skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
single-digit microseconds tick to trade (i.e. from when a message appears on the wire till a relevant order is sent to the exchange).

Without trying too hard, you should be able to get to 100 microsecond tails (CPython and perl prototypes can hit 80 usec at the 90th percentile).

Generally people use 10G nics with some sort of DMA (e.g. solarflare nics support a solution called OnLoad).

Though it should be said that, over the past few months, the effect of a few microseconds is mostly irrelevant (though being slow by milliseconds can be calamitous)
Ask HN: Any good open source file hosting/sharing solutions?
I just revived an old computer and got nginx installed. I have 200GB of free space and am now trying to turn it into a file hosting/sharing server for my friends and me.

Anyone have any good solutions? All the ones I have stumbled upon on Google don't look promising.
Humans are products of nature, therefore whatever we do is 'natural'. There aren't natural chemicals and artificial chemicals, there are just chemicals. The whole distinction is silly. Nightshade will kill you just as a dead as synthetic atropine.

Doing anything will likely have unintended consequences, I would hazard a guess that vaccinating people has saved more lives than AIDS has claimed. Now that we have an AIDS vaccine, should we not vaccinate people for fear of causing an epidemic 80 years from now?
California lawmaker surprised to find genre of music cannot be outlawed
Lapham's is a great publication. Especially for anyone who loves history (through the words of those living it, without the benefit of hindsight).

Though, you definitely have to love reading also to make it worth your while. Some of it can get pretty dense. I usually end up reading only 2 or 3 of the articles but still get a lot out of it.
I really really like your response, thank you so much, this is what I was looking for!!
I don't agree with your terminology. Concurrency is having more than one task in flight; it's inherently non-deterministic when the tasks can interact via shared resources. Parallelism is having more than one operation happening simultaneously; it can be a way of implementing concurrency, but it is not necessarily non-deterministic, depending on how it is exposed in the model. And indeed, map-reduce with pure functions is a way of using deterministic parallelism.

Concurrency is a high-level concept; it comes in at the architectural layer. Servers open for multiple clients, where those clients are asking the server to operate on shared mutable memory, are non-deterministic; small differences in timing make all the difference.

Parallelism in an implementation-level concept. Depending on how it is put to use, it can be merely a way of speeding up deterministic computations; or it can be directly harnessed to implement concurrency.
His mother and father were relatively hi ranked Soviet officials. He had it "made" in SU.
Also, the guy bought a 100 million dollar house. YES, he cares about the material comfort and luxury. If you don't, you live in a regular apartment or a sub- million dollar mansion.
Unless the wind is blowing toward you.
OpenVAS - Advanced Open Source vulnerability scanner
EverNote has always worked well for me. My only issue with it is that notebooks can only be nested one level deep.
Would also suggest to anyone interested in this topic to check out anything written by Nassim Taleb. Both of his main stream books are good ("Fooled by Randomness" and "The Black Swan"). Black Swan is more general while Fooled slants towards finance. Peter Bernstein's "Against the Gods" about the history of risk is also great and a little less wordy than Talebs.
Android Developers Create Siri Rival "Iris" in 8 Hours
There are meterological radars that use doppler shift to measure wind speed, I wonder if you could use the same basic idea to construct a radar airspeed indicator?
It’s Not China; It’s Efficiency That Is Killing Our Jobs
Something seems wrong with this story. I understand how speculation can push the price up but if the price goes too far above the true value for too long there has to be a drop - the bubble needs to burst at some point. Has there been a drop in price since this article came out? Have farmers adjusted to grow unusual amounts of wheat? Are there parties to the events who have been shielded (bailed out) from any downturns?
How the Japanese IT Industry Destroys Talent
The article totally glossed over how the long orders were "rolled over" from one trading period to the next. This seems like a critical detail. What happens when all the orders come due and you're holding a bunch of long orders?

Also, wasn't this on HN a while ago? Or did I see it somewhere else?
This was posted about a couple of days ago (https://torrentfreak.com/security-flaw-links-bittorrent-user...), and the Register makes the same (incorrect) assumption as TorrentFreak that IPs can be traced to a single person.

This attack vector links Skype accounts to IP addresses, and then tries to find those IP addresses in BitTorrent swarms. But IP addresses are not people: an IP assigned to an account I owned is not necessarily being used by me, and the person who has a Skype account using a given IP is not necessarily the same person who is using BitTorrent to join a swarm from that IP.

The major issue here is that anyone can find out the IP address of any Skype user just by knowing their username, which can be found in the Skype global directory. Even worse, the user isn't able to block this (or even be notified about this) and the attack can be done by someone not in your contact list.
tl;dr STFU & make awesome stuff.
You mean Python specifically or for other programming languages?
wow these "tech" worker parents are seriously pretty messed up. I'm pretty sure my early computer use and curiosity led to my current career as a software developer, I can't imagine not knowing how to use a search engine until eighth grade, I was messing around looking at HTML code and stuff in like 5th or 6th grade
Fiona Ma, the legislator proposing the bill, came off slightly incoherent, Lee Liu (sp?) seemed to have a reasonable assessment of the ramifications of the law and the events.

