skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Haha, just logged in to see this: "PaulGraham: APPLY TO YC SO I CAN MAKE SOME MONEY FROM THIS" and also "PaulGraham: THIS IS THE NEXT FACEBOOK".
Based on what I've heard from friends who've actually reverse-engineered some of these products, there's more of these where they came from, including inside products from even high-profile companies in mainland China.
Randomized QuickSort has an expected worst case runtime of O(n log n).

To pick that part, first you write your (randomized) QuickSort, then your antagonists picks the worst case, and last you let your algorithm run and pick its random numbers. No matter how the antagonist chooses the input (but not the random numbers), you get O (n log n) expected runtime.

This is different from an average (over all inputs) run time.
Original article: http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/meet-badbios-the-mys...

Stop posting blogspam to HN. Always post the original article.
Should startup spend millions on sales or product development?
Is it worth spending millions on sales when you can spend the same on product development without Jeopardizing Sales?

As per HBR, Sales organizations especially in technology companies are moving from "Field Sales" to Inside Sales". Do you think it is good idea for technology startups to cut costs by moving away from "Field Sales”?

I personally feel its time for Lean organization especially for Startups. Most of the tech companies/startups can move initial part of their sales cycle inside(telephone & email) & may be (if really necessary) latter part of sales cycle can be explored to be by field sales team.

Moving away from “Field Sales” towards “Inside sales” not only makes your staff efficient & effective but also reduces the cost (one of the key resource of a startup)

Field sales should come-in when one needs face to face meeting only. Personal touch is important but at what cost is something to debate.

Read more on HBR
http://s.hbr.org/1ec0dcp
I don't think it's appropriate to make fun of somebody else's culture "for a real laugh," but these links were interesting anyway. So, thank you.
I agree that the underlying runtime and ecosystem affect the "feel" of programming in a given language a lot, but the comment above was specifically referring to the snippet of F# in the blog post, which could be trivially translated into OCaml.

AFAIK the main differences around the runtime are that the CLR has true concurrency and access to more libraries without using FFI, while OCaml is able to produce very tiny executables (~200kb) if you use the native compiler.
It's also realistic to say that if an attacking entity started a selfish pool, there would be a percentage of the population that would join that selfish pool.

It's obviously the wrong move, but just because you're a sociopath doesn't mean you're smart.

I hear people say to me all the time that it's "ok if I'm the only one doing it". If this papers strategy is effective, it is a realistic threat that lowers the bar necessary to destabilize the network. 33% to take over the network, but much less to start the ball rolling.
diplomacy will never be the same
Well, they're #8 on the list. What point was trying to be made?

The retort is much more relevant:

Most of the companies on the top 50 list are simply investment companies – they aren’t operating companies. (The only obvious example is #50 China Petrochemical.) The enormous size of these companies is simply a reflection of the way most people invest in the public markets, through mutual funds, money funds and other vehicles. Disturbing? Nah. Simply a reflection of the way most people invest in the markets.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2011/10/24/retort-the...
Google invests $608 million in Finnish data center
Don’t gerrymander the internet
You should keep in mind that not everyone is able to work "80-hour weeks". I myself would not stand a chance. It is cool if dedicating your life to work like this works out for you, but it is irresponsible to hold it up as some ideal which everyone must aspire to.

I'm not sure if this was the intention of your comment, but I get the general sense whenever this subject pops up on HN that you aren't really doing your best if you aspire to a regular 9-5 workweek. Nothing could be further from the truth - I am a very ambitious guy, but I will refuse to work longer weeks unless it is absolutely necessary. And if so, only for a limited amount of time. Violating this will literally ruin my mental health. I am not the only person who works this way.
Slower than what? This is for creating encrypted versions of your files before you back them up, so your backup program will only see encrypted files.
I'd hoped this was something like Napster built on WebRTC data channel. No such luck.
Compose key, currently. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key )
There are a number of differences (attribution, the way the stream shows you edit diffs from your team members, the way content such as code and media is handled, the way email integration works, etc).

But fundamentally it is a difference of design intent. Hackpad is not a replacement for a word processor. It is not designed for cosmetically designing papers or reports. Hackpad has been designed from the ground up for collaboration on ideas and for living documents (which evolve over time). It's in use in a number of leading tech companies (airbnb, stripe, upworthy) as well as on the open web.
I don't know how is is now, but in 1970, Colorado had one school system per county, with the schools within a system having the same level of funding. Even within a system, there could be a dramatic difference between high schools. In Denver, TJ seemed to be the best school, followed probably by South; Manual had not escaped the legacy of being the vocational school. In Jefferson County, I think that the hierarchy ran something like Wheatridge, Bear Creek, Golden, Arvada. And kids at the same school could get very different educations based on family background and even individual motivation.

