skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is really easy to see the problem with Airtime and you could have recognized this already with Chatroulette: It is really exhausting, people don't relax while video chatting. Even with your mum you constantly have to think about what is seen on the video feed right now.

Especially on Airtime there is no purpose. This would maybe make sense in a clear dating context, but a rejection would hurt much more this way - not fun to do. So why should somebody put effort in talking with some stranger about something?
Some software companies do this on the App Store, e.g. Toca Boca. They name all their apps "Toca <something>", and they're all in the same genre (kids' games with emphasis on free play - no goals or missions etc).

Their games cost $2; while it isn't a lot of money it's still above the minimum. And they seem to be doing pretty well too, several titles in the top 50 here long after release.
How so? (genuine question - you don't make it clear what you're referring to)
It's not proven, it's the definition. If there is a subsequence that isn't contained in a non-repeating infintely long sequence, then it isn't a non-repeating infinitely long sequence.
To be fair on the conquests stats, George Lazenby did end up in a castle on a mountain surrounding by "beauties, everyone of them different": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVP2n_GcdlQ#t=0m40s

And he wore a kilt, went commando and gave the ladies easy access to his junk. I mean, what more reason did they need?
Yes, it was cool. When it goes up on Vimeo I highly recommend that people listen not to my talk, but to Linda Sandvik's heartfelt and inspirational talk called "Getting Better". Amongst many things she's behind Code Club: http://codeclub.org.uk
Maybe not in Haskell, but Clojure's multimethods handle this just fine.
Bank Alliance, Aozora to form Kirayaka alliance.
I find, sometimes, that doing an

#apt-get -f missing

fixes many of these post-upgrade problems. YMMV!
> The US is by far the most wasteful healthcare spender in the world, with vast amounts of money producing very mediocre outcomes.

I'm a proponent of free/social healthcare but do those results stack up if you look at where the spending goes? What I mean is do 40% spend 80% of that money and get the best healthcare in the world and the 20% spent on the other 60% of the people buy poor enough healthcare to bring the stats down?

I also get the impression that doctor's salaries are high and that might need to be factored in to the cost comparison (e.g. do the healthcare spend comparison in units of doctor's salary.

US doctor's salaries may be necessary incentive to get them to take on US scale student debts for the duration of the medical degree, I'm not saying that they are necessarily greedy but that unless doctors can be cheaper it may not be possible to spend the same and get equal medical outcomes as other countries.

It might take more than political will, outcomes may decline for the best off and doctor's pay may have to fall for the same spend to get world class results for the same money. I would still be a proponent of such a system if all people could be treated humanely, not bankrupted for injury/illness even for some reduction in quality of care for the currently well covered.

*All numbers are examples. Lawsuit costs are also often cited as a reason for the high overall costs so that may be fixable to some extent although other forms of regulation and safety net's for victims may be required.
If you only have two, it's bearable, though.
There are national do-not-call registries. Companies are required to check those before calling. If they don't then they get fined, which usually starts at around 25,000 euro.

This is for The Netherlands, but I believe it's similar throughout Europe.
Maybe using display: 'inline-block' is a solution?
You're conflating two things. The technical definition of "normal" is that it contains every finite string as a substring. That will imply that it's infinite and non-repeating.

However, you can have a string that is infinit and non-repeating but not normal.

Pi is infinite and non-repeating, but it is not known to be normal.
That's exactly the solution I imagined. Dial something like *69 and have the sender marked as a robocaller. It shouldn't be hard to find the people getting thousands of reports every day and shut off their phone service.
Here's Brendan Dawes' take on James Bond kills:

"... the image pays homage to the wonderful opening titles to Dr. No by Maurice Binder. Bond only killed one person in The Man With The Golden Gun yet seemed to go a little crazy in GoldenEye..."

http://brendandawes.com/projects/jamesbondkills
I'm guessing people here are familiar with Borges' "Library of Babel". (If not, it's a short story about a library that contains every possible book).

