skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Skip lists: fast PyPy-compatible ordered map in 89 lines of Python
1. They don't sell info, they just target ads

2. Google are an AI company, who currently make most of their profit from ads. They are well aware that there are big opportunities for them to make profits outside targeted ads.
I read the book "In The Plex". A lot of academicians joined Google mainly because they wanted to get an actual product/service out into the hands of people instead of just doing research or writing papers.

I have a different reaction than you. It's good to see brilliant minds stepping outside of the academia and join a commercial entity to actually build something.
A year or two, I would have agreed with you. However, I've been working on a new project in D3 over the past month and I've realized that it now has so many mature, built-in visualization layouts that almost anything you'd want to do can be done out of the box with a little bit of tweaking. See, for example, the layouts in https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Layouts (which include a pretty tree layout) as well as the axis/timeseries handling built into d3.scale/time/svg. Granted if you're doing a completely new visualization, you're going to have to do a lot of custom stuff, but there are a LOT of helpers built in these days.

The biggest learning hump for me was understanding the way data is bound to DOM elements, and how a mismatch between the data and the selected DOM elements is handled. I never really understood until I read Mike Bostock's post "Thinking With Joins", at which point I attained d3 enlightenment: http://bost.ocks.org/mike/join/

edit: not to mention the growing library of user-made d3 plugins at https://github.com/d3/d3-plugins
If you're really interested in this, I'd encourage you to take some actual Parsec code and make this change, then compare the two for readability. My guess is that while it's conceptually nice, you'll find in practice it hampers readability more than it helps.
Google is sucking all the talent and the brain of the world.. i wish at least that the efforts would get published in new papers and open source software..

Or the world will enter into a dark age of knowledge, ruled by huge corporations, and everybody else having to share the crumbs that fall of the table..

I hope that not all big minds fall of for companies.. or at least that companies start to commit with knowledge shareing to the rest of the world

we should stop black box knowledge companies or we are doomed in the long term.. (like the coke secret recipe case)
I agree. I'm already planning a Sublime plugin for this.
Apple’s Maps being updated often and significantly
There's a lot less stigma attached when it's a (relatively) anonymous forum, when you're not face-to-face with the people responding, when you have a large support group because people who understand and care find YOU (via your headline) rather than you having to find them, and when someone who responds in a negative way is likely to get downvoted and called an asshole.

There are probably still people on HN who respond negatively to an admission of depression, but they're (wisely) keeping quiet.
If you purchased Programming Ruby 1.9 directly from them, it's a free update.

From the article:

Log on to pragprog.com/my_account and place an order for the new edition, your coupon will be applied to the ebook automatically.
This is all about "like", what about "respect"?
I'm pretty sure it's a Windows GDI font rendering problem. Windows DirectWrite, Mac's CoreText and other platforms seem to do okay.
I'm also having problems. I get a message that says "Your card will not accept a charge at this time". It is the same card I use to buy books at Amazon.
Ah, OGinparadise is the same one who posted that Expedia has lowest prices, despite it's problems: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4965868
I work at a medium sized business and we're having little trouble adopting Trello. It's been about 8 months since we started, and other departments have also adopted it for their own projects. Once introduced, they love it. It's a great way for everybody within the company to have visibility of what others are doing.

We meet regularly with other departments to triage their request queue (list) and move it forward. It's great for them to see the software process and see their request in context with the (many) other requests.

We often break out separate project boards and link to it from a master (planning) board. That really helps break down the larger tasks.

mhp noted that it's not designed for bugs, but we have no problem using it for that, in conjunction with some GitHub issue tracking.

I'm certain a startup would have no issues adopting it into a great workflow.
This is a very naive view of reality. WYSIWYG editors are superior in almost every way for almost all users. I used to force markdown on people too, but WYSIWYG is really a killer feature for most users. It requires far less learning, the features are more discoverable, it's quicker to edit even after they manage to become proficient with markdown, and there is no mental translation from what they're editing to what it's going to look like. But also other features that you might not immediately think of are very important, such as the ability to copy-paste from their existing word processor documents and preserve markup. Editing rich text with a plain text editor rather than a rich text editor is to most people like editing your photos with a hex editor instead of Photoshop is to you: not the right tool for the job, unpleasant, slow, requires learning, requires mental translation, and can't easily copy paste from existing material.
Dead pigs in Shanghai water supply don't ring alarm bells for Chinese officials
Ha ha. I am fascinated with Erlang as well. But never really got any time to pick it up.
I've seen a lot of dumb Rails server configs and even dumber usages of Rails without any tuning at all.

