their own APIs to their services. Relying on PayPal alone can be risky.
What is a mirror cell?
Didn't know that word (not a native speaker). Thanks. My question still stands though.
I wish there were a way for submitters to pin info to links... my repo comment will be buried soon.

Anyway: https://github.com/Groxx/Flattehn
Agreed, mostly, at least from first principles. The enrichment will be very modest. On average for any given chromosome, 45% of DNA in the mother's blood should be maternal DNA from one chromosomal copy or the other. This gets us to 90%.

The remaining 10% is split between one paternal copy and one maternal copy.

This means that--if we ignore other differences such as fragment length--you're potentially trying to label the chromosomal copy that comprises 50% of DNA as the one inherited by the fetus, versus the one comprising 45% of DNA as the one not inherited by the fetus. That's a very small enrichment.

Now, because of the length differences that they identified, they may be able to vastly enrich for fetal DNA (or precipitate out maternal DNA), obviating this problem.
Nokia N8 clone with dual processor
Maybe someone with industrial chemistry experience can explain this to me- if an organism contains both normal and "mirror" ribosomes, it should produce both isomers of a given protein. How do you separate the mirror versions from the normal versions on a large scale?
That's a great summary. A good analogy is that Tropo is 30% harder to learn than Twilio... but it can do 300% more than Twilio.

We've got a big release coming that makes Tropo much easier to use. Entirely new documentation, sanded off some of the rough edges on features, added new ones to make some use cases simpler.

I'd love to hear about the specific road bumps that made it harder for you, it would really help us improve our simplicity. We will give you $100 on Amazon or Paypal for your time. If you're interested email jtaylor at voxeo dot com.
This looks to me like almost exactly the same situation as with Nokia and Symbian. At this point, it's fairly obvious MeeGo is the way forward for the company, and they're trying to put Symbian out to pasture gently, but there's really no way to do it without the appearance of platform volatility.
You make a valid point. But, those answers have to do with the questions that startups ask all the time:

1. how do you launch? answer: "lean startup this"
2. how do you make convert more users? answer: "A/B test that"
3. is design important? answer: "design is important"
4. what happens if you fail? answer: "that's okay, I failed"
5. what do you do first, community or revenue: "build a community, then revenue"

We're limited by the subject matter, which is what makes this community so valuable. Moreover, our answers are similar because we've all developed a very similar startup ethos over time.

Are there other questions we need to be asking as startups, which produce different answers?
I don't think they're claiming that this stuff sticks around in any significant quantity after the fetus is delivered.
We had a pretty good discussion about browser bytecode a month ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1893686
Enabling them to become a better and more effective business. It has to do with better connecting them with their customers.
Watch a tv show in 2000: Buy a TV, pay for cable, watch TV with many commercials.

Watch a tv show in 2010: Go to your library's computer (or the computer you probably already have), access hulu.com, watch for free with minimal commercials.

Buy a song in 2000: Drive to a store, buy the CD for $15 and cd player

Buy a song in 2010: iTunes or Amazon for $.99.

The point is not that nothing is free, or that it may never be free, but that it's very cheap and very accessible with less effort and fewer different orthogonal pieces of specialized hardware.
It's amusing in context, but it's not an absurd contract term. Hosting a CDN on an "unlimited" hosting provider is basically bandwidth arbitrage. It makes total sense that the hosting provider would want to limit their hosting to bona fide hosting customers.
and here I was ready to make a snarky comment about a monad being a specific instance of a polyad
The best Western children's TV show in the 2000s that I can think of is Avatar: The Last Airbender. Which isn't just a great TV show for kids, but a great TV show in general.
"Nested mixtures of }, ], and ) are very difficult to pick apart visually."

And nested ), ), and ) are easier to pick apart visually?

At least with }, ], and ) you know any given } matches a { and not a ( or a [. Whereas with all )'s, it's a lot harder (for me) to know which ( in a mountain of ('s it's going to match.

A good editor and proper indenting will, of course, mitigate some of the pain. But I'd MUCH rather have a mix of {'s, ['s, and ('s, than all ('s.
It's only violating your privacy if you haven't given your consent to be used in advertising. This will truly be effective when advertisers figure out a way to get people to voluntarily use their image in ads. It's not that crazy to think that will happen. After all, I see plenty of people voluntarily using their images to advertise for Coke - in fact just saw a guy wearing a Coke Tshirt at the park yesterday.
I'll preface this by saying that I work in electronic trading, so I have a dog in this hunt and my opinion should thus be viewed with some suspicion.

You make two points in the two posts that are related:

The key point that is missed in all this imprecision -- is that CDS derivatives markets are not like other derivatives markets -- which are regulated. They are contracts that occur between large financial institutions only. That is the 'secret'. The rest is just the equivalent of a high school tourist at the visitor's desk.

