skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah, this is great. I first learned assembly programming to modify one of my favorite video games, Earthbound. To my surprise, the game was a cult classic, and extensive efforts had been made to develop tools to modify every aspect of the game.

As part of that effort, I learned 65816 assembly, a 16-bit descendant of the 6502. The day I modified the code to add a run button, thereby eliminating one of the most annoying aspects of the original game, I was ecstatic.

I checked back on the community, PK Hack, a few months ago. The level of development was amazing. Virtually the entire game was mapped, byte for byte. There's a sophisticated visual map editor, and a cross-platform data editor.

The coolest part was to see a tool I envisioned, for which I developed a lackluster proof of concept, come to full fledged fruition.

Earthbound, as it turns out is a rather uniquely developed game. The second game in the Mother series, which is enormously popular in Japan, ran into severe difficulties. Co-developed by HAL and Ape, the coding was rather schizophrenic from the outset. Eventually large parts were rewritten by Shigesato Itoi himself, as the legend goes. The end result is a spaghetti soup of code generated by some type of macro system, compiled from some variant of C, and written in assembly itself.

To manage this complexity, many of the events in the game used a text scripting language that abstracted away the underlying routines. This scripting was a series of in-line hex sequences, each its own set of instructions for how sprites, character entities, etc. were supposed to act when the code appeared, which we termed "control codes."

12-year-old me, supremely confident in his abilities and utterly lacking in all technical knowledge, suggested we build a scripting language on top of the control codes so that manual text editing would be eased. The result was a slapdash Visual Basic job that used a BASIC like syntax for simple substitutes for control codes. Of course at the time, I had no knowledge of parsers, DSLs, language design, or really basic computational knowledge. The result was a wreck.

But that wreck stuck in someone's mind. Years later, after obtaining his computer science degree, one of the hackers with whom I had worked implemented a full-fledged language on top of the control codes.

In retrospect, I don't remember the vast amounts of time I ostensibly wasted learning an obsolete game's design and building tools with which to modify it. I remember the heady moment when you suddenly knew how a data field worked, or after a whole night of hunting with a hex editor the data you wanted appeared, and the sheer giddy thrill of discovering new knowledge and seeing it implemented right there, like a physical mark on the world.

I recognize this has been a long and tangential exposition, so if you've read any of it thank you for indulging me. Another glimpse of that low level assembly, like the smell of home after a very long time away, brings back so many vivid memories.
Note these tests were run on Python 2.2 which makes the results old enough to almost certainly be invalid. Last time I checked, straight string concatenation was faster than everything else for the types of inputs I was dealing with.
I still have it, at least on my laptop where I use classic maps.
Just rent kit. I needed a high end LeCroy DSO a while back. These fuckers are £18000. Leased one for a month for £700.
"I almost feel like the using the internet is the same as traveling to the US, which is something I would never ever do."

Seriously, you're so terrified of traveling to the US? Give me a break man, the UK government has done plenty of scary things and have been complicit and willful participants in the sort of surveillance the NSA is conducting. Are you hiding under your bed at night then, because if you're scared just to travel in the US I would feel you should be just as terrified living in your own country.

I'm going to be in the UK in a few weeks, maybe I should be concerned I'll be detained for 9 hours without access to a lawyer and my laptop, phone, and other electronics confiscated for no reason other then some nebulous pretense that I could be associated with terrorists?

While I'm seriously concerned about the what the NSA is doing some of the language I've seen here borders a bit on the ridiculous. I don't think anyone should legitimately terrified to the point of not wanting to travel in any of these places quite yet, as opposed to lets say Eygpt, where there are more real dangers and a seriously corrupt government and police state. A bit more on the rational side figuring out which encryption technologies the NSA has compromised (http://bit.ly/17botWf) and not using them might be a more valuable use of your time.
A location picker right from the menu bar would be nice. VyprVPN does that (Not to say that it's a great app).
It's true. You'd expect, given Apple's emphasis on native apps and the importance of tie-in to its ecosystem, that they'd do everything they can to handicap both Safari and UIWebView. But in fact they're both superior to anything Google's providing with the possible exception of very bleeding edge Chrome Beta.

Google's neglect of Android's WebView doesn't really jibe with their claim of pushing the web forward.
Is there a ChatRoulette clone in HTML5?
A precursor to the compilers class is the Formal Automata one. This is very useful in understanding fundamental computation models (what is computation, why, how can we do it etc..). I was recently reading [1] to refresh some concepts and found it to be more engaging than some of the older books on the topic.

[1] http://www.valorebooks.com/textbooks/automata-theory-and-app...
I've never seen that kind of huge queries for OLTP (online transaction processing) apps, but I've written ~1000 line SQL queries for off line batch jobs. Especially with the recent popularity of Hive that allows UDFs written in Java, one can do wonders with SQL.

