skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quick sort being O(n^2) and merge sort O(n log n) has nothing to do with O-notation (asymptotic analysis) vs analytic combinatorics (exact step counting). With analytic combinatorics you may get the exact number of steps the algorithm takes yes, but the leading term in quicksort's step count would still be n^2 and the leading term for mergesort's step count would still be n log n. The problem this post is about has everything to do with worst case vs average case. You can analyze average case and worst case both asymptotically and exactly.

As far as the practical utility of the techniques, for analyzing time, O-notation is clearly much better. Analyzing the exact number of steps taken is in most cases impossible, even with the powerful tools of analytic combinatorics. Analyzing the asymptotic time complexity is in comparison trivial. Even if you do manage to stumble on a case where it's possible to determine the exact number of steps, that still doesn't tell you anything about the constant factors involved in the algorithms, since you just have the number of steps for some definition of a step (those objecting that you could determine exactly how many CPU cycles an algorithm will take are living in the past -- with modern processors this is no longer feasible at all). The only thing that an exact step count can get you is non-leading terms that the O-notation hides. For example an algorithm might be O(n^2) when in fact the number of steps is n^2 + n. Knowing that extra +n is (almost) never of any practical importance, especially given that we're counting steps not time in seconds.

Don't get me wrong, analytic combinatorics is a beautiful subject and may even come in handy in some practical cases, but this post is vastly over-hyping it. By the way, even if you do want to count combinatorial structures exactly, instead of going the analytic combinatorics route in practice it often makes more sense to just define the exact count recursively and memoize. You don't get a closed form solution this way, but it is much quicker to do and can handle far more cases.
Please explain prices: Australian Parliament subpoenas Apple, Microsoft, Adobe
then you'll love these:

Veritasium - http://www.youtube.com/user/1veritasium

Sixty Symbols - http://www.sixtysymbols.com/

Periodic Videos - http://www.periodicvideos.com/

Crash Course - http://www.youtube.com/user/crashcourse

The Brain Scoop - http://www.youtube.com/thebrainscoop

Smarter Every Day - http://www.youtube.com/destinws2

Vi Hart - http://www.youtube.com/vihart

George Hart - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTl0dASnxto6j2wlVs5Bs2Q

Numberphile - http://www.numberphile.com/

Vsauce - http://www.youtube.com/user/Vsauce

TED-Ed - http://www.youtube.com/teded

MinuteEarth - http://www.youtube.com/user/minuteearth
Well, the "branch-free" paradigm requires pushing a stack frame and making a jump to the passed function (requiring a pointer lookup) and a jump back to the calling function. In the branching paradigm, only one execution path requires a jump at all, and that jump is made based on an offset embedded directly into the machine code, so the additional pointer lookup is not needed.

So, I'm going to come down on the side of the traditional model being inherently more performant.
Screen or Tmux? Both
Thanks for mentioning that! I just tried setting up a work environment with 3 virtual screens. and the 4 finger swipe for switching really is nice.
You know how Opera does it, and how much simpler your solution can be? http://i.imgur.com/mehY4Hw.png
What's missing in data science talks? Domain expertise
DebiaN vs Ubuntu as a base system (for a cultural hacker).
pros and cons

which has a smaller base system? (i think debian has a smaller base system than ubuntu. although ubuntu server is pretty lean.)

which has an easier config? (i don't want to spend a week. 1 business day max. 4 hours.)

which one has lower energy usage? (i think canonical (and intel) have made laptops a high
priority...where is debian in this regard? i am ignorant.)

better philosphy? (i think the debian way makes more sense. as a ubuntu user, i hold back my non critical patches for at least a year anyway. which debian variant is close to this upgrade pattern?)

repository uptimes? (the couple times i've left debian it was because the repos were 404ing at crucial times.)

right now i'm in xfce4 using the gala wm with plank. (probably the most inspirational desktop i've had since zenwalk '07-08 (a powerful time in computing for me). if only pkgsrc would've worked i would've used it longer.)

