skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To take an analogy from another field that, this is like a cinematographer getting bent out of shape and angry at the camera leasing company because he used a film stock his camera wasn't correctly calibrated for. From what I've read about it, it sounds like the setup on the servers had some issues that made the queue time issue into a problem where it wouldn't necessarily be for another, or even most other, customers. If you are or want to be, known as a technical company, that means you have to take responsibility for your mistakes, even if your mistake was thinking that the vendor was going to catch and fix all the mistakes and bugs in the service that they are providing to you.
Building web services that are performant, stable and economical is hard work; you can't take your eye off the ball, and you can't just blindly hope that vendors will take care of your shit for you, you have to know what you're buying, and what you should be getting.

And, if you're going to go public with your complaints, it's best to do so in an understated, fact based manner. In this case, Rap Genius comes off like a guy screaming at the waiter in a fancy restaurant. They may be displeased, they may even be right about the choucroutes en sel being salted cabbage; but lot's of people around think they're making an ass of themselves.
I turned my personal site into a point-and-click adventure. What do you think?
Introducing Raminibar - Personal site turned Point & Click adventure!

What is a personal site? For many years, I have been keeping a page where I'd list some info about me and occasionally update my blog. This made the format somewhat cold and impersonal. I decided to make this site into something more like me. I hope you'll like it.

http://raminibar.com
also android fanboys who are instead falling all over themselves to claim that later and worse but open somehow beats better and earlier.

It's an ideology, mindless anti-progress, anti-innovation ideology.
Nice post, Ken. I've been appreciating your work since xfractint in 1994 or so.

Note that in a wired-AND-capable current-mode logic, like open-collector TTL, you can get a similar RS latch out of a couple of inverters wired into a Henkin-sentence circuit like this, with the latch inputs being the latch outputs; but the behavior is slightly different than what Ken documents here. Here he says that, essentially, the 8085 tolerates bus-fight, but the bus drivers in the ALU are stronger than the bus drivers in the registers, and so after a brief bus fight, the register bit flips.

But with the wired-AND approach, bus fight doesn't exist; you just don't hook up any external zeroes to the Q and /Q lines if you want to read the latch, or to write it, you assert an external zero on one of them.

The trouble with open-collector logic, as I understand it (I've never built or debugged an open-collector circuit in my life) is that it's kind of slow. If I understand Ken's post, the circuit described here is a kind of optimization of the wired-AND latch I described above: there's a weak positive driver stage to speed up positive-going edges on the output. Is that right?

It's always interesting to see how real-world circuits depart from the purely digital, RTL ideal in order to save some resource. Jeri Ellsworth's work reverse-engineering old chips (which I hope to God is not secret!) found another example: dynamic stages in pipelines, where rather than using a flip-flop or even an entire latch, you just rely on the capacitance of an input to hold the previous value for long enough that the next stage in the pipeline can do its job. Works as long as you clock it fast enough, fails when you try to single-step the chip.

(Also, thank God, an actual hacking-related story on Hacker News, as opposed to "I lost 3lbs and a percent of body fat in a week" or "Every night when my dad would come home from work he would be filthy from working at the junkyard all day.")
There are so many languages that it can be real hard for beginners to decide what to do. I use Ubuntu and ChromeOS. Ubuntu recommends Python and GTK whereas, if I am not wrong, ChromeOS extension and webapps are primarily written in Javascript. I am learning programming currently using Codecademy HTML and CSS tutorials and have to decide what to do next. In order to keep myself focused I want to write a clipboard app. I am not sure what to choose Python or JavaScript.
April fools comes early?
Avalaxy you basically summed up my thoughts behind choosing Windows 8 to start. Of course I get strange looks whenever I tell other developers what I'm doing. If you are interested you can read my full thoughts complete with some numbers: http://spottedzebrasoftware.com/blog/ignore-windows-8-at-you...
General note: please check script before using unless you want another valentine's day ;)
Especially considering that 30% is impressive enough.
>> If you need performance why not go with scala.

I've looked at it a number of times, I don't like the syntax. When Java came out in August 1995 I was one of the first downloaders (and not even a fan of Sun in particular at that time, just interested in checking out Java) and it was clear just looking at it I would like it.
There is pretty significant relation between number of pins and prices of almost every piece of hardware involved. IC package price is almost linearly dependent on number of it's pins and for most mass-manufactured chips packaging is major component of final price. Also wide parallel interfaces are harder to design from interference perspective and to route on PCBs. General shift to essentially serial interfaces for almost everything except main memory is motivated by simple fact that trading silicon area used by serialization/deserialization logic for less device pins, simpler boards and simpler system design is very worthwhile whenever it's at least partially possible. For very slow interfaces it has been this way for at least 30 years, since mid 90's for slow system buses (that's why around 2000 motherboards stopped having ISA slots, ISA was replaced by serial LPC interface around that time) and since early 00's for almost everything in non-specialist applications.
farming does require more problem solving over a wide range of disciplines