My cynical self suggests that Fiona was proposing legislation for the sake of getting her name in the public awareness around a popular topic, whereas Lee Liu just fundamentally understood the issue, and is likely a much more effective harm reduction advocate.
The key seems to be the way in which the accumulated long positions were periodically rolled over, but the article doesn't seem to explain how this was done.
According to the article, the bubble did indeed burst:

> Then, like all speculative bubbles, the food bubble popped. By late 2008, the price of Minneapolis hard red spring had toppled back to normal levels, and trading volume quickly followed. Of course, the prices world consumers pay for food have not come down so fast, as manufacturers and retailers continue to make up for their own heavy losses.
There seems to be a false dichotomy being made between hands on education and the use of technology in the classroom that bothers me a bit; why should they be separated? I see no reason why a collaborative, hands on approach to education is precluded by the use of technology.

The developers of Racket (formerly PLT Scheme) have an after school program called Program by Design (http://programbydesign.org/) and one of the things they found was that some of the students started wanting to learn more math because they needed to know how to add things to their programs! The extreme view presented in this article seems to be based more upon fear of technology than any kind of understanding of it.
Meet Kabutar
Sorry to bother you! When you're a tiny startup like us, you gotta do radical things! Kabutar was a harebrained scheme we came up with on a late night involving lots of alcohol and questionable judgement.

So here's the thing, we're building a photo sharing application for web & mobile that helps you make your photos look cool.
Upload a photo, add a filter and boom! You've got an amazing looking picture. It also helps you make awesome stop motion films, ask questions with photos and helps you sell stuff easily again with photos.

Clickity click on this linkity link to see what kabutar is: http://www.kabutar.in/

Cheers
Shubhendu

A fun new way to share photos
www.kabutar.in

PS: If you don't check out Kabutar, its going to break our little hearts and we'll be forced to stand in the corner of the room facing the wall.
I used to work at Goldman's. This story doesn't surprise me at all. This is what all good bankers do. I think the story hasn't gotten attention because it is not a story. It is just how things work.
Very similar, ifttt.com is definitely an inspiration (as is Yahoo! Pipes). However, we have a very different and more promising direction (we think!).
Sarandon criticada por llamar nazi al papa
Interesting startup but I see couple of problems with it:

- The landing page is sub par. Put more time and effort in it because it looks horrible (at least to me)
- Maybe think about mobile application or at least optimized version for mobile phones.

Keep up the good work.
Agrandar El Miembro Masculino
We need to get rid of our highly distortionary tax policy. We incentivize "saving" over 'spending" by taxing capital gains at a lower rate, but we've got too much saving now and all that money is looking for places to go.
Also try going after Europe first before the US.
How to Seem (and Be) Deep
Python, specifically.
You really wonder why Microsoft has such a good Research Department, but barely anything useful comes out eventually into the hand of the user. They should really look into changing their cooperate structure
Right. Those are stricter definitions.

Although wouldn't Parallelism's multiple operations each be "in-flight"? That is, it's pretty clear that one can have concurrency without parallelism, but you seem to suggest that one can have parallelism without concurrency ("deterministic parallelism"). Which doesn't _sound_ right... Even with MapReduce, the order in which tasks are complete are not deterministic (different hardware, network latency, etc), so I don't see how you could determine in which order mappers are passed on to reducers.
Thanks, I must have skipped over that part. Also I was able to find a good chart at http://www.wikinvest.com/futures/Kansas_City_Wheat_Futures

The article still isn't clear (at least to me) on who took the losses for the speculators.
If you think that the only needed quality to be a billionaire in Russia is being smart, you are in fact disconnected from reality and shame on you for that - you should know better.
New figures suggest that iPad losing market share to Google Android tablets
This reminds me of the observation that a perfect (i.e. zero-drag) kite would rocket straight to the top of its flight envelope and then dive-bomb the person holding the strings.
UN says world population could be 15 billion by 2100
SIMD is an example of parallelism without concurrency.
I completely forgot about that interactive table thing 'til now.
I think their are just approaching the problem from the wron side. They are right in saying that the computer is being used wrong, but wrong in saying that not using the computer is the solution. I'm more in alignment with what Mr Wolfram from WolframAlpha is saying: Computers can helkp you with tasks that are repetitive and inhuman, you should learn what is needed to solve a problem efficiently. That is actually more in alignment with what the Waldorf system says: Creativity through hands-on. Denying kids access to technology is just stupid, because if you think about your own life: Doesn't technology make it easier and more efficient to get things done?
I usually don't do this, but this article is long. The summary (tl; dr) is as follows:

1) Large institutional long investments in a certain type of wheat future (Chicago soft red winter) started crowding out the real customers of physical wheat, such as bakers.

