skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The reason why the Trie doesn't improve (and actually it does worse) is probably that the strings are too short. At an average of 5-6 characters per string, each one has size comparable to a single pointer.

A way to make the plain string search faster would be to use binary search. It is possible to do it on a space separated string by jumping at a generic position of the string (which could be in the middle of a word) and going back to the rightmost space preceding the position. It is easy to see that the algorithm is correct and if the words have bounded length the runtime is still O(log n).

BTW, by using a fair amount of succinct data structures and bit tricks it is possible to do way better than this: a succinct (binary) representation of the trie can use around 3 bits per node, and the labels can be compressed to 5-6 bits per label. However I would not implement that in JS :)
Second time’s a charm: FriendFinder files to go public again
Your comparing "nasty" fp with "well-structured" OO, but let's ignore that for the moment.

My experience is the opposite. I run into a lot of nasty legacy OO code (think java not smalltalk) and it's very hard for me to refactor it piecemeal. I've been doing a clojure project at work for the past 6 months and it's surprisingly easy to refactor side effect free code.
What he meant is that the bookmarklet will actually scrape the content from within your browser and submit it to Instapaper if you have access and Instapaper's crawler doesn't. Marco has discussed that functionality on the Build and Analyze podcast.
…because although lookup performance is maximized and the amount of data sent over the wire is minimized, the processor time required to parse the data structure and the memory required to store it were both well out-of-bounds for the target device.
The problem I have is at least partly one of truth in advertising.

For example: If they were truly using a "spherical model", then one would not expect to have queries fail at the poles & dateline, would you?

At least it is documented and fails hard with an error rather than giving wrong results, so a developer can quickly figure out the weak spots --- though I bet a lot of people would prefer the wrong results to queries that cause exceptions in their systems.

> Do you mean you think they don't know how to do it?

I think it has more to do with the absurdly low bar they've set for themselves to check the "geospatial" box than it does with competence.
You'd have to bench it, but the only thing I could think of that'd be faster is the standard +num coercion that's also used in the code snippet. Unfortunately, that does generate NaNs.

Edit: Double checked the spec (it's quite readable) and the main difference is that + will coerce ignoring whitespace while parseFloat will ignore leading whitespace and parse leading digits. E.g. var x = '1.23foo'; parseFloat(x) is 1.23; +x is NaN. Neither looks like it should be faster than the other.
Depends on who's links are sending you to the site. From the e-mail I got:

Readers who come to Times articles through links from
search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter
will be able to read those articles, even if they have
reached their monthly reading limit. For some search
engines, users will have a daily limit of free links
to Times articles.
There's a lot to like here, including this: "Like every bubble, this is a game of musical chairs. While you still need irrational focus on customers for your product, you and your company now need to be everywhere and look larger than life."

But is it realistic to assume that the bubble will go on through 2014?
I realize that anecdotes make for very poor data, but I have never seen a re-org work. I've survived dozens of reorgs at my own employer and at client firms, and I have never, ever seen a successful one. The best you can hope for is to see incompetent management pushed into do-nothing positions, such that the damage they do is contained.

More often, the shuffle creates new fiefdoms, new dotted line bosses, and not one substantive improvement in function. (It's usually too painful to make the necessary horizontal changes to push "peter principle" types into harmless positions. These people are the re-organizers' friends, vassals, or patrons. What inhuman manager could bear to throw his friends under the bus to no immediate advantage for himself?)

For example: when you have turf war between two managers, a re-org creates the opportunity for turf war between three or more: the old empire-builder who was ejected, the new empire-builder brought in, and the manager who was already encroaching on the old fief.
Comments on NYT paywall announcement
See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
Measuring User Experience — Initial Forays
Lynx compatibility!
When you write "the fuel is extremely hot and takes about a week to cool it to a normal level," perhaps what you mean is not that the fuel is literally physically hot, but that the fuel is so radioactive that it continues releasing a significant amount of energy from spontaneous decay even in the absence of significant neutron flux to trigger further U or Pu fission.

When a U or Pu nucleus fissions there are several possible outcomes. Some of those outcomes yield radioisotopes whose half-life is on the order of a week. Thus when you suddenly interrupt a running nuclear reactor, you tend to still have a some energy output queued up to happen spontaneously regardless of any further fission/neutron chain reaction. IIRC, your "week" figure is roughly correct, but not because of ordinary heat capacity, but because of this continuing radioactive decay: the energy output typically continues for days to be several percent of steady state power output preceding the shutdown. (Which is enormously more energy than could be stored as heat in the mass of the reactor at any earthly temperature.)
“Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.” - Jim Rohn

You can do it. You have the drive for it. It's all one big learning experience. Never stop learning. Learning to gain knowledge is important. What's more important is learning how to learn, learning through understanding. Building your photo sharing site is one small learning experience in the grand scheme. You've got nothing to lose. Sure, you're investing time into it, but you'll walk away with knowledge and connections that you previously didn't have.

