skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My background: I am a HPC sysadmin, and I administer a cluster of about 240 nodes. I have a PhD in astrophysics, and have done research in computational medical physics. The users I currently support are mostly people who molecular dynamics codes.

Molecular dynamics could an ideal match for the hardware and your own knowledge: the standard MD codes (NAMD, VASP, Wien2k, Quantum Espresso) in the field are all well-tested and debugged. Some of them (NAMD at least) can also take advantage of GPUs. These codes represent hundreds of person-hours of R&D. I advise against reinventing the wheel. In fact, in almost all established computational science endeavours, it is safe to say that you should not start from scratch. And definitely not if you have just a single semester.

I don't know much about existing quantum monte carlo codes, nor how mature the application of GPUs is to QMC. I assume you will do a brief literature review. (Brief because one semester means that the scope of your project has to be fairly well-limited.) Communicate with QMC practitioners via mailing lists etc, too. There are bound to be some problems people have that they just never got round to figuring out due to other priorities. Parallel programming is hard, GPU programming is hard, and transforming serial algorithms into GPU-efficient algorithms is hard. But that's half the fun. :)
That was a Cloud Atlas reference :)
You also see this nonsense in DVD menus where there are two choices and no way of telling.
I would've been more interested in a response for the more "realistic" petition for an interplanetary ship.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/assign-nasa-do-fea...
I'm not convinced that un-restricting works would benefit society. If Disney gets to keep copyright on Snow White forever, about a third of the movie's profit will continue to be paid in tax.

So the choice is between (a) letting 7-year-olds everywhere watch Snow White, and (b) having more money to pay for roads, schools and cancer research. Is option (a) necessarily better?
well played, obama administration. well played.
I don't think there is anything at all unclear about (a ? b : c). I use it all the time when programming in C and its derivatives.

The (a and b or c) idiom is used in Lua, Ruby and Python (in descending order of idiomaticness). Since the person I was responding to seemed to be using syntax reminiscent of these languages, I thought I'd offer up this expression form as an alternative to resorting to statements.
I added the death star data to my toy project I've been working on.

http://projects.melignus.com/petition-heatmap
I love(d) the effect of dragging down Workbench to reveal Deluxe Paint at a different resolution.
Not Safari. WebKit.
> if the process that shrinks the pool is better at chopping off the low end of the distribution

We actually know from decades of metrics that the process of getting a masters in education selects for the bottom end, not the top. Education majors are one of the lowest scoring groups on the GMATs. Eliminating this sort of certification in favor of Bachelors in general would in fact increase qualifications dramatically.

As far as jumping through hoops, many of the best teachers I have met left the field in exasperation due to the hassles and unnecessary stress of dealing with administration overhead and meddling, and micromanaging of their curriculum by education board members who often have no notable qualifications or experience, and in some cases appear to be functionally illiterate, yet determine policy.
One way of addressing this issue is putting the labels outside the switch itself... like: off[* ]on -> off[ *]on
If you're going down that path, add windows servers to your list and find more things missing.
Foursquare, The Coolest Startup Office We've Ever Seen
YouTube Networks
I deleted my reddit account in part because of the Obama-fellating. Can we keep the politics off HN?
Really? Can you name of some examples of where you've needed it in your work? (honest question)

I am a programmer who works with a bunch of statisticians, doing "big data" stuff. What I observed is that most of them don't really spend very much time doing statistics. They spend all their time finding, collecting and massaging data. That generally involves a lot of programming. Once you get the data, the conclusions are fairly obvious without any statistics. Just make some plots and there are glaring orders of magnitude deficiencies.

I also wanted to learn more statistics... but basically with software, you are overflowing with data. The challenge in science usually is to gather data. In software the challenge is the oppoosite -- you have so much data and you need to make sense of it. To be concrete I'm talking about stuff like logs from web servers and various other systems.

So I learned a lot about sampling algorithms to cut down data, as well as various streaming algorithms. But I haven't actually learned that much about statistics. So I wonder if I am missing something.
Show HN: Stop inviting me to stuff on FB
Someone on twitter complained about getting too many 'I want to add your birthday' app invitations. So I made an app that allows you to yell at them. The question is, do you have the balls to do it?
This is the funniest part of the response by the Obama Administration:

"We're working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it."
The problem is that the position of the moving part (the asterisk in your example) is unclear. So effectively the [* ] is not distinguishable from the [ *]. Putting the labels outside won't fix that.
Arie - a Terminal theme
shamelessly plug: libccv supports REST-ful API in 0.4 version, it is open-source, and free: http://libccv.org/doc/doc-http/. Trained pedestrian / car / face detectors are included.
Strange that you need a G+ account to view this...not very open is it.
Someone on twitter complained about getting too many notifications for 'I want to add your birthday' app on FB. I made an app that allows you to yell at those friends. The question is, do you have the balls to do it?
Posting your blog behind the g+ walls is an interesting choice. Anyone can read but only plussers can comment. I think I had something nice to say but after spending a few screens going down the plusland rabbit hole and trying to back out of creating an account. I forgot what I wanted to say.
Websites have ratings in all kinds of varieties and could have audits of some kind. Maybe the techniques for estimating ratings, audits and click-through without cookies can't be completely automated or 100% accurate, but so what, someone can make a business out of doing that well. Maybe website owners would have to start allowing ad companies to run some code on their servers, LOL. I'm sure cookie like strategies could happen in print and broadcast with extreme measures but it would be expensive and the privacy violations would likely be so glaringly obvious that no one would stand for it. Just because it's easy to do and hide on the web doesn't mean it should be done. CPC is just one business model, maybe it's not the only feasible one. I'm not saying I despise the current model or that I think that law is a good idea, I don't even care about privacy myself and I don't want to have to click more buttons than I have to, but many people do care and have no idea how deeply they're being tracked. Some think something should be done about that, enough to influence some governments. I'm sure there are a lot of historical failed attempts at other models but a lot has changed, I don't think it could hurt to at least consider implementing some other ideas, new and old. Not me of course, someone else.
Couple more super annoying mobile UI patterns that should die:

1. Banner ads in footer that blink every time you scroll the page. The blinking makes me go nuts when reading a longer article. It gets my attention alright but I sure don't associate that brand positively in my mind.

2. Not being able to select text on an iPhone in safari. I really dont get this. Websites shoot themselves in the foot because often I want to share the article and quote a sentence or two. I don't because I can't select the text!
Fuck links that make me log in to google to view. And fuck them even more when my true name gets flagged for violating some google policy, and I have to submit it for review.
Added this one to the app also XD http://projects.melignus.com/petition-heatmap
Well, it depends on the site in question, of course. But we can make some estimates, if you want.

In the past, I've talked to some colleagues who've had content hit the front page here, and they reported numbers ranging from around 1,000 unique visitors to about 30,000 visitors over a one-day period. So it can vary quite a bit, apparently.

Let's assume that things are more intense than that, and go with 50,000 or so unique visitors in a single hour, distributed rather evenly over that time period, making 2 page views each. Let's also assume that our web server serves up 20 style sheets, JavaScript files, images, and other assets each page view. We'll also assume that this is an interactive web app, so there'll be some database activity, too. No CDN is being used.

So we're talking around 2 million requests over that hour. Since we're assuming they're evenly distributed, for the most part, we'll assume we're dealing with about 550 to 600 requests per second.

That may seem like a lot, but it really isn't. Many of the requests will be for static content (JS scripts, style sheets, images, and so on), so they should be trivial to serve up. Apache or nginx running on a modern, bottom-tier VPS should have no trouble keeping up with this.

Likewise, assuming queries that aren't overly intensive, MySQL or PostgreSQL running on the same server should easily handle a few hundred queries per second. Only a fraction of the requests will actually involve any significant work from the web app itself. It should not be considered unreasonable for the web app to handle a few hundred requests per second.

We won't even consider using a reverse proxy like Varnish, for instance, to reduce some of the load on the web server, web app and database.

Keep in mind that this is a relatively intense scenario, too, at least compared to the activity than can be generated by an appearance on the HN front page, as has been described to me in the past. In reality, we're likely looking at much, much less traffic than in our estimate above, even during the period of peak activity.

Hopefully that helps explain why I think something is very wrong here if a relatively basic web app can't keep up with a relatively moderate amount of traffic.
Stopped reading at "Death Star". Kind of ashamed that I blew 20 seconds typing this. Also ashamed that probably 50K in tax dollars were blown in responding to it.
Why else would you type it in? I can't imagine many people saying "hm, that command I didn't intend to run didn't work. Maybe I should run it as root instead."

Hopefully if you're in a NOPASSWD user/group, you know what root can do if you're careless; if you're not, there's yet another point where you'd have go out of your way to do damage with this shorthand.
When this pop-culture reference is forgotten and some historian ready this... they'll think we were all a bunch of loons.
Ink CSS Framework
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesi...
I clicked "Open link in Incognito Window" on Chrome, and it worked for me without signing in, FWIW.
Virtualization Performance: Zones, KVM, Xen
Quija sliders are perfect for this ;)
http://shaunxcode.github.com/ouija/
My problem may be that I'm on an iPhone.
To select text in Mobile Safari you have to tap and hold, not double tap. WebKit views are only place in iOS where this is inconsistent.

I suspect it is this way because double tap was reserved for zoom-to-fit in iPhone OS 1.0, and now we're stuck with it being that way.
Where do you draw the line?

