skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having set up a similar goal many years ago - to stay/live in a big number of countries - it's interesting to see that we both settled for Singapore.
Congratulations on the move! Asia is a great place to be. And a great environment for doing business. I'm in Hong Kong --- in several cities around the region including here, SG, KL, and Jakarta I see lots of latent entrepreneurial energy starting to manifest itself.

One warning: since it seems you plan to majority-own some local startups I hope you have an excellent accountant to help you with Uncle Sam. (yep, Americans living overseas still have to file with the IRS. whole mess of complicated forms. can even end up having to pay tax on undistributed corporate profits if you're not careful ...)
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/20/11-asian-girls/
i live in both sf and singapore (50/50), and i am actually very much in support of these rules.

my only grouse is the suppressed political scene, and i am glad that even that is being lifted in a slow but steady manner. and trust me, 90% of my friends have criticized the government in a very public manner on facebook/twitter. last i checked, they are still running around town and still complaining.

do not believe 90% of what you hear about singapore - it is actually a very open and welcoming place, quirky punishments not withstanding.
Westerners who've never lived there and wouldn't be in any danger of suffering any of this "harsh" treatment love to complain about Singapore.

Visit sometime with an open mind.
TheCopyPasteBlog Monthly Traffic Report | May 2011
Do you learn the local language every place you live?

I would suppose that's a pretty herculean task unless you already know several fluently and spend a considerable amount of time daily studying and practicing.
MENS 420 TOP-WHITE SILVER TURQUOISE [MENS 420 TOP] - $72.96
I love the hellban idea. It's like the light and dark world from legend of Zelda.
List comprehensions in Python
I can understand why you consider the syntax of Ruby as backwards seeing how you come from a C-background, they're quite different languages in most ways.

To be honest, the OO support in PHP feels a lot like an afterthought (and it actually is), it never quite feels right.
50 Pounds of Pots - from Derek Sivers
The whole point I believe is to remove the notion of "your own people". Therefore, you "fit in" anywhere.
There's a way to cover your competitors and this isn't it.

This just comes off as juvenile. "They didn't buy us even though we make more money!"
I think OkCupid has been doing to POF what Facebook did to MySpace. Mediocre products that serve a real need will survive for a while, but long-term people gravitate towards quality.

That may all end now that they've been acquired by a mega corp though.

Look at this trend: http://trends.google.com/trends?q=okcupid%2C+plentyoffish...
It's been a rough week. Hopefully things will return to normal once DNS propagates.
there actually is a method of recourse: email pg and have a conversation about it. i am aware of quite a number of people who have at one time been hellbanned and have had that ban reversed.

and as long as i'm commenting, i support hellbanning as well. i haven't seen anybody mention the fact that pg does this as a part-time thing. he does not have time to hold everybody's hand, explain to them what they did wrong, and deal with the inevitable heaps of abuse. it is instead incumbent on every participant to figure out the mores and rules of this mini-society, and adhere to them.
Clean streets vs. freedom of speech. Sounds like a no-brainer to me.
if K is fixed, as in the example from the article, this can be done in O(N) ...
Law of Attraction
MONEY.

LOVE.

PEACE.

PROSPERITY.

FREEDOM.

JOY.

You can have everything you desire. The Law of Attraction will be your guide to transform your life from dark to light, moving you forward toward magnificence, bringing you to your dreams and your dreams to you.
Here is a pretty nice (and informative) article based on the research behind the Dual N-back game.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=you-can-i...
Axioms are fine in logic, mathematics, physics, ... so why not elsewhere?

The axioms that I believe in are provable. Things like 1+1=2. There is no proof that <insert your god here> created the world in <insert your days here>.

So tell me an axiom, preferably religiously based, that I can go out and prove.

Religion by its very definition is faith based. As soon as you start proving/disproving it, religion simply doesn't exist anymore.
I understand that it sounds like a religion. It's probably because, at least for me, my choice of it is just as much about it ideals as it is about it's technical pros & cons.
This really hit the nail on the head for me. I'd switch to Scala/Haskell/Clojure if it could give me a multithreaded GUI toolkit, where I'd never have to worry about whether I was on the event thread or not.

