skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had a hard time reading this article without wondering if it was some kind of spoof. The USA has the most efficient freight rail network in the world (other countries optimise their networks for passenger), and this isn't due to a single factor. It is never going to be under threat from the Hyperloop, because most of the cargo carried are things like coal, raw materials, containers, etc. that aren't sensitive to being delivered "just a few hours faster" (or even days). Also, most of the US freight rail network is heavily heavily optimised and drops containers off for truck haulage after transporting the cargo to the most efficient spot on the network.
Nuclear energy is a prime example for her usual MO. The people didn't really like nuclear energy but apart from some small groups of activists there was no real opposition. So, in summer/autumn of 2010 she let her people present plans to abandon the phasing out of nuclear energy. Once those didn't meet any meaningful resistance, Merkel sprang into action and made her coalition pass a law to that effect. Then spring of 2011 arrived, the accident happend and public opinion turned into staunch opposition of nuclear energy. Merkel immediately flipped.

Don't get my wrong, I am not opposed to politicians admitting they were wrong, but Fukushima didn't change any facts about nuclear energy. Merkel was operating on exactly the same facts in autumn as in spring and yet her decisions were polar opposites. The only thing that changed was public opinion and that is what I criticise.
Any Turing-complete language can do any computational task that is computable by Turing-complete languages, so by that criteria every language is the same. Obviously, in practice they are not.

That's a straw man, I didn't use that as a criteria.

PHP and Ruby are both object oriented imperative scripting languages that are commonly used for connecting to a DB and spitting out markup

See that? That's me describing specific qualities of the languages that make them similar. Of course, you could use Ruby or PHP to write a graphics engine (in fact, I have done so with Ruby), but that is not a common use case. Most of the time, Ruby and PHP are used to solve the same set of problems: scripting server-side logic for the web.

Consensus of whom?

The internet? The programming community? That's why I used the "nebulous" qualifier. I'm not saying it's a fact, but it's a pretty popular sentiment which is about as solid as it gets with regard to matters of taste.

Yes, PHP and Ruby are different, but most of the time they are used to do the same thing.
Agreed, and it's worth pointing out that this is what Arduino has to say on the matter:

"Note that while we don't attempt to restrict uses of the "duino" suffix, its use causes the Italians on the team to cringe (apparently it sounds terrible); you might want to avoid it. (It's also trademarked by a Hungarian company.)"

http://arduino.cc/en/Main/FAQ
Or, rather, if your emphasis is on crunching numbers, and so many of them that performance is always a big issue, then Fortran is pretty much the best.

Not all number crunching is the same.
I really like the potential implications of this to future A.I. research. ;)
Keep a to-do memo file with links as in Vim help
The Best Ways to Create an Effective Website for Creative Brands
I think this is absolutely incredible. This is exactly how I've always envisioned responsive design.

I'm really looking forward to the usual HN pessimistic discussion on why this is bad/wrong/could be done better. I know a lot of people don't like the negativity, but I really enjoy it because I get pumped up about stuff like this. WSJ is pretty reputable too.

MIT licesnse for everything
Copyright (c) 2012 The Wall Street Journal,
http://wsj.com/
For any arbitrary program, we may be able to know that it will halt.
The thing that kills me is people who reply to emails with a phone call. I actually quit putting my cell number in my email signature because of this. If I wanted to talk to you I would call you; if I emailed you for something then I expect a reply via email.
agreed. The judges comment at the end nearly yanked a tear from me; sounds like an old professor, with a genuine care:

Shon,

Savor your third year! Luxuriate,now,in your incredible success.Keep a daily journal–30 years from now it will amuse you while giving your grandchildren warm insights into who you were and how you became the distinguished lawyer that you will become.

Most of all, be happy. All the best.