2) Because wheat varieties are moderately fungible/exchangeable, the downstream bakers started to use a different brand of wheat (Minneapolis hard red spring) and changed their recipes accordingly.

3) This second class of wheat is very widely consumed, and bidding up its price caused riots and food shortages around the world (or so the reporter states. He didn't provide specific examples, as this predates the Arab Spring).

The overall effect is if a particular food staple suddenly became a fashion item, with wealthy people buying it off the market for non-dietary purposes at such a rate that poor people could not afford it.

However, the key bit I don't understand, and which the reporter doesn't explain, is how commodity fund investors didn't lose their shirts by betting on wheat to keep going up. If they did lose their shirts then this bubble is unlikely to repeat in the near future.
I don't see anything wrong with humanizing the 1% given that they are, in fact, human.
lock-free data structures are also really really neat. Implementing such is another matter though...
You have to have good reason to fire an employee. There needs to be a paper trail of him not being able to do his job or him being generally insubordinate. The only thing that can legally get you fired on the spot is sexual harrasment or where you've broken the law in some manner that could affect the company.

Anyway you dont fit in to a regular command and control type organisation. Welcome to my world :) ....

Now if your generally a rebel but you do love creating things then you _might_ be an entrepreneur. First get a job and then view the job as the thing that allows you to become an entrepreneur in the future. Ie the job is your "Venture Capitalist". Save up enough so that you can quit in the future and go it on your own.

Again this means you have to put what you want before your urge to be right. This will take you about 3 years to learn. In 3 years you could have $50000 saved up and the oppurtunity of a lifetime to be an entrepreneur.
Idiot lawmaker over-reacts and writes law telling kids to get off her lawn, pull up pants.

“I believe with the new secretary, the new people appointed to these boards, more sophistication in terms of what raves are, the safer they will be,” Ma said. “Can’t wear gloves with lights, you can’t walk around with stuffed animals.”

Yes, let's save another 1 in 100000 lighted-glove, stuffed animal-related death.

I hate busybodies.
Absolutely agree.

In my 20's I was completely certain that I would be successful without hard work as I was smart & talented. After a decade of that imagined success not materialising I am far hungrier, more determined and working harder now than I have ever been before.
At the risk of being the ugly capitalist in the room, it's worth mentioning that farmers have long used financial instruments to help them hedge against very severe volatility in their industry. Volatility caused by Acts Of God[1], like droughts and diseases.

So while I'm all for more regulations, I think we shouldn't demonize an entire sector without considering that some of what it does can and has be helpful.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_God
An understated but key idea from relatively early on in the article is that investment firms like Goldman Sachs have a strong incentive to destabilize markets, since a commodity that never changes price cannot ever yield an investment return. Seems like a bit of a perverse incentive, pitting investors against the common good
And they have a very nice app for subscribers as well.
This letter reads like some looney Usenet rant. Between my cringing and facepalming, I began to see the beginnings of a reasonable argument here, which makes this letter all the sadder.
How about using some regular old skool php forum software. Small files can be shared as attachments, and a maybe setup a private bit torrent tracker for large stuff?
Why Do We Get Sick at Altitude?
Hmmm. Kids from affluent families who likely have highly educated parents working at high tech companies do well on standardized tests created to cover the entire spectrum of children? nowai
Multi-touch UI -- 25 years before iPhone
Isn't it sad that the computing experience is now defined as using Google? What a waste.
When I think back to when I was in first or second grade I can see a direct correlation between technology and the areas I've always excelled at. For instance, I've always been very strong in History. When I was at an elementary school level I would come home and play World War 2 themed video games, Oregon Trail, Age of Empires, etc. this sparked huge amounts of interest in me, and led me deeper into these subjects. My parents told me a story about how when I was in third grade my class got to go to our school library. I went up to a librarian, and asked her for a book on The French resistance in Paris during the Nazi occupation. The reason why I asked? I had been playing the medal of honor video game. So from my end, I think technology can definitely be a boon to education, as long as you're making sure that the content that children are getting from them is good.
I thought the whole point of the "Retina display" is that it reaches the threshold of pixel density where you can't see pixels anymore (at that distance from the screen).

