skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the 23rd root problem is just unfathomable: straight up channeling the over mind.

What is that number, I mean really what on earth is that string of digits called, in human terms?
There's always Rubinius but it seems that the path to alternative implementations of the Ruby language is paved with hoards of hurdles so yeah, it'll take time.
I'm still on Go 1.0.2. However, I strongly doubt that having 1.1 yields the correct result in the amount of time that the article boasts; I rewrote the program in C (direct translation), and with both clang and gcc, I get timings of around 2m05s. It's hard to believe that for a CPU-bound task, a Go program would be 200x faster than a C program.
In both cases it sounds like the designer/developers were not qualified to make the decisions they did about their systems. Not to sound like a snob or anything, but using Rails plugins? Really? That just sounds sloppy.
Anonymous: CISPA Internet Blackout April 22nd - MauriHackers
Taking pictures of my 18 month old son is miserably with a phone (iPhone 4S and Nexus 4). The kid just moves too much. A DSLR, even in Auto mode, makes it far easier to capture what he is doing.
More on the future of books: Neil Gaiman at the London Book Fair
As soon as you use something you did not make yourself, your project could theoretically be compromised. This ranges from drivers, compilers, OSs, hardware, to the text editor you wrote anything and everything with.
In the real world, we can protect things with a reasonable expectation of security. We can't exactly have a CCTV camera watch an incredibly small count of bits tamper with every other one in countless server closets and data centers, but we can have CCTV cameras watch an unscrupulous public servant write some extra ballots and put them in a box to be sent to DC (or wherever else).
You are right that it is not about the software. I think you are wrong thinking that it is about the protocol.

It probably should be about the data. The data should be openly available to everyone.

But there are some requirements to the data that make this tricky (understatement).

With the data in your hand it should be possible to independently verify the results. It should be possible to individually verify that your vote is somehow in there. But it should NOT be possible to link votes to individuals, it should be completely anonymous.

This is not a problem that is likely to be solved by software engineers. If there is a solution, it is in crypto and math more than software.

I do think this is an important problem to solve. It would enable the ultimate democratization. Instead of voting for representatives it would become feasible to directly vote on issues by referendum. If tech is about anything, it's about democratization and cutting out the middle man.
Transactions only cause lag on their trading engine. They are not the reason their whole website and online presence disappear!

When MtGox denies service, like today, this is because of a DDoS. They have said multiple times that they see 10+ Gbps (SYN flood and UDP packets) hitting their servers on a weekly basis!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=166578.msg1737375#ms...
Mercedes-Benz Austria Website Defaced By Member of TurkishAjan Hacking Group
Some videos of a meteorite, this morning in Argentina: http://www.nuevodiarioweb.com.ar/notas/2013/4/21/videos-mete...
MacHeist just added Bitcoin for payments… with a twist
jsLinux is not FOSS.
I would take the approach of broadcasting the vote to several monitors. When you place a vote you get a confirmation number. That vote is then uploaded to N third parties that later verify that they all got the same votes. Then the voter could go online, type in this special ID and verification code and see that indeed his vote was counted as voted.

This doesn't mean that you couldn't or shouldn't have a paper trail as well. As long as you have a single end-point, then yes, the issues you brought up are valid.
Seconded.

I recently wrote a image searching program (find a set of images as sub-images in another set of images) and I wrote most of it in Racket (Scheme dialect). I wrote the inner loop to calculate the correlation matrix in C and made an FFI call.

