skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But that's really misleading, as the energy involved in increases in velocity go as a square, whereas increases in height are linear.

In fact, if you go to 600 km height then you double the PE change, but don't much change the KE requirement. I'm not sure your comment would really help someone who doesn't already know what's going on, but I'd appreciate replies from people who are trying to understand more about this. Maybe I'm just the wrong audience.
Instead of choosing one over the other, why not choose both? I specialise in both PHP and Python. For web projects on commodity hardware, nothing beats PHP, especially when used with powerful frameworks such as Zend, Yii or Drupal. For installable programs or scripting, Python works well with wxPython.

>> Quoted from article: "It was around this point that I decided I'd rather be an unemployed Pythonist than an employed LAMP developer."

Sorry man, I'd rather be an employed LAMP developer, but with a few side projects in Python. It's just a programming language, not a religion. :D
MySQL in Amazon RDS: A benchmark with YCSB ...revamped
"WCF, AppFabric and ASP.Net" happen to give you an awful lot of that sort of infrastructure for free, I rarely directly use anything async in my web apps either. I do wonder how you're managing responsiveness in the forms apps though?

Where the async syntax really shines is dealing with external services. If you're calling a lot of database, web services, sockets etc it can make your life easier.
I'd also suggest everyone to give ProcessWire a go. It has a really nice API and works nicely behind Varnish.
> (If machines are smarter than human)

At this point, you have intelligence explosion, and current economics means squat. The machine will take over the world, killing us all in the process (we're made of atoms it can use for its purposes, whatever they are).

Or it can build a paradise, if it has been programmed to do exactly that. Good luck with that, since it's not exactly easy to describe "paradise" with programmatic precision.
https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=towel.blinkenl...
async doesn't really give you anything new you couldn't do before, just nicer syntax for composing it all. As you say you've already found other ways to compose your asynchronous flows for you.
This is what I am going to buy my 4-yr old son when he turns 5. The look of wonder in his eyes, the thoughts that must be buzzing in his head when I explain things he cannot see. Buy him a microscope.

But also get him something he can socialize with - like a rugby ball or cricket bat, whatever for whatever sport you play in your area.
That's a very interesting link, the diagram of the earth moon system explains it quite well, I think. I just googled and found this article that reports the same effect between the earth and the sun
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17228-why-is-the-earth...
I don't miss where the windows key is because I rarely have a need to press it. Linux is my primary OS. I also have the extended Truly Ergonomic, and I think I could remap the extra key to windows if I so desired.

I'm not sure exactly what the activation pressure is, but I don't think it's much off 35g. I think the exact number is in the specs on the website.

The 'cd' thing I can type with one hand, but that's because I type using dvorak.
You raise a question, but there's a missing detail in your input - how many machines (and what kind) you are using.

If you have 80,000,000 machines serving 80,000,000 requests - that's not very impressive. Even if you have 80 servers, that's extremely unimpressive.

If you can do all of that on 1 server, then YOU probably don't need async. In fact, unless you're wasting time, 80,000,000 averages less than 10 requests/second, and peak is likely less than 100 requests/second. That's really not much - I do that with interpreted python.

But every language does need facility for async processing.

edit: it's 1000/second, not 10/second, as everyone down here corrected. Apparently, I cannot math before coffee. (I don't drink coffee). Apologies.

fun mnemonic: the number of seconds in a day is 864e2. (eight-six-four-(e)-two).
To be honest our webforms app is tiny and only does basic integration tasks between legacy software and our web app so there are no points it can block.

We do everything synchronously with respect to databases. Integration is all docoupled into workflows.
Actually, I find the shift keys are in a superb place. While I was used to having control there, now that I work primarily in Vim, I have more of a need to modify with shift rather than control. The new location of shift is actually one of my favourite changes!

I agree that good typing discipline is important. Luckily, I am very home row focused, as I made a lot of effort to type like that when I made the switch from qwerty to dvorak.
What's Coming in PhpStorm 7
Nicotine and alcohol are less expensive and easier to come by. That's certainly a factor.

