skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Care to explain why you feel that way? It's a major feature from the dominant social network that could have consequences in the academic space. Personally, I'm curious what effect this could have on Blackboard if they continue to (re-)expand into .edu territory.
Blame the government. They are the gatekeepers that choose to allow this type of pollution.

It is Walmart – not the government – which pollutes in somebody else's garden. And North American consumers are certainly to blame as well for shopping at Walmart and thus contributing to increase its clout.

If consumers could see the details of the whole supply chain (from collecting the raw materials all the way to putting the product on the shelf), companies with no concerns other than maximizing profits – like Walmart – would lose their customers in no time.
Try zooming in on Russia, Alaska, Brazil, or Egypt and you find a lot of empty tiles. Still, if you can render the whole thing in 4 days I suspect caching what people actually look for would be good enough as people probably hit max zoom on manhattan 1000x as much as they do on some random village in the amazon. The advantage being you can just invalidate tiles as you get new information vs trying to render the whole thing every time you get new street data for Ohio.
Thanks for this great article.

Both this article and Effective A/B Testing (http://elem.com/~btilly/effective-ab-testing/ slide 51) say changing the proportions mid-test is bad. Can anyone elaborate on why this might be?

For example, if I'm randomly showing my existing landing page or a new landing page to visitors at a 2/3-1/3 split and measuring CTR to the signup page, and I change the proportion to 1/2-1/2, why would that skew results?
Instagram's business plan
Its saying dont use that particular password. Any attacker of this script would know what it was inspired by and attempt that password in a dictionary.

Rendering it about as useless as 123456789 in this instance
In Apple e-book suit, DOJ unearths paper trail 'to screw Amazon'
Flip side of the proposition: many geeks don't love Radiohead. No disrespect those who do, because everyone certainly has their own set of tastes. But the statement is just as false as claiming that geeks love Bach (I do, but you may not).
Green tea has a lot less caffeine than black tea.
Groklaw has been doing a fantastic job providing day-to-day details of the case. I strongly recommend reading there.
> damn - I can't test that easily - this code sucks

Depends on what you're doing. If you're writing a report that relies on a bunch of complex datasets, then it's a pain in the ass to generate said datasets, and calculate the expected result, but the test itself is fairly simple.
What are the dimensions?
Can you add a picture on a female wrist?
>I predicated my assertion on bounded memory, hence n is constant. Therefore O(log n) means that the operation is bounded in time by k log n. But since n is also a constant, this is equal to some other constant k'. This is equivalent to saying that the operation is bounded by O(1).

You're fundamentally misunderstanding what big-O notation means. You cannot say that since n has an upper limit, everything is constant. By your argument, the actual speed of an algorithm doesn't matter, period, since the sample size is bounded, which means that everything evaluates to a constant.

That's wrong.

Big-O notation is used to give a ballpark estimate of an algorithm's efficiency. In this case, the metric being used is the number of data fetches the CPU needs to get to the specific location that it's looking for.

O(1) means that the number of possible CPU instructions is constant, no matter how large n is. So a static array lookup is O(1) because, no matter how large N is, the CPU only has to do a fetch. That's 1 instruction, and while the actual time is variable due to cache misses, the total number of instructions is constant.

O(log n) means that it will take log n operations to get the result. Binary trees are a great example. Assuming a perfectly balanced BST, the worst possible number of lookups(i.e. to the farthest leaf) will be log n different fetches. If you have a system that creates 127 buckets, the worst possible number of lookup operations is 7, which is log base 2 of 128.
I'm obviously a bit biased but this is an excellent article, detailed, well articulated and actually speaks to the personal experience of the writer.
I am going to be so angry if[0] this makes web devs start designing for grids that have to be 1300px wide to work. I don't fullscreen anything (too wide for the height, and too wide for the font size!), and while the majority of webpages look just fine in a ~600px wide browser window, possibly after right-scrolling to put the content column in the window, rarely does a day go by that I don't have to tear off a tab and widen it---not to make it look good, but to make it usable at all. Like that crappy Bump page posted here earlier today: if you view it in a narrow window, even if you right-scroll the window the content is sliced at window-width, with the page absolutely unusable at anything less than my full screen width. I don't know if there's anyone out there still on an 800x600 resolution, but there's a significant portion of the web that they actually can't use in any way. It doesn't have to be that way!

[0]Realistically, I know it's "when", but I'll stick with the denial a little longer.
"Of course it is. So what?"