I'm not familiar with Ruby's FFI, but I found making FFI calls dead simple in Racket.
I suppose I should have clarified that the specs are bizarre for a developer's laptop. The cost associated with the upgrades are relatively minor, considering the life of the machine, and devs are typically customers that know how to spec out machines.
I saw it mentioned in some very old literature when studying for my pilot's license. (Sometimes as "mental load") so I'd say its been kicked around in aviation since at least the mid 60's.
Keep in mind that some figures only will update once per day. It could be much more by the time tomorrow hits.
And please offer multiple payment methods. App.net is credit card only. :-(
Why does America lose its head over 'terror' but ignore its daily gun deaths?
pdf.js uses background workers for parsing/processing pdf pages. really any other native format which could potentially js-processed for display in a browser directly
Personally I found using $http less restrictive - there seem to be some edge cases where $resource behaves oddly. Ideally what you should be doing with REST calls is pushing them out to Angular Services (http://docs.angularjs.org/guide/dev_guide.services.creating_...) rather than making them directly in your controller.

Here's a simple example:

appServices.factory('Thing', function($http) {

var Thing = function(data) {
angular.extend(this, data);
}

Thing.all = function() {
return $http.get('/things).then(function(response) {
return new Thing(response.data);
});
}

Thing.get = function(id) {
return $http.get('/things/' + id).then(function(response) {
return new Thing(response.data);
});
}

Thing.delete = function(id) {
return $http.delete('/things/' + id).then(function(response) {
return new Thing(response.data);
});
}

Thing.create = function(data) {
return $http.post('/things', data).then(function(response) {
return new Thing(response.data);
});
}

Thing.update = function(data, id) {
return $http.put('/things/' + id, data).then(function(response) {
return new Thing(response.data);
});
}

return Thing;
});

In your controller, inject the service:

function thingCtrl($scope, Thing) {
Thing.all().then(function(data) {
$scope.things = data;
});
}
thingCtrl.$inject = ['$scope', 'Thing'];
I'd agree it's dubious, but I was mostly commenting on the "correctness" of the code. It'd work on Go 1.1, so it's technically "correct". Sometimes. :)
PERT [1] is a good technique, especially for parallel tasks, depending somewhat on how complex (how many) tasks need to be done. It is like a Gantt chart but IMHO better displays the data and dependencies and allows for additional information or referencing within the items. One of its downfalls can be when things change on the fly, but it should be possible for a software implementation to fix that.

I'm not aware of any software implementations, but I'd be surprised if there aren't any. Many applications need multiple tasks completed in convoluted series/ parallel. The automation industry does a lot of this kind of stuff for one, I am sure there are others. If not, it should be reasonably easy to make such a thing..

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_Evaluation_and_Review_T...
You can get the speed of e-voting with paper ballots if you tally up the totals twice: once with a scanner when the ballot is put in the box (appropriate design of ballot and box required ofcourse), so you get immediate digital results, and once with manual counting to give the vote legal standing. The fact that only a manually counted result would have legal standing ensures nobody will see the point in tampering with the digital counter.

I would agree that there's no reason to have e-voting instead of paper ballots. The only possible excuse I might imagine for e-voting is that it lets people vote from home which enfranchises more voters, but that would just lead to a wave of vote selling so...
They have put a lot of effort in to their documentation, which personally is more important to me than the aesthetic of their website.
If you compiled data about every image on the site in one file, and then loaded that file with every request, you could just use regular CSS and media queries.
I participated in this contest, and solved this problem. The problem with the post is that it's basically saying "This correct ruby program is way slower than this incorrect go program, therefore ruby is bad for programming competitions". Obviously not a valid argument.
As noted this article is from 2004. Unfortunately such errors are still around, as noted by Neil Saunders in a recent blog post[1].

1. http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/gene-name-errors-a...
I'm not quite sure what the resource here is? Lecture notes and syllabus overview? No lecture videos? so how is this useful for the rest of us who are not in Princeton. what am i missing here.
As netnichols stated above, "I had to wait about 15 minutes for 'the agent' to show up that would conduct the pat-down." I'm guessing that this is the reason.

I've successfully opted out once. In that instance, an agent performed a pat-down with no wait. I tried again more recently and, after fruitlessly waiting 5-10 minutes for the special pat-down agent to arrive, gave up and reluctantly went through the backscatter.
IIRC it may involve using some parts from Win 3.11 running on MS-DOS 7.0 and other windows 95 parts.
What is Project Mantzaris?
A two year study can hardly be considered to be definitive.
I wonder what the results would be for a 20 year study?