RGK
I love Logstash+Kibana+Elasticsearch. Holding 410 million log files in a 10 node cluster! Congratulations Jordan!
Ask HN: Startups doing SCM plus
Are there any startups out there that have a non cloudbased Configuration management & modification request system? I have been tasked with finding/setting up a system for the "Big CO" that I work at, and am wondering if Clear Case is really my best choice.
I did. And part of my comments are even from the later part of his article on the criticizing of high school geometry. he talked from the real subjects of geometry side, and looked down the formal language presentation in the textbooks. But the latter is an important skill training, which is arguably more important than the mere geometry pattern recognizing itself for most of people.
If you're using Sofort, then there's an off-site redirect involved and it's no longer as simple as entering two numbers.
Not sure how a joke like this could in any way be seen as an attack against women... comedians talk about all sorts of race, gender and religion topics and joke about wanting to kill the person they live with all the time even though they love them (the article talks about him being funny). Not everyone panders to be PC every moment of every day of their lives. Maybe I'm just insensitive, but it seems like a real stretch to take a single comment to mean he hates women.
You confuse group outcomes for individual rights. It is wrong to force me to die for your cause. It is just that simple.
New White Paper: An Analysis of Function Point Trends
Yeah, anyone who has installed numpy, matplotlib, etc has probably noticed that you need a Fortran compiler to build the native extensions...
Is Fortran actually the best choice for this application? I don't know how heavy the calculations are for sports analytics, but I'm guessing it's less advanced than scientific simulations. Who cares how numerically efficient your code is if you use 10x the lines than a modern language and spend half your time struggling to maintain it.
Not so relevant but for any of you who prefer Rust to Go and haven't tried Go, don't do it.

Go's std, visibility by case and gofmt, among other things will make you cry for using Rust.

I really hope Rust get's better with time and it really focuses on being developer friendly not just a bag of nice features.
The takeaway: ASSASSIN'S CREED WAS RIGHT!!oen1

:-D
Legal? No. Does it happen: yes.
The Complete iOS Developer's Style Guide
Show HN: Watch your stocks with TickerPal
So do most of the world's cosmologists, you know boring stuff like the fabric of the universe, the beginning of time, the hunt for dark matter.

It's parallelisable - if that's a word.

Admittedly the stuff I have seen is all written without knowledge of the maxim "write your code as if the next person to fix your code is a mad axe murderer who knows where you live."

But they still unlock the secrets of the universe with it, even with unusual naming conventions.
I think the issue is that the ads "read" so unauthentically compared to the very positive experience I've had with DO and their wonderful setup tools, documentation, etc.
I'd never heard of this project before now. While I'm not ever likely to use these libraries directly, I do use a lot of software that could benefit greatly from a BLAS offering similar performance to MKL.
For a while I thought you meant Seymour Cray, or one of the supercomputers he designed and built.

Was it so hard to type one letter in support of readability? Or is "cray" its own word now?
Ok, but its still client side which I don't like. You're making the mobile device download all this markup, and then utilize further CPU cycles to discard that markup. It should run server side.
Amazon launches Mobile Associates API
A long tipping point, but one indeed.
I had to chuckle when I saw this. Their front page has a picture of the Franklin S. Harris Fine Arts Center on the campus of Brigham Young University http://home.byu.edu/home/
Sorry, maybe like the other commenter mentioned below, the word I probably was looking for was 'industrial'. Or whatever refers to it as 'massive and complex'.

Not necessarily a bad thing, for web development, most of it's depth is an over-kill.
The explicit example in the article was "Creating formulas in a spreadsheet" (paraphrasing a bit). Is that really a task that will never be required of non-supervisory workers?

I'm really not sure where you're going with this, or what it is that you see as "run[ning] off the rails".
I heard about how the modern diesel-electric trains are engineered and wondered what I could learn from their systems, and was just about shocked. My intent was a thought experiment on "could we build a better hybrid car?" And the answer is a resounding yes... just look at trains.

