skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a comment that often comes up, but rest assured the top competitors really are that fast from scratch. There are some screencasts floating around of Petr competing in Toocoder SRMs, and you can also look at the timings on I site Topcoder and ACM competitions, where there really is no copy and paste. That said, one does end up memorizing some things with practice. For example, after having to code it up a few times it is easy to get a nice short implementation of network flow that you can type in in 2 minutes or so.
The terrifying part of his job is that almost all of the current Bitcoin services now use the same software, so that "any change to the core code has potentially disastrous impact. If everybody rolls out a new version and there's some problem with it, the whole Bitcoin payment network could grind to a halt."

This is the part that has always scared me.
You're right. I was referring to exchange transactions, to simplify. Ie. you need a buyer and a seller (or an investor and an entrepreneur). It's not closed in the strict sense, because there is growth.

Our current situation is similar to your final sentence - that of heavy liquidity preference - there are a lot of sellers and too few buyers, and investors who are mostly storing wealth in cash or liquid assets.
This PDF carries a date of October 2011.
Presumably the people who decide what welfare and taxes should be right now.
Viral loop slideshow presentation
Manage.py, a human friendly CLI builder for python apps
I guess one possible setup would be pdf.js running on server-side and having its output captured. One advantage of this, from what I can see, is that there would probably be fewer external dependencies than this setup.
The ipython interaction trace seems to run counter to the grain of doctest/docstring. I frequently copy and paste standard interactive sessions into a file to act as docstring exemplars or immediate doctest content for cross-platform/cross-version compatibility checking. I couldn't see how to do that with published ipython session output. Is it just a matter of changing the ipython prompt or is it a more fundamental issue?
I've always considered The Mirror Test a deeply flawed experiment because it relies on a number of assumptions that are difficult (in my non-expert opinion at least) to guarantee.

For examples, babies are tested with a sticker, it's assumed that a baby's lack of motivation to remove the aforementioned sticker is proof that they baby is not yet self aware. Yet that's assuming that the child isn't just curious about his or her own appearance (as at that age they might not be familiar with their own image) so that the sticker is inconsequential to them.
Here's what you need to become a leader
Wasted opportunity! Open source it, and send everyone a link. Including the professor.
Everyone I've talked to about it gave up on the iOS Facebook app and just started using the web version.
property tax would be reasonable - income tax would be ludicrous.
Original Ideas
Does anyone has experience with Caspio [1]? This claims to allow making sophisticated web applications nearly entirely with a GUI.

[1] http://www.caspio.com/
So this is from 2011 and this is the thesis paragraph:

"But here is the question: if the pace of technological progress is accelerating faster than ever, as all the evidence indicates it is, why has unemployment remained so stubbornly high—despite the rebound in business profits to record levels? Two-and-a-half years after the Great Recession officially ended, unemployment has remained above 9% in America. That is only one percentage point better than the country's joblessness three years ago at the depths of the recession."

Unemployment has dropped a couple of points since then, but the answer to the question was this, "Is it over or isn't it?" And by "it" we mean the Recession. As far as I can tell the American economy has run in an unsustainable over utilized state for the last few years. People who had jobs so afraid of losing them that they do anything to keep them, employers so burned by the Great Recession they operate understaffed rather than risk putting precious capital at risk. That is an unsustainable point, workers burn out and businesses leave money on the table because they aren't at full production.

What we've seen is that as the job market started opening up there has been a lot of movement, and relaxation on the part of workers such that business is required to hire to keep productivity high. Much more along more 'normal' patterns than we've had over the last 5 years.

The lesson for me was that great spasms in the economy result in a lot of irrational behavior (from a market perspective not an individual perspective) which takes a while to work out. The next interesting lesson will be see what the US government learns from these forced budget cuts. Which, if you recall, had everyone gnashing their teeth about how it was going to put the economy back on the skids.

All in all it points out why economics is a great source of questions and a lousy source of answers :-)
I don't think there is any relationship between the location of a country and corruption.

Japan, Hong Kong and especially Singapore are rated as some of the least corrupt countries on earth[1], ahead of both the US and the UK.

(South) Korea rates roughly the same as most of Europe, while China & Sri Lanka are roughly the same as Italy (hmm).

India & Thailand were rated roughly the same as Greece.

There seems to be a much closer (if still rough) correlation between a combination of GDP/capita and press freedom.

