skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You've essentially just derived my Parallel Hierarchical Replanner (PHR)... :-) However, your step 6 isn't always useful because not only do you sometimes discover new obstacles (higher costs), occasionally you discover new shortcuts (lower costs).

In the PHR, you spawn two (or more, but ignore that for now) threads. One runs the globally optimal planner on as up-to-date data as it can; slow, but important to keep working upon. The other runs a local window planner from the agent's current location to as far ahead along the most recent global plan as fits within the window.

The result is a pretty good trade-off between actually executing the plan, and waiting to finish computing a globally optimal one. Essentially you're tracking along a stale but once-upon-a-time optimal global plan, locally optimising subsections of it. There are also some more generally useful trade-offs to this too, like using an anytime planner for the global thread.

My PhD was then an attempt to generalize these strategies into a cohesive framework. It starts from the assumption that what you really want is not to travel along `optimal' paths, but just to get to the damn goal as fast as possible. To that end, measuring everything in terms of time becomes sensible. Ultimately, it comes down to solving y* = arg_min_over_Y{ p + e + c }. y* is the optimal set of adjustable parameters in your system (e.g. choice of algorithm, number of threads to use, amount of RAM to use, tuning parameters in the algorithm, etc) in the space Y of all possible parameter sets. p is planning time, e is execution time, and c is the time taken to solve that optimisation equation itself. i.e. it's a transindental equation, so the only way to solve it is to estimate each of those time factors.

Finally, everything gets wrapped up in a nice package that combines a learning model, state estimator, optimiser, and planning system, and solves that equation repeatedly. Every time it does, it "applies" the y* parameters to the system (whatever that means depends upon what they represent), and starts again. If it helps, you can think of it as a feedback loop that adjusts its own controller gains, and where one of the inputs is the time taken to run the controller.
One thing make allows you to do is incremental runs. For example, if the first step in your shell script costs 1/2 hour, you really don't want to run the shell script over and over again when you are debugging the next step. Yes, you can implement your own caching logic in your shell script, but its usually much better to use a tool specifically designed for that job.
There's a significant body of research forming around how to get "minority cultural groups" to survive inside a larger, dominant culture. If you look into "cultural resistance" you'll find some interesting books (I recommend the _cultural resistance reader_ and _unlocking the clubhouse_).

Basically, it comes down to helping someone who is part of a cultural minority maintain their identity (in this case, women's culture) while they are dipping a toe into the waters of the different culture. That's why groups like PyLadies are useful and important.

The research supporting creating these groups is why I believe they ultimately will work to increase the number of women involved in open source, and the tech world in general.

Now we just have to collect data about what we're doing that works and what doesn't, and try to spread the knowledge as fast and as far as we can.
A mashup between a To-Do list and a bookmarking system.

This way, I could just fill links in, then when I got time, read the first one and unstack it instead of having 20+ tabs opened at the same time.
In other words: if you're not sure, use make.
Almost all residential ISPs operate under government-granted monopolies, though. If this were not the case it's a lot less likely that "Hollywood" could get thousands of smaller competing ISPs on board.
... or use an editor with syntax highlighting for Makefiles.
I prefer my white space to not mean anything because I normally can't see it. If I show white space then I see meaningful and non-meaningful white space. I find this aggravating and figure the designer of such a language is a control freak who will likely continue to aggravate me in other stupid ways. I don't need this in my life. I don't know how this disagreement between myself and the language designer seems 'superficial and lazy' to you.
I don't think it's as high as 45%, or at least I can't find something to corroborate that.
I have a feeling this is an initial marketing feature for him.

You pull in users who value the convenience and ease of signup and once you reach critical mass the feature no longer yields the percentage of conversion that makes/breaks your venture.
I work from home 5 days a week. I love the ability of having a flexible work environment , so I drive myself to remain focused during the day and produce the most that I can.

This doesn't work for everyone, a lot of people will say they get distracted, or don't have motivation to make it work. In my mind it's generally because they haven't setup the proper home office atmosphere and/or processes.
Really? Cause I found this:

"Additionally, we may impose usage limits to our services,
suspend or block services, or cancel any and all services
at our sole discretion at any time. Finally, we do not
guarantee the accuracy and timeliness of any data received."

You can see that little gem here:

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/terms-of-service...

under Service Level Agreement

"Subscriber understands that Privateinternetaccess.com
also reserves the right to scale back or throttle
bandwidth originating from subscriber accounts that may
breach the present Agreement or in the event of
excessive usage on the Privateinternetaccess.com network."

