skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Missing the point.

If I create an algorithm in X lines of code in one language, and I can create the same algorithm in another language in X/10 lines of code, it will be easier to understand the latter IF ONLY because it's more concise. And easier to understand means that, given a spec, it's easier to see that it's been implemented, special cases and all.

And easier to understand also means the bugs will be more obvious, easier to prevent in the first place -- and easier to find and fix when they do occur. Q.E.D.

If you want to see an example, check out this benchmark -- the Lua code [1] and the Java code [2], with Java at 9x the Lua. Can you seriously claim it would take the same amount of time to debug both, and that they have an equal opportunity for bugs?

[1] http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/program.php?test=knucl...

[2] http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/program.php?test=knucl...
Rust definitely has Android support planned.
Ask HN: Adwords tips for a SaaS business
I run a SaaS tool that helps screen printers manage their shops. I'm looking into Adwords and optimizing my campaigns. Does anyone have tips that worked for them?

Currently what I'm running with a .13% CTR is this: http://d.pr/n/byja (pasted so you can see the linebreaks).
What are the indicators of failure that you focused on?
It is difficult to store a couple of gigabytes, withstand a potentially intrusive search incident to arrest or intelligence action (i.e. on the Gulfstream, wearing a hood...) without that data being found or destroyed or removed from your control, and then widely disseminate that information while held in detention, potentially incommunicado, etc.
And you can't donate with Bitcoin? What is this?
If, however, one wanted a similarly intuitive explanation of the e^i part of the story, I recommend these two articles in order. They explain the hand wavy part about complex numbers and rotation:
http://betterexplained.com/articles/a-visual-intuitive-guide...
http://betterexplained.com/articles/intuitive-understanding-...
none of the posts I read here mentioned the true advantage of C++ over other languages: It's the only language that offers enough flexibility to write 1) generic, 2) correct and 3) efficient code. With C you get only 3. With Haskell you get 1 and 2. With ML you get some of 1 (yes I contend that C++, in the hands of a competent programmer, can be as good as ML or even better for writing generic code) some of 2 and some of 3. C++ allows you to have cheap abstractions (using them does not require paying significant penalty, unlike Scheme or Smalltalk). Java and similar managed languages excel in neither of these criteria in particular.
> Can you imagine a state that doesn't wield violence? That's what a state is.

That's part of what a state is, but it's more than that. A state is a violent organization that has managed to convince the vast majority of society that its violent actions are acceptable. In any conceivable society (state or no state), you will have violence. The difference between "criminals" (druglords, thieves, rapists, etc.) and "government" is that the vast majority of society condemns the violence of the former but accepts (and often even praises) the violence by the latter.
RSA and AES are wildly different animals. You break RSA by factoring very large numbers. Currently this is done with GNFS, which is steadily improving. Theoretically, it may also be possible to do it much faster. Nobody brute forces RSA.

In order to crack AES though you need to either brute force it (which you will never do. Not that many bits, just forget about it.) Or you need a cryptanalytic attack that allows you to do it with reasonable computation and memory complexity. An attack that is currently unknown.

But surely such an attack could conceivably appear.. so what is the difference? The difference is that while RSA is a ticking clock (worse case scenario: slap on another ~256 bits to "factor-able" every 5 to 10 years), AES is only a ticking clock in the sense that we cannot rule out the possibility that one day it may start to tick.

If anyone in the world can crack AES, or will be able to crack AES anytime soon, it's the NSA, And it does not matter to Assange if they can crack it (unless the entire insurance file is a bluff).

AES was and is absolutely the correct choice for an insurance file. (I believe this is about when tptacek steps in, correctly calls me an idiot, and points out that another symmetric key cipher is a better choice.)
Hipster HN-er liked Facebook before my grandma got on.
Felt like expanding a bit more:
Note that this is a result of evolution in the language: What's referred to as modern style of C++ that has emerged from the works of people involved in the STL/boost tradition and for the large part informed the new standard. It's a noticeably different style from what you would see in a codebase written in mid-90s. It's arguably less object-oriented than most Java systems, and adopted certain concepts from functional programming, while exploring several innovations hitherto unseen in other languages.

What also enables this is advances in modern architecture. 64bit processors allow for large address spaces and large stack frame sizes, which obviate the need to allocate every single bit on the heap. You can often see sizable C++ programs measuring around 100KLOC or larger which use new/delete in a handful of places. Automatic storage is, well, automatically managed. For when free store semantics is needed, smart-pointers abstract the complexity of several common cases where automatic-management is not adequate.

Using value semantics, streams, lambdas, regular expressions, and a good library for command line flags processing (e.g., boost) C++ can even be a perfectly apt choice of language for scripting. The development effort need not be much longer than python but with no optimization the result can be easily 10 times as fast.
I am sure this means that you've never been starving with all your help fully tapped out.

