skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The bigger problem with democracy is how to stop the majority from prosecuting minorities? If majority of people voted - e.g. would gay marriages be allowed?! Would smoking tobacco become illegal (as in same laws that govern marijuana users cover tobacco users)?
Good point. I just added this note to the end of the article:

Our criteria for picking the winner came down to one number: tour request rate. In other words, what percentage of users found a listing they liked and contacted it using a particular design. We use other data points to augment this core metric (bounce rate, time on site, number of listings viewed, search criteria revisions), but ultimately a variation only wins if it's better than the control at getting users to an office space that they like.
Seems more like "two rights make a right" - companies benefit from public institutions and in return companies do not discriminate. Both of these things are beneficial to everyone. Only in libertarian ideology are either of these things considered as wronging people, and only for ideological reasons that have no foundation in the real world (nebulous appeals to abstract principles).
I stated the exact opposite
I use both, if you are looking for a dev house job go with rails as loads of dev houses are looking for rails at the moment in my Area, Bristol&Bath(England)
You should take a look at Plan 9. Everything is a file, and service are implemented as file servers - including the windowing system (rio).

Some of the ideas are available in Plan 9 from User Space.
This is a summary of my understanding of their method after a very quick scan of their docs:

They assume working as a malicious/selfish pool having less than 50% of hash rate, but still a significant portion of the total hash rate. All other miners that are not part of the selfish pool are called honest miners.

When selfish pool finds a block, they don't advertise it but continue mining their forked, private blockchain. They have an advantage of one block over the public blockchain now. Of course they have no chance of building longer blockchain in the long term, as they have less than 50% of hashing power and the public blockchain will always get longer after some number of blocks. But what they count on is this:

Scenario 1: honest miners discover a block and the public blockchain gets the same length as the selfish blockchain. They immediately publish their block as soon as they discover someone else discovered a block. They hope to create a race condition and a public blockchain fork - so that some hones miners will get the “honest” block, but some of honest miners will get their “selfish” block and start mining using it as a base. Having some of the honest miners on their side they have a chance that their fork will get longer and the “honest” fork will be declined by the network.

Scenario 2: selfish pool is lucky and discovers another block, giving their blockchain two blocks advantage over the public blockchain. They continue mining and they publish one block for every block discovered by the honest miners. This creates race condition with some of the honest miners on their side, but they still have some blocks found and not published. They publish all their remaining blocks as soon as their advantage decreases to one block. The network chooses their branch as it's longer and they get all the reward coins from their secretly mined chain.

Now, I know nothing about blocks discovery/notification mechanisms over the network and how fast it works, so an important question to someone knowledgeable is if this is a probable scenario that their block published only after some competing block has been found and published has still a chance to get to some significant number of honest miners first so that they start mining over their block - as this is required for their strategy to work.

If the above is viable, then this strategy of course requires some significant hash rate share, but I remember that even having 10% of total hash rate, the probability that you will mine couple of blocks in a row is quite high - and that's all you need to create situations when you have two-three blocks advantage over the public blockchain.
> the / in an XPath expression plays the same role as the > in a CSS selector:

The `/` in an XPath expression is probably a better match for the space in CSS selectors.
I like the fact it has a TV tuner! The extendable antennae might be a bit wonky, but I would love to use my tablet to pick up radio and/or tv. there is no guarantee of internet connectivity in an emergency so I am curious why no tablets that I have seen offer similar?
Had a conversation like this with a friend a week ago.

The conversation was about (insert major cable tv operator here) calling him up randomly asking him to take a quick survey, at which point he hung up the phone.

Now, had the same person / company called him asking the same thing, but offering a gift card of $x amount (regardless of what $x is), it would be worth his time. X could be as low as $5 with the sky being the limit, but the point being, if you want something from him that would waste his time, any gift, no matter how small, would make it worth his time / effort.

Moral of the story; most people would be willing to do something, so long as a gift / award was involved, no matter how small the gift / award might be. The more you ask them to do; the bigger the gift should be.
Fast, interactive and beautiful visualizations with Python
Spying Cartoon
It probably isn't. It's when you want to do async or timed things that things start to fall apart.
The key idea is very simple and is very clearly explained on pages 6-7:

"When the public branch is longer than the private branch, the sel fish mining pool is behind the public branch. Because of the power di fferential between the selfi sh miners and the others, the chances of the sel fish miners mining on their own private branch and overtaking the main branch are small. Consequently, the selfi sh miner pool simply adopts the main branch whenever its private branch falls behind. As others find new blocks and publish them, the pool updates and mines at the current public head."

