skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Instead they could ask for a range and an estimate of how likely you think that the actual answer is inside that range.
Ellison Takes The Stand Against Google Today in Java Trial
Everyone has sex. Few engage in battlefield combat. Comparing the two debases the conversation.

Whether having an app that talks about positions is going to make a 13 year old (more?) sexually active is a completely different question, but compounding the two is nonsense.
I read his comment without any trouble. I don't work in finance but I'm perhaps a little more familiar with it than the typical HN reader. It certainly didn't come across as an attempt to snow the thread with jargon.

A careful reread generates this list of domain-specific terms:

resting orders, liquidity, HFT, passive trading, cancel, execute, spread, market making.

Most of these mean what they sound like they mean. If "liquidity" is complicated, it's also the topic of the whole thread. "Passive trading" is probably the closest thing to jargon in the whole comment.

It would be better if nobody made sarcastic comments, wouldn't it?
With all due respect, I think it is in the DNA. Looking at our evolution during the past million years, may be women were dominated by men. They might not have had enough freedom to follow their curiosities until several thousand years back. So it will take more time to have their brain evolve to levels that current men's brain is at. Have we done enough comparative studies of men's and women's brains?
In a video game anything the player doesn't see is a waste of time. In the case of games with large branching story lines it's a tradeoff between putting effort in to content which might be unseen and adding "depth." AI is the same. A genius AI that does all kinds of magic in the background is useless if the player never gets to see the magic.

Games don't want true AI solutions, they want to entertain the player. Put enough veneer on the world to make the player suspend disbelief and move on. Anything else is a waste of money for the most part.
Nikjju Mass SQL injection campaign (180k+ sites compromised)
Show HN: We made an app for managing your Twitter favorites
Awesome Infographic Applying Analytics to Social Media Fluff
The rapidity of recovery from the flash crash can be credited to HFT.
Considering 4), i just discovered iWebInspector (http://www.iwebinspector.com/) which allows using the normal Safari developer tools for the iOS simulator. It's wonderful, free, and i don't really get why i haven't discovered this tool a few months earlier. Would have saved a lot of headaches :)
I think it depends a lot on your kind of business.

For the kind of internet businesses VCs like, business plans were always BS. That's because the pivoting and the hockey-stick growth curves make mush out of them.

But I've watched friends start more normal businesses: 1-10 person service or manufacturing businesses. For them the business plan has been really useful in that it has forced them to think through the details. And in particular, made them work out the math.

That math is useless if you're planning on making the next Google; either you'll be buried in money or you'll be done. But margins on real-world businesses are modest, so it's really worth thinking through whether you can turn a profit.
It sounds like they display at a lower accuracy than what you may actually specify, and there's a bit of jiggering to allow the displayed request and true request to both be 'accurate'.
This is excellent, and I'm fully behind it. Some of the best coworkers I've ever had were 5:01'ers - they got things done on time because they had to, and they didn't burn out.

Just don't break the build at 4:59. That's all I ask.
Just discovered that google can convert long series of units.

Say you wanted to do this, at the obvious risk of some undiscovered toxicity, and say you weigh 200lbs.

At a cost of fullerene-c60 of $592 for 5 grams, at 1.7mg/kg, you're daily dose costs $18.26
http://www.google.com/?q=1.7mg%2Fkg+x+200lbs+x+592%2F5+dolla...

Even worse, however, is the olive oil you have to eat each day, with the C60 disolved into it is 39 teaspoons!
http://www.google.com/?q=1.7+mg/kg+/+0.8+mg/ml+x+200+lbs+to+...

Which is 4/5ths of a cup of oil per day.

EDIT: I guess they didn't actually get a daily dose.

we treated the rats daily only during 7 days and weekly
during the ﬁrst two months, then every two weeks until
one control rat died.

Nor did they get dosed their entire lives, as earlier in the paper, we find that

After ﬁve months of treatment (M15) one rat treated with
water only exhibited some palpable tumours in the
abdomen region. Due to the rapid development of tumours
(about 4 cm of diameter) this rat died at M17. As rats
are known to be sensitive to gavages, we decided to stop
the treatment for all rats and to observe their
behaviour and overall survival.

So, it looks like they only treated for 7 months, for the most part, once every two weeks, and then no further treatment. The treated rats, after only 7 months of treatment, achieved the benefit.
"...We’re all failing this generation of entrepreneurs by not being tough on them....we need to stop encouraging entrepreneurship without acknowledging the extremely long odds of success, the numerous downsides..."