Not sure I can answer a question like that. But from reading the comments here I'm not sure everybody notices the publicity angle which drove bringing attention to this because a filmaker saw an opportunity.

What he is doing isn't that spectacular. The quality of seems about average for his age and probably wouldn't win any awards in an elementary school fair or anything. (I'm somewhat familiar with what kids this age produce and this really isn't all that great.) The father didn't appear to put in any effort to helping him understand how to put a little more quality in the construction (which is of course different from building it for him).

By "this guy" who are you referring to? The boy or the film producer?

"This guy put in a lot of work, he deserves it."

I'll assume by "this guy" you mean the boy. So you think that this is worthy of all the donations he is getting to pay for his college? He is getting the donations as a result of a random meeting with the film maker.
> As for how it affects the question of imperative vs. functional data structure performance, it should tend to favor the imperative ones. The issue is that purely functional data structures aren't allowed to just grab a block of memory all at once and insert data into it at leisure. (That would be a form of mutation.) Instead space has to be allocated as it is needed, in a piecemeal fashion. As a result, longer-lived and more active purely functional data structures will tend to scatter across the heap over time.

It's a bit more complicated than that. To talk about runtime (and memory) of an algorithm or a data structure, you need to have a machine model. If you look at what happens in, say, Haskell: We write our algorithms in a purely functional way, but we are interested in their runtime after compilation into native code. The compiler is free to do any transformation that preserves correctness, so if it's smart enough, it might grab a block of memory all at once. Or if it can prove that data won't be used again, it can safely change variables in place. (The language Clean even has type system support for that kind of mutation. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_type_system))

You might be able to analyse functional algorithms with a machine model that doesn't involve compilation to some form of imperative code. Perhaps by counting reductions in lambda calculus. But then it's hard to compare that to asymptotic performance of imperative algorithms.
The Difference between Leaders and Followers GBWG
From the article: "In order to confirm that July 1 advances by one day in a non-leap year and two days in a leap year I had to look at the actual calendar. There I discovered that the premise of the email was wrong. July 1st doesn’t fall on a Friday this year."
As for the fallout, Polls was down throughout this episode. Because it spread virally by posting people's votes to their newsfeed, the three or four days of down time halted all growth. Traffic dropped to nothing and never recovered.

This is really interesting. It makes sense the way you described it, but I didn't realize how fragile growth can be.
So much for "any press is good press."
1) If you typed it once, and it didn't work, and you typed it again "exactly" the same way, and it worked, then you didn't type it exactly the same way both times.
2) I actually agree that CoffeeScript is pointless. But not for the same reasons as you. You see, I'm a good programmer.
Sanitary Landfill Design for Long Term Performance (1.2 CEUs)
These Groups at school was the original purpose of facebook!
Relevant: https://twitter.com/#!/hugsformonsters/status/19015129652174...
http://justquillin.com/
I just finished this course. I started learning programming in January.

It struck a very good balance between being accessible to beginners yet still teaching substantive knowledge. Beginners can learn quite a bit; if they put in the effort to keep up and make sure they truly understand the concepts.

The format was excellent. Lessons were broken down into short 3-5 minute videos. Quizzes were frequent and confirmed understanding of the concepts.

I personally hate learning with videos. Fortunately, they included detailed course notes with each lesson, so I could read through those quickly when I needed to review.

Finally, each unit came with homework questions, which were graded. Some were quite easy, but others really made you think (there were some forum complaints about this).

As a programming newbie, I learned a lot in seven weeks. I'm looking forward to their new higher level courses.

Having a CS 101 entry point for beginners is really important, and Udacity did a good job with theirs.
IT jobs in Malaysia and Singapore for Americans?
Anyone know how tough it is for Americans to find technical jobs in Malaysia and Singapore? Are the locals there heavily preferred over Americans so that Americans can only get hired if they have a rare skill that the locals don't have? I figured it would be easier at those countries than the NE Asian countries since they speak English.
Use of trademarks in Adwords backfires on Google
I have found that heavy use of mocking tools couples tests tightly to the design, resulting in great difficulty when I need to redactor. To me, the ideal is that I can change my design as I see fit without difficulty. My tests specify what my application does - how it behaves, not how it is structured. In my experience, this entails minimizing the number of points where tests touch production code, i.e. keeping the test suite DRY.

I do use test doubles, including mocks, where things become difficult or slow to test (generally application boundaries). But keep in mind that every line of mocking code costs more than an equivalent line of the alternative.
Meteor - a realtime javascript framework
You missed the ':)' ;)
WTF? How did this bizarre resolution even become an accepted "standard"? It emerged with plasma TVs of five years ago or so, and was baffling then. After that, it started showing up on netbooks. Now it's the most common?
I assume the decrease in crime has a lot of factors. But, can't the decline of violent crime be partly explained by more people being kept in prison?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/US_incarc...

