skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
iCircuit is a performance hungry application so it's completely valid to ask about perf. Some points:

1. The majority (99%) of your app is not perf-circital. It's just setting some properties on UIViews and letting CoreAnimation do the rest, or reading data from the DB, or waiting on a network socket. If something is slow, you just throw it on a background thread with a continuation to resync it with the UI thread.

2. Over the years, I have found that micro-optimizations (like: allocating objects on the stack as in C vs allocation on the heap in C#, no dynamic dispatch in C vs lots of virtuals in C#, etc.) are _all_ that C give you and are not enough to make an app like iCircuit fast.

What you need instead is the ability to easily change and experiment with algorithms. C# gives me this -- programming in a strongly typed OOP language gives me the safequards I need to do this. The GC is what allows me to do this quickly and without pulling out my hair (caches in C/C++ drive me nuts because I have to be so careful about ownership rules of objects).

In a nutshell, I'm willing to trade the small (constant) perf hit in order to have better tools for tackling the hard problems - such as analyzing a 1,000 node circuit.

iCircuit contains one tight loop where it has to factor a very large matrix many times a second. That loop runs fine on .NET on desktop machines (don't even break a sweat), but I used a C function for the iOS version since there was about a 2X improvement of speed for this function. Fortunately, .NET makes it stupid easy to call C functions so I have the best of both worlds.
I'd like to know this as well. Did you ask on the Software Quality Connection website article itself?
Actually, even with a $200 ATI graphics card, you can earn about $500 revenue per month for about $100 in electrical costs.

That said, I suspect such a high level of profit won't last for long. It remains to be seen whether the current high value of bitcoins will last, and the more miners there are, the more profit has to be shared.
I think some of us are counting on the price to rise before we see significant return on investment. And for some others, electricity may be free, or at least not paid by themselves.

As for estimating the whole network's energy, here's a gross, probably exaggerated way to measure it. My 5870 gets 370 Mhash/s at 188 W. The current network rate is 2000 Ghash/s. 2000 / 0.37 * 188 = ~1 megawatt. Seems reasonable, especially since it's distributed worldwide.
Fabris should put donate button on the page!
I would happily donate to thank him for his great contribution to the Open Source and pushing boundaries of what possible to do with modern technology.
thank U Fabris :)
That's making the assumption that the exchange rate goes down. If, (big if) the currency finds demand..the exchange rate goes up.

I saw it pointed out somewhere that bitcoins are meant to be rare, and that once the final bitcoin is generated, as there's meant to be a set ammount, there will be many orders of magnitudes less of them than dollars, euros, or the etc. So, even if the cost right now is high, having a hash of them could become worth a great deal.

That is of course speculative, but when there's going to be 1 bitcoin for every 600,000 of today's dollars...assuming the sum of bitcoins becomes worth a thousandth of that of dollars, each bitcoin will be worth 600 dollars...run a mining op for one coin a day for a year(365 coins), hold onto it for a while, average the price down to 300 dollars a coin...sell for a hundred grand...

So running a bitcoin mining opp, or even buying the coins at current market value, is a feasible long term high risk investment. I wouldn't suggest putting all your eggs in that basket, but I would suggest adding the purchase of the occasional bitcoin (or the cost of mining) to your list of high risk investments.
Pay day loans are a scam perpetrated on the poor and uneducated. Lots of money to be made, if you can live with yourself. You can spend a lot of that money to try to look good, but I'm not sure that educated folk would actually buy the message.
While India does in fact have a similar imbalance, I invite you to look at the problem in the context of this image:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sex_ratio_below_15_per_cou...

Also: (order the chart descending by either at birth or <15)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio

The numbers are actually much stronger than I thought they would be.
raising funding is a reasonable indicator of being in vaguely the right direction of success (defined by your metrics) at an early stage, do you not think?
My Motivation - Late nights building remarkable software
Could the individual(s) who’ve downvoted this comment please explain to me its serious flaws? (Feel free to email me at the address in my profile if the points wouldn’t be of interest to other users.) I’d seriously be interested in improving how I present short, comment-based arguments, as I generally don’t participate in such online discussions.

While I rarely comment on HN, this topic has really struck a cord with me as I’ve found many people (both online and in person) are focusing primarily on the low interest rate. While not an expert in corporate finance, I’m strongly convinced Google’s current liquid assets aren’t generating returns in excess of 3.7%. (See my comment in another thread of this discussion where I compare these returns to Tbonds.)

