skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Brain of a Beginner Blogger [Infographic]
I've taken a speed reading course through Groupon (Iris) and it has increased the amount of books I consume by 100x. Good for Amazon. :)

Speed reading might be broken into two parts. There's the part where you train your brain+eyes to consume more words faster (stop vocalizing words, better peripheral vision, etc.)

But the most important part for me isn't what people typically think of when you hear "speed reading".

It's better skim reading.

The technique I learned was read each chapter 3 times...

Start your chapter. Read the first paragraph or two at your normal reading pace. Get a handle on what the chapter is going to be about. Then, skip to the last paragraph of that chapter. Consume it at your normal reading pace. Go back to the beginning of the chapter and read the first sentence of each paragraph in the chapter at your normal reading pace. Now, you have a great outline in your head on what this chapter is about. Now go back through it a third time, and speed read the crap out of it :) Try and read it as fast as you can. Because of the first 2 reads you'll have much better control on what paragraphs can be skipped, which need a little attention, and which need to be memorized.

It's not perfect, and you probably wouldn't read your best fiction this way, but it's helped me a ton.
I've been trying to think of a way of using typing cadence to capture "bits" of information. Think you would have a good solution for that?

Take this scenario (and also check out the exclaimer at the bottom!).

All users on the earth type the same paragraph, or perhaps some password (clearly the longer the most distinct fingerprint, but bear with me on this).

Based on this sequence of keypresses, I capture the timestamp that each keypress is activated, and then the duration that each key is held down for.

Based on this information, how would you recommend, or suggest that a person goes about detecting some unique fingerprint from these values.

I was thinking the best way would be to have each keypress some space point and the duration held down a vector. And then if each use is entering the same paragraph, the distance accross all of the vectors could be used to calculate some identifying fingerprint.

Exclaimer: I'm absolutely not interested in the slightest in tracking users. Every weekend I try and research something that interests me. Last weekend was user fingerprinting based on the typing speed and cadence of users.
I was hired at Monetate this past summer after seeing a post about it on Hacker News. I'd be happy to answer any questions about the company or my own hiring experience.

email: sgallagher monetate com
This is why academic writing - even academic writing about cool technical topics - is often "dry." We have to write like that. And it is tiresome to read. But it's necessary for two reasons. First, it would never get past peer review otherwise. But even if we could eke it past, it's still not a good idea because when someone else goes to replicate or build on what we did, all those details that drag down the writing become mightily important.

I've often thought that people who publish papers should also have a blog, and where they should have a more digestible explanation of their work. Of course, I have not done this. (Yet.)
Or the shape of the equation itself?

There's quite a bit of research[1] in the area and it seems for most applications you can indeed get away with quadradic or basically any superlinear backoff algorithm.

However, most of the work I've seen was based either on synthetic models or tested only on smallish networks under artificial congestions. It's hard to predict how it will cope at internet-scale when theory meets broken vendor-implementations.

[1] http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5766...
Former employees can still sue over the way the layoffs were conducted.
37 for everyone who's ever lived (+30% more people)... and for the future? I dunno, how long do you want to go? 2x...

However, 33 bits is a simplification. You can express 8.5 billion different values with 33 bits, but unless those 33 values map to well-distributed discriminators, the number is meaningless...
From 2 internships, that's not at all a fair reflection. There are some awesome opportunities at BB and there are some issues too. It's got some old code, but the good things far outway the occasional collision with Fortran.
You can outsource this: http://mycorporation.com/corporation-llc-documents/maintainm...
List of Best Productivity Tools for Startups
The similarity with java give me the creeps... And I'm a java programmer.
Interoperability between clojure and python is promising, because it lets you do lisp programming with python libraries and data structures.

If you want to do lisp programming with CL libraries, you could just use CL.

I'm not sure what the advantage of clojure in CL is over just using CL.
Could you give more detail about how you use inner-app services? They seem like a good way to manage project complexity, but I can't find much documentation on how they work in Rails.
According to Wikipedia [1], numbers around 100 billion have been bandied about quite seriously, and much lower estimates have been "debunked as unscientific".

An interesting debate, regardless. I had no idea it could be so hard to calculate. At any rate, as you say, 43 bits would have humanity covered for a long, long time.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Number_of_huma...
If even a small portion of the US' population had any idea what socialism actually was, maybe we wouldn't all be going bankrupt from our asinine health care system....

This country....
Accidental downvotes are a lot more common on HN than you might imagine. The arrows are really small and close together, especially on an iPhone. I'd guess that's what happened.
Facebook's future in mobile ads
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> What if the "invention" is not prior art, but other
> people can come up with the same idea on their own?

