skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That method is, for me at least, really really fast.

Eleven seconds to compute the 1,000,000th Fibonacci number. Compared with the naive method which takes 143 seconds.

Code below:

def add(a, b): return (a[0]+b[0], a[1]+b[1])
def sub(a, b): return (a[0]-b[0], a[1]-b[1])
def divsq5(a): return (a[1], a[0]/5)
def mul(a, b): return (a[0]*b[0]+5*a[1]*b[1],a[0]*b[1]+a[1]*b[0])
def subi(x, a): return (x-a[0],-a[1])
def pow(b, e):
r = (1, 0)
while e > 0:
if e & 1 == 1:
result = mul(r, b)
e = e >> 1
b = mul(b, b)
return r

twophi = (1,1)

def fib0(n):
return divsq5(sub(pow(twophi, n), pow(subi(2,twophi), n)))[0]>>n

def fib1(n):
a = 0
b = 1
while n > 0:
(a,b) = (b, a+b)
n -= 1
return a
Death to high school English
This is really nice, thanks mparke!
I have the first Palm WebOS device. I also paid to be a developer. Thanks to my early adoption, I no longer receive WebOS updates so I can't really even develop for WebOS 2.0. So... I'll be switching to android.

On a lighter note, I think WebOS is innovative in many ways but it hasn't quite gotten enough traction for it to be competitive to the bigger smartphones unfortunately.
Yeah I laughed at a conference when a Microsoft exec brought it up as a strong point that the Kinect has developed an ecosystem of hacking for interesting alternate uses.
How do you do great customer service?

How can I learn ideas about doing better customer service?
"In a replica set configuration, all reads and writes are routed to the master by default. In this scenario, consistency is guaranteed."

One would hope that reading and writing a single node database was consistent. This is table stakes for something calling itself a persistent store. Claiming partition tolerance in the above is the same as claiming availability. The former claim has been made. Rest left as exercise for the reader.

Namasté.

- Lil' B
Boom - it wasn't serious! It was meant to spark discussion on how on earth do these cars handle trickier aspects of driving on unmodified grids, such as traffic lights.
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Flagging is for spam or offtopic posts, not authors you don't like.
> helping a customer define a process and improving that process with technology 100X.

This, this right here. One of the things that I discovered over the course of my 20s is that this one particular thing gives me vastly more satisfaction than solving any of the "big problems" I thought I cared about when I was 23.
I see a lot of criticisms here but it was apparent in the presentation today that Google is targeting this mainly towards business, organizations and schools. Their selling point is elimination (or significant reduction) of the maintenance and support that the IT infrastructure requires.
There is one, but I can't remember the name of it right now. I spent a week going through lots of it to see what kind of activity, but there was very little. On top of that, there were lots of people just barking non-nonsensical and/ or derisive remarks at the various federal politicians; and, absolutely zero participation from any of the politicians themselves.

This is why I suggested to start in a small community first. In order to keep it relevant to people that live in that community, the only thing that made sense was to authenticate users via post cards (with OTP passcodes) sent to an address within a zipcode (In my town they send out a community news page with my water bill). My thought was to keep it to short messages realted to only municipal maintenance issues and try to build from there. Funding it would be the biggest obstacle in my mind, so if anyone has specific ideas there, that'd be great.
I was hoping Palm would eventually license WebOS to companies that could make better hardware and offer more desirable form factors. WebOS is nice but the original Pre was just truly awful hardware. Under powered, fragile, terrible keyboard, screen was too small, etc. It doesn't look like the other WebOS devices released since have really improved on this much. Unfortunately HP would never consider licensing so hopefully they at least look at the SmartPhone market and realize people seem to like slim devices with high resolution screens. Big fat sliders with small low resolution screens have a very limited market these days.
American firms snap up Israeli startups SC Square, AcceloWeb
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Tested again, seems yes I can pan sideways (not sure why I couldn't before) but still can't zoom which makes no sense when the doc is wider than the viewport.
Two optimizations you can apply:

1. Given how your big integer code is probably implemented, you probably want to distribute the divisions by 2 into the intermediate calculations, rather just shifting by n at the very end.

2. Consider that (a, -b)(c, -d) = (ac + bd, -(bc + ad)). That means that the powers of (1,1) and (1,-1) are always related by negating the second component. Thus you only need to actually compute the power of (1,1) and double it.
No, they all use the 'unofficial' API.
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His way around that is to use the matrix recurrence relation, which is also there in SICP as an exercise.

But it's a nice discussion in any case.
Yeah, there are a whole lot of things I could do, but I just wanted a really quick program to see what the relative speeds were. And I have to say I was impressed.
If HP really wants developers behind it, they should consider giving away these devices to the developers. Even a $500 phone is a cheap investment with high returns, when made on a developer who's going to invest time (and money), is going to learn mostly by herself, and release an app in the market, even if in the hopes of making money for herself.

