skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Government NEVER EVER gets it right.

While this too often seems to be true, I happened to see this the other day, which describes a few federal IT systems that apparently were implemented well:

http://www.volokh.com/2013/10/20/big-federal-web-deployments...
Apple OS X 10.9 Mavericks
The Year of the Cat is done. Surf’s up, Dude!
Hey! There's only 57 calories in a tablespoon of mayo. If people are responsible and only use one or two tablespoons (to dip their fries, for example) then it is totally fine!

People need to learn to eat slower and really savour the food. Small portions of more intensely flavoured food is way better than huge, bulky meals of starch and meat and sugar. Whole grains too! I used to eat a half pound of regular pasta topped with several cups of cheap meat sauce. Now I eat 1/5 of a pound of whole grain multigrain pasta mixed with 3/4 cup of high quality marinara sauce (no meat) alongside a nice big salad (with minimal dressing). It tastes way better and is much healthier.
Ecmmerce is a normal thing these days, so we tend to consider it more or less functional. But realistically, its still pretty broken. Checkout processes (including amazon's) are all different and most are clunky. The best way to tell what shipping will cost is to do a mock purchase. Amazon makes you choose shipping option before u see the price. You don t know hw long it will take. You need to give them your cc details.

Just using amazon for all purchases makes it all a little easier.
Reminds me of a colleague who RDPed into each of our 140 subsidiaries to change a config file.
He had a list of servers on his desk and ticked off every server.
Took him the whole day to apply the changes.
You are seeing different results than me. This depends among other things on your location (also probably which data center served you the result). The number of pages in index for a large site can even differ depending on the time of day (About n results).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6g8MJKFSWJU (Matt Cutts answers: How reliable is the site: query and why does the total count sometimes change from page 1 to page 2?)
Open Access Week 2013: The Time for Reform Is Now
It would be interesting to know more about the (historical) distribution of the overall applications, especially how many are settled within the last one percent quantile of time.

Assuming a distribution and working with a simple e-function, around 3.500 total applications with an acceptance rate around 1.25% (batch<50) might be a ballpark estimate.
Maybe the most underestimated problem today.

Some startup opportunities:

Fish farms [1]
Ocean surface cleaning [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfishing [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch
This thread is full of people saying that HFCS is the cause of obesity, and merely avoiding fructose will cure obesity.

We agree that fructose is not the only problem, and that people eat crap, regardless of hfcs.
This was perhaps the Minitel's greatest failure as well - because it was state run... The free market wins again.

If the Minitel launched in the eighties, how could have this article been written in the fifties?

Seriously, are Americans still fighting commies? What is this sick obsession with "the gobment"? Today we know we need both the private market and the government to build an economy that is both prosperous and beneficial to the people. Could you cut this fifties crap already?

And this wasn't a case of the "free market" winning again. This was just America winning again. And given that the US median income is steadily dropping while in France it's steadily rising, I don't know if there's much to be proud of.
Interestingly, my co-founder and I always still fell into the trap of purchasing something on the net and within a few days seeing the product for a whole bunch less. About a year ago, we set about building a tool that would "monitor/watch" the prices on our behalf and we wanted it to work on any shopping site.

A few month ago, we launched Pricify http://pricify.com and this is our first iteration. Basically, you can use a simple bookmarklet to add products to pricify from any online store, once the product drops in price the system sends you an email or facebook notification, if at any point the product hits it all time lowest price it sends you a separate email as well.

Last week we had a guy who bought a car as a result of the price drop he noticed and contact us to thank us. This has provided us further confidence of its use.

We've learnt so much already and are adding what our users are asking for. Ultimately, we want to build something that solved a problem for us in the hope that it solves the problem for others, so far we have been seeing promising results.

We want to get into the content, blogging from a SEO perspective, but we've had very limited bandwidth trying to focus on the main functionality itself being completely bootstrapped!