One thing SQL really helps is it force you to think "data first". Instead of thinking algorithms, step by step what you want to do, it makes you think along the line: what data I got and what output I want to get out of it, not unlike functional programming, but with more focus on data sets.
"The Godmother of Silicon Alley," Red Burns (1925-2013)
Scipy 2013 Tutorials. Awesome workshops on ml and data manipulation in python.
Right now it's in Preferences, under Transporter. But we do plan to add your favorite locations directly to the menu for easy access. Thanks!
A very old article from 2004 (please edit the title). The tests are only for cpython2 and for a very old one.
The answer is clear.. culture. and thats not only in japan

This is neocolonialism kind of thought pure and simple..
why instead of asking why country X dont have the same cultural values of country Z (as if country Z have some sort of superior values), maybe whe should ask what county X really needs? and what is its own natural path?!

different cultures SHOULD follow different paths, and thats a good thing...

did you ask if country X has something to teach to country Z? im sure it has..

why the senior culture of japan, of respect to the older people is inferior to the arrogant youth culture that doesnt have any respect for the older and marginalize them?

The sad history of ocidental intervention to conquer and profit of the oriental japan in the 1800´s, anihilizing its milenar culture, and the crush of the samurai class by the newly born ocidental-like army has nothing to teach us?

The japanese people are more happy now than before?

its alrigth to ask about the startup culture of country X, but lets take care of the moral tone of superiority, like if some culture could be granted as superior to any other..

we should know better by now.. we need ways to make different cultures to flourish in its own way and path..
the right thing to ask is.. "what can the values of my culture do to help the culture of country X to flourish without them to loose their cultural identity?"

instead of "hey you guys why are you guys are not like us, if what we are are better?"
You should write isolated libraries of business logic, not bake it into your data layer.
> annnnd then the database technology changes, and your benchmark results of three years ago are now actively hosing you

Why would you use the benchmarks based on a technology you don't use? Continuous Integration is another word for "everything is a technology, even code" so your benchmarks are re-run every build and there's no problem.

PosgreSQL has efficient and DB-specific bitwise operations, but if you switch to MySQL they don't work at all.
Show HN: Bootstrap In Practice, my ebook for starters
pg, will accepted non-profits get that, too? (Guessing not.)
I have not seen anything that comes close (other than CGI scripts) from either the system admin side or the client code side. I would love to know if other folks are addressing this. The closest (well, other than Perl) is some of the tooling surrounding Java deployment.
In order to get into an MS program would I need to do a BS in CS or just do the prerequisites I am missing. Off the top of my head I know that I am missing Calc 2, Calc 3, Linear Algebra, Algorithms, and Operating Systems. Does it matter where I do the prerequisites? I imagine I could just do the maths at a community college.
Thanks for the read, will probably switch to KeePass then.
I don't get the same numbers on Pingdom at all... Main page loads in around 0.6 seconds for me (from Amsterdam, which won't be the fastest). With all external scripts (Persona + Olark) we're talking around 3-4 seconds...

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/d6MDaV/https://www.bitballoo...

That said. Our homepage is just part of the Rails 4 app powering BitBalloon. The static websites you host with us will be a lot faster...
You're not actually disagreeing with my point, but I'm not going to engage in a conversation that begins with an ad hominem.
Here you can also find the table of contents: http://www.williamghelfi.com/blog/2013/09/06/bootstrap-in-pr...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5966377
Interestingly enough, this is pretty much the example given for the timemit module:

http://docs.python.org/2/library/timeit.html

Results:

$ python -m timeit '"-".join(str(n) for n in range(100))'

10000 loops, best of 3: 40.3 usec per loop

$ python -m timeit '"-".join([str(n) for n in range(100)])'

10000 loops, best of 3: 33.4 usec per loop

$ python -m timeit '"-".join(map(str, range(100)))'

10000 loops, best of 3: 25.2 usec per loop
aside from the "manifesto" angle, this could be
a help-wanted ad seeking an intern web-designer.

-bowerbird
Yeah, worrying about being thought of as a crazy person is precisely what's prevented me from trying to contact any professors, because I'd imagine they have to deal with that sort of thing pretty often: outsiders bothering them with unscientific pet theories. That's why it's frustrating not having credentials.

Attending seminars is a good idea. Thank you. I wonder if I should call up universities and ask for info regarding any computer graphics related seminars / events. It seems like those would be very uncommon, but it's probably my only chance.

I have no contacts because I was mercilessly harassed throughout highschool and leaped at the opportunity to drop out and write software for a living. So I have no idea how to network. Showing up and saying, "Hey, would you be interested in chatting about computer graphics theory?" seems like it'd earn me strange looks.

I just moved to Chicago, so I was hoping University of Chicago has some sort of computer graphics program, and that I can figure out some way of becoming involved with it.
I didn't say vaccines cause autism, but thanks for regurgitating the usual non-conversation at me.