Also drug addicts are generally addicted to more than one substance.
I found this true for a while, but I tend to alternate quite a lot. I work directly on my laptop from home, with a normal layout - I occasionally shift in the wrong place, but that's about it. I have bigger problems sharing keyboards as I don't type qwerty, but I type dvorak. That switch takes a lot more mental processing.
I would incentive the kids to make sport instead of coding.
Very good text. I'm struggling with the same problems right now, typing this from a beautiful medieval city in Istria, Croatia, and trying to look at my laptop and not at the wonderful landscapes and Adriatic sea on the horizon. It's harder than it might sound and extremely distracting. And I have to sit here because it's the only place around with a decent wifi. Self-discipline is a b__ch...
Comet Collisions In Solar System May Support Life By Creating Amino Acid
Building a Recommendation Engine
Writing Maintainable Tests for Backbone Views
VLM compared it to the situation in Detroit not the US. Thus the relevant statistic would be the share of auto industry to Detroit's GDP (which my google-fu failed to find)
BIG WARNING - THIS IS NOT THE BEST WAY TO INSTALL GNUPG! IT DOES NOT
VERIFY ANY (REAL) SIGNATURES!!

FYI - Debian unstable (aka sid) has a pacakge, and there is a backport to Ubuntu Saucy. I'm not sure what the best/easiest way to automatically pull down sources for a newer release than the release you're running in Ubuntu (there might be some apt-add magick for source mirrors?) -- but since it is up at launchpad[1], you can:

a) try the binaries
b) build the debs yourself (aka manually "backport"):

mkdir tmp/gnupg -p
cd tmp/gnupg
sudo apt-get build-dep gnupg
sudo aptitude install dpkg-dev #This might get pulled
#in by the line above
wget https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/saucy/+source/gnupg/1.4.14-1ubuntu1/+files/gnupg_1.4.14.orig.tar.gz \
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/saucy/+source/gnupg/1.4.14-1ubuntu1/+files/gnupg_1.4.14-1ubuntu1.debian.tar.gz \
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/saucy/+source/gnupg/1.4.14-1ubuntu1/+files/gnupg_1.4.14-1ubuntu1.dsc

tar xzf gnupg_1.4.14.orig.tar.gz
cd gnupg-1.4.14
tar xzf gnupg_1.4.14-1ubuntu1.debian.tar.gz
cd debian
dpkg-buildpackage
cd ..
sudo dpkg -i gpgv_1.4.14-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb \
gnupg_1.4.14-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb \
gnupg-curl_1.4.14-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb

Note: This might not be a good idea with a package that is as imprtant
as gnupg (among other things apt package lists are signed with gnupg!).
And as you can also see above, the packages are not signed (explicitly,
even if they do come in via https...).

At least this built fine under wheezy -- but I haven't tried installing them (I'm not that worried that someone will snoop my workstation cache..).

So not really meant for advice on how to get an upstream gnupg -- but
useful with a few other well-behaved programs. So big warning,
practice safe hex and all that!
Man, you should choose better your target audience...
If you're interested in a scam, check out Ripple...
Goes back quite a ways. There's John Brunner's 1975 classic Shockwave Rider. See also early cyberpunk stuff (Gibson, Sterling et al): http://project.cyberpunk.ru/lib/. More recently, Stephenson Snow Crash, Stross Halting State.

Also thoroughly enjoyed both Cory's works, esp. LB.
> Atwood designed the CODE keyboard as the answer to all of the touch-screen typing we now do.

He designed a physical keyboard to replace a touch screen keyboard (which arguably no hacker would use for coding) that mimics a... physical keyboard?
Possibly a raspberry pi (with camera)? A fun project might be to make a bird house webcam or similar.
We're finding this out in a lot of places. The key issue is variability. Larger sample sizes usually lead to less variability, which means flow-based systems will hold up better.

If you've broken your work out into tasks, instead of stories, presumably you have a lot of them, and they're mostly the same size over a large set. So sure, should work fine.

If, however, you have a small number of highly-variable chunks of work, then flow-based systems fail. It all depends on the nature of the item pool.
>This begs the question: you really need async in the language?

Or even delegates. Or interfaces. Or LINQ.