Early days, but would love any advice on whats already being learnt from the others out here.
What about Python's re? How do you determine whether an implementation of "regex" is context free or regular expression as we know it? It has been a long time since I have to deal with CFG and formal CS. Thanks.
We saw one whale, sort of rolling helplessly on the surface with what looked like a big tumour on its head.

Pure fear mongering crap.
Running code in the regex with (?{ ... code ... }) is cheating, because you can just put a whole Perl program in there. It's also one of the many badly implemented features of Perl that could be more useful if the implementation was any good. Using it will cause subtle bugs when you use regexps in the code called from there (even if you just call a sub/function), because the context (of regexp processing) isn't saved.
But the article does say that Airbus and Boeing each had a major project in recent years (A380 and 787) and they're unlikely to have anything major for the next decade. A350 sounds pretty major to me.
I found code like ' int code = [response code];'
Why 'int' and not 'NSInteger'?

That being said, I've been looking for a NotWorking replacement, and this might be it. Either this or I write my own once and for all.

Will give it a go!
Also; https://github.com/Mashape/unirest-obj-c/pull/8
I was thinking the same. Someone needs to collect and monetize the garbage. Sweden is already short of garbage for energy production, so there has to be a value in the garbage.
a blockchain that finances its ops by access to aquaponic food dispensaries would be an interesting future innovation. Similar to current cryptocurrencies, but the "backing" is that the dispensaries will take the currency for purchasing produce, and the mining process itself is linked to the creation and maintenance of those AP microfarms.
> an economic definition

My favourite comes from Fischer Black:

However, we might define an efficient market as one in which price is within a factor of 2 of value, i.e., the price is more than half of value and less than twice value. The factor of 2 is arbitrary, of course. Intuitively, though, it seems reasonable to me, in the light of sources of uncertainty about value and the strength of the forces tending to cause price to return to value. By this definition,I think almost all markets are efficient almost all of the time. ‘Almost all’ means at least 90%.

Gotta love that optimism.
> For anything other than trivial queries ScalaQuery/Slick generates very bad SQL

For Slick, yes, but for ScalaQuery 0.10, absolutely not.

All of my ScalaQuery generated SQL is semantically _exactly_ what I would have written by hand, and completely typesafe, with generated prepared statements to boot. This includes outer join based queries, subselects, and other operations that cause Slick to generate nightmare SQL (why I'm avoiding Slick until the library is stable on the performance front).

I love ScalaQuery, but Slick, TBD, they have a ways to go yet, the new Scala collections syntax with groupBy and sortBy is particularly hideous compared to ScalaQuery's SQL based groupBy and sortBy.

The Slick team will sort things out, hopefully sooner rather than later (for example, I'd love to have Slick 2.0's composable parameterized query snippet functionality, that alone is a huge boilerplate WIN).
I am very much interested in this topic too - specifically for the UK market.
I'm sure Google will be just as enthusiastic about incorporating Mozilla's new video codec daala as Mozilla is about adding Google's image codec webp.
They fined them for (accidentally) selling shorts they couldn't cover.
Finnish team makes diabetes vaccine breakthrough
The trouble is, although OP believes Priceonomics should be solving his particular pain point, they clearly aren't in the business of "solving" it anymore. They are in the business of making money and if their site has downgraded your particular use case, it means, ceteris paribus, that it just wasn't making money for them.
>And by that logic nothing in the Universe is anonymous, since it's deterministic and it doesn't lose information, so theoretically everything could be traced back to its origin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreversible_process

If a process is irreversible it means information was lost. And from the article, "All complex natural processes are irreversible".
I'm familiar with the argument that strict typing catches bugs, but some bugs are trivial and a few are very tricky. Based on my experience with languages besides Haskell (which I don't know), I suspect that the kinds of bugs computers catch automatically aren't likely to be bad ones. The bad ones are runtime errors and logic errors, and I guess there are two kinds of these: ones that come from sloppy coding, and ones where you made an error in thinking. The type-checker might help with the sloppy ones. But I think the best language defense against those is to be concise and readable, so the logic is easy to see and you don't lose the forest for the trees.
FWIW - I ended up switching to wp-supercache as I had so many issues with W3TC.
See also: http://www.medicaldaily.com/diabetes-vaccine-breakthrough-fi...
JodaTime is unbelievably awesome.

