skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Video games and to a lesser extent television are stimulating, while most drugs are not.

What about 'stimulants' then, mmm? Oh wait, you were only talking about mental stimulation? Many actually do sharpen the mind. Nootropics? What about psychadelics or lesser psychoactives then? Oh wait, you don't consider those experiences 'stimulating'?

You put television above drugs? Psychoactives and similar experiences (eg. sensory deprivation) really are critical to the history of human cultures... in particular the emergence and development of visual art[1] and other forms of communication (glyphs, writing, dance...). Television and radio, for all their wonders, historically speaking do represent a johnny-come-lately, distributed programming channel for an (a)pathetic population of pliant, endebted, time-poor, couch-dwelling wageslaves subsisting on artifice and an everpresent supply of tangential mental wankery.

I agree fully with 'all things in moderation, including moderation' as suggested by your first sentence, but I disagree strongly with your conclusion.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtymYxADpnE
Depending on the app server you are using, it should be able to cache results of a query no problem. I've never considered this to be an issue :)
ie Gartner's Magic Quadrant...
40,332?

"Yahoo says U.S. sought data on every active user account in 2013"
Based on the questions you asked, you seem to be suffering from feature creep and over-speccing.
I second the notion to not decrease your prices. There may be a few people that have the time and are willing to produce their own alternative product, but iDoneThis is definitely worth the cost (probably even more).

As with many subscription products, I feel that iDoneThis will become the product that business owners get used to paying each month.
Programmer's Day - 13 September
Kind of funny that the user who posted the top ranking link -- the news of Steve Jobs death -- that was just about the only thing he posted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=patricktomas
Hi. I'm a man, and I'll explain exactly what you're missing. There are no different perspectives that you need to try to understand.

This was a gutless, sexist, little shitfest in front of a tech audience in a supposedly professional forum, not someone sneaking a peak at a woman.

Do you and the rest of the geniuses who are unable to read the article and who are commenting below about "evolution" and other horseshit really, really not get this?

And to any other eternal 14 year olds out there who think there is anything "hilarious" about this, please understand that if you behave like the morons cited you will have an increasingly difficult time getting a job anywhere after a stunt like this. And many of us will make it our business to get in your face quite a bit more than that.
The article does not argue that anyone needs to do mathematics. It just attempts to explain why mathematics tends to be hard for otherwise smart and motivated programmers.

That being said, fft is a divide and conquer approach to multiplying the dft matrix by a vector, and it achieves nlogn time by taking advantage of the special structure of the dft matrix.
The whole point of end-to-end encryption is to defeat such hooks.
Most modern parser generators are capable of more than the author gives credit for. Bison/Flex, for example, can handle most of the issues mentioned (feedback from the parser back to the lexer for context-sensitivity, Flex start conditions for grammars within grammars, %prec to explicitly resolve conflicts).
A project would need to have a very simple grammar or very stringent performance requirements to consider writing a parser by hand. "Parser generators can't handle my grammar" is usually a bad reason, although there are the rare exceptions.
> If a female made an app that included men's butts, would people have the same reaction?

When the jester mocks the king it's funny. When the king mocks the jester it's just mean.

The situation is inherently asymmetric, which makes but-what-if-they-were-(men/white/straight/etc.) arguments facile at best and disingenuous at worst.
Trello (trello.com) is entirely "Cardesign"
Why is corporate espionage and sabotage by our guys something that is permissible?

The article says nothing about sabotage
I've hired on oDesk and Elance and agree that managing remote workers is a skill and you need to be on the look out for scammers. I do all my jobs on Elance because they have a good project based setup where you only pay when a milestone is completed. I hire all my freelancers on a project basis 1st and then shift them to hourly if they are reliable. I've also found that Elance to have more US based freelancers to choose from.

One thing that bugs me is that none of them have good apps - you would think they would figure that out!
> There is still no computer that is efficient at winning no-limit hold-em.

... and there won't be for a long time yet, as all hobbyist and academic efforts have been focused towards a consistently winning limit bot, because of the reason you outlined.
I love the dichotomy.

You're either some repressive, woman-hating beast (or woman with stockholm syndrome) or a open minded advocate of completely free sexual relations. There's a good reason why we've gravitated towards monogamy (at least as an ideal) -- it works.

Relatively modern communities that have (19th century utopian groups like the Onieda community are a great example) tried a more "free love" approach tend to veer off into chaos, or require their an repressive social structures to remain intact. People are a pain in the ass, and dealing with a web of sexual and intimate relationships is very difficult.

There's a middle ground between Catholic teachings and chimpanzee mating behavior. Most of us manage to muddle through somehow.
Is the score scaled in any way, or just most points?
vworker (formerly: rentacoder) was great while it lasted. Honest, talented engineers.

