skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's a mildly amusing challenge and response to that challenge:

(http://www.patrickcraig.co.uk/other/compression.htm)

This page has some nice compression gimmicks (a file that compresses well with one algorithm but hardly at all with another; a file that uncompresses to itself)

(http://www.maximumcompression.com/compression_fun.php)

The large text compression benchmark has some nice finely tuned compression software and statistics.

(http://mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html)

And the Hutter prize is interesting. (Get the 100 Mb file of enwiki8 and the de-compressor to under 16 Mb)

(http://prize.hutter1.net/)
My first job was at a company that did exactly this. Most of the developer staff came in the same way I did: part time college student software tester/tech support.

It was only after the company was purchased by a company with a very different mindset did I realize that this wasn't universal. This makes me just love Twilio a little bit more.
Anything not at either end of that spectrum (I'd argue Wordpress, for instance is dangerously close to being an example) is a compromise which shouldn't exist because it will incur a heavy maintenance burden (greater than the limited but simple solution) in exchange for it's flexibility which it might not be able to pay back as well as the fully flexible solution.

Assuming content management is the key goal; I tend to use either a static generator (limited, purpose-built, ultimately simple) or Drupal (approaching becoming a framework that happens to ship with a CMS, has a learning curve from hell).

For someone that needs more than the simple use case, my suggestion is to delegate to a guy who has spent a long time and cleared the hurdles to proficiency with one of the flexible-at-expense-of-complication CMSes. Though, I'm one of said guys, so I'm biased.

Obviously, Drupal's not exactly pretty (and PHP is a lot of fun to hate) but I find that it comes with code I don't have to write to scratch enough of my customers' itches for me that it's hard not to love it anyway.
This is a full writeup: http://alexgaynor.net/2011/apr/03/my-experience-computer-lan...

You're correct, I got my facts wrong. We were allowed to use ctypes for gmpy, but not for something else. We weren't allowed to submit a ctypes-using and array-using benchmark that didn't work on CPython due to a CPython bug.

the end result of us trying to be slightly better was that we ended up being kicked and a few other people ended up being kicked as well, though they weren't really guilty.

Overall the experience was that the results are not "fair" and are guarded by arbitrary rules that are not really written anywhere. One of those rules is that an arbitrary (typically most popular, but not necesarilly so) implementation is only allowed. This makes it much less trustworthy that it can actually be.
You can do this for anything on Facebook, or any other other service where people post private information they probably shouldn't post.
Assuming 44.1kHz sampling rate the smallest path length difference between the ears is approximately 6.8mm. This corresponds to 2.3 degrees (with sounds source at infinity). Humans can place sounds with about 3 degrees of resolution so unless you have some citations I am seriously skeptical about the claim that higher sampling frequencies gives you anything whatsoever.
I stumbled across this interesting paper about the subject at some point: http://cogprints.org/3667/1/APRI-PH-2004-12b.pdf I know a lot of you will gloss over this, but I think you will be surprised at how interesting it is if you read it.

Basically, it tries to see if mathematical equations have meaning by determining how well they "compress" the results. For instance, the author says the equation eπ−π=19.9990999... is compressible (the equation generates more bits of π than it takes up itself), and thus it is likely that there is some mathematical reason for this -- it's not just a coincident. On the other hand, 314100 gives an approximation to π but does not compress its representation, so there is nothing intriguing about this formula.
Come on, there are many options in the market that suits well in every mentioned need, just to point, http://www.codeplane.com just right the same thing.

Ok, you can create a new service, but you shouldn't act like you're the only one around that do what you do.
Agreed. I'm not sitting here thinking "Oh, well, $50? Not interested... wait, only $36, count me in, then!"