6.1" seems more the size of a small tablet than anything fit for a phone. Assuming people hold a tablet about the same distance away from their eyes as a phone, perhaps even farther, what's the point of having an even higher pixel density? Isn't this going to cause more design problems than it provides marketing benefits?
I'm definitely going to try out EverNote, but I'm note sure about the combination of tagging and notebooks. It seems like only one of those should be necessary.
Ask HN: What are some good resources for learning distributed systems?
How did you become proficient in distributed systems ? Please provide any books/papers/tutorials/videos that you used in learning distributed systems to implement large scale systems.
Appreciate your responses.
Sun Tzu's 'The Art of War': Comic Book Adaptation Now on Android
* Idioms and Anti-Idioms in Python (http://docs.python.org/howto/doanddont.html)
* Python Idioms and Efficiency (http://jaynes.colorado.edu/PythonIdioms.html)
* Python Style Guide (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/)
* Google Python Style Guide (http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/pyguide.html)
* Pocoo Style Guide (http://www.pocoo.org/internal/styleguide/)
CSS: EM, PX, PT, CM, IN…
They're unfortunately not operating outside of the US yet (at least, not publicly). From what I hear, they're anxious to make this possible. Your best bet is probably to follow them on Twitter (https://twitter.com/#!/stripe) to find out when they announce international support.

Edit: You can asked to be notified when your specific country is available: https://stripe.com/global
While I agree with you, I'll add that the ability to use Skype to 'track' someone across IPs (and then through the BitTorrent swarms) allows more evidence than a simple 'it came from this IP.'
> the falsehood that high net worth requirements somehow protect consumers

Perhaps they serve to protect that vulnerable segment of our population, the mega-corporation?

Once yours reaches sufficient size/influence [never to be explicitly specified] it may be able to claim such rights for itself before the U.S. Supreme Court, the supremely sympathetic arbitrator of such matters in this country. [/sarcasm]
Covered in the article. Begin at "While Japan had relied on..."
Fear of being poor increases as you get older (at least in US). And that is the bigest obstacle for many people to pursue entrepreneurship dream.

And regarding school, there is really no reason why not to go school when you are little older. In other words, we have this assumption in US that all schooling has to be finished by 24 or something like that.
I personally like Java a lot and would use it in a startup. It's solid and easy to get good performance out of. It also has a huge amount of open source libraries. But I wouldn't necessarily use it for everything. Python / Ruby has good frameworks for the presentation layer of a web app.

The perfect combination would be a dynamic language for the web server that calls a java based web service for most of the functionality (Jersey rocks)
Arch linux with a lightweight WM or framebuffer.
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I absolutely loathe these arguments.

The economy is not a zero sum game! When I gain a dollar another person doesn't inherently lose one. We build wealth, and while efficiency eliminates certain jobs, it just shifts employments to other sectors as long as people continue to innovate. For this argument to hold any sort of water we would still be fretting over what to do with all the unemployed candle makers after the advent of electricity. The answer isn't to move backwards, or as the author suggest to promote inefficiency, but to use our creativity to move forward. The world has plenty of problems that need fixing, and as long as there are problems with the world, and there always will be, and as long as we as a society and a planet continue to strive to make tomorrow better than the day before it, we will continue to innovate and create jobs.
Did you read the article?

It talks extensively about how the markets were set up for exactly this purpose, and that the balance of long and short positions for the futures kept the market relatively stable in exactly this way, until the relatively recent (1990s) influx of commodity indices pushed a whole bunch of money purely into long positions and destabilized the market by, effectively, buying far more futures contracts than there was actual wheat.

Edit: and buy not buying any short futures to counterbalance them.
Amazing. Elegant. Nothing super new, but a brilliant assemblage of existing research to accomplish something awesome.
Recursive Python Considered Harmful
Strangely enough, this is a recurring nightmare of mine. I'm holding commodity futures that I forget to close out, and then one day farmers show up at my door with the delivery.
Well, there's a limit to the practical use of gadgets in the classroom. Learning human interaction, motor skills, and other parts of being human are best done with other humans.

It's also pretty clear to me that equating computing to the use of Word, Excel, and Google leads one to the conclusion that computing is easy and not a big deal to pick up. Naturally, as a software engineer, I disagree vehemently with that.

I think that some level of real (not turtle or other games) programming should be taught from middle school on to the point where a HS grad can successfully write a small program to deal with the small needs of life: things like accounting, sophisticated searching for files, etc.

I believe - have faith - that a programming-enabled population can do some pretty amazing things when set free to do them. All it takes is the knowledge and the eyes to see what can be automated to do so.
No, they learn how to look at context to determine what words mean in a given situation.
Those are nouns, not pronouns.
The demoscene is at the intersection of art, music programming, hacking, online groups, tech festivals etc. It has a long history with a tremendous corpora of productions, techniques, culture, publications, etc. It's probably the biggest sub culture that nobody has ever heard of, with thousands of computing enthusiasts getting together in arenas to literally show off their code.

In the demoscene, code is art.

Its participants will literally consume years of their life on a production for nothing but the pleasure of it.

When I saw the title of the course I immediately assumed at least half the semester was going to be on the demoscene since no computing based cultural movement I'm aware of more succinctly speaks to the course title than the demoscene.