[1] http://www.transparency.org/cpi2012/results
How I Use My Email List
Randomized selection algoritm is actually O(N^2) in the worst case. Median of medians is the O(N) worst case selection algorithm.
Having a hard time phrasing this without being a jerk, but many of these "native is better than web" psuedo-rants contain misinformation or seem to be lacking in an understanding of the current state of web technologies like persistance, app caching, etc, etc.
Show HN: QuickHist - Generate ASCII Histograms from the URL
WSJ is a mediocre paper. WSJ OpEd is editorially a separate paper, and famously insane.
But that wasn't necessary for deterring invasion.
The great thing is that most are not forced to use Debian with its "outdated packages". Freedom of choice.
The reverse is also often true.
I think learning to focus and tune certain things out is a skill like any other, that anyone can learn to a degree. Admittedly I haven't made much progress here either, but I think that with practice it becomes easier.

That said, I wholeheartedly agree with your idea about changing your environment. This is the single easiest thing I've found that helps me focus. Of course, there's always still the rest of the Internet...
This already happened in he 0.8 fork
No. Such things were unheard of. As a professor I tried to institute them, but two things worked hard against it. (1) It was a commuter school, so getting people together outside of class was very difficult, as they didn't reside there and they had other places to be. (2) The concept of what to do in a study group was completely foreign. The social pressure to 'behave,' that is, be a good group member, do your share, and so on, wasn't particularly strong. In effect, like a lot of things, it benefited those who least needed the benefit. It also hurt them (they were often the same people who had important other stuff to attend to). Once it went from mandatory to optional, it died.
> It's insane that any business should spend so many cycles on managing this. I would have thought Republicans (pro business) might be more open to a state role in healthcare precisely so business's don't have to manage this burden.

Two things to keep in mind, with this and a lot of other issues:
- The cycles spent handling it aren't a big deal to large corporations.
- The idea that small-business interests and large corporate business interests are one and the same is one of the Big Lies of the Republican party.
A Porsche is not what I'd call a practical car. It's not especially comfortable if you're tall, the visibility is poor, it doesn't hold a family or have much storage space at all, it's not efficient to operate or maintain, and it's not cheap to produce.

So what's the real lesson here?

Maybe it's something about aesthetics, but then the part about designing for expert drivers versus "average" drivers doesn't make sense.
New Design Theory: Smartphones should look like tubes.
Stealing is wealth transfer, not wealth destruction.

And it wouldn't be anonymous, so it could be investigated and relatiated.

The same argument applies to bank robberies.
It's not a charity though. It's about providing a minimum service for people. Even with "free" health care in the UK, it's not free (it's paid for via National Insurance taxes and many facets still have additional costs (prescriptions, regular dressings, dentistry, etc) albeit often highly subsidised.

Surely it's better to have a subsidised minimum service than to rely on charities?

And more over, if your objection is purely because you don't want to be told that you should look after your fellow Americans, then that's either a really sad representation of how little respect Americans have for their kin, or the facet of a childish mentality where kids deliberately disobey their parents because they like to test their boundaries. Either way, it's just a terrible attitude to have.
Every single objection you have to this article has nothing to do with either its content or form.

Help me to understand why you would post a comment like this:

>Color me critical, but it seems like, basically, the point of this article was to show off exactly how informed in her 'hard-nosed' critiques, and how that is proffered as justification for the obvious bias present in the article.

I'm not sure how to translate this other than "He thinks she's so smart, so he's asserting that he has an opinion worth listening to."

>I also find it interesting that despite the apparent mountains of reading, the author cannot determine any good reason why one might oppose ${THING_THAT_AUTHOR_SUPPORTS}, which tells me that either her bias refused to allow her to accept posed oppositions as valid, or that she simply doesn't care that other people do object.

Translation: "He has an opinion, and he thinks that there are no reasonable arguments against that opinion, so his opinion must be worthless." Remind me never to tell you what I think 3 times 5 equals, because my opinion will not pass this criterion.

>I think there are plenty of valid reasons for opposing it, just as there are plenty of reasons to support it, and frankly, I think all of major justifications on either side of the argument fall into the category of fairly obvious.

Now we know what you think - but you're not considering telling us why because it's "fairly obvious?" The author told us why he thought what he thought, and you attacked him for not telling us why everybody else thought what they thought, too.

>That said, kudos on ${ACTION_OF_AUTHOR_SUPPORTING_THING}. It is a tough decision, and it will ${COST_OF_SUPPORTING_THING}, but despite that, if you're ${WHAT_AUTHOR_IS} who ${HAS_AUTHORS_OPINION}, it is the obviously correct choice.

Do you think the author is searching for your vague tautological approval?

Comments like this trouble me. I don't understand why people take the time to make them. Color me honestly troubled.
There is a problem, but I'd think twice before calling it collusion or cheating. Here in India the social norms are a little different - when you talk about classmates, groups of friends, teams and gangs, the failures and successes of one are the failures and successes of all.