I read an interesting thought experiment about the concept:

1. There's lots of different languages around, but all languages (even Chinese) use a finite alphabet of symbols. So for simplicity we can just convert all languages in the Library into binary.

2. On first appearance, the library would contain books of an infinite number of lengths. But it would surely be more practical to split such books into volumes.

3. You'd have a maximum volume length of say, 1 million bits. Books shorter than that can just be padded with 0s. But you can now double up volumes: volume #6345 of book #1840849 might be an exact duplicate of volume #93974 of book #11132445. Which means the library can now be finite in size: it only needs to contain all one-million-bit strings, a mere 2^1000000 volumes.

4. Why stop there, though? It's clear we could just use smaller volumes and get a smaller library. In fact, the library only needs two pages - one '0' and one '1'. Depending on the order you read them, you can get any book you want out of it.

Information theory is weird.

Edit: here's the original: http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/universal_library.ht...
I’d like to thank Dimitiri Grabov, and Steve Buckley for organizing Hacker News London

Dmitri deserves 99% of the gratitude. I only play a very small part at the moment!
Well yes, of course. vm, like many people, misreads "no pain, no gain" to say, "pain == gain."
Not sure where he says that owners of the trees make lots of money? He states that top quality corks can be worth a Euro, but he doesn't mention the amount of money the cork growers make.
Kim Dotcom plans new cyberlocker service that feds can’t reach
Another shipwrecked sailor, doomed by the Siren's call of live video.
It's not a myth. Linux support for newer hardware is still abysmal. Video card drivers still suck. Multiple display (more than two) support is bad-bad-bad. Unity and xinerama still don't click.
Agreed. I'm 24 and the overriding reason why I haven't started a startup is that for the past three+ years I've had my hands full supporting my family, who fell on hard times due to the economic downturn. I can't risk my parents being on the streets dying from lack of healthcare. I'm willing to take the risk for myself, but right now my parents have nobody to turn to.

It's exceedingly clear to me that "they would start a startup anyways" takes a very privileged view, as if risks are there to be taken willy-nilly, and the fallout of a failure nothing much in the grand scheme of things. That may be true for the self, but if others depend on you, it's a whole different perspective and some responsibility must be taken.
Show HN: The number 42
Other profilers are available.
'nullable' => self::getNullable

also won't work in any version of PHP
If you want to play around with the example, I've stuck it on jsfiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/KndsL/2/
Very few languages consider non-indentation whitespace as significant (not counting using whitespace as a token delimiter, which Haskell definitely does, e.g. "foo bar" =/= "foobar").
I think Dalton was an excellent Bond, better than Connery or Moore. I find Moore and Brosnan to be ridiculous, whereas Dalton is suitably psycopathic and dark. I like Craig's take on Bond too, but the plot lines of the films are disappointing.

I agree that the most recent Bond films have felt like ridiculous action movies.
Ever since I was a kid in elementary school I've loved the idea/thought experiment of owning a hard disk full of every possible n-by-n binary image. By definition, on this hard disk you would have a sketch of every person you've ever met, every person you've ever loved, every place you've ever been, every alien in the solar system. On one hand, it's endearing you could depict so many things in such a finite medium, but at the same time it's astounding how much storage space you would need for even the smallest reasonable numbers of N. Sometimes when I'm bored waiting for a bus, I love to think about what it would be like to pour through all these images and somehow know which ones would be meaningful in my future that I don't yet know.
I've been to two of these already and they're absolutely fantastic. 500 people regularly show up and it usually fills up pretty quickly. Thanks to Dimitri and Steve for continuing to put this on. Also, a big thanks to the sponsors who provide beer and pizza!

P.S. - I've thought about asking to give a talk about start-ups in the enterprise since I'm probably one of the few here that works in that industry. I'm in the process of finishing up a long blog post on the topic. As it's something most people don't necessarily talk about here on HN, I thought I'd gauge some interest first.
> ... but would I be right in thinking that the probability of a normal, infinite number containing a given arbitrary string of digits is "almost sure" rather than "sure"?

