skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think you really understood my reply.

I have a life project. What is sometimes called a calling. (If you don't, you probably cannot process what I am saying and should disregard this post.)

So whenever I am doing some other work - anything at all - other than my calling - to pay for food and housing - I am acting under duress. Which isn't much fun. Of course, some kinds of forced labor suck more than others. I could be felling trees, or laying pipes, or something even more physically unpleasant. So overall, programming for money is far from the worst among possible fates.

And often, even persons who lack a calling and for whom all work is just work, "just switching professions" is not an option. For a different perspective on why many programmers stay in their line of work despite hating it, consider this book: "Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls:
True Stories of Castaways and Other Survivors" (http://books.google.com/books/about/Desperate_Journeys_Aband...). It is largely about shipwrecked sailors. One of the more interesting facts about these is how many kept at their profession despite suffering wreck after wreck - witnessing murder, cannibalism, and various other unpleasant things. The explanation offered by the author is that sailors typically entered their trade during childhood, and were largely unfit (by their own estimate as well as that of others) for any other work.

I started programming when I was nine years old. And perhaps you did so, or know those who did, at an even earlier age. This is not necessarily true for all such people, but switching professions after having your whole development as a person wrapped around computing can be like being asked to switch to being left- (or right-, as the case may be) handed, late in life.
That is a great example of the ASCII escape color sequences. thanks for posting. I was working on something similar the other day - and really like your method.
New York Times R&D Group Launches First Commercial Product
thanks. your second paragraph is exactly my point - but I don't know if it's true, just a guess on my part (a hypothesis if you will). The way you stated it in the second paragraph is exactly what I was getting at.
I'm impressed. My first thought was "I should write an app for this", but seeing what they have done I have no intention whatsoever to even try. :-)
From the point of view that public markets are accesible to everyone - the secondary market is like a grey market: there's limited information, likelihood of anonymity and weak controls. With that in mind, I would call it "shadowy".

Also, I think making money on timing the market is not a bad thing. To each his own. However, timing the market does not create value. It is merely displacing value or what they call a zero-sum game. I don't think the article goes too far in displaying MA as someone playing that game. In fact, makes the point so valid that it's hard to argue that he has created some sort of permanent value. Other than netscape, the FB board seat is just a fancy chair...
Akaros - an open source operating system for manycore architectures
Show HN: Smart Reader - native RSS reading app that suggests interesting news
We all use different kinds of RSS feed readers to fetch news, but as the number of feeds we subscribe to grows, we may wake up to 400+ news items every morning, but very few RSS feed readers can suggest to us what to read first.

Smart Reader is a Windows RSS reading app that has a built-in machine learning algorithm for suggesting interesting news. It learns by user's labeling of what news are interesting to them, and as the learning progresses, it will start suggesting among the user's subscribed feeds what it thinks the user might find interesting to read first.

Smart Reader also tries to provide a consistant, clean view for reading news articles across different domains.

Here on the team we have seen some very nice results using Smart Reader. After just one day of training, Smart Reader was able to pick out many interesting articles for us. After about a week of training, the interesting news suggestion has gotten so good for us, we default to reading suggestions before searching all the feeds for interesting news.

We would like to share with HN to see what fellow hackers think of this app, and to gather bug reports and insightful feedback.

Here are some screenshots:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/69176916/sr1.png

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/69176916/sr2.png

Here is the readme, with instructions on how to run and train Smart Reader:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/69176916/SmartReaderBeta.pdf

Here is the binary for the beta, no installation required, just unzip and run "Smart Reader.exe":

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/69176916/SmartReaderBeta.zip

The beta app will run till 5/31/12, thanks in advance for all of your time and feedback!

You can import your Google Reader subscribed feeds into Smart Reader by importing the OPML file exported from Google Reader.
Fascinated by the nascent eco-system of apps built on top of email. To PG's point in one of his essays about fixing email...I wonder if the transition to the future of email lies in using email as a protocol.

As applications are developed that better utilize some of the structured data within email, do we eventually transition to a world where very few emails under a certain threshold are read...but instead parsed for information content. Thus potentially putting the receiver back in control of the overall experience?
Ask HN: How is Santa Monica for entrepreneurs?
I'll be moving to Santa Monica from SF to work for a very large game company. I know the tech scene there is not as big as SF, but I want to know how big and active the tech entrepreneur community is there.

Anyone from Santa Monica/LA want to comment?

Thanks
Interesting. As a long time AutoCAD and SolidWorks user I have never thought of Trimble as a 3D CAD company. Not even a software company. One has to wonder if SketchUp could have found a better home than Trimble.

I can see an established 3D CAD company really enhancing it as a potential bridge onto their bigger tools and providing more interoperability with other platforms. I can't justify buying a license of SolidWorks for my kid's PC but if SketchUp were a SW product with a ramp up to SW I would definitely consider it and even pay for it.

