skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For word sized integers, k=O(1) so radix sort is O(n) and quicksort is O(n log n). If you have a comparison function that takes O(k^3) then you most likely can't even implement a radix sort for it, so the comparison can't be made.

So the fact is that quicksort is a factor O(log n) slower than radix sort. The flip side is that quicksort is more generally applicable to any comparison function whereas radix sort only works for lexicographic sorts. In almost all cases that is exactly what you want, but for example I'm not aware of any way to efficiently sort rational numbers with radix sort.
Is it just me, or does that robot in the graphic look very similar to the ones in the Björk video "All is Full of Love"?
Evan.. nice to see you on the top slot on HN!

Thoughtful blog post as usual.
I imagine few maintainers to maintain 20 different packages, and if they do, they are likely related in some way – and then I trust a Debian maintainer more to gauge the impact of a new version on the system than some upstream maintainer, who likely even uses some other distribution.

But if that works for you, then great :-)
This should be fixed in the latest iPython versions. iPython is now virtualenv-aware -- it'll add your venv path at startup even if iPython is installed in global site-packages.
Thank you virtualmic, yes karma is what I figured our country is poor at. We have an extremely poor karma. To put it simply, most of us are running after marks and grade points during our school age, and easy money and promotions and boot-licking after that.

There are only few who ever thought of doing it the right way, working hard or even voting the right people to power. Everyone else only expects things to work, and yet does it the jugaad way cursing everyone else on the way.

I'd say the collective karma of our nation is broken; and where ever it has, things have imploded or gone for worse as we can already witness. Look at any community or country out there, it's always the fundamentals that make or break its destiny.
We've moved from the old world of the LAMP stack to one of many different solutions optimized at solving different problems. It is more about the problem, your style and your teams programming background.

As a long time Ruby developer who's always in search of faster, better, cheaper I've found the following:

- Rails is still the safe, moderately fast to develop in do-anything framework. It excels at CRUD and will have a maintained library available for pretty much anything you need to do. It however is relatively slow and Ruby comparatively sucks at anything async.

- Node and its supporting frameworks are fantastic at async and smaller single page type web apps. But it's a bit trickier than Rails or similar to structure and manage larger code bases. NPM is awesome for web development, better than Gems. Packages in general are not as mature as Ruby Gems and will be some time until they are. ORMs are quite weak compared to what you have in Rails (see Mongoose vs Mongoid).

My current stack of choice is Rails+Bootstrap for CRUD, Node+Restify for APIs (or Express if you need to throw in a little HTML as well), MongoDB for the DB, Redis for caching/pubsub/jobs. I'd use Postgres instead of MongoDB if I had an application where data integrity is paramount above all. All the supporting processes like job workers I write in Ruby (Sidekiq is great).

I'd like to use Go and I'm keeping an eye out for an application for it -- something that needs really high performance.
excellent post. sounds like the story of "Ekalavya" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekalavya
Some would say "left-wing" is actually a euphemism for evil. What you read into "*-wing" is in the eye of the beholder.

All I said was these views were non-mainstream, though there are interst groups working to change that such as the WSJ and certain entrepreneurs or business leaders and think tanks. Not that the views are evil.

Please point me to some left wing Austrian-school economists to refute the association.
This is very inspiring... up to the point when you meet someone who works in finance who makes twice as much working half the hours. :(

(Disclaimer: I have a similar job although I am not nearly as good at it as your dad)
In their defense they probably thought that it would get them better wives.heh.
I think there needs to be a distinction between collaborating to understand something as a group and directly copying answers verbatim from others.

I felt like GuiA was describing the latter and while you are describing the former.
> Don't get me started on Nautilus. You're using Gnome? Try uninstalling nautilus and using Nemo. It's a fork of the old Nautilus by the guys at Linux Mint.

I have Nautilus 2.32 pinned over here with an otherwise Xfce-y DE. The latter still doesn’t seem to have figured out how to deal with icons on the desktop in a decent way.
I've been a TA for Matlab course in my university for three semesters and there are a lot of students cheating in assignments. I thought it would be interesting to see how different submissions are grouped into clustered so I made a visualization page (and a bunch of scripts). Turns out that there are quite a few clusters even the similarity threshold is set to be 90%.

https://github.com/songgao/AlikeSubmissions

I wonder what it's gonna be like in Google Code Jam submissions. Although alike submissions don't necessarily imply cheating.
Haven't seen this mentioned here yet, but Laravel is a great option if you are considering PHP. Laravel 3 is very mature while 4 is just around the corner. It comes with a nice CLI for scaffolding and is very well documented. It also has a nice speed advantage over frameworks like Cake. Laravel + AngularJS makes for really fast development times while creating low maintenance applications.
I can absolutely accept that distinction. Do you think "American coders" would have been the title if that were the case?
I would love to make Mac applications but the prospect of having such a small potential userbase makes it a non-option for me.