Is it impossible? A "Failed Dream"? http://weblogs.java.net/blog/kgh/archive/2004/10/multithread...
Asimov did all the typing himself (no dictation, no longhand). IIRC he was proud of his very fast typing skills.
A lot of banks and telcos in SG will use your DOB, mailing address, and NRIC number as security questions when you call them. Posting your info here is not wise IMHO.
In real life, it means: "the share price should increase faster than the broader market".
I have a major problem with groupon and while I have not read every article posted in recent months on the company -- I have followed their revenue numbers enough to further beffuddlement:

Groupon's business model is to get retailers to discount their product by 75% - sell to the end user through groupon for 50% and groupon takes 25% of the original retail cost.

My friends in SF who own restaurants, bars and shops all refuse to work with groupon as the costs to them just dont make sense.

As far as I am concerned, even though their revenues are staggering - the model is flawed and not sustainable. The only thing to do is to hype the fuck out of the company and cash out big - the revenues will plateau and the model will need to pivot/evolve in order to return value to the businesses.

The problem is that the massive hype that groupon has will continue and far too many VCs and SV elite will be sucking the groupon cock for years...

Personally, I actually dont have much respect for the model. As a groupon user - I havent bought a thing now in 11 months and as I mentioned the businesses my friends own here in SF all refuse to participate.
Does that mean that going for a vacation and writing part of a book during it is probably not allowed under visa waiver? Fail...
Wow , I am also working on a html version of this game. I have got a reasonable version and hope to release it soon
I second that. It's a very safe city and I don't mind that minor crimes are taken seriously here [1].

[1] http://nope.se/temp/bike_theft_singapore.jpg
Downvoted because your statements are completely false and based on nothing. If you actually used Rails then you will know better than to make such statement.
The Fable of the Keys
Is an individual's freedom to do something more important than another individual's freedom from something? My country takes a rather paternalistic view on this but like I said, i am casually optimistic that things will change and we as a country are moving towards a more informed citizenry renegotiating the social compact between the govt and people and finding a balance in both positive and negative liberties.

Edited: I can't seen to reply the comment below, so adding the reply here. One of the things my country takes very seriously is both the perception and actual oppression of minorities. In this case, we want ethnic minorities to have the freedom from majority oppression. As an example, there are measures that are put in place that prevents some of our freedom to say certain stuff about the religion Islam in a certain way. To say the rules are like a cudgel instead of a scapel would be right but as a citizen I can see where my government is coming from.

Like the comment below said, generally yes to freedom to instead of freedom from. What is considered not a general case in Singapore differs; that does not make us wrong. Neither does it mean our system is right and perfect. What it does mean is my country is learning and hopefully maturing.
You do not need to wonder, the video of what he thought is on the internet at:

http://www.wimp.com/predictedinternet/

Asimov, what a great guy.
While Sivers is obviously an awesome guy, why is this post about him moving to Singapore hitting the frontpage?

Just curious.

(Congrats on becoming a Singapore citizen btw!)
I do Python and used to do a fair bit of Django work. Melvin's reasons are pretty on the dot.

Migrations are one advantage Rails has over Django. They're otherwise pretty similar. (South doesn't count.)

I wouldn't say that any language dumbs anybody down. People can be dumb in any language. You should chill in ##C on Freenode and see what stupid really is.
We definitely want to add autocomplete to ThriftDB.
>And jaywalking is illegal in the US too.

Depends on where you are. Most cities and college towns in the US don't care where you cross the road so long as you're not doing it recklessly, and places where laws are enforced generally have nothing more than extremely small fines.

I'd rather not live in a society that restricts human liberties to the point of making citizens robotic. Yeah, the US has its share of problems, but chewing gum and porn aren't among them.
And a good faq: http://www.gwern.net/N-back%20FAQ
I can confirm to you that the SP1 causes occasional hanging (30+ secs).
English is an official language of Singapore.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore#Languages
I used to manage a team in Singapore when with Lockheed and would go there regularly.