No. Given the assumptions (a normal number, therefore infinite in extent), the probability that a given finite sequence appears somewhere in it is 1.0.

> Or can it actually be proven mathematically that it contains such a string?

Here's one way to think about it. Let's say that you flip a perfectly fair, random coin, heads counts as 1 and tails 0, and each flip adds a bit to a sequence. Let's further say that some finite bit sequence is chosen as a finite-subsequence target, let's say the text of "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy (a famously big book, 1,225 pages).

We can agree that, as the normal bit sequence increases in length, the probability of encountering "War and Peace" within the sequence increases as a strict function of the number of bits in the sequence.

Now the clincher -- what is true for a finite sequence (that the probability of encountering a given subsequence increases but never becomes certain) is not true for an infinite sequence. For an infinite sequence, the probability for the appearance of a given subsequence becomes certain, i.e 1.0. The only requirement is that the subsequence be finite.
Infinite and non-repeating does not imply it contains every number.

For proof of this, consider an infinite non-repeating number, without the number 9.

Pi is infinite and non-repeating.
I have not yet seen proof that pi contains every finite number.
Obviously the price of textbooks isn't the ultimate bottleneck for learning stuff. But, there are important difference between free & cheap. Easier access has all sorts of catalyzing effects.

For example, a free textbook can be referred to. "For a more detailed discussion of this read chapter 4 of Gaussian Processes for Machine Learning."
There are several projects that attempt to implement JVM in JavaScript. Doppio [1] seems to be the most mature one. So, we may yet see JVM-based languages in the browser (and without the need for a plug-in).

[1] http://int3.github.com/doppio/about.html
This is not true. For instance, sequence 00 does not occur in sequence

010110111011110111110111111...

which can hardly be described as "repeating" (or periodic) sequence.

The point here is normality. Fix alphabet A having b letters. We say that a sequence S of elements of A is normal if, for every word w, we have

lim n->inf C(S, w, n)/n = b^(-k)

where C(S, w, n) is the number of occurrences of w in first n letters of S, and k is length of w. More intuitively, S is normal if every word occurs in S with the same asymptotic frequency.

So, if a sequence does not contain some word as a substring, it cannot be normal by above definition.
This is a maintainability nightmare.
Of which at least Tandy and Commodore had been in the business market since '77.
It's very common for people to repeat that claim that Peter Norvig gave in that presentation that design patterns are work arounds for language shortcoming. This is only true for some patterns. MVC, Facade, Composite and others are obviously applicable in most paradigms. Moreover, some patterns are obviated by library improvements, such as Singleton.

The truth is that modern OOP (even in Java) doesn't many of the patterns in the GoF book any longer. That's not much of a surprise though: GoF is 18 years old. Approaches to problems have changed and the patterns used are a bit different.

Idiomatic Haskell is full of design patterns. Here's a few of the popular ones: monads, composition (of functions, not objects), maybe. When I stopped use Haskell actively, they were just getting a handle on the overuse of monads. Pattern overuse had occurred, just as in Java. It seems that pattern popularity follows the Hype Cycle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle)
.. in the US. In most of Europe for example, your ability to circumvent DRM for the purpose of reverse engineering for interoperability is protected.
> You could pose the question the other way around: is the infinite hidden within the finite? This philosophical question is probably outside the realm of mathematics ...

There's a reason it's outside the domain of mathematics -- it contradicts the definition of infinite. By definition, an infinite set cannot be a subset of a finite one.

> ... but an interesting thought-exercise.

Briefly, but easily answered. :)
"almost sure", in probability, means an event with probability 1.0. I realize this is somewhat counter-intuitive from an English point of view, but it makes sense from a Math point of view.
True

Maybe it's even part of some wine/wood interaction

Screw caps may be ok but they certainly look cheap.

I'm not convinced low-end corks are better than synthetic cork (in the case of some aging), and maybe the technology improves, leaving the solid corks to the expensive wines.

