skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some things to think about:

- 50mb is >> total cache on most systems you'll use.
- This is far from the only function you need to optimize.
--> The best performing algorithm in a micro-benchmark can be sub-optimal in real use.

- You've got a fixed-for-the-day list of <10k <9 letter unique upper-case strings
- The bulk of them you'll process are <= 4 letters (CMCSA/CMCSK be damned).
- The median is 3 and the mean is <3.6.
- The symbols aren't anywhere close to uniformly active
--> Benchmark with a typical data stream, not a uniformly distributed one.

- You're likely not even considering trading most of them.

- How much better is your algorithm than the obvious binary-search?
- Or worse -- plain'ol front-to-back linear search?
- Are you sure you understand 100% of how the computer works?
--> Yes? Mail a check to Goldman and find a better line of work.
--> No? Test it with a quick benchmark.

- Is binary search cache friendly?
- Why not? Plot out the memory accesses if need be.

- What's wrong with taking a linear-interpolated guess?
- Is that cache friendly? .. or could it be?
- When your guess misses, what's that cost?
- Can you think of a cheap modification to lower that cost?
- Is the distribution really linear?

- What's wrong with a "perfect hash function"?
- Does it need to be perfect?

Incidentally, hardware wins at this function. You can just generate logic to do all the if symbol == "XYZ": return 3's in parallel.
I was a minute into the article before it hit ⌘ + f to see if he mentioned TDD
Actually, I think the holographic wrist device could be done with a pair of augmented reality glasses and a wristband with a little AR marker on it for orientation. Of course, you'd be the only one able to see it (unless you're linked up with other people with the same glasses). Actually, that brings up an interesting idea. If a lot of people have AR glasses, they can all experience a shared reality with all kinds of crazy "holographic" stuff flying around. Of course, it's going to be weird for the people who don't have the glasses.
I Never Get Tired of Watching Star Wars
It depends on if he wrote that stuff in the first place.
That makes sense, as modern Hebrew is largely reconstructed ancient Hebrew with added words for things that were invented in the past several centuries. I don't think the people who reconstructed Hebrew would have gone out of their way to include foul words.

What is surprising is that the foul words were borrowed from Arabic, and not Yiddish or any of the other languages commonly spoken by the Jews who settled in Israel.
Poll: Where did you get your site/app's Terms of Service & Privacy Policy?
I'm both interested in how startup folks are doing things and doing a little market research. I occasionally see mistakes in SaaS terms or obvious evidence of copy/pasting. An attorney friend and I were discussing a service that helps build TOS/Privacy pages based on common SaaS features/properties.
We paid an attorney/law firm
We copy/pasted & find/replaced from another site or app
We used a PAID online service or generator
We used a FREE online service or generator
GroupMe Acquired by Skype for More than $50 Million
I really hope Skype lets GroupMe continue to operate on it's own, and doesn't ruin it. It's an awesome service, and lets me keep in touch with my tech-adverse friends from back home. Some people use AIM, some use Facebook, some use email, some use MSN, some use BBM -- but everyone has texting.

The beauty is the simplicity. On vacation with some friends? Spin up a new groupme for the week. I can't see it remaining this easy if skype starts taking advantage of "integration points".
In Robert Baer's book "See No Evil" he describes being questioned by the FBI while working for the CIA for allegedly trying to organize an assassination of Saddam Hussein.

There were no basis for the accusations but he understandably pretty unhappy as the penalties for being found guilty could be pretty severe.
This is a crazy smart comment. Thanks.

... is anyone really using hardware to do this, by the way?

Hardware regexing at this scale is practically a COTS part, or was when I stopped doing network security products in '05.
u at the beginning is usually for a glottal stop with a dammah above it ( أُ ) while in this case it should be a fatha ( أَ )
This immediately made me think of the line from Desiderata.

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Full text on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desiderata#Full_text
If you had just posted this without the first sentence, you would't have needed to make a throwaway.
Its a fact that the data you provided does not take into account 'participation' drop off.
If you want to continue presenting statistics like that, maybe you should find a set of data that encompasses the more obvious problems?
I worked with a dev who was assigned to a full-time QA duty by the management. Sort of development pre-QA tester if you will. Guess what? He filed over 200 (two hundred) bug reports within a couple of weeks. Major ones. Other devs never complained, the management was ecstatic, but the guy still quit few months later because they refused to release him from QA duty and back into the development.
Considere http://learningthreejs.com tutorials on three.js.

This library does a good job at abstracting all the webgl
You should also fix dukkan -> dukaakiin to become dakaakiin
Patenting Genes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-400_%28SAM%29
NKNEWKIRKBlog
How stress damages DNA
No it will not happen tomorrow.
The law in question is already postponed to November.
Title is very sensational without reason. I think the usage of filter is not mandatory. Current already censored package will be used as default AFAIK.
It looks like this was written in 1975. It is amazing how well the critique of the genre holds up.
It's a javascript library that essentially consists of two functions (get and set) to retrieve and store some arbitrary content identified by a key string. That content is stored on the author's server though you can override the domain name and put in your own.

