skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fun projects of varying ambitiousness that comes to mind:

- Write a Rust garbage collector in Rust, hell, rewrite the Rust runtime in Rust.

- Do a Linux kernel module.

- Or a bootloader.

- Or an entire OS.

This is a great demonstration. It's one thing to know that something can be done, seeing a concrete example is invaluable.

And now I'm kind of itching to write that bootloader.
Show HN: a NPM module to synchronously prompts users for command-line input
Yes, you got a point in here, I should focus a bit :)
>> Oh, puh-lease.

> Don't be a dick.

Oh, puh-lease.

> there is server overhead too

It's all going over the SSL, remember?

I have a life-long passionate hate towards XML, but you have to look at a larger picture to understand why Google is killing XMPP support. It's not the performance, it's not the lack of the protocol elegance. It's the fact that they are building a wall. Facebook got their herd walled and it seems to be working well for them, so it's only natural Google is doing the same. The XMPP was in a way, so it's gotta go.
Well, I'd like to believe career and life can both be achieved, it's all just a matter of managing yourself. That said, contractor life doesn't appeal to me too much right now. But thanks for the comment :)
> but merely having an easy means to do it (guns) doesn't factor in at all.

The research on this is very good and very clear. Access to effective means of suicide increases rates of completed suicide. Guns are very effective means of suicide, thus access to guns increases rates of completed suicide.

You're making a mistake to compare rates of suicide among different nations. That's tricky because of the different ways suicide is reported (or not reported), but it's also not relevant.

What we really want to know is what the rate of completed suicide would be in the US with guns available and with guns not available.

Once you have that information you then decide whether it's significant enough to warrant restricting guns.

I'm trying to ignore my own strong anti-gun sentiment. My kneejerk reaction is to say "ban all guns!". My considered response is something like "increase availability of mental health treatment! Provide rapid access to crisis and home treatment options! destigmatize mental illness! Persuade men to get treatment for illness, especially mental illness! Start a discussion in the gun owning community about locking guns up, and about getting treatment for mental illness".

Your comments about treatment of elderly people in the Netherlands feels odd. Please, do you have a cite for that?
Have you honestly never seen poverty in Europe? You've never seen homeless people or people begging?
The example in the question seems to demonstrate a common misunderstanding with regards to Big O notation. It measures the time complexity of an algorithm in terms of its input size. But the n in the OP's example is not the input size, it is the input value.

In the actual implementation, the input size is of course constant (being an int), but if you look at the intended algorithm it is (I have renamed the variable into b on purpose, to avoid confusion with the n usually used in the Big O notation) we have something like:

* Take a number b.

* Loop from 0 to b-1 and print the number of the current iteration.

As far as this algorithm goes, the input size here is not b, but of order log(b) (number of digits to represent b), while the algorithm's runtime is proportional to b. That means this algorithm has exponential runtime.
Why does everyone claim to be the "most simple" static website generator? Then they list their few dependencies like "web framework foo". My idea of "most simple" would be something like this:

#!/bin/bash
for f in *.mdwn
do
pandoc "$f" -o "${f%.*}.html" --standalone
done

A bash script with a loop plus one command to convert a markdown file into a HTML file. You might choose something different than pandoc. Most likely you will have an executable called "markdown*" in your $PATH.
Longer trip. More billable hours. Made up at the end.

(Wups! )
> - Write a Rust garbage collector in Rust, hell, rewrite the Rust runtime in Rust.

The runtime is currently being rewritten to Rust[1], and the GC-in-Rust is almost complete[2] (as far as I understand it).

[1]: Work in progress: https://github.com/mozilla/rust/tree/incoming/src/libstd/rt

[2]: https://github.com/graydon/rust/tree/gc
"Yes, but you're.."

"Would you please let me present what I have to say, sir, and then we'll discuss it."