Imagine, 10% of desktops have Mac OS, of that only 20% will buy my application; that's a very small user base.
More accurately: Why I develop this specific class of applications for the desktop rather than the web. This is basically what the author is talking about despite the generalization regarding desktop apps; if he's going to stick with that he should have gone with "desktop" instead of "mac."
>Maybe, I need to learn to tune everything else out and focus more.

I spend every day practicing, and completely failing at this art. I've come to accept that I cannot ignore things that are going on around me. I cannot choose to focus on something.

I've only being on this planet 25 years, that's not a hell of allot of time, but in this area I can say I have experience. If you want to focus, change your environment. You cannot learn to tune something out. At least, I know I can't.
I remember being in a very interactive week-long seminar where one of the 30 participants was a white guy with a beard. A few days into it I realized he was two guys. Just before the end of the week I realized he was (at least) three guys.
> but I worry about MongoDB since data in this application is critical and loss would be catastrophic

Don't worry, this is just some old and well debated prejudice against Mongo (don't want to start a mongo discussion here though). Mongo has five different safe write modes you can choose from plus optional journaling and is in general some of the most impressive piece of tech and the best document store I know. Just try it and you won't go back and it's popular: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=mongodb%2C%20postgres...
A CDN isn't always the answer
Send texts from someone else's number
Unfortunately I couldn't find a great text example but here are two sources on: IPAB

More recent:
http://www.cato.org/multimedia/media-highlights-tv/cato-inst...

From one year ago (shorter ~ 7 minutes):
http://www.cato.org/multimedia/daily-podcast/ipab-obamacarea...
You school didn't have study groups with Americans?
In the days of SAN, all assumptions about separate filesystems should be revisited. They might be, in fact probably are, on the same spindles.
I don't really understand your point. In my understanding, for silk road to be rent-seeking it would have be actively working to keep drugs illegal, thus maintaining their profits. I have seen no evidence this is the case.

I'm also unsure why you think SR "creates no value"? It creates value in the same way eBay does.
I think dismissing web tech b/c of what Facebook does or John Gruber says is short-sighted. Case in point: the people over at Sencha rebuilt Facebook in HTML5 to run faster than Facebook's native app [1]. It may take an additional level of skill and careful planning...and it may be easier to shoot yourself in the foot with a WebApp that provides a compelling experience with performance on par with a native app, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.

1. http://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-l...
I'd be very surprised if we didn't start to hear calls for a tax on the robots.
There are a few challenges facing Bitcoin, and I think that in the long run Bitcoin will not be the chosen digital currency of the world.

The first problem is that there is a highly predictable and (at the moment) constant supply of bitcoins, which means that the value of the coin will adjust like a commodity as more or less people start to use it. It's like Gold or Oil in the sense that when people want it, it's worth a lot, and when people don't want it, it's not as expensive. That chains the value to the demand, meaning that any time you use bitcoin as a store-of-value, you are putting yourself at the complete mercy of the market.

Many advocates believe that as the number of people using bitcoin grows the price will stabilize, but I think that using bitcoin as a store-of-value is going to end up like using the gold standard, especially because some early adopters have tens of thousands to even a million (Satoshi is believed to have a million) bitcoins, and any of them could decide to 'cash out', which would dramatically change the supply and potentially affect the whole market.

Another problem is that the currency is highly traceable, and while you can do things to obfuscate your spending habits there are lots of techniques involving statistical analysis that shed doubt on the effectiveness of obfuscation. You can take this back to the "I have nothing to hide" argument, but there are plenty of powerful parties that will be more interested in a currency that can't be traced (imagine big business or big finance), and an untraceable currency would certainly be more attractive.

But to me the biggest current problem with bitcoin is the uncertainty. There are many conflicting schools of thought in economics each with their own reasons why bitcoin is good or bad. But beyond the basics, macroeconomics often involves a lot of voodoo, and for any new paradigm there will be major schools of thought that will believe the new paradigm is bad or unstable in some way. There is no real way to fight this except to accept that we ultimately have no idea how new economic paradigms will affect our world, and that some of the naysayers may be correct and thus caution should be used.
Randomness is one such "scientific" explanation. In fact, it is the religion of science, serving as the de facto answer for unknowns regarding creation and existence.

Your comment reminds me of the line attributed to Chesterton, "Give us one free miracle and we'll explain everything else."