I completely agree with the thrust of this article. My only qualm is that the word "entrepreneur" is too broad.

Let's put it this way. Need money? Go downtown and go door-to-door looking to help people. Maybe you can clean their office, or walk their dog, make a website, or cook a hamburger for somebody. But if you have some reasonable amount of skill and are willing to physically go out and meet people and adapt to what you hear, I can guarantee you that you are going to make money. It probably won't be in the way you imagined, but it'll work.

This is the basis of entrepreneurialism: making something people want. Get out there and find what people want. Match your abilities up to that. It's a wonderful thing.

The problem comes when we try to add any qualifiers at all to this. What this author is talking about is internet or technology startups. That's a whole nother can of worms. It's like going downtown and looking for work as an accountant. Yes, it might work, if you are already an accountant and your town has a lot of accounting firms. But the odds suddenly increase a hell of a lot.

The problem I see with many recent college grads and many startup fans is the belief that they already know what kind of entrepreneur they are going to be. Once you start qualifying things, you are killing your odds. Business is a conversation, not a soliloquy. We've got a lot of people terribly dedicated to some long-shot, 1-in-50 chance venture. That's not a startup. That's gambling.

But I completely agree that for purposes of this article, we have let a lot of people down. We deserve to give them a much more realistic view of how things work instead of spending so much time on Facebook, Google, and Instagram. We're making this into some kind of perverse lottery, and that's not good for anybody. Just don't use such a broad term as startup and then make some sweeping case that "people just aren't cut out for it" Yes, most people aren't cut out for some specific description of a business venture. But I'd argue that just about anybody can sell apples on the street corner. This isn't an intelligence thing, this is an engagement thing. If anything, you can be too smart for startups.
Windows Azure introduces Media Services
> The point is that small inputs can have large intermediate scratch datasets and even smaller outputs.

Perhaps in some rare circumstances (although not the one you cited), however most people use map reduce for aggregation of one form or another, which doesn't require vast amounts of intermediate data unless you are being deliberately inefficient.

> Even more to the point is that being able to do scalable transformations like computing top N CTR on a lot of data with little regard to available computing/network/disk resources is the reason why you would copy your input data to EC2 for processing.

Actually you'd copy it to S3 for processing, and then it would need to be downloaded into EC2 (unless you want to leave your EC2 instances running, which you won't unless you have a large number of shares in Amazon). It's hard to imagine situations where it is faster to move the data across Amazon's LAN, than to simply process it on the machine it's already on.

> If the author has a point to make he failed to do so beyond making himself look like someone who enjoys labeling things he doesn't understand as a "cargo cult."

The author looks like someone pointing out that the original purpose of map-reduce is that you do your computations where your data is, and that moving your data so that you can do map-reduce on it misses the point. The author is correct.

You might have a stronger argument if you could show some common non-contrived situations where there would be a relatively small amount of input data but vast amounts of intermediate data. You haven't yet.
Appcelerator gives devs a gateway to mobile cloud services with Titanium 2.0
I don't really think this reflects terribly well on Jobs. He makes all that money and what does he do with it? He builds himself a boat.
Are you serious? First you say its in the DNA, and went on to ask if research was done on it? How did you arrive at the ridiculous conclusion?
Show HN: I am making an online debating platform What do you think of the idea?
I've been thinking about this for my site and I've decided to set a minimum number of characters for a username so that it stands out as being a username rather than a random set of characters.

I think if you allow 3 character username people are more likely to use things like 'asd' and 'qaz'. Then on a site such as HN where you have comments labeled by username it can become confusing if all comments are labeled with garbage. Whereas if you set a minimum of 5 characters then people are more likely to user human readable words rather than garbage.
Hi Thomas, thanks for the feedback, I was hoping you would turn up...

Its very true, if someone broke into the server (or I was malicious) they could replace the js with code that after decrypting the page sends it onto somewhere else in plain text. I did consider that situation when putting it together and added the ssl security to help prevent MITM attacks.

I don't really intend this to be a way to share content in a secure manner, as you said there are much better tools for that. It is really an experiment in how you could built a tool where the server doesn't know, because it doesn't want to, what content people have submitted to the site. As you know the url fragment is not sent to the server and so I never see the encryption key.
5 Designer Communities You Should Be a Member of
3. Never invade Russia in the winter?
Apart from mini-crashes. And massive profits for companies that create nothing and actually were the cause of the recent financial meltdown.

Could you explain how low latency trading caused either of these things?

I'm particularly curious what relation you see between low latency trading in various computerized exchanges, and a financial meltdown primarily involving OTC trading in heterogeneous derivative-like equities.