"When the sel fish miner pool finds a block, it is in an advantageous position with a single block lead on the public branch on which the honest miners operate. Instead of naively publishing this private block and notifying the rest of the miners of the newly discovered block, sel fish miners keep this block private to the pool. There are two outcomes possible at this point: either the honest miners discover a new block on the public branch, nullifying the pool's lead, or else the pool mines a second block and extends its lead on the honest miners."

"In the first scenario where the honest nodes succeed in finding a block on the public branch, nullifying the sel fish pool's lead, the pool immediately publishes its private branch (of length 1). This yields a toss-up where either branch may win. The selfi sh miners unanimously adopt and extend the previously private branch, while the honest miners will choose to mine on either branch, depending on the propagation of the noti fications. If the selfi sh pool manages to mine a subsequent block ahead of the honest miners that did not adopt the pool's recently revealed block, it publishes immediately to enjoy the revenue of both the first and the second blocks of its branch. If the honest miners mine a block after the pool's revealed block, the pool enjoys the revenue of its block, while the others get the revenue from their block. Finally, if the honest miners mine a block after their own block, they enjoy the revenue of their two blocks while the pool gets nothing."

"In the second scenario, where the sel fish pool succeeds in finding a second block, it develops a comfortable lead of two blocks that allow it with some cushion against discoveries by the honest miners. Once the pool reaches this point, it continues to mine at the head of its private branch. It publishes one block from its private branch for every block the others find. Since the sel fish pool is a minority, its lead will eventually reduce to a single block with high probability. At this point, the honest miners are too close, so the pool publishes its private branch. Since the private branch is longer than the public branch by one block, it is adopted by all miners as the main branch, and the pool enjoys the revenue of all its blocks. This brings the system back to a state where there is just a single branch until the pool bifurcates it again."
I can't see this posing a serious threat to Bitcoin. If I understand this correctly the idea relies on mining a block and keeping it secret so that the selfish miners can start mining on the next coin. But they can't change the properties of the network. They'll have to respect Bitcoin's difficulty calculation, since if they try to change that, the main Bitcoin network will reject their chain. Plus, they'll need tons and tons of hashing power to stay ahead of the network.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but even if you've got future blocks precomputed for weeks in advance, all it takes is someone else finding the current block by chance to completely invalidate your private chain?
The con about big prizes is you have to make sure you're complying with any laws about lotteries and gambling.
It's either cheaper or it isn't. I don't understand this "but you make it up in volume" logic.
I use a bookmarking service (Pinboard) as I do for all pages I consider that I might need to get back to at some point. I also have the Pinboard archival service that saves a copy of the web page in case that goes away.
Did you even read those discussions? The C Segfault was due to a plugin. facepalm
Helium is nearly 7 times better at conducting heat than both air and nitrogen [0], lower density [1] and about the same viscosity [2].

[0] http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/thermal-conductivity-d_429...

[1] http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/gas-density-d_158.html

[2] http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/tables/viscosity....
A fair point, and not condescending at all :)

That is a major issue. Though I would argue that like many things in America, we have a false image of ourselves. Our school system is setup to be socialist, where everyone gets exactly 1 unit of education and then are released into a supposedly free-market world. That doesn't work, and the flaws in charter schools you are pointing out are actually exposing the faults in believing it's possible to deliver exactly 1 unit of education to all citizens.

I think a lot of folks worried about education reform are running around with some sort of utopian dream for how the world could be, while not realizing that there are philosophical arguments that have to be made almost simultaneously around the notion that not everyone is capable of being educated the same level, nor do they want to be.

What happened to the pride of voc-ed schools where kids learned specific skills that would help them earn an income and hopefully provide a high quality of life for their future families? Put more bluntly: What is the goal of education?

If we can't answer that, we have no business trying to legislate betters schools.
It's #1 now.
Why Are Computers 1: A Fairly Deep Yak Shave
> What is this async stuff you are talking about ?

Something vim cannot do, that other editors can. It's called an event loop. Vim only ever does anything based on user interaction. Sometimes you may just want to sit back and have vim do things even though you hadn't typed something recently. Like pair program remotely, have a clock, get notifications, all kinds of timed things.
On average, yes. But mining is a probabilistic process. Occasionally, a minority group will get lucky and mine two blocks in quick succession. If they keep their blocks secret, then they can cause the rest of the network to waste time mining on obsolete blocks and thereby increase their effective share of the network's hash power.
Mining a longest fork and maintaining it is probable if you have more than 50%. If you have less than 50%, there is still a chance, but eventually, the main chain will catch up.

For example, even if I'm a pool with 25% of mining power, I could still occasionally find 2 blocks in a row. But I won't maintain that lead because in general, over time, for every 1 block I find, 3 other blocks will be found.