That's one of the reasons why being on the JVM with Scala, Clojure, etc. makes one's coding life simpler: huge ecosystem to draw on with minimal effort (i.e. rarely need to roll your own).
You understand that Hacker News uses precisely this persistence strategy (in-memory data structures with persistent state written to the filesystem on the hard disk of the server), and has been going on 6 years now?

You also understand that most of the advice easily accessible on the Internet comes from people trying to sell you something, and so they have a vested interest in you adding many layers into your software stack that you don't need?

If you work in an actual engineering organization that has a clue what they're doing, mmap() is your best friend, and the more layers you can cut out of the stack, the better off you are.
Merging views from Google street view?
A friend is leaving the city and I like to print him a special gift. We were used to walk around the same path every day so I am searching a way to merge and print photos from this path as a long panorama to offer him. Are you aware of some tools/scripts that do that from google street view?
I was under the impression that ARC simply inserts the retain/releases into the code essentially write before the compile, so in theory would be equivalent.
Obamacare.com - Drupal website with stock theme and default branding not removed
Uhm, perhaps my English is slipping but that just seems like a description of what they saw.
The vast majority of implementations of "regex engines" across all languages do not actually just match regular languages, including Python's module.

They're more like general full-featured pattern matching engines for most forms of text.
The website is supposed to be responsive - just try resizing the screen to see the original theme logo and other elements.

Used theme is called "News Center". You can find it just by Googling "News Center Drupal theme".
Start-up reinvents the bicycle wheel
By checking if('en'==='en'), he is just making sure that we still live in a sane world and that machines are not controlling men. He should be appreciated for such far-sightedness.

I don't understand all the hungama you are creating :P
Curtain-up of 2013 Halloween Giveaway of WinX DVD Ripper Platinum before Nov.4
Digiarty Software announces the curtain-up of Halloween giveaway, by far the biggest bargain of the corporation and the first time to give away WinX DVD Ripper Platinum Halloween Edition in 2013, valid from Oct.21 to Nov.4.
For some reason I thought ZeroVM is based on vx32, not NaCL:
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~baford/vm/
Does anyone know if there is something similar based on vx32?
Not really, scrolling seems to be very natural interaction model on touch screens. If you compare UI approaches of different apps, most of the popular apps use scrolling, flipping hasn't really proven itself and it's a bit gimmicky
Wasn't this on the front page yesterday? I remember a huge discussion, but HNSearch doesn't work on this mobile, so I can't check.
You may have heard people with things like backups and emergency generators saying "you have to test this stuff weekly, in case someone has broken it so it'll fail the moment you call on it."

Software is the same.

Knight had code that hadn't been run in 8 years. Sure, the code worked 8 years ago, but things have changed around it since then. As the problem code never ran, no-one noticed it getting broken, or had any reason to fix it if it broke in testing.

Most likely the code worked fine 8 years ago, broke in the intervening 8 years, and hence was broken when activated.
I don't know about python, but a lot of languages support PCRE (perl compatible regexp) or at least a large subset of it. PCRE is sometimes less than what current Perl supports but in any case a superset of "traditional" regular expressions. For example there's support for recursive subpatterns [1] which clearly places it into context free territory[2]. Other regular expression engines support similar features, so I'd say that most real world implementations are not regular expressions in the formal sense.