Basically you could write the same thing in C.

Or assembly.
Why not both? It is true that maybe 10 years it's a bit early for serious coding, but I don't see anything wrong with it, when my time came, I was like 16 and I always practised sport(still do) had time to code and for friends.
In ASIC RTL, two really important things should be considered. DFT implementable and synthesis friendly. Verilog with those two can only compete. In that sense, ARM is one of the best at it.

I am not sure if a static checker meant 'lint' but Verilog writer can be better being good at static check and static checker at next end.
I totally agree with the addition of a social element!
My favorite 'hacker' story (It's really a phreaker story, but for the most part about the more benign, cooler parts of that culture.) is Evan Doorbell's three hour long "How Evan became a phone phreak" which starts at a place that's very rare for a hacker story, the beginning. (Compare The Matrix, where when we first meet Neo he's already searching for Morpheus in the opening scene.)

Evan recorded all the old phone sounds. (This is the man who brought you The Sounds of Long Distance) He includes these in the program as he talks, so it's almost like you took a time machine back to the seventies and stood by him with a pay phone as he tells the story.

He also makes sure to explain things in the order that he figured them out, which is a subtle detail that makes the story a lot more interesting.

The only thing I don't like about this entire series is that he never finished it. You never actually get to the point where Evan figures out how to Bluebox.

Available here:

ftp://ftp.wideweb.com/GroupBell/

(It's the "howBPhreak" files)
Automating the hell out of it
It's doing symbolic equivalence checking via an SMT solver, iirc.
Ask HN: What should I do to make this product viral?
Recently we have revamped http://www.joognu.com and its Android app.

Joognu.com allows you to capture, weave and store memories with your child and gift them when your child grows up.

It's fundamentally private. You store those memories here which you would not like to share on Facebook. But the product essentially has to have some viral features as well so that more and more parents become aware about it.

Keeping that in mind we have given few features like below:

- Parents can selectively share individual memories (photos, videos, etc.) on Facebook
- Parents can share the entire timeline with their relatives and friends.
- Relatives and friends can only see those memories which are kept open by Parents on the timeline.
- Relatives and friends can like those memories and comment on them.
- Parents can invite people to get more free space (We give 5GB free space to start with)

We are getting some virality due to these features but not enough.

What other features / benefits you suggest we should provide to make Joognu.com more viral?
What I meant was that for h_1%, you're going to wind up with probabilities in the area of like, 1.2e-34, very quickly, if the coin is a fair one. The update process is adjusting via multiplication, and for a really bad hypothesis, that's going to bring its probability dramatically close to zero without that many trials. Even though the absolute difference between 1e-4 and 1-e34 hypothesis feels smallish when you look on a linear scale from 0-1, a 1-e34 is a lot 'stickier'.

Your explanation has the benefit of being a better explanation; my goal was just to explain where the inertia was hiding.
IBM System 390 Computer room circa 1990
You're so rad, man. Major respect.
You're wrong. Again, the book deals with this point directly.

- "Their talk" of science is not merely inaccurate, it is _disingenuous_
- This disingenuousness raises questions about the authors' sincerity (which the authors of Intellectual Impostures are at pains to limit to the scientific areas, but could well be extended)
- They do not "dismiss the work" of the authors
- They are at pains to try and work out what the authors might have meant (including unpicking "bad analogies" or "inappropriate asides".

Once again I'm required to ask for evidence of this from someone likely not to have actually read the book closely.
The subtitle was added to second run theatre prints. Long before the remastering.
My guess is that it won't be patched. The general consensus is that untrusted bytecode is inherently unsafe[1]. Use the source everwhere, which is safe and also portable. If you're using bytecode for performance or security reasons, you're illusioned, stop.

Background: Lua 5.1 has a bytecode verifier, which was designed to reject malformed (and potentially harmful) bytecode. However the author of this exploit (Peter Cawley) has found way after way to get harmful bytecode past the verifier over the past few years.

Ultimately in Lua 5.2 the verifier was removed to avoid giving a false sense of security to developers. Ironically Peter Cawley stated that would have preferred to keep the verifier and just fix the holes[2]. He has written an external verifier for 5.2[3].