It's like a more desperate grab for customers, but unwilling to admit that the model may not be right.
Well obviously America isn't uniquely bad in this regard if compared to the rest of the world and what we are talking about occurs on a spectrum so everything is relative but compared to other Western European nations I think America is absolutely quite bad in comparison.
#creative

I was specifically talking about that one page and its location. It is English, meant to be parsed as a literal by a program, it's not a random number or a response to a query, that .txt file is literally logically equivalent to the "succss" html page.

so, why is it so convoluted English instead of also just reading "Success"? It's just Microsoft being Microsoft.

this is not trollish of me in the slightest. if it doesn't apply to you, please just ignore it. I stand by the statement.
cia

God loved Jacob.

God says...

4:17 Then sent the king an answer unto Rehum the chancellor, and to
Shimshai the scribe, and to the rest of their companions that dwell in
Samaria, and unto the rest beyond the river, Peace, and at such a
time.

4:18 The letter which ye sent unto us hath been plainly read before
me.

4:19 And I commanded, and search hath been made, and it is found that
this city of old time hath made insurrection against kings, and that
rebellion and sedition have been made therein.

4:20 There have been mighty kings also over Jerusalem, which have
ruled over all countries beyond the river; and toll, tribute, and
custom, was paid unto them.

4:21 Give ye now commandment to cause these men to cease, and that
this city be not builded, until another commandment shall be given
from me.
That's not working too well. :(

All the bags in the city are still plain old plastic.
The MOOCs are coming The MOOCs are coming
The wikipedia article on browser share does a good job of illustrating the fact that nobody really has any idea what's going on:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Sum...

At least we can conclude Chrome is probably somewhere between 19% and 35%.
sorry if i missed the dns part; talking specifically about the test page in question
Regarding point 1, you had many things wrong. I picked what was the most obvious to me at the moment - in order for it not to apply, there only needs to be one thing wrong with it. And my point with the natural logarithm is that once you introduce it, you have introduced an irrational number. Overall, I'm not sure what your point has been.
> optionally adding in a factor of 10% later

You're better off not adding anything. If you could add 5% instead, then you'd be much better still.
They're working on it, and I'll make sure to post it on HN when it goes open source.
Show HN: Starlet. Fluid, square, marginless grids (would love some help)
Readable code - and the long lost secret of how to achieve it [short talk]
As a college student I would actually say that this tool is pretty very useful for keeping up with the various things I purchase for myself, for others, and that others purchase for me (e.g. Chipotle, pizza, groceries, etc.). The minimalism & simplicity are a plus. Moreover, the functionality outlined by this statement is what I find to be truly useful:

"You can cut and paste the text from the results box into an email to all your buddies that owe you or you can save the worksheet...and send a link so they can see the worksheet that you created."

The fact that everything is coordinated by name also allows for a lot of flexibility. For example, if for some reason I wanted to add multiple rows, all with the same "Person", the system assumes that these people are the same based on the name, which is what I would personally expect.

Overall, kudos for a nice simple tool.
However programmers might find a social network of only programmers worth much more than $36 per year.
Q1: Will this allow for tracking and management of shipments not created through Postmaster?

Q2: Will this allow for monitoring of preprinted shipping labels (e.g. RMA labels or https://store.burrellimaging.com/index.php/supplies/mailers-...), with web hooks when they are used for a shipment?

Q3: When creating a shipment, will it be possible to specify rules for the "service"? E.g. "cheapest service with delivery by X date, but no more than Y dollars."

Q4: Can carrier specific account numbers be provided for lower shipping rates (and so shipments will be tied to account for claims, etc.)?
I think it will be better simply because spammers can sign up for hundreds of Twitter accounts and spam like crazy. When they get booted they just re-sign up. Doing so at app.net means paying $36 bucks, far less likely.

That goes for normal people too, when they pay something they tend to respect it a bit more. Forums have been doing this for years.
If you want to deploy a site using FTP, why not do it? Why does it matter what people think of your deploy process?
If you want private repo hosting on the cheap, I would suggest using Gitolite [1] on a VPS [2].

The current version includes self-service key management, regular users are able to create repos in their own namespace, and easy forking of repositories. It's extensible, you can write your own commands in any language.

Granted, it has minuses. It only has a command line interface (no GUI), requires a little setup and editing of configuration files and reading of docs.