When they got bought by freelancer, everything became way more scammy. It also became much more difficult to interview potential hires. Lame.
Agreed: we're stuck with a byzantine tax code for the foreseeable future, and it will continue to be monumentally unfair. But that fact doesn't stop us from taking real property value out of the equation altogether, at least in unincorporated areas.

Would you at least agree that things don't have to be quite so complicated once you get out of the city?
I'm not sure how you're collecting this data but any chance you could do (points)/(# of [registered or active] users at the time it was posted)?
It's also rather funny (or sad) that a lot of the posts are about the death of a person/project/business.
Statement by DNI James R. Clapper on Allegations of Economic Espionage
You're right that it doesn't break the bank. It just feels overpriced.

I am not underestimating the work/effort that goes into creating it, I am very aware of the effort required. My primary motivation for using it in the first place was because I was too busy to write something like this myself, and for that the price is fair - my time is worth more right now.

But I don't think a system which sends out email reminders and logs daily text updates is $600 per year software, sorry.

The author is clearly perfectly entitled to keep the price at whatever level he likes, and I wish him all the luck in his endeavour.
Just check some real, no bullshit, modern research like this:
https://sites.google.com/site/gallantlabucb/publications/nis...

Who do you think are these researchers? More ML or more neuroscience?

///These disciplines are very relevant to understanding how memories are stored. More relevant than neuroscience in fact. Say, if you'd study modern computer vision, you will have some understanding about mechanisms in the works of human visual subsystem; about how humans memorize, recognize and associate images and image sequences. You will not have that understanding, if you'd study modern (basic) neuroscience.
Worries That Microsoft Is Too Tricky to Manage
Two quick points of feedback:

First - not a particularly important detail - but please do your site a favor and get rid of the very tacky rocket ship clip art. I don't know why every SaaS MVP decides to abuse that image.

Second, this: "Status reports suck. We make them suck less."

That's not a professional sales pitch. Unless you're trying to sell to college teenagers (who wouldn't buy the product to begin with), it comes across as almost a parody or joke.

Also, saying you make the focus and point of your product suck less, is an extraordinarily bad way to try to sell a customer. It's a sales pitch from a negative. Never do it.
I'll need some convincing before I believe there are civil libertarians in either party. Empirically, whoever supports the same party as the President supports greater executive powers while the other party opposes them.
> Shouldn't the goal to be as slow as possible (but no slower than a user will tolerate)?

Slowness is an idiotic goal: slow on slower hardware is fast on faster hardware and slow on faster hardware is unusable on slower hardware. The goal should be a minimum level of security that is still practically secure, and something without a backdoor/easily churnable with adequate hardware. Do you think anything that the majority use today is adequate? I don't. So I think this is all bullshit.
Google has their own similar internal software called Snippets that instead of nightly sends out an email once a week, collects responses and sends out a digest along with a web app interface

explanation of software:

http://tech.pro/blog/1490/how-it-works-google-s-snippets

some former google engineer rolled out an open source version of the software that with some factoring, nightly cron jobs instead of weekly and potentially a cleaner user interface for the web app could prolly fit your needs

https://github.com/kushal/snippets
I find myself questioning if US war on terror is any different from terror they claim to fight.

Odd that. The NSA are frankly getting more scary than any known threat. Whatever else is out there, sunlight is the best disinfectant. Subverting privacy free-speech and the open-exchange of information is not the road forward.
Help build the next gen of BI at Chartio
Would most people want to be gods? Video games are more fun without using cheat codes.
Was it okay to let Titstare present at TC Disrupt?
Co-founding a company doesn't hurt in becoming CTO.

(Disclosure - I know Ian, the author of the article, and a few Artillery employees)
Texas laws regarding property and property taxes seem rather un-Texan.
tl;dr: Whatcha gonna do about it?
http://mystartuphas30daystolive.tumblr.com/

this one?
Here's the report, in English, that aired on Globo tonight. It details most everything you've mentioned.

http://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2013/09/nsa-documents...
Boxee Forums Hacked, Boxee Devices Offline
It looks like Boxee devices ping *.ping.boxee.tv to detect online presence. If this URL goes down (may be due to the hack) Boxee refuses to open up internet-connected apps on the device even if you have an internet connection.

https://twitter.com/search?q=boxee&src=typd&mode=realtime
NSA Documents Show United States Spied Brazilian Oil Giant
"if it was backdoored by the NSA" - are you going to assume it will stay backdoored by only the NSA? A vulnerability is a vulnerability.
> I personally find these obscure technical (and highly abstract) explanations often far more easy to understand.

I do, too, but I also know that nontechnical, nonmathematical people are turned off by a quick immersion in mathematical reasoning. I have a theory (not just mine by any means) that if the beauty of mathematics could be presented before the required discipline and attention to detail, we might lose fewer possible future mathematicians. As things stand, the public level of innumeracy is depressing.

