skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have thought this as well. The fact that a bunch of exchanges all went down simulatenously and /r/bitcoin had a super-rare non-circle-jerky top-post (calling the bubble bursting), by a brand new member, gave me the impression that there was a coordinated attack going on. TBH, my first thoughts were more of a trading cartel trying to get in cheaper; but government was a possibility as well.

That being said,.. who knows? Certainly can't prove that's the case or even make a good argument for it (although, I do think a good argument could be made that something fishy was going on.
> would you call University education dicking around as well?

That's a big debate! For a lot of people, I would, though, yes. There are serious economists who posit that universities are mostly about signalling, rather than actually learning much. I don't think I agree with that entirely, and believe it depends a lot on what's studied. It also depends on the opportunity costs, which may not be that high for many people that age.

> GPUs, which of course were developed for the sole purpose of playing games.

I don't believe the creation of games is a zero-sum game at all; there can be many winners, and, as you say, there are other side effects that are beneficial. The creation of games also falls into one of business, side-project or open source project as mentioned in my other post, no?

Artificial coding competitions aren't really about creating much of anything though, from what I can tell. A bunch of people solve the same thing and then throw away what they made.

I agree that challenging your brain isn't a waste, but it seems that in a world that is desperate for coders, there are more productive ways of challenging your brain in a way that's perhaps even more satisfying, because of the positive feeling of having helped to create something useful.
Most people don't know what a DoS or DDoS is outside technical circles; and it's become a bit of a joke in the Bitcoin community that every problem anyone encounters with MtGox or pretty much anything else can be attributed to a DDoS attack.

Re: Gox's transaction volume capacity, the market is begging for someone to come along and solve these problems.
Looks like CipherCloud's basis for trying to get this question taken down was the screenshots. Looked like classic fair use to me, but I'd rather see the answers up and public, even without the explicit illustrations.

(Context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5579538 )
Great point....simple too!
A good photographer can do amazing work with whichever camera they are given, under the right circumstances (in the following case, a fully controlled studio fashion shoot) http://fstoppers.com/iphone
EBay recruits users in push against sales tax legislation
Man, I had an idea to do something like but with more of a privacy angle as a browser plugin (i.e all your social network data would be 'encrypted' and only visible to people you designate ). Now I realize it could have worked if I applied 'the formula': marginally useful product + corporate targeting + large sales team.
That's not the way patents work. There is not a renewal, but a new patent on the modified substance. The patent on the original substance would still expire. This, of course, raises an interesting question. If the claim is that the tiny modification doesn't change the drugs effectiveness, why not produce the original substance with the expired patent (or purchase a generic from a pharmaceutical that is already doing just that)?

Their actions seem to suggest that they do believe the modification increases the drugs effectiveness, but they don't want to pay for any of the R&D behind that.
> TL;DR. Ruby is optimized for developer happiness, not machine happiness.

sounds good . I am ruby happy developer .
Just a suggestion, but I would also give some thought to efficient coding style, not just algorithms. For example, you could have speeded up your I/O dramatically.
I partially disagree, partially agree.

In these competitions, it's about implementing a solution as fast as possible, while still get it working under the time limit (5/8 minutes). It's mostly about having the right idea and implement it.

In very many cases, you would like to be able to manipulate and play with algorithms and have efficient mutable data structures. For this, Java/C++ (Essentially C with data structures) is very suitable.

However, in some cases, you'd like to perform advanced simulations, mathematical calculations or manipulations where immutable data structures are more suitable. In those cases, you would LIKE to have magic: Arbitrary numbers, ratios, (efficient) immutable data structures and a more functional style would not only eliminate work, but also reduce the amount of errors you're likely to do.

The important part is that the implementation uses the right idea, not that the implementation is fast. Usually it's handy with a lower-level language to implement the algorithm right, but at times, a higher level (functional) language is better when it comes to implementation speed.
New Private Rocket Launches Into Orbit On Maiden Voyage
"But I still wouldn't be surprised if they had similar emotional effects."

Reducing inflammation tends to reduce anxiety, so the effects would definitely be similar. That said, tylenol also binds to the cannabinoid receptors, albeit weakly, so that may have something to do with the effect there.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

To be fair the computers he was referring to were behemoths with a small army of engineers maintaining them. How many of those are there today? Probably not that much more than five.
He could win if he proves to be better at marketing. Outside of the HN / SV Startup World "echo chamber" most people in most companies in most of America (much less the world) have never heard of Hipchat, Campfire, Grove, Convore, or this guy.

You could argue that he isn't competing against Hipchat, etc., but competing to convert current non-users of this kind of technology.