Supermarkets in France sell corks, I remember seeing them split by aging time, from 1,2 years up to around 20 years
This reminds me of the "pi encoding" - if pi is, in fact normal, you can encode any file as a tuple (`start`, `length`) encoding a substring of the expansion of pi.

It's often phrased as a compression paradox of a sort - surprisingly many people overlook the fact that `start` will tend to take a lot of bits to encode.
I got your version up and ready for A/B testing today!

Can you please submit the site in a new post to HN?
I'm too new here and don't want to post my own web site here.

I promise to write a blog post on the results, this will be fun!
Perhaps we can finally debunk one rule about writing sales letters.
a. proove it

b. pi as a decimal number is an approximation that is only as long as you calculate it to be. Moreover, decimals do not contain non-numeric information. That's just your own interpretation. Imagine a number system where pi is 1. Clearly no names in 1. Now imagine a number system where pi is expressed as π, like... the number system that we use. Clearly no names in π.
It's funny when people complain that Apple's GUI isn't like the OSes that copied them... When in fact that's because they copied them wrong... :\

I agree there are crippled parts to OSX's CLI, but would be curious to know which bits you think are crippled? As from your other assertions, I suspect they are shallow.
Thanks for the explanation. While I have no doubt you're right (because I am completely outside my field of expertise), I have difficulty intuitively accepting the answer. By way of comparison, the wikipedia entry on the infinite monkey theorem [1] refers to the probability of producing the Shakespeare corpus as "almost sure", a situation that seems broadly analogous to the one you describe.

I suspect the difference is that the monkeys are required to produce an output which is merely random rather than evenly distributed.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
> He’s clearly an articulate, balanced and confident young man, completely at ease in English.

Why is everyone so surprised that his English is excellent and that he is very confident? His clan pretty much owns and runs a whole country and rulers and their families generally have everything available to them, in every dictatorship all around the world since the beginning of time. Including the best modern education available.

If anything, it is surprising how outspoken he is against the regime and thereby his own family and the entitlement that allowed him to be where he is now but then again, "quod licet iovi, non licet bovi" and sons typical hold a special value anyway.
> If he (or she!) wants to open or run a business, he (or she!) will do that regardless.

There's a concept of 'margin' in economics that is applicable here: some people will never open their open their own business, others will, no matter what. In the middle are people who might, or might not. Doing things to make it easier for them will tempt more of them.
I'm saying that having a stale cache won't be a problem for an application that is designed around the fact that you will occasionally have stale data.
FYI if you live in San Francisco and make less than 54k a year you can get Healthy San Francisco (http://www.healthysanfrancisco.org/). It can be free depending on how much you're making. When I had a startup I broke my arm and had to get surgery, it was only $100 bucks.
What if foo() could return nil in some cases?
Hi. I thought the block size is much bigger in fractal trees (like 4MiB instead of 4KiB) than in B-trees hence the fanout would be about the same?

I'm trying to experiment with these ideas on my side, but can't quite grok how large the buffers must be at each level of the tree.

Let's take a concrete example like: 2^40 (1T) records with an 8-byte key and an 8-byte value. In a traditional B-tree with a 8KiB block size and assuming links take 8 bytes too and assume for a while that blocks are completely full. So, that's 1G leaf blocks, a fanout of about 1K and hence & full 4-level trees: 1 root block, 1K level-2 blocks, 1M level-3 blocks, 1G leaf blocks.

In this setting, I understand that a fractal tree will attach a buffer to each internal node. How large will they be at level 1 (root), level 2, and level 3 ?
You are not accounting for meta information, such as which volumes go together in which order to form which book.
There's no need to use shift to get a semicolon on a french keyboard.
Ah, weird. Thanks.
I'm only one data point but seeing my dad unable to retire, he's 70, and myself being 47, I'm definitely afraid to give up the cushy job I have.

If somehow I knew food, shelter, medical and retirement were covered I'd be far more likely to try a few things now that I wouldn't have hesitated to try 15-20 years ago.