Then at the very least, it's evidence for obviousness, which (although a tougher sell) can also invalidate a patent.

EDIT: IANAL
Even if that's correct, that doesn't mean that what Kim did wasn't illegal or wrong. Kim wasn't simply engaged in "file sharing" he ran a multimillion dollar parallel distribution system. He wasn't sharing, he was basically using file sharers as a Mechanical Turk to scrape the Internet for content which he then monetized at a large scale.

What he did was illegal, but not necessary wrong.

If you think Kim was in the right, then why not Amazon? your cable company? Why does Valve even bother paying Bethesda a share? Etc. File sharing is highly tolerable as a small enterprise, even if it is aggregately large; it's not tolerable as a highly profitable business model.

I see it as increasing efficiency, but others see it as stealing.
Felt some hate, mostly because I just threw some numbers and did not mention how the app is actually run/built. Really don't know how on earth you can criticize an app you have no idea how it's built (just by numbers!?!?). Show me your code and I will point "common design problems" as well.

I don't agree with the author. If you are really interested in this, I gave a very small talk about our app last year (Railsconf 2011 - Bohconf). If you want to talk about it, just find me at Railsconf 2012. (
Blitz.io: New Relic as an Analytics plugin
I agree the premise is false also, but it doesn't need to be 33 unique bits either. The combination of the bits has to be unique and that is not something easily provable unless you know the entire dataset, so the premise is just kind of irrelevant to reality I think. They do this same kind of thing on crime shows all the time. He has a blue truck and a mustache. How many people with that description live in lower queens? "13 sir."
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> Do you know any good library?

I've never worked on a product where timekeeping was essential, but if I did, I'd probably use libtai[1], by DJB.

[1] http://cr.yp.to/libtai.html
And a Rumblefish employee (Lead Architect actually).

They at least appear to be answering questions, that's a start.

Edit: apparently an AmA on Reddit too. From http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3640452

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/q7via/im_the_ceo_of_ru...
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Partially to spur conversation and partially because I don't remember the details of previous discussions, does ITA still use LISP?
How to drive your users up a wall by being nice (HN Search)
SEEKING WORK
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This is a well-known technology :-) See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystroke_dynamics

In the research community it's a proven and accepted concept. There are products in the market that do two-factor authentication based on password + keystroke dynamics, but I don't know how well they work.
The problem is that not everyone works at a startup, armed with a credit card.

If you sell to the Fortune 500 or government, a procurement officer does the purchase. The procurement guy's purpose in life is to extract discounts. With government, it's even worse, as you have GSA and State contracts with published price lists.

There's also legal complications. If a vendor gives a discount to one government entity, all government entities qualify for that price by law.
> VIPR teams which count TSOs among their ranks, conduct searches and screenings at train stations, subways, ferry terminals and every other mass transit location around the country. In fact, as the Los Angeles Times has detailed, VIPR teams conducted 9,300 unannounced checkpoints and other search operations in the last year alone. The very thought of federal employees with zero law enforcement training roaming across our nation’s transportation infrastructure with the hope of randomly thwarting a domestic terrorist attack makes about as much sense as EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s Environmental Justice tour.
Finding a technical co-founder: You're doing it wrong.
The author seems to be talking about this submission:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3644751

It got a couple hundred visits from HN and, if I've found the correct submission, no votes or comments - so he's assuming there was an active discussion and it was removed and buried because of the content.

There's a simpler explanation, of course.
Looks like you still have some bugs:

rewritten data: 1 0 2 3 0 3
first row : 0 0 1 1 0 1
group a : 1 0 1
group b : 2 2 3

Group a and group b don't seem to match up with the data. Or I've misunderstood something.
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Isn't the answer always 42?
To me... Reading any fiction at all like this, seems ridiculous. I'm not reading stories with the intention of learning the plot as quickly as possible.. Or else I'd just look up a summary online.

I gave up on speed reading because I didn't see the point. My reading of most technical texts is more limited by the speed of my understanding than my actual reading speed.

Am I looking at it the wrong way? Is it actually a skill I should try and master?
Precisely. The good people tend to be a silent constituency because they have better things to do than carry the "humble Rails developers exist" banner through the average discussion thread.