It looks like this paper's technique is to take advantage of those temporary situations where one pool is lucky enough to get ahead.
That is why companys tend to give brief factual references so that some manger doesn't go off on one and land the company with a big lawsuit.
Seems a pretty risky bargain for Prem to put $250m at risk with their cash pile dwindling day by day and likely costs of shutting down various parts of the business.
If I were a buyer I'd be just sitting and waiting for them to get more and more desperate.
Bugs happen in software, you can not avoid. It is specially true for Vim which is used in wide variety of platforms. But still the segfaults bug listing is not that frequent as you described. Also Bram and other members are responding to to bug report in timely manner. Last I heard author of Sublime have stopped responding to bug reports.

Also you have zero knowledge of how Vimproc works. It spawns process or create socket connection in background and clients have access to it as a resource object from which client can read data during CursorMoved and CursorMovedI autocmd events. It is actually psudo-async but it works very well. I am using the plugins that have used Vimproc, even I used it in my PHP autocomplete plugin https://github.com/m2mdas/phpcomplete-extended (shameless plug) and it did not failed me yet. Also if you looked at the s:garbage_collect() method https://github.com/Shougo/vimproc.vim/blob/master/autoload/v... it is trying to release resource handles of the processes exited.

Also why should I need a clock inside vim? There is tmux/Screen status line for that. Please provide another valid use case.
Non-Technical Founders: Who Should you Hire to Build your App?
Unverified Snowden Account is Amassing Followers on Twitter.
I'm the author of the article (the reponse not the original). I didn't say em is based on "m". All I said about em is:

"(For completeness, I should mention here that the "em" and "ex" units are exceptions to the above. The lengths 1em and 1ex do vary relative to the other units, because they depend on the font in use.)"

I'll update this to say "font size" as I didn't mean to give the impression that it was dependent the choice of font.
So Vim is broken because you can't have a clock in your status line? Are you an idiot? Seriously, all that ranting and you can't come up with a single practical example of Vim being "broken" other than not being able to have a clock in your status line? I'm assuming you just made up the segfault thing because I have literally never seen that happen.
"Can you please explain why hard-drives follow a flying head approach? Why don't they just perpendicularly fix the reader above the disk, rotate the disk and then use a linear actuator to move the reader back and forth - exactly like optical drives?"

The head is only "flying" relative to the platter. A hard drive works pretty much like you describe -- a short stack of fast-spinning platters and a read/write head on a swing arm that pivots back and forth over the platters.

A pic: http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~maciakl/blog/img/hd.jpg

They are child's play to take apart (http://turmon.org/Images/celeste-disk.jpg)
The only way this "strategy" works is if a few things are already happening:

1. Communication is already really good

2. You have a basic plan in place, milestones laid out, and because of #1 being good you're ready to handle anything that doesn't go to plan (because things definitely won't)

3. If you have a plan in place you better have discovered some hint of product-market-fit (figured out who your customers are, what pain point they have, and how you think you can solve it) that the plan is based around

If you have those things in line, there isn't anything wrong with "get shit done!" (which I really take to mean less meetings, less screwing around over-planning, etc). This mentality or strategy backfires when you are missing a few items from my list, or you have bad managers / founders who don't understand the importance of the list.
Here's how I use XPath - constant Googling! This is a good explanation, maybe I'll actually learn it now.
There has been a spec for XPath 2.0 for quite a while - though I don't think there are many implementations:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPath_2.0
Actually, "successful" isn't a good criteria. Any entrepreneur who is on their way to success, or trying to be successful should be counted.

The lessons on the path to success are many, and they are varied.
city vs state level projects.
Fake[1].

[1]: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/397369906401771520
Gah, FML and damn you Monday morning. I meant to say it IS IN #1. Corrected my comment.
Weird. I'll have a look.
As the manager/co-founder, helping with tools, coping mechanisms, etc. is often not enough. When an employee has shit falling off of his/her plate, he often needs help prioritization. Managers/co-founders often assume everyone knows the priorities of projects and that's often not the case. If the manager's or company's priorities have shifted, that needs to be communicated to everyone. If you have a meeting scheduled with some big-wig tomorrowand I'm providing data for that meeting, I need to know; otherwise you may not get your S until it's too late. But, by God, I'm GSD!!
Cool, seems like it's based on this demo:
https://github.com/maachou/TweetMapViewer

I hacked together a little twitter following thing using that as a guide this weekend (http://myemotions.herokuapp.com)
> My guess is that, due to Apple and Google's expertise in touch screen and motion capture software, you won't see any new players coming out of the woodwork with a new phone everybody wants.