Edit: a little Googling makes me think this more likely came from Terence McKenna: http://www.personaproductions.com/2011/02/terence-mckennas-n....
Thank god someone else pointed that out. I stopped reading at your first warning sign — any doubt I had about Nicholas Carr being a complete dick just went up in a puff of smoke
At the same time, every member of that 10% bought a Mac desktop, and therefore bought a product with high margins. If 10% of your potential audience has no problem buying software, especially high-margin software, they'll be easier to sell high-margin software to.
Great inspirational story! My dad was a hard worker and could build anything. He died when I was pretty young and I had to find my own inspiration to succeed in life.
You seem to be saying you had graded (with grades that went somewhere on a transcript that matterd) problem sets in grad school. That is a rather antiquated concept, even for undergrad..
One 'good' thing about the Cold War was that it 'put the fear of Communism' in the heart of every Commie-fearing capitalist.

We had a moral obligation to be seen as and actually provide a better life than that experienced by those behind the Iron Curtain. We had to pay attention to the negative aspects of market-based economics and at least attempt to mitigate these problems.

It also showed people what 'real' communism looked like. It's big joke that people think we're measurably closer to anything resembling socialism.

The idea that capitalism itself is a moral end to achieve in and of itself, regardless of the reality, seems to have taken root. People who are left worse off are dismissed as stupid and lazy.

As someone with an economics background I'm strongly in favor of markets and capitalism, but it's worrying when people forget that the strength of this way is based upon the health of the economic institutions that enable it to function.
>It's rent seeking in the same way that smuggling illegal immigrants is rent seeking.

Smuggling illegal immigrants is not rent seeking. If an illegal-immigrant-smuggling company lobbied the government to tighten immigration controls, that would be rent seeking.
Interesting scenario. I never heard it voiced before, and must be so rare it can safely be ignored as a non-issue.
You seriously have to be kidding about the non mainstream stuff. When have they advocated for a gold standard? Several prominent mainstream economists write for their op-eds, including Nobel laureates. I can't recall one Austrian.
Can we please stop talking about Bitcoin replacing the Dollar? Bitcoin isn't suited for local transactions or for contracts on a large scale. That might change, but the value of the bitcoin protocol is in other applications.
That's about 2% of the total amount of desktops. I don't know the exact numbers, but I assume that it amounts to several dozens of million sales.

Are we getting so disillusioned that we consider to be "such a small potential userbase"?
Better Custom Font Rendering Finally Coming to Google Chrome on Windows
That is a different argument from your initial assertion.

The IHS's failure is not an indication that the us government can't execute on healthcare.

Additionally there are plenty of regulatory agencies in the US that do a phenomenal job at what they do even in the face of dire circumstances, the FDIC being a really good example. Literally hundreds of banks went out of business between 2008 and 2010 (see: http://www.fdic.gov/bank/individual/failed/banklist.html ), and the FDIC unrolled those institutions, found other banks to take over depositor accounts, without any substantial problems.

The government can and does work, even if it doesn't always. The question is how can we ensure that government's interface with the healthcare system is one of the systems that does work.
The trivial solution to homewt cheating is to stop the worthless practice of assigning and grading duplicate homework. Assign unique projects, or don't grade mass homework, so incentives don't get misaligned.
There are 75 million Mac users, many of whom have iTunes accounts and credit cards on file – they can buy from the Mac App Store with a single click.

20% of 75 million is 15 million. 15 million copies of any paid app is huge.

Also, let’s not forget that Mac sales has been growing for years, while the PC market as a whole has been shrinking. Today, there are 3 times as many Mac users than 5 years a go.
The system you propose does not account for shifting expectations. Try getting everybody to agree on what "basic needs" are and you are going to pull your hair out in the process. Once people get used to receiving wealth for free, they will look at those who have more and demand that they be brought up to the same level; slowly but surely. For instance, who are you to say that basic needs don't include travel and rich experiences?

There will always have to be some percentage of the population that works in order to keep all these machines programmed and maintained, and you don't want those people to be enslaved by the masses. Everyone should be required to work for what they need, but thanks to automation the amount of time people need to spend working to afford the stuff they need is a lot lower than it used to be.
What? The burden of proof is on you. What examples of non mainstream economics are you citing with the WSJ? Links to actual articles that prove your point, please.
I want a $5 prime ribeye steak. I can't find one. Does that mean there's a cow shortage?
Well, kiddo, there are these ancient things... they called em "books"
(heh, couldn't resist).

But seriously, used bookstores and the library are a great start look for classics such as Knuth Art of Computer Programming. Also check with the college course catalogs and see what CS classes are using as textbooks.
Ive owned a 911; it's a brilliant car and one of my favourites that I've owned. :) And I agree with everything you've said.

One of my current cars is an MGF; I love it. It's unreliable, isn't very good at acceleration, can be a bitch to drive... but I still love it :)

Conversely; I have an old Peugot 106 which sits on the drive and never ever fails to start when I need it. It looks ugly as sin and can handle like a bull, but it does the job (getting from A to B) without fail due to superb engineering and subtle simplicity.