With a couple weeks or a month of work I could shrink the hosting fees or resources consumed by a factor of 5 out of most Rails apps that are sitting up around 30 servers... and probably a factor of 10. Leaving aside whatever rookie or even intermediate mistakes were made in their Ruby code or their database, this post indicates a lack of understanding of what happened when their server fell over. Proper tuning of a deployment should not trigger a 100% failure mode like this.

These folks were itching to get off of Ruby for whatever reason... after all their roots were in Java. If your goal is to do a rewrite and learn a new language and gain some notoriety why waste time learning what you did wrong with Ruby or your server config?
> Per the private photo sharing, I don't think that a poor track record is a great excuse for including another potential security issue.

I didn't say anything of the sort, I was saying its stupid to put stuff online if you don't want it on the front page of a newspaper.

Disabling thumbnails, while I see it as a pointless feature I don't see it as being very hard to do, perhaps if these porn syncers at work cry out enough, it will be in the next version.

PS: allowing anyone complete access to anyone else's "private" files isn't doesn't constitute a poor track record, its absolutely shoddy as hell and speaks volumes about their likely "fix" and attitude towards security practices in general.
To be honest... kind of. They release papers but most of the layers at the bottom are Google proprietary. Certainly the source code is proprietary. Hell, even most of the information about GFS is proprietary, despite having a successor. From an academic perspective, their disclosure is kind of crap.
Awesome Interview with Kieran Farr, co-founder of Vidcaster-500 Startups
Show HN: HTML5 Game Project
In Silicon Valley, rich getting richer and poor getting poorer
Okay. So the cause is fatigue. So lets compare to Super Bowl Sunday, St. Patrick's Day, and the 4th of July when it falls on a Sunday through Thursday.
Show HN: Gempad - your phone as the third input device
Pigs In Shanghai River: Number Reaches Nearly 6,000
Yeah, it's a nice holdover. I keep hearing great things about Nginx though. Someday I'll have time to check it out :-)
Google Maps Direction Shortcut
Stop wasting time and use Google Maps more efficiently.
> Lyons is skeptical about claims that readability increases the chances that a language will attract a large audience.

The article makes an important point but I've always interpreted readability in terms of expressiveness: To what (admittedly qualitative) extent does the language help a fluent developer write readable code (where each line flows naturally from the next)?

Rather than attracting people to the language, it's about hitting that sweet spot where the code is highly "compressed" yet still has a natural syntax without being opaque. I find that the syntactic overhead imposed by some languages (i.e. those that don't require indentation or which lack array literals, for instance) has less of an effect on readability than the author's skill. PHP has these flaws but can still be quite readable, and in that sense readability should be attractive.
> Why/How is it that small communities like HN have removed the stigma attached with mental health

They haven't - there's still stigma around MH problems. It just doesn't show itself in threads like this.

See any thread about i) interviewing or ii) spree shooting and there'll be plenty of stigmatising comments.

It's not so bad, because at least most people on HN are happy to talk about it.
Let's be new and terrible programmers together, because I feel like the only way to fully understand whatever tech is out there is to actually use it.
That looks like typical code written by a mathematician. Look online for implementations of various mathematical algorithms and you'll get more code like this than you'll ever wanted to ever see.
> I'm pretty sure they reused lots of Sims 1-3 code

You made this assertion elsewhere in this thread also. I don't see any reason to believe this is the case, do you have any evidence in favor of this theory? There's a huge amount of PR from them saying this is not the case, and from my minimal experience with game development it makes no sense.
+1 for the cool monitor stands but geez... Invest some $$$ in a real keyboard: scissor switches are the most painful type of keyboard switches ever : (
Never heard about it, thanks!
That's a good point. But keep in mind, a 51% attack can't steal your coins. It just allows the attacker to spend his own coins more than once.
Considering that about 90% of the gameplay comes from interacting with the other cities in the region, I really don't think this would work out as well as people think it would. The cities are small enough that you can't supply all the power/water/garbage/people/industry out of one town, and it's the EA servers that are maintaining the connections between them.
Each game "Server" for SimCity is actually an Amazon EC2 cluster of servers, with 1 central master DB server. Even when the servers were "full" on game launch, all of the EC2 servers were responding to requests normally - it was the cluster's master DB server that was slow. All of the "servers" are actually in the UK Amazon EC2.

This brings us to the scalability problems and why regions/cities are not shared to all servers. The database is the bottleneck, so sharing regions between servers would only worsen performance.
One thing you don't get in the C/Python combo is total static typing. The other big win of Go is elimination of a lot of runtime errors.

