skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're incorrect about me. I live in a country that went through hyperinflation a few decades ago, and I was born in another country whose currency was wiped out in the late 90's. In both of these places society responded by converting de facto to US dollars. People would stuff their mattresses with dollars and prices for anything other than groceries would be named in dollars. Sure Bitcoin offers an alternative if you live under a regime that can tell you what kind of currency you can hold, but wouldn't that sort of a regime also crack down on holders of Bitcoin if that were to catch on?

P.S.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Argentina go through a dollarization phase at some point?
Democratic legitimacy comes from the democratically elected government, regulating the economy is accepted by pretty much all democracies as one of the powers of a government. I am not sure if that is what you mean by "the might of an institution."

I think a democratic currency should be the one selected by the democratic government in most cases. Otherwise, if you accept my premise above that a currency like Bitcoin is good for asset-holders, they could use their influence in the economy to force non-asset-holders to use Bitcoin. That would be the opposite of democratic since it would be more wealth = more votes.
Nope. Avoid. Switch to templates at the moment you think you need this kind of a solution. Use for example super comoact http://archan937.github.com/templayed.js/
Compared to almost full blown mustache implementation, pithy.js, surprise, is a bloat.
Sorry of being harsh, as a positive note, the code itself, in abstract way is my liking. Very good. May even steal some snippets.
True! You have to be careful with the quality (the big issue that I had using Elance). I've done something very similar crawling Twitter lists, and probably could work with crawling Yelp. I'll see about adding it to the article. Thanks!
I'm really hoping for some Telltale Games for Android.

I really don't have the time for PC games, but I sometimes have long (4+ hour) bus trips, and an Android adventure game would be amazing.

I'd also like an old X-com remake for android, and some other tower defense games besides Plants vs Zombies (or PvZ 2 :) ). PvZ was the first Android game I've bought.
Being described as a "learning experience" usually indicates that a project was just scrapped.
Except that it has to be priced at $.99-$1.99 for most people to do so...
More important than lines of code, how much foundational architecture do they share? Code is just an implementation detail, architectural changes are more feasible in a new codebase.
$25 a month? Did you forget a few zeroes?
At the point you can spot cancers in MRI scans it's often too late.
GPUs these days have alongside their massive collections of ALUs, large tracts of fast local memory. That's why they are viable for LiteCoin mining.

ASIC implementations for Bitcoin will be based on SHA256, built with not a lot of internal memory that can be accessed without traveling across another bus. Those implementations will not work with LiteCoin or scrypt, which is memory bound. GPUs have lots of memory.

It's no technical advancement over Bitcoin, I agree, but it is gaining acceptance (the prices have maintained parity with Bitcoin growth) and it seems that your current investment in LiteCoin mining will remain relevant for longer than old Bitcoin hardware, just because ASIC developers working on Bitcoin problem all see LiteCoin as just a weaker Bitcoin clone.

That's not an argument against LiteCoin.
Mashape shares their OAuth Bible
Yes, I meant 'runtime.' That's what I get for commenting without coffee... the parent's usage of 'VM' infected my comment.
Well said.

It's interesting — very few customers are actually bent out of shape about this. (A few are, for sure.) It's more non-customers who are watching from the sidelines that seem to be upset. I do want to try to explain ourselves to the community in general, and that's what this post was for. But my first loyalty is to serving our current customers well.
Springpad: Everyday life, done better
The hard part with bitcoin is borrowing in a way that gives a guarantee to the opposing party.
> Right and this is happening in ... Cyprus. So all the money coming in to the BTC economy at the moment is Cypriot?

To be fair, the effect of the actions in Cyprus weren't limited to Cypriot money -- much of the money involved was international, particularly Russian (and, reputedly, much of it was likely stashed in Cyprus by organized crime.)

Much of the money coming into Bitcoin being because it is perceived as a better place for organized crime to stash money than traditional banks I can believe, though, frankly, I'd see the events in Cyprus (while relevant to that consideration) as secondary to the comparative immaturity in regulation and anti-money-laundering monitoring affecting entities in the Bitcoin space as opposed to traditional banks.
I don't understand why they aren't updating and selling all their properties on iOS and Android.

There's an entire new generation that could buy them, plus point-and-click adventure games sound like a great use case for tablets.
Because you're comparing the value of one thing over time against the rate at which you would gain value in a different investment over time. I can see an argument for why you might say tbonds have been a better investment than gold, per se, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the necessary volatility of fiat money because it's not backed by anything of real, unchanging value. I'm talking about the purchasing power of the same amount of gold and USD over time.
Let's say that everyone who got laid off today at LucasArts forms a new studio and somehow lands the contract to make the next Star Wars games.