I, too, was written off. I dropped out of college and was a temp for 2 months at $9.50/hr before landing my first job in IT. It's been well over a decade and I haven't looked back.
What if someone said it isn't impossible, but...

I'd say, "Impossible != Unlikely"

based on your skill set, you're likely to fail

It's probably safe to say that almost everyone who ever achieved anything great was also "likely to fail". It comes with the territory.

it can also lead to spectacular failure

Spectacular failure is to great achievement what striking out is to hitting a home run.
This shows one of the reasons I love math: mathematicians only say "you can't do that" when they can prove you can't, otherwise they'll say "I don't see how to do it and it would be hard because ..."
Workarounds aside, I won't pay. It's totally a fair price, and so is the $5-20/month the 100 other services I use are asking me to pay. But in the aggregate I can't afford it. The web has allowed us to become readers of many perspectives, and this movement (regardless of whether it's right or wrong) will push us back to identity subscribers.
In a similar vein....I am presently working in more of a business analyst / advanced end user for a product under development. I don't know how many times I've been told by developers on the project that something "can't be done". Some good fun was had for the first few weeks before they found out I was a developer, after a few times of sending them the code to accomplish "the impossible". But now it's just getting annoying...they still regularly fall back on the "can't be done" crutch, even when I tell them otherwise. Absolutely zero curiousity in learning something new....yet their considerable egos seem to remain fully intact.
Well, one could argue that the patent system supported innovation, namely the original innovator Philips. :)

This guy just was too late, someone else beat him to it.
Mobile Frameworks to Create Mobile Applications
This article is amazing, One of the best parts of being young is you don't have enough experience to know what you're not capable of. As a junior programmer I went down more misguided pathways than I care to remember, but every once in a while one of those misguided pathways had gold at the end, and I got there.
Split between all the power plants or with the HQ workers moving around in rotation?
Nuclear Advocates Insist Reactors Completely Safe Unless Something Bad Happens
That's correct - or at least it's correct for a certain type of personality and I believe the number of people with that make-up is relatively small.

Ironically it's those very people that love finding what is new, different and very often great - the early adopters - that dislike when their discoveries hit the tipping point.

Without the early adopters the masses might never discover the greatness the world has to offer. Perhaps the reason they can't stand the critical mass is so they can discover something new. Begin the process again.
So, they took a logo with depth (3Dish) and flattened it, plus did something kinda weird with the color. It doesn't look quite right with all the other icons on my dock.
This seems to be an absurd number that they are throwing out there. Perhaps it is a psychology tactic to get people to accept a $15B IPO. I'm not sure how Groupon can maintain this value as more and more people are beginning to associate anything with Groupon as cheap. Take for instance the deal they offered on Wednesday for the new Matthew McConaughey movie, once people saw the offer they immediately assumed that the movie was horrible.
I work for the Times as a developer so I'm going to stay out of this conversation other than trying to correct or inform. I'm keeping my own opinions to myself (as best as I humanly can).

So with that said, here are 3 links I received that shed more light on this:

"A Letter to Our Readers About Digital Subscriptions"

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/opinion/l18times.html

"Digital Subscriptions and Premium Products"

http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/account/purchases/subscr...

More Info

http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp0145.htm...

I hope they prove useful and informative.
Ask HN: Review my startup: A venue for photographers and editors
http://nuninu.com is a venue for people who needs photo retouching and for freelance photo editor. It provides two basic services:

1) For the photographers:

It provides photo-editing service without having to pay upfront. You will only pay when you are happy with the edited version of your photo. Also, your pictures may be edited by a lot of editors, this means you will have more options in choosing the best version of your photo.

2) For the editors:

It will give you the opportunity to harness your skills in editing/retouching photos by taking any project or all of the projects available, and will get paid if the photographers choose your version. Also, you control how much you are charging for your service.

Please let me know what you think about the design, concept and the content, and also the ease of use of the site.

Thanks in advance on your honesty review.

If you don't want to register, you may use the account:
username: joshua
password: pass

Jag
"The 20-article limit begins immediately for readers accessing NYTimes.com from Canada, which allows the company time to work out any software issues before the system goes live in the United States."

We usually have delayed launch dates in Canada (like iPhones and iPads). Really caught the fuzzy end of that lollipop.

That said, I'm almost certain I'll start paying.
Thanks for the input. Definitely making the whole line clickable is easy to do and I've thought about it before. No import yet, I know. I debated whether to build import before or after posting and ended up going to feedback as early as possible. Definitely if people like it import from browser bookmarks and delicious is the #1 next feature on the queue.
I always thought it looked like a morph ball from Metroid fused with a Simon Says: http://www.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&biw=1439&...
"A way to make the plain string search faster would be to use binary search."