[1] https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite

[2] http://prgmr.com/
Would love some help from any CSS or JS pros who would love to pitch-in via collaboration or pull-request.

Any feedback and criticism is welcome too. I built this for my own needs in the photography/portfolio space.
A National Talent Strategy – Ideas for Securing U.S.
Dropbox does have a limited form of version control fwiw. Select a file on the website and there's a "Previous Versions" item highlighted.

Not that I'm recommending this approach. That side, I do have GitHub repos that are also in my Dropbox, so I can collaborate with non-technical folk. It works great and haven't had a single issue with it in about 6 months of usage.
Seems like that ought to be sitting on top of github.
As silly as it sounds, one of my favorite aspects of Node is how ridiculously portable and modular it is. NPM makes everything a breeze, and (thanks to support from Microsoft) it actually allows easy development on Windows. I realize plenty of languages have their own package managers, but NPM is fantastic.
The callback aspect definitely requires more discipline, but I'm glad that I've learned it.
I chuckled - I hope you're not serious.
The first two myths aren't really myths.

In "The worst case is terrible", the author goes on to explain that the worst case is unlikely. That may be true, but it's still O(n).

In "Hash tables become full, and bad things happen", if I'm reading it correctly, the author shows how you can make each hash table bucket a linked list so that each bucket never becomes full. But what happens when you have 1000 items in each bucket? If you keep adding elements and you want to keep reads fast, sooner or later you're going to have to add more buckets, at which time you need to re-hash every element in the table.

I'm a fan of hashtables, but there's some rather suspicious handwaving in this article.
Yeah, "I know many" refers to a group of people I know, so I'm not generalizing. It's like that silly quote from the Anchorman '60 percent of the time, it works every time'.
The practice of giving incentives to download apps has been officially banned (by Apple) for over a year, but I don't think the apple reviewers have been enforcing it uniformly.
The problem is that they did not do the test using actual tin foil. They used aluminum foil. All readily available "tin" foil is actually aluminum.

Just try finding some real tin foil.

There is a reason for this.
I'm curious about this. What do you do when you encounter bugs that have a longer fix period, say several days to a couple of weeks? Do you stop new development or are you dedicating part of your team or team's time to only working on bugs?
TinyPost Spam
No, the domain wasn't registered until this came to light today.
I'm confused - he's addressing the point made in the article by Ed Pegg that things are interseting if you allow log and sqrt. Surely that means he's allowed to use log and sqrt, and in particular, to use them in rational expressions.

So I don't really understand what your point is.
Wouldn't you then be paying for the EC2 instance's idle time in addition to the I/O you're using?
LowEndBox are Kickstarting somebody into the hosting industry with $5000
LowEndBox are offering $5000 of freebies to the winner of their kickstarter competition.
What benefits are PUAs supposedly promising and not delivering on?
I would imagine that these guys are very sad and depressed right now, given all the harsh -- and correct -- feedback that they've gotten here. I'll try to add something different:

The various competitors in this space compete apparently on public/private visibility, price, storage quotas, and user+repo counts. If you compete on these dimensions you will have a very difficult time differentiating yourself -- there simply is not enough difference between one repo provider and another on these bases to matter. Cost of switching, I would imagine, is relatively easy -- `git remote add`, `git push`, and done?

There is also, perhaps, competition on UI/UX quality. This can be a differentiating factor for some, but I think not as strong as it is for other markets, given the strong technical background of the target market. If you had some original and compelling offer which had a poorer but workable UI (which improved rapidly over time), that could negate the advantage that e.g. Github has over you on interface.