So it comes down to which will be more of a win for you and your product. Go has a big advantage here IMO though because of static typing AND performance increase.
Yet another site that disables pinch zoom for iOS devices. Pointless..
I've been talking to the fellows at Delve (http://www.delvenews.com/) and they are all smart, talented folks. Their product is really cool and I've found it to be excellent at curating content and the email digest they send out makes for great, personalized reading.
Google Search and Google Chrome are totally separate products within a massive company. (The same situation is why Gmail had terrible search for so long.)
Turns out someone did a $10,000 dollar double-spend which - as far as I can tell - no one spotted until they pointed it out.
Rather than straddle the middle, I think I'd go with as high-level a language as I could get, coupled with a simple low-enough-level language to get whatever performance benefits I needed. Some combo like Python/C, Clojure/Java, or maybe some other lisp dialect and C.
Something really interesting must be happening with AI at Google, because in the past few months both Ray Kurzweil (the best-known proponent of the singularity) and Geoff Hinton (the crazy-talented individual who invented deep-belief networks using interconnected "restricted Boltzman machines"[1]) have joined the company.

--

[1] For an overview of deep belief networks, see these videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdIURAu1-aU , and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DleXA5ADG78
Reinventing the Airline Industry
Actually I am almost certain Thai and Lao have those consonant divisions as well, in fact I believe 3 or 4. If I am not mistaken they are still taught and are part of the tone system and/or can affect unwritten vowel selection. More certainly, the consonant classes somehow stem from the need to preserve pronunciation of Pali, a middle-Indian prakrit language (with features not present in these SEA countries' modern languages) that is used as the littoral language of Theravadin ("older school") Buddhism. See http://pali.pratyeka.org/ for more info on that.
This has been my experience learning Go as well.
I have actually never ran across hackpad, thank you for sharing that. As far as using Idealist vs Google...I will never ever look at your data, analyze it, or share it with advertisers, which is reason enough for me. I also believe that I provide a better cross-platform experience than Google Docs. This is hard to back up since I have the unpublished iOS app sitting on my desk.
Your explanation sounds more plausible. It could be more akin to Blizzard adding 2 new realms to their realm list, rather than 2 physical computers.
I've actually seen entire companies and universities run on two physical machines, for sufficiently large values of two physical machines.

When I was working there, the University of Oregon ran almost all of the routine computation and webpages on one big Sun box that was about as fast as my calculator, and one enormous Vax box that was about 8086 level speed.
> with Ruby.

Title should have been: "How we went from 30 servers to 2: Replacing Ruby"
Haha, very nice.
What I found interesting while reading this article was the parallel to what a doctor does when diagnosing problems.

In medicine, it's commonly known that the interview with the patient (the 'history') is the first thing a doctor should be doing. Not just because it establishes a relationship with the patient, but because the diagnosis of most illnesses is guided primarily by the history [1] - even with modern MRI machines and DNA amplification techniques! At the very least the chat with the client provides context for the problem that you are investigating - you are now putting flesh on a skeleton of meaning rather than trying to create it on your own.

This article stresses the importance of first getting a verbal 'history' from the client - what the problem is, characteristics of the problem, time-course of the problem and co-incidence with other events (like software upgrades). There is also a parallel to medicine in that in this field a skilled practitioner may be able to diagnose the problem based solely on the history alone [2].

The second thing I noticed was the fault-finding mindset. As a medical student halfway through his second year of hospital placements this is something I took some time to learn. The initial approach to finding the reason for a problem is usually to (1)think of a possible reason for the problem, (2)try to fix that reason, and (3)if that doesn't work, goto 1. While this is a good because it shows you are actually thinking about the cause of the problem rather than its effects, it's not the most efficient way of going about things. One way doctors can narrow down problems is by restricting them to systems such as the cardiovascular system or the neurological system. A searing pain in your chest is more likely to be due to a problem with your heart or lungs than due to a problem with your kidneys or gonads.

This article takes exactly the same view of servers, classifying the individual hardware and software components that make up the vast majority of (linux) servers in the wild.

I don't fiddle around with servers much any more, but I'm bookmarking this page because it is such a useful illustration of a fault-finding mentality.

[1] http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=11058...
[2] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/08/29/10344...
That is the world wide web. You published it and anyone could save a copy of what you published (right-click, save as) at any time. This is no different surely?
"Having a 50K lines of code dedicated to just inversion of control or O/R mapping makes a problem a lot more complex than it probably needs to be."

Exactly. That's the terrible stuff with all this "enterprisey" mindset: people are working on medium-sized codebase made of this special kind of hell that Java/C# + ORM ([N]hibernate) + XML + SQL is and these app often run into the 200K / 300 KLOC lines if not more. Yet what does these applications really do? Actually not very much. Yet these programmers are sure to be working on super-advanced stuff because their codebase is big.