Also, my state is one of those which spends the least on education, so my views are probably skewed as a result.
I know it's shallow, but I've been doing the same thing.
Games are more interesting than businesses or open source. Have you never encountered someone with a different opinion?
Nothing newer on the topic? Given that 64-core nodes have become standard in high performance computing, and there are talks about 100s of cores on a single chip, the research may benefit from revision.
> In the second, the raster images are background image. Only the required image is downloaded.

The author neglects to point out that every image will waste a http request downloading the svg file so this is going to give poorer performance than having the logic in your css (perhaps he considered it too obvious).
I don't see the point with eval. Every lisp has a eval, and most AOT Lisps are faster than ruby.

Not including eval seems to be a "discipline and bondage" fetish of language designers.

Yes, you can write pretty awful code with eval. But it allows metaprogramming aswell. I'd like to judge if something is awful or awesome.
TL;DR: he compares a computer without an SSD to a computer with an SSD, the computer without an SSD is slower.

Why do stories like this get upvotes?
This seems like such a vague, insubstantial piece of advice. I've seen it before, but never in a more concrete form. I don't see any "magic" in Ruby. How do I determine if a language is magic? Usually, the best I can figure is that they're either confusing syntax with semantics or they're actually thinking of some library like ActiveRecord rather than Ruby.

Really, for pretty much anything I could conceivably think of to call "magic" in Ruby (e.g. method_missing), there's equivalent "magic" in Python (e.g. __get_attr__). And yet PyPy is pretty darned fast.
I like Fredric Brown's Answer which is a more cynical take on the Question theme...
http://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html
"It should be more profitable to sell the miners out than to hoard them because if they're distributed the cryptographic safety of Bitcoin is greater"

Can you explain this in more detail? I don't understand what decentralization has to do with miners' profit.
Very Short Reply Expected
Ask HN: Algorithms/Problem Solving
I'd like to hear some stories of people that have been intimated by algorithms. With either in interviews or programming competitions it seems like there are a great deal of us who brush off a lot of it as just not being wired the right way to ever be great at these.

Is it something that with practice you can handle any of these problems people throw at you?
Geometry Daily - A new minimal geometric composition each day
> What's the use of medical advancement that can't help more than 10% of humanity?

A drug under patent might be accessible to 10% of the population now, but considering the number of people who will be able to access it in the future the total percentage looks very different. 50 years from now, long after the drug has gone generic, what percentage of the population who lived over that time would have had access? It would be far more than 50%.
Aspirin (and ibuprofen) is counter-indicated for people with stomach problems like GERD. That's not fear mongering.
> it is very reasonable to code that part in some fast language while delegating the bigger (and often more complex) part in a higher level language such as Ruby.

Agreed. Contrary to what lbrandy said, I've tried it, and it works very well. Writing Ruby extensions in C, or wrapping C libraries for Ruby, is really easy. Wrapping a PNG library for Ruby allowed us to draw about a trillion pixels' worth of images based on the human genome across a modest cluster of ~100 cores in a few days [1,2,3]. For reference, a terapixel image is about ~4TB of uncompressed data and ~800GB compressed, with Microsoft putting up comparable numbers for a project they ran on a fancier HPC cluster in 2010 [4]. We were heavily compressing it into PNG tiles on the fly so ours came down to ~60GB.

Regarding pointers to pointers to ints--if you keep all the data within the heap of the Ruby extension, as we did with the wrapped PNG library, then it can be stored in whatever simple data structure you want.

[1] http://chromozoom.org/?db=hg19

[2] https://github.com/rothlab/chromozoom

[3] http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/29/3/384.fu...