It is one of my favorite cities on the planet.

I took a sabbatical in 2000/2001 for six months and backpacked through asia - I spent 2 months in singapore then as well.

The laws and strictness of the place is greatly exaggerated from my perspective -- if your not doing crazy stuff, you have nothing to worry about.

The city is AMAZING -- and is the FUTURE of cities; they have taken massive infrastructure projects to prepare for more than doubling their population by 2020 - and they build massive underground connective malls and walking causeways.

The city has an incredibly high density of plant life (trees and greenery) and it makes an impact when you visit. Many of the buildings have a large setback from roads where they have trees and grass and planters between the buildings and roads. This is really a wonderful civil engineering trait of the place and makes the city much more beautiful than dense urban dirty environments we see in american cities.

In my opinion, if you ever watch much anime -- Singapore is the city that will most closely resemble that which you see in anime.

I love Singapore - the only thing I dont like is how freaking hot/humid it can get.... and the cost of living.
Uhh, not same reasons. Harper is an ML hacker, he wants to avoid IFs to encourage generic programming and pattern matching. Adding a new branch to an if clause requires some nesting, adding a branch to a case/cond is just one entry of many. After that, pattern matching becomes natural an you tend to see a function not as a single wholesome "body", but a family of mappings.

Again, switch, duff's device & other computed-goto hacks are "constructs", a chunk of "decision" code that sits in the middle of the page directing traffic. Pattern-matching is far more sublime than that: along with manifesting itself as a visual construct, it can also hide in the head of the function, cozzying up with its parameters, and also in binding/assignment forms.

A distant, but weaker cousin of pattern-matching is destructuring, more common in Lisps.
I'm currently looking for an article from a professor or a haskell developer (can't remember which) discussing the difference between parallelism and concurrency. Can't find it, but I'll post these for now:

http://www.danielmoth.com/Blog/threadingconcurrency-vs-paral...

Its a worthy read and may change your mind at least a bit. Though overall, I agree that not all developers benefit from learning functional programming languages as the ones specified, I truly believe that most developers would benefit greatly. Anyway, if I find the article I'm telling you about i'll post it as well.

EDIT: I believe this was it:
http://ghcmutterings.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/parallelism-co...

EDIT 2:
I also believe that most of these languages actually promise more. For example, one of the biggest promises Haskell gives is no side effects. Though this does have a mayor implications for concurrency/parallelism it also (in my opinion) provides safer, cleaner and easier to maintain code. (It does take a memory hit, I'll admit to that, but I personally prefer that safety). Erlang's biggest promise I believe is its fault tolerance. And over all, I honestly believe that functional programming puts you in a different mindset and once you get used to it (I'm still learning, but even then I find it mind opening) you see things clearer. But when it comes down to it, its impossible to be objective about this. However, I will objectively say, everyone should try at least one functional language, just to give you a different view of things :D .
I have a new _no_ computation in log statements rule. A bug in there is nigh near impossible to fix because you're not looking for it.
Proud to be an Entrepreneur [video]
I love the icon at lower right in that sign. Is the cop joining hands with his fellow citizens, or dragging them away?
You can't get the raw power that you get from WPF and BAML. You can't tap into the GPU for free and multi-thread client side at ease. I agree web platforms are the future. It's distant though.
Why is it necessary to "give up your ability to fit in with your own people" to understand another culture? Why would understanding America and Singapore mutually exclusive?

I know people who have lived abroad for a few years and returned--they weren't fundamentally changed or different, same person new life experiences is all.
"Is an individual's freedom to do something more important than another individual's freedom from something?"