I guarantee you that their pay will be much lower from that contract, and their new independent studio will probably not get a favorable (if any) portion of the back end on sales. That means that not only will they get paid less to make the game, but even if it is successful, the result of their hard work will not result in much improvement to their situation and indeed they will then have to land a contract to make the next game.

My point is this a move that favors only the executives and fucks over the folks who do the real work. And in reality rather than hypotheticals, they are all out of work today and must find new jobs, a shitty position for anyone to be in and my heart is with all of them.
Spaceborne dark matter hunter sees telltale antimatter
> That's because that amount is set as the maximum heap size.
Nope. My maximum heap size is set to 1GB, but the live memory set does not exceed ~200 MB typically.

> If any more memory is required, the disk swapping becomes heavier and heavier.

If any more memory would be required it would not swap, but OOM. Again - if you ever need to swap, then you must be coding on a netbook...

> Visual Studio does all of what you've mentioned for languages

Nope. Not to such extent as IntelliJ is doing it. You need Resharper for all of that. From JetBrains. And VS can easily grab 500 MB of RAM too, especially after a week of work without restarting it (memory fragmentation, maybe some leaks).
If it's truly impossible to get centralized request routing queues at Heroku's scale in any other product offering, that is evidence that a demand that Heroku provide it might be unreasonable.

Aside from that, I am extremely sympathetic to Heroku's engineering point here --- it's obviously hard for HN to extract the engineering from the drama in this case! Randomized dispatch seems like an eminently sound engineering solution to the request routing problem, and the problems actually implementing it in production seem traceable almost entirely to††† the ways Rails managed to set back scalable web request dispatch by roughly a decade††††.

††† IT IS ALL LOVE WITH ME AND THIS POINT COMING UP HERE...

†††† ...it was probably worth it!
Mobile phone turns 40, with little fanfare
What? I never disagreed that Java is used for realtime embedded systems.

I'm aware of the existence of "real time Java". There can be such a thing because of specifications like " areas of memory that are not subject to garbage collection, along with threads that are not preemptable by the garbage collector" [1]. Like I said... guarantees....

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_time_Java
This is a great suggestion. I don't have the extra funds to hire anybody, but if I manage to launch this on my own it's likely I will.

What I meant by "enforcement" is my understanding that leadership/management has a lot to do with things like firmness in language and body language cues, etc. to maintain a power hierarchy.
Most of the people I know who are able to assume a leadership role are exactly the kind of person I'm afraid to trust to get on board since I can't defend against them taking control of the project.
I don't think anyone was celebrating this news, especially given the lack of details. It's clear that something like what you described is what's going on, but the news is still interesting in that a relatively new startup is able to pick up a previous competitor.

I'm interested to see what they do with the new users.
Eh. I was more disappointed when Westwood bit the dust. In all honesty, LucasArts was long, long past it's golden era.

Though I'm currently playing through Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis on my way to and from work, on my phone, via SCUMM. I'll always be grateful for that.
> Any further letters from Mr Poole and his legal team would be met with a lawsuit for malicious prosecution, they warned in comments given to Betabeat.

That's a funny way to treat friends.
FWIW, this is not the first time LucasArts existed as a licensing arm and not a development house. For much of Jim Ward's tenure in the mid-2000s LucasArts was essentially what Disney is positioning it as now. LucasArts as everyone knew it died a long time ago, the most upsetting thing was that the company that was left had no vision past the Star Wars license, leaving all the other IP to rot.

My hope is that Disney actually has a more holistic view on the LucasArts properties, because it's used to managing many diverse properties in a way LucasFilm was not. Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle etc etc might actually get released out to those who want them. This might be the best thing that has happened to LucasArts and its fans, but of course the job losses are disheartening.
Harsh. I'm going to ignore the more inflammatory parts of this (feel free to restate if you want me to engage in discussion), but one bit did grab my attention:

"A major selling point of Heroku is that scaling wouldn't be a risk"

This is interesting, especially the word "risk." Can you expand on this?
Or Ballblazer?
There's also this press release talking about the release of XBlock SDK: https://www.edx.org/press/xblock_announcement
Stop working so hard
The cited Weinberger article says:

Different from random projections, the hashing-trick
preserves sparsity and introduces no additional overhead
to store projection matrices.
Again this deflation misunderstanding...

Deflation is (might be) a problem with money as a wealth-storage facility; it's not a problem for a wealth-transfer technology. People get confused about this because government-issued currencies serve both purposes. Let's untangle them.

As a money transfer tool, you convert your wealth into BTC, spend them, and the receiver converts them back into his own currency (or other liquid commodity) of choice. If both conversions occur fast enough, you're both protected from BTC fluctuations. That's what non-speculators will do as long as the BTC remains highly volatile; by doing so, they keep the BTC liquid against their wealth-storing currencies.