i want a system with the least amount of cruft. whatever services and modules i can tear away, i need to doit.

whats the init script wars about? do they affect me really?
Who would Objective-C be? The dwarf?
Yeah, "search to launch" using Spotlight (and before that, Quicksilver) existed in OSX before Windows (v7 I believe) added it.
I would move my ass to a first world country before I ran out of money to do so.
It depends what types of schools you include. The "Diplom" and "Magister" closely resembles the US master's degree, so their proliferation is lower when comparing to _all_ degrees in other countries.
However it has been replaced by BA/BS and MA/MS between 2005 and 2010, so you can expect more BAs to enter the labor market today.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abitur it states that 43% of an age group get the Abitur, and most of them attend university according to http://www.kmk.org/fileadmin/pdf/PresseUndAktuelles/2011/eag.... That document also states that some 28% of the population get a university (undergratuate/graduate) degree today.
On the other hand, more people do apprenticeships in Germany than in other countries (without nessaraily having an Abitur degree), and those apprenticeships are accompanied by classes and an associate degree which can be extended to a "meister" of some sort. Some studies are regarded as apprenticeship that would be taught at colleges in other countries (e.g. patient care). If you add those degrees they make up another 15% of an age group. So in total that's something like 43% which I think would be comparable to US numbers.
The people that would blow the whistle on this are people that report bugs, but don't get paid. If he claims to have paid people, but the 'people' and vulnerabilities are just fabrications, then only someone within the organization would be able to blow the whistle, no?
Why Discourse uses Ember.js
I don't think they're 'blaming' google Earth; it's just a possible explanation for what otherwise appears to be a senseless murder. It's a fact that houses depicted on street view don't always line up with the correct address; anyone in the market for a house who uses Google Earth is familiar with this.
Regarding the firewall issue - doesn't OS X include OpenBSD's PF ? If it's the case, then you get great and easy firewalling. Provided you can actually configure it with $EDITOR + /etc/pf.conf.
Having a GUI for PF doesn't make much sense when you have a rules syntax that is as expressive as PF's. There may be some edge cases where netfilter can do things that would require a work around in PF but in my eyes the latter wins when you look at the features + tooling + configuring package. Also there are some things PF can do that netfilter can't.
Which is the intention of mudslinging. It's not to settle anything. It's to make the target lose support without ever really being able to do anything about it. It's been very effective in this case.
I don't see where you get the idea that the article was blaming Google Earth. The fact that Google Earth sends you to the wrong address is presented as an interesting bit of evidence that might exculpate the son.
Interesting, What part of it?
> Do Google or Facebook release a list of names and how much they paid for their bounty programs?

Names, yes; $, no.

[1]: https://www.google.com/about/appsecurity/hall-of-fame/reward...
[2]: https://www.facebook.com/whitehat/
Getting to the goal takes time - sharing from Washington's example
> Well, the way I (and Roy Fielding) see it, the browser is a stateful agent that just renders HTML to a viewport, and executes JavaScript.

I cringed.
It has been beautifully done here http://cheeaun.github.com/hackerweb/ already.
Regarding the programmable part, have you tried the new JavaScript based office applications in office 2013? I haven't but heard good things about it
Apple and Samsung, frenemies for life
We live in a modern media climate where to make any organization break above the noise and get attention - which it needs if it is to do its job - a narrative inevitably includes founders. Just like here in startup land.

Other organizations exist and none of them get attention.

RE: Drone strikes http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-21333570

The reason it's in the news RIGHT NOW is due to the current story about leaked documents showing the US government secret legal case for targeting US citizens. So that's why I think that. Because it happens to be the case.

And my point has been that objecting to his personality is a trivial reason to undermine his work, and allowing the climate of hounding him into submission to successfully do so renders leaking a far more dangerous task and one that fewer people will engage in.
If you start on the bottom drawer you don't have to close them to access the next drawer
Android Hacker? Come take on the Telecom Giants
SendHub (YC W12) is looking for an Android Developer.