If criminals are kept in jail longer, they can commit fewer crimes against the public.
Good idea. I did a similar website in a weekend using opentok API : http://bit.ly/IScw8F .

It was cool to use the website with family and friends since every one was using different services like MSN and yahoo chat. But i had issues with opentok coz it uses Flash p2p which was causing a lot of issues even when it was running on Chrome.
Any thing you define life in terms of is a fundamental error. There is no meaning except that which you make for yourself. You can define it in terms of what to be, or what to do. If you define it in terms of what to do, life loses meaning once you run out of things to do. If you define it in terms of what to be, you end up in an ego contest with anyone else who wants to be the same thing, and life loses meaning once you become "common".

Religion dodges the issue by presenting goals that cannot be reached, which I think is a fair compromise for most people.
Linux Users Beware: Patch New Samba Flaw 'Immediately'
This is exactly the type of thing that would end up on HN. The kid has both the hacker and entrepreneurship spirit in him and that's exactly what this site is all about.
Similar here at University of Washington. I am an administrator for the (now unofficial) Class of 2015 group and when they announced this on our campus a few weeks back people were denigrating it for that, among other things.
Why didn't you tell me you hated my Lisp tips! :(
2027 for IE13 to support it. Perhaps we've learned to hold our breath for too long...
I learned a lot about this from Edward Z. Yang's blog:

http://blog.ezyang.com/2011/06/pinpointing-space-leaks-in-bi...

http://blog.ezyang.com/2011/04/the-haskell-heap/
This is the mail system
What? If the people who publish user generated content (e.g. Google, Facebook, etc) are responsible for what their users say, then the internet as we know it is over. There are thousands of comments on Reddit, Facebook, et. al. that could be considered threatening or libelous defamation of character, but Reddit is not responsible for that. If they were, the very fabric of free speech on the internet would decay, as any user made comment could bring on a lawsuit.
Transposing on a guitar is trivial, it's not like piano where changing keys changes fingering. On a guitar, you can just move to a new position and play the same fingerings, bam new key.
Not to mention that everything people watch on these TVs is compressed to into a mottled pastiche of crap. You're not even getting 720P's worth of resolution on your "1080P" set while watching your 5-mbps "HD".
It's completely off topic, but the .aspx extension on the URL is much more interesting than the announcement itself.
The new Instagram millionaires including the designer who joined three weeks ago
> There ought to be a an energy label for algorithms :)

There should be carbon footprint metric for their implementation as well.

;)
Sorry, I don't. I only presented it once, and that session was not recorded.
I agree.

> 2) there will always be software (video encoders, HPC stuff) that will always be done in Fortran/C :D

Alas, yes. But there are efforts underway to challenge that. Theoretically, your compiler should be able to do a better job, if it knows more about your intent. I'm learning about some techniques for really high performance Haskell. E.g.:

* Iteratee/Enumeratee: http://okmij.org/ftp/Streams.html

* Stream fusion: https://donsbot.wordpress.com/2008/06/04/haskell-as-fast-as-...

The C equivalent of stream fusion would be loop fusion: if you have to for loops one after another iterating over the same array, you could fuse them into one loop. That same trick works in Haskell, even more often and with more benefits.
> Your momentum gone, you blinked at the screen and went to the water cooler. It would be hours (maybe days) before you got back into that kind of zone...

Do people really have this problem?
You're right that it's supposed to be the absolute upper bound. From a purely mathematical perspective, I agree completely. I wish I could edit my post to say:

>By definition, a O(log n) structure takes, for most inputs, no more than log n operations to get to the node you want to get to.

However, from a CS perspective, I still think that it's important to stress that the inputs do matter.

Big-O is not intended to be a worst-case analysis on running time. There are a lot of assumptions that go into the analysis on the inputs.

For example, it's generally accepted that binary search tree lookup is O(log n). However, if you have a very badly unbalanced tree, the lookup time could be O(n).
Try this instead:
https://github.com/mikemaccana/japanese_mayonnaise
Facebook debuts "Groups for Schools," includes 25mb filesharing function
What do Instagram and OpenPhoto have in common? Ubuntu
It's certainly possible, but even Google isn't doing it without help from the GPU (see WebGL maps).