With Android already doing well, I don't see a developer risking her time as well as money on Palm, when it's uncertain how much success she'll achieve.
I too am a big WebOS fan. So much so, I'm learning web development so that I can write some apps to help populate its market.
Google looking for revenue sources beyond advertising.

Naw. They are hoping that instead of spending your time behind the wheel, you will be spending it on the internet watching some Google ads.

/s
Thanks God. At least it's not Cassandra. :)
VERY interested in this as something I would like to do in some form or other. I don't have kids yet and am working on disconnecting my income from the hours I work with passive income (the dream right?). At the very least I would like to work from home so I can be there for my child and partner immediately if required.
File System Latency: part 1
Open source foiled Microsoft antitrust case
I've always had a soft spot for WebOS and still prefer it over Android and WP7. However, Palm gimped themselves by making it Sprint exclusive and putting the OS on cheap plastic hardware.
For some reason this reminds me of mIRC's licensing system. A timer pops up that makes you wait 5 seconds or something unless you register. You can still use the program but that little bit of a reminder is what made me finally buy the program that I had been using for nearly 10 years before that.

Are there tons and tons of people who pirate it? Very much so. But the thing about mIRC is that I don't think it would be that difficult of a system to replicate as an open source product which makes the security implementation important.
Oh, the old n=1000 trick. Well played.
If you wanna go the "official" route, you can pay VZW (and AT&T?) to have it act like a MiFi and connect up to five devices to it over WiFi. So awesome. But it does burn through batteries. The good news is...the Pre has REPLACEABLE BATTERIES! And they're cheap as hell on Amazon.
Sitting Is Death (infographic)
Don Knuth has not used a checkbook in years.
Answer: because he doesn't have clients, employees or customers.
Sonakshi Sinha on the cover of Hi Living
I have not heard of a single protection scheme that could not be broken. Not from the laziest homebrew 'protection' to the schemes used to protect 5- or 6-digit sale price engineering software, passign through every game in between.

If you plan on implementing a protection scheme, here's what I would want you to do. Think of the best and worst things it could do to these two classes of people: legitimate customers and pirates.

Pirates. Worst [for you] case: it inconveniences them for an hour. Best case: it inconveniences them up until two weeks after your release [two weeks is the usual goal for a game, Spyro was legendary in a way, and lasted two months http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3030/keeping_the_pirat... ]

Customers. Best case: it inconveniences them for five seconds. Worst case: Depends on your scheme. Make it one where worst case is a one-day support e-mail away. Not where they lose all their files, are left cursing your name and treated like trash because they just wanted to move to a new computer.
Firebird intelligence gathering aircraft makes pilots an optional extra
The Associated Press's Case for Releasing the Bin Laden Photo
Pretty much every single point applies to Android as well, and if you have to pick based on mind share and momentum...
I guess since google.com/ig stores a cookies on my browser, all of them actually, I couldn't get the normal google search page, even with logging out.
Thanks for the private mode tip.
Ask HN: Does outside funding increase a company's longterm viability?
Do companies that take outside funding have a higher chance of being around in 2, 5, or 10 years? More specifically, is there data that shows a correlation between fundraising and long-term success?
They seem to be making progress at massive change in the middle east (Libya, Eqypt, Syria, etc.). It's pretty inspiring how much strength there is in numbers. I'm not much of a leader, but I would always participate.

Maybe one of the talented designers around HN could spin up a nice site to pledge to march on DC if/when 10 million people sign up? I'd write the copy and donate some hosting $.
Right, that is why We the People create regulations to protect the society that We own. General welfare and common defense and all that jazz.
> Does Wikileaks believe all organizations have the right to aggressively pursue leakers in court?