By the way, to answer the question, 15ms of liquidity is just as good as 100ms or 1 sec of liquidity. The ordinary trader doesn't care about latency, latency is purely a game between HFT's to see who will receive the profits from selling liquidity.
That's kind of what I mean. It doesn't matter that .communicate(...) looks bad to the author (it doesn't to me). In any real solution, it's not there. There's a "copy_to_clipboard(contents)" call.

I just get the feeling this was only considered "clumsy" because there is not enough other code to complain about anything else.
It's not a great name for search though. I couldn't find it on Google, and it's nowhere near the top in App Store search.

It's possible it'll get better as the name gains popularity, but telling someone "Search for 'Pocket'" isn't going to work right now.
Random question: where did this particularly implementation of CTR mode come from?
So basically you don't know the actual midpoint where the market is trading.

Doesn't that mean people can get an advantage by guessing where that point is and bidding just below it? (Not too far below, because then you're wasting money.) And if so, do they use strategies to try to determine where the midpoint is? (e.g. offer a very small number of shares at many different points, see which ones execute)
MasterCard To Launch Daily Deals Service
Has it any chance of standing in court ? I mean it's as close to patent for idea as it gets.
I hope there will be movement of not buying things manufactured by companies filling silly patents. I feel it's my duty to ignore this company after reading it.
I don't know. The cryptographer Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn keeps cryptographic capabilities in his browser bookmarks, too.

http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg107...
Well, most of it's sequences are lazy. map, take, ect are all lazy. Which is awesome because they are composable (at least, to me, coming from a Haskell background).
This is exactly how NASA should be spending their money. The entire Cassini / Huygens project cost less than $4B upfront and has been massively successful.
Strings were revamped in Ruby 1.9 to have more robust support of Unicode and other encodings. One of the side effects is that both the semantics and internal representation of Strings changed such that treating a String object as an Enumerable no longer made sense.

There's a good treatment of this here:

http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/ruby_19s_string
as I understand it, the flash crash of may 2010 was by a bug in the algo that said "in order to allow the market to absorb a large order, simply divide it into X chunks and put them on the market one at a time". The bug was that this algorithm worked if your total shares T were small enough that T/X didn't affect the market. But on that day, T was so big that T/X still moved the market, and the algo didn't take that into consideration. You could protect against this by having sanity post-checks, but once something hits the market there's basically no CTRL-Z button.

One interesting thing about the flash crash was that the original "stock" wasn't a stock at all, but S&P e-minis, which are tied to a whole cross-section of stocks but are on an exchange that is mostly traded by pros. We have circuit-breakers now on individual stocks that halt trading if a single stock moves too much too fast, but that won't be effective if the whole index gets pushed down like it did that day.
just write the Mozilla and Chrome extensions to expose a C implementation of PGP/GPG to Javascript?

Would that really help? The same hypothetical malicious server admin could simply alter the JS to not call the code from the extension and the average user would be none the wiser. What am I missing?
Oops, that was a previous name I was working under. Its actually what the underlying django app on the server is called...

Fixing it now.
This isn't about keeping the content private for the users. This is all about removing the server's ability to read the content, to attempt to absolve the server owner of liability for that content. Therefore the server has no incentive to lie about the encryption algorithm used.
http://openpgpjs.org/ is an interesting and related project to keep an eye on. Obviously, if it is delivered from a server and run in a client, you can't trust it. I can imagine it being useful for people writing browser addons or nodejs apps though.
How a pilot uses the iPad
What were the performance issues, and how did you fix them?
Just read this on VoltDB's site:

"Third is NewSQL, which obtains better performance and scale in the only way possible – with a totally new architecture. NewSQL delivers high performance and scalability while preserving the traditional ACID functions needed for OLTP. NewSQL systems like VoltDB deliver better throughput than NoSQL without requiring transactions to be supported in user code. NewSQL systems also preserve the high-level language capabilities of SQL."

How does this work?
How test coverage is meaningful (or isn't)
I've seen so many news articles full of hyperbole about HFT, and this is the first legitimate explanation I've seen. Thank you.
Why doesn't he just give potential investments his test? It is of no consequence to him if the ones who fail continue on and ultimately fail in their business, he will have only invested in those who are guaranteed winners anyway.
Very interesting, with your work on voxels will modellers soon have to model the inside of objects - eg) Rather than modelling the human 'skin', model each part - clothes, body, tissue, bone?
The article mis-states their case: women earn 52% of chemistry undergrad degrees and 41% of straight-up math degrees. The problem is not math itself but the culture surrounding Engineering, Physics and Computer Science in particular.
I said "I think it is in the DNA." and not something like "I know for sure, it is in the DNA."
My guess is that we're not talking about 7kb of data (50*140) per second, but 30-50 signed, stamped, delivered transactions, right?
Why do people get so offended by jokes? Laugh, they're supposed to be funny. I can understand if someone is being harassed personally, but it goes much further than this.