Isn't that premature optimization, though? As I noted in my post - lookups, even in the worst case, take less than a millisecond. Presumably someone could do that if they wanted even faster lookup performance, although I don't need it in this case.

I definitely agree that a binary representation would probably get us pretty close to an ideal form - although I'm (as you are) skeptical that it could be done in a performant way in JavaScript.
I'm sure it is because Hollywood set designers did research in nuclear reactors to use as the basis of their sci-fi set designs, but it's hard for me to think of those pictures as anything but creepy and foreboding.
I don't want to be harsh, but I really hope you aren't really like that. This is really arrogant and you would hardly gain anything by acting like that. It seems like you are trying to demolish him by proving you are right instead of helping the team growing to a better solution.

Manager: A web app is impossible.
You: Yeah, I agree that it would be really hard to build,
but it would give us great advantages.
Manager: Maybe, but we can't trust data entered by regular people.
You: Yes, this is a pain to deal with. Fortunately, from
my past experience, I learned good ways to cope with that.
At the end, everyone agreed that it was well worth the
trouble. Anyway, I don't want to annoy you more with that,
I know you are really busy. Let me find the project I
worked on and let's talk about it later on.

So basically, here's your way:

Manager: "I'm the manager and I know what to do"
You: "Fuck you, I'm the coder and I know WAY MORE THAN
YOU"
Manager: (Don't like being contradicted by an employee..
even less being told fuck you): "I am right, here's why"
You: "Fuck you, I'm the coder and I know WAY MORE THAN
YOU"
Manager: (Don't like being contradicted by an employee..
even less being told fuck you): "I am right, here's why"
[..]
You: "Fuck you, I'm the coder and I know WAY MORE THAN YOU"
Manager: "No, you fuck you. I'm the manager and you won't
win"

Here's my way:

Manager: "I'm the manager and I know what to do"
Me: I know you are the manager and you choose what to do,
but as a programmer (and from my experience), I could help
you take the best decision.
Manager: But I'm still the manager and I WILL CHOOSE WHAT
TO DO, not you.
Me: Yes, totally. I'll get some facts about xyz and get
back to you, so you can choose the best thing for the team.
Belongingsfinder - find sentimental items after a disaster
It is more expensive than Netflix or an Amazon prime account. They're different things, of course, but it seems too expensive to me. I'd probably subscribe at about half the price, but at $180/year, I'll just clear my cookies and/or read the Washington Post.

I work in the news media (public broadcasting), and right now the public still sees reporting as an inexpensive commodity, especially online. Ironically, I think public broadcasting is set up much better to garner supporting revenue from the public than for-profit media, since we have a history of doing so, and people inherently understand and relate to our support model. We still give away our content for free, too, even if you don't pay. The NYTimes is never going to be able to guilt me into paying the way NPR or PBS will.
Show HN: Profile for Celebs
http://www.feedfa.me

You would think that following your favorite artists online is an absolute piece of cake, and that the pages you need to visit on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are all findable in a snap.
Well, if you have ever tried looking for the pages of any top of the line artist such as Lady Gaga or Taylor Swift, then you already know what things are really like. You found that out the hard way.

And what happens when something that so many people are bound to look for is so hard to find? The answer is obvious: somebody dreams up a solution. And that is what Feed Fame website is. On this site (which can be used for free, and without having to sign up) you will be allowed to know which the true profiles of current artists (and personalities) are.
What exactly does this function do?

I tried it:

round("2.2") -> 2.2

round(2.2) -> 2.2

round("2.6") -> 2.6

round(2.6) -> 2.6
I feel it is always wise to take the word "impossible" as a personal challenge to prove otherwise.
Surprisingly enough, this can even happen in academic environments that should know better.

Though far from the level of difficulty presented by jacquesm, the same thing happened to me with an end-of-term project a few years back.

We had to make a small piece of software in Java. Most of my mates were going for boring stuff, such as sudoku solvers or small neural networks to play the likes of Connect four.

I wanted to make a Gameboy emulator.

"You can't do this", said my professor. "At least not in two weeks' time."

Well I don't remember much besides coding during those two weeks, but guess what - after 14 days, my program could boot Tetris. No sound, granted, but it was playable.

My professor was quite the sore loser though - he considered the program incomplete since it only booted a few roms, didn't have sound and could crash randomly. I ended up turning in a gameboy rom dissassembler instead, complete with GUI and breakpoints setting.

Still, never believe that "you can't do that".
Asked whether any UK military personnel had been involved in OEV, Britain's Ministry of Defence said it could find "no evidence".

This strikes me as extremely suspicious.
Seems fair to me. Eventually, freeloaders (myself included) will be relegated to reading al-Jazeera, BBC News, NPR, and some random combination of AP/Reuters/UPI via Google News.