HN seems to link to a lot of these blogs where the author breathlessly shares some sophomoric musing demonstrating more arrogance than insight. A few people with nothing better to do post critical comments while dozens of others cheer "right on, I'm liquidating my savings to do my <adjective> start-up too, stay strong brother". The rest of us have just finished our coffee and have work to do today.
Even obscure languages that suck may well have a more talented "average programmer" than those which don't. The best programmers are those who learn new languages because they want to, so a language that isn't useful for passing a degree or getting a job will always have a higher average talent level than java et al. Even your reducto ad absurdum doesn't really work - a programmer who invented a language themselves is probably better than the average java/.net programmer, even if that language itself is terrible.
WebRTC is a w3c standard - it's part of HTML 5 - so getting browsers to support it isn't going to be as big of a problem as you suspect.

Browsers today (even with HTML5) are mainly consumers of media. There's great ways to get audio and video to a browser, but no capabilities for getting access to a user's microphone and camera and no way of sending media from a browser to elsewhere. WebRTC fixes that.

A phone call has two halves, there's the signaling (where does this call go to, is it still active, did the other party hang up, etc) and the audio (the "media" in telecom parlance). What Phono is doing in this demo is connecting the media and the signaling from an early WebRTC implementation to the public phone network. Using the audio capture from the browser and letting you make and receive real phone calls with it.
To be fair, I don't know if this is HN Search's fault, or the fault of some of their underlying technology. It's been driving me absolutely crazy though.
Destroying the results of a genetic program that's reached an optima after hundreds of millions of years seems like an incredible waste of biological knowledge.

When we can duplicate those results in an hour on a desktop PC, I'll agree with you. I'm not holding my breath.
I had never heard that term before you introduced me to it a couple of weeks ago, but that was the first word that popped into my mind when I opened the article.
ResearchGate recieves series B funding from big names
Any HN'ers in Sydney with a spare Yacht want to go check out Ball's pyramid? I'll cook. :-)
Why Windows 8 will suck
See <strike>comment #12</strike> the comment posted at February 12, 2010 at 5:15 am in the blog post.* The term entropy refers to uniqueness.

As for the development of algorithms to gather those bits, that's what my entire Ph.D. is about and what my blog is mostly about. This is what I've been proving for the last 6 years.

*Just realized comment numbers are unstable. Bad wordpress.
They still list LISP in the job description for ITA.
Thanks! I was sure it must have been called something!
Just check the yacht for rats first...
I think this should be modified to say "Doing the right thing, period."

Doing whatever your customer says 100% of the time isn't good practice, as it inevitably results in bloated products.

The key is to always _listen_ to your customer, considering their opinion, but selectively act on their feedback.
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Dart will most likely join Wave, followed by Go.
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Caching Magnets with Clojure 1.3
Just out of curiosity, have you ever actually been a software developer at a place where someone you worked with was fired on a regular basis?

Have you ever been a team manager where you'd get an email from the higher-ups saying "give me someone's head" on a regular basis?
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> This is probably because you didn't think out the various trade-offs and design decisions

I did, I just didn't want to write too many reasons, just a short rant...

> It's not a constant.

A variable that can only be assigned when it is declared, is not a constant? I think there's a fundamental disagreement in our life philosophies that can not be resolved through debate... ;)

> string values are immutable, they can't be concatenated without lots of allocations

A much more elegant approach that solves most string concatenation problems is string interpolation, which Dart has. There are legitimate uses of StringBuffer, but I'm not sure why they need to mention it in a Language Tutorial.

However, my real complaint is not that. They took the time to put int and double under a common interface, num. So, why not put concrete string and StringBuffer under a common interface, called string, and also have StringBuffer implement a monoid interface (for the + and * operations).

Edit: I hope this doesn't come off as rude. Just tried to clarify my original points.
It does apparently have a bit of a rat problem, though.
While I agree that the real difficulty is getting consistent adoption, such first steps are extremely important. If no one takes these steps, such technologies as WebRTC will never get proper adoption. Features with such technologies will not be revenue drives, but you get media exposure and also can give yourself a pat on the back for doing the right thing.
What resources? Are you suggesting we should force entomologists to attend medical school or whatever you're on about instead? Are you sure social programs of that sort wouldn't decrease the quality of human life anyway? Have you given any of this any thought? Do you give anything any thought, or do you just drift through life as a collection of anthropomorphized knee-jerk reactions?
LOL, thank you!

Truth be told, however, I don't lose a lot of sleep over downvotes -- be they accidental or intentional. Life's too short. Also, I'm of the (perhaps slightly perverse) opinion that I'm not being interesting if I'm not getting at least a few downvotes every now and then.
Why do you believe that ONE human life is more important than the extinction of an entire species?