skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seems like you could use source control on plaintext files with a simple markup for specifying behaviors (doc embedding, syncing with a parallel process, etc). Then you write a program which reads the docs and guides movement along the procedure according to the markup.
Why is there no business in the US yet that matches healthcare consumers with these Indian operations? A healthcare travel agent if you will.
lemme guess. fentanyl?

if so, you're a liar. the generic patches undergo thousands of tests before a doctor ever has one prescribed.

sorry to burst your anecdotal evidence bubble. but you are fabricating things.
De gustibus non est disputandum, as they say. I don't care for this story either, it's less of an actual story, and more of a "what if" that feels somehow a bit corny to me.
Have you seen http://trash.io

http://trash.io/room/whatever_you_want to make a new room

realtime, drag and drop images, youtube, vimeo and multiplayer html5 games.

ws, redis, on top of a rails app on heroku.

enjoy.
It doesn't necessarily need to be a religion.

It's clear that something like what we call The Big Bang happened. But we can only trace back time and space to the origin. What happened "before" the origin is probably unknowable to us on this side of the origin. The best we can do is speculate, in scientific or literary terms.

So think of this as speculative fiction, expressed in terms of the author's time.

Personally I thought the progression of man through the ages was the most interesting part of the story.
I think it's important to separate the concept of what tool to use for editing vs. what tool you use for version control. You need a tool stack, maybe some glue code.

You could do it in HTML, then keep the HTML files in git so you can do version control. You can use any number of editors/WSIWYGs with HTML. You could then build custom tools to ease the workflow - are there any resources for this?

I thought first to say you could use Google Docs, but while it has a revision history and export to many editors, it does not do diffs well, and I'm not sure how well it handles your tabular format. I also doubt any particular online CMS designed for writing or editing will work particularly well, and meet all stakeholder needs.
It should at least be noted that an awful lot of those overdoses are because narcotic painkillers are often doped with paracetamol in a misguided attempt to keep people from using them to get high.
Did you need to check `&& (start..finish).cover?(square)` on Line 17?
Duh, Captain Obvious is on duty.
Standardizing Application End User Licenses
This has been fixed. A CA certificate bundle is now included in the build for curl to check against when connecting to SSL enabled URLs, so there'll be no more certificate errors even if a default CA certificate bundle isn't available on the server. Also, user inputs are sanitized, the code posted there are from an older version of Sendy. Thanks for the heads up.
Why it is important not to have children
My dad lives in a really remote region and doesn't go out much, so he asked me to buy like a yearly supply of paracetamol for him(along with a trunk full of food). What I did not expect, was that it's going to be such an annoying problem. As I said, I did buy what I wanted, except that it took me 10 minutes instead of 2. If you want to make it hard for people,just make every medicine prescription-only.
There are; google "medical tourism" - that being said there is some potential liabilities in that business...
Reading your requirements specifically in relation to the procedures using “2 astronauts working outside the space station (called EV1 and EV2), plus a robotics operator inside, and other actions taken by mission control on the ground. All of this is happening in parallel. Sometimes EV1 may be working on a task where all the steps can be done independent of what EV2 is doing, while other times their steps are heavily intertwined. The same goes for robotic and mission control steps” it seems like you need a project management tool.

Whilst you’re currently using Microsoft Word for this, it would actually be much easier to do this using Excel (and create a Gantt Chart) OR you could use something like Asta Power Project[1] which is used in the Construction Industry as well as with Technology Organisations, Engineering, Manufacturing, Oil & Gas and Financial Services etc which rely on projects running in parallel.

The reason I recommended the Asta Power Project tool is because you can:

- Create accurate schedules easily using a drag/drop feature

- Have complete visibility over multiple projects in
real-time

- Optimise your project resources

- Access powerful reporting tools

- ETC

I've actually used the Asta Power Project Software myself; it's pretty powerful and feature rich.

[1] http://www.astadev.com/products/asta-powerproject/
How does it work out when you figure in State, County, and Local spending?
> New York is far and away the most diverse place in the country, and only a few places in the world can compare (e.g. London).