Does it make sense to compare the two that way? Farming is a an activity that has problems to be solved, programming is a method of solving problems - including farming related ones. Sure, farming has more and more diverse problems to be solved compared to pure programming problems (i.e., CS), but almost every programmer solves problems in other domains, and those are almost infinite.
This is a good point. A university CS education will not be about writing good code in any particular language (at least mine wasn't). If you are not at an engineering school there will not be a lot of emphasis on software engineering practices. And you can't really lean on your peers very much because they are as inexperienced as you are. Even your TAs and professors likely don't have any experience writing production quality, maintainable code in a commercial/business setting: they are more likely to write "proof of concept" code for their particular research interests.

In short, a traditional Computer Science curriculum is not designed or intended to churn out e.g. Rails developers who can be immediately productive. An apprentice-style training system could do that, however at the expense of not teaching some of the more theoretical computer science (or teaching it in a much more applied style).
In my mind, in addition to teaching fundamental skills like reading and writing, the purpose of K-12 school is to expose kids to a bunch of different subjects so that hopefully they'll find something they're passionate about.

So yeah, every kid should (try to) learn to draw and code and everything else we can reasonably expose them to.
Hi meaty, I take your point. So far my experiences have lead me to believe that going freemium is the way to go for the Windows 8 Store, so I hear what you're saying. That being said, I made Adlib for-pay (with a trial) because it was simplest and I wanted to KISS. For my next project I will be going freemium.
Douglas Crockford Explains Monads
I have the same Withings scale that he mentioned in the article. I can swing a full 5 percentage points a day on my body fat reading depending on how hydrated I am.
you're basically trying to write off nirvana's (IMHO excellent) rant using a minor technicality

He's not trying to write anything off and it is a pretty big technicality. nirvana should have omitted that ideological jab to begin with as it was unnecessary and shows his bias for Apple/against Google. Google is more "open source" than Apple in any way that matters, considering Android is currently on devices their competitors (Amazon) are selling. Apple is mostly responsible for WebKit which is commendable and useful but as far as practical considerations go, nobody gives two shits about Darwin.

But yes, engineering should be the focus and people assume the worst with Apple.
Soo old why does anyone post this!
How Can Two People Feel Completely Different About the Same Job?
No you won't.

You need to bang protons or neutron together. Electrons don't participate in color force and can't make quarks.
This title is ridiculous, and walking desks are outclassed by simple standing desks. You don't need to be walking for 8 hours a day to get the type of results this guy claims to have gotten (by the way, bodyweight fluctuates 5-10lb in a day either way pretty easily). Doing a sprint style working for 20 minutes a day will give you great results and is short enough to fit into your day.
Thanks useful. If I may say, I think it's a really unique and fun word game!
Maps and folds, at the very least, generalize to trees fairly naturally. They also behave essentially the same way as for lists.

If you want more versatile functions, you could look at the famous "Bananas, Envelopes, Lenses and Barbed Wire" paper which introduces a bunch of recursion schemes that apply to trees as well as lists and other structures. These have Greek names you might have heard like "catamorphism" (a generalized fold).

Even if you don't end up using the functions, it's a good read. Might be a bit dense though, but it's not that bad or terribly heavy on math.
Go and its tooling have a strong "straightforward" aesthetic that appeals to some people. Languages that go after power and ecosystem are in a more crowded battle for mindshare.
Not the most elegant solution, but a view plus some triggers will let you create a fully functional "table" with any column order you please.
The team working on Go regularly rejects proposals that make the language more complex just to save a few keystrokes. They and most experienced Go programmers value the simplicity of the language. Syntactic sugar is routinely rejected out of hand. The increment operator (++) isn't even allowed as an expression because it is too easy to make confusing and error prone code. (you can still use it as a statement, you just can't do like foo[a++]). I wouldn't be worried about the language increasing in complexity much. :)
That's surprisingly interesting to read (at least the start), lots of raw information. One fun thing I noticed, he's using sed-syntax to correct his spelling mistakes. Is that normal or is he true hacker? For example he writes "s/Hilary/Hillary".

Good hint on how safe/unsafe RSA actually is:
"bradass87: 2048… never heard of it being broken publicly… NSA can feasibly do it, if they want to allocate national level “number-crunching” time to do it…"
Of all things for him to stop drinking....

But if you are worried about arsenic don't eat rice, and be careful of the ground water (depending on where you live).
Do you have your preferences set to return more than the default 10 results? When set to the max of 100, I get a lot of suboptimal results. It's getting better than it used to be, but the worst case I found had slots 1-70 all occupied by the same site.