Skills:
Java (2 years experience),
Android (1 year experience)

Nice to have:
Experience with Google Guice (Or other Dependency Injection Framework).
Experience with Cordova/PhoneGap.
Javascript

About us:
We’re making it faster and simpler for professionals to communicate.

Founded to help educators reach students and parents in under resourced communities, we’re taking on the Telecom giants. Hate your phone carrier? Us too. Telecommunications is a duopoly dominated industry, which has systematically suppressed competition over its 150 year history, in order to keep prices unfairly high. We’re going to change this, starting with business phone service.

SendHub has over 70k customers across the US in business, politics, faith groups, sports, education and many more; making hundreds of thousands of calls and sending millions of texts each month.

The Role:
You’ll be involved in every part of the software life cycle from specs discussion to implementation to testing and releasing. You’ll work on challenging problems that require deep knowledge of the tech stack and work with fun technologies such as VoIP and Bluetooth.

Our Philosophy:
We believe in building a wonderful product and taking care of our people. We understand the importance of personal growth so you’ll get autonomy, recognition and regular feedback. We move quickly. Working in short iteration cycles, we release our apps to market at least once a week. We expect a lot of each other but we wouldn't want it any other way.

Benefits:
Health, dental, meals and we don’t track vacation days.

We're based in downtown Menlo Park, CA (very close to the caltrain station). If you're interested, please drop us a line: jobs [at] sendhub [dot] com.
Can't you just manually install your own root certificate on your machines instead of buying from a CA?
You can either have (a) consistency or (b) convention. Most people would jump at the opportunity to ditch (b), re-invent the wheel, and establish (a) just for the cleaner semantics.
I was simply trying to locate an apartment near Metro. I toyed with the idea of scraping their site but remembered this Wired story from 2009 [0] so I just gave up on using them for my search.

0: http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/17-09/ff_...
The problem with Finder is not so much finding things, but handling them once you've found them. Finder is probably the worst piece of file management software I've used in the last 20 years by far. Directory Opus on the Amiga was a better tool for moving things around.

Finder is so bad that I prefer dropping down to a Terminal and just doing things that way instead.
This post is great, I'd love to see more blog posts about refactorings of open source code on Hacker News.

It's good to be reminded of refactoring techniques, and to be reminded of what neatly refactored complex code looks like.

I think being able to refactor code, and make it look that good is a hallmark of a great programmer.
I don't understand how to read your comment:

Option A) Be careful, it's just another bubble!

Option B) This time is different!
Good overall, but is there justification for having consider_user_for_promotion called through a before_filter? It doesn't filter anything or redirect the request. It also doesn't retrieve instance variables for the request to process. You could theoretically put the whole method being refactored into a before_filter, but that's just a shell game.

I agree with making consider_user_for_promotion a standalone function. I like that because it is reusable, and self-comments the code.
I really enjoyed reading this!

When Discourse was originally announced, I read this file (quite randomly), and was distressed at the complexity and length (even though I totally understand time constraints and the need to 'get it to work').

I had never heard of the Law of Demeter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Demeter), nor had I heard of Sandi Metz's rules for Rails development (http://gist.io/4567190), both of which put in concrete terms some of the lessons I've learned when maintaining Rails applications.

I'd love to see more of these!

Edit: After reading over the pull request, I admit I'm a little confused why the response code was refactored into 'perform_show_response' - this seems like the direct responsibility of this controller method (and isn't common or otherwise misplaced). Is there a reason why you moved it out?
Learning to be a system administrator is a skill. I don't doubt for a moment he is skilled.

It reads as if you have equated skill acquisition with knowledge acquisition, can you say more about what leads you to believe those are equivalent?
I have started out with Graphics Design course[1] at Berkeley Extension in SF downtown (good for people who work in the bay area).

It's once a week, I enjoy learning the very basic elements of design like understanding and using shapes.

Other than that, keep reading books and ux.stackexchange.

In my day job, I work as a software engineer.