Time will tell.
Cool stuff. Out of curiosity, what are you using to embed Latex in a blog post like that?
Often the different notation from older books makes them harder to learn from, but sometimes I've found them useful. (Watson's "A Treatise on the Theory of Bessel Functions" was the only place I could find certain formulas derived.)
The author of this release is James Montier. He writes about behavioral finance on his blog http://behaviouralinvesting.blogspot.com and through his books. He's reached shown some very interesting human pitfalls in managing money.
My problem with Van Horne's presentation is not that it was sexist or offensive, which it was, but rather that he made himself (and path) look like frat boy douchetards.

Here's the VP of Business Development for a company valued at $250MM, and he acts like a child. The sexism, to me, is less repugnant than the notion that an idiot like this would have such a high degree of authority in such a highly-valued company.
Considering how much most pages can be optimized, its a good tradeoff. How often do you refresh during development? How much time are you waiting for that reendering?

Random load speed survey: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/Average-...

Lets say you can cut off the standard deviation of the survey above, do you refresh 50 times a day? For 1 month thats ~5 hrs of work you gained.
(i'm the author) - we have used both at different points. At this point, we deploy everything we used to deploy on EC2 to StormOnDemand physical servers, and sometimes Storm SSDs.
Could you give an example of one of the laws? This is new to me too
Consider this a job offer to work at 42Floors
My recollection: He will go so far as to put bubble gum on a stick to retrieve coins through a grate because it nets him $400/year tax free.
Let's imagine you head over to the DMV over lunch to get your license renewed. Rather than have a line of people being served via FIFO they randomly pick who gets serviced next. Your lunch hour expires before you get your license renewed, meanwhile other customers barely have to wait thanks to the random selection. Rushing back to work you get pulled over ...

Silly example I know but FIFO matching is consistent with this idea of fairness. Without it it's possible that market participants could keep getting jumped by the random selection such that they never get an order execution.
I really like this, I'm looking forward to digging through the source and finding out how folks set up their django apps.
Your comment is conjecture, not evidence. It's an invalid conjecture, because it makes sweeping assumptions about some of the most complicated, chaotic properties of securities markets. And it's incorrect.

There are market centers that prohibit high frequency traders. Reg NMS requires any center that disseminates quotes to prohibit trading through the NBBO (best price at any point in time across all exchanges). So these market centers must be dark pools, not exchanges nor ECNs.

These centers represent a small and shrinking amount of trading volumes. Nonetheless, they exist.
Congrats to Ash and the team!!
i should (and will) update it soon; the post comes off slightly more negatively than I would like at this point - We are now really happy with secondary indices and are happily deploying Riak on (relatively) cheap physical servers at stormondemand. The more I use Riak the more I love and recommend it...
Biotech startup Looking for web developer
We are a biotechnology startup introducing a next-generation, universal diagnostic platform. We wish to redesign our website and build a web store for scientific products. Compensation is on a per-project basis. If you are interested, please email info@fireflybio.com with a resume or links to your work. Lisp hackers most welcome. Thank you!
Since when is getting what you were promised the same than a VC ROI model? VCs expect as much as possible, they want to hit jackpot. I give $100 for a watch so I expect said watch, not a Rolex!

And getting jack shit is the exact opposite of what kickstarter says it does, you could just press the donate button of any harebrained scheme on the internet and get jack shit, you don't need kickstarter for that.
Thank you - that makes sense. I must have glossed over the part that the 37 API's in question were not copyrighted by Oracle. Thanks!
Would be cool if I could adjust the speed.
Congrats, Ash and Garrett!
My bad, totally missed it. A better clarification on my part would have been "sell early access to a mailing list via monthly subscription which becomes a monthly subscription product".

If there was a beta available, all the better.

Either way, the customer knows exactly what they're getting into.
How 'Screenularity' Will Destroy Television as We Know It
That's a pretty cynical view of punk bands. Sure, some were behaving badly for publicity. Some were behaving badly because they wanted to behave badly. Some were just about the music.

I, for one, DO NOT welcome the new Punk Startup overlords.
My understanding is that HFT has been used for frontrunning (which is undeniably stealing pennies), and associated with unintended market instability (flash crashes) due to unforeseen trader interactions. This post primarily defends algo trading, which does not have the negative connotations of HFT.

The author claims speed is mostly important for order precedence, but I find this to be a naive view. The potential upside for a trader coming to a conclusion and executing a trade first is minute compared to the potential for frontrunning trades that have been executed but not yet communicated to the market. Yes, this kind of frontrunning requires (sometimes[1]) automated illegal eavesdropping on secure financial transactions, and is highly immoral and illegal. But you don't make $100M a day without compromising some morals[2].

Algo I'm okay with, but HFT is a fancy toy for messing with the markets.