"I am poor and rich people pay too little tax so it is ethically OK for me to steal from rich people"

"I am a native American and white people robbed my ancestors so it is ethically OK for me to steal from white people"

...etc
Are you willing to pay for this service but need higher accuracy? I'd love to hear from you.
The verge mobile site is a victim of 1. However they let you close the ad completely while you're on the page.
Could you give a quick summary of what happened? Reading the post and the HN comments (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=968018) gave me a mixed picture
When you say "own," do you mean "legitimately posess" or "hold copyright on"? I think GP is talking about the former.
Tech's oversharing economy
Segmented control with only two segments?
Its amazing what a government can do in the absence of powerful lobbying groups.
I could almost agree, except I just tried the auto scroll option (space key to toggle and + / - to modify speed), it might be very subjective, but this helped me read this start to end smoothly, I kind of like it, can't explain why, it is much better than auto scrolling the "old way" where the text moves. Somehow he made it so the speed was just right for me, but I'm sure many will find it annoying.

EDIT: tried it on some other articles, chose some boring ones just for the contrast, it might be just me, but the auto scroll option is going to be the only way I read articles in the near future, I actually read them faster, and more likely to reach to the end of it (based on a very short experiment though).
It's also a great distraction killer (ads, banners, related stories)
Nice.
Dude, its nursery school.
96 looks about right, here the final json response:

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/responses/more/all/12/2/0

Here are a few more I've found poking around:

[1] https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/responses/more/all/1/3/3
[2] https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/responses/more/all/1/3/4

Maybe there's a documented API somewhere, but the queries seem to follow a pattern ala:

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/responses/more/all/[$pageID...
Worked without an account for me.
Ah, see?--"while i am away". Possession of tangible items deprives someone else the use of it. There is no such natural limitation on ideas or expression of ideas. It requires additional government "interference" before ideas and expression are made to be scarce.

You are not using your home anyway and I was gonna pay the wear and tear.

Better for the public good, hell, maybe I get some great ideas while I sit on Bill Gates' porch ;)

"Possession of tangible items deprives someone else the use of it."

If no one can legally copy my book (or my grandfather's book) I had a better chance of making money from it; if it's free fewer people will buy a copy (we can all agree to that.) If the government says that now I no longer have copyright, how aren't I deprived of something?

Some people leave homes, estates, gold coins, stocks, others leave books or songs. Roy Disney's family is a live and well, and so is Disney Inc, and to me it seems unfair to them to lose Mickey Mouse
It is ironic that the only Apple product we're getting an overdose of play-by-play insider information about development and launch is the one people care the least about: Safari.
Ahhh, the Chief of the Science and Space Branch at OMB perpetuates achieving "the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs". Allow me to author a petition...
I hate to bring this point out like that but:

Everytime you face a disagreement apologizing humanizes you in the mind of the other person. Their approach will usually soften and will show sympathy. It allows your point to be driven further into the exchange, make the other side friendly, and reduce the amount of potential loss.

Though I did do it in a genuine manner. Its that I have been in marketing for so lonf that things just become second nature. I hope to one day meet you and buy you a cup of coffee (water for me, due to past heart issues).

It is like the roboticist who one day wakes up and realizes that his body is now made out of metal. :)
- Hybrid bed with memory foam and sleepmaster combined that only vibrates on the side you sleep on
- Appeal to your senses depending on which side you sleep on. Spray of water device, touch/smack in he face, smell of waffles, sounds that appeal to individualy (raindrops, sensual voice, etc)
- Hire a butler to wake you up independently if you are rich
- Get into a fight with your spouse and sleep in different bedrooms
How Wireless Gadgets Are Breaking the Internet
Some of Dennet's science buddies have set their sights on tackling the apparent lack of evidence for 'free will' and this appears to cause problems with the philosopher in Dennet. There's a (probably biased) summary of Dennet's position on free will at the top:

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/free-will-and-free-will

If you want to get the gist of Harris's argument, this review might suffice:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/books/review/free-will-by-...
Are you saying that AirBnb, for example, can't be the regulatory body for its customers? Or is there a reason why it's necessary for the government to step in?
I think it has more to do with apps which have some touch-tracking in place, perhaps for creating a heat map. Try copying text from a twitter post on the mobile web app or Facebook mobile web app..
Pairasight Is An Embeddable, Open Source 3D Camera
PayPal Apologizes For Freezing Science Fiction Writer Cancer Fundraiser
Whoa there: Church and State!
I presume this is for people using keyboard navigation, or a trackball (or a non-touchscreen device?)? Or am I misunderstanding?

Oh, I see, it could be a dipswitch style toggle where you can't tell which is toggled.