> On the other hand: when using "simple" definitions, you always have to worry whether, if something sounds strange, it is because you haven't understood it or if the "simple" explanation was simply bad.

Yes, very true, one must be very careful to get it right while making it simple. I personally think a persuasive layman's explanation of something mathematical can go wrong in so many ways, and the more persuasive, the more room for error. Consider all the crazy "explanations" of quantum theory out there -- the more popular ones have no connection to reality.
Here is the thing.

I would be willing to wager that there are backdoors (aka vulnerabilities) that NSA doesn't know about. The whole stack is sufficiently complex that there isn't much you can prove about it, with or without malicious intent included in the calculation.
That's about how many people still use Yahoo.
Modifying a DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem for high performance
I don't think it's fair to say some idea is not applicable because you don't know of an application. Number theory was like that before the advent of computers, and I'm a firm believer that there are thoughts that cannot be thunk until the right framework comes along to allow it.

That being said, a lot of these pure subjects do have applications. For example: algebraic geometry (the crown jewel of pure mathematics, my colleagues would have be believe) has applications to tons of industrial problems in the form of solving systems of polynomial equations (see homotopy continuation). Algebraic geometry has also been applied to robot motion planning, etc.

Descriptive set theory is applied in functional analysis and in ergodic theory, which in turn is applied to statistical physics. Not to mention that descriptive set theory is the pure-logic equivalent of computational complexity theory, and that there is potential to connect the two fields and resolve some big open problems (though it's doubtful that P vs NP will be resolved this way).

And almost all of modern physics is based on more or less modern mathematics: tensor analysis and other flavors of linear algebra, lie theory, etc. Algebraic topology is starting to find some traction in the subfield of persistent homology, which aims to study high-dimensional data sets in the context of homological algebra. I even gave a talk earlier this year on the concrete attempts people have made to apply persistent homology to real-world problems [1]. It's still an extremely young field, but shows some promise.

I'll give you that mathematics is extremely abstract, because I believe it. But to say that it's not applicable and being applied wherever possible is a bit naive. And to say that it's only 200 year old mathematics is to ignore the most applicable fields which did not exist even a hundred years ago: combinatorial optimization, mathematical computer science, and modern statistics and probability theory.

[1] http://jeremykun.com/2013/04/27/persistent-homology-talk-at-...
What total nonsense. These "cards" just represent what a smartphone can reasonably show. As anyone who's ever tried to read a web "page" on a phone will attest, the format is less than ideal, except possibly on the bigger phablets. Short snippets of content (the Readers Digest version) is just a convenient format, see google weather, tweets, pins etc for examples. Think of it this way, search results are a list pointing to a page, a card is an intermediate format, better than the list item, less than the page.
Property taxes are, effectively, rent paid to the local government by people who otherwise think that they own said property. Fail to pay it, and you get evicted. It is quite a racket already, but combine this with crony deals with private companies, and corruption shows its ugly face. It is all "legal", since the ones carrying out the scheme also happen to make the rules.
Appreciate the feedback. The icons are all stock flatui. As I said, I built it in a week, and launched it two weeks ago. I'm working on a makeover, but prioritized getting the app polished ahead of the marketing site.

I disagree on the tagline, though. I'm not saying that our product sucks less. I'm saying that it makes doing status reports suck less. You may prove me wrong in the long run, and I'd be happy to be wrong on this, but my initial instinct is to keep it the same.

Thanks though! And sorry to the idonethis team. I don't want to hijack your thread.
"Potential adversary" means anyone that may not acquiesce to the requests of our government, and/or form military partnerships with rival major powers.

Every nation thinks about defense in the same semi-paranoid (or "neorealist") mindset. It's a consequence of a dangerous existence in an purely anarchic system.
Apologies, I made a poorly directed joke at the new UI of twitter. I'm honestly not against it, personally, but I know it has garnered the ire of quite a few of my friends.
Rip Blu-ray to Samsung Galaxy SII
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I think this question is worthy of an "Ask HN" with one game per answer and people upvoting from there. Hope you post it as an "Ask HN" soon. :-)
We have a few prints by Scott Hansen (of iso50.com & Tyco), an old Esso sign, and the cover of SICP under the glass of the workbench.

I also built a screenprint station in hopes of making a few more prints. Motivation comes from all the broken/failed prototypes laying about, not so much by witty sayings on paper.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/42388170@N06/9704231493/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/42388170@N06/9704231633/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/42388170@N06/9707467188/
"Today, in 2013, a trivial software bug is all it takes to allow the author of a web page to upload and run code in your browser process. That is a consequence of the architecture we run on."