But I wish them luck.
Introsort is good in practice, but it's not a quicksort.

If you are interested in theory, the pivot in linear time algorithm (like QuickSelect) is truly marvelous. It also provides a good study of how simple a randomized algorithm can be, and how to de-randomize it into something much more complicated but deterministic. But in some sense that complications help you understand, because otherwise, randomize algorithms are often `magic'.
When we rolled out hover2 in production it looked significantly different from Google, so we were concerned that we might lose the lift. But we didn't. So we chalked the lift up to the hover UX paradigm rather than the visual similarity to Google.
Interesting pendulum going on here:

A big reason we moved to Dropbox and the cloud was to avoid the single-point-of-failure and security problems associated with self-hosting. Most home users aren't going to take the time to make sure their arkOS is constantly up-to-date and configured securely, and anything hosted from one particular location is liable to data loss from all sorts of physical issues (hardware failure, theft, natural disaster, etc.).

I have a Dropbox Pro account because I'd rather pay someone a small amount of money to take care of these things for me than risk my data being destroyed by a fluke. The ability to access files from across devices is a big benefit too, but a big part of the cloud push is to move critical data off of individual devices, and I don't see arkOS handling that in its current pitch.
Yes! Fantastic, thank you, I've been looking for something like that.
Every time I leave my office block, I have to use a card touched to a reader to badge back in. Oh... the horror!
This may seem like a stupid question, but wouldn't the owners (including current senior management) know this, and be be able to double their wealth by squeezing out the inefficiency? Why does this break down? Is it because outside shareholders don't have voting power?

btw - I like this question on HN because I expect the answers to be of higher quality than on Quora.
You may never eat street food in China again after watching this video
As far as I know, it originates from the /g/-board there.
Because they have a problem with the simplest thing, choosing good brand name.

Among Android companies, Samsung was the first one with consistent brand strategy: Galaxy S1, S2, ... updated each year.

It doesn't require IQ 160 to grasp this: good name and update each year.

But for some reason HTC, each x months created new brand: Hero, Desire, don't remember, One, and the last one: One X/Mega f... I don't remember even after reading Engadget three times a week.

LG tried to copy Samsung and changed the letter to G. So finally we have G1 and G2. Not bad, they are more consisted than HTC.

Sony has letter Z but still doesn't know how to enumerate updates. The last model is Z1 and the previous was Z or Z Zero? I don't know.

Blackberry also uses letter Z, and their last model is Z10?

At least Google coined good brand name, Nexus. Nokia has Lumia series which are selling quite well.
For people that don't get it. The idea is simple. If you're a pool with 25% hashing power you can sort of make this happen. What you do is that you mine like a regular pool. In fact it's not a dishonest pool but it's called selfish because it acts like a normal pool. Say you find a block, which happens like any other pool. Instead of publishing it, you keep it private. This is the key.

Now with enough tries it will happen that you find two blocks in a row - again happens all the time with pools. But what you do is that you wait until the other pools find theirs. Once they find the block (you already found it remember?), or they've wasted many cycles finding it, you publish yours that you've found already.

By doing this you kind of selectively publish the blocks you find, wasting other pools cycles and sort of giving you a heads start for the next block search. It's all actually about building a pool that selectively publishes blocks so that it can get you a heads start for the next mining cycle. Miners will likely join this selfish pool because they'll have a heads start and not feel as though their hashing power is going to waste since it's constantly being invalidated by the selfish pool (by publishing blocks at specific times).

The paper assumes there's only one selfish pool. I presume that if a selfish pool arises, there will also be a variety of other selfish pools arising at the same time. If all pools are acting this way, then there's really no incentive for miners to go to any specific pool (avoiding centralization). So it will just be like regular mining again.
Watching the video it still seems like I can still see that the bot is responding to the human. (I mean, I know that is what it's doing, but I thought I wasn't supposed to be able to detect it.)
This is a nice counterpoint to the article yesterday about a pentest team using a fake woman to spearphish their way into a US government agency that was posted here yesterday. [0]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6664572
I'm German so I probably can't apply to YC.
Plus I've just made this as a hobby/side project and don't have time to deal with trying to monetize it yet.
How Sourcegraph maps the Python code universe: Introduction
Business is a pillar of the civic religion of America, and Americans like the idea of things that are good for people also being Good for Business. Civic-minded businessmen have been touting the positive effects of social progress on Business for decades. Galbraith addresses the phenomenon at length in _The New Industrial State_.