Some examples:

* I had two friends back in college, making us a gang of three. If two of us did well on a particular subject and the third didn't, we'd get called over to his place by his mum, where she'd beg us to teach him and help him out. Home cooked food was a very common and effective bribe.

* At our first job interview on campus, we told the interviewer that we were all three joining the company, or none of us would. All three of us got in.

* One of us having a girlfriend when the other two didn't meant he was an asshole. Two of us being hitched meant we were obligated to move heaven and earth to help out the third guy.

* Each of us would do one third of the coursework, and we'd coach the others on it and learn the rest. This also applied to individual work - we'd just split it in three parts and share all of it.

* At the final year project / thesis, we did collude. I was freelancing at the time, and I managed to land an interesting project building a case handling / lifecycle system for a client. I put that design forward as my final year project, and listed the other two as my "team members". We all got top marks.

Do I regret this? No, not really. These guys were my friends. People called us the Three Musketeers,
and I sure as hell wasn't going to leave either of them behind. And they would have (and did) the same for me. Would we still do it if it was illegal? I don't know. Maybe.

Now, ten years down the line, we've all gone our separate ways. There is still pressure, though. Two of us are married, and if and when we meet the third's parents, we will hang our heads in shame. We didn't help find him a wife.

Odd, but true.
What enterprise apps are delightful?
I don't follow the argumentation that the Luddite Fallacy was wrong and is becoming true - I would say it was always true but the effect was just overcompensated by other effects now declining in importance.

Further I think the negative tone is not justified; I think a world without labor is a desirable world. That's also why I think all statements along the line »we have to create more jobs (in the sense of more work)« are ridiculous - why on earth would we desire to have more work to do?

The final state - a world without labor where everything is produced by machines - poses no direct problems; all goods are free and everybody is free to do what ever he desires. (There will probably be some indirect problems when billions of people are on holiday everyday, resource constraints, one must probably ensure that no one starts to hoard all kinds of goods reducing the supply for others and surly a thousand things I don't think about but this is probably all manageable.)

The real challenge is the change from status quo. The first jobs ceasing to exist or beginning to be unprofitable are naturally the ones comprising of mostly unskilled work and than expanding towards higher and higher required skills. This in turn split the society in two groups - one group still working and one group no longer working or doing unprofitable work. This on its own is not a problem but it is a major problem in connection with the way our society currently works.

The economy does not only produce goods to satisfy the demand of the population but although permits laborers to consume these goods by paying them. Consequently we have to either find a way to detangle these both responsibilities of the economy or ensure that all people are able to do a fair share of the remaining work (this is more jobs in the sense of splitting work fairly). The later option is probably the one that is harder to implement because the remaining work will require higher and higher skills and therefore more and more people will not able to do any of this work successfully.
Water Planets in the Habitable Zone
I know, but it's not going to be as easy to fix if it happens on a massive scale, i.e. when everyone's using it.
If you're looking for some rapid development with Erlang, you've got a few options at your disposal:

Nitrogen Web Framework (http://nitrogenproject.com): Event-driven development. You can do almost complete development in Erlang and writing very minimal javascript or HTML (it's generated by the framework). Nitrogen doesn't provide a database abstraction layer, but Erlang does have database integration which works just fine. You could also use BossDB (below).

ChicagoBoss (http://chicagoboss.org): Rails inspired MVC for Erlang. Has a lot of stuff baked in: BossDB (ORM for a handful of different database servers), mail server, Django templates.

Zotonic (http://zotonic.com): The Erlang CMS. Lot and lots of stuff.

One of the most comprehensive resources for this is the Framework comparison put out by Evan Miller (the maker or ChicagoBoss): https://github.com/evanmiller/ChicagoBoss/wiki/Comparison-of...
Any time I've seen someone large or mainstream try to sell Linux PCs, their marketing and sometimes their choice of distribution has been bizarre.

At the low-end, they've usually used some no-name distribution with nonstandard components and a skin that looks just like Windows at first glance. I think making it look like Windows is probably the worst thing they could do for user comfort; regardless of looks, they'll eventually run in to something that doesn't work like Windows. The experience is less jarring if it looks different from the start. Getting help from technical friends and relatives is definitely easier if it looks, feels and works like a popular distribution.

The low-end Linux machines usually aren't cheaper than Windows, and little explanation of the advantages that might matter to that market segment can be found in the marketing materials for such machines. The advantages as I see them are easy access to a large amount of free, safe software through the distribution's repository, and reduced maintenance relative to Windows; it doesn't become slow, get malware, etc... if you just use it without messing with anything.