Until you reach that point, please don't make such concrete declarations.
Thanks for sharing that article.

While it's true that there is bad publicity from "collateral damage" that can fuel an opposition, this assumes there is an opposition.
Great, now we just need someone to start selling paying users. I'm sure people would pay for that. Or else they can just use their own service and observe unbounded growth.
If you're saying it's a good thing that you can't have both, I'd agree. But if you believe PG that Startup = Growth http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html then "solving" it might involve simply not being so startup or growth obsessed in general.
Plan a) Use an anti-satellite missile to destroy your satellite.

Plan b) Use a standard missile to destroy your ground station.

I think that the anti-satellite weapons were tested only against decoys. I don't remember a case were there was a rogue satellite and someone destroy it or the owners, but it's very difficult to argue with missile owners.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon
Internal ad networks & new mobile networks will be the key to social in 2013
Where I live, we have random breath testing units. This is where the police choose a random stretch of road and time, and pull over either the entire stream of traffic and each driver has to blow into a breathalyser, or they randomly sample traffic if there is too much, and each sampled driver has to blow. I got sampled just recently on a sunday afternoon, ironically on the way home from buying a large case of beer and wine to stock the larder for the christmas period. The testing office laughed when I pointed to it and said 'not until I get home'.

In the big operations they actually have a mobile police station in a truck, and if you register over the limit in the portable device, you are taken into the 'station' and booked immediately.

Since the introduction of this probably 20 years ago, the DUI rates have plummeted. Last year, over 12 million drivers were tested, which resulted in about 100,000 convictions, a rate of 0.8%. Since the introduction in the 1980s, there has been a reduction in the single vehicle, nighttime fatal accident rate of 26%, as well as an overall reduction in accidents across the board. Before the program started, fatal road accidents testing showed that the driver of the vehicle recorded a blood alcohol content of 50mg or higher (0.05) in 49% of accidents. This has been reduced to around 20% now, along with a nearly halving of fatal accidents (fatality rates are also reduced with mandatory seatbelts, increased speed limit enforcement and improvements in vehicle design).

There is no argument that increased enforcement lowers the chance that a road user will be involved in a fatal accident. In any case of decriminalization, this information must be used to design an enforcement program for driving that goes along with it.

There's no doubt plenty of people are driving around stoned right now - so arguably any random testing should include alcohol, marijuana, amphetamines, cocaine and other drugs all in one simple test. Perhaps the technology isn't there yet, but it's one of the most effective harm minimisation strategies available.
That was my first thought. "Isn't this illegal????"
This isn't anything new. Most of the major ISPs in the UK work with the Internet Watch Foundation [1] who maintain a blacklist of sites with certain types of content (child pornography, criminally obscene images, etc.) and have been blocking these for years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation
Weed and alcohol (and other drugs) are substitutes, and since alcohol is much worse for you both health wise and in terms of causing social problems, more people using weed could easily be a huge benefit to society even if it is bad for them.
C++ is identical in speed to C, if you know what you're doing, even if you're using "advanced" features. The only thing C exceeds C++ in is simplicity. Yes you CAN write slow code in C++, but if you need speed, it's there. In the parts of your code where speed isn't AS important, but you're not ready to drop to a scripting language, you can manipulate things with higher-level structures and smart pointers and such.

C++ plus scripting is the best way to go, IMO; you get object-oriented abstractions, better type safety at compile time, and yet you still get speed. Destructors alone make it worth using C++ over C, so you can ensure stack structures clean up on return from a function and can avoid using a "goto exit" model.

And if you need every last percent of speed, you can write that code in a "C" subset of C++. C is still completely there under the covers. Except you have to do more casting.

C is really not much better than a portable assembly language. And I should know, having written commercial games entirely in assembly language.
ANU claims to have a quantum number generator available over the internet for free http://qrng.anu.edu.au/index.php Interfaces in several languages already available, including an F# interface I published yesterday https://github.com/jackfoxy/RandomBitsSolution I'm not qualified to judge the efficacy of the ANU generator, but I suspect it is good.
Yours is an interesting reply in context, because his reaction is not one of dismissal, but of exhaustion: he didn't get anything out of the meetings to pick his brain. The person asking very well may have.

I'm guilty of the 'let me pick your brain.' And your advice, which is directed to me, is spot on - and I'll take it seriously. But the true wisdom lies in the depths of it: treat everyone like their human. Don't exhaust a man just because he's successful.
It's been on HN: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=itu... Threads from yesterday/today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4859882 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4861122

Here's Vint Cerf in the NYT 6 months ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/opinion/keep-the-internet-... (2 points, 0 comments)

There's also been mainstream media coverage over the last week.
You can also find it on popular torrent sites, as information wants to be free. (I would have bought it if it had been on Amazon, but, well.)