Cook isn't trying to make a persuasive factual argument, he's making an endorsement, the power of which comes from his role at a major American firm. I have no doubt that he personally believes that workplace equality is beneficial to business. The argument against assumes that he's a bloodless psychopath who is willing to condone discrimination as long as it improves his bottom line.
Please, this is like saying no new works of Poetry, Philosophy, Fiction, Drama, Religion will be written. Reminds me of Fukuyama's ridiculous "End of History" argument.
It wasn't your precious market that ended segregation or created an environment where people felt safe from lynchings.

Neither did the government passing laws. What ended these things, to the extent that they are ended (try looking up the figures for racially motivated violence in inner cities sometime), was changes in people's attitudes. And those changes are mainly due to compulsory public education plus generational turnover: the old bigots died and their children were indoctrinated with a different mindset.
Thanks for your input bsimpson. I definitely agree that self-hosting does present a whole new set of issues when it comes to reliability, security and accessibility. That is why the project has put a focus on developing tools like VPS architecture compatibility, dynamic DNS and port proxying relays, encrypted and automatic backup services, and more. Hosting your data on the Raspberry Pi is just the tip of the iceberg for the project - we want to make it as safe as possible while still keeping the control and privacy that is increasingly important these days.
Show HN: Capybara-touch, a Capybara driver for MobileWebkit
You might want to check out Zimpl. It's a language to make it real simple to formulate mixed linear programming problem. (Mixed here means integer and continuous.)
Europe etymology map
Eurotrip Hack: 10 Cities for $232
The 12-hour lifespan of content links is interesting; it prevents indexing or hot-linking content on the site. Even if the RIAA/MPAA/etc. set up bots watching the room and issuing takedowns for infringing files, the time allowed to comply with a DMCA takedown is greater than the lifespan of a file on the service.

In other words: this should be fun, until they get sued out of existence.
Smurfs were real, and normal size! It's the mushrooms that were big enough to carve houses inside.
IMO, absolutely not.

IIRC, there was an actual incident of people getting HIV/AIDS from a transfusion which lead to the introduction of the ban.

Unfortunately, the number of homosexuals in the world isn't high enough to offset the number of people who would stop donating blood from homophobia if an organization changed their stance on this issue.

I'm not willing to let masses of people die just so that I can be "politically correct" about homosexuals being able to donate blood.
Sensationalist. A blog citing another blog citing a Wall Street Journal article citing a quote from a Facebook employee who probably was just giving examples of data that could be tracked. Decide for yourself.

"The social network may start collecting data on minute user interactions with its content, such as how long a user’s cursor hovers over a certain part of its website, or whether a user’s newsfeed is visible at a given moment on the screen of his or her mobile phone, Facebook analytics chief Ken Rudin said Tuesday during an interview."
You are blowing this so much out of proportion. I wouldn't have given that question a second thought. Why should I? It's a perfectly normal question and I can understand why it is being asked. If you are single, you have the flexibility to travel.

If you aren't, you have a family to look after and that opportunity will be reserved for someone else. I'd be excited if they asked, I'd be thrilled to travel.
U.S. Patent No. 6,957,224: Efficient retrieval of uniform resource locators

U.S. Patent No. 7,072,849: Method for presenting advertising in an interactive service

U.S. Patent No. 7,099,862: Programmatic discovery of common contacts.
4 upcoming technologies to disrupt the decade
Ensure: Literate assertions in Python
Or that they own a cat.
Could you elaborate on the tolls it takes?
I wanted to recommend that! ;)

But to expand a little, orgmode has two modes of LaTeX-integration. The first one gets normally passed from text, so you can just use e.g. \emph{} in your orgmode source file. The other is a dedicated LaTeX-environemt (#+BEGIN_LaTeX ... #+END_LaTeX) that puts the appropriate literal LaTeX in the appropriate place within the document. I use its beamer-mode and do any tikz-graphics as literal LaTeX code within the org-file.

Though I do my normal writing simply in LaTeX, because that just deals more neatly with edge-cases, really.
Fired BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins could leave with millions
No metric of investment success is very instructive unless there's some estimate of or proxy for purchase price of positions.

For example, some VCs play the game of buying a bit of stock in as many hugely successful start-ups as they can, even if it's on the secondary private market at near-IPO valuations, so that they can put cool logos on their websites.
What we now label "blogs" predate the word "blog" by several years. They date back to at least ~1993. A word was added to our language to describe something that already existed.

If using that word to describe examples that came before the word was coined is anachronistic, then surely so must be using modern English to discuss, say, the Roman Empire?
> And like most robot systems, you can "trick" the robot by just occluding its sensors.

I'd probably lose rock-paper-scissors if you blind-folded me, too.
Glad it dose not automatically show the images.
These really qualify as "grave breaches" of the Geneva Conventions, and the United States is obligated under the treaty to pursue charges against the torturers, along with everyone up the chain of command. Other countries are also obligated to pursue these torturers. It will be interesting to see if any of them are ever brought to justice.
It happens.