[1 | http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/07/is-goldman-legally-fro...]

[2 | http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a... ]
Another thing I like about South Park is that they only seem to make fun of things people can help -- they'll make fun of black culture, but not black people.
The term "hogrammer" is being used to justify the term "brogrammer"? That term seems ridiculously offensive in and of itself.
WalMart now accepting cash for online orders
Gawker launches Burner comment system (Why Anonymity Matters)
How is this better than http://industriousone.com/premake ?
I was unaware that the APIs were contributed by others. Do you have any idea who might be some of the (theoretical) copyright holders of the individual APIs?
We play Tetris on the building
Students of technology universities are constantly inventing incredible things – not necessarily high, but almost always – entertaining.
I'll say it very simply: People insist that more liquidity is a good thing. I'm saying it's not that good, and we have plenty of liquidity already. Companies that do HFT(and otherwise provide more liquidity) are part of the larger problem of financial companies that hire a lot of smart people and make them do work that has little value to society, but happens to be very profitable.
This is done in order to avoid intra-ETN transaction costs. There is nothing malicious or underhanded going on.

This has always happened. Suppose you're in a room with your investor club and you want to buy 500 shares of AAPL. The evil "flash order" is akin to mentioning to your local group "hey guys I want to buy 500 shares of AAPL at $x, in case any of you want the other side of the transaction".

If none of your local group (with whom a trade would incur no transaction cost) wants it, then it goes through to the wider market where it may or may not find a counterparty.

The 0.5 second time limit is arbitrary, chosen to accomodate a range of latencies for the various local would-be-counterparties.

Nobody is stealing anything. It's just a way around some of the fees that one willingly pays for harder to fill orders. If an entity on your local ETN has a market making strategy where he/she is willing to fill some orders, then a flash order rule can improve efficiency by removing transaction cost.

If you think this is a bad thing then you have a profound misunderstanding of its mechanics. Ironically, like most of the anti-HFT claims, your position benefits the old school establishment exchanges. ETNs are the little guys trying to compete against the big guys by offering better technology and lower transaction costs. Flash orders are part of their service to fight against the competition-stifling fees charged by the big guys to route electronic orders.
I don't understand.

The man created the web browser, built multiple billion dollar companies, angel invested and sits on the board of Facebook, and is now one of the most well known VCs in the world - and this is saying what - that he's not as good as Felix thinks he could be?

What the hell has Felix Salmon ever done?

I'm seeing more and more of this: pundits and armchair entrepreneurs online who just can't help but tear down people who went in the arena and worked their asses off and built something.

Shut up and go build something people want.
I am not a fan of flash orders but a few nit-picks:

- I believe you have to opt in to have your order flashed. You seem to be suggesting this is happening behind traders backs

- Only one market in the US still supports these types of orders. It may have happened hundreds of times while reading your sentence but that is a tiny fraction of executions occurring across all exchanges during that time-frame.
The latest Kindle DX crops margins automatically from PDF files. It works well on LaTeX generated files, though not always on scanned ones.
Just signed up. Would love to hear more about your business. It's really a pain to find a laptop that would not suck under Linux for any of the important dimensions (wifi, battery life, external monitor support, working fn keys and etc).

I know of System76 and etc, but their hardware doesn't inspire me much (spoiled by Apple).
Ask HN: What NYC startups should we feature on 5in5NYC
Last week we launched 5in5NYC ( http://5in5nyc.com ) to shine a spotlight on the NYC startup community. Each week we're gathering 5 NYC startups and letting them tell their stories, and then chat amongst themselves.

We'd love to focus on the up-and-coming companies that are doing interesting stuff and who don't necessarily have connections or access to open doors at the traditional tech blogs and publications.

Mostly, we want to be as helpful as we can - this show is in many ways karmic payback for the many people who've helped us and our companies along the way.

So, who should we invite to be on the upcoming episodes?
The point isn't worthless, but it's being presented in a jaw-droppingly insensitive way.

Would you dare to say what you just said to an actual rape survivor? Are you that emotionally tone deaf or just misanthropic? Having a bunch of people ask you questions in a way you don't like, in a context where you're free to leave at any time, is not a form of violence. Maybe it's a form of aggression but not one that can credibly be compared to rape.
US law generally doesn't allow actions to be made illegal after the fact (ex post facto). So no, the act must be illegal when it was committed.
Wait, isn't this guy a VP at Path? This kind of language must be industry best practice.

Heyo!
No I think it's the opposite. It is cool, but no one knows about it.
That example, however, it not solely germane to ultra-HFT. More traditional market makers have provided that level of liquidity for a long time.

The studies I link to provide compelling evidence that traditional market makers provided much lower levels of liquidity.

Do you have an example of where sub-100 ms execution truly adds significant liquidity?