Same page, under Our Rights

Which is REALLY ODD that they would have those terms, because on their contact page:

"Are there any limitations on usage or bandwidth?"

"We do not impose any restrictions or limitations on usage
and/or bandwidth consumption. Please feel free to engage in
any legal activity. "

Huh. Wonder which one I should believe?
Show HN: Auto-rsvp tool for sxsw
No. Following a step-by-step will actually not make you a hacker. That rather goes into the script-kiddie direction.
Pretty sure bootstrapping has less to do with the size of the strap and more to do with the fact that you're doing it yourself. $16k of your own money is a lot different than $16k of someone else's.
The Chinese make 'em, they don't use 'em. You know, like iPads.
Crunchyroll is a unique case. It started out as a typical pirate video site that basically streamed and profited off anime fansubs, then later managed to go legitimate by licensing anime from Japanese studios (presumably because it had a large audience and the studios decided to experiment with streaming to the international market). It's a one-off occurrence that I don't think has been duplicated by any other site since.

It'd be great if more pirate streaming sites started up and became legitimate, but it's unlikely to happen so easily with content owners who are more protective of their copyrights (e.g. US studios/channels). They'd probably sue instead of discuss licensing terms.

Hulu and Netflix need to go everywhere, but content licensing by region will always stand in their way. Here we're stuck with high-priced cable TV packages that I don't find appealing, and Amazon's ebook store isn't even available.
The URL isn't any more exposed than any password would be over HTTPS, that is to say not at all unless you are being MITM'ed by someone who controls a CA in your browser.
Don't work with recruiters, period. Why? From the hiring side of the table, here's why.

1) they misrepresent you and lie. "Kevin has 10+ years of experience with Ruby on Rails". I go "huh, Kevin's a lying shit. Bin."

2) 40% of your goddamned salary finders fee?! Fuck that shit I'll find someone else.

3) why would I be interested in employing you if you're not interested in us? The fact that you've gone to a recruiter just says "I have no idea what I'm doing or where I want to go, and I can't be bothered with research"

4) why would I hire someone that's already on myriad recruiter databases and therefore likely to be poached by the same shyster that placed you?

So, yeah, don't use recruiters. As an employer, I get 20+ emails per day from these animated coproliths, and they all get deleted. I don't have time to read 30 CVs for "javas php rubo on rales" developers.

I'll just hire the smart cookie who wants to work for us and approaches us directly.

Edit: also, the only reason recruiters exist is because they exist. They introduce artificial scarcity in the labour market and then exploit the deficit they created.

No better than ambulance-chasers.

Double edit: just to ram home how useless these people are, in the last seven years I've had recruiters try to sell me myself, no fewer than three times. Not a single thought between their immaculately preened ears.
Man alive just use an IDE.
"everything is discovered rather than hard coded"

I take it you've never used or read any of the Find.cmake files, or tried to figure out which variables you need to set in all the spaghetti. Is it _LIBRARIES or *_LIBRARY_DIR? Is the comment at the top related to reality? The awful homegrown language makes it all worse.
There's a saying to describe such a performance and the people who do appreciate that kind of 'stuff': artsy fartsy.

I'm sure half of the pleasure is to then talk about how incredible, magnificent and transcendental it was to assist to such a performance. Must make one feel special in NYC.

I also do appreciate the humility in that title: "Almost too beautiful". Sure, we mere mortals can't understand this, because it's too beautiful for us.

Several people have asked if this was a joke... By now I'm honestly beginning to think that HN has been trolled by a ring with sufficient accounts to upvote anything they want on the HN front page :-/
I would add that a big cultural difference in US from, say, Ukraine is that people avoid talking about money as a plaque. As if it is a bad shameful subject. I do not know where it comes from - pride, competitiveness, avoiding jealousy, lack of confidence or extrapolating work policies into personal life.

I think people lose a lot because of this. First, they do not let share their struggles with each other. Where I came from people used to complain and exaggerate about their money problems, but nevertheless they share. Without sharing, there is less emotional and practical support from friends and family.