"The Houston region is now the most racially and ethnically diverse large metropolitan area in the United States, surpassing the New York metro area, acccording to a new analysis of Census data." [1]

(Granted, the study was done by folks at Rice University here in Houston ....)

[1] http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2012...
Perhaps you really believe this definition of science. I've never encountered it before, nor do I know anyone that would use this definition. When people operating on a different definition of science encounter your definition, you can hopefully understand that they will be insulted to have what they think is science to be called not science. Whether you meant it or not, it appears as an attempt to elevate yourself (the person passing judgement, by calling it not science) over the study authors. Thus it comes across as contemptuous, and so one starts wondering: why is this person trying to belittle the study? Is there a hidden agenda? Is this person trying to make it look like the scientists performing the study aren't scientists, so that everyone dismisses the results? These are the things that one will naturally wonder about in the context of contempt, even if the contempt is accidental.

> In fact, science is ten studies making one claim.

If it is a fact, can you provide a source for this definition? I've never heard it before, and it contradicts everything that I've encountered to date.
The App Store: Good Deeds, Poor Communication
There is a huge difference between Ruby and Go, in terms of performance. I wonder if anyone has any experience with Python, considering that both are interpreted programming languages.
nope, iterating up to the square root of finish covers that
Rather, it's just another example of the uk becoming more and more of a nanny state.
Openstreetmap shows it as not yet finished, and i it does not yet exist, that seems to be correct.
* competitions based on speed of computation.

I'm sure if the competition was based on speed of implementation there would be different conclusions.
It's a long shot, but if it were me I'd put everything in a text MarkDown/Up language (train everyone on it), then have things laid out in a managed directory tree that is administered by way of a source repository tool (Git, &etc.)

The markup isn't necessarily a requirement, but some sort of text-based standard for how these documents are laid out would be important, imho.

For print-processing/missionpacks, I'd use latex. Its really the best possible way to solve the text formatting problem, especially if you use a markup. You could have your own markup dictionary/language too, which would fit right in with latex files.

So the whole policy group uses plain old text with smart formatting (so they are actually doing the work in-line) and doc generation through a latex pipe. Yup. Its the 70's all over again, and actually I'm becoming more and more aware of how non-ridiculous this is, while at the same time somehow being ridiculous. I wonder if there is a word for that ..
Oh, there is! Here's a list of such businesses (on the right side of the page):
http://www.patientsbeyondborders.com/facilitator
Nestlé: Stop trying to patent natural cures
Eh, some Haskell projects are improving their design. The web-frameworks certainly have[1][2].

[1]: http://www.yesodweb.com/

[2]: http://snapframework.com/

It's progress.
Wow. HN is officially over when even "The Last Question" gets the top-comment middlebrow dismissal treatment.
App.net http://cl.ly/OSPc
Posthaven http://cl.ly/ORwQ

Right, that is safely 40% less :-)
India has a medical insurance system. It's pretty simple, really - you pay actuarial cost + profit margin and it covers low probability high cost events.

Cost sharing induces patients to be price conscious, inducing downward pressure on prices. Most common procedures have prices listed on a sign, for less common stuff you need to ask the doctor for the price.

It doesn't usually cover birth control, psychologists, etc, nor is it a redistribution scheme in disguise.

The system works quite well. The rest of the world should learn from India.
Wow, 5 minutes in Ruby, and less than a second in Go? I know scripting languages are slow, but it's easy to forget just how much slower. (EDIT: Corrected misread number thanks to dljsjr).

I don't want to detract from the article's main point with a cliche "algorithmic optimization beats fine tuning", but I think it's worth mentioning. Unless I'm mistaken, this particular problem can be solved about 10,000,000x more efficiently.

> Given two numbers X and Y, return how many numbers in that range
> (inclusive) are palindromes, and also the square of a palindrome.