If you would like to discuss the idea that vaccines can pull the trigger on particular children who are born with a loaded gun, then maybe we can have a constructive conversation.
The last big outbreak of polio in the US was among the Amish, in the 1970s.

Historically, members of Christian Science have been against vaccinations (and other forms of medical treatment) since the Compulsory Vaccination Act in England in 1855. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Science#Avoidance_of_... .
OP here... accessing the underlying SQLite database is very easy by using Core Data. Compare it with using the SQLite C API directly for one second: As things grow you will have more or less the same "problems" with the plain C API when it comes to concurrency. Have a look at FMDB (a popular SQLite wrapper written in Objective-C). You will see a class called FMDatabaseQueue which tries to simplify concurrency with SQLite. It follows the same "pattern" as concurrency typed contexts.

So I argue that you have the exact same problems when using Core Data that you have when using the raw C API for SQLite - conceptually. The benefit of using Core Data is a nicer API and other features that you would have to reimplement...
Move things to the DB if the calculation aggregates data (the input is much larger than the output), to avoid materializing data and shipping it around. (Map-reduce is a subtype of this.) Otherwise don't.
Would you mind sharing how you configured Alfred to let you switch your VPN endpoint?
I believe that the current most efficient way of doing this is

''.join(map(str, range(n)))
What happened to sciencebasedmedicine.org?

Does anyone else see an auto-generated placeholder spam page linking to "Naturopathic Nutrition", "Faith Healing", and "Homeopathic Treatment" when they go there?
Not really. It shows different numbers it seems:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/7/4704708/optimized-for-iphon...
Current design was build by developers, not designers and will be renewed once the professional design is ready.
We put all our efforts on backend and storage subsystem development and completely forgot about our temporary public website.
Site images were taken from various public stock image services, I hope we didn't violate any rights by using these images.
Yes, lots of high school students are insufferably pompous and selfish. They are just growing from children into young adults.

A high school head teacher should be able to handle this.

Also, as an adult, you should also be able to handle this without becoming annoyed and judgemental.
So SSDs are bad for server loads... what secret sauce does Digital Ocean have that Linode doesn't? Did they write their own storage layer that's doing something cool?
Harvard Business School Case Study: Gender Equity
"who failed to contribute as much philanthropically as people would have liked to have seen"

Given some of the stuff coming out after his death, it seems to be more of the case he didn't satisfy people's need to hear about it as opposed to doing it. And since he died very early, we will really never know what the final word would have been.

I guess I would be a horrible billionaire too, since my father taught me it is impolite and improper to brag about giving. I can see why Gates does it (publicity is needed to make his goals), but that is not always the case (and sometimes, it messes up what you try).
It does, thank you. For others, this is my solution for now:

set editor='mvim --nomru -f +<line> +"sil! call cursor(0, <column>)" <file> -c "au VimLeave * !open -a Firefox"'
Google Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.pla...
But the larger context of this move was doing more with less. And Nginx just working with 4 instances and serving just as much, with a reduced average latency of page load, justified the move.

"More with less" here is a judgement call. You've increased the number of processes and subsystems that need to be managed (nginx + php_fpm), which is more. You've increased the context switching when dynamic requests need to be passed to another process and proxied through nginx. The communication between the frontend web server and php_fpm needs to be serialized in some fashion, so you're now incurring a greater than 1x cost in processing and parsing things like HTTP headers and the request (serializing and deserializing the data to pass that between the processes). It seems you're ignoring the actual cost of running dynamic PHP code because the cost has been moved out of the "web server", the thing that listens on port 80, and into something that isn't considered "a web server", but this is just a change in bookkeeping.

Do you know where that reduced average latency is coming from? Is it because nginx is serving static assets that would tie up an apache worker that could be running/serving PHP in apache? If so, you can do the same thing by offloading all your static asset serving to another server (or a completely external CDN, which has other extremely beneficial client-side advantages too) using apache too. That is, the choice of software here isn't as big a win as presented, it's the architecture of the ecosystem that is the big influence.

It's great that you found something that works better for your workload, and it's appropriate to use what works and not get bogged down in why all the time. But the way you've presented it doesn't indicate well that all the causes and effects are completely understood. And I think this ends up giving Apache a bad rap.
As stated, the check for updates is finally over HTTPS in the very latest build (333), but you do not verify the certificate in any way. So its essentially HTTP with obfuscation. This allows a malicious network to downgrade clients to build 332, where the check for updates is over plain HTTP and downloaded binaries are not verified.
Complementing the thought on sentence structures: 5 word sentences could be extracted from existing texts. Tagging them would give you the set of possible sentence structures.