There have been some really puzzling decisions at the high-end too. Dell's Ubuntu developer machine having the lowest available screen resolution comes to mind. Usually, when large computer manufacturers offer professional machines with Linux, it's hard to find them. There's usually a "customize this model" page that offers a choice of OS - any of several versions of Windows. The Linux versions are treated as separate products and not listed where the standard models are. People only find them if they're actively looking.

It almost seems like these ventures were set up to fail so PC manufacturers and/or Microsoft could say "Look. We keep trying and nobody buys these things.".
I oppose it because I think it will make the situation much worse. I prefer working in the direction of freeing healthcare not regulating it further.
Hi there, haha I was literally pouring my heart out whilst writing, I'm going to go over it now and correct those errors, thanks for pointing out!
This is a great point, but also orthogonal to the tech/platform choice. One can still develop a front-end using web tech which connects to a localhost server (see for example Google Refine -- which runs a localhost web server). It may make packaging and distribution it tad more annoying, but there are tools that can do this, and then you get the benefit of cross-platform adoption -- as well as the option to make it a hosted service, if desired.
I believe this will change once you get out of non-intro CS. My friends and I work for the CS department and we see people whom are not interested in CS or are required to take just the intro course cheat often.
That's a nice idea!
I'm very much in the camp of not wanting my data in the cloud. I don't autoupload photos, for example, because I want control over them.

What I would like is a home cloud server which would handle all the services I could get from the cloud with explicit sharing with chosen people (e.g. my family).
This was a hardware project (IC design) I did back in 1998. Open source hardware was uncommon then, and most of the professors were not even online. Further, open-sourcing this would have meant more students in the upcoming semesters copying the work and submitting it as their own, something which I did not want.
Has anyone checked the state of the labor market in chemistry recently? Almost no one does benchwork any longer, this tends to be contracted out to China, and increasingly the big players are opening up R&D centers overseas, too. What is left stateside is sales, management that oversees the contractors, and regulatory affairs.

Why should IT be immune?
FWIW, I did not downvote you.

That said, if there are things in the article you disagree with, why not spell them out and offer your alternative take, instead of just saying "it's offensive for one person to ..."

Disagreeing with an article and having a well reasoned position on why you disagree should be fine. But generic negative comments without much "meat" to them don't seem as valuable.
Atmel MCU to power world's first wireless mesh propeller beanie network
what makes this characteristically german?
Random is incorrect.
Scary exceptions do make for scary generalizations...
I end up adding known distractions that I can (mostly) do without to my system hosts list and then if I need to use them, I have them on a phone/tablet I will find more annoying to use for a longer time period, thus limiting my time and desire to use them. There's browser extensions that accomplish the same thing of course, but the hosts list takes a few more steps to circumvent.
English and Dravidian: Unlikely parallels
I didn't see any mention of tables in the doc. Does this means it's outside of the "good enough" range? Table extraction would be a great feature.
Warning, rant:

Web does not mean ubiquitous network availability. It's a turn of phrase that only seems to originate from Silicon Valley and Redmond. When I get on the London Underground my network is gone. When I drive from Cape Town to Hout Bay my network disappears. When I go into my favourite coffee shop in Berlin my network disappears.

If an app (Evernote, for example) relies on a non- store-and-forward network connection to hook me up with my data it gets uninstalled. I can't use Trello for the same reason. When I need my data I need my data.
Steam's actually in experimental these days, just apt-get install steam/experimental and be on your way :)
Ah, I didn't think about that. I suppose all these little charges add up to more costs to the customers in the end. This saves you money, customers aren't too inconvenienced and existing familiarity is a plus.
The lack of consistency is what gets me.

- You have the RIGHT to education in the United States.

- You do NOT have the RIGHT to be alive to be educated.

* Additionally, you MUST treat someone in the ER if they are dying, but if they will be dying a week from now, send them on their way.

That is one thing I give to hardcore libertarians, they seem monstrous at times (no public schools, let sick people without insurance die, can't afford food then starve, etc) --- but at least they are consistent and honest. Also, they will claim that private companies / charities will stop this horrible stuff from happening.
Here in the UK there are football players who make £200,000 a week kicking a ball around a piece of grass.

There is more to life than money (as long as you have enough money), I'd be happy with the equivalent to £25K a year and a job I love for the rest of my life.

I started my own business not because I wanted to get rich (I doubt that will ever happen in the sense of making millions) but because I wanted to build good B2B software in a niche where none currenty exists and because I felt unchallenged/overworked in my previous jobs.
It was a good read typo's included :).

My father taught me a lot about life as well, whenever I get stuck I think "what would my dad have done?" and then I do the exact opposite, he was a superb example.
This is essentially Zab with a different leader election protocol, combined with the Migration trick from SMART.

Zab: http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs347/reading/zab.pdf

SMART: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/howell/papers/...