I would just count the digits of X and Y, then ranging between those counts, apply the following algorithm: For N digits, enumerate all numbers of N/2 digits satisfying the bounds X and Y. If N is even then simply mirror the first N/2 digits. If N is odd, mirror the first N/2-1. Finally, check the bounds of the resulting number against X and Y to filter out edge cases.

If the original algorithm runs in 10^N time, this would be 10^(N/2). For N=14 as mentioned, that's roughly a speedup of 10,000,000.

Edit: It seems I misinterpreted the question (which sounds like you're supposed to enumerate all palindrome numbers X>=N>=Y, and also print out the squares of those numbers). This is actually asking for a particular type of palindromes -- those which are palindromic squares of palindromes. As macobo helpfully points out, you can drastically optimize mathematically from this additional filter.
I like the idea of the top-up, in-app purchases. Makes me wonder how successful a much-loved, popular app would do if it adopted a 'get free, pay what you want via in-app' model, along the lines of Radiohead's In Rainbows sale. Think something like ... Monkey Island 3. Unfortunately, if my maths is correct, Crabitron has sold barely any (literally 1-3) top-ups :-(
CPython is a bit faster than Ruby, but I'm not sure it'd be drastic enough of a difference for it to be much better in the author's case.

Porting his code to PyPy would be very interesting, though.
The article doesn't actually say that performance was one of the judging criteria, and I'm unable to find anything in the code jam rules about this. Can anyone here clarify?
In this context, no it's not.

One thing that Code Jam does differently (and imho better) is that they give you an input set and you have 8 minutes (or so) to upload the solution. This is expected to give more than enough space for language speed variance.

Instead of execution time, coding time is much more precious in such competitions, and

Micro-optimizing has it's place, but it's usually not in a programming competition. that's what using ruby instead of C gives you leverage for that, as you can express more complex ideas and algorithms more easily (which should be the focus point).

This doesn't mean you shouldn't know the cost of operations.
Check the map key. The FAP 342 and FAP 420 are set as "under construction", not built and existing.
Well, but the majority of new US medicine is just modified versions of old substances.
Yeah. I realized that after this script ran for 8 hours :)
most numbers are not palindromes. so generate palindromes, and then test.
Thank God nothing like this happened in Venezuela.
The script generates some false positives on reserved words. It's a bug I need to fix.
We in the Oric-1/Atmos scene are still producing software for these 8-bit machines. (I say we, I'm just a participant in the party as a CLOAD'er, mostly, but one of these days that bit will flip..)

Anyway, there is a huge resurgence of interest in these kinds of old machines, which frankly: still work, even if their users have all died or moved on to other things.

Old computers can still teach every new generation a lot of things about the world, so instead of pitching that stuff out folks, consider the oil-debt of what it took to build (i.e. a lot) before your relinquish the right to make it boot.

My old machines still provide hours of mirth and adventure. I could put one on the 'net, but then again a big reason to have this machine is entirely not to have it on the 'net! :)

(Edit: http://oric.org http://forum.defence-force.org/)
On the value of testing on real devices
Even if they could have pulled some stunning and innovative UI, sparkling apps on all the platforms(at least major ones; by this I mean Android included), it could have been an irresistible platform. Sth that was useful to people other than being a paid Twitter replacement - mostly.

WhatsApp comes to mind.
Describe "on any server". Like a $20/m AWS micro?
I Choose Superman
Once you request to download the input data there is only a short (8 minutes IIRC) window of time during which you can upload your output data. Therefore your program must run within that time period.
>Also, HDR is so 2007, natural photos are where its at.

The whole point of HDR is to create a natural image with natural colors.
It is true that Ruby tends to be slow for programming competitions, especially if the computation is done serverside such as Codeforces.com.

Notice that your solution runs in O(sqrt(N)) time. If N were up to 10^14, with 10^3 test cases, then your solution could have to deal with up to 10^10 iterations... which is dangerous even for a fast language (since your CPU can only do about 10^9 things per second). As a rule of thumb, one should only ever deal with at most 10^8 things. Even just incrementing an integer 10^10 times can take some time (fortunately, not every one of the test cases were 10^14 so your Go solution took under a second).