Here's an easier solution: use the damn platform widgets. It probably looks better than your custom solution and integrates with the rest of the OS better anyway.
72-Hour Gaming Marathon Needs Your Help to Build a School
You think someone purposely praised a competitor's service, brought up previous misdeeds by betapunch, and had a public argument as a scripted drama to promote...?
Perhaps "any publicity is good publicity" - at the end of the day, he's had two posts about Betapunch on the front page of HN as a result of all this, and I doubt people will remember this whole episode in a few weeks.
They don't save money...YET. Give it 10 years.
Coffee Joulies
" When you say "own," do you mean "legitimately posess" or "hold copyright on"? I think GP is talking about the former."

Let's leave theories aside. I own a book when I decide when /how /where /if to print. If you can legally get it, modify and distribute it for free, I lose sales. That's almost certain. So if the government doesn't protect my book /song /movie the same way it protects your iPhone or vacation home, how do I own it?

(I understand what the law and constitution say, I just disagree, especially for certain works.)
Yes, logically that's true. Unfortunately, in the past programming wasn't particularly respected—remember Admiral Hopper discovered bugs—prior to that everyone had apparently assumed their programs would just be a small matter of coding or something. The scientists I know continue to regard a program as this necessary inconvenience, I suppose in part because the math is the reality.

So yes, I agree, but there's going to need to be some education and cultural change before we get there, and I think fields that have embraced a computational subfield have a big head start.
I was referring to sites that find a way to disable tap and hold text selection, intentionally or not.
Russian Giant Yandex Has Secretly Built A Killer Facebook Search Engine..
Yeah, I definitely couldn't and wouldn't reinvent the wheel in one semester :) I have, in fact, been using LAMMPS on Kraken (the other supercomputer at Oak Ridge) for my research, but I decided for this project I would do something a little different so I can learn something new.

The literature I have read thus far on GPU QMC seems to indicate that it's a fairly recent endeavor and has only been tested on small clusters. Of course, I need to do a deeper search before I begin working on anything, but if the field could use help scaling it up to something the size of Titan, then that could provide an order of magnitude increase in the kind of processing available and significantly help research that relies on QMC. If I could even make a small dent in the progress and add a new simulation technique to my knowledge-base, I think that would be a successful project!
No, I'm saying someone will have to be the regulatory body for AirBnb, because their business is infringing on other people's rights, for example neighboring homeowners who are disturbed or damaged by AirBnb renters, or customers who are exposed to dangerous conditions on an AirBnb property.
Pretty much any toolbar or banner that persists, while I'm scrolling, bugs me. It's especially annoying when I zoom in on a paragraph and a persistent, full size, toolbar looms over content.
Things We Wish Gmail Could Do
It's about solving everyday problems.
What's Wrong With CS Research (2007)
I am proud if $0.00043 of my taxpayer dollars went to this. It gave me more value than I get from the vast majority of $0.00043 increments of my taxes.

($50k/$2.9 trillion government taxation revenue * my approximate tax paid yearly = $0.00043)
Tim Cook Says China Will Soon Become Apple’s Most Important Market
An old UI annoyance
77% of Parents Blame Video Games For Exposing Kids to Violence
Put it on the side; I think its more natural to pull right or left to "unravel" the eink surface than pulling it up or down.
As I understand it, techcrunch was designing a tablet in partnership with a design firm. The firm ripped off the design and created a competing tablet.

It was called the joojoo but they didn't get it out until ariund when the iPad was released and it couldn't compete at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JooJoo has the history
every single link to G+ this comes up, and every single time the response is the same: If you are signed in to google but not G+, you have to sign in. If you aren't signed in to google, you don't have to sign in.
CNET's parent company CBS blocks reviewing Dish products over legal dispute
Seems like bootstrap, whats different about it?
How to animate a series of images using jquery
This is also a feature in Chrome. Please enable it. It makes the web much more bearable. Stops many annoying background ads, autoplaying videos, etc.

How to enable: http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57536917-285/enable-clic...
As are checkboxes.
Now might be a good time to recall the School of Apology by Joel Spolsky. It's rather succinct:

Apologize unreservedly, or not at all.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html from chapter 4 and further on.
I don't know if Firefox has the "badge" setup that Chrome has, but in Chrome there is a plugin (puzzle) icon shown on pages that may have inaccessible flash elements. Normally if a page isn't working, my first attempt is to click the puzzle and say "Run plugins" or "Always allow on this site".

It can be annoying to remember to do it, the first few times you may curse the site for being broken before you realize what's going on.
Am I the only one that assumed steeve was joking? I still think he is and find the sarcasm quite poignant and amusing.
How to Effectively Tackle a $50,000 Freelance Project
I thought that too. I like some of the JS stuff they have though. Like the pagination and date picker.