For a real world implementation of rendering in <canvas>, see Kothic.js: http://kothic.org/js/

My version of Chrome on a high end MacBook Pro renders those tiles in ~350ms each.
"More than 170 million people have upgraded to Google+"

Seems to me that continuing to count everyone who gets an Android phone or signs up for Gmail as a G+ user just invites people to pile on and point out how underwhelming G+'s userbase has been to date.

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=Google%20Plus%2CPin...
No, I meant "he" as in the subject of your post - the filmaker.

I find it a bit odd that you, I assume an adult, are saying things like "what he is doing isn't that spectacular" in regards to a nine year old boy.

I don't get why you have so much cynicism toward a nine year old boy but it is not my place to challenge your view.

Simply put, this boy is very creative; that it's relative to some arbitrary set standard threshold level of creativeness does NOT matter to me, I don't care - he's creative. As an adult, I feel it part of my responsibility, and part of the greatness of being a Good human being, to cultivate young minds.

This is what I got from the film - I think it's great. I think this kid is great (again why does his greatness have to be relative to "other kid's greatness") and I think the filmaker put in a lot of work to create value for all involved.

Beautiful story, it brightened up my day, I'm happy. =D
Think coffee helps stimulate you? Think again.
I encounter many people who do not see the point in learning math. They're the same people who get taken for a ride regularly when they finance a purchase, deal with contractors, plan their investments, get rooked on their credit card fees, etc. And they rarely realize what has happened to them.

It's expensive to not know math.
I see your point, but it's the same point that every other pro-PHP person has made. PHP lets you get stuff done fast... but in a few weeks (or even days depending on the person) Python and Ruby will have overtaken you, because all of the tutorials out there teach you to build a giant pile of insecure spaghetti hacks.

PHP is a terrible language for a beginner to learn, because there's no rhyme or reason to most of the things that it does. Which leads to cargo cult programming and bad habits that take a long time to break.
Responsive design is what all us designers and front end coders should be focused on learning and using.

Check out the Starbucks website and manipulate the window size. It automatically changes stylesheets based on window size.
I think the OP wanted to highlight that people are consuming the OS (Android and iOS) and not the phone itself. That's why Samsung sales skyrocketed.
Yeah! I'd always wondered what that check-mark button on the calculator was for. :-)

On a related note, ever since I was a kid, every calculator I've ever encountered, I run the square root of 89, and if it returns 9.4339811(..32 on more powerful ones) and thereabouts, then I trust the calculator. Kids do weird stuff. Big kids continue it sometimes.
Actually, the question then becomes one of trading off sharing vs cache locality. To whit, for many functional languages, memory allocation is essentially just a pointer increment, so there is no a prior reason to not assume that a freshly allocated tree occupies a contiguous region of memory, or at least contiguoudly on each page where it's been allocated.

Claims about data structures in the context of how they're allocated in a modern machine architecture / memory model are not the same thing as claims regarding the semantics that are exposed to the user of a programming language.

I think you do raise an interesting question, namely what's the layout in memory of a tree like data structure in eg scheme or Haskell, when the tree is built from scratch, but also when updated and a garbage collection run has compacted the data. Oooo, I totally want to investigate this now! (I don't have the time to, but I totally want to.)

Point being, depending on the memory management semantics for heap data in a programming language, any claims about locslity happening for tree data may or may not happen.

This actually raises a really beautiful question: what is the complextity of any garbage collection algorithm that exactly or approximately maximizes the locality of tree or directed graph like data structures in memory? I want to speculate that perhaps the data structures which people find fast in practice are actually in some sense enabling the gc to preserve locality. I wonder how optimally the layout can be when only linear or nearly linear time algorithms are considered!
I'm a green tea drinker and I've actually read that small amounts of caffeine throughout the day are okay. Seems to be working for me. Went from coffee to black tea to green tea and have been primarily drinking green tea for 2-3 years now.
Now that's just messed up.
"it presents a much better experience when viewing videos"

How? You hear this same claim all the time, never with any explanation. It's not as if you're LOSING pixels or screen size watching video on a 4:3 tablet. They're simply going unused.

Actually, 4:3 presents a BETTER viewing experience, because transport controls, captions, and data about the video can be presented above or below the image area, instead of over it.
this is pretty funny. good find.
Nokia quite simply didn't have the technology to compete -- Symbian isn't up to the task their Linux offerings needed to be solid about 4 years ago to be relevant now. I'm not sure they sat out, they just didn't get it to together.

I think if they fail with MS, they would have failed with every other option as well. MS is the best option but it is perhaps much too late.