skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I spun the JSON decoding off into a few goroutines and managed to get it down to ~1second (but it was out of order, so didn't quite solve the same problem - though this is fixable). This is was ~10 lines of Go (and only using a single core).
It's important to understand the context of this post. Adeo said it was an email to their startups which they decided to publish.

It's a pep talk to people who've already or are on the brink of taking the leap. In that light it's entirely applicable. It's not speaking against sane business models it's about use this as an opportunity to dig in and kick ass.

It doesn't matter how you get to "kick ass" ... as long as you get there.
Would this be China Unicom or China Telecom, or both?
Get Top Sellers Music Department 12 april 2012
This article is silly.

If you want to write only text, use a text editor.

If you want a publishing tool, use Word or Pages or whatever.
Newton returned home (from Cambridge University) due to plague outbreak. If this occurred in modern times, he'd have University-granted access to all the top journals in whatever field he wanted via the web -- not just access to the selection of books he brought with him.

The doom-and-gloom about modern times is unnecessary. Where there is a will, intelligent minds will find a way. Hell... a motivated high-schooler can moonlight in a grad school lab and (pretty much) any of us would dole out authentication credentials for him to download whatever papers he'd like...
Too bad you can't use this technology to implement an ISP-free Internet. Or... is it possible to have more than two particles entangled?
Absolutely.

Just read the blog for the Social Fixer extension (formerly known as Better Facebook). http://socialfixer.com/blog/

It is amazing how much work he has done as a single person to add new UI features and remove features people don't like while keeping up with the front end changes made by an entire team. You can see from the blog that these changes happen fairly frequently.
I've been using MS word for at least 15 years - but 99% of the time when crafting documents, I do not use MS-Word. Much of the time I simply use my web browser (as I am now.) A lot of the time I use mail.app.

For the 3-5 pages of notes, I switch to textedit - which I love, and is awesome but does have a bad habit of steadily increasing the number of open documents I have (Quitting doesn't close them - next time you restart they all come back - I understand why, but it doesn't change the fact that I have to, about once a week, manually do some garbage-collection to keep the number of open docs down to a reasonable number)

But - when I'm putting together a 50-100 page technical specification, in which I'm embedding PDFs, figures, captions, cleaver headers/footers, carefully watermarked "DRAFT", Auto-updating table of contents, section breaks for multi-column sections, nicely crafted tables, and, most important of all for me - the ability to send this 75 page document to six reviewers, and get their comments nicely organized in electronic accept/reject mode - I am happy that MS Word is available during that 1% of my workflow.

I agree with the author for the other 99% though. Text, or one of its markdown variants is a helluva lot more 2012 friendly.
From what I understand, the copy command will put some content into clipboard, then the paste command can be programmed to read that content and print or convert it accordingly.

For example, if I copy some content with formatting from Word and paste it into Google Docs it will try to preserve the format. Is that expected behavior? I dont know, but that's how it's designed and I think that makes a lot of sense. If I have a table in Word why shouldn't I be able to copy that to Google Docs?

I dont know enough about the clipboard programming to know if the program that calls copy can determine what comes out based on the paste program.

Also, I think the garbage formatting lines in that article will never be shown to the user. That will only be shown if you try to look at the formatting directly or if you're reading the HTML.
Part of this would have to do with the fact that mail servers are never really updated with new "features."

- Sendmail was first released in 1983 initially.
- Postfix was released in 1997 initially.

Though both are getting maintenance updates, and new processing features, none have improved the actual error path system. Maybe someone should write a better MTA?
> So there's one industry that's keeping it. Any others actually NEED Word's advanced functionality?
Not being facetious, let's name em.

In the Engineering/Consulting industry we use it often to collaborate on proposals, reports and other documents. Key clients - many of them utilities or energy companies - also prefer Word documents and use Track Changes.

It's very hard to move away from that momentum, partly because you can't use another tool and just export to .doc/.docx due to the format being so arcane.