I think this combination of a lightweight library and free online storage could be useful for people who would like to have a static website with no functionality or storage whatsoever on their server. It could also be used in scenarios where JS code is used as glue between one or more websites and the user (for example in browser plugins).
This is really interesting and exciting from Microsoft's perspective. As I understand it, while a purchase like the Skype purchase waits for approval by the regulatory bodies, the purchasing company (Microsoft) and company pending purchase (Skype) have very limited communication.

My guess is that Microsoft had no involvement in this purchase and is basically winding up with GroupMe as a party favor. Pretty nifty party favor, if you ask me.
With Skype itself being acquired by Microsoft, it's hard to imagine GroupMe remaining a standalone product--or even as elegantly simple as it is now.
Don't know why you are being downvoted - I'm mystified as to why people think there would be much overlap between what SAP does and what Autonomy does.
I'm completely serious, often times I'm wondering if a walmart super-center has the section I'm looking for or is one of those half super centers without the section I'm looking for.
It wasn't a working prototype though. It was a very interesting conceptual demonstration put together using video editing.
I personally find patenting genes disgusting. These genes are naturally encoded in everyone's cells (with some variations). This will have far reaching consequences and will generally impede scientific discovery/progress.
Do all first links on Wikipedia lead to philosophy?
Priid - a ad network for sports and outdoor activities
Well then you have to extend the argument to plugins as well, and certain plugins (SnipMate, AutoComplPop, Fugitive, etc.) can increase productivity by several orders of magnitude.

It's best to store your .vimrc + .vim/ folder on GitHub or a thumb-drive for easy restoration rather than crippling yourself with a limited configuration. Someone else mentioned Homesick (https://github.com/technicalpickles/homesick) which works really well.
I bought the very first edition, just to be disappointed. There's nothing in the book as good as the Gervais principle. The blog is superior. The book is a coffee-table theory of of everything, (or everything about the mind). A bit like what Wolffram did, but poorer. He's well read, but still manages to cite things wrong, partially, or not at all. It feels like Gladwell, with more ambition, and less respect for the audience.
Even if they do, I have the feeling that the loser in this purchase is Twilio. I have a hard time imagining Skype or eventually Microsoft paying Twilio to handle their telephony infrastructure.
Evernote swoops for Aussie tech start-up Skitch
Print vs. Online
>Their unusual preference of CAMELLIA-256-CBC is pretty amusing to me.

Yea, I noticed it too when I checked this using Firefox and Chrome.
I'm quoting him: "Autonomy — a company I’d never heard of before but which more or less sounds like a rival to SAP."

That indicates he didn't do much research. Another thing that indicates lack of research is that his comparison of Autonomy to SAP is wrong.
walmart - sold out

target - sold out

best buy - sold out

online hp shop - sold out

office depot - sold out

amazon - ripping off customers with original price

newegg - rip off also

where am i gonna get my touchpad future android mega device? ;(
Social media monitoring stumps most businesses: Report
$85 million
Student hacker 'penetrated' Facebook
Some references:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-06/hp-chief-mark-hurd-...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Hurd#Resignation
this is where Big Endianess comes from? ;)
Fixed. Thanks for these corrections, and please feel free to email me (maciej@ceglowski.com) if there's anything else I've garbled.
Text classification and analysis isn't a small field. Plus this is a public company that's been in the FTSE for years (i.e. one of the top 100 companies in the UK)
I know they're very different beasts and in completely different situations, but it's still interesting to remember that Voyager 1, using 30+ yo technology, is currently going about three times as fast as this plane.
Perhaps the issue is that, like so many science fiction authors, his ideas are interesting but his actual writing, characters and dialogue have nothing in particular to recommend them. In short story form, the ideas come and go quickly enough that one doesn't have a chance to get too bored with them. In a novel like Solaris, on the other hand, there's really only one idea and it takes a hell of a lot of words for it to actually get out there.

Asimov is similarly bad at actual writing, but his ideas are sufficiently good and they come sufficiently thick and fast even in his novels that he's still pretty okay to read.

In contrast an author like Neal Stephenson manages to write a science fiction story with proper characters who are interesting to read about even when they're not expounding on some science-fictional idea.
Your overall fee should always reflect competitive pressures.

Your competition are:

1. Other local developers who have the same domain expertise

2. Other local developers who don't have the same domain expertise

3. Outsourcers

4. Alternative technology stacks

Each of the alternatives have their own risks and advantage. If you are dealing with portions of technology where you are not familiar with, then you have to ask yourself whether it makes sense to charge more to cover for the additional time, or incur the cost of learning on yourself. In which case, whether it is a technology you wish to master. You have to remember it only takes one little problem for things to blow out.