[4] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/terapixel/
Isn't this more selling the pre-used shovels and pick-axes after you've already been at the mine for months using the investors' equipment?
There is a free tier which I have to assume will only grow over time as the business scales.

http://blog.app.net/2013/02/25/introducing-a-free-tier/
Airline pilot here, not the same of course, but I am used to sensible procedures that must be done on time, also I am aware of the importance of fast feedback and continuous evolution of procedures. Just some questions:

- How astronauts and mission control receive this procedures, written, computer, ipad, are google glass(or a similar HUD) a possibility to show the procedures live while working?

- Is it possible for them to make annotations, questions, have feedback on real time, or while preparing the mission? Could this be a desirable feature?

I don't really know of any tool that may be useful, I don't think that Microsoft project could really fit, it is too complicated for the task IMHO. I it should be something with this features (maybe not, Just guessing!):

- A version control like git that allows to save procedures, sub procedures, edits, comments, explanations or technical discussions that are not included in the "printed" version, informs and a tool to navigate all of them visually.

-User management: be able to have your own user, so as to have your edits in your account. Be able to follow another user or group of users.

- Word editor template a la google docs, that allows to see both EVA procedures, but with some excel like capabilities, like creating a time line(rows). Steps (cells) that can have a relationship with other cells from the same EVA(column), with the other EVA, with mission control and/or self properties (like tool to be used, comments, reports, etc..)

-Possibility to save sub-procedures to be used again, insert them in a different mission, also must have the possibility to be branched in a new mission to modify them. Also be reported, comment/discussion timeline, etc...

- Be multi-platform: laptop/PC/mac/linux, tablet, print format, and also HUD appliances(google glasses), (so the astronaut is able to scroll and read while on the vest).

-Also I suppose that multiple views of the same procedure must be possible, like simple, expanded, annotations, reports, versions, missions, incidents, warnings...

I don't know if a software of this kind could be created from parts of open source programs like open-office, git, etc.. or it must be created from cero.

Edit: typos.
Star Wars Episode IV retold in 1 minute animated speed run
Indeed. And there is more than one way to do it. The most obvious thing is to write a Ruby C extension. But you could also write a totally separate worker process in the language of your choice and glue it to your main Ruby app with a message queue. In most real-world cases, either solution will get you the performance you need to avoid 10xing your servers.
What's the use of medical advancement that can't help more than 10% of humanity?

When the patent expires everybody benefits. Until then, it's available to everyone, but they must help pay for the drugs development. If nobody pays, the drug isn't developed, and nobody gets any benefit.

It's far more important that we move to a world in which all human beings have access to basic sanitation and healthcare than it is to spend billions of dollars attacking statistically rare diseases producing medicines that will help only a few rich people.

Would you die for that? You expect others to, no? That's kind of totalitarian. At the same time, this argument is fallacious in the sense that it assumes we should address no problem until the lowest level problem is solved for everyone. That's undesirable for a large number of obvious reasons I will not bother enumerating.

Do the "few rich people" that are helped not end up paying for the R&D of the treatment for everyone else in perpetuity?

In fact, I'd go one step further and argue that your statement is actually false in the long term. A world where all humans have access to good healthcare and education would actually be a world in which more people contribute to research and development of new drugs and one in which knowledge would advance faster.

That's a nice thought. Unfortunately, there is a huge advantage to not paying development costs, in that you can externalize them to others and reap the benefits, which is what many countries, including India and the UK, have chosen to do. In India it's ignoring the patent, in the UK it's setting a price ceiling, which effectively shifts the burden to the US since the profit maximizing strategy is still to sell the drug in the UK because marginal revenue exceeds marginal cost. If the US stops paying, the drug never gets produced, or gets produced much later because there is no private incentive to produce.
While the limit is indeed bizarrely chosen, I think that one falls into the fairly common case of the FDA setting a per-pill maximum, not a limit on overall quantities. There's a limit of 100mg potassium per pill, but afaict there aren't any controls on buying the supplements in bulk, so you could order thousands of the pills if you wanted. The total-quantity limits seem to only be on things where the DEA has gained some authority over the substance.
ابراج اليوم - ابراج يوم الاثنين 2013/4/22 حظك ليوم الاثنين 2013/4/22
Are you using Entangled? I've looked at doing the same thing, also using colored coins. But it's going to take a lot of work + luck to go up against someone as well-monetized as Ripple.