As a speculative tool, what makes BTC valuable is the fact that you can buy actual stuff with it. The value of the BTC will adjust so that the active BTCs (those already mined and regularly exchanged, rather than stored for speculation) will represent the value necessary for the liquid trade of BTC-priced goods. In the long term, an investment in BTC is indexed on the BTC economy. Since the cumulated value of all BTC-traded goods can't indefinitely grow faster than the actual economy, the value of a BTC can't indefinitely grow faster than a derivative indexed on the world's economic health.

Conclusion: the BTC will asymptotically converge, either toward 0, or toward very-large-spread indexes such as S&P500.

Economists' understanding of deflation is based on government-controlled currencies, where manipulations are expected. When you make wealth by hoarding a deflationary money, you bet that a government will reward you for not lending your wealth to someone who will put it to work. Nobody can make BTC do that: if less BTC-purchasable wealth is available, the liquid portion of BTCs lose value, and so does the speculative portion, thus counteracting the deflationary trend.

And anyway, when was the last time economists accurately predicted anything but the past? :)
IGF winner Hofmeier pays it forward for Porpentine's Howling Dogs
I have experience with this type of customer acquisition. It works, but it's painful in that it is extremely boring.

To take some of the boredom out, I did two things: (1) Used oDesk to gather email addresses with business information and (2) Built a custom system to send out individualized emails.

(1) My experience is similar to Tracy's in that the quality you get from Elance/oDesk will be poor . . . at first. The reason why this is so important is that if you want to do as Tracy describes, which is send personalized, non-spammy looking, friendly emails, you have to get business data (company, CEO's name, etc.) free of any errors.

I found freelancers on oDesk and get them the Inc 5000 and told them to get me the email address of the CEO, the company name written in plain English as you might use it in a sentence (ie, not Hacker News Incorporated, but Hacker News), the CEO's first name that he/she goes by (e.g., Katie, not Katherine), etc. I had to go through it by hand like a teacher and point out every mistake made, and I did this about 3 times before I started to receive higher quality data.

Then got those people I trained to train others and I held the "managers" responsible for any errors. I hired mostly native English speakers from the Philippines.

(2) I had the freelancers enter data into a shared spreadsheet and wrote a script to dump that into a database which would prepopulate templates. I would then inspect each email and send them out one by one (this step could perhaps be skipped later on).

Each company had a "thesis", e.g., Inc 5000 companies want to use our product because they're growing quickly, and various other attributes that would determine which template was sent for which company and then compiled analytics accordingly (A/B testing different templates for a given thesis was built in).

The system then scheduled follow ups after a given amount of time up to 3 follow ups before stopping.

This stuff works, but it's a grind. If you start to pay freelancers for the info gathering, you should carefully watch your expenses and track the relevant stats (conversion rate, CLTV, etc) to make sure that you're actually making money.

One last thought, I'm sure Tracy's post and my comment will get pushback about being spammy, and I sympathize. Even patio11 got pushback for his post encouraging people to use email more as a channel. I think it's very important to craft an email that's meaningful and delivers some value to the recipient, and that means targeting and craft in the email itself which was at the center of my efforts and you can see the same in Tracy.
Honestly, why would I choose this over iTunes? I love Rdio (I'm a former Zune pass subscriber, and Rdio far better replacement than Spotify), but in what way is this better or different than the competition? The price and catalog appear to be pretty much identical.
Yeah, tablets seem like they'd be a great fit for SCUMM-style games.
Are you sure? From what I read, the big gap is between Free and Non-Free.

After that, I think that some marketing could convince the vast majority to pay a lot more than 99 cents (I did, for Plants vs Zombies).

I'd pay somewhere around U$ 5 per game myself :)
The real problem lies in the fact that most consumers don't realize that it's an issue. It only hits them when it actually happens. Those of us in the tech community are more forward thinking when it comes to this sort of stuff. Would you care if you paid $15 for a movie, then a few months later the service shut down and you couldn't watch it anymore? I bet you would. Would your mom/dad/grandparents/etc care? Most likely.
I miss the X-Wing/TIE Fighter series, especially the awesome X-Wing vs TIE Fighter game. I would have loved to see a modern remake of those games.
See, the toxicity of this is that, were the facts in support of your obvservation, it would cause many to completely ignore whatever I'd said as "typical white male privileged bullshit."

Don't you understand how much damage that type of thinking does, and how it's as bad as the progress we've been trying to make against, for example, dismissing a woman's opinions out of hand because they're a woman's?

Don't turn try to turn back the clock on equality, especially in a medium where ideas actually can stand on their own merits (or lack thereof).
This is really unfair. This comment:

>A lot of Heroku's apparent value came from the intelligent routing feature. Everybody knew that it was harder to implement than random routing, that's why they were willing to pay Heroku for it.

is being addressed by Adam in this comment:

>Heroku's value proposition is that we abstract away infrastructure tasks and let you focus on your app. Keeping you from needing to deal with load balancers is one part of that. If you're worried about how routing works then you're in some way dealing with load balancing.