Please reread my post starting from the words "The Latency Arms Race".
It doesn't really use the "command line". That's just a play on words. It...uses the address bar. So you can just email yourself something by putting "futz.me/xxx" in front of it.
Agreed.

Until I see evidence that "bro companies" are more successful than normal ones, I have no qualms about shunning them.
>There is nothing malicious or underhanded going on.

And yet most market participants think banning them is a no-brainer.

http://blog.themistrading.com/when-exchanges-attack/
I've been told they are adding new themes soon that are more generic for U.S. and international users!
Show HN: Ditto.com - virtual fitting based online optical store
I am happy to announce to fellow hackers and Y combinators about our website launch today. We are trying to build real size 3D virtual fitting platform ditto.com for making it easier for our customers to purchase eye wear. Play with it, and let me know how you guys like it.
I've been in the industry for decades and interacted with thousands of developers over this time. I've never seen, met or heard a legitimate report of a brogrammer, being an immature, extroverted party going frat house programmer. It's basically an ESxP on the Myers-Briggs. That personality type doesn't get programming or design at all.

I have definitely seen this personality type in sales and executive positions though, also banking and finance, and among VCs.

But among programmers? No.

Now let's talk about why the US has fewer female programmers than Russia, China and India since that's not always been the case.

The work environment is the reason, and also pay. Hostile and confrontational gang-attack style interviews such as the person mentioned in his talk (and spoke out against) are a turn off for many, and women more than men. The writer walked out on the talk before he got to his point, but it sounds like, by criticizing the practice of gang attack interviews, and about to talk about attracting women, he may have been about to point out that fraternities that treat women as peers and respectfully end up with more female interest than fraternities that engage in gang assaults. Comparing recruiting to courtship is not a bad analogy. People don't like being abused and high quality people are going to avoid being in relationships, whether work or personal, where abuse is occurring, such as the many places that have gang attack style interviews.
But that would seem to imply that, for example, the RIAA can't sue someone for downloading half a song (or all but the last 5 seconds).
I thought he answered your question well in the section Automated market makers - like humans, but faster and smarter.
My 2 cents:

1. Productive is Destructive ... literally (that's why we're in the position now of having figure out a way to mine asteroids -- industrial productivity under the current model is environmentally unsustainable)

2. Markets are (viewed in aggregate) evolving to be something akin to a global autonomic nervous system ... money like transduction makes the world go 'round.
"Because I don't like sharing."

I think you missed the point of Pinterest. This is to Pinterest what iPhoto is to Facebook.

But I'll be honest, I was first interested in Pinterest because I thought it would be a lovely bookmark aggregator. This does that pretty well from the look of it, but it's definitely a self-hosted image bookmarker with a Pinterest-esque interface, rather than a self-hosted curated web.

Might be splitting hairs over a title, but the difference is significant.
I guess that makes sense, that should be a settable feature, though. I don't want multiple pinned tabs for gmail.
Oracle patching Mac Java directly should prevent fiascos like Flashback from happening again.
Evacuated Tube Transport Could Revolutionize How We Travel
This is true.

My guess is that the "bro culture" is designed to attract a different population of men, who ordinarily would have gone to Wall Street or similar industries, but are attracted to the present web boom.

When the bubble's over, I predict the brogramming fad will fade. I certainly wouldn't want to work at a place with that culture if I could avoid it, but it seems like an essentially temporary phenomenon.
Getting a good job is not as important for women as it is for men? Are you serious? And why is that, in your opinion?

Two (hypothetically related, depending on your answer) mini questions: Do you think it's equally as unimportant for ugly women? What about lesbians?
Eclipse gets 2011 ACM Software System Award
Yes, fair point. That's a good argument for using the git-number plugin instead, which has similar core features. The scm_breeze plugin didn't seem to like my hostile Cygwin environment, I'll try out git-number tomorrow, it should be a bit easier to get working. At first I was put off because I didn't know where it was putting its state. I see now that it is a text file in the .git directory, which on reflection is neater than the environment variables scm_breeze uses.
You should definitely invite http://bespokepost.com!
Even without this matter of law, Jonathon Schwartz (Sun CEO at time of Android development/release) is doing a very good job of blowing the door off of Oracle's case [1]. All Oracle can do now is say that the CEO at the time doesn't shape legal policy (ha).

[1] http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120426122828498
Wrong question; they're working on different levels of abstraction. Ninja is designed to be a very fast and lightweight tool for doing work based on a dependency graph: actually knowing how to build anything on its own is an explicit non-goal.

Premake, on the other hand is a full-blown build system that can make decisions and knows about how to perform specific code-related tasks, and can then generate rules for other tools to follow. Unless I'm mistaken, Premake could hypothetically output a build.ninja file.
Congrats Dan! Regardless if you take it or not, you're on a great path. This post by Jason speaks for itself.
Keep it up