Eventually these contracts became standardized -- they referred to the same # of bushels, and they were backed by clearing firms and central clearing houses at the exchange

In the current state of affairs, the CDS market is not transparent and the participants who want to avoid transparency point to the custom nature of the contracts as a reason that they shouldn't be quoted electronically. However, this situation is similar to what existed in equity/index options before the products started to be listed by exchanges: customized contracts were traded through brokers. This sort of OTC trading still occurs, but it exists alongside a very large, very active market of exchange-traded options whose prices are very transparent and thus automatically force down the fees that can be charged in the OTC market because they provide publicly available pricing information on similar contracts. If electronic exchanges were to create standardized contract terms for CDSs targeting some of the more heavily traded debt instruments (sovereign debt be a good target at this point for obvious reasons) and then list these contracts electronically, I suspect that this would bring a great deal of transparency to the pricing of these products due to the participation of firms like Citadel (which already has a large and profitable group making markets in electronically traded options). Large players have resisted such transparency in the fixed income markets for years, and this seems no different.
I'll add it when I get options running, which unfortunately needs a pretty big change to make this more flexible. The source is up, you can see it's pretty simple.

Did you want your comments' points to be hidden, or your points at the top of the page (or both)? I sort of liked when it showed your ratio instead of points, I could get that going as well.

https://github.com/Groxx/Flattehn
Fastest Strassen's Linked List implementation I've seen
A cell constructed entirely from molecules with complementary chirality[1] to that of the molecules in normal life on earth. Alternately, read the article:

A life-form … based on mirror-image versions of earthly
proteins and DNA.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_(chemistry)
Hi - Tropo should cost about the same as Twilio depending on your use case, but Tropo does alot more than Twilio for a roughly equivalent price. For example. Twilio just does SMS, Tropo does SMS and IM. Tropo adds speech recognition and higher quality speech synthesis, etc.

Also, I wanted to make sure I understand, what kind of specifics did you feel are lacking in Diggz post? We love to learn how to improve our product and our communication about it. If you are up for discussing it we will give you $100 on Amazon or Paypal for your time. Just email me at jtaylor at voxeo dot com.

-Jonathan (CEO Voxeo)
WikiRebels: Wikileaks documentary
Let's see if I can explain it another way. The price of everything eventually reaches $0.

There is only a certain period of time from which you can profit from any particular good. If you make a hamburger, you have probably 2 hours to sell it before it goes bad and is worthless.

And likewise, if you create a cell phone, you have maybe 2 years to sell it before nobody will want it. And if you make a movie, you have a few months where you can sell the movie (in a theater) and make money from it. Once the movie hits the internet the ability to make money off it decreases (piracy will happen more in the future, not less). Make a new app for the iPhone and you have a few months where you can make money before a free alternative arises.

This is technological deflation. And the pace is increasing. The time you're able to make money is decreasing rapidly. Mathematically, as that time approaches 0, the effective price of everything starts reaching $0. Why buy anything today, when it'll be effectively free tomorrow?
Grammar Server is a product they make for building and managing speech recognition grammars. It's pretty awesome, too, and any recognition grammars you create can be used with Tropo.

NuBot is the IVR testing product http://www.nuecho.com/content/view/28/147

I'm not sure of the cloud per minute pricing, but they'll likely be pretty responsive on email. They're a good group of people.
Study computer science / mathematics? Solve riddles?
The WebhostingTalk thread makes interesting reading:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1005111
"There are free implementations of Common Lisp (GCL, CMU Common Lisp, CLISP), but they came late and incomplete. "

SBCL is open source and free and complete and performs incredibly well with multi-threading etc. I wonder how old this article is?
I'm not buying the idea that simply having mirrored proteins is enough of an advantage for an organism that it would be able to completely out-compete the majority of already existing natural organisms.
This is very interesting. I'm a little conflicted about whether the benefit of distributing this info outweighs the risks of teaching anyone how to hack a website. There are certainly LOTS of vulnerable websites still out there...
funthree said By the time a mother has had a few kids, her blood has held all of the DNA in the family. and that's mostly true :-)
Can you recommend any that might work for me? I am international - Jamaica specifically.

I am yet to find a payment processor that will work for me, other than Paypal.

I am launching a SaaS app that bills monthly recurring.

Thoughts?
I will consider that a feature request for part II. :)
Hmm, I see. Does it also execute code, like a sort of exception handler, or is it just for limiting/allowing access to scope?
I've met the author, and considering he's one of the founding members of Ubuntu I would read this article in a different light than most of the comments on here. I think it's more of a call to action to make us think not just what Open Source can do for us, but what we can do for open source.

BTW: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Mako_Hill
As near as I can tell, the summary of your lesswrong link is something like:

"Some people disagree with me. But they're just playing games about social status!"

Which, I mean, is cool and all, but it's perhaps possible that maybe some people are just more cautious than others, for example. There have to be better arguments than fabricating someone's motives out of thin air and attacking those.
do you feel that you need time to work out the kinks for a large customer or are you ready to deploy? I think if you have kinks use the first 10B business as a chance to iron out your product to make getting the next (100) 10B businesses easier.
It looks like they built it around two: UK2 (under multiple brands of theirs too) and Softlayer. But both colluded to shut down SimpleCDN at the same time.

The main problem is they went to the datacenter providers first, not the network providers. DCs make their money over the long term by selling hardware cheap up front (just a monthly fee) and hoping ongoing costs remain low. CDNs put a high operating cost on the system, so it is one place they end up losing out big time.

What they should have done is partnered directly with a network provider. I was looking over at the MaxCDN offer they linked to on the page and they appear to have partnered with Mzima. That's a smart move (Mzima's an awesome network; akin to Internap, but a lot cheaper). Maybe if SimpleCDN recovers from all of this, they'll start approaching things differently and stop trying to put stress on a business relationship where it hurts the most.