skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Also near the bottom.

> On the database side, I configured VoltDB to run at K=0,
> which means the database was running with HA switched off.
> Most applications would not run that way in a production
> environment, but my goal was to test client-side throughput
> and scaling; I wasn’t really focused the database side of
> the tests.

Testament to the author for mentioning it. It makes me interested in voltdb, whereas before it was unknown to me. But the numbers should indeed be taken with a grain of salt I think.
Who did they get to do their re-brand? The strategy is sick, video is slick and design language is killin it.
Use the source, don't read it (comic)
Of course the TSA won't use those suggestions - they didn't when Schneier made them, years ago.
Also guys—anyone reading this who’s signed up—if you have any non-tech Twitter friends you might want to invite that’d be awesome! A quick glance over the site should tell you that the majority of users so far are web-dev types and we’d really like to diversify sooner rather than later!

Cheers,
Harry
Openstack: Where Enterprise Enemies Hug
not to be a jerk, but organize is spelt incorrectly in your title tag. should be 'organize' not 'organise'
If you:
Write a technical blog
Contribute to open source projects
Attend user groups in your spare time
Mostly only read books about coding and productivity
Push to GitHub while sitting on the toilet
Are committed to maximum awesomeness at all times, or would have us believe it

Much of this applies to me, and applies to me because I love programming. If you don't love programming, I am unlikely to ever respect you as a programmer. Doubly so if you confuse loving programming with being at the beck and call of a given employer, or confuse loving programming with what hours you spend in the workplace.

The 5:01 article it links to is insightful, though.
NASA Tournament Lab on Topcoder (http://community.topcoder.com/ntl/)

Topcoder (http://www.topcoder.com/)

Planetary Data Systems Challenge (http://community.topcoder.com/pds-challenge/)

Planetary Data System (http://pds.nasa.gov/)
>> And that software will be able to run on Windows Phone with only slight modifications.

I'd bet accomplished mobile devs would take exception to that. Changing the UI, inputs metaphors, device capabilities, etc. may not be significant to some apps, but those are are in the minority.
VoltDB achieves concurrency via scheduling, rather than shared access to data structures.

There are concurrency primitives around networking/messaging and transaction scheduling, so there aren't truly ZERO locks in the system as a whole.

The big difference is that VoltDB has zero system-locks (mutexes,etc) around table data and indexes. It also has no logical locks/latches arounds indexes and rows like other systems. This makes executing SQL very fast. Because it doesn't wait on disk or on mutexes, SQL execution is typically bottlenecked on memory bandwidth.
I love the idea of making it easier for people to find one another to collab on things. How will you keep out recruiters, though? Seems like they always end up on these things and start increasing the noise.
Normally I dismiss statements like "the lobby for X is the reason why things suck," but in this case I think you're at least partly right. H&R Block has literally spent millions lobbying against tax reform bills.
Microsoft actually wrote the native WP7 Facebook app. It's probably the best mobile FB app I've seen. But... it's still missing features and less responsive than just loading facebook.com in the browser.
I seem to recall that there's something about the way the way that the US income tax works, legally, that prevents that from happening. That is, your income tax has to be something you pay rather than something someone pays for you.
I have to say that 90% of what I said applies to the vast majority of startups today, rather than the occassional one that succeeds big. Google is characteristic of a different era and philosophy; I doubt very much that it would be possible for Google to have become Google in today's ethos, and if it did, it would not have created more than a handful of truly rich people.
From paragraph 2: "In future blog posts, I’ll attempt to justify the social value of HFT (under some circumstances), and describe other circumstances under which it is not very useful."

From paragraph -1: "In future posts, I’ll discuss it’s societal utility and costs."
"No one comes into the store and asks for a Windows phone."

Of course not. People come into the store and ask for a phone the does "the email and stuff", and walk out with some Samsung model they've previously never heard of.