When several companies reported a drop in LOC of 90% by switching to something else than Java then at one point you have to at least consider that maybe most of your Java codebase is hot air.
I think it's an interesting feature, but it's still something that is a "once in a long while" feature. And, when I do use it, it's often pointless since I will need to take it to the mechanic anyway. If this was a free feature on my car, sure, I'll use it, but I'm not going to buy a product for that feature. More importantly, people who really don't care about cars in general and just take it in when the lights go on aren't going to either. (Especially when you consider the cost of getting your own self-diagnosis wrong. How is my mom supposed to know if a loose gas cap is a big deal or not?)

I think there's a lot of potential here but it needs to be something that a) I will use all the time and b) I will get real, tangible value out of it, not academic understanding of my driving habits or a few bucks a month off of my gas by changing them. (Which, by the way, is another "thing" I now have to worry about: is Automotive telling me my driving is ok? What do I need to change? Now I feel like a loser when I don't "do well" one month.) It needs to make my life easier or allow me to do things behind the wheel that are valuable but currently hard/dangerous to do. I think there's plenty there.
> i wish at least that the efforts would get published in new papers

You mean like this very large list?
http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html

> and open source software

Or this also very large list?
https://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=label:google
The main thing the article proves is that the servers aren't needed for any real time calculations. What's to say the servers don't provide valuable data based on previous events in the game, data that's needed for future simulation?
> I think the idea that you can actually conquer this disease sets you up for failure.

This idea needs to be heard. Depression quickly feeds on itself, making one hopeless about the inability to fight back against hopelessness. When I learned to accept that the depression was (temporarily) going to win, and that it was its own cause rather than something about myself or my life, I discovered I could just ride it out.

As with quicksand, it's the struggling that pulls you down deeper.
There's an apparent pressure from publishers to create always-online games

Maybe for something like Diablo 3 but there's a level of solo play that defines a game like Sim City.
It certainly appears to be. Here's a former Harvard prof who wrote a pretty interesting blog post: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvar...
>>>You can't succeed in business by being this high maintenance.

Since when is holding a publisher to contract terms it agreed to abide by "high-maintenance"?
I don't think he meant kitchen sink, more that there are fundamental aspects from many parts of languages that are bound together well, which makes

> Rust strives to be as minimalist as possible without sacrificing the goals of low-level control over memory and C++ performance (optional GC), memory safety, race-free concurrency, and type safety (no null pointers).

somewhat funny.
My presumption is that if and as batteries become increasingly manufactured, and perhaps reconditioned, from recycled batteries, the cost/benefit improves. Essentially, battery deterioration is the result of structural deterioration that is rectified by the input of some energy. This is, or should be made to be, significantly less demanding of energy -- and disposed byproducts -- than is original sourcing from raw materials. I.e. no materials are actually "lost" during the deterioration, and materials used in remanufacturing/reconditioning should be largely recyclable, as well. And reprocessing should take a lot less energy than sourcing and separating from raw materials.

The question then becomes whether the lifespan of a battery technology will be long enough for such benefits to emerge. Given that, already, the net CO2 benefit is at least positive (ignoring, for the sake of this argument, other "green" factors), this seems to be a risk worth taking.
I can see your point. I didn't really consider this because I come from a country where creationism isn't, and wouldn't ever be taught in a science class. I guess I am a little cynical because I work in a science research lab (as a technician) and a few of the scientists are close minded, beginning with their conclusion and tailoring things to fit. These ones are very political and most concerned with putting their names on other peoples work.

Though that being said, most of them are open minded and thoughtful people. One of them is just amazing and has become my hero as I've watched them continuously fight the good fight against a toxic system that is against them most of the way.

I agree with your last sentence. The original paper should not have made such grand claims. When I read the first 'viral' reporting I actually went 'meh' and kind of dismissed it. It was, after all, just one paper, and no doubt we'd see a lot more over time if it were true. After all, rocks are falling from space all the time. But then this response, and more so, peoples defence of this writing, that really got my goat up.

It really reminds me of Tim Harford's TED talk on God Complex. I see this complex all around me, while the people displaying it deny it.
I think it's pretty clear what's so interesting: google has the some of the largest datasets ever assembled, on a hugely diverse range of subjects. If you want to play with that data, you've got to work for google. Probably the only other place you get to play with that much data is at the NSA, and their goals are a bit less fun than google's.
Yup, that's me in a nutshell. I used svk first and then moved on to mercurial.

Then I had to learn git. I like the model for lightweight branches in git (bookmarks in mercurial) but the step backwards in UI is still irritating. I'm used to it at this point but teaching it to others is a constant source of pain ("git checkout -t/-b"!)