It's happening increasingly quickly now as compared with 20, or 40, or 80 years ago.

The “topple rate,” the rate at which big companies lose their leadership positions, has more than doubled, suggesting that “winners” are in a precarious positions. (Quoting Denning). Companies stay at the top of the heap for ever shorter periods of time. Similar statistics on residency in indices such as the DJIA or S&P 500 support this observation.

The long-term decline in ROIC (return on invested capital) 1965-2009. From 6.2% to 1.3%. Though there've been some ups and downs, that's a very long-term consistent slide.

And it's pretty much always been the case that technology companies, especially those that don't have deep and broad connections elsewhere, fall over fairly quickly. AT&T and IBM managed to get themselves deeply wedded into corporate and government fabric. Xerox and Land (the instant photo camera company) not so much. Consumer electronics has been pretty fickle, and Blackberry grossly overplayed its hand in the mid-2000s.

More on the transition of businesses in the Shift Index:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/01/25/shift-in...
http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2009/0...
We believe in Lean startup
Ask HN: which cheap server hosting in Europe (not OVH) would you recommend ?
Hello,

Which hosting provider would you recommend for storing a lot of personal files (backup from a nas at home) and eventually hosting a few tiny websites/sandbox ? I need about 3 terabytes.

OVH is still in "sold out" mode, and I don't want to use a service based in the USA for privacy reason.
Oh no, you've used the performance argument against me ;-) Obviously, when performance issues are on the line, you often need to trade simplicity and maintainability.
What is this gem called? I've seen it on boatbound and MyTime, now on 42floors. Same Rails based layout.
Yes - expertise is highly overrated too. Ask experts to give 90% confidence intervals on topics in their area of interest, and see how many they get wrong. This spans industries.
I love this idea and I think this has the potential to be really amazing. I could see myself using it socially as well as a sort of remote office. The ability to have music autoplay (? it appears anyway, doesn't seem to be working for me right now) seems very interesting. I think you're really onto something with this. My main concern would be privacy before I started using this on any type of regular basis though. If you can solve that, or even really just make a self-hosted version, I'd be all over it.
Part of the reason a mushroom would be so tall is that when the cap opens, the stem is connected to the middle. So a mushroom top that is say, 10 feet across, would be at the very least 5 feet tall. As the top gets heavier the stem would have to be larger in diameter to hold up the increased weight.

It's also not uncommon to find fungi that are several feet long growing on trees and such. Not sure if the article specifically said mushroom or if it was just a fungi they found a fossil of.
I think that parent's complaint is that we come into the word problem with loaded expectations from our real life experience, and these distract from the core of the word problem.

I don't see a way around it, but it's a valid complaint about word problems that involve unusual scenarios. The "One train leaves blah, other train leaves blah, find where they cross paths" word problem is in tune with the real world, whereas an infinitely stretchy rubber band with an ant isn't.
Not every potential Vim user already uses it. So right, you couldn't pry Vimscript out of the hands of diehard users, but you might get a big crowd of people who aren't otherwise willing to take on Vim in the first place.
Let Your Emotions Lead You To Success
BlackBerry Was Just Kidding About Someone Buying It
My anecdotal experience of friends there is that they are universally talented. I can't point to anyone who squeeked in. Of them, half are working their tails off optimized completely working at a place that can scale their abilities. The other half could immediately leave for a promotion or two somewhere else. It amazes me that the talent level has scaled to 30,000 employees.
No problem at all!

Searching is a big one, looking through my shell history i frequently use egrep although I think egrep is a bad example here since I could use the IDE to do a search. The problem is that I frequently want to do something with the results - maybe make a substitution in each of the result files, or compress the files, or copy them to another host.

I overuse the find command, locate would run faster in many cases but find is just a reflex. E.g. answering:

find data/ -type f -mtime -1 # get me the working dataset from today

I see a lot of source control commands, This is something all the IDEs do but in my experience it's much more robust from the command line than an IDE.

There's a few 3 or 4 line scripts for various tasks I was doing manually. To give an example one is to kick off a rebuild of my KVM virtual machine (I currently write a lot of CFEngine code so this is a frequent thing when the unit tests of the cfengine code don't go to plan and leave the KVM borked!)

The biggest use case in my shell history is simple navigation to look at or operate on various files. Fuzzy search in ST2 is slowly winning my heart here right enough but it doesn't work on remote hosts or even local dirs not in my project.
I don't know that the site is NSFW, but clicking the links on the site is not advised at work.
Web Development on the Chromebook
So Google does acknowledge that Dalvik's JIT does not cut it.
Secrets of Javascript Ninja - John Resig
ARM talks tech about the 32-core CCN-508 bus
Extreme dogfooding