I think it there must not be much testing for the non-default settings. I much preferred the earlier interface where results from the same site were grouped, capped at a small number, and there was a "More results from this site" link.
You cannot get a merchant account unless you have have a SSN.

Obviously, opening a company will not grant you a SSN. It will be hell to simply open a bank account.

It is easy to open a company, close to impossible to actually have a business.

I own an useless LLC in Delaware, btw.
Nice - but you need some background or edging to the text. The light green is too hard to read on the graphics at the top.
indeed, but if your goal is not running it for profit but just producing tasty organic veggies from a hobby garden, then things mostly just work if you're in a temperate area with predictable climate. Just keep watering it and it will grow to the point of producing stuff, even if you totally mess up everything else. Software, on the other hand, rarely "just works"... nature and the "experience of evolution" are not on your side in the programming field...
Ask HN: what's the best way to decorate a website for St. Patrick's day?
What's the best way to bring the St Patrick's spirit to a website? One of our developers thought of changing the backgound image + adding a beer icon http://siteapps.com/app/st_patricks_day_site_template-442

What else?
More people start an undergraduate education than finish it. If you're only looking at people who got through the system, you've already filtered out a number of those who have low motivation or low ability.
It is different and difficult. I think that's because functional programming isn't simply a sideways step from imperative programming, but is instead a level of abstraction higher than imperative programming.

Hofstadter says analogy is the core of cognition. We tie unknown things to known things to understand them, and I think that's why you get all these bad analogies where people try to tie the more abstract concepts of fp like monads to everyday things ( "monads are like burritos," for example).

And this really doesn't make sense because monads and such are pure abstractions. How do you tie a pure abstraction to something concrete? It's like saying zero is like a burrito.

The better analogies tie pure abstractions like monads and arrows to other abstractions that you already understand. For instance, Odersky trains you by iteratively refactoring imperative Scala code into more functional code, and thereby gradually carrying you up the ladder of abstraction.
Unexpectedly awesome!

I kinda wish you could navigate from it though. Eg: When I click on the TED laptop, load the talk in below.
That's completely beside the point though, and not the issue at all.
I'm confused, and a little depressed, that anyone would describe four miles per hour as "a light run." Maybe, if you're four feet tall?

Also, I agree with the "April Fools" question but I'm afraid the answer is "no, it's just TechCrunch."
LiDAR Viewer 2.10 - Visualização de Modelos Cartográficos Massivos
There's a really amazing moment in "An Evening With Kevin Smith" (highly recommended!) where he recounts meeting some dick producer who admonished him over concerns of practicality.

"Kevin, making movies isn't about getting together with your friends and having a good time!"

[Pauses] "It isn't?"
You are continuing to ignore my central point. Men in our society are not indoctrinated in a culture of fear about rape the way women are. People do not routinely lecture men on things they should do to avoid getting raped. Most men walking by themselves at night do not worry about rape as one of the principal dangers to be wary of. Completely ignoring any question of how frequently rape happens to men, the mere existence of rape does not have anywhere near the impact on men's lives as it does on women's.

It is plausible to me that there is also a culture of shame affecting men who have been raped, along the lines that you have described. But if so, it is very silent compared to the rape culture surrounding women, and thus has far less impact on men who are not themselves victimized. It is no doubt no less awful for men who are the victims of rape, and I agree that any such culture must, must, must be fixed.

But at the same time, I can't blame the activists out there for targeting their primary effort at the side of the problem that has the broadest effect and the widest societal impact. And also, I optimistically believe that if we eventually do manage to fix the culture of shame and blame attached to rape that affects women, a lot of that progress will automatically carry over to the case of men who are raped, too. Feminism has never been just about making things better for women! That's just where the first big steps are naturally found.
And its Chris Dixon.
I just pledged $200 to OpenCompass
That's my biggest concern about making the switch. I've gotten used to the performance characteristics of MySQL and some of it's quirks. Some small side projects on Heroku have been pushing me to learn more Postgres and perhaps I'll use it for something more important soon.
It appears to be common nomenclature dating back to the 1960s-70s [1] to refer to the registers in a CPU as a single "file" in RAM, although the term "file" denotes the fact that you can access multiple parts of it at once.

From [2]: "A register file is a critical component of a modern superscalar processor. It has a large number of entries and read/write ports in order to enable high levels of instruction parallelism."

You might want to think of a register file as "a group of registers with several (parallel) input/output ports", as opposed to a component which can only perform a single read/write at a time. Basically, a really fast multi-channel RAM which can do simultaneous reads/writes. The number of read/write ports is usually dictated by your hardware, instruction set, parallelism, and scheduling [3] [4].