[1]: http://extension.berkeley.edu/spos/graphicps.html
The scary reality is most of Wall Street and The City is built on Excel. It's universal, and non-CS quants can understand it. Of course QA on these sheets is near impossible.
That post was amazing. Even the related ones he wrote on Backbone.js and Node.js are worth going through.
> Had around 1,500 unique visitors with an average time spent on the site of about 7 and a half minutes.

With no disrespect to the OP, that's not a ton of users, even for a single day...so I'm kind of surprised Craigslist noticed enough to block them. There must be tons of unapproved scraper scripts checking CL on a daily basis.
Brackets takes advantage of this already, right?
http://brackets.io/
I'm Slowly Losing My Mind
It's at least as important as anyone else's.
Do you know of any more of this cool stuff? I've already looked at 'Seven Trees In One' and zippers and want to go further. I'm just learning combinatorics and classes and want to relate it to programming structure.
Here's a real implementation of prettyprint without conditional jumps (this assumes signed right shifts are implemented as arithmetic shifts by your compiler, but everyone does that anyway):

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdint.h>

void prettyprint(int a, int b)
{
int lt_mask = (a-b) >> (sizeof(int) * 8 - 1);
intptr_t lt = (intptr_t)"%d is < %d\n";
intptr_t ge = (intptr_t)"%d is >= %d\n";
char *text = (char*) (lt & lt_mask) + (ge & ~lt_mask);
printf(text, a, b);
}

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
prettyprint(atoi(argv[1]), atoi(argv[2]));
return 0;
}

The point is that the CPU doesn't have to guess what to execute next, so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_misprediction cannot happen.

And if what you're interested in is using the call stack to keep track of executed code, a more effective approach would be to convert the program to CPS, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation-passing_style and http://matt.might.net/articles/cps-conversion/ .
"Is there any randomized controlled trial supporting that notion?"

There are definitely trials showing that marijuana is more effective than pure THC. As for whether it holds as a general rule, I don't think that's really empirically testable since there are probably an infinite number of cases both where it is and isn't true. I don't think everything is reducible though, because for any given plant there are trillions upon trillions of possible permutations of chemicals, and I think the fact that it's a little bit different every day and somewhat random probably helps to prevent the efficacy from declining over time, as happens with most pharmaceuticals. (The first rule of recreational drug is 'rotate your receptors', and I see no reason as to why that shouldn't apply to medicine as well.)
I guess it just applies to folks in the south west, hundreds of miles from the border.
Amazing tips. Thanks a lot. And I can totally sympathize with having a project to learn. That's how I learned to code, and that's how I teach students. Good to hear that design can be done in the same philosophy.
content is capital.
Good question...

First, you will understand lots of things easier if you read at least the first book of the Isaac Asimov "Foundation" series.

Then, I've been researching this for a looooong time.

Also you will waddle through lots of crazy stuff, trying to find the gems.

I only started to find out, what information matters, and what don't, what is real and what is just nutjob ideas, after I met some particular people in real life.

Also there are deep religious issues on this, and some fringe stuff (for example: the ex-wife and some more people related to a known member of Group A claimed that he rose to power in his country using black magic).

But a good start, is research about what is Thelema (and its followers), who is Antonio Gramsci, what is Frankfurt School, what is Muslim Brotherhood, the islamic plans for gold standard, Colonel Gadaffi push for gold standard, Punks, Cyberpunks and Cypherpunks, Saddam Hussein push for oil be sold for Euro (instead of USD), Sunni vs Shia wars, pro-Assad christians.

These are the stuff I remember where real facts are easier to find.

Other things that I would mention here are too bizarre and hard to understand, and filled with misinformation.

Also if you decide to research this stuff, caution to who you talk, you might get dragged into the thing (and let me tell you, it is not pretty, I had two serious close calls recently).

Of course, like the OP, you might get dragged into it anyway.