There is another aspect to consider: pre-built components and your own IP. You can command a higher hourly rate if you tell them that you will include software libraries that you bring to the table, or alternatively bring the overall cost down. In some countries, there are taxation differences between selling licenses and selling labour.

It should also reflect timelines. Some people are prepared to wait, other people need this immediately. Your charging should also reflect this. For instance, when people have an urgent need, you should put more effort into providing confidence that the project will be delivered on spec and on time, and charge accordingly (i.e. don't try to compete on price).

In addition, your cost should reflect the number of attempts the customer has made in the past. For example if he had two failed attempts, you have to ask yourself what is actually wrong, and perhaps he is unable to communicate the requirements properly.
Thank you for posting this. I somehow managed to never hear of this man.
I find that interesting from Twilio's perspective: GroupMe was using Twilio to send SMSs (at least at first, but they didn't have much time to change the most important part of their service) and Twilio has recently added some VoIP components (Twilio Client) to their offer, which, even though doesn't compete directly with Skype, is covering much more bases than Skype is when it comes to integration in web or mobile apps.

And based on some announced usage numbers from GroupMe a few months ago I imagine Twilio was/is making good money from them alone…
A lot of people on HN will use the same log in information they use on other sites. Some even have their email in their profiles.

If someone logs in on a wifi hotspot, their password is easily visibile to others. And voilà, suddenly you have access to someone's email, facebook account, etc.
Selena Gomez Going to Host the 2011 MTV VMA Pre-Show
The browser wars still haunt the economics of the web and software.

Looking back, it is ironic that Microsoft's monopoly conviction came from their decision to first license Internet Explorer for free (as in beer) then to bundle it with Windows. At the time, it was the death knell to Mr. Andreessen's Netscape as they charged for their browser and Windows had far more platform dominance than they do today.

I think that set an important standard in a lot of people's mind - I mean Microsoft made you pay for everything. The web was the brand new frontier and it was so important to them that they would license the browser for free to compete against Netscape.

The US Government said that was "evil." Looking back, I'm not so sure it was. I do think these old things are a big factor on why we are where we are with respect to the economics of the web.
There is a certain amount of misinformation in this post that I'd like to clear up:

1) In the 10th century, (Old) English and (Old) German were already somewhat divergent, and not really mutually intelligible, but closely related.

2) The same goes for Norman and French. While in the same language family, these were not quite the same language.

3) Have you read any Chaucer? I'm not sure I'd call Middle English "mostly comprehensible". It takes a lot of work and a good ME dictionary at hand. By contrast, Early Modern English (think Shakespeare) is more in the line of "mostly comprehensible".

4) It's not just the fact there was no central authority that caused English to massively change. There still isn't a central authority, but change has been slow and non-radical for the last 500 years or so. Having a central authority doesn't really prevent change, either, although it might help to slow it down.

5) It's not at all clear what you mean by "arbitrary" in your claim about language change and state control, but you certainly have not backed up any claim about languages under "state control" being more "regular".

6) The alphabet switch for Turkish did not succeed because the Latin alphabet is "simple and phonetic". The Arabic alphabet is also simple and phonetic, as is (or as could be) any alphabet. It was not a great fit for the Turkish language, however, and the Latin alphabet (with a few additions) mapped better.

7) But much more important than any facts about the Latin alphabet was the fact that Kemal Ataturk was a dictator who pushed through a massive literacy programme on the population (who, it should also be said, was basically supportive of this goal). Had he done an alphabet reform instead---adding a few letters to the Arabic alphabet to make it a better fit for Turkish---and accompanied it with the same literacy policy, it'd do just as well. (Better, arguably, because it would have left the writings of the Ottomans much more accessible to the literate modern population.)

You might be right about computers arising in alphabet countries (I'd broaden that to any non-ideographic writing system, including Greek, Korean, and those of the Indian subcontinent and southeast Asia), but it might be more accurate to say that if computers had arisen first in China they would have looked very, very different. (Even in Japan, they might have gone the route of kana-only systems first, in a similar way to how early western machines had ALL CAPS interfaces.)
I see where you're coming from, but I still occasionally play Red Baron, Pitfall and Combat on emulators. Crystal Castles for me was another good one on Atari 2600, but I think this was after Super Mario Bros.

I agree that it's a largely subjective thing, and I would say Super Mario Bros 3 is a great game, SMB 1 is a good (and clearly game changing if you'll pardon the pun) game. Donkey Kong is another example from earlier, but I won't pretend that it was a good port to the 2600 that stands the test of time.