Probably so. I don't see how this is hypocritical. Wikileaks never says that governments or corporations should enjoy their information being leaked. Wikileaks is just a publisher.
What's your spec? Works great on my Air.
Why the [of Indie Games]?
I would counter that anti-trust decisions are not industry decisions, but population wide decisions and hence they should be made not by industry focused bureaucrats but by more accountable general politicians.
"Non-techy" people express their creativity outside of a computer, sometimes uploading photos to websites.
It is simple and minimalist. Keyboard shortcut in Gmail to create a task out of an email. Tasks with dates show up on Google Calendar.
You know what's lacking from this list? A killer feature that both Android or iOS lacks. And that doesn't just have to be software, it can be the backing of other high profile manufacturers or a super low price point. The problem is that when you don't have market share you have to have bells and whistles the get geeks excited. I love HP as a company, and they're great as making stuff — but making an operating system is a different ball game of sorts.
Are you stuck with the hp app store or can you go to places like apptown?
This is addressed by the above suggestion. It lets them take a job with ABC or Time Warner, just not Comcast/NBC.
Google threatens to pull Street View from Switzerland
I <3 automation. Not having to do boring tasks over and over again is awesome.
Cisco to cut global workforce
Universities Slash Budgets Nationwide
The level of corruption here is just depressing. And not just for consumers — might tech companies or telcos come out behind when they're dealing with cable companies? Although sadly this is the sort of thing that happens in other industries be it defense or Wall Street.
Agreed - been saying for years that Palm screwed themselves over by trying to get in to the phone market with the Pre. They should have gone after reinventing the "PDA" market which they'd invented years earlier. Something like ipod touch with webOS 2 years ago would have, imo, allowed Palm to be a much different beast today.
Nothing about the spaces in this video is specific to men. Why not just discuss spaces for people that are passionate about something?
go rapportive team!
Good point... if I was writing this again, I'd mention the Synergy system that ties in data sources from email, contacts, and calendar sites online into the core webOS PIM apps, giving you a unified view of everything. I didn't list it because it's a bit hard to build on, but I feel like it's the stand out feature.

Oh, and really nice multitasking. Effortless app management... but those are more user concerns.
ROME: an interactive music video in WebGL (Google IO)
For purchasing apps, you use the HP App Catalog, but you can easily sideload applications using the developer tools, and that can install alternative catalogs like PreWare.
Interesting you mentioned that the sync took a lot of work. Would love to know how you did it and some pointers. A writeup or a blog post perhaps?
I agree that both static and dynamic type systems have their place, but I think this article misses the biggest con of Scala to me: the push towards stronger typing, such as that of Haskell.

I estimate fewer than 5% of programmers I've worked with truly understood type theory deeply enough to program a complex system with them properly. In addition, 0% of the systems I've worked on required such strong typing to achieve success.

Typing in Java is comparatively weak, which I view as a feature because it allows you to make more practical trades between expressiveness and simplicity.
Well, yes, that makes sense for a membership association like the Screen Actors Guild. Unfortunately, if Facebook wants to retain its real-name-only cachet, it simply can't afford to have too many stories like this pop up.

This story is particularly worrisome when you consider the amount of ID-verification that this account must have had on file after he already faxed them 3 pieces. What does it take to proof yourself from peremptory nullification if a driver's license, birth certificate and bar association license don't cut it?
Wow. I will definitely be making a WebOS app now. It's really too bad Palm didn't think of Ares. It could have definitely changed the game.
Only the same people who know how many Kindles they've sold. Amazon is pretty tight-lipped about their financials, at least at a granular level.
Twice, Apple has said publicly that they are running the store at "just above break even."

From last year:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/01/26/app_store_wild...

and February: http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple_app_store_runs_...
Google launches Chrome OS, says Windows is 'torturing users'
The other important point:

Every minute you waste on the specter of piracy is a minute you're not spending making something useful. Given the choice between spending time on people who are paying you versus the people who never will, the choice seems obvious.

No one is going to crow to their friends about your awesome anti-piracy mechanism. Make their life better? That would be something worth sharing.

Piracy is inevitable, loyal users aren't. Put effort into the fight you can win.
Friday, December 30 2011 will not exist in Samoa
Sanergy Wins MIT $100k Business Plan Competition to "Turn Shit Into Gold"
That would mean the data set was not durable, it doesn't speak to consistency at all. DB consistency is about transaction ordering. Transaction 1 always comes before transaction 2, but 2 may exist or not as it pleases. Transaction 1 must be present if 2 is present.
Or you could be getting consumers who are already buying tickets to buy more tickets. For instance, I average one international flight a year. If I could get flights for cheaper that number would most probably increase...
I was not at all suggesting the story was false; rather that Poulsen was further "interpreting" the story based on a prior "interpretation" by the New Statesman. [honest edit: I suppose this is a weak sentence. I really did not mean to imply any actual falsehood, rather two levels of the kind of linkbaity shift one finds all too often in online news.]

That said, it seems my Google-fu is weak; I did not turn up that link nor any kind of repeat-threatening of the Guardian. Thank you for the link. Frankly, I think that both the Wired article and the New Statesman piece could have benefited tremendously (newcomer credibility-wise) from including it.

Having now read the Vanity Fair piece, I'll retract my prior criticism of the New Statesman article. If anything, given that I've given Wikileaks a lot of my attention over the last several months, I'm not sure how this escaped my attention, but it puts a lot of things in a different light. I for one certainly thought the relationship between WL and its chosen newspapers was a lot more rosy.
There are more than two types of people though. Back when I wrote about the subject I came up with four shade, though there might be more.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2006/09/05/everything-you-need-to-k...

To misquote a Chris Rock line, there exist at least some people who are as honest as their options.