For what it's worth though, Track Changes is what Word does pretty well. I rarely use it outside of work though, preferring something like Byword on my Mac or just TextEdit.
Ask HN: Need a serious iOS app tester and their friends
Hi,

We are having trouble finding a serious tester for an iOS app that we are building. It is called Reminders With Friends.

Ideally we are looking for one tester who has a good friend who would also like to test with them since this app works best with someone else to test all the features.

Thanks

Sunny

email us at:
support@slyceapps.com

www.slyceapps.com
Member of Parliament or MP for short. Also, MPPs (Member of Provincial Parliament) could probably help here too.
CloudFlare - Introducing: I'm Under Attack Mode
A simple Android game a Friend built.  What do you think?
A friend of mine threw this together (HA! 160+ hours). What do you think?
Based on the level of detail mentioned in the OP, it's pretty clear the author is Canadian.
In some cases (like the state office I work at), Libre Office track changes would be fine. We aren't all doing legal negotiating with counterparties (MS Office power users! I am super impressed!)
That is strictly true, but I've possibly found a way around this and have posted a CC licensed version (the most open I was able to find) on GitHub accordingly. https://github.com/joahua/AusPostcode
> And, of course, emailing or establishing contact first is
> pretty much never a bad thing. Well, as long as one follows
> through with what they say they're going to do.

There's the implicit engineering problem right there! You've always do a bit of implementation/thinkening before even going that far. Don't want to be the Flakey Sir Promise-A-Lot, do you? But of course it is sometimes hard to draw the line if it's a reasonably interesting problem ... and that's where hearts get broken and egos get bruised.
I don't know about Google docs per se, but most rich text editors produce horribly broken results when Word's "HTML" is pasted in. Many of them have add-ons or special procedures to attempt to clean up the mess, but it's an iffy proposition at best.
Unlike the States, Canada does not have a cash-in-cash-out system for our version of Social Security, so many debt to gdp figures you look up online are very, very misleading since we will be in much better shape when the baby boomers retire.
are you still there?
How is German a particularly difficult language? It's relatively simple and very similar to English - some things are more complicated, some are simpler, but as mhd says it's a moot point due to local translation skills, etc.

I think he's on the right track actually - in Australia it's a similar scene, whereby local 'copycats' get in first and steal the market share, simply because the US companies are focusing on their local market first.

In some cases they have consolidated their position and are still the market leader despite the US originator moving into the Australian market (e.g. Scoopon vs Groupon) but in other cases the US company destroyed the local one (e.g. eBay, which had quite a battle on their hands to win the auction market here, but eventually prevailed - I can't even remember who the other people were now!)

Also I'm not even sure there's really a significant 'cultural divide' between Germany and the US anyway. US culture flourishes there.
Having someone to bounce ideas off of and just brainstorm with is pretty useful. I like to be like Einstein and have little thought experiments going on in my head about every product or idea I come across.
i'm switching as many clients as possible away from Word to google docs where it is possible and makes sense. just yesterday i had a client ask me for some software to write and submit docs on a Mac notebook for her online classes. it took 3 minutes to set her up with gmail and google docs and show her how to share.

the interface is clean, no ribbon shit, nothing extra. it's cloud wordpad++. it's inherently cross-platform and free.

there is a place for word, but that place is small in today's world, and even smaller for the asking price.

the versioned editing is useful. but i'm fairly confident there is an automatically git-backed revision/collab cloud editor out there...the name escapes me.
Goldman might argue that, were their trade secrets lost, they'd have to shut down their HFT, which would negatively effect the economy.

Until someone rightly points out that it would actually benefit the economy, were they forced to shut it down.
There are many free tools that do this for me automatically while I code. From your website I can't tell why yours is better, or even if it is better. Care to expand?
The usual benchmark complaints: You're not really comparing language performance, because the Python version is using an optimized C library.