[1] PHP manual for PCRE recursive patterns http://www.php.net/manual/en/regexp.reference.recursive.php

[2] Recursive subpatterns allow matching a language of the form (a * n)b(a * n) which is not regular.
No, the SEC fined them for losing money stupidly. In order to have access to the market like they did, they had to follow certain laws that are enforced by the SEC. When they were losing all that money they weren't following those laws.

It's like if you cause an accident while you're driving by breaking the law; you get a traffic citation (and the accompanying fine), even if your car is totaled as a result of the accident, because you did something illegal.
Bitcoins reached 200 USD on MtGox (188 on Bitstamp)
That has miltitary secrets that you wouldn't want other govt to know and be able to utilize in their own development of fighter jets.

In the case of web code, there's nothing's new and innovative about the software that is unknown by existing developers. There is the potential for exploits but open source can help plug up those holes by allowing the community to assist in the process.

Sure, dumping the supposed "500 million" lines of code all at once would make it hard to review but they could release one compinent at a time over several months/years and vow to release all future code.

On a side note, wouldn't reviewing and repairing govt software be an excellent teaching tool for schools? How proud would a child be to have their code fix be accepted into production?
What would be the impact of such a coroutine emulation if the threading is used to leverage multi-core hardware for high performance computing such as done by Atlas [1], OpenBLAS [2] or MKL [3]? These libraries are tuned to maximize CPU cache hits. It seems to me that executing each thread task sequentially using coroutines would probably break such optimizations.

[1] http://math-atlas.sourceforge.net/
[2] http://www.openblas.net/
[3] http://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-mkl
Not sure if there is still value in the garbage if extracting it from the ocean costs a lot.
Anybody encountered online merchants charging extra to pay using VISA/MC?
>>Running code in the regex with (?{ ... code ... }) is cheating, because you can just put a whole Perl program in there.

Would you like to call eval, recursion, macros, closures and many such things cheating?

Sorry but doing things without understanding or knowing the true consequences of what you are actually writing, always causes bugs. And that's true with any programming language.

Perl has many features which are designed to make the language powerful enough, to express solutions to very complex problems that other wise demands piles and piles of code in other languages. That's the whole point of the Perl language as a whole, you should take a really hard problem on a Friday night which you would find very difficult to code up in a weekend and then go to a finished script by Sunday evening.
For the general case I'd argue that Scala's syntax is far easier to sort out for anyone coming from C-based langs.

However, yes, for complex type hierarchies, heavily curried functions, and other higher level approaches, Haskell obviously wins, equivalent Scala code is a mess in comparison.

Odersky recently tweeted an EPFL paper addressing simplification of the type system (that got Scala FP devotees up in arms); i.e. in the not too distant future we may have fewer ways to do the same-ish thing (a good thing, IMO, if the language can be trimmed down, at a minimum that bodes well for current portability issues).
It does have a whiff of sensationalism, but perhaps that's the old cognitive dissonance in action, because thia article is scary.
Bitcoin just passed the $200 mark
Kickstarting a static website with ember.js and handlebars.js
Why Arq uses Amazon Web Services
The way it is written implies there is a connection between the trash they saw and the whale's tumour. I believe this is what the "fear mongering" is referring to, as there is no evidence to support that link.

The environment may be damaged but the state of journalism is so poor that sometimes it's hard to tell if the story is based in fact or just a boat load of feelings.

The whale is dying! [All whales will die.] Won't somebody please think of the children?
Live Google API javascript client library critical bug
Huh? You can configure openvpn to run over ipv6. I'd've thought the problem was more likely to be trying to connect via NATed IPv4.
Easy source code license management with licenseutils
That's only a limited success, because I still trust the US Government, even NSA, more than almost any foreign government. (NSA has more resources, but there's at least some semi-effective political and thus popular oversight).

The ultimate solution is providers which can prove their operational security to end users continuously, through technical controls.
I know this article is focused on noise, but the most important part about this engine is the efficiency. The fuel savings alone from having the high pressure section running at peak RPM in any situation is incredible. Billions and billions of dollars in fuel savings for a modern fleet.