Unless Google has a revolutionary strategy for short term trading of liquid assets that generates returns in excess of 3.7%, in which they are so sure of they’ve committed their entire $37B cash-on-hand into, they’d be better off reallocating some of their existing liquid assets into whatever new investment they have in mind for the $3B.

The only other explanations would be preparations for a massive acquisition (major news) or this was done for some corporate politics reason (not news worth).
Optimizely (YC W10) brings data-driven Web design to the masses
Depixelizing pixel art (SIGGRAPH 2011 paper)
That's exactly what I was thinking.
This doesn't add up, netflix can make that much traffic, given that only 7m of their subscribers actually use online viewing.
This very suspicious IMHO, netflix doesn't even appear in april's comscore report.
An approach that I think is worth exploring is ad-hoc aggregation: variable selection with summary bucketing (aggregate results have a error bound) so that individual samples cannot be isolated.
Great job with the site! This space is definitely in need of some innovation. I actually immediately thought of Plancast, but WhereBerry seems to be focused even earlier in the decision process (I want to do this, but don't know when). My current solution is a trusty Google Spreadsheet called "Things to do in SF", but that is not social at all.
To be precise, the cost of repatriation is min[(35% - foreign tax),0].
Ask HN: Part-time money through programming?
I'd like to learn to code to earn some extra money on the side, and I'm trying to figure out what language or what market would be best to go for.

My needs are:

1. Very low-risk / high-probability of success.
If I do it, I will almost certainly be able to make money.

2. Easy to find the work.
Relatively lower supply vs the demand.

3. Short(er) path from beginning to learn to working.
While I expect to work hard to ramp up, I
want to begin earning soonish, even
if it a lower rate.

4. Allows for part-time work without having to
move or travel much (I live in Atlanta).

5. Visual design skills are not essential to finding work.

I've had a few people tell me to focus on Wordpress (html, css, php). Others have said either Django or Ruby or Rails. I've also heard that learning to support a specific enterprise application may be the better way to go for my purposes.

I'd love to know what you guys think.
No. The use of a colon instead of a comma probably added to the confusion.
The software industry without patents would look almost exactly like the current software industry, but with fewer lawsuits and less FUD.

Because of the triple-damages liability for willful infringement, patenting your idea is a great way to make sure that nobody will pay any attention to it or make any use of it whatsoever. At Microsoft software engineers are actually forbidden from reading patents; only the lawyers are allowed to do that, specifically to protect engineers from knowingly using a technique described in a patent. All infringement will therefore be inadvertent.

Abandoning software patents, then, means that people would still carry on reinventing unpublished ideas in their own projects, just as they currently do and always will. Nothing would really change for big companies anyway, since they basically only build up patent portfolios to defend against each other's patent portfolios, but they'd waste less of their engineers' time writing up pointless patent claims that nobody else will ever read.
Hey hopeless, thanks for your thoughtful comment.

There isn't any solution to the pass phrase apache issue. If you forgot / lose it you need to:

a. Remember / find it

b. Buy a new certificate.

You can create private keys without pass phrases, but this is less secure.

It's interesting to hear that you think SSL certificate expiry is a common problem. As you say notification could be setup in Google Calendar, but we just tend to overlook things like this. However I wonder whether a for sale web app could be justified on this single simple feature...

As for trust, it is a real issue. Trust and security are two different things. The security could be fine, but if there is a belief (rightly or wrongly) that it isn't safe then there will be a problem selling a product or service.

From my understanding the certificate is sent from the server to the visitor's browser when they connect, so I don't see storing them in an online service as a security risk. However I need to research the security implications of storing the private key and pass phrase. Any advice or info here would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks PG!
Fantastical: A new calendar app for Mac launches
Currently, mining is considerably more profitable. With $1000 you could probably put together a server that would generate 700 MHash/s, which currently equates to about $1000 in profit per month. You'd repay your initial investment quite quickly.

However, a mutual fund represents a consistent and safe income. I very much doubt that bitcoin mining will remain as profitable as it is now for very long.
I hope we can now have the MPAA and RIAA realize that, actually, most people do want to pay, they don't choose to pirate because they are all inherently bad, and they don't need to be sued from the face of the Earth to show how bad they are.

What changed is what the customers value, and how much they will pay for it. The $9 I spend a month on Netflix is $108 a year, which is far more than I have paid for DVDs in the past. I don't value owning physical media or individual movies, I value streaming and libraries.