Secondly, without talking about money there is less chance to learn and cooperate for successes. If my friend wants to do X and never mentions to me that, I have no chance of telling him what I know about it from my experience or from my other friends experience.
Nvidia  Tegra 4 Architecture Deep Dive, Tegra 4i, Icera i500 & Phoenix Hands On
If they know what you pirated, why don't the content providers just get your ISP to shut off your internet until you watch enough ads to make up for the cost (they could do a little rev-share to incentivize comcast). Piracy will exist as long as content providers insist on selling something that can no longer be sold.
Regardless of how you start, what you make and whether you deliver or not, let us know of your side projects. We're making a side project showcase/discovery place.

http://sideprojectors.com
Thumbprint Education Platform
Thumbprint is creating a new educational platform with the goal of changing the way technology is used in education. Thumbprint is creating a truly crowdsourced platform that allows users to create, customize, collect and share content. Thumbprint is building a platform that enables iPad=based-learning and measures all of a student's achievements, regardless of age, grade, subject or school. Thumbprint is combining passive and active learning in a single solution.
Where to go after this prototype?
I don't come from a development background so I hired a CMS (Joomla/Drupal) freelancer to get a very basic prototype made. Unfortunately, the person I hired was not able to finish so it's non-functional and it looks really plain. I can only use it as a mockup of some of the functionalities and portray the basic idea. It's in the social media space so user interface and design are important and I don't think the way it looks right now is very appealing. If I could get some funding to recreate it professionally in Rails, I believe I can really create something people want. Where do I go from here?

My goal was to try to articulate the idea with this mockup version and apply to some accelerator programs, but I haven't heard from 2 of them already. I plan to apply to a few other ones but I want to make sure I put the best foot forward and see the overall vision because this prototype does not do justice. I already spent nearly 2K on this prototype so I really can't afford to put more money in at this point. I just need someone else to believe in the idea with me and allow me to get some miniscule seed funding. Any ideas? What else can I do?
I've used Make in a similar context: building documents.

Raw simulation results (.log) ->
Processed for plotting (.plot) ->
Ugly Fig files (.x.fig) ->
Pretty Fig files (.fig) ->
EPS files (.eps) ->
The final document (.pdf).

By including the right dependencies in there, you can have individual figures update themselves when the raw data changes, and whole swathes of charts update themselves when the 'fixer' scripts get updated.
Automating iOS App Store screenshots
Any discussion of economic growth policy in China immediately reminds me of my first visit to China, in 1982, when very little economic growth had happened for about three decades. Going from the United States to Taiwan earlier in that same year gave me a whole new appreciation of what "poor" means. But then going from Taiwan as it was in 1982 to Guangzhou (via Hong Kong) the same year even more more starkly showed me what real poverty looks like. China's economic growth model of the most recent thirty years has been very consciously patterned on the growth model of Taiwan that began in the 1950s. Three books that I read during my first stay in east Asia helped me understand what I was observing all around me in 1980s Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China. The first book was an abridged edition of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations,

http://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Nations-Adam-Smith/dp/161382081...

which was very illuminating about why Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Guangdong Province, areas with similar cultures but very different governance, could have such different economic levels. The second book was How the Other Half Dies, now available as a free download of the original book,

http://www.tni.org/tnibook/how-other-half-dies-0

which I saw on the bookshelf of a student from France who lived in the same international dormitory I lived in in Taipei. That book has some interesting details about the successful land reform in (South) Korea and Taiwan, details expanded in the book Island China,

http://www.amazon.com/Island-China-Ralph-N-Clough/dp/1583483...

a more detailed study of Taiwan's development. Successful economic development doesn't have to be rocket science, especially when there are examples to imitate with varying mixes of natural resources and natural disasters and demographic challenges, of varied cultural backgrounds, all over the world.
I'm missing something. What happens when you come back?
A shorter version: close browser, write code.

"How to" articles are an easy way to procrastinate, unless you're legitimately stuck on something.
Why does the pdf version cost more than the paperback?
They can be. It depends on what you're after.

I definitely think anytime planning is underused in games. It's like a modified A* planner with a weighted heuristic, but which reduces this weighting factor after every successful iteration. The Anytime-D* algorithm then efficiently re-uses calculations to make subsequent plans faster. I'm not a games programmer, but I used this in a tech-demo planning paths for >5000 agents in a constantly changing map.

The biggest win in my opinion is that it devolves gracefully. If you're low on CPU time, you get worse paths. When CPU is readily available, they get better again.

FWIW, if you're reading this Valve, I'm still waiting for your call... ;-)
"Seriously, the idea that someone would need advice on how to 'start working on a side project' seems almost bizarre"

Well it isn't bizarre in context right? There are lots of people who have spent the first 18 - 20 years of their life what to spend their time on. A significant fraction of them have never even begun to work on things that weren't "part of the plan" as it were. So coming up with a side project is a daunting task.