But isn't that the deeper point?

Program in something that lets you optimize easily (or use optimized libraries easily). That's a significant, real-world performance advantage.

While it is a virtual certainty that Go will get a fast JSON library, Python's broad, mature library support is very helpful.
How does that explain the four "current" versions, then?
Need to clean up shitty Word generated html? Just use ckeditor online
go to http://ckeditor.com/demo

- copy text from word
- paste into ckeditor using the paste from word button
- convert bolded text to actual h1's or whatever else needs to be done to make sane html
- copy and paste from the source view
- done!

so much better than Dreamweaver!
True. But Word has a much larger installed base than any of the real desktop publishing tools you mentioned, or any proper web page editing tool. Every new PC nowadays includes Starter editions of Word and Excel. Word also happens to be capable of doing some of the things that these more specialized tools do, albeit rather badly. Meanwhile, people don't like to learn new tools. So it should come as no surprise that everyone just uses Word for everything. The result? Wrong tool for the job.

But I'm not sure if I agree with OP's idea that Word is becoming obsolete. Maybe it's not very useful for technically oriented people, but we still have a long way to go before printing becomes obsolete, if it ever does. Even Google Docs shows page outlines by default, as if the document were meant to be printed on Letter-sized paper. Which means the best that we can hope for, for the foreseeable future, is that people will use the right tool for the job. [edited]
A friend of mine threw this together (HA! 160+ hours). What do you think?
Yesterday Wired was saying that it's not a bubble.
Short answer: No and I don't think so, respecitevely. (though there are lots of C#-based boards running the .NET Micro Framework if you bend that way.)

EDIT: Oh, just remembered you can program Lego Mindstorm in Java. Although I don't know how user-friendly that environment actually is, it's not the one Mindstorm comes with.

Long answer: The C++ dialect you use when getting started on Arduino is fairly short on C++-isms and is designed to be simple, straightforward and familiar for people who used the Java-based Processing framework.

So it wouldn't be a big stretch. At a guess I would even say Arduino is very much simpler than Java for a total beginner, talking in terms of number of concepts required to build something simple but useful.
You are confusing what users should do with what they actually do.
Adidas Clothing | Buy Discount Adidas Clothing Jackets, Bags & Hoodies
Unfortunately the initial entangling still requires physical contact (provided by proxy of the photon on the optical fibre in this case).

Further more, once entangled, it is still not possible to transmit information (in the way we think of it every day) faster than the speed of light. This would break causality as we understand it.

What quantum teleportation allows is the instantaneous transmission of quantum information between the entangled particles. I.e. the superposition of all possible states can be made the same at both ends. However it is still not possible to know which of these states actually represent the classical information we were interested in. Hence classical information can't go as fast as quantum information.

This is as best I understand it though it would be nice have get an expert to further expand on this.
easy way to clean up word html (ckeditor) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3831069
Mba Program
The University of Tennessee MBA Full-Time MBA Program. The University of Tennessee, Knoxville was founded in 1794 and was designated the state land-grant institution in 1879. The University now has nearly 26,000 students and 400 academic programs.
Coroutines and fibers in general, regardless of the language avoid the "pyramid callback" that can - depending on the developer - in spaghetti code.

Lua on its own right, is a bit special. Fast, small, easy syntax - almost similar to Javascript when you think about it. However, "Coroutines in Lua are not operating system threads or processes. Coroutines are blocks of Lua code which are created within Lua, and have their own flow of control like threads. Only one coroutine ever runs at a time, and it runs until it activates another coroutine, or yields (returns to the coroutine that invoked it). Coroutines are a way to express multiple cooperating threads of control in a convenient and natural way, but do not execute in parallel, and thus gain no performance benefit from multiple CPU's. However, since coroutines switch much faster than operating system threads and do not typically require complex and sometimes expensive locking mechanisms, using coroutines is typically faster than the equivalent program using full OS threads."
Canada creates glow-in-the-dark dinosaur coin
"Death to Allegra Geller!"
I think you mean to say that Kernel doesn't need to implement macros because they can be built using $vau.