I don't have any better ideas for this space -- the generic advice for you I would give is to innovate in some different, not-already-explored way. Can you provide something completely different from more users, more repos, more storage, lower price?
#creative

I like this idea, but the results have what I would say is "very low momentum" in them (not speaking with any kind of terminology here, just ad hoc) meaning that just as when you write L E T T E R S e..x..t..r..e...m...e...l...y... s--l---o---w---l---y you get much more wiggle in them, the two images on this page are very very wavy, as though the pen that drew them had no momentum.

isn't there a way to have lines be drawn by a hand that has inertia/momentum and is trying to follow the logical curve, but just wavers a certain percentage and correct as it goes along? This is what gets (in my opinion) the result we see. Someone drawing at a good pace by hand and correcting while he does so. not a "random deviation" around the logical path, whch is what these results seem to be more like.
Tiny correction since I see this mistake often (and I was making it myself in the past): the symbole for Apple is AAPL, not APPL. Not intuitive like Apple is supposed to be, huh? :)
Like someone else commented in the TC article about Typescript, this Resig quote, changing "Google" for "Microsoft" is relevant:

"Why is [Microsoft] putting time and effort into
changing JavaScript when the DOM is what needs fixing?"

https://twitter.com/jeresig/status/124114331616026624
If by curve-smoothing you mean, "creating a new layer in photoshop on top of the original and trying to draw as carefully as possible".

Plus, he obviously only uses a 'pen' style brush.
I'll assume you are not trolling. My point is that

log(-1)/(sqrt(-1)*log(e)) = ln(-1)/sqrt(-1)

I am just writing the same equation using a log with another base so I don't have e in the equation explicitly.
Yeah, that drives me nuts when I see it.
Except that phone numbers are easily iterable. What other sort of data could I do this with? You have to know the data in advance in order to find a result for it.
How about dropping the developer yearly price too?
Apple would have no problem taking this away if they filed a WIPO claim. He clearly registered it in 'bad faith' (a legal term) and is willfully and purposely violating their trademark. I suspect though all they would have to do is ask and he'd hand it over - perhaps with a letter threatening legal action if he didn't immediately comply.
Don't grow up ;)!
Corporate ethic law:

How evil a company is is directly proportional to the percentage of marketshare it has.
Thank you very much! I appreciate it - Very useful information! Would upvote x10 if I could.
White House confirms cyber-attack
So, growing 100% from 10,000 to 20,000 users allowed App.net to drop annual pricing from $50 to $36, which implies their expenses grew by only 44% (from around $500,000 to around $720,000). If expenses continue to grow at similar fractions of the rate of user growth, App.net should be able to price the service for around $5 per year with just over a million users. At that pricing point, App.net would become a compelling economic proposition for many consumers.
Open webOS 1.0 On An Asus Transformer Prime: Part Two
What a delightfully condescending description!
If those of you posting wouldn't mind, add your company to http://map.innovatesf.com.

We're rolling out some new features in the next few weeks, including a feature for company "owners" to place links to their job description page.

For SF startups only, but that appears to be a lot of you.
Yahoo! Pokemonium got DMCA'd. At least their MediaFire upload of the game is gone! File Removed for Violation.

I hope their website go down soon too.

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?u8c9acao554m1tl
Well, from a Python point of view, I don't really care if everyone in the world gets a smartphone tomorrow.

Can you really imagine a future in which people all over the worlds do not work at desks?

Or one in which people sit at desks doing all their work on a tablet or a smartphone?

The issue is an ergonomic one, and I just don't buy the idea that the "shift from desktop to mobile" is "the same magnitude, if not greater, than the shift from desktop app to web".

Python will not end up as mere glue. As the article points out, there is going to be a large supply of new Python programmers (or "non-programmers") arriving shortly, due to educational programs and Pi type devices. Remember "Computer Programming for Everybody", or "CP4E"?

http://www.python.org/doc/essays/everybody/

That was the original vision for Python, and it is slowly happening, don't worry.
The point of the exercise is to find a short approximation of pi, no? If you allow the use of e, then you can define pi. What he wrote is not an approximation, it is pi. Surely at that point you've defeated the point of the exercise.
There appears to be a vocal group which suggests their way of doing it is best, even if it involves trudging through configuration documents that remind one of engineering schematics.

Not knocking down the many brilliant developers who work this way, but it seems the simple approach sometimes is the best approach.
pretty sure you are just an aggregator. Visa & MC are making this more 'feasible'
I've found mingw and msys to be very fast and easy to use.