1dc2e5b6f0d5036a182e85ab34da839d15eaf1ed cypherpunks.epub

5d546aaa83aebd43a2342f6dc737d271a34ff684 cypherpunks.mobi

ccaf1c45fc31633c9728dcd2cd4545b55a27be7c cypherpunks.pdf
But isn't saving a story the ultimate form of upvote flattering? I'd also vote for it's existence, if only to be worth more than a mere upvote.
What is the difference between Google Panda and Google Penguin updates?
"...a real alternative to iPhone and Android"

There is something about this title that just incites a negative reaction from me. To me, it implies that the current available options are broken beyond repair and that a "savior" is coming to liberate us from them, and boy... do I hate self-proclaimed saviors, especially in the tech area.

Android/iPhone/WP7/Mozilla OS/$xyz are the options we have, and we don't need a real alternative to them anymore than we need anything else. New mobile OS coming up? Great, competition benefits me, the end user, since my devices just keep getting better. But please don't pretend to be something that you are not.
I've changed my mind.

The problem isn't with storing that 1.4 GB, it's with distributing it quickly to very many people.

Something much smaller is just a copy-pastable string that'll find its way into Wikipedia edit summaries or onto t-shirts or whatever.
Yes, at least 2x here. I'll pull up Chrome's FPS display later.
If you think it's safe to drive while stoned, think again. Relative safety compared to driving drunk is not important, it's the absolute impairment level that is the key here.

If anyone reading this is in the habit of driving around stoned, please stop before you kill or seriously injure yourself, someone important to you, or some random stranger. It's just not worth the risk.
With regard to java, a lot of the complexity is in ancillary systems rather than language or the libraries themselves. You may not like Maven, for example, but what's the c++ equivalent? Autotools? I think not. Any cross platform c++ project immediately falls over the build system problem before you write a line of code, and most of the time we choose a non-native, underperforming solution (eg. MinGW on Windows) - anything for a quiet life. Honestly, Java would be a better answer.
Thanks :) I don't think it's a conspiracy theory, I just think that the way he frames it is a bit overly dramatic. Personally I just try to stay relatively anonymous and I operate under the assumption that whatever I say or do is basically public information. I can't be bothered with encryption when I'm talking to my friends because those conversations usually consist of things like, "Where do you want to eat?"
Motivation. If I'm motivated to get the work done, I will have razor focus. If the task is something someone else wants me to do (but I don't particularly want to do), then I won't be as motivated and it won't get done as fast.

Additionally, I don't like doing tedious things, so I always try to make whatever I'm doing as less tedious as possible. For instance, I'm supposed to get some feature working. The underlying code is very complex. Getting the feature working wil be very painful and tedious. If I can refactor the underlying codebase first, implementing the feature will be less tedious and more enjoyable. The problem is that sometimes my team mates don't want me refactoring code, so I'm forced to trudge through the complex code and it takes me a lot longer to do it that way.
IP based, so using a different DNS resolver doesn't help.
Show HN isn't about advertising to an HN market. It is about showing HN what you have built.
A glimpse of clarity and circles
Well, that kind of strengthens his point. Open source libraries are posted here all the time and few ever make the frontpage.
A sprite sheet would be nice.
Well, according to an article I read in New Scientist a while ago, people who were given cannabis and asked to perform drive in a simulator tended to slow down enough to nearly overcome their impairment, while people given alcohol didn't tend to slow down at all. And in fact people in the study who were given moderate amounts of both alcohol and cannabis tended to do driver better than people who had just taken alcohol.

And anecdotally, the one time I ate a pot brownie I was convinced that I must be swaying back and forth until my friends convinced me I wasn't. The experience started with 20 minutes of horrid vertigo which I gather was a pretty idiosyncratic reaction, so take that with a grain of salt.
Because technically its not very sound. Examples of where "minifying" (removing whitespace) could go wrong if done across any served HTML document...

1) pre tags - being that pre tags take into account formatting, removing whitespace is going to alter how the content is rendered

2) any empty tags - its becoming a thing of the past but there are many instances where browsers will render a tag with a single space inside differently than a tag with nothing inside. In other words, space within a tag may be intentional by the developer.

3) spaces inside attributes may matter - you could have an attribute on an html tag that say is data-whatever="1 2\n 3" and potentially reducing those spaces could be bad - depends upon what the developer intended

Additionally there are some other things to consider...

1) GZIP if used will make the impact of scrubbing out whitespace almost nonexistent

2) Most HTML served is dynamic, meaning that the HTML compression will need to be run on every HTML response - this could have some performance negatives. (If your just compressing static HTML once it should be fine.)
The price of bitcoin is rising.

(Of course, it would be a different matter if the dollars' price is rising and bitcoin is not)
The product lens
Thanks for that; good sources of random numbers are always appreciated.
Just curious, wouldn't a zip file accomplish the same objective?
Having seen/used the rudimentary commenting mechanism in Wavefront .OBJ files (a 3D interchange format) to stuff in more modern information (tangents, additional UV channels, etc. etc.), I can say that comments can help a format live on well past its expiry date.