Generally, yes, it is.
Ten million items is a lot for real-time on-demand code. I rarely deal with more than a few hundred items. Let's compare:

dataset_1mil = range(1000000)
dataset_1k = range(1000)
dataset_100 = range(100)

[random.shuffle(d) for d in (dataset_1mil, dataset_1k, dataset_100)]

%timeit sorted(dataset_1mil, reverse=True)[:10]
# 1 loops, best of 3: 1.12 s per loop

%timeit heapq.nlargest(10, dataset_1mil)
# 1 loops, best of 3: 330 ms per loop

%timeit heapSearch(dataset_1mil, 10)
# 1 loops, best of 3: 268 ms per loop

%timeit sorted(dataset_1k, reverse=True)[:10]
# 1000 loops, best of 3: 302 us per loop

%timeit heapq.nlargest(10, dataset_1k)
# 1000 loops, best of 3: 248 us per loop

%timeit heapSearch(dataset_1k, 10)
# 1000 loops, best of 3: 346 us per loop

%timeit sorted(dataset_100, reverse=True)[:10]
# 10000 loops, best of 3: 22 us per loop

%timeit heapq.nlargest(10, dataset_100)
# 10000 loops, best of 3: 46.9 us per loop

%timeit heapSearch(dataset_100, 10)
# 10000 loops, best of 3: 128 us per loop

There you have it. Sorted is best for small datasets in the hundreds, break-even is in the thousands, heapSearch wins in the millions.

Datastructures are great, but be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of their implementations. Most recently I discovered that checking collisions in many small sets is faster with tuples (creating sets is rather slow). Test things with your data, not just "big data".

Bonus tip: Amortize when you can. If you're sorting your data anyways, then even the cleverest heap won't undo work already done.
I thought you were referring to this one:
http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/parallelism-...
Nice work. Could you highlight queries?
Your favorite subject is always yourself.

Why should I care about this? Was bitcoin in the headline earlier?
Axioms by definition are not provable.
Um... that's news to you? I've seen that written as a cliché dozens of times.
I guess I'm the only one who thought this was going to be a bond investment article...
...though I wasn't....I will read...tomorrow.....Jejejej, thanks though :D
Music Beta by Google
Yeah I feel like you can't have true instant search without autocomplete. Lots of people don't realize that the reason Google's instant search is effective is that they can tell what you are going to type before you finish typing it. Autocomplete would be huge.

You guys can probably do a pretty effective version right now but I imagine data about what people are searching for allows you to create a better autocomplete feature. And that data only comes with time.
I've visited Singapore twice. I've settled in Australia, originally from Europe.

I was really worried when I visited Singapore and took their 'tourist' tour. They put you in a bus, drive you around all jetlagged and give you orange juice on the beach. Completely surreal.

What really put me off was their unconditional love for their government. The woman 'tour guide' in the bus just couldn't stop thanking the government for giving them so much. It was unhealthy. Yet they don't own anything and they live in towers. Sure it was really pretty but it freaked me out a little. I felt a deep communism in this pro-capitalist ex-colony.

I'm no die hard capitalist but I prefer the australian way of owning my own life and freely talking crap of the government.
He's normally very charismatic when speaking/being interviewed, so in that context, it's pretty funny.
How is anyone's freedom of speech violated if they're not allowed to litter?
How does that compare to, say, loading Java application stack? How much of total application lifecycle does loading time take?
This is not to say, that no fix needed, just that it is possible that impact is much less important.
I also wonder if there are just limited lifespans for these types of sites. Dating, community (slashdot->kuro5hin->digg->reddit->hn), social networks (friendster->myspace->fb), etc. These sites seem to move in waves like fashion or gentrification.
I don't know what the protocol is on HN, but I would be interested to see it.

It seems to me that if you know the K'th largest, it's O(N); but otherwise, it's harder.
In my opinion, you can judge the autocracy of a state based on how polite (or, impolite) the police (or civil servants) are and their general attitude towards an average citizen.
I lived in Singapore for 12 years. It has, by far, the most polite police force. The civil service is way more efficient than any other country's bureaucracy. When you deal with any arm of the government, you get the feeling that they are there to serve you.
The cities in anime I suspect you are referring to are almost exclusively dystopias. The things that enthuse you about the city make me certain I would not like it, perhaps even less than I like American cities. I like my cities with history and layering, nooks and crannies as well as new growths.
Well that explains why I failed at fetching an item by id, and I tried a whole bunch of different ways. You should really mention somewhere that the "id" referenced is an internal id, and not the HN id.