---

Besides that, I think you're overstating its significance.

a) Maxwell's equations don't claim to be 'most fundamental'. They are a concise basis set for a space of problems. They occupy a memetic sweet spot; abstractions both above and below them are more verbose. The metacircular interpreter of Kernel can't compete with McCarthy's version.

b) Any language with fexprs is 'as fundamental' as Kernel. Including LISP 1.

c) In its search for hygiene Kernel eliminates quote. Scheme folks will likely find this a useful tradeoff, while common lisp folks with their backquoted macros will shudder. In kernel you 'create macros' by explicitly consing code.
Expected an article about Nikon hardware, but still enjoyed it.

The author has a lot of neat looking posts, I recommend giving them a look.
Hosting your Jekyll website on GitHub pages
Hehe.. Yes. Trying to trace packets to see where they get lost
It is explained that there is a photon traveling from one atom (node) to another which encodes information (as quantum state of the atom). Ok.

But then there is a glossing over of what I think is the more impressive part:

"The group also was able to entangle the atoms, which allowed them to share information with each other no matter how far the distance between them. "

So they go from wired-up 60m distance photon information transmission to infinite distance quantum entanglement information transmission. In one sentence. Without any details!

Over what distance did they test this entanglement? Was it as reliable as the wired-up version? Were they able to repeat it under different conditions? Is there a reason they were limited to only two nodes?
A living robot who smiles, sings like a girl
Instagram is an exceptional product built with significant restraint and focus. It took them over a year and a half to release an Android app, because they were focused on what matters. This is exceedingly rare, as most teams would end up shortsightedly chasing the last few percent of users. Your assumption that the Instagram team has some above average connections in the valley is also baseless.

Make your own luck.
"... but we still have a long way to go before printing becomes obsolete, if it ever does." Seen @bubbles?

[Disclosure: I am working on this :)]
I really like mine as well, but for most people it's probably not the best streaming box on the market. I also have a Boxee for the codecs AppleTV doesn't support, and when I bought a streamer for my inlaws as a Christmas gift the Boxee is what I got them. It even does Airplay in the latest firmware.
Interested to see how they'll handle file uploads, authentication, etc. Especially authentication, seeing as clients have full access to the database right now.
The clone costs nothing, uses open file formats, and is more friendly for certain things like editing CSV files in a spreadsheet.
Tech Insight Magazine: HOW TO: Track Your Samsung Android Phone When Lost
There's a really good reason why an API should be written (like REST API for example) between the client and the server, and that the client should not be exposed to the internal workings of the database for many reasons.

The API should be carefully programmed and kept abstract from the database, which might be one day changed completely. To keep the user interface agnostic, it should not be aware of how the database works.

Also, this is a recipe for mistakes, since giving the client direct access to the database (even if it is secured) raises questions about the data integrity and data protection. It is much more prone to abuse that way.

I'd love to see a CAPTCHA signup implementation with meteor.
Is Astrology really helpful?
With the increasing competition, the demand for astrology predictions is also increasing! This had let most of the people get dependent upon Astrology science. If you are also interested in same then look here and know how you can be benefited with the same.
Well, the U.S. just cut off Library Genesis (gen.lib.rus.ec), the presumably-unauthorized archive of math/science ebooks. It works great from European proxies, but not from here.

(My point is that if they tell you you're getting unfiltered Internet in the U.S., they're lying.)
I just think he was faking it by using "tonne" instead of "ton".
New Hyundai i20 VS New Maruti Suzuki Swift – Style Tussle (Expert Review)
With the Hyundai i-Gen i20 unleashed last month, the premium hatchback war in the Indian auto market has just intensified. First it was only among Hyundai i20 and Maruti Swift but with Ford Figo coming into play the game has completely changed. And in the mean time, Hyundai launched the refreshed version of i20 which is certain to throttle its sales giving Maruti Swift a kind of stare. Contrarily, the Indian giant Maruti is enjoying the top position in premium hatch segment with its new Swift and the difference between no. 1 and no. 2 position is shrinking with new i20’s entry. The compare also includes new Hyundai i20 diesel vs new Swift diesel....
This comment will probably get buried and no-one cares, but...