In my experience it's been Cygwin that's a bloated, non-intuitive, awful monstrosity to be avoided at all costs. I've had great difficulties in the past with Cygwin DLL's, particularly when a program comes with its own Cygwin DLL which is a different version than the system Cygwin.

I haven't used Cygwin since 2005 or so due to these difficulties.

For Windows virtualization solutions, my first stop these days would be Virtualbox, qemu or the like. Second preference is mingw/msys.

I've also had a positive experience with a little-known solution called Colinux [1], essentially a Windows port of another little-known technology in the Linux mainline kernel called user-mode Linux. Colinux requires some setup, especially if you want graphics (for GUI work, you need some remote desktop with a Windows client like Xming or VNC). Again, I'd recommend VirtualBox or qemu for casual use, but Colinux is an interesting technology, and I've found it gets very good performance.

My negative experiences with Cygwin were so great, it is only something I use when there is no alternative available. And in preference to all of these is simply using Linux, but sometimes that's simply not an acceptable alternative to Windows (i.e. when you're making a product that you want to run on all popular OS's, supporting only Linux seems like a recipe for disaster. See Sage [2] for an example of an open-source project whose official line on Windows compatbility is "use Virtualbox.")

[1] http://www.colinux.org/

[2] http://sagemath.org
These stats and graphs are at least a bit misleading.

For the Firefox cross section they show

10.91 + 3.20 + 0.72 + 0.99 = 20.08 ?? It is in fact 15.82

Which explains my first question: Where is Firefox 3.6? I cannot believe ie6 is still "so big" and Firefox 3.6 has vanished. Which it hasn't. It clearly has ~ 4.26% or a bit less.

Kinda misleading info graphic
Very good points re: multi-platform. I'm an ex Java developer, so I'll have a look at the Android codebase and see how difficult it is to write an Android version.
Does sprunge work for non-textual data?
#creative

I'm serious in kind, but not degree :) I do realize it's pretty frivolous, and a bit funny.

It's also a good minimal example!

Even though it is only meant to be used as a literal in a program to check against with a regex, still, someone has to write that regex. Someone will either write in "Success" or write in " -- i just flipped tabs, clicked a link, then flipped back to finish this sentence -- "Microsoft NCSI".

so, ha-ha, but a little serious. it's a good example that pervades every other creative choice made at the two companies.
Clearly you can't perceive sarcasm.
Gitlab team is making great software - basicaly they've copied what's best in Github and released it to the world allowing you to set up your own git hosting service (accessible only by your team). In my opinion it's great piece of software as long, as you don't want to share your code with anyone out there (beside your teammates). Ergo - it's better imo for students, as long, as they have machine that will be able to host it (VPS basically).
Separating the Pseudo From Science
On iOS I have been using Felix. It may be a non trivial amount of money, but is excellent (especially for a v1) - very polished.

The other popular option is rivr, which has a slightly different take on things, and maybe not as pretty as others, but is free.
Yeah in the last year a lot of them have come through, and I've also noticed a large grave yard of apps starting to build up too, GroupMe, Fast Society, etc

It's only been on the market for a couple of months so we'll see how it goes :)
I hadn't heard this story before, but time isn't kind to this particular conspiracy. The moment of clarity: Mr. Curry wanted to sue Microsoft but "couldn't find a lawyer willing to take on the case" -- in 1998. EVERYBODY was suing Microsoft in 1998, including multiple governments. If you couldn't find someone to sue them that year, I'm afraid you don't have much credibility.

And this made my head hurt:

"All computer security systems begin with the Intel processor itself," Curry said. "I helped Intel develop their processor, so I know how they work and how vulnerable they can be if left exposed." ... "In fact," he added, "Microsoft NT 4.0 is the least secure of all the NT versions... Processors on Windows NT Version 4.0 are insecure because they have been designed to automatically open the processor up to accept commands on start-up."
I take your word for it - I genuinely don't know, the correlation is however hard to miss.