----

[1] Bollesen, V.; , "Core memories," Magnetics, IEEE Transactions on , vol.6, no.3, pp. 534- 535, Sep 1970

[2] Gonzalez, R.; Cristal, A.; Ortega, D.; Veidenbaum, A.; Valero, M.; , "A content aware integer register file organization," Computer Architecture, 2004. Proceedings. 31st Annual International Symposium on , vol., no., pp. 314- 324, 19-23 June 2004.

[3] Wallace, S.; Bagherzadeh, N.; , "A scalable register file architecture for dynamically scheduled processors," Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques, 1996., Proceedings of the 1996 Conference on , vol., no., pp.179-184, Oct 1996

[4] Balasubramonian, R.; Dwarkadas, S.; Albonesi, D.H.; , "Reducing the complexity of the register file in dynamic superscalar processors," Microarchitecture, 2001. MICRO-34. Proceedings. 34th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on , vol., no., pp. 237- 248, 1-5 Dec. 2001
But did you enjoy building your project? Did you learn from it or benefit in other ways?

It's most likely that you won't recoup on your investment if you only see this in financial terms. If you expand your definition of success it is possible that you have already succeeded.
I simply do not understand this anti-college anti-credentialling sentiment. I am featured in the latest Hacker Monthly ( print version of HN). So they asked me for a bio. I wrote something about how I learnt everything in college...am not a hacker...and that you should go to grad school if you want to get better at CS. So they edited out all of the pro-college stuff and just said this guy is data scientist.
You don't figure out Dirichlet allocation and principal components and matrix regularization hacking away in your garage. This stuff isn't going to occur in your mind out of the blue. Its fairly complicated and even those of us who were systematically taught these things at school take years to internalise it. Don't downplay education. You are missing out on a treasure trove of knowledge humanity has collated over centuries, just to hack away and reinvent the wheel by yourself...well, good luck with that.
I'm skinny, and other than the weight of the food I eat / defecate, my weight will not fluctuate at all. I can eat whatever I want, however much I want, and not gain weight. I was able to gain 5 or so pounds, but only after I ate whey everyday and did a lot of lifting.

I might be able to gain if I tried some ridiculous whey / protein diet and workout regimen, but I don't care that much. However, for the past 5 years, my weight and waist/hip size has not fluctuated at all, regardless of what I eat or excercise. Though I'm sure age will relieve me of this gift.
Cynefin: A Leader's Framework for Decision Making
Request Now: Need feedback Allows DJ to receive SMS song requests
High Stakes, No Prisoners is a sharp, brilliant insider's account of the way Silicon Valley really works: the sharks, powerful incumbents, and old-boy networks who play hardball all the time and the geniuses who make the products that have changed the world.
I know that using VPN I "trust" the VPN owner, because he has all the data I send/receive. I was thinking about such setup: buy VPS (for example: linode; it would be good to buy one anonymously), setup my own VPN (openvpn) and then use some external (for example: mullvad) VPN provider. I'm not sure if it's right or more secure that regular VPN, without additional steps. Can someone comment?

I have a couple more questions:
1. how can I use Tor with VPN the most efficient/anonymous way? should I connect VPN -> Tor or Tor -> VPN?
2. Can you point me to good resources about privacy/anonimyty online and linux configuration for privacy?

Thanks for help.
Less Wrong (http://lesswrong.com/) is another topically focused online community with civil and interesting discussion.
iOS and Android are bigger right now but:

1. Its very hard to get any mindshare among 300k apps so it makes sense to launch on the platform in my mind where you can get the most traction, which seems like Window 8 right now (if f(eyeballs / apps) is a good model for this).
2. Windows is bigger than them both. I know that isn't a popular fact on HN but its pretty clear that like it or not the market is going to shift to Windows 8 slowly but surely.
> Go and its tooling have a strong "straightforward" aesthetic that appeals to some people.

Yeah, specifically I see it as part of the "worse is better" school of design, of which I am a great fan. A sort of 'cat -v' aesthetic. I find that working with a language, or on products, that have embraced that mentality is just so much... calmer. It puts me at ease, for lack of better terminology.
I was kind of disappointed that they went with a flat file approach for permanent storage, especially because the documentation for the typical RDBMS interaction isn't exactly comprehensive.
It may not come as a surprise, but I am currently interning @ Microsoft (Netherlands), doing research into the Windows Store vs the competition (Play Store, Apple App Store) to find out where the opportunities for developers/marketeers/entrepreneur in the Windows Store lie. I've got some interesting numbers, there are more opportunities than one might think.
40 Years After an Acid Attack, a Life Well Lived
He burned an extra ~eight hundred calories with his walking desk.

I'd rather exercise for an hour and burn that amount.

Still, I think we can all agree that burning more calories is good: but I'd rather my company emphasis physical fitness in more 'real' ways than simply giving you a walking desk.