Or, you know, some of us may pay.
Where'd the 58k go? It sounds like you need to get some control over your finances if it 'just disappeared'.
Don't attribute to malice what can be explained away by stupidity. In my experience, people genuinely believe certain things can't be done (http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2010/12/16/young-and-clueless-a...).

Those people just inherited preconceptions from their environment (co-workers, bosses, common knowledge...). Their brain never even tried to wonder if a new approach was possible.
That's one very nice story. Thank you.
Internet Explorer 9 is Great, But is it Too Late?
Do you have an alternative idea? It seems to me that the only way to maintain quality and at least a little bit of objectivity is to charge a flat fee. Charging for use (including advertising) drives individual writers and sections to via for the most eyeballs and clicks. Charging a flat fee requires the entire newspaper to improve.

Also, it won't be long before all the news fit to read is behind some sort of paywall (or something similar), unless drastic change takes place.
Magnus has finally released the Phantom Protocol
Or you could you know, pay for content you enjoy instead of abusing public services to shirk paying for content.
It's definitely not time to stop fussing over Photoshop; that's not going away anytime soon.

It depends on who you are. I have never in my life used Photoshop. So if it disappeared from the planet, my life would change in no way, except that The GIMP would have more contributors.
What Cloud Politics Means for the Hosted Startup
NYTimes.com has had the ability to read an article all in one page (and set that as the default) for years.
Zed Shaw was great. Next up, Monkeypatching Your Brain
Coming Soon: The Five Dollar ATM Fee
NASA to unleash 1 million lbs of force in "can crusher" test
This is why I will favor google over apple every day. Steve Jobs killed all of Apple's philanthropic efforts when he came back.
They aren't trying, they are flailing around in desperation. When you start toggling all the levers to see if one of them works you've given up trying to understand and respond to the problem rationally and you're just hoping beyond hope that some darwinian mutation based process will save your bacon. Most of the time it doesn't work.

There is no easy band-aid fix for the disruption of the traditional news media. A successful "newspaper" equivalent in 2020 will bear little resemblance to what we consider a newspaper to be today. That alone should be obvious. But instead of changing with the march of history the NYT has decided to change as little as possible and hope that things work out for the best. They may stave off immediate doom but their plan is too shallow to stave off long-term doom.
> Isn't that premature optimization, though?

Yes of course it is, I should have started the sentence with "if performance becomes a concern". Since in the post you say "if you were building a game that required multitudes of dictionary lookups you might want to go with a faster hash or Trie technique" I just wanted to point out that binary search would probably work fine as well, without the huge memory increase.
Times Square iPhone hack was actually a clever plug for a new movie
Google copied 2.5 megabytes of code from more than 700 Linux kernel header files with a homemade program that drops source code comments and some other elements, and daringly claims (in a notice at the start of each generated file) that the extracted material constitutes "no copyrightable information".

Uh, what?

If Google is proven wrong, pretty much that entire software stack -- and also many popular third-party closed-source components such as the Angry Birds game and the Adobe Flash Player -- would actually have to be published under the GPL.

Stopped reading after this...
With a caveat added: "... in general". As mentioned by sokoloff, the halting problem is solved routinely by people in software engineering research groups. This does not invalidate the Halting Theorem simply because the Halting Theorem talks about the impossibility of a single Turing Machine FOR ALL programs.
It sounds like you need to build on the strengths of the JS implementations you care about, and encode your data structure in a string or something. Have a jump table in the beginning with the first characters, and then likewise for other characters, with some other convention to denote leafs. You won't be able to add to the trie, lookup won't be as fast, but it would still be O(log N) and parsing would be dead simple.
Alan Kay also said: "I made up the term "object-oriented", and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind."

Going by Kay's original definition, Java, C# and C++ do not qualify as object-orientated languages. I think we may have to accept that the original term has become somewhat diluted over time.

However I don't think OOP is all about polymorphism, because you can have polymorphism without objects (e.g. Clojure's protocols or Haskell's type classes).
It didn't "just disappear". I took in far less money, especially in the first year, as a startup founder than my (very modest, by New York standards) living expenses were. My point was that I put this money into the startup effort. An investment of time and money, not a loss. At the present time, however, I can't invest again for a while. So the checkbook is closed.
I think this is a good comment. If the goal of your organization is to share information, then make that your goal. When the goal is "eliminating all nuclear power from the Universe", then it's hard to take your data seriously, because the reader knows that it's cherry-picked specifically to support their agenda. Bias, even when declared, is bad.

An analogy: imagine that there is a really good prosecutor who wins a lot of cases. Great! But what do you think when he says, "my goal is to rid the world of poor people by prosecuting them for capital offenses and ensuring that they are executed". Not as good.
GroupMe Won The SXSW Group Messaging Wars, Says Infographic