"All right!" I sit down and sort of close my eyes to listen to all this stuff, all these details about this big project, and I still haven't the slightest idea why he's giving me all this information,

Finally, when he's all finished, he says, "I'm telling you about our plans because we want to know if you would like to be the director of the
laboratory."

"Have you really got the right fella?" I say. "I'm a professor of theoretical physics. I'm not a rocket engineer, or an airplane engineer, or anything
like that."

"We're sure we have the right fellow."

"Where did you get my name then? Why did you decide to call me?"

"Sir, your name is on the patent for nuclear-powered, rocket-propelled airplanes."

"Oh," I said, and I realized why my name was on the patent, and I'll have to tell you the story. I told the man, "I'm sorry, but I would like to continue as a professor at Cornell University."

What had happened was, during the war, at Los Alamos, there was a very nice fella in charge of the patent office for the government, named Captain Smith. Smith sent around a notice to everybody that said something like, "We in the patent office would like to patent every idea you have for the United States government, for which you are working now. Any idea you have on nuclear energy or its application that you may think everybody knows about, everybody doesn't know about: Just come to my office and tell me the idea."

I see Smith at lunch, and as we're walking back to the technical area, I say to him, "That note you sent around: That's kind of crazy to have us come in and tell you every idea."

We discussed it back and forth--by this time we're in his office-and I say, "There are so many ideas about nuclear energy that are so perfectly obvious, that I'd be here all day telling you stuff."

"LIKE WHAT?"

"Nothin' to it!" I say. "Example: nuclear reactor . . . under water. . water goes in . . . steam goes out the other side ... Pshshshsht--it's a submarine. Or: nuclear reactor ... air comes rushing in the front... heated up by nuclear reaction ... out the back it goes ... Boom! Through the air-
-it's an airplane. Or: nuclear reactor ... you have hydrogen go through the thing ... Zoom!--it's a rocket. Or: nuclear reactor ... only instead of using ordinary uranium, you use enriched uranium with beryllium oxide at high temperature to make it more efficient ... It's an electrical power plant.
There's a million ideas!" I said, as I went out the door.
Nothing happened.

About three months later, Smith calls me in the office and says, "Feynman, the submarine has already been taken. But the other three are yours."

So when the guys at the airplane company in California are planning their laboratory, and try to find out who's an expert in rocket-propelled whatnots, there's nothing to it: They look at who's got the patent on it!

http://www.chem.fsu.edu/chemlab/isc3523c/feyn_surely.pdf
Thanks. Done and done.
> I wonder if you're trolling or just clueless

Given the curious interpretation of ‘polynomial’ by means of an only somewhat correct translation, I’d tend to the latter.
> (what job is only 40 hours a week any more other than checkout jobs at supermarkets or governement jobs?

I think this is an American perspective. Plenty of very good jobs in Europe and London in particular are 40 hour weeks. Plenty of research shows that people are more productive in the long term working 40h/wk.
Using dropout with deep neural networks is an (extremely cheap) way to gain many of the benefits of using an ensemble. If you want a great overview of the dropout technique, watch this tech talk by Hinton: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DleXA5ADG78

Also, the recent maxout algorithm (from Montreal group, authors of Theano) that got state of the art results on several datasets is essentially just an algorithm designed to do particularly well with dropout (as far as I understand it).
we need to transform our society and BIncome is the lever to start it.

To much ressources are used for our way of life, to much unnecessary goods are being consumed, or thrown away.
> consumption needs to cool down.

The gap between an elite, adding their interest rates to all goods and the actual work force widens daily.
> social inequality is simply counterproductive, disabling citizens to participate, innovate ..

Needing several jobs to live keeps citizens from participating in politics spurring a detached elite to corrupt society.
> buying power/influence with money is corruption

and so on
Did anyone make sure this guy knows that log in Computer Science is base 2?
We need to remember that most places simply writing 'log' is assumed to be base 10.