Technically I hate the glued together, shit-stack that is the organically evolved web. One part of me thinks we have devolved from the Big Iron/VMS days.

"Are we at any point in the near future going to have fully transparent hardware? No we are not."

Open hardware isn't cost effective, and economically and politically probably is repressed. There's darn few viable projects that I can find on the internet and a few underground systems that are borderline crackpot. There might be a better market for these systems today than there was a year ago. There seems to be a growing mistrust in commercial software, but there is no substitute for commercial hardware.

"We're going to have to get over the NSA stuff, at least for the most part."

I have to go to the office tomorrow and pretend that I work on secure systems for sensitive data. :)
Wow, the amount of death posts.
This seems to remind me of the SHE from Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End. Obviously we are a ways away from that, but this is an interesting step in that direction.
You know, this might just be my personal reading of these words. When I hear "apparent" I don't necessarily think of its connection with the visual, I think "evident", in spite of the etymological connection with the visual Latin root. But to me, "appear" cries out for a visual interpretation, much more so than for "apparent".

Again, I think this may be splitting hairs -- I might be making too much of this.

"Apparent" in a thesaurus: http://thesaurus.com/browse/apparent

"appear" in a thesaurus: http://thesaurus.com/browse/appear

Quite a difference.
There's an easier way to find this list.

https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=+&sortby=point...

But, it's cool to see old posts :)
Changing the past while at the same time vanishing yourself from existence is still changing the past... but I will consider your proposed remedy when it comes up.
Anyone wanting to play around with Ansible should really check out Vagrant too. Quickly spin up Vagrant instances (VirtualBox, etc VMs) in seconds to test things. I use Vagrant heavily to test puppet manifests/modules, and have thrown together several screenscasts about Vagrant @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/4-vagrant and one about Learning Puppet with Vagrant @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/8-learning-puppet-with-vag... but you can do the same things with Ansible.

See Vagrant & Ansible docs @ http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/provisioning/ansible.html
The tour will be up tomorrow. Agree on adding a sign up button up top. Thx.
For anyone who wants this for themselves, here's a Python script [0] that generates similar output [1]. It doesn't have the nice Google Cache feature from ajani's version, but it does produce static HTML which some may prefer.

[0] https://gist.github.com/tav/5545779

[1] http://tav.espians.com/temp/hacker-news-top-1000.html
Thinking About iPhone Pricing, and What's Up with the Fingerprint Scanner?
Generated parsers are seldom the most efficient parsers; they can't use many tricks that can make hand-written parsers much faster, because they need to cope with the full generality of the language class they're targeting.

Maintainability is a moot point. The more complex your language, the bigger a maintenance benefit you get from a parser generator, providing it's expressive enough. For parsing C++ outside of a commercial compiler, I'd look at a GLR parser, for which the tables would most likely be tool-created. (In a commercial compiler, I'd be back to hand-written again.)

The value of being able to change your grammar and have your parser follow suit instantaneously isn't high past the prototyping stage. Other things will consume the parse tree, and depending on the tool, the parse tree's shape may be driven by the parse rules (ANTLR) or the parser actions may be more or less deeply embedded in the grammar and require refactoring themselves (most other tools). The downstream consumers of the structures almost certainly need modification too, since it's not likely you're just changing syntax sugar. Whereas if you have a hand-written parser, you can minimize the work needed to adjust downstream. You have more latitude for engineering.

It's great to use tools to validate a grammar, to prototype parsing it, and perhaps even for lightweight work like analysis. But when it's essential you have a 100% accurate semantic analysis, great error messages, excellent performance, deep tooling integration (e.g. IDE code completion), the more control you need over the parsing processes. It's closer to the critical path of success for your target market, and generators are too generic.

For me, parser generators work well for a certain range of applications. Given a range of complexity, with 1 being a date format parser and 10 being a commercial compiler with IDE integration, parser generators work well somewhere around 3 to 7. At the lower end, their costs in terms of integration, third-party dependencies etc. outweigh the complexity of the problem they're solving. At the higher end, you need a lot more out of the tool than it is designed to give you, and working around it causes more pain than anything you're saving.

I was a front-end engineer on the Delphi compiler for 6 years. I don't know of any major commercial compiler that uses a parser generator. Almost all use hybrid recursive descent.
My uncle was an early adopter of these sorts of things for his rice farm. When I saw the movie "Cars" for the first time and the film portrayed Tractors as "dumb" I thought to myself, if you really knew what went into a modern tractor you would not portray it as "dumb" in an animated movie.
What article was there? I just saw that there was a video that was unavailable.
The author works for Mozilla (he's their security module peer), and is therefore focused on Firefox OS - which aims for low-end smartphones. Hence the reason for focusing on older ARM. Hope that helps.