Microsoft is currently paying AT&T to push the Nokia Lumia. The rest of the carriers have zero incentive to push Windows Phone devices when companies like Samsung and LG are so willing to customize their Android devices to each carrier's whim.
Basic Japanese always struck me as having special purpose registers and a postfix notation. The basic sentence structure is "noun wa noun da verb." where wa is the "set the subject" operator and da is "set the direct object" operator then stating a verb sets the verb register to complete the statement.

Once a register is set, you are able to omit it from later sentences until you want to change its value. "noun wa noun da verb. noun da verb." would indicate that the same subject is doing two different things to two different objects.

More operators: http://fm1397.com/knowledge/chalkboard/chalkboard-session-5-...
"Arrayed on one side will be representatives from the United States and other major Western powers, advocating what many call “Internet freedom,”"

Yeah, somehow I doubt they will try too hard to fight for Internet freedom. If there's any positive aspect to come out of this, it's the fact that they don't want US to act as if they have power over the whole Internet. It still worries me that China, Russia and others will get to "negotiate" anything about the Internet, though.
I was on a StartupBus to SXSW this year- at the pitching stage, one of the guys pitched an idea based around simplifying people's taxes. He was a qualified CPA himself, and had years of experience working in the tax industry. No-one volunteered to work on his idea. The winning StartupBus team was a site that let you make your own custom breakfast cereal.

I suspect that if we want to ask "why isn't tedious process [x] automated by now?", we should be looking at ourselves for answers.
Title was a bit confusing. You aren't purchasing bitcoins, you are purchasing goods using bitcoin. Big difference.

Great service though, I use it as both a supplier and a customer!

And found a couple new songs for my playlist!
Customers seem to love the Lumia 900. e.g. http://gdgt.com/nokia/lumia/900/
I'm not sure if I am supposed to be impressed or not. On my macbook pro with 1 redis master and 1 redis slave I can do about 300k updates / second to the master replicated to the slave. Comparable? Who knows?

These benchmarks don't mean much to me -- what matters is performance for your application.
THIS:

"Better yet: since the agency is already receiving that data from all those financial institutions through a separate stream, how about organizing the data for me and simply letting me sign off on my automatically-generated return? I suspect that a lot of people would like that, given that the alternative is spending a spring day doing paperwork."

Especially for those who only have a single W2 or a similarly simple state of affairs, it is quite ridiculous the amount of pain you have to go through (and preparation fees you have to pay) CONSIDERING THE GOVERNMENT ALREADY HAS THE INFORMATION!

I definitely think tax preparation firms are lobbying to keep from simplifying the preparation process.

I remember one year around 2005 or so I was able to file my (federal) return by telephone directly with the IRS for FREE (I was a student and had only the one W2) and it was relatively painless but the next year the option seems to have disappeared. Anyone remember that?
There are reports of a partial outage which is ongoing:

http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=13...
It's trending on twitter, seems to be pretty widespread.
Surely wikileaks is in for a chance at this one. All they need is one disgruntled NASA employee.
Except, that in my case, and a large minority of others (at least measured in the millions) all we are doing is filing a 1040 with the info from our W2s and taking the standard deduction. I've also had to fill out a schedule D for stocks, but as of this year that info is also reported to the IRS, so there's nothing I know that they don't know.
The OP provides a good technical explanation. Unfortunately he fails to mention another closely related term to high frequency which is what makes this type of trading highly lucrative: 'Front running'. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_running .

Front running is illegal, but if you look for successful cases of high frequency trading they are generally tied-to/accused-of front running. And as you might imagine, in order to do front running you need to be high-up on the food chain (i.e. be a market maker)

The missing key about front running in the article is the 'anonymous' bid-ask: "The matching engine takes his order and displays it (anonymized) to all other traders with a data feed." and "She places her orders, and it is again displayed to the world (anonymously) and stored.".