Log base 2 is just how many times we can you recursively split something in half, which is not that complicated of a concept. However, his log example is base 10 and if he was trying to figure out these things as base 10 it would be super confusing and not make any sense.
Interestingly, I have a counter-example to one of your points in your counter-example.

In my graduate work I have spent a great deal of time reproducing the work of others. This is because there have yet to be well defined benchmarks for the performance of various algorithms. In order to show that a new algorithm is superior to the current state of the art, it is necessary to implement the other algorithms.

This has resulted in a open source program that implements various published algorithms, where the authors did not release any program to implement their schemes.
I too wish to learn more about this.
You can absolutely sell these. Google may ask you not to, but that does not inhibit you from selling them and they work fine for the next buyer. This is pretty awesome, Go Bitcoins!
> to do cleantech crap.

Considering that climate change already kills 150,000 people per year [1], and that this rate will continue to (dramatically) increase, I think it's pretty rude for you to belittle the few good people who choose to fund cleantech (putting their fellow man above short-term economic "rationality").

[1] http://www.who.int/heli/risks/climate/climatechange/en/
Most popular Haskell libraries use single-letter names internally for type and value variables, and then verbose, full names for Types and TypeConstructors. Don't get soured on Haskell just because of one presentation.
Thank you.. and even then a lot of things get overlooked in frameworks, or even component toolkits. With the web components you need presentation (html + css) along with core event handling (js). Many tools/frameworks forgo some or all of that. There's also being able to inherit the markup and/or styling of components to build larger tools...

With that in mind, I really want to like TJ's component system, but leave a lot wanting in terms of something more encompassing like Bootstrap, which has a consistent CSS/Style for more than a single component.

I appreciate a lot of the tooling around, but even a basic bootstrap site with jQuery + CSS + addons + module scripts for even the menu tends to come in over 200K in size.. and less than 1% of that is the actual content.

--
aside: really dig fleet/seaport, and your github account really makes me wish github offered a sort by forks/followers/stars, I know you modularize everything but it does make it hard to get the bigger from smaller stuff. ;-)
http://hnofficehours.com/
How about Softwire? http://www.softwire.com

We tick all your boxes. Tech: We use interesting state-of-the-art and varied technology (I just finished a Rails project; I've done plenty of Java work at Softwire). Career: We are a small(ish) company growing fast so there is opportunity to define new roles and help us manage the transition into a larger company. Work/life: We don't work long hours; generally 38-40h/week. Pay: We pay very well (I don't think we can compete with some of the financial companies, of course).

Here's the official blurb from our recruitment manager:

Softwire is an extremely successful and vibrant software company offering bespoke software development services in a diverse range of sectors including media, security, online retail, travel, finance, publishing and insurance. We are currently looking for software developers with prior commercial experience to work in our offices based in London (NW5) and Bristol. We have placed in the top twenty of the Sunday Times Best Small Companies awards for the past three years running, and employees will tell you that this is a truly great - and probably unique - place to work. We combine a relaxed and friendly environment with a superb all-round package of benefits including:

- Varied and interesting work that will keep you on your toes day in, day out.
- Great remuneration – all employees reap the rewards of our joint efforts, and a guaranteed 60% of profits is distributed to staff via annual bonus.
- Flexible working time and conditions and no pressure to regularly work long hours.
- Focused training, rapid personal development, and the opportunity to take on elevated levels of responsibility early in your career
- Frequent social events and company outings.

Applicants must have demonstrated excellence in previous employment and possess impeccable academic records - usually straight As at A-level (or equivalent) and a good degree from a top university. You will need stand-out ability and enthusiasm in order to be successful.
Well I am trying to understand it better. Instead of explaining it to me better, I get downvoted instead.