The problem I have is that instead of just ignoring tasteless jokes when you are offended (which is what I usually do..although I don't get offended), people like this need to make it so the person that said the joke is silenced.

Special interest groups in the US have been doing this to the media for the last couple of years.

You can't legislate personal opinion away, which is what it seems like they are trying to do.

I don't understand why people are still complaining. Every workplace I've worked in has been so deathly afraid of lawsuits, that we had to be politically correct beyond anything I've ever seen in the past.

It's not the 50s anymore.
Google could soon face big fines over iOS Safari privacy controversy
Last week, Bloomberg published this op-ed defending HFT: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-10/high-speed-trading-...

The piece is largely propaganda. A nice rebuttal is found here: http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/04/hft-pirates-and-their-a...

Can anyone explain why multiple exchanges exist (besides for historical or political reasons)? It seems anti-competitive that exchanges can be private at all, let alone that exchanges can be allowed to operate as monopolies in a market or country.
When the URL is linked, wouldn't the fragment be sent as a referrer when loading page resources?
He's not imputing a direct connection between HFT and the derivatives meltdown. He's implying guilt by association, since HFT systems were deployed by the big investment banks. Of course, so was Powerpoint, which itself probably played a bigger role in the meltdown, so maybe we should ban that too.
Silly, if there are more women and having a degree is valued by society then there is no problem. If there were fewer women then that would be a problem that needed to be addressed urgently.
If the crypto operations are run in browser elements that are obviously part of the browser chrome and not the webpage, then they should be safe. As long as the end user knows the difference.

Eg, if the end user knows they can safely write a message and hit an encrypt button in a particular window opened by the browser, but not just any old textarea on the webpage.
The main gripe i've had with it has to do with the subprocess module. It's "semi" unpythonic. There's MORE than one obvious way to do something. Looking at popen, popen2, popen3...that in combination with communicate.

But overall I agree...i don't feel it's too clumsy.
I agree. If someone invented a keyboard I could think creatively at, I might never get any exercise again.
O'Brien: The Influencers of Silicon Valley
Patent Hints at iPad-Powered Portable Ultrasound Machine
OK, I have to ask. Where does one get a database containing every CD in existence?
I love that idea of a reward/bounty system. For example multiple musicians could try to make short tutorials and the bounty is shared among the top 3 voted submissions. That teach-me-anything and get a bounty system could work for quite a few other areas as well.
Read It Later rebranded as Pocket
What the linked article doesn't discuss is that it is possible to get a real-time notification when a trade occurs. The price of the last trade is the mid-point that you are referring to. Algo trading/HFT shops are listening for trades as well as quotes - this is how they know the price that trades are actually happening at.
I have no idea what this appeal to authority is supposed to mean in this particular context. If Zooko is bookmarking crypto keys, he too is doing something dumb.

The URL fragment identifier is what it is. It is not a security feature.
Quite an interesting way of displaying the images in the table.
Its the one from http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/aes.html

I am considering moving to the http://code.google.com/p/crypto-js/ version as I'm not sure that it is currently producing keys in the best way.
> A programmer's salary is great, but why can't I work 20 hours as a programmer, and 20 hours as a tree-planter, or teaching rock climbing to high school kids, for maybe 55% of a programmer's salary?

You can. You just have to learn to negotiate.

I currently work 4 days a week, with the other day being split between helping with a youth club, and Open Source hacking, and throwing a mountain bike down hills. I had to spend more time looking when I last changed jobs, but that also ended up with me in a job that I love for other reasons as well.
This is how HushMail works for email. Except they can be (and have been) compelled to send backdoored code to individual end-users in order to access their users keys and hand over the unencrypted data to their government.
subprocess is just a wrapper written in python to the os.* functions. it adds a layer of win32 compatability and a consistant interface at the cost of some features

> I’ve written programs that used os.system or os.popen because, in earlier versions of Python, that was the recommended way to do it

just stick to using os.* - just because the documentation recommends you 'upgrade' doesn't mean it is right.
An n of six per arm in a three-arm study is not "actually pretty large."