All the research is already done, by train builders. They've done the math that says when to prioritize amperage over voltage for efficiency, and how to optimize various systems. And that's just one thing that I found massively impressive. (Now if only I could find the site I read, it was impressive.)
(In which case it installs and fires up a copy of nginx behind the scenes).
For the past 3 years I haven't had a cell phone, that is up until about 6 months ago when a friend gave me a Samsung Mesmerize. I don't have a line and only use Google Voice to receive texts, and I make calls through Talkatone.
Bizarrely, the libertine paradise has not ensued.

It has been going on for ages actually. We just didn't want to spoil it by letting you know where it is.
Thanks. To add to the guy who said he was in Brazil, I'm in the UK, perhaps it's non-US people who are getting deluged.
Thanks for the correction. I probably meant industrial when I said academic.
Five deadly sins of a freelance designer
The language is only half the machine. The human is the other half. The question is not if Fortran is the best choice, it's is Fortran the best choice for him.
What a grim world you live in.
These are the guys trying to cram Javascript into every possible goddamned use case

Fixed that for you.

Yes Fortran is probably the right tool for the job in this case, but I also think that creative experimentation with programming languages, invention of new languages, new implementations of and enhancements to existing languages, are good and important, and not just a "hipster" thing. All modern programming languages and their implementations have warts and deficiences, and building a new and improved one requires a level of skill and dedication that goes far beyond hipsterism.
Ecma to hold workshop on the Dart programming language
Not sure why code to crunch some statistics would have a huge maintenance cost. There goes one point out the window.

As for the first, a) I touched on the fact that Fortran is a modern language and b) unless you've got examples showing two side-by-side implementations of the same algorithm with Fortran being 10x longer, then it sounds like you're just another of the aforementioned hipsters who is experiencing aversion to something just because it is not new and shiny.
Same here, it's a modern piece of art, if you ask me!
How would you explain why birds raised in isolation can still build nests? And sing the songs of their species?

I would propose that it is possible that some animal "instincts" are really inherited memories from their ancestors.

And that if we look hard enough and deep enough, we may find similar human "instincts".

Have you ever seen a baby with a fear of spiders? Whose parents swear the child has never even seen a spider before?
Kiind Takes Aim At Corporate Rewards, Only Pay For Gift Cards When You Use Them
Railroads lost 99.9% of that business 70-100 years ago.

You ship stuff that doesn't have time-definite requirements with UPS Ground or Parcel Post. Time definite, you use an express service. If you have time definate needs and larger quantities, you use FedEx Custom Critical, or some LTL truck service.

Some folks today ship same-day parcel shipments via Amtrak, Southwest Airlines, or other passenger service. That's what hyperloop parcel delivery would compete with. It's onerous and expensive (ie. I need a guy to drive to the station with the thing I need to ship), and only makes sense if you have an office adjacent to the city pairs or airport. Lawyers used this service alot pre-internet.
on one of our machines that sends generates logs we do around 2400/s when the application is under heavy use. we have 9 machines that generates logs but they all generate different amounts. we mostly are using heka for generating stats from log files because we are too lazy to instrument the code and we have excellently detailed and formatted logs :) but we do have some logstash machines still pushing stuff to elastic search for low traffic applications we run.

we found that when using logstash even just for pushing stats to statsd it was not performing well enough. i've experimented with hekad pushing to elasticsearch on our staging cluster and performed well enough but we had weird problems showing up in nagios when we were using logstash+elasticsearch in production (checks were timing out even though we were seeing no degradation of performance on the servers). because of this it is quite difficult to get any kind of central log pushing into production. :(
They can all be subdirectories of the same main repo, yet import each other with paths like github.com/mainrepo/packagename.

The real thing that I haven't figured out a consistent solution to is how to manage versions. You could approximate version numbers with branches or tags, but nobody's put together a convention for it that works well with the tooling. That'll be important as go matures and has more libraries.
I just received mine yesterday and this was the exact thing that struck me after a few hours. The integration is kind of subtle if you aren't looking for it. Once you realize its there, the whole experience seems revolutionary.