However, Problem C of Google Code Jam qualification 2013 can be easily solved, even with a slow language, by making some observations:

1) Instead of iterating through numbers and checking if they are palindromic, you can just iterate through the numbers with half the number of digits and generate the palindrome by mirroring the half. A naive solution that uses this would run in O(N^(1/4) log(N)^1.6) instead of your O(N^(1/2) log(N)^1.6) solution. (The log(N)^1.6 is due to the time taken for multiplication, assuming the Karatsuba method).

2) With a small amount of math you can figure out that for any fair and square number N = MM, then for any digit s in M, we must have s(sum of all digits in M) < 10. Thus solutions are of the form:

case 1) Contains up to nine digits 1. (e.g. 101, 111111111)

case 2) Contains up one digit 2 and up to four digits 1. (e.g. 1002001, 2)

case 3) Contains up to two digits 2 and up to one digit 1. (e.g. 200010002, 202)

case 4) Contains one three. (i.e., just 3)

A naive solution using observation 2 may run in O(log(N)^5.6) time.

3) Use combinatorics to figure out count the ways to arrange the digits in the 4 cases shown above, rather than iterating through them. As it turns out, it is unnecessary to do this since even using an O(log(N)^6) solution I passed the 10^100 input. Since there are only about 40,000 fair and square numbers from 1 to 10^100, you can easily precompute them and find them by binary search.
Performance isn't a judging criteria, other than you need to be able to provide the proper output from a given input within a certain number of minutes. For this problem, it had to be within eight minutes.
No, 5 minutes in Ruby vs < 1s in Go.

OP's last benchmark was only for the iteration part. Look just above it and he posts the Ruby times at around 5m.

Still, pretty drastic.
I would say that a DSLR is useful for taking nice-looking photos in more challenging situations than a phone can (places with poor lighting, fast movement, or where depth-of-field or magnification are important). It's depressing that a lot of amateurs use a $700 DSLR on AUTO to take pictures of their lunch though.
If you precompute the palindromes in the range, store a table of prefix sums, and calculate each of the 10,000 cases in constant time it will probably pass (in ruby).

Edit: as electrograv pointed out, another optimization is to generate palindromes from sqrt(start) to sqrt(end) rather than testing each number in the range for palindrome-ness. This saves you a factor of 10^3.5.
Performance is not technically a criteria but you have eight minutes from the time you download the input data until you have to be done uploading the output data. So if you spend 50 minutes incrementing integers, then you'll get 0 points no matter what :)
Does anyone know what happened to multivax.com?
In my experience the speed decrease isn't worth it during competitions.

I heard some talk about allowing Python at the International Olympiad in Informatics http://www.ioinformatics.org/index.shtml (in addition to Pascal and C(++)) but that's probably far off
What you have is a graph (in the computing sense) of steps that happen along two parallel lines, with a bunch of steps that may or may not stop others from happening on the other line.

I'd look at things like a VCS's history graph, or video game skill trees to see how this could be visualized.

I'd break it down into text files with:

- One file that covers all procedures
- One file per procedure (or sub procedure)
- One structured paragraph per step
- A per-step list of tool/supply dependencies

This would be manageable in most VCS's, and could easily be broken out for work by multiple people. You could also have tools that automatically generates a list of all the tools used in a step/procedure, and then checks it against other procedures to avoid needing two of a tool when only one is available.
A builder's mindset
I also come to the conclusion that Ruby-like languages are just not the right tool for this kind of problem, but it should be pointed out that you would have been able to solve the 10^14 data set easily, even with Ruby.

I was solving that problem with PHP and got it running reasonably fast (1s per range) for ranges up to around 10^60. PHP is probably faster than Ruby, but it's still in the same area.

The first trick you can use is that you don't have to go through all numbers between start and end, rather you can directly only traverse the palindromes (i.e. you will only have to increment one half of the integer).

The second trick is that only numbers consisting of 0s and 1s (and a 2 at the start/end or the middle) can satisfy the condition (exception: the number "3"). This further massively reduces the search space.