My advice is, again, don't load untrusted bytecode. This also means that wherever you execute untrusted source, you must check that the first byte is not 0x1B ("\27") before passing it to loadstring() (or use the 'mode' parameter to load() in 5.2).

[1]: http://www.lua.org/bugs.html#5.1.4-1

[2]: http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2011-03/msg01123.html

[3]: https://code.google.com/p/lbcv/
I'm the author of the blog post. If the question is related to why I dropped PHP it's because I was getting a lot more done in Django and Tornado so I could finish projects quicker and take on more work.

There were so many clients in need of Pythonists in London in 2011-2013 when I was working there that I didn't have the time of day to take care of PHP ones. Also, PHP rates were dying and there weren't a lot of people competing for the Python work so I could keep my day rates nice and juicy.

I can think of a lot of things that beat Zend, Yii and Drupal in terms of code management, security, DRYness of code that's implemented, flexibility, the list goes on.
I also have been looking for this and have found nothing free & compelling out there.

I'm considering building a platform for a self-organized digital nomad community. I am currently exploring ways to provide initial value to have it grow organically and would love to get other people's perspective.
> In fact, unless you're wasting time, 80,000,000 averages less than 10 requests/second...

Please show your math.

I took 80000000 / (24 * 60 * 60) and I got 925.

So you seem off by about two orders of magnitude.
I wonder what would happen here in Scotland - we don't have punitive damages so the most you can be awarded in court is the loss you can demonstrate to have suffered.

So if I use a software package commercially and don't pay for it perhaps the maximum I could be sued for in the local courts would be the license fee I didn't pay. If there is no "commercial" license then could it really be said that a loss has been suffered?

[NB I know contracts and licenses usually have clauses stating the jurisdiction where disputes will be resolved]
"create a standard for a VM that other languages can compile bytecode to. Create an API in this VM for graphics, video, audio."

There already is a standard VM with an API for graphics, video and audio - it's called HTML5, and, as a bonus, it also includes an API for text layout. Sure, if you sat down intending to design such a VM, you might not come up with HTML5, but so what; what concrete improvement would you get by distributing programs as bytecode rather than JavaScript?
Can you please tell me more about your experience with Haskell?
The easy way to solve this class of problem is to compute two quantities -- one, the object's energy at rest on earth's surface, and two, the object's energy when it gets into orbit.

The first is mostly gravitational potential energy (GPE), the second is a mixture of GPE and kinetic energy (KE). They're both easy to compute.

Finally, to figure out how much energy is required to go from the launch pad to orbit, simply subtract one energy number from the other, remembering that the total energy is the sum of KE and GPE.

A complicating factor is the fact that a rocket's mass decreases as it ascends (as the fuel is burned), but this isn't a deal-breaker -- all one needs to do is profile the ascent, the increase in velocity alongside the decrease in mass, using a numerical integral. That's not difficult at all (and it has to be a numerical integral).

More here: http://arachnoid.com/gravitation_equations/orbital_mechanics...
Great stuff. Came to post that one.
Definitely.

I've watched friends struggle to make art part-time, and I've seen the huge - breakthrough - difference that going full-time on the same art makes.
Belgacom international traffic spied on by NSA - report
The following are three forms of subsidies:

1) Schools are non-profits everything they do is subsidized.

2) Student loans subsidize schools.

3) State schools have in state subsidies.

If a professor is writing and researching, that is time and focus not spent teaching. If tenure is granted primarily on research, teaching suffers.

To those who think the status quo is fine, I ask: Are we in the correct balance of teaching and research in the humanities? If yes, how did we get there? And if there are strong cases for humanities research, why not more?

My opinion is much of what appears to be advancement of knowledge is really a system of misplaced incentives. You see this in teaching loads and overproduction of qualified humanities faculty relative to high school teachers.
Democracy is a way to guarantee human rights in a developed or semi-developed country, it's not a way to develop your poor country. Installing democracy in a poor country is like installing Windows 7 on a 486: you gain the benefits of the new system, but you have to live with the accompanied slow speed, caused by the fact that the minimum system requirement is not met.
Technical Lego.