I love online software over downloadable software for many reasons. One is it makes piracy virtually impossible. Another is that the conversion rates are much higher. Those might be totally unrelated, but hey, accounts in my DB means I don't even have to care. (Gamers are voting for this future with their wallets.)
The Palm Pixi is not a slider, and I love it.
I was actually just playing Assassin's Creed 2 a few minutes ago.

No internet connection required.

It was very convenient.
It really helps to have a partner to stay motivated and keep from missing deadlines. Once you are completely on your own it is so easy to get distracted.

Agree about the validation. You can try to sell it before you have much of anything. A screen is all you need to try to sell it to people. Talk to as many people as possible. It is so easy to just sit in a corner and code - that is really dangerous.
Yet another illustration, as if more were needed, of why you shouldn't do date calculations in local time.

I hope there's no Samoans with anything important scheduled in cron for that date ;)
Well, both have computed the Fibonacci terms at a given level, so how different could it be? Here's my implementation:

def fib_fast2(n):
assert n >= 0
a, b = 2, 0 # invariant: a,b are components of 2(phi^n)
for bit in bits(n):
a, b = (a*a + 5*b*b)>>1, a*b
if bit: a, b = (a + 5*b)>>1, (a+b)>>1
return b

It's almost identical runtime as the one in the article - a hair slower (15.32s vs. 16.17s to compute fib 10M). They're probably related by some well known relation between Fibonacci numbers.
Sounds like this might be the problem http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2538706
what if the probability is published and constantly updated and there are simple ways to improve your probability?
I agree, and it's open source too. In fact I am currently working on getting it to work well with the full keyboard on my new Android tablet/netbook.
meh, in 3 years they'll probably just announce a new pricing structure where every reasonable use of this ends up with 1000%-2000% price hike (GAE user here, grumble grumble)
> I'm actually pretty surprised that there are HN users that don't know about his essays...

Actually a long time ago, I remember reading one of PG's essays on High School and was struck by the sheer number of active comments (vibing with the thoughts) on it from kids who were in high school and most likely had no idea what HN was.
As a first generation of Chinese immigrant, I personally experienced bamboo ceiling in a government agency. While I am still not very comfortable and skillful to raise my voice at my workplace, I totally agree that young Asian generation should raise your voice and demand what you deserve in a meritocratic society. Go ahead, be a real Asian tiger!
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Technical tangent: I opened this in a tab, intending to read it later, then came back and noticed Firefox was using 100% CPU. I thought "oh god what's happening" and tried closing other tabs to determine the cause. Eventually I discovered that a) this website was the culprit, and b) this is most likely because, a few pages down, there's some kind of (processor-intensive) simulation happening.

Lessons I draw from this:

- In designing a website that outsiders visit, you should probably follow this rule: If your page must have a majorly resource-intensive object on it, it should either be visible and obvious at the top of the page, or have a "Start" or "Play" button and not run until the user presses it.

- Firefox should get some (easily accessible) way to see resource usage broken down by tab. Chrome does this; it's probably made easy by the fact that Chrome makes a separate OS process for each tab (or group of tabs). I wouldn't recommend switching to that model, because it would be work and because I wouldn't like it (I don't like how it clutters up the global process list in Activity Monitor), but it would be nice if you could see CPU and memory usage broken down by tab.

- (Optional) Browsers shouldn't run purely graphical animations if they're not visible (like if they're several pages down). This might not be perfectly achievable--e.g. if animations started when you scrolled down to them, then one animation slightly higher than another might start earlier when the designer wanted them to be synchronized. Maybe you would instead have background things keep time without actually rendering anything. This might not work for cases where the nth frame depends on the conditions of the n-1th frame, and so you'd have to run the whole simulation in the background anyway--though maybe leaving out the "draw" part would make a big difference, I don't know. But if it's a series of static frames, like a GIF, then I think this would work--when the GIF is offscreen, the browser would just keep incrementing a frame number (mod the number of frames in the GIF).
Because that's the context of the article and HN users might want to know that. It's not clear in the original title.
Aardvark'd (Fog Creek documentary) is now up on YouTube for free
Actually, Ares has been available for over a year now -- the technology team behind it has been building our new Enyo framework for websOS 3.0.
As an owner as one of the CR-48 test units, let me just tell you that I can get on the internet quicker on my three-year-old MacBook than this thing. The MacBook is connected to WiFi by the time I'm logged in from sleep. Not so with the CR-48.
However, the 100 free megabytes of 3G per month is nice. I've used about 400kb total since December.
This is really cool. Providing this as a service requires a very different approach than running open source code.
Games are slightly different, for example with WoW there are plenty of people playing for free on private servers people have setup, you don't see this at all with SaaS apps. Although if your game is an MMO and popular enough the network effects mean the vast majority of players are going to want to be on the legit servers.