Plus, the technical issues are not even the biggest challenge, it's forming and managing a clearing house in a decentralized manner. I'm not sure it's possible. But someone has to physically conduct the exchange of dollars, euros, or bananas. Otherwise, you've just developed a p2p version of localcoins.
I actually consider pointing out the scientific elements of a SF piece is the best kind of compliment.
dreen quoted Asimov upthread, on why he considers it his favourite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5585271
Facial Recognition Software Failed to Find the Boston Marathon Bombers
And the contracts for these machines are what, cheap? I've be interested to see a source for the contention that paper's actually more expensive -- not saying you're wrong, but I'd have guessed paper is cheaper with all of the volunteer labor involved.
best response to a lay-off that I have ever seen
Just looked that up. It's Windows-only and I use a Mac.

Regardless, I'm using the old, pre-Synapse drivers and they work ok.
The great thing about this comment is our security measures stop like 2 or 3 levels before even reaching the point you're describing as insecure. Like the people involved even know what an MD5 is?
Fathers Recognize Their Babies’ Cries Just as Well as Mothers
It is clear you are following the situation as closely as those "ignorant members of the bitcoin community"; as MtGox themselves are calling these DDoS attacks and have reasonable proof of such.

It is also true that Gox's matching engine is .. uhh.. not upto snuff, but your accusation that 'ignorant members of the bitcoin community' are just calling everything a DDoS is in itself, quite ignorant.
Curious, would you call University education dicking around as well?

Seems to me challenging the brain is never a waste of time. We would not have some of the medical technologies we have today if it were not for massively parallel GPUs, which of course were developed for the sole purpose of playing games.
> bring a knife to a gun fight

> If the goal of the competition is to slice apples

What?
Just for another data point, I think it's totally fine.
This kind of SVG image isn't really an atlas in any form. The images don't share any sort of coordinate space or even coexist in the same file. It's more like a URL lookup table that happens to point to images and be keyed by the size of the viewport.
Quoting the mtgox homepage which in turn claims to be quoting wikipedia: "As of July 2011, Mt. Gox handles over 80% of all Bitcoin trade".

MTGOX is more than just a USD to bitcoin exchange.
Everyone always agrees with this and, in my experience, has never really tried it. It works better in theory than in practice (or, at a minimum, it works only on a small subset of the types of problems that a naive view might otherwise lead you to believe). The problem is the data isn't organized in a way to be computation efficient, and all the C code in the world isn't going to make chasing pointers to pointers to pointers to ints fast.

A ton of work has to go into computation-friendly data organization (see all of numpy, scipy, etc) before you can ever actually optimize effectively.

EDIT: since all of my responses are of the form: "oh no I did it once with great results", I'll retract the part where I said "have never really tried it". I'm not arguing it's never worked. I'm arguing that the set of likely performance problems and the set of easy-to-optimize-with-C problems don't overlap as much as people would like to believe.
I wish they would work more on ember-data and documentation.

I genuinely spent my weekend figuring out how features work trough trial and error.
Option A:

-Write your application in Go

Option B:

-Write application in Ruby
-Profile Ruby application to identify code to be rewritten in C
-Learn C if you don't already know it
-Rewrite various parts of your application in C
-Run Valgrind to search for memleaks
-Ensure that your target systems all have required libs installed

Option A seems much simpler...
Surely this can be solved by embedding the SVG in a data: URI?
FFI is also dead simple in Ruby.

https://github.com/ffi/ffi

It's pretty much `gem install ffi` and off you go. I've used a Ruby gem [1] that talks to a hashtable storage library via FFI and found it perfectly stable.

[1] https://github.com/jmettraux/rufus-tokyo