Edit: Seems it's called 'Lego Technic'. I just remember calling it technical lego as a kid. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Technic
Ruby Tips Part 2
There's a stack of software verification projects, most probably using Z3, here - http://www.rise4fun.com/
Chrome Extension Development - Simplified
A better way of thinking about this problem instead of adding N observations in a batch is adding them one at a time. The Beta(a,b) distribution does this - Uniform is Beta(1,1). IIRC adding observations you're just ticking up a and b one at a time depending on whether the outcome was a head or a tails. This applies to exchangeable observations (if you flipped some other coin previously it doesn't work so simply in this model).
great! I sent you an email.

It's funny you label it as social reservations.
Did you see this page? http://www.adormo.com
because we also launched a test project (italan only for now) http://social.adormo.com/ where it's much more social.
I just wonder what site you did visit :)
Things I like PHP for would be single file simple scripts which are part of otherwise essentially static sites. For instance, a static blog (with Jekyll/Pelican/whatever) but a single .php file which is for searches (in a sqlite FTS cache of the blog, say) or 'related posts' or whatever. Then you can upload it into an apache "standard" web host, and add that tiny bit of server-side stuff that otherwise would be a pain.
F*CK YOU, PAY ME: Mike Monteiro on how to get clients to pay you
Also note that uncompensated amateur performances are ok, but paid ones are not. So presumably if you are doing symbolic work without pay (say, the first shovel of a groundbreaking) the fact that they could be paying someone doesn't make it employment.

This leads to all kinds of interesting questions.

If you are an artist and here on a business visa, are you allowed to paint on your own canvas? Are you allowed to buy or sell paintings that you paint here in the US? I would think so. You might not be able to paint a mural for hire though.
Which genres are you referring to here? This is a really interesting data point.
The Clojure koans are a good place to start - https://github.com/functional-koans/clojure-koans
I think async is a systems programming tool rather than an application programming tool. If you're writing a web server or a web browser, it'd be useful. But for a web application, you're already sitting on a highly scalable and robust async library called IIS so when you need a background task the easiest thing to do is to make it a RESTful API call. I find many web developers now intuitively break up their application into parallelizable chunks without ever really thinking about async or threads, they just just say "this web page is taking a long time to load, maybe I can defer some of the work until after the page load" or (as you seem to have done) "maybe I can use tools like AppFabric Workflow to orchestrate all these small tasks".
If you're not blocking threads, either explicitly on I/O, or on perceptibly lengthy CPU operations[1], and you don't have a high proportion of kernel CPU% that can be put down to the cost of thread switching, then you personally don't really need async.

But it's a big leap to go from that to saying that nobody else needs async, so it need not go in the language.

[1] Taking the calculation off the main thread isn't the only way async can help here. The primitives also give you a way for taking better advantage of multiple cores (futures) more easily.
Watch the righting of the Costa Concordia
Investors pumping up price of Bitcoin
I think it would be neat to have a single place for all up-to-date tips/tutorials/techniques regarding Ruby & RoR (like Superhero.js)

Excellent resource BTW. Keep them coming.
Why would you want such a thing?

Fact-based accusations? That doesn't work well with the thought police.

The funny thing is, you go take a look on what this guy wrote in the past and there's stuff like

"There's a related question here which no one is asking, which is whether the economic catastrophe facing the global marketplace is a result of a failure of white culture in America."[1]

Seriously? Is this any different from saying that famine in Africa a result of a failure of black culture (whatever that is)?

Is this a "guru"? Guru of what? At least the so-called "asshole" can actually build something useful, instead of just thought-policing without looking in the mirror...

[1] http://dashes.com/anil/2009/01/monoculture-is-bad-for-busine...
Well that's why I mentioned that it may be too early and also posted a disclaimer. But the idea isn't that bad, is it?
This exploit works because the sandbox designer failed to forbid bytecode loading, which is known to be much more unsafe than accepting only source files. I believe there are several known ways to crash a VM by loading bad bytecode, for instance.

Patch loadbuffer() et al. to make it refuse bytecode files and you're safe.
Jolla’s Sailfish OS gains Android compatibility