But maybe I'm getting carried away with the car metaphors...
Haha: "Students, to pass this class, analyze submissions in MATLAB, and write a report implicating the copiers."
This strikes me as a terrible idea for two reasons.

1. Slim bike tires getting stuck in the grooves left for the train tracks.

2. Big trains with a ton of inertia running at ~50-60 mph using the same route as cyclists going at ~10-20 mph.
Who determines what the basic income should be and how exactly do they do it?
> I really don't get this attitude some Americans have that any kind of public service designed to make the lives of your less fortunate peers just that little bit easier is some how a bad thing.

I think the problem is we like to have the freedom to select our charities (and charitable giving amount) rather than have them forced upon us by statute.
Maybe he meant WebGL, but even then it could be done very well as with more modern OpenGL variants with bitmapped font tables. OpenGL on Mac is 3.2 IIRC. Nvidia recently tinkered with proprietary version of OpenVG with beautiful text rendering capabilities. There are numerous ways to make great text with OpenGL be performant with native code. Even GUIs with IMGUI approach. Some of those techniques could be done with WebGL, I'm sure. So, I don't really understand his point about text and OpenGL a no go
Sure, WebGL is not all you can get with native and OpenGL, but nowhere near a fiasco in performance.
Recent gluster vs ceph debate at LCA.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfRqpdgoiRQ
Then maybe the organization shouldn't be national. The law does need to be national, or Texas and Alabama will send all their sick people to states that provide free care, much as Nevada now buses out its mentally ill.
Well, according to this [1] the Mac install base is around 66 million users. So, if 20% of them bought your app for $1 you'd be $13 million dollars richer. That seems worth it to me. It seems that you are underestimating the size of the market and potential the to make money by writing applications for the Mac. You are also ignoring the fact that Macs sell at a premium so those 66 million represent not the bottom end of the market, but those with money to purchase services to make their lives easier.

[1] http://aaplinvestors.net/stats/mac-installed-base/
Windows 8 does boot without secure boot enabled.
Developers, please take note of the authors statement below....

"Many developers assume that everyone wants their data to be “in the cloud”, but that's actually not true for a lot of my customers. Professional researchers often sign agreements in their children's blood stating that their data will be stored on an encrypted disk, won't leave their laptop, and will be destroyed when the research project is completed. “The cloud” is the last place they want their data to go."

There are so many great note taking and productivity application that I just can't use because the majority of my notes are of a confidential nature. If my company provided macbook where to be compromised I would not be held liable, however if my personal dropbox or evernote account where compromised I would be held accountable.
If the host were not an American company, perhaps. Not all news is world news, though
Throw in on-site daycare and you'll have a very attractive deal.

Did you find insurance that the employees can keep at the same rate even if the company folds or they're terminated? I heard someone talking about your problem #4 and how they'd helped a bit by at least keeping anyone from having ballooning costs.
"Thousands of mostly small online merchants are already accepting payment in Bitcoin, though this virtual currency has no intrinsic value and isn't tied to anything that does."

True and also true:

Thousands of mostly small online merchants are already accepting payment in _US Dollars_, though this _physical_ currency has no intrinsic value and isn't tied to anything that does.
Might be interesting to know that caffeine is not necessarily what many perceive it to be:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/jun/02/drinking-coffe...
I have yet to see it being pointed out that none of the encryption in use for these cryptocurrencies will necessarily remain extremely hard to break for long. A good question is: what if bitcoin or something alike does effectively gain traction and one day a math breakthrough (or a computational tech one) make the crypto weak? How much wealth will be destroyed then? Who would you turn to for help?
Our system is not perfect, but taking central banks out of the loop is not a way to improve it. It would be much more useful to find ways to push down financial transaction and currency exchange costs.
> it's worrying when people forget that the strength of this way is based upon the health of the economic institutions that enable it to function.

...which would be markets, correct? There is no free market for welfare.
Highest compliment I ever got from a teacher: "You got then highest score of everyone who didn't cheat."

I think that knowing that he knew that they cheated and I didn't, that meant something that lasted more than that the artificial confines of that one class.
ilaksh You should take this guy up on his offer, sounds like hes willing to mentor you.
Not jealousy per-se, but the drive to want more. People work long after basic needs are met.

I admit my understanding is somewhat shallow, but I think the problem with the USSR had at least as much to do with price controls as any cash transfers. In a capitalist system with BI, if there's a labor shortage the wages paid to labor will increase and the price of goods will increase accordingly, and people will be motivated to take those jobs as the BI payments shrink in purchasing power. The HUGE advantage is that when there is a labor surplus, those people that remove themselves from the work force (voluntarily, involuntarily, or semi-voluntarily) still play a role in aggregate demand.