Please explain it further and tell me how you can estimate the time when a DDoS attack is being done on the system, or the CPU is overheating, I'd really like to know how you estimate that. Apparently I'm clueless and in need of many clues.
> I studied Html5, but I never even heard of some of these feautres

That's because they aren't "HTML5" yet.
If you can't name a single protocol that is better at what XMPP does, don't you think "(lets face it) terrible" is a bit of an overstatement? It seems more like a "democracy is the worst system, except for everything else we've tried" scenario.
Well, it's like this -- log_2 and log_10 (and natural log) differ only by a constant multiplicative factor, so they're all the same asymptotically, and it doesn't matter which one you use inside the O(). Pretty neat right?
Indeed, in some countries (like mine) calling yourself an engineer while not having the real degree it's illegal, even if it's your job description.

Incidentally, here (Argentina) we have the equivalent of farming engineer, called "Ingeniero Agrónomo". It's a very common career choice, and well paid.
Well I admit I don't understand it fully. That is no reason to accuse me of trolling or downvote my comments.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynomial

Is Wikipedia not correct on this issue? I was told on one hand to look stuff up on Wikipedia, and on another I found out it is not always correct.
On the server, I mean.

source: I'm an ex-cofounder of a now very successful syncing solution startup who uses XMPP and I wrote the initial server and client code.
Why is there count() and rowCount()?

Why does where() only accept a string? This means the dev has to build their own where clause, and means they can't use prepared statement placeholders in the where clause.

On a less db specific point, why are you not writing namespaced code?
I'm a really optimistic type, really. Optimistic to the annoyance of some people. But in the case of security and cryptology there does not exist a choice between optimism and pessimism, but a choice between sharp eyed paranoia and wilful ignorance.

A defence is always only as strong as the weakest link, and an attacker usually has all the time in the world to find and exploit it.

Optimism has no place here.
I'm pretty sure you could setup an arrangement where you don't have to pay someone a full time wage, but they step in if something happens to you.

Pretty morbid (but necessary) talking about what will happen if you're rendered inoperative.
Cool, but not perfect:

at the end of void ArmDebugger::Stop(Instruction* instr)
(rhs of http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~yw21/demos/simulator-mips-simulat... )

we have an alignment of ' 2 * Instruction::kInstrSize' to some random code at the end
It would have been from the forums funds. At one point they had at least half a million dollars in bitcoin from various ventures, probably more.
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Said no one with money. Ever.
Looks like very biaised towards knockout to me.
I have a question that I don't really know where to ask that relates to unsupervised feature learning (I think).

Lets say I have many-body problem, such as the energy of some number of atoms given their positions. I can calculate this by solving some equation, but its expensive. If I wanted to apply some machine learning to the problem some form of regression would work if I stuck to a fixed size (some number of atoms in a particular coordinate system).

More concretely, if I had energy as a function of two atoms, I could fit some function through the points and get something halfway reasonable.

However, if I want to have three atoms, I have no idea how to treat it. The learning algorithm has no idea about "atoms" or that their energies might be composable in some way.

What sort of machine learning could figure out and learn the underlying rules of physics and "understand" how energy should change as a function of the positions of the atoms and the underlying physics rules that must be preserved. One of these rules is that the energy must go to a constant (possibly zero depending on the energy is defined) if you separate the atoms infinitely far apart and must go to infinity if the distance is zero. Also the function must be smooth with continuous derivatives.

I haven't made my point very well, but perhaps someone would know what literature to read about unsupervised learning algorithms that could "learn" physics.
You need to step away from all this. You clearly have a toxic mindset (though not necessarily by any fault of your own), and the fact that you insist on perpetuating it and projecting it on arguably unrelated situations is evidence of that. I feel like every thread I read has an identical anti-corporation or anti-manager comment from you!

I've said this before, but you often have some great insights in your posts. This negativity achieves nothing and simply works to discredit the rest of what you say.

So you had a bad experience, so what? The world isn't out to get you. Learn what you can from it and move on.
* On the server.
Thanks for clarifying your point. This makes it not only much more digestable, but sounds actually quite reasonable.