OSM, although a great force for good in the mapping world, is not in its current state a viable competitor to Google Maps and other paid datasets.

You need to start driving around, using LIDAR, and create a massive parcel / address database to really do it right.

You need photos, from the street and from the air. For OSM to really fly we need to see open source hardware combining photography, GPS, LIDAR, that folks can strap to their cars or fly from RC planes or balloons or kites.

Geocoding needs to actually work, worldwide. That's incredibly hard. Its so much more than the visual maps.

Just pointing this all out, since everyone seems to gloss over the fact that Google Maps has a massive monopoly in this area right now.
Ugh, I didn't even consider that a (partly) client side framework would have been GPL. Unless they come out with a very clear, simple and friendly commercial license it pretty much kills meteor for all practical purposes.

(To be clear, it's not that I begrudge the author's their right to license it how they want. I simply think frameworks like this are too central and important to have any uncertainty about licensing associated with them.)
Walkie Talkie App Voxer Goes Big, IVP And Intel Lead $30 Million Round
The article may be misleading to those not familiar with quantum teleportation. It doesn't have anything to do with instant messages across the galaxy.

"That means it would be possible to build a network of 'quantum repeaters' that use quantum teleportation, rather than photons, to transmit information between different places."

You cannot convey information over distance faster than light using quantum teleportation. You simply ensure that both entangled atoms' wave functions will collapse in a way that's correlated.

Wikipedia has a nice explanation: "Assume that Alice and Bob share an entangled qubit ab. That is, Alice has one half, a, and Bob has the other half, b. Let c denote the qubit Alice wishes to transmit to Bob.
Alice applies a unitary operation on the qubits ac and measures the result to obtain two classical bits. In this process, the two qubits are destroyed. Bob's qubit, b, now contains information about c; however, the information is somewhat randomized. More specifically, Bob's qubit b is in one of four states uniformly chosen at random and Bob cannot obtain any information about c from his qubit.
Alice provides her two measured classical bits, which indicate which of the four states Bob possesses. Bob applies a unitary transformation which depends on the classical bits he obtains from Alice, transforming his qubit into an identical re-creation of the qubit c."

What's cool about this experiment is that it shows you can transmit a qubit's state over distance in a quantum way, which could be useful for a network of quantum computers, which themselves are only useful for a small subset of problems--most involving cryptography. The quantum-repeater application may also be useful in reducing packet-loss-induced error, though it seems to be an incredibly impractical method of doing so for most applications.
After I hacked the Emotiv EPOC headset to get the raw EEG data out of it, lots of people referred to me as a pirate. However, I firmly believe that customers have the right to do with their property what they will, and I ended up writing this in response to all of it: http://daeken.com/the-hardware-hacker-manifesto
If you are going to say that my claims are baseless, please explain "... they focused on what matters.". What would that be exactly?

Significant restraint and focus? Please expand on what you also mean by this.

You're right on one point... They don't have above average connections. They have spectacular connections. Only the connections that being funded by Jack Dorsey, Sequoia, Benchmark, Andreessen Horowitz, etc. would provide.
LG Optimus 3D Max wages dual-core war in benchmark tests
The Future of CPUs: What's After Multi-Core?
Stanford CS276, "Intro to Information Retrieval," also covers most of the stuff you need to know. In spite of the cruftier name. The textbook is freely available:

http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/
I'd rather be $100 trillion in debt with a $1000 trillion economy than $10 million in debt with a $20 million economy. Your point is stupid.