But, of course, why change now? Why should the RIAA bother trying to get Spotify-like services launched in the US? Who needs evidence and metrics when you can have vitriol and blame?
Mark, that's too funny. The idea for WhereBerry came from my own Google Spreadsheet, creatively titled "Concerts I want to go to". Turns out a lot of people have these...
I'm not sure why you think your idea would shave off any time from the car-to-air sequence. If anything it would add time-

You still have to get a boarding pass, go through security, walk down the terminal to the gate. The only difference is, normally you can plan ahead and waste no time since you know when your plane will be taking off. With your new system, once you get to the gate the plane might be full so you have to wait another hour (and maybe even go to a new gate).
2.99 doesn't hit my sweet-spot. And I realised that the price has stopped me from investigating the app further, to see what premium features it may offer.
How to Suck at Information Security by Lenny Zeltser
The best ideas are ones that seem obvious in hindsight. This is one of them.

I look forward to trying it out.
Is there a dark side to happiness?
It's true that funding is only a step toward success. I'm constantly reminding founders of that. But as of now, at least, it is empirically a necessary one. Construct a list of the most successful technology startups however you like (by revenues, market cap, number of users), and you'll find the number that didn't take outside funding is zero or near it.

It's an interesting phenomenon that all the biggest successes take outside funding. Perhaps the reason is that the better you are, the better terms you can get money on, and for any given startup, there are terms so good you'd be stupid not to take money at them.
My reading of the Chinese classics - or rather their authors - is that, historically, the single greatest ambition of China's intellectuals was to advise rulers on better governance. Which didn't seem to me a particularly productive or healthy relationship between the intellectual and political classes.
For the value of bitcoins to go up the world at large has to have a reason to leave conventional currencies and jump to it.

When bitcoins become rare why won't someone else start a new bitcoin2? I think there's an asymptotic max price that can't be crossed.
Usages are completely different. People look at a few YouTube videos in a given day, usually at low quality for a few minutes. Some people, like me and many people I know, have completely replaced cable and network tv with Netflix. Streaming an episode of Lost at 720p is going to take up a lot of bandwidth.
*_once doesn't memoize, however. The result of include_once called twice isn't that the same template is repeated, but rather that the first call outputs the template and the second call is silent.

include/require_once are not statements to the effect of "return same output as the last time I include/required this" but rather "if I haven't already include/required this, do it now."

It's a very difficult proposition to say that good programming requires the latter capability.
Utility and Happiness
Maybe YouTube is just compressing stuff at a much lower bitrate than Netflix.
Hey Tony, I'd be willing to take a look and prepare a brief (heuristic) usability report with specific recommendations for free. All I'd ask for in return is a review/testimonial of my service. I'm a UX Lead at a major U.S. financial company and founder of UXForum.com. Let me know if you're interested: sean@uxforum.com
Why are you picking out the data that best supports your thesis? 15–64 shows India and China at exactly the same ratio, even though India has no 1 child policy at all. The gender imbalance problem does not come from the 1 child policy. Don't pick and choose data to fit what you think, look at all of it.
Anyone care to adapt this system for e-voting, in general?
Ask HN: Tools for parsing video metadata
Hello Guys,

I was wondering if there are any open source tools to parse metadata from mpeg/mpeg4 files. Is there a standard format for metadata?
Thanks
OK, so which of my facts are wrong?
He keeps his life under wraps: No twitter, no facebook, publishes code under pseudonyms and declines interview requests.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that his day job is at french SIGINT.
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss to ask U.S. Supreme Court to review settlement
All the fiat offers is confidence that you won't be the one left holding the hot potato. Seems to me bitcoin provides the same confidence through mathematical cleverness, which is actually more trustworthy in the long run.
Would predictable statistical distribution of complexity not be enough? As in, you get a randomly assigned job, that takes on average a given amount of processing power, and is proven to not need more than some upper limit - or even, you time out after a given amount of processing power and request a new job.
And ideally have each unit small enough that mining will completing multiple jobs so difference in complexity starts averaging out.
Smear campaign against Google Chromebooks?
Sony Welcomes Back for PSN Users With Free Games & Much More
Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: Four tests for if you have a good startup idea
Most people watch a few minutes of low-res YouTube videos a day maybe, versus 2 hours per movie of HD + 5.1 Surround at night on netflix. Netflix HD is ~2 GB/hour. So I can easily see Netflix driving more BW than youtube.
What would be your sweet spot for an app like this?
Well, It's a great way to try out
rm -rf /
> the results so far haven't been uplifting

10% growth every year for a quarter of a century? I regard that as very impressive.

> I don't think that a comparison of the US system vs. China is going to produce a clear "winner"

It's likely that one of these two countries is going to end up dominating the world. Of course, it's not so much about countries as social systems: both have their strengths and weaknesses.