The best advice is simply do something you haven't done before, code a compiler, code an interpreter, code up a javascript library, design a web site, take pictures of every bird in your back yard, dig up some dirt and sequence the DNA of things you find there, plant a garden, take an art class at the local community center, volunteer to sort food donations at a food bank, pretty much anything you haven't done before try it.

That way you can discover things you are really interested in, and things you really aren't interested in. Since theses experiments are things you never have to do again if you don't like them, go in with the attitude of "Hey I can tough it through anything once, because it's only once."

Its pretty simple advice and I am always amazed when someone hasn't thought of it already, but I have met a number of people who have graduated from college and then paniced with no idea what to do because their 'plan' ran out.
I haven't seen this before; what other apps/sites have used it?
A serious competitor to Amazon
This kinda this is what inspired to me to use google authenticators time based OTP's and try to make a service out of it (shameless plug: http://www.gauthify.com), I think theres a solid benefit to be gained from OTPs in a login setting since they're rotated, not memorized, and random.
It's also quite illegal to take power from mains lines even inductively. If this kind of thing catches on I imagine the manufacturer would have a lot of lawsuits on their hands.
I'm trying to wrap my head around this, not being familiar with Go yet... is this analogous to the difference between a Task and a Thread in the .net world?
The Lesson of Iraq (1958)
A more charitable reading might be that the suggestion is to be more thoughtful about things involving data (rather than regulation or whatever).
> In my mind it's generally because they haven't setup the proper home office atmosphere and/or processes.

True as that may be, it's fairly easy to stay focused in a work environment and fairly hard not to go insane at home. Setting up the proper home office atmosphere and processes, experimenting with different ways of working, that in itself is part of the ordeal.
Feynman: Difference between Mathematics and Physics
Product Managers play a very important role in the success of a product because they allow the specialists to focus on their role. An designer is good with UX and UI but doesn't necessarily want to create product requirements. An engineer is mostly interested in code but is not really tuned to what the customer needs.

Designers, Engineers, Sales perform well when they have deep narrow focus and goals. The Product Managers' job is to allow them to excel in their specialist role much like the conductor of a multi-piece orchestra.
I dramatically reduced it by simply removing my phone number from LinkedIn.
Here's a Ruby one-liner

n=1234567;(1..n).reduce{|t,n|s=i=0;loop{i+=1;s+=rand;break if s>=1};t+i}.to_f/n
The low end ubuntu hardware specification is better than what they are showcasing FirefoxOS on at MWC currently. It's hard to guess what the end comparison will be once it's fully production ready.

Android and FFOS perform similarly on the same hardware platform for what it's worth - each have their own advantages in some cases.
Have an up-to-date LinkedIn profile that lists your skills and experience will do most of the work. Of course you can also create profiles on all different sorts of freelance/jobs sites, but that's only when you're really desperate.
Physorg? Ugh.

Didn't even bother click, came here to read comments instead.

Can HN please ban Physorg like everyone else?
Try business class service.
I agree that make's syntax is hard to pick up and often unintuitive, but in my experience, if you reject make, it's a big, red burning flag that you don't fully understand the problems that it solves. The ability to define arbitrary dependencies and actions (including overriding built-in ones) is the defining aspect of a build system. All of the build systems I've used besides "make" (mostly scons, waf, ant, and gyp) have attempted to first-class certain types of dependencies, and the better ones allow you to define some of your own, but they all make assumptions about what one might want to do that make things I do all the time impossible (or at best, way off the beaten path). Examples include post-processing object files before linking, post-processing a binary after linking, or generating object files from something other than the compiler.
Me too, building a series of HTML/PDF output pages from a docbook source, for example.

Make is a lovely tool that is useful for more than just compiling source code.
The choice of whether to implement language constructs whose very semantics require that their return value be un-observable is completely arbitrary. Why make your language more complicated in order to support something that by definition has no effect?

Of course things like crippled lambdas can be worked around by using a named function, but the fact that you have to do that in the first place tells you that the person implementing lambdas did so without at the time understanding what they were for.

Anyway, it's fine for some kinds of imperative programs, but calling it a functional language is misleading.
On Steve Jobs’ birthday, here are some of his funniest moments [video]
The source of this article that claims teleworking is great is a survey of teleworkers, making the result - I'll be generous - "unsurprising".
Translation: The system is hard to use, has little content available, and downloads slowly when you can find something to download.