Hopefully there wouldn't be too much trouble with ambiguous word types, e.g. green can be either an adj or noun.
Not enough data scientists, MIT expert tells Computing
I get it, Im expecting them to drop google voice any day now and I'm going to be pissed.
Are they trolling us?
I worked at RockYou.com in its heyday, which was when we had the #1 app on facebook, Superwall.

Superwall used exactly one of the strategies outlined in this article: Fix one of the pain points on a platform. The platform was Facebook, the pain point was sharing images and videos with your friends.

Facebook decided that sharing images and videos with your friends was a good idea, perhaps because they saw our success with it.

Superwall died. Rockyou pivoted into something totally different. A couple down-rounds of funding (I think).

"Take on the pain points of a platform" is usually referred to as "Don't try to beat the platform at being the platform".
From a straight performance perspective:

The rule of thumb is that DBs are bound on IO, so any calculation that you can get with the same amount of IO as returning the records is likely to be "free", and any calculation that requires more IO is likely to be "expensive" (unless that allows you to avoid IO by restricting returned records, avoiding future queries, etc. - it gets complicated fast).

So things like column-column calculations, simple aggregates, etc. are likely to be good ideas on the DB; for anything else It Depends.
Depends on your perspective, I guess. The difference between not knowing how to program and learning, say, ruby is a fair bit larger than the difference between knowing how to program in php and learning ruby.

Take php and ruby (two languages I happen to have used a fair bit both). If you're writing your typical web app, you'd probably use mysql for a database. That's the same. You talk http to the client - same. You want to parse xml? Probably going to use libxml underneath the covers. And so on. So yes, there's different libraries for the two, but there's also a lot that is shared.

As for different philosophies, they are both pretty much imperative languages. Php has a simpler object model than ruby and ruby has some fp features, such as co-routines, but by and large you write programs in the same style.

And different purposes? I'll dispute that. You pretty much use both languages for more or less the same things.

Mind you - I'm not saying they are exactly the same. Clearly they're not. But I'm saying the difference is in the nuances.

And while I do agree that ruby is a nicer language than php, I think the trend of treating it as if it was toxic is completely out of proportions.
This is how I am doing it. Currently working through CLRS, but I don't really like the lectures. Also taking Linear Algebra, which is just amazing, btw.

Others have suggested Coursera, but so far, I don't think it is prime time for those who are really serious. I've found that many of the classes are somewhat watered down and I feel as though I am reviewing concepts I already know instead of learning. Too bad there is no mention of EdX here. Their classes are much more intense, complete, and CS-heavy than anything I've seen from Coursera. The grading system is far superior as well. I wish EdX had more love, but maybe the problem is that it is too intense.

A note one SICP. There is so much in that book and it is certainly worth every moment. Just expect to grind long time with it. I wasn't sure how much I really learned from the book until I started making my own projects. I was quite astounded to see how much really did sink in and how much I just understood without any extra searching. I was also saddened to see how certain programming languages don't bend to the ideals found in that book.
Troubled LSU RB Hill likely to play in home opener
Cool food blog, not sure why it's on HN though.
A few of those actually look really tasty, which makes me feel kind of disgusted with myself.

Your food photography skills are really good, especially if those are "real food" and not totally prepped.
What a great article. I posted the mobile link because the full version was falling off the new page. Here's the full version, complete with nice D3 illustrations from our fellow hackers at the NYT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/education/harvard-case-stu...

The article happens to be about HBS, but I think some of the same lessons can be applied to our startups too.
Now can you figure out how to cook it and ship it to me?
Does join scan the entire input to know the exact size and allocate that at the start? Doesn't it do the usual thing for resizing and that is to double the capacity? A generator will save a temporary list, it will however result in a lot of overhead for the generator switches. It might be beneficial if the input is really big.
He forgot about all the robot fighting games, where you 'program' a robot (or tank) to fight other robots/tanks, such as: http://fightcodegame.com/ http://robocode.sourceforge.net/ http://www.nessbots.com/ and dozens of others: http://www.sumost.ca/steve/games/

Also, there are tools that make it easier for kids/beginners to create games, and in doing so learn programming, such as: http://www.playmycode.com/ http://pixieengine.com/ https://www.scirra.com/construct2

Some other LightBot-like games include Cargo-Bot, Robologic, and several others: http://breakoutmentors.com/kids-programming-resources/

There's ComputerCraft in Minecraft, etc.

And there's learning programming by modding games/simulations such as minecraft
Don't misread me. I'm not saying people shouldn't get vaccinated. All I'm saying is we have a pretty good idea what a "normal" non-vaccinated flu season looks like.

Of course getting vaccinated is the right thing to do, even if it's only partially effective. My dad has emphysema, so I know where you're coming from.
Mozilla Firefox OS App Manager.
> Is that not what we already do through welfare/benefit payments?

Not in France. Here, you're supposed to look for a job (and prove it). If you don't, no welfare for you.

I believe few countries have a welfare system that is conditioned on nothing else than near-zero revenue.