However a trade embargo is not sabotage and there were reasons why it was originally put in place

That's probably a difference of perspective, or opinion. In a way - and in my perception - an embargo towards a country is a form of sabotage. No need to nitpick this point, though.

While the reason for the embargo is well documented and quite understandable. The main reason why it's going on for so long is probably the massive and unproportionally large influence of the Cuban exile community. A lot of them pretty unsavory types.

Also, while I don't want to defend the Castros it should be noted that Batista, his predecessor who came into this role by a coup (he was elected president in the 40s, but would'nt stand a chance to be re-elected, so he putshed) was not a friend of the people and that the revolution had huge popular support.

In any case: thanks for the links. I don't really care if an argument comes from the left, or the right as long it's well layed out and soundly reasoned. As a matter of fact I read a few quite good papers and essays by the Cato Institute, even though we're certainly not on the same page politically (it yet needs to be seen where they move to, when the Kochs succeed with their takeover, though).

Cheers, interesting discussion.
Yes, you can convert log base x to log base y. However, the point is that if OP is assuming that we're using log base 10, developing an intuitive understanding of why a binary search is O(log n) is significantly harder than if OP knows that we're referring to log base 2.
This is correct, but in case it makes more sense this way (it does to me):

log (base X) Y === log (base e) Y / log (base e) X

So the difference between log (base 2) and log (base 10) is just the difference between being divided by log (base e) 2 or log (base e) 10. Since those are both constant factors, big-O notation doesn’t care.
I think there will be some natural gravity wells that form around JS frameworks/toolkits. We have the incumbents jQueryUI, extjs, etc... along with the upstarts: AngularJS, Knockout, Backbone, even Bootstrap, etc. Each offer specific advantages over others.

Another consideration, which imho is even bigger than toolkits and frameworks will be packaging and distribution... Bower, and even npm are pretty popular... you have CommonJS vs. AMD vs ES6 Modules ... It's an interesting time, with a lot of options, and no clear leaders (other than those with large corporations behind them).

I'm starting to see the likes of Bootstrap and jQueryUI as pretty heavy/bulky.. and re-thinking how/what I really need and want. I have a pretty big addiction to jQuery's features, and not sure if I want to start doing custom builds with fewer features for newer/mobile browsers, and 1.9.x for ieold.

The uptake of mobile browsers (my last job saw mobile expand from 0 to 20% of its' users in the past two years, which is huge), the amount of data used is a big deal, and monolithic toolsets are a burden there.

-----

And for the love of god to anyone reading this... stop specifying "Helvetica" or "Arial" in your stylesheets and just use the "sans-serif" fallback, which is the most similar/appropriate font for the platform 99.999% of the time.
EBay Auction
For me, the 98% of VCs are all like Gandalf the Grey. They have kind of an idea what they are doing, they maybe actually understand 98% of investment, but they just can't get the last 2%. The thing is, they are all followers: Never would they be able to recognize the next Facebook, because it doesn't fit their pattern, whereas their pattern matching has to look out for startups that don't fit their pattern.

How do you become a 2% VC? You have to have been a successful startup founder before. Otherwise, you just don't have the understanding of building the future. The 98% VCs got there from studying business to working at McKinsey, to being an Investment Analyist. Yeah they can do fine by investing in proven startups, that have been done before, but they'll never get their 50x-100x, because they can't predict the future.

So if you haven't been a founder before and you want to be a VC, please quit your job, stop wasting everybody's time and money, start a company, and come back as Gandalf the White.
> Solving the second implies in some way having already solved the first, due to the nature of positional systems.

Untrue. (Edit: actually true). It works perfectly well to have a decimal number system using digits 1-10 instead of 0-9. For sake of notation, let's say A is the digit representing 10.

"A" = 10, "11" = 11, "19" = 19, "1A" = 20, "21" = 21, etc.

Edit: actually, I misread your argument. What you argued is definitionally true.