I guess the take away is something like this might be better or worse depending on your current situation.
I've not had any problems and we've ordered 63 machines from them since July. To be fair they are not customised ones though.

As for support, all companies suck but they are several orders of magnitude better than HP and Dell. We've had not had anything break for a year or two which is good and when we did (a t420 doa), it was resolved in 4 days.
Few popular IDEs that developers use to code in Python, JavaScript, and Ruby.
Ah I thought it was more proper to add the u than to do the line over the o. It's at least much more prevalent :P.
Hangouts ftw!
The U.S. also has a do-not-call registry that you get fined for violating (donotcall.gov). The problem is that they don't know who to fine, because it's really easy to spoof caller ID and the businesses aren't dumb enough to identify themselves.
> you end up stuck with whatever your brain has learned by age 14

I very strongly doubt this is true and I must object because this holds up the old alleged "fact" that at a certain age "you're just too old" to learn something new and I detest this with a passion.

Off the top of my head, Gary Marcus' "Guitar Zero" does an excellent job of de-bunking this.
Loads of websites here in Taiwan. While the rest of the world you could say "moved on", that's just not true, other places keep making the same crappy websites like it's 1997...
For my part Unity is the first time I have an UI that doesn't make me swear and wish I was back to using my old Amiga....

I installed Ubuntu 12.04 with the intention of ripping out Unity for a tiling window manager, but gave it a day or so, and that was enough to realize that with minimal adjustment to keybindings etc., it was pretty much exactly what I wanted with the exception of the loss of spatial file browsing which still annoys me,but then again I rarely use use the gui for finding files so it's something I can live with.
Aldebaran uses Python to create amazing robots.
> I've met several Germans and Swedes that I couldn't hear any accent on at all

Then you haven't met the multitude of Germans who do not dare speak a word of English and would never watch or read anything in English and buy the German version of video games despite being taught English as their first foreign language in school for no less than 6 years.

Yes, there are a few exceptions amongst the younger ones who watch movies and TV shows in English and typically they go to the other extreme and are fluent speakers but they are rare.
http://time.is/ claims to get ±0.011 second accuracy for me, and it appears to use JavaScript.
Very modest of you John. I personally found your talk great, and I came away from the event with a crazy idea which I'm going to pursue. ;)
> If you were on Windows you'd need to install Visual Studio just to get a compiler.

Not true, even if you consider only Microsoft software.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=8279

And if my project involves heavy use of shared libraries, I'll take cygwin over macports any day.
The "shortcoming" is fixed by uninstalling a single package.
"Contestant further represents, warrants, and agrees that any use of the Submission by the Sponsor, Administrator, and/or Judges (or any of their respective partners, subsidiaries, and affiliates) as authorized by these Official Rules, shall not:

a. infringe upon, misappropriate or otherwise violate any intellectual property right or proprietary right including, without limitation, any statutory or common law trademark, copyright or patent, nor any privacy rights, nor any other rights of any person or entity;

b. constitute or result in any misappropriation or other violation of any person’s publicity rights or right of privacy."

(http://robocall.challenge.gov/rules)

I find this clause rather disturbing, I think I know what they meant to say, but they instead wrote something so overly general, that if enforced, effective makes this competition un-winnable. Maybe someone else can weigh in on this.
"...having a disastrous experience at PHP London"

Oh, do tell
Raspberry Pi could cost less, but not too much..
Ok, I misunderstood then. I thought it would subtly return no value instead of a value, and you'd only discover this at run time. That would be bug prone. If it simply generates a compilation error, no problem.
I came to think of it after reading part of one of the answers in OP link:

"So yes, it has the story of your life -- but it also has many false stories, many subtly wrong statements, and lots of gibberish."

The "gibberish" is bound to contain many truths. This kind of encoding is very different from the mathematical idea of subsets. I am probably bending concepts beyond breaking point here, and you are correct.
It was a complete failure on my part, I had/have an inability to talk/approach groups of people and ended up sitting on my own guzzling cans of sprite before making a hasty and rather embarrassingly early exist.