I would like to lookup items by HN id.
It's curious. Lots of people I know use okcupid; nobody I know uses PoF. The one time I tried joining several years ago, my account was repeatedly deleted. PoF has a target audience, but I have no idea what or where it is. Does anybody?
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2598559 => http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=brudgers.

BTW, none of these people are dead banned. All of these cases are one shot dead posts.
> It seems to me that if you know the K'th largest, it's O(N); but otherwise, it's harder.

Finding the kth largest element can be done in O(N) time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_algorithm
It's addictive - agree with others, needs more questions, so I'm adding some now myself!
The parent poster was making a joke. A simple such method is to scan the entire list, take the largest item, remove it from the list (or give it a fake value). Do this k times. k is fixed, so it's O(k*O(n))=O(n).

Obviously, as k approaches n, this algorithm is in reality O(n^2)
Inside investors (those who invested pre-IPO) cannot "dump hard on day 1." In all IPO cases, insiders have a lockup period, generally between 60-90 days before they can sell any stock whatsoever. The only stock being "dumped" is the block of stock being sold in the IPO.
You can't possess or view pornography---that's a violation of free speech. There's more.

But the only positive that's trumpeted about singapore is that their streets are clean and their city beautiful. This is good for the tourist, but not necessarily a place you want to move to.
s/communism/totalitarianism/g and you'll make better sense.
The secret to "Ideas are easy"
That was the tour guide -- you get a completely different version of things in a candid discussion with friends who live there.

I am by no means an expert on the politics there at all, but if one thinks that the us political system is not more corrupt at the highest levels then is simply delusional -- yet life is good for most of us in the US.

I think that one can create a bit of there reality and are not 100% subjected to the douchebaggery of their government, same goes for singapore -- just dont make the cardinal mistake (which applies equally globally) of being poor.
This would be a great science fiction story with the hook that he's a sim of an actual person created to participate in social games
I had dropped university this October, after 1.5 months of education. After dropping it:

- I had worked on the good startup and right now I'm working on the awesome one. Of course, I earn big money from them. In this startups everyone that worked with me is 23-30yrs old, so I think that dropping the university when you're on the first/second year of education is an excellent choice (of course, if you don't have any motivation to continue studying).

- I had done what I always wanted to do, but I had no time to do it when I was in the university (open source projects, learning of some programming languages).

- For achieving something, as it said in this article, you need control and motivate yourself to work 10+h/day.

I wouldn't go back for any reason.
Earlier this year I visited U of Illinois and sat in with a group of seniors who were working on a homework problem. I printed off the homework problem for myself but was not able to solve it since I had just learned about Big O notation in my high school Calculus class. I think this algorithm, if modified to select by rank instead of just top k items, might be the solution.

The problem in question is 2B:

2. (30 pts.) You are given an array A with n distinct
numbers in it, and another array B of
ranks i1 < i2 < : : : < ik. An element x of A has rank u
if there are exactly u 1 numbers in
A smaller than it. Design an algorithm that outputs the
k elements in A that have the ranks
i1; i2; : : : ; ik.
(B) (20 pts.) Describe a O(n log k) recursive algorithm
for this problem. Prove the bound
on the running time of the algorithm

Source: http://www.cs.illinois.edu/class/sp11/cs473/hw/hw_03.pdf

Is that possible?
Pof has a huge userbase in Canada, okcupid is catching up though.

http://trends.google.com/trends?q=okcupid%2C+plentyoffish...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_algorithm#Selecting_k...
I'd recommend you start from Sipser [http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Theory-Computation-Michae...] or Papadimitriou [http://www.amazon.com/Computational-Complexity-Christos-H-Pa...] to learn more about complexity theory (then we can discuss why your response is nonsense)