I also see your point about games that were good then versus now, but I have to say that Pong was only good because there wasn't anything else around. Space invaders, Galaxian and co are still playable today. Still, endless examples and counterexamples abound and there'll never be a definitive conclusion for the reasons you mentioned. Still, it's good to take a trip down memory lane now and again.

Out of interest, what was your favourite Mario game of all time, and how did it compare to SMB1?
What's your favourite number?
I'm sorry, I had assumed that the onus of proof lay with the person making the original (and countrary-to-popular-belief-and-best-available-statistics) claim that unemployment was still increasing.

Participation, of course, is a tricky beast. Sometimes people stop participating because they're despairing over being able to find a job, but they also retire, or get pregnant, or go back to university or (if immigrants) their home countries.
Brushed Metal style in CSS3
Cuddling With 9, Smooching With 8, Winking At 7
It's not a guessing game. $85M is the reported price.
I have to imagine that if Skype does anything with GroupMe at a technical level, they'll cut Twilio out of the picture. Skype writing checks to Twilio seems like a temporary situation.
Getting a bitmap to glow in android 2.2 - with link to what it looks like
Had posted this before, but now added a link to an example demonstrating what the "glowing" looks like
This is incorrect. Modern ICMB designs include maneuverable reentry vehicles. Even modest accuracy in an ICBM requires at least a minimal amount of course correction in the terminal phase.

But apparently state of the art re-entry vehicles are capable of much more complex maneuvers including 180 degree turns (heading on ground, not the full 3d vector obviously).

The US has had this capability since a research project in the 1980s. Some form of it is deployed on Trident as well as the comparable UK and CH systems.

There is very little published on the topic, but if you start researching the AMaRV project you'll find some details and claims. Of course there's really no way for someone outside the defense community to confirm these claims, but I know of no physical reason why they couldn't be true.
RealITy television.
Why does this appear again and again? Why isn't it on every single programming related course:

amount = 14.,

Is just asking for trouble...
Loved it. I've not read enough of Lem's output to compare it to his other work. A Lem SF novel that includes information theory works for me.
By the time I looked at this, the end path had changed, as "Fact" now leads to "Truth" instead of "Information". How long until someone intentionally manipulates the chain?
Oh, I know. But tests make it so much easier.
What others say about the competition is true, but you can also tell from how he's doing the end titles that he's into custom lo-fi typography.
The most significant difference between this prototype and existing ICBM technology is that the reentry vehicle has more lift and less drag.

It's counterintuitive, but re-entry vehicles are typically bluntly shaped because it reduces the heat load on the nose cone by pushing the bow shock further out in front of the craft. The downside of this is higher drag and less lift, so ICBM warheads fall more than they glide.
The Random Rambling Blog
I did a bunch of research for my PhD thesis on this, and came to the conclusion that "the probability of concurrency errors is proportional to the square of the amount of shared state". Threads share state by default, which brings significant risk.

Also server side engineers aren't necessarily safe; there are a number of C library functions that are not particularly reentrant. This has been known for decades because reentrancy is important in signal handling situations. The safest way of dealing with asynchronous signals, in fact, is to use global flag variables and use the flag as an indication that one should e.g. call waitpid because at least one SIGCHLD has come in since you last went through the main loop. You may deny that this happens particularly often, but that particular hack was an important simplification of my life a few months ago.
To get a sense of the status of Arabic dialect with a referent that might make more sense to a western audience (or maybe not), try this approximation: Arabic now is like Latin a millennium ago.

In the 11th century, standard Church Latin had evolved slightly relative to Cicero but was clearly the same language; someone who was fluent in Church Latin could reliably travel anywhere in Christendom (and to cosmopolitan cities elsewhere) and make themselves understood. The local dialect there might have evolved from Latin, or might not, but there'd be someone educated and literate that they could communicate with. In the areas where the language had evolved from Latin, the hoi polloi could kinda sorta make out the Latin (better in some areas than others), and the cleverer ones could figure out the relationships between their language and Latin, and the educated ones would just go learn Latin (but perhaps have an easy time of it).

Thus also, mutatis mutandis, with Modern Standard Arabic. The analogy isn't perfect but it turns out to be pretty darn good and lets you make some good guesses about the situation on the ground in the Arabic-speaking world and the mutual intelligibility of, say, Qatari and Tunisian (i.e. not very much).
Live and Let Die
the author doesn't capitalize his sentences. i didn't find it difficult to read and only noticed halfway through the article. supposedly, capitalized sentences are easier to read, so i wonder if i've been conditioned by the internet to find uncapitalized sentences easy to read as well. off-topic, but interesting.
Getting kids on the right track with early science education
I hate to detract from the point, but flash...for that? Bit much, aye?
I was using the 2011-07-22 set so the data's already a bit stale...
Dropbox adds Lion support; fixes public URL generation