I think Adam is getting to a really fair point here, which is that nobody really minds whether the particular algorithm is used. If A-Company is using "intelligent routing" and B-Company uses "random routing," but B-Company has better performance and slower queue times, who are you going to choose? You're going to choose B-Company.

At the end of the day, "intelligent routing" is really nothing more than a feather in your cap. People care about performance. That's what started this whole thing - lousy performance. Better performance is what makes it go away, not "intelligent routing."
Doesn't really matter. The fact that they charged without permission is seriously wrong, and I don't see them owning up to that. They seem to think their mistake was in not notifying people well enough.
It is not the same thing but it demonstrates the same point that under these charges Criminal Intent does not need to be proved, unlike most any other criminal charge.

I suppose I did not need to use a different hypothetical, but I thought it would demonstrate the point about intent, bc in my hypothetical the Defendant could not have had intent when a minor produces an ID that says 18, ie. how can you intend to have sex with a minor if you believe the individual is 18? You can not intend it, at least legally and I specifically used a hypothetical that creates some culpability on the minor, producing a fake ID, but even that is not a defense because that only goes to intent, the actual crime still occurred.

Back to the original hypothetical, keep in mind we are not talking about recording a crime in a public place, it is much more specific we are talking about recording statutory rape in a public place - there is no defense regarding intent bc it is a strict liability crime. Moreover, it does not matter it was inadvertent, a mistake or anything else if the video exists and you recorded your intent, or lack thereof, is not a valid defense to a strict liability crimes.
Backwards compatibility, I think?
Because they weren't victims of fraud.
Why spend when you can buy tomorrow even cheaper? A deflationary currency is not a good idea.
Ha-ha, and let's call this HTTPSEC http://cr.yp.to/talks/2013.02.07/slides.pdf !

(Spoiler: HTTPSEC is not a real thing, it's what we'd had if people who invented DNSSEC, or people like the parent commenter, designed something like TLS).
Ask HN: Freelance devs, how do you format your LinkedIn profile?
I have a small dev consulting shop I run. Sometimes I work on projects that last six months, sometimes only six weeks. How do other developers working freelance or running small shops format linkedin? Do you list all the major companies you've worked on projects for or include "clients such as" under your main title?

As some more background, I'm fairly young and want to come across as more established. I've worked on some significant projects, but at the same time I don't want to give off the impression that I've jumped around between a bunch of companies.

Solutions?
Square-Enix is an absolute shitshow that should be a lesson against having a guy who doesn't understand games at all as CEO. I think their fate was sealed when Wada fired a huge fraction of their experienced workforce resulting in a talent deficit which in turn lead to poor quality games (FFXIV...) which then snowballed into a lack of trust for Wada and the company as a whole.

At this point all they do is make remakes of 20 year old games.

edit: that being said if they come out with FFVI for Android I'll probably buy it X_X
Why wasn't it worth finishing the game in their pipeline? If it's mostly developed and they treat sunk costs as sunk costs isn't it basically throwing away money to cancel something that's pretty far along in development?
Your complaints are all about the past. What are you looking for here? For Heroku to invent a time machine?
They don't care pre-emptively, but it only takes getting burned once after sinking hundreds or thousands into a dead platform that they start to get skeptical.
Anyone interested in the article should give VW a try. You can get good baseline performance in a fraction of time compared to other traditional approaches like liblinear et. al.

https://github.com/JohnLangford/vowpal_wabbit/wiki
The kernel of their user-hostile decision is right here:

Right now, you’re barraged with a lot of internet advertising, popups, etc… This has become part of the internet experience. At the core, we’re simply trying to better customize some of this experience. And possibly give you access to highly relevant local advertising.

"Hey, we're just going to take a piece of the shitty ad-laden pages you visit. Maybe you'll see something you like, but chances are low and beside the point."
The Science of Parallel Universes (video)
Some diehards think Disney already did something with it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8dpLebI-4s
You're absolutely right, I didn't mean to imply what schools & corps currently do was shady in any way (as long as you're aware that they're doing it).
I think this is actually quite different from random projection, which creates linear combinations of several continuous variables. RP is much more similar to PCA in that respect. OP's method works on a single categorical variable and essentially shuffles the possible values, then 'folds' them down to an arbitrary size (the size of your hashing function).

>ideally they'd be using a cryptographic-strength hash fn

Cryptographic adds nothing; there is no danger from someone reversing the hash (and if there is you may have bigger problems). Any hash function that is suitably random in its redistribution of the variables should suffice.
Because if the spec didn't, every engine would do things their own way and no website would work in more than one browser.