> And I betcha if you analyzed a Chinese and American bureaucrat, you would find that they look, act and think alike.

I'm sure you're right.
IMHO the big picture issue here is not just the increasing complexity to develop across, but that more and more layers of media are being commoditized and owned by the search providers.

- Search engines let others build communities and filter out the noise, then scrape the reviews & replace the sources with place pages.
- Expanded snippets (and review scraping) allows the search result to act as the individual product level page. Some custom vertical filters (like the Google recipes search) now allow Google to eat the category level pageview as well. Microformats encourage even more structuring of data, and as it is structured the independent sources of data become commoditized when the data is repeatedly structured in an easy way that allows search engines to displace the end data source.
- Ecommerce sites submit feeds & in AdWords they can bid on a CPA basis...there are a lot of 1-word searches where Google shows me some random product ad & they are collecting all that aggregate feedback. They are not the only ones monetizing down the tail though. Search Bing for "mother's day gifts" and they have some ugly shopping promotion above their organic results. Search Yahoo! for something like "mortgage rates" and check out the ad in the organic results.
- Then there are tons of other sorta attacks on the organic results in terms of verticals (books, videos, local, etc.) as well vertical ads (mortgage, credit cards, hotels prices, etc.) as well larger ad units that push the organic search results down, and finally even new search result formats which use way more whitespace to push the organic results further off the screen.
- Then there are mobile applications and mobile search interfaces that further put themselves between searchers and anything "algorithmic/organic/unpaid" and the end user, replacing it with higher ad density.

SEO was a growth industry for at least a decade, but in the US now I think it is more a game of increasing competition fighting for a smaller pie.

What makes it doubly hard for smaller businesses is that with the Panda update Google directly stepped away from the pure algorithmic approach and decided to subsidize brands. Great if you are brand, but not so good if you are not. Of course, a lot of businesses do not have the scale needed to justify large investments in brand advertising. Geico can spend nearly a billion Dollars a year on ads, but whoever reads this probably can't. ;)
Paypal's money market yeild is currently .06% per week.
At that rate, with $1000, you make .6 dollars a week, and buy maybe a bitcoin each month and a half...the discussion here is about earning a bitcoin a day mining, so I'm assuming you're down under a third of the mining return.

Assuming the cost of the electricitiy is 1.26 cents per kwh, and your machine is running at around 800 wats, constantly, that's 720 hours and 576 kwh, seven dollars a month...so the cost of running doesn't seem to be that high either.

Edited for bad math. May continue to do so. Please point out errors.
For most libraries, 10k is a fairly large fee for something only a small number of people would use. We do spend good money on very specialized databases, but they're fabulous resources, not something you can just whip up by yourself. Also, large fees require additional authorization above and beyond regular acquisitions. Something more reasonable would reduce friction.

Another idea for marketing: You may want to consider trying to sell to departments by contacting faculty/grad assistants researching in the affected field. Then, have the faculty request the library purchase a license. We pretty much buy anything faculty requests within reason, but ignore salespeople.
You're exactly right and this really hammered it home for me; the generation today is not into owning a physical piece of media.

In the 70's, owning an LP was awesome (and necessary) because there was usually some effort put into the artwork. Today, no one wants to own a mass produced DVD/BluRay Disc with shitty artwork and no liner notes.

Some CD's still come with good artwork, but the generation now values owning digital media.
Can somebody post screenshots etc, for the poor souls that don't have the capacity to try this out?

edit: via @emiel (author's twitter) http://t.co/qE0s5hm
Woo -- 12 whole flights completed. Yawn, until we see something scale.

It's easy to overrate the savings opportunities in private air travel: there are empty seats! there are deadhead flights with no passengers!

But hard to realize those savings. You need enormous scale. And most private jets would be far less comfortable than an MD80 or 737 if all the seats were full and it wasn't your friends or family -- loud, no headroom, no service, tiny bathroom. They make up for it by flying where you want, when you want -- but we lose those a lot of those benefits with this "solution".

As said, this makes no sense hub to hub. Flying from Lubbock to Springfield? Maybe. Good luck filling those other six seats, and also filling that deadhead flight back.
The one child policy was only enacted in 1978. It stands to reason then that the 15-64 bracket isn't fully representing the effects of the policy.

The only brackets that properly account for impact of the policy are the more recent ones.
Currently, I use the Amazon marketplace instead of Google because the Google marketplace doesn't support my device (Pocket Edge upgraded to 2.2).

However, there's no reason (other than policy) that a device couldn't access both.
Has anyone tried to generate hashes with an EC2 GPU instance?