There are more criteria that you can use to narrow down the numbers to consider (e.g. the number of non-zero digits can't be greater than 9). But in the end, cracking the 10^100 range is probably not possible in a language like Ruby or PHP. Using something like C++ on the other hand it becomes a triviality.
Well, from what I see on your site security and trust is an issue. You are asking people to direct their DNS to your servers, that is a lot of responsibility to take on. Who are you? How do I trust you? How do I know that someone can't corrupt my zone entries in your system, either on purpose or on accident. eg. lets say I setup a git repo with zone entries for another customer you serve, how do you decide which one is authoritative?

I would only consider this useful if you posted your code on github so that people can run it on their own DNS servers.
If I may ask, why? I don't personally think this is going to be successful, what with Hipchat and Campfire in the same space (which are very very popular) and grove.io having a good name for it and competing directly against you.

Edit: I think you also misunderstand the value proposition for your customers: you mentioned above that you should buy because you get "a full VPS, maintained by me", which is very odd.
This is a good point that I didn't consider. Running the 'just iterate over the range version' of this code with jruby:

[master] clifff@fair_and_square: ruby -v
jruby 1.7.3 (1.9.3p385) 2013-02-21 dac429b on Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM 1.6.0_43-b01-447-11M4203 [darwin-x86_64]
[master] clifff@fair_and_square: time ruby fair_and_square.rb C-large-1.in.bak

real	6m39.105s
user	6m37.762s
sys	0m19.009s
3 Huge Mistakes I Made When Launching Leap
It's both.

The Indian supreme court recently rejected Novartis' patent on Glivec, because the formulation wasn't different enough to merit a new patent (I don't know enough to know whether that was the right decision; just pointing out that the patent situation is different). The Indian government also has pricing restrictions on ~350 drugs deemed "essential".

On top of this, compared to the US, there's little to no drug marketing in India (yet). Plus lower labor/capital costs, etc.
I've has decent experiences with Python in Google Code Jam, with two exceptions. (1) Python can't handle large numbers, so the mere existence of huge integer inputs for the large prime number problem blew up my code since Python could not convert numbers that large. (2) Python is fine with math, but at a certain point of data accumulation, performance just plummets, no matter how good your algorithm is. Overall, though, I haven't had the experience the parent comment did. Either Python works beautifully or it literally just doesn't work, rather than take an hour.

I treat it as a challenge, though, as it forces me to be smarter about my implementation.
Yet the federal government does spend money on education.
This is a fact, and in no way am I being dishonest when I say that if the federal government spent more money on education then we would have a more well educated electorate.

The respective states actually do fund defense, although to a lesser degree than the federal government.

Kindly illustrate how I'm bending facts to sell a "distorted picture of reality?"
It sort of is, there is a submission time penalty.
A quicker and equally valid starting tome would be "None Dare Call It Conspiracy".
>(It's under objects.)

That would be because Factor is OO.
"development" means developing what?

I probably should have put that in: I work on everything you mentioned, with the exception of mobile apps.

I do most of my work remotely (my campus wifi is pretty good), but everything works locally as well.
This problem has a quite elegant solution - Suppose you know the fair palindromes (is a palindrome and a root of a palindrome) of length 2*k. Then you can add either a single digit or double that to the center, and test if it's fair. This algorithm generates all the fair palindromes. https://gist.github.com/macobo/5430510

By memory, there were under 50000 such palindromes in range 0..10^100.
My point is that you should give folk an idea of the kind of value you're expecting - $100? $500? $10000000000?

Either way I think posting this here is inappropriate.
How do you feel the extra step of compiling to CoffeeScript would impact performance and response time? I have been considering contributing in that direction.
It's too bad that many neophytes of photography tend to use the HDR term for oversaturated and exaggerated pictures that were probably not taken with multiple exposures to begin with.
From previous experience discussing on HN, I would say 'lutusp has a very specific view of the philosophy of science, and doesn't consider it open to debate.