It may sound cliche, but fiddling with that stuff, that I learned how serious the phrase "And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you" is dead serious.
Havij Pro Source Code available
Surface Pro sold out because there weren't enough to begin with
Here we go again...
I think the "be your own CTO" advice for non-techies starting out with just an idea is always solid. I had a similar programming background to you and for over a decade I was working on the business side of things, successfully launching product from sales, marketing and business development roles.

However after having technical co-founder issues twice I recognized I needed to learn how to, at least in the early days of testing an idea, be my own technical co-founder. How to hack the initial stages of an MVP together in order to test things out.

I learned Ruby on Rails back in 2010 and haven't looked back since. It's easy to pick up and there is so much good information out there on how to learn you can quite quickly, if you're smart and committed to doing so, build up from being an absolute beginner to a reasonable intermediate-level programmer able to put out a functioning minimal viable product.

It won't be perfect, and you'll want to bring in the star programmers later. But it's not something you'll ever regret.

A simple analogy which you may appreciate as an Algerian. As an English speaker if you go to Paris and only speak in English you won't find a Frenchman who understands a word you say. If you attempt your best French, however poor, you'll find people talking back to you in English and willing to help. Same with engineering talent. Every engineer is approached all the time by non-technical people with "an idea" who "just" need it implementing by a techie. Unsurprisingly these approaches don't get taken up often. However if you have a product that is viable and working and now needs making better, more scalable, more secure, you have something that you can engage other engineers in.
In what sense? I don't understood.
Or http://schema.org/
As I am unfamiliar with the state of the US education system, could you please explain what exactly are you referring to?
How battery improvements will revolutionize the design of the electric car
I wasn't implying they are introducing bugs intentionally. In the normal course of adding capability to new releases of an operating system tailored to newer phones with better hardware, it's only natural that older phones will run those new operating systems slower and the experience will degrade. Nothing conspiratorial about it. But, it works really well for Apple, because they can charge you to upgrade to the new iOS version, and then in 6 months when you're sick of your laggy, unresponsive old-ass iPhone, they can helpfully sell you a new one.
One idea I've always had in the back of my head but have never pursued was plugins for text editors/IDEs that allow developers to quickly and easily make commentary on the code they are writing, and the end result would be blog posts formatted much like this one.
Thanks for the advice.

On Stack Overflow: I understand that design is a different ballgame than code. However, a Q&A site geared towards helping with the tools of the trade (photoshop, illustrator) might be useful, right?
I'm leaning towards a Samsung phone as well ... which model did you pick and how do you like it (so far)?
There are many good paths to take, and I'd avoid discussions about the "right" language to start with. Pick any language and run with it. If, down the road, you need to use a different set of technologies, then that time will come. But right now, it's time to learn. If you decide to learn Ruby, feel free to email me if you need any help getting started. It's my HN username at gmail. Good luck!
Cool, I didn't realize that lists could have dimension too. Thanks for the correction.
Erm, you might want to take a look at this (NSFW):

http://www.lenna.org/full/len_full.html
1. I would bet one is more likely to find valuables in the top drawers, but I could be wrong.

2. Some dressers will tip over if all the drawers are pulled out at once and are loaded with enough things.

3. The contents of the drawers were largely untouched/gone through. If one was in such haste they would probably throw the clothes all over the floor.
I'm like 99% sure they intentionally left a few 'low-risk' vulnerabilities which they knew people would uncover (and be rewarded for) to entice the big boys of security probing to roll up their sleeves and get to work looking for the really big ones.

In the long run, they're paying a reasonable amount of money for an army of security consultants to give the service a once-over. Smart!
ok , so it is for the SSD ?
To further explain:

Know that people follow you because they find value in what you publish. Start producing valuable content and promote it through various forums. Note that a good followers list is created over time. It does not merely happen over night.
Why Facebook Makes You Feel Bad About Yourself
Don’t Hack the Hacks
I kind of feel like this is where OS X is almost at a moment of brilliance, but hasn't quite reach there yet (and is hampered a bit by legacy considerations)...on just a single screen, full-screen mode works almost exactly like you describe and is a joy to use.