If they come out targeting other startups and technology companies, then I'd agree the odds are long. But come out targeting textiles manufacturers or transformer manufacturers, or shipping / trucking / railroad companies, or any of a bazillion other industries, and they may just have a shot at establishing a beach-head. Especially if they are willing to provide some vertical specific aspects to specifically appeal to customers in specific niches.
Or virtually every language that is functional in a way. For example Lisp and Haskell.
There are a couple of polyfills available for Web Workers
Well sure, adding "where execution time is factored" makes it hard to disagree with you. (And ultimately, it usually becomes a factor sooner or later.)

That wasn't the context in which I was writing my original reply, however. I was responding to a post that mentioned "magic" as a reason to disregard Ruby for competitions, which I didn't agree with. (The Ruby solution in the submission was slow even using a while loop, which is far from magic.)

If you're able to solve problems in the same amount of time using a fast and a not so fast language, of course you pick the faster one in a competition. I'm not arguing against that.
Microsoft OneNote. Multi user editing with easy linking between pages. Lovely to use and effortless to deploy. Just try it for ten minutes.
The clown car technique -- used for foreground images in your HTML documents, works best when the SVG contains only background images . If you use <image>, all the images in the SVG will be downloaded.

Yes, the SVG does "waste" a single HTTP request -- you get two http requests: one for the SVG file and one for the image it downloads that matches the media queries within the SVG. However, you can use a data URI within your HTML to eliminiate the call to the SVG file. An example of this (in CSS) is here: http://jsfiddle.net/estelle/ZHrb2/

The reason I called it Clown Car technique was because we're stuffing a whole bunch of images into a tiny little file.

I am looking into this technique not just to solve the <picture> RWD image issue, but also as a way to manage images. We currently separate content (html) from presentation (css) from behaviour (js). I like the idea of managing my assets separately as well. Thinking this helps along those lines.
This analysis is pretty generic...I'm not sure what real insight it offers specific to Tumblr. One of the things it doesn't go into detail is the actual user-to-user interaction...which is extremely limited. I've been using Tumblr for years and I still don't know how to directly comment on someone's content without reblogging it...or how to reply to someone else who has commented on my content.

Also, the OP doesn't touch on the most unique part of Tumblr, which is its not-quite-a-blog but more-than-a-tweet niche. Its format is very limited...you have several types of posts to choose from (photo, quote, text, video) and when you pick a format, you are stuck to a rigid form...for photos, you enter a caption and upload a photo (or photoset)...and that's it. You can hack around the constraints but it is difficult...and yet, this ends up making tumblr more inviting, because of the lack of setup involved. Constraints are freedom, sometimes.
Or embedding it directly into the HTML - almost any browser that can show SVG can also handle it as markup.

But, the benefit of this technique (as far as I can tell) is decoupling, and any kind of embedding re-couples the data. Maybe in an acceptable way, if you can do it at a deploy step. It depends on what the use case is.
"The legislation includes an exemption for merchants that generate less than $1 million in annual out-of-state revenue."

Tying things to a dollar amount doesn't make much sense in any case.

1 million in sales of electronics (with low margins) is not the same as 1 million in sales of hand knitted sweaters (or pick your example).

What we will see is an entire middle layer develop to help "small" merchants deal with the complexity of collecting sales tax that will inevitably take a cut of the action and add an additional tax.
To improve CPython performance slightly, put the code into a function (global vs. local lookup).
PQL 0.2 is out! converts python expressions to MongoDB queries
Also, if you ever think you need built-in support for large numbers in your programming language during one of these contests, then you're using the wrong algorithm. These contests are typically designed to be doable with very, very simple code using primitive data types.
Go does't have 1/100000 the amount of libraries and support that Ruby or C does.

Option A only seems simpler because you ignore the time/complexity in coding the task at hand.
I've had the following idea for a while and was wondering if anyone can point out the flaw:

Imagine a system where every individual has their own public/private key pair (backed by tying it to their SSN). You then have two SQL tables:

CREATE TABLE voterVote (
id INT,
category VARCHAR(255),
vote VARCHAR(255),
PRIMARY KEY (id,category)
);

CREATE TABLE voterVoteId (
voter_id INT PRIMARY KEY,
voter_city VARCHAR(255),
vote_id INT FOREIGN KEY REFERENCES voterVote(id)
);

Both tables are published. The one thing I forgot to mention though is that the vote_id is encrypted with the users public key. This way any individual voter can check that his vote is what is should be and people on the whole can check that votes were tallied properly. Furthermore, we dont need to worry about hacking compilers, etc. because this can be done on the internet. The last thing we need to worry about is that the machine is lying to people when they go to check their vote. The only solution to this is to have the code which decrypts the persons row in the voterVoteId open source, but still since the protocol is open source and the data is open source, we can bet that there exists one honest person to build a tool to check. One more thing: how can we tell that extra rows werent added to VoterVote? We can check that the number of people in a city matches the number of keys issued to every person in that city (which again is backed by SSN).