If you have forehand knowledge of the bid-ask (i.e. non-anonymous) the market maker can front-run and with high-frequency make a considerable profit.
One possibility: Create pro tools to help musicians grow their mailing lists. Most bands make money from touring. Having a big list allows them to get people to show up at gigs. So help them grow their lists and provide tools for doing broadcast messages to those lists.
http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/gmail.com
Obviously HFTs can't wait until the match occurs before jumping in the middle, but they can and do jump in the middle of a match separated by milliseconds. Granted, they're assuming risk by doing this, but the risk is low, especially given that they can also cancel in milliseconds if the market shifts.
My taxes aren't anything like that complicated.

According to the Tax Policy Center over 70% of tax payers took the standard deduction in 2010. Surely solving for that case first and letting those people who will always pay accountants to minimize their liabilities continue to file on paper would increase general welfare. It's the 80/20 rule in action.
There is already software out there to handle your federal income taxes for free. However, to use Free File Tax Software.
This program is available if your AGI is $57,000 or less: http://apps.irs.gov/app/freeFile/jsp/index.jsp?ck

http://www.irs.gov/efile/article/0,,id=118986,00.html

PS: Anyone can still use free forms: http://www.irs.gov/efile/article/0,,id=237156,00.html
"Powered by Bing"
I read somewhere that non-hft tend to trade much more at the "second" tick. This may have been b/c they were dumb (hard to believe) or because converging at the same time (15:30:10 instead of 15:30:10.175) gives them better chances to finding a match to their sell/buy position
If it's the same "carrier" who put crap-load of useless, buggy malware with every android phone they sell, then who cares what they say. They clearly have no clue what is even "good enough" to weight in an opinion about Nokia.
This reminds me of a demo I saw Billy Hoffman[1] do a while back at a conference. He demonstrated a way of embedding whitespace in a forum post that is mapped to a malicious JS method injected via XSS. The point was to circumvent HTML sanitation attempts to strip raw JS code.

This tool could be used for something similar. Just replace the semicolon token[2] with something less obvious (say '\t' for example), and you've got a pretty interesting tool.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Hoffman
[2]: https://github.com/RodH257/SemicolonScript/blob/master/Defau...
To those that didn't get the reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMATCbC0g3I :)
We’re English so it’s hard to balance the two; we used ‘favorite’ as that’s what they’re called on Twitter but proper English has crept in in places. We’ll probably move over to all American–English at some point.

Cheers!
H
Cool! Do you know if anyone has written a ui that wraps this?
-ize or -ise are often style matters and not spelling errors.

(http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/ize-ise-or-yse)

(http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/03/ize-or-ise/)
GMail is down
From my understanding of this, HFT basically makes it impossible for a non-HFT trader to buy at anything but his maximum buying price and to sell at anything but his lowest selling price. This seems like it would significantly undermine the profitability of the market for non-HFT traders.
Gnip Adds Tumblr to its List of Social Data Sources
This. Also, allow them to sell the rights for commercial reuse. Although I don't think it should sound like charity or donation. Musicians should be able to set a price for a 'virtual ticket' that will allow you to download their music via any means, without the guilt.
I was coming here to say that; this is true for crap apps. The apps which has 10 downloads in it's life and then the dev writes a post-mortem on Reddit proclaiming you cannot make money with mobile apps. UI is getting more and more important and switching from desktop to mobile is definitely not changing 10%.
The tricky bit is that they are paid based on which phones people buy. Androids have higher commissions than iPhones, for instance.
Transaction fees for most brokers are pretty high. Even "discount" brokers like Scottrade charge $7 for every stock trade.

There are other brokers that charge $0.01/share traded or less.[1][2] A $0.10 spread becomes easy profit if the buy/sell only costs $0.02.

The linked broker below requires you to be an "expert" before you can sign up -- you have to have made at least 100 trades -- but otherwise just about anyone can sign up.

I have NOT tried to use them for day trading (or at all, for that matter), so please don't consider this a full recommendation. Just trying to show that there ARE other options that are cheaper.