That said, I will not pretend for a second that this is a good idea. Crockford did the right thing.
In Cory Doctorow's talk at Google, he said that all routers today have interception technology in them. It's only a matter of being enabled or not in some countries or in others. But it seems so many have asked for it, that they don't even bother to build routers without that interception technology in them, so now their default router has interception built-in by default.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI
I initially picked up Lua because it was so easy to embed ( also it was small ). Recently I have seen it used more as a stand alone language, but it really shines when you need to add a scripting layer to an existing project. I was making a GUI for a control system and I exposed all the drawing primitives and control points to Lua and was able to get a very fast prototype cycle working.
It's not the government that expanded filtering use, it was the courts.
Well, those people wouldn't be affected. Even those people with a profile could still create throwaway accounts for those other subreddits.

There are a few sub reddits where people are sharing real life information, so maybe confirmed profiles would be beneficial for them. I don't know if that just adds a bunch of cost and not much revenue.
JANET is still one of those few bastions of sanity. Goodness knows how long that'll last though. Probably until someone notices it's being run sensibly and decides to do something about it.
Just out of curiosity: if you (or anyone else!) had to make a "must read code" list, what would be on it?
On the surface this sounds brilliant, but is it really of worth, statistically, with just a few hundred respondents? Being based around such simple, easy questions, I'd think money could buy you far more eyeballs.

Though if the price includes comments from each respondent in addition to their choice, that would fill a different need than raw statistical testing, and could maybe still be useful at that price.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanfeed_(content_blocking_sys...
Maybe "creepy" - I search for an item, and Google shows me ads for that item for the next month; I keep searching for that item, and Google learns to tailor its results to what I want.

Some people find this useful. Other people find it creepy.
I think his call to action at the end is too abstract. It's important to understand that there is a problem, but the solution lies in understanding why the government is the way it is and why people vote to have such a government (fear).

The battle is winning the minds of the average person, by showing them that an encrypted, unmonitored, uncensored internet is in their best interests and not something to fear.

Or in the worst case, show that an all powerful (and therefore eventually corrupt) government is the greater of two evils. The proper tool for this is probably cheap, scalable marketing stunts and compelling media that spells this out in layman's terms.
In 2000-2002 I was a member of LunarStorm, a (now defunct) Swedish community where at one time 90 percent of Sweden's high school students were members. What I liked about it was that it gave you much more opportunities to interact with - and get to know - new people; Facebook mostly keeps the interaction to people you know, and you can't really start talking to anyone who seems interesting, or reading what they write and commenting on it without officially becoming "friends" first. But following the writing of interesting people and commenting on it was how I made friends on LunarStorm, many of which I still know ten years later. I miss that. And I don't think you can easily recreate it in the panopticon that is Facebook; having every conversation broadcast to everyone you know doesn't make for a relaxing atmosphere.

(I haven't tried Google+, so I don't know how it works in that respect.)
There are some e-ink screens that can barely support video, but there's usually still heavy ghosting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24srQXX81Oc

I'm willing to let them cheat a bit on the static refresh rate in the demo, but the fact that they're showing animated UI effects like zooms and fades is a little worrisome, unless they have access to next-gen eInk that I don't know about.
A few tips I've picked up by finding a few ebook marketing websites recently by accident:

* Long-form! Write a lot of text explaining why your ebook will be useful, giving helpful examples (but not real answers... that's in the ebook) and basically just lots of stuff that'll make the reader feel like you've put lots of work into this thing, you're giving them all this text for free, and it'd be kinda rude if they didn't buy a copy of your ebook.

* Get people saying "yes": the simplest is to only have the beginning of your interminable pitch on the home page... don't have any actual info there (not even the fact that you're selling an ebook): instead, put a big link at the bottom of page 1 that says "Yes! I'd like to learn more!" or similar.

* Urgency AND anchoring in one! When you finally show the price (after initial anchoring like "most people would expect to pay hundreds of dollars for tips this valuable"), use a bit of JavaScript to say that "Our normal price is $79 -- but due to high demand we've lowered the price to only $49... but only until " + tomorrowsDate + "! If you miss this flash sale, you'll need to pay full price, sorry!"

* Get their email so your long-form sale can go on forever! Require an email address to see an excerpt, or maybe even to see the page with pricing. Then every week or so send them an email with another ton of text, and "accidents" like "oh no, we accidentally lowered the price with a typo but we'll have to honor that just for today!"

This is only partly tongue-in-cheek. This may sound annoying -- and indeed, it is -- but I'll bet it really works. Even recognizing the tricks at each step, it's sometimes hard for me to avoid getting sucked in.