This will probably fail miserably at something simple I've overlooked, but it was fun to dream up :)
> Taking a step back, what problems are they solving anyway? Shorten time to market for app makers? Because social app plumbing is getting pretty cheap and easy to pull off at scale with IaaS.

Huh? IaaS does not provide users which is the basis of social, anyone can write code which implements a social network, getting users is the hard problem. The problem App.net is trying to solve is to provide a social network that app makers can trust. Currently you can get awesome functionality from Facebook or Twitter, but as Twitter have shown so publicly, they will only tolerate you as long as they perceive you as providing a net benefit to them. If they see you as siphoning off any potential revenue for them you are dead in the water. Obviously Facebook is not quite as outwardly belligerent to it's developers, but the same rule applies. App.net addresses this by aligning it's business goals with the apps on its platform making money.

Now obviously App.net doesn't have enough users yet for it to provide the value that developers get out of major social networks. However App.net has a lot more traction—especially with developers—than the majority of attempted stand-alone social networks. What they need are a few wedge apps to create a virtuous cycle that attracts the attention of more and more serious commercially-oriented developers. It's a tough row to hoe to be sure, but they've been putting one foot in front of the other and I don't see them as being anywhere near failure yet.
Cryptography for vote is super easy : each voter submits a secret prime number with the ballot and then the product of all such numbers is published together with the vote. It's as secret as factorization and everybody can check if their vote has been counted.
Sure it does, right up until you also need libraries that Ruby has but Go doesn't. Also you're trading away a few language features to get Go, so between the two you're tossing a lot of programmer time out the door to avoid writing in C. Maybe that's still a worthwhile trade, but it's not really a simple one.
People here need to stuff it and read more before running on about Bitcoin - I've seen more biased, uninformed, telephone-word-of-mouth mutilated information, etc. And ironically, some are even running their mouths while accusing others of doing it. Mt.Gox has been being DDoSd , not just from transaction volume (due to their poor trading engine), transaction spam (a "fun" point of contention among people) and from other SYN/UDP flooding.

Everytime, until two days ago, each DDOS correlated in a massive drop off in price - including the air-releasing drop from 260 to 60 back to 120. Two days ago, the attacker lost money, and today, at least as of now and the price it was last night, the price seems to reflect the truth: sadly, mt.gox is a cornerstone right now (not for long) and mt.gox being DDOSd doesn't mean the immediate impending end of Bitcoin.
I need it to be dead simple for people to join the chat, using existing chat clients. i.e. whatever they have installed, I can't ask them to install something new.

What I mean is this: A lot of people I want to invite into chat, it's an experiment for them and they aren't really committed.

Oh, I have to install IRC software? Sorry, too much work.

Oh, I can't access it from AIM/gchat/etc? Sorry, too much work.

These are the people I want to onboard, so they can see the value in participating in my chat room.

What is the tool that allows me to attract anyone to the chat room, without them installing new software?
This guy. Remember the Monsters of Springfield episode of "The Simpsons"? Where the song was "Just Don't Look, Just Don't Look"? That's how I feel about him. After a decade of rediculous statements and vastly decreasing returns, it's time to stop paying any sort of attention to RMS.
The value proposition is that if you develop an app on App.net and start making money, App.net will not pull the rug out from under you. Furthermore, you don't have to trust their word on this as their business structure is designed to ensure this.
I also solved in python, however, my code to pre-generate all "fair and square" numbers in the range 1->10^100 only took 6s to run. Didn't even need optimization. I simply constructed the numbers outright, ie, there was no iteration in my code and trying to see if something fit. I just figured out a rule that would generate all those palindromes with no checking. I think that was what they were looking for in that submission.

If anyone is curious, the rule is as follows. Any palindrome where the sum of the squares of the digits add up to strictly less than 10(9 or less) will be the square root of a "fair and square number". From there, I constructed them using a recursive method which finds the first half of numbers fitting that description and mirrors them to get the palindrome.

I ended up getting an incorrect solution on C-large-2 but that was because I failed to realize that I would lose precision when finding the square roots of the bounds of the range. While integers in python can grow indefinitely math.sqrt() will give you a 32bit floating point number which will represent square roots of 10^14 numbers accurately but not square roots of 10^100 numbers. The diff which turns my program into one that gives correct answers has literally 3 changes lines(to use decimal.Decimal instead of the math library for doing square roots).
I have tried it and it was both trivial to do and gave large performance gains. The ruby implementation does not add that many levels of indirection.
This article raises several fairly depth-less points, as a frequent user of an anonymous (but tech related) Tumblr blog I feel fairly confident in giving a short analysis of one of the key points it misses:

The first thing I tend to notice is the amount of damaging or "triggering" posts, anything from eating disorders to mental health, depression, sexual fantasies and more. The anonymity of the site allows a lot of people to "come out of their shells" and start to talk about what's on their mind.