I don't know if its a direct result, but I could see how this integration yields a lot of benefits. For one, even with the low specs of the Open, things move much faster when compared to a similar specced Gingerbread phone I was using earlier this year. The way that the search works is similarly amazing as the apps load quickly, even without pinning them to the phone. There are also little things, like the fact that you can save animated gifs and have them run in the Gallery viewer.

It certainly has a long way to go with some aspects of usability. For one, I have yet to find a way to remove files without connecting to a computer. Navigation could also use some work, as some apps require you to start over instead of providing a "back" button.

Considering I bought the phone just to play around, I have been really impressed and can't wait to see it grow.
Internal Documents Reveal How the FBI Blew Fort Hood
Yes, mongo as in Mongoloid (Down's syndrome, not the race) is offensive in mostly English speaking, Caucasian contexts. However, I'd figure MongoDB becoming a well known term would break some of the offensiveness associated with the pejorative use of mongo. At the same time, I don't think anyone keen on MongoDB will be thinking of the pejoratives associated with some part of the name.
To nit-pick, calling a bug that has been patched in a different version of Java for two months and exploited in this version at least a week ago a "zero-day" is quite a stretch of the term!
Actually, you don't. A fortran compiler is optional, and used mostly for f2py and I think(?) for the LAPACK bindings. (The fortran bindings are more efficient than the C bindings for reasons I don't remember at the moment.)

Numpy's (and matplotlib's, actually) core is written in C.

Scipy is a different story, however. A lot of scipy's internals are written in fortran.

That having been said, fortran is a _very_ nice language for a significant portion of scientific programming tasks. IO in fortran is rather painful, though, i.m.o. Tools like f2py (which still doesn't really support fully modern fortran, unfortunately) make it very easy to combine fortran and python, for whatever it's worth.
I tried using a week's worth of Ensure Complete as a meal replacement. It didn't provide satiation.
There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch: Microsoft's search for a new customer
RoboCoin: Bitcoin ATM
So you'd have to refresh the page when you change phone orientation from portrait to landscape?
Um, people have been doing high performance numeric and scientific computing in python for over 15 years now. The truth is, for a lot of numeric computing, you're better off using python, which calls fortran or c code to do the heavy lifting.

Fortran can run very fast. If all you need to do is numerical calculations, that might be enough. But that's never all you need to do: you need to preprocess your input data, or deserialize it, normalize it, join it or transform it based on some rdbms data, then you do your calculations, and then you need to graph it, serialize it, etc. Most of those tasks are somewhere between excruciating and impossible in fortran, however modern a dialect you use.
Okay, fair enough. let me clarify:

- Those points I used are real arguments being made today. I don't have exact quotes/links, but they do exist. There are people who believe those 3 items are perfectly correct. I admit item#3 is a bit of an exaggeration, but there is an alleged issue of over-diagnosis of ADD. I'm not saying they're wrong, but just saying to keep in mind that there is a lot of money that would be lost if those 3 things were to be discovered false.

- I called out the USA because this article is about the USA. Also I noted in italics that I wasn't saying it was only USA.

- Indeed, I don't have any alternative. Though I did mention I like the idea of multiple countries doing the study to see if everyone reaches the same conclusion. I'm just saying there is something to be said for a bit of skepticism. We know how long it took for science to decide tobacco was bad for you. It wasn't like they didn't know before, it just took a long time to push past the greed & corruption that kept the data hidden. Just saying to always keep a critical mind with these things. Afterall, this article here is calling out exactly what I'm claiming.

EDIT: And I see my original comment has been upvoted out of the graveyard during my commute to work, so I guess there are people who agree with what I'm trying to say.
In my experience, with slower platforms/languages, while it may be conventional wisdom that the database is the bottleneck, that's not actually the case in many circumstances.

Certainly in circumstances where you're doing a complex query involving fields that are not indexed or several joins, you're going to be waiting on the database.