[1] http://interactivebrokers.com/en/general/education/comparebr...
[2] http://interactivebrokers.com/en/accounts/fees/stocksPricing...
App "Read it Later" Becomes the Now Free "Pocket"
We'll be adding more skillsets in the future - thanks for the feedback. Anything else you like / don't like?
Funny thing is that I prefer to go home @ 5 as well... but when I do get home I often read books about programming, catch up on articles and papers, or work on some amusing side-project.

Often I'll learn some maths, experiment with some new approaches to solving problems, or watch screen casts to learn how other people approach the craft.

I don't do it because I'm some corporate shill. I just really love programming.

I also have a wife, a child on the way, and my life seems pretty balanced to me.

I just look at overtime and think: well I only have so many minutes left to live, what's in it for me if I do this? Sometimes the answer is just money because that's probably what I needed at that moment... more often than not in recent years I don't bother unless there's equity on the line (which has never been on the table anyway). If my employers ever had a problem with it I just moved on. Things got tight but they never hit rock bottom.

It's all just about priorities and sticking up for yourself.
The 'kickbacks' usually come in the form of retail 'educational programs'. The most effective of these are of the form: (pretend to) read some articles, take a quiz, earn some points and then redeem them for branded gadgets.

I once worked retail as a computer 'technician' for three months and I made as much in free stuff as I did in wages. (I was quite up front about my limited tenure there but I later found out why HR took no issue with that: at three months you can be the senior non-mgmt employee.) I would assume these loyalty programs are becoming even more aggressive towards retail workers and that you could even quintuple your 'salary' for the lowest paid computer/phone positions.

If you've ever wondered why Craigslist was flooded with $1000 CPUs priced to $300, now you know.
Udacity vs Stanford's vs MIT's OCW vs Khan Academy vs Code Academy
Which one do you like? Do you know any other online learning? Do you wish for any new services, application , tools for online education.
Code coverage can provide two things

1) It can be a signal, a low number raises a red flag, but a high number doesn't raise a green flag.

2) It can be a great analysis tool. When you have partial coverage, digging through the coverage reports and seeing where you don't have coverage can tell you a lot about what isn't being tested, what the test writers assumptions were, etc.
Tying the Knot- recursive data structures in Haskell
Accepting the earliest bid seems quite arbitrary. How would the system change if a random participant was selected? Or perhaps you could buy preferential treatment or use an algorithm weighted by some good actor metric.
This article has a good breakdown of why carriers are strongly motivated downplay Windows phones.

http://ceklog.kindel.com/2011/12/26/windows-phone-is-superio...
It's the same argument that Microsoft reps made against using Mac OS, Linux, BeOS, NeXTSTEP, etc. on the desktop. "You need to go with the most installed base / most apps to not waste your money".

I get the feeling that Microsoft / Nokia is going to have to aggressively go after the pre-pay and feature phone market. They need something that undercuts the price and makes money for all the independents that sell phones. Android and iPhone are not players in the pre-pay market.
What does Twitter know about me? My .zip file with 50Mb of data
Works fine for me. Perhaps its regional? I'm in FL.
The real problem is not the lack of systems but the ridiculous complexity of tax law. Since the complexity is unlikely to go away any system would have to handle it - and this is not an easy task.

Given that the OP works for an organization which is "focused on digitization of government data" it is quite peculiar that he doesn't understand the problem domain any better. It's quite a joke to think that it's a matter of throwing in some web forms here and there.