Unfortunately, when you take away the shame of public and open speech, you tend to find that the worst parts of humanity start to see through - there are entire blogs devoted to losing weight, anorexia and pictures of women with impossible physiques, creating a circle jerk culture of unhappiness and lustful ideology.

Of course, in regards to user experience, the content is user created, so if the prevalence of these kinds of posts says anything it is that this is what the people who use the site want to see, judging by the tens or hundreds of thousand of re-blogs they tend to receive.

However, if you ignore the seediness of the anonymous world for a moment, you can also see the good in the site, there is a lot of art which would otherwise be hidden from the world, beautiful poetry and pictures and there seems to be an inherent nature in the people to stick with each other, giving one another support and advice whenever they need it.

This can be seen especially in terms of suicide and depression, where there are people posting about their self harm troubles and other people sending them "asks" to support them and tell them it will all be okay, it becomes somewhat of a massive online support group. These people don't feel like they can talk to people in the real world, their counselors and family don't understand so they come online for their fix of advice and help, to actually feel wanted and loved and cared for.

This is something which websites like Facebook and Twitter tend to miss, for better or worse, our profiles there are normally tied to our identities, we can't talk about these private things because then people in our real lives will know our most inner most fears and troubles, the sick people behind our normal exterior, so they use Tumblr to express this part of them.
Well it's just that to support another language they need to make solutions for every problem in that language to test that it's actually possible and they don't want to do that.

and on that page it says:

Each submitted source program must be written in C, C++ or Pascal, it must be smaller than 100 KB, the evaluation server must be able to compile it in less than 10 seconds and at most 256 MB of memory. No other extensions different than the ones listed above will be run.

They put Python and Ruby on the machines so you can write a script to generate testcases, you can't submit programs written in those languages
Really, Mr. Asimov? If our mortality did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it? And is existing throughout time such a grand and limitless condition? Georg Cantor proved that there are always much greater infinities that we could not begin to approach, even if we would never die. So I am not convinced that it's a compelling puzzle to find our own limitations, even if we were unlimited in the dimension of time. That's still only one dimension.

Anyway, the story appears to be reproduced without permission in violation of copyright.
I disagree with the premise in a similarly nonsensical fashion. (I mentioned neither execution performance nor weapons in my reply.)

The ultimate goal in a competition is to solve the problem within a fixed amount of time. This requires you to actually implement the solution to be able to run it. If you are able to do that more easily with a language that is inferior in execution speed, that will probably be the best strategy. At least compared to using a really fast language that you are not as comfortable with.
It fails because it's not actually anonymous; the government knows with cryptographic certainty how you voted.
spend my bitcoins? no.

nevertheless, i'm curious how this would work. a command line utility you connect to your wallet, which looks for addresses in user profile "about" sections?

i'm not sure what "bot" signifies then.
Show HN: A new way of communication with photos about fashion
www.catwall.com
Personal projects are not startups.

According to "The World Defined by Btipling". Most of us haven't read that book and don't care.

Have you talked to investors?

Who cares? Maybe he's self-funding it. Having outside investors isn't an absolute requirement to be a startup.

Have you quit your day job?

Who cares? Maybe he's bootstrapping the startup in his spare time while still working a dayjob. Maybe not. What f%!#ng difference does it make?

Are you seeing startup like weekly growth?

There is no such thing as "startup like weekly growth". Not all startups are going to fit the exact same model in terms of revenue growth, user growth, or whatever other metric you care to pick. And as far as that goes, he may be pre-revenue altogether. But none of that changes whether or not his thing is a "startup".
I've been taking part in GCG since ~2008 now. I have only once encountered a problem where my solution in python was too slow but an equivalent one in C would've been fast enough. Though just barely(my python solution ran in ~10min, the C one I wrote later ran in 5min, the time limit was 8min). In that particular case, there was a more efficient algorithm which we were expected to find to solve the problem(ie, my brute force-ish solution was not anticipated and it would've been "cheating" if it had actually worked) and I didn't find it.

In general, I'd much rather be able to implement my solutions as quickly as possible as the challenge is usually in 1) finding the correct algorithm and 2) implementing it correctly and fast. If you can do that, choice of language usually doesn't matter unless in some of the problems you might get in the finals(I've never gotten that far, I usually rank somewhere in the top 2000). Also, for me, the ease with which I get things like arbitrary-size integers, sets and dictionaries far outweighs any speed gains from something like C++.