But if you're just fetching rows by ID or indexed fields, slower platforms and languages end up being a bigger bottleneck than modern databases. Sometimes this is masked somewhat by the fact that the database drivers and/or ORM are slow, so from the application's perspective, the "database" is the bottleneck. But one should not confuse the drivers and ORM for the database.
No. The entire purpose of responsive design is that it adapts to the client that is being used to view it.
OK, but to my other reply. If they are going to blatantly front run, why would they even bother with the markets. Just spoof market behavior to you and take your money. Much easier.

If this behavior is impacting your execution why are you still using "Evil Broker"?
I hate a lot of ads, but don't really think adblock is fair. If the ads in totality bug me enough, I might stop going to a site, upload elsewhere etc..
that's good to hear. it could also have been a plugin that we were using that slowed things down. our log files are in csv so i wrote a plugin that uses ruby csv to parse lines and split them into key-value pairs based on String->List[String] hash we have. so it might have been the go csv parser has much better performance than the ruby csv parser.
To be fair it was nationalized in the wake of the Penn Central bankruptcy and all of the other railroads wanting to drop passenger rail. Railroads were even able to opt out and I think a few did for a few years but it just didn't make sense to move passengers vs freight.
How does Passenger deal with blocking I/O from applications if it is single threaded? Does the entire event loop block while doing I/O?
Very nice post. I love the illustrations.
This paper on GotoBLAS (which OpenBlas was forked from when GotoBLAS died) is a wonderful read on how to deal with the CPU cache hierarchy etc.:

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~flame/pubs/GotoTOMS_revision.pdf‎
Birdsong.fm - Work or Relax to Sounds of Singing Bird
I hate the term "Growth Hacker", but there is certainly a ton of demand for full stack marketers. The role may seem vague because it is definitely cross-functional but almost always has the following requirements:

- Product Competency (ability to product manage and make sensible product decisions)

- Marketing Competency (knowledge of all possible marketing channels and enough understanding to prioritize marketing efforts across them)

- Engineering Competency (ability to work directly with engineers and ability to do basic statistical analysis)

This basically describes a Product Manager who also has an in-depth understanding of marketing, which is not really that vague at all.
Major FWD.us Donor Says a "Strong Foreign Accent" Makes You a Bad CEO
If you wanted to people to contact you through the bottom github buttons labeled github, twitter, and mail, they would all get directed to github's front page. Looks great otherwise.
This is why I like having compilers.
The leap from "Instincts are inherited" to "This is because memories are inherited" is the furthest thing from science you could possibly get.
Infants remember speech heard in the womb
>Um, people have been doing high performance numeric and scientific computing for over 15 years now.

Have I disputed this fact somewhere?

>The truth is, for a lot of numeric computing, you're better off using python, which calls fortran or c code to do the heavy lifting.

Proof that Python can't get the job done in that particular area. Nevertheless there remain Python zealots who will tell you that it's the best for everything.

>Fortran can run very fast. If all you need to do is numerical calculations, that might be enough.

Actually it sounds like that is all he needs to do. Reading and spitting out a .csv file from Fortran is trivial, despite its clunky IO syntax.
If you really wanted, you could always take a FriendFeed style approach and create a document store on top of SQLite. http://backchannel.org/blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql
Who took that business in 1913ish? USPS was carried via rail until at least the 50s.
I don't think it's illegal, not even really front-running. That'd be them turning a price profit on filling your order, not just using it to avoid a potential loss.

Also, you're right, at a minimum, via a subsidiary it's possible for the brokerage to "fill" your order without it ever reaching the exchanges, I think as long as it's inside the national bid-ask price spread at that moment. They pitch this as a feature - it also lets them avoid exchange fees. Then they can manage their overall risk separately.

Yes, I stopped trying to make those trades years ago. At one time though it was a remarkably consistent way to succeed on a small scale.
Found it really interesting, I'm one of those that know nothing about FX, this has been very enlightening to me.
Scott Aaronson on black hole firewalls