What does that have to do with anything? Samsung is the largest smartphone maker and you didn't even mention them. Xiaomi is likely to be a huge force in the next couple years. I'm sure there will be more.
Blockbusters and the long tail
Scenery.js - do interesting things on a web page as it scrolls
Sounds like a vari-ant of Zeno's Dichotomy Paradox.[0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno's_paradoxes
Did you have a point here? Do you think he should have just said "sure man, sounds great, go for it!" Did you know that a lot of non-programmers have a lot of great ideas, and that educating them about the difficulties of implementing those ideas isn't actually a bad thing?

The particular app in question has been tried a million times and countless hours have been invested into it, perhaps learning from that body of work would be helpful? But hey, maybe that guy is The One who will come out of nowhere and solve the problem in a completely new manner (half-serious - it's technically possible, but I don't think it's useful to put our eggs in that basket).
How Many Lines of Code Does it Take?
Hey, thanks.

Yes, its a premium reward. I am thinking of creating a bundle of useful resources like software licenses, ads space on top forums, etc.

The 'ability to take actions' point is a great one. I'll include that.

Would you mind telling me a bit more about the 'testing' part? I didnt quite get it =)
Legion was not "purely military" unit, it was part of SS taking orders directly from Himmler. If that is not Nazi, then I don't know what is.

Digging deeper in history and discovering relations between Latvia and Germany will indeed lead to better understanding of Latvian mentality.
I think cryptocurrencies are neat and I'd like to be a part of the bitcoin economy if it's possible to do that without radically changing my life. One way to do that without taking on much risk would be to buy a noisy little machine that will produce about as much as it cost me and maybe a little extra. That's the kind of participation a lot of people are interested in.

If other people want to radically change their lives to support bitcoin, then more power to them. If it's hard for a moderately interested casual user to get involved in the economy, then there's probably not much of a future for bitcoin.

At the moment it is impossible to start mining for profit. No one is buying new ASICs because they won't pay for themselves. Almost everyone who's mining now is racing to earn back their initial investment.
How are you voting in tomorrow's San Francisco Municipal Election?
Spreadsheets work better than code in some instances. Visual data-flow (boxes and noodles) in some instances. Graphing calculators in others. Hell, even Morphic and VB have their place!

Each of these tools creates a 'function' in some way or another. The main problem I see is that it is too hard to make a function in a spreadsheet, combine it with a function made in a data-flow graph editor, and all tied together with a function made in a text coding language.

We need to make the publishing and consumption of 'functions' easier. I've started the work on the underlying framework. Please stay tuned!
Tim is an incredible marketer. If anyone believes he actually says anything on his blog that is a real reflection of the real him should really think twice.
Hi Danso,

It's because it is a complete new data stream that let's it gain a much deeper understanding of it's visitors and thus optimize their website.
The article also links to this product review of the tablet by 38 North which is a fascinating read: http://38north.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/SamjiyonProduc... (PDF)

It is interesting to see how things happen in that country. It is such a strange environment for technology infrastructure and skills it is really interesting to see how they handle it and what ends up getting produced there.
Looks cool but as soon as I loaded the hackpad document (not the blog post) my computer's fan started going crazy, not a great sign.
Definitely! empathy is such an underrated skill for consultants (use the term broadly, anyone who provides a service to another). If you can't understand, via basic communication, the other person, how can you hope to serve them?
I was about to recommend that book. It's amazing.
If anybody wants to read more about Boyd I would also highly recommend Coram's book that the article mentions, I am in the midst of re-re-reading it, what a force of character.

There are also audio recordings of one of his briefings on YouTube.
Discussion on Bitcoin Reddit (including comments from Bitcoin developers): http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1puk1a/arxiv_paper_...
Taming non-terminating Bash processes
It's a cool idea. If I'm not mistaken, the FCC is now allowing some development and use of the old TV bands. I'd love to some creative use of it from the open source community.

http://transition.fcc.gov/oet/projects/tvbanddevice/
You're totally right. But I would argue that its search engine is considered a standard by many. And now with a 90% market share it's reversing its policies.

Also, lest never forget Google Reader:
"Embrace, extend, extinguish: How Google crushed and abandoned the RSS industry" http://www.zdnet.com/embrace-extend-extinguish-how-google-cr...
I agree. Sexual orientation, however, rises above political belief and religion as a matter of personal identity. In other words, it should be clear that discrimination for reasons of gender, race, national origin, age, disability, sexual orientation, and genetic information should be illegal. If you're going to move above that and ban other forms of discrimination, religion and politics are a natural extension.