Think of it as an orbital reduction gear more than a transmission that allows two different sections of the same axel to spin at differen speeds.

Checkout fuel burn vs. other engines. [1] The maintenance cost ratios across an entire fleet versus the fuel savings make it an absolute no brainer for regional fleets.

Source: My father a DER at MTU Aero Engines who developed the geared turbofan with Pratt & Whitney. DERs develop and sign off repairs in accordance with FAA regulations. He was also certified is EASA repairs.

1- http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_&_Whitney_PW1000G

Edit: Double the
It was actually posted twice yesterday:

https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=the+oc...
Much of the garbage mentioned in the article is only out there because of the tsunami and will presumably clean itself up over time.
Simple, but clever idea. I keep telling my wife our house is for people to live in, not a warehouse for her books, memorabilia and kids toys. I'll try anything to keep our house livable.
Mostly missless memory in the Mill CPU
With the potential of starting a ZeroVM in 5ms, and running it for a very short amount of time, do you see yourselves starting to charge in smaller time increments (ms)?

I work a lot with smallish data, where queries/processing may take 20 minutes or a few hours. Often I can split this work up significantly, but when most places charge by the hour it's rarely worth it. PiCloud are excellent in this area, and Manta looks interesting (but possibly a bit more expensive) but I'm not aware of many others. I love the idea of being able to start, with little overhead, a large number of short lived jobs. Particularly if I can run them locally or my own cluster.

I look forward to seeing more on this.
We can make the Internet a little more green
There is a trend to create websites and apps bloated with Javascript, animations, big pictures, and so on.

I think we should remember that there is a cost to this: energy consumption.

We have the power to make the Internet a little more green by building quicker and CPU/GPU friendly websites and apps!
It'd be cheaper to get garbage by mining old garbage dumps in other countries - say, India or China - and ship the garbage back than it would be to mine the ocean. The ocean garbage is really spread out thinly.
Ubuntu runs ~six hours on my 3 year old dell vostro that's rated for four hours on windows.
I arrived in Auckland today from my home in Australia, and did a massive double-take when I opened the article. Kinda neat, considering I saw that perspective of the Sky Tower just before.

I love life's little coincidences.
and most importantly, save what you have read such as articles, videos, newsletter. You will be needing them in the future.

cheers!
Mysterious (With Music Box) by Yuko Ohigashi, a brilliant (very) young composer.
You're Not a Hero For Reaching Inbox Zero
Exact same situation here, but in the Netherlands.

So far I put everything I can on a low interest account (circa 2%).
My idea is to wait 1 more year and invest in real-estate, without having to take a loan .
The rent would be used to reinvest in the future.

I don´t trust the stock exchange, mainly because I don´t really understand it, probably.
Maybe there is manipulative reason why they used a Canadian company, which can claim copyright instead of it being owned by a federal entity which would have to make it open source (ie. like all NASA photos are public domain)

Even a FOIA request wouldn't work against a Canadian company.

That said, it's not a single program. I think it is dozens if not 100+ APIs

I mean just look at this chart:

http://i.imgur.com/fIbcj3K.jpg
More surprisingly, btcchina.com is trading at $218/1BTC.
No, it's not. I'm quite happy to use a recursive definition for a truth value for statistics because it reduces to counting. I'll accept counting as an axiom.

Show me one casino that ignores statistics and remains profitable. Try setting one up yourself.

And, in fact, if you'd said that someone had run a CBA on CBAs, I'd have accepted that as your answer. You couldn't even do that though. You seem determined to turn it into a philosophy of science debate.

So, in short, you like CBAs and that's reason enough to insist on them for everything. No evidence required. And if someone asks for evidence, look to the sky and ask "what is truth?" I see.
We often get frustrated with strict change management processes, excruciating verification etc .. but there is a reason why the most mature (not always the biggest..) operators have these processes in place.