In complexity I would say it's up there with his favorite Apollo quote. Maybe not on par - but close. Just thinking about the size of the rule engine which is required makes my head hurt.
Back before my life got a whole lot more complicated and I was a simple wage slave I recall filing my 1040EZ by phone. This was maybe 15 years ago.
Many coverage tools have ways to ignore getters/setters and things like "if (debug logging enabled) log" types of statements.
The problem is the human element. If you are doing something that can in some way be construed as going against the app store guidelines, eventually you are going to get a reviewer who rejects/takes down your app. Even if other reviewers knew that your app had been around for ever, you are eventually going to run into one who doesn't, or feels it's his/her job to be as strict as possible. There is very little consistency in Apple's process because of this. The company I work for has had apps rejected for things we've done literally about a dozen times before, and we certainly knew were border line but we figured were OK because it had been allowed so many times before. But eventually we run into a reviewer who for whatever reason, rejects something that we've done tons of times before.

Overall I think Apple's process works, but the inconsistency is just ridiculous. Especially when your releases are time critical.
Presumably it has a lot to do with the ecosystem that the customer has already bought into. If they already use Google's products, then Android phones are the natural option, if iTunes then Apple. Nokia's shoved themselves into a specialist category by opting for Windows-only.
IIRC they are still ideographs, usually representing the japanised chinese pronunciation of a word and the japanese pronunciation of a word.
Agglutination.
Going With The Flow: Google’s Secret Switch To The Next Wave Of Networking
I don't see how "crowd computing" is fundamentally different from the crowd sourcing techniques already in use on the enterprise level, for example Facebooks translation.
What subtle issues do you see with sharejs (just curious, I'm in the process of porting it's OT algorithm to python).
Intuit TurboTax (http://www.turbotax.com) has been doing this for years, but charges ~$50 for federal and ~$30 for state (and a little more if you have a business.)
Fascinating interview with one of the most promising Canadian startups in 10 years. I'm very impressed with their innovative and cohesive vision. Definitely on my top list of companies to watch.
Frontrunners have knowledge of specific trades that are about to occur. You frontrun a specific block trade. The definition you imply here suggests that all market makers are "frontrunners".
Actually Apple doesn't hate brunettes, what they hate is the likeness to reality that your brunette colored people are, where if you color the hair like in your second example, the people become less realistic and more like abstract icons; their hair being the exact same color as their body skin (yellow and red). Doesn't take a genius to figure this one out, but then it doesn't take a genius to write a bitching blog post either.
That's why robots aren't doing your taxes. How about for the vast majority of Americans who have one job, no business ownership, no foreign income, no equities trades, a very simple IRA or 401(k), zero or one spouse, zero to n dependents, and possibly a mortgage?

1040EZ should be replaced with 1040AUTO: at the end of February you get: what we've already had submitted by your employer and bank(s), here's the precalculation: sign here and check off the agreement box, or check the complication box and file the appropriate form in April.

Don't let the best be the enemy of the good enough for most people.
Insanely Expensive Gadgets
Twitter's Innovators Patent Agreement
The 1040EZ is not exactly a hard form to fill out:
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040ez.pdf

One side of a piece of paper. You enter 12 numbers, and need to look up one value in a table too see how much tax you owe.
Wikify Your Metadata
Because with crowd computing AI controls and optimizes the workflow and results. Human in, computer out.
Figured this was the case. 4 of my emails are out.
If that number isn't just iPhone sales, then it includes the free versions for Android, Chrome, Roku, etc.
CA already does this with the ready return. All the information is already filled in with an option to change some information if something is missing.
Let me rephrase. Using 75% implies a certain level of authority I don't have.

"I think it will take a bigger imbalance before people start worrying about a gender imbalance in favor of men."
Some of these things relate to employers, and some of them relate to programming and craft. I'm all for keeping a sustainable pace on your project, and not letting your employer's priorities continually override yours. But some of this sounds too much like a defense of those whose dedication to learning stops at the office door.

I respect those people for the time they spend with their families and loved ones, and wish them the best, but I don't much enjoy working with them. I love what I do, and if you do too, I expect to see some evidence that you enjoy it in your spare time. Particularly for consultants or independent contractors, I find the notion that all of your professional learning should be on your client's dime to be ethically troublesome at best.
Idea: A tool to make it easy to subscribe to web-based lists of Twitter accounts