skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ya, the title is pretty link bait-y. Just think of all the people who clicked the link and then found out they have no interest in sorting.

Title: I saved the world!!!#$^%!1111
Content: I was about to step on an ant today and narrowly missed it, saving the universe and all of existence for that ant.
Haskell is nice and all, but it's hardly better in every respect. To name a few problems with Haskell relative to OCaml:

- pervasive use of laziness makes space utilization hard to reason about

- Highly complex runtime (mostly due to the need to work around laziness), which makes it harder to trust the correctness of the overall system and to and understand performance

- Significantly more complicated type system, which has its ups and downs. It surely makes the language more complicated to learn in and use in many cases. Benjamin Pierce, no slouch himself, has pointed out that he sometimes has to go read a research paper or two to understand some new library.

- Enforced type-level separation between pure and unpure code, which again, has its ups and downs.

Haskell is a great language. But it surely doesn't dominate OCaml.

And the OCaml community is doing quite well of late, as far as I can tell. There's a lot of new energy in the last few years, with great progress in both the core language and in the surrounding infrastructure.
I just realized I meant to say "slow banned".
This makes my wallet thinner. This requires no changes from existing merchants or their infrastructure. I approve.
I agree. It would be helpful to be notified that you did something wrong and what it was. The rule was not published, so I had no idea that I needed to diversify my posts.
I was thinking a fingerprint scanner is exactly what's missing on these devices (what I've seen so far, Coin, Echo & Wallaby), but this is also an interesting solution with iCache.

Too bad about what happened to it. (Actually just found out about iCache and what exactly happened and while I'm sad, I can't say I'm surprised.)
That's true. Having been briefly in academia, I only evaluated algorithms based on Big-O and just a bit of practical experience taught me that there tends to be a sweet spot, where the o(n^2.7) is both much faster then your naive implementation, but simpler to code, better constants, and better cache lines then the o(n^2.7003).
Not sure why people on HN are up voting an article putting down a new YCombinator.

Even if it's valid, which I don't think it is it's not really what HN should be about.

It's not constructive criticism since it basically writes a company off.

Even the legal issue is BS. So what if it's not 100% kosher if they get away with it, good on them. All companies when they start take risks.
Ok, so while I wish I had the time to create a cool web app to analyze political data, I def think it would required not to overload the user's CPU. I launched the site and immediately my MAC slowed down to crawl. I checked top and it at at 100%+

I do not recommend you clicking on any of the dots.
As with politics, follow the money.
I agree. The nature of my work is very cyclic. I would love to be able to work on courses during down time and put them on hold during busy periods. A coursera course that I was taking is just finishing up now and a few weeks ago work was busy and I feel behind. I'll end up 'failing' the course but at least I did manage to learn from it and hopefully the videos will stay up so I'll be able to finish it on my own schedule. There are also coursera and edx classes I've signed up for with no intention of participating so I have access to the material when I have time. To me, one of the biggest potential benefits of online learning isn't being utilized, everyone being able to work at their own pace.
As I understand it, it's pay to have a mentor and get a certificate. I think the courses are exactly the same as they were before, and just as free.
There is a chrome extension and bookmarklet. Check the sidebar for links.
But all the credit unions are owned by desjardins if I recall correctly.
Entirely possible to use pt-online-schema-change on an RDS instance. It's just running a bunch of SQL commands and is very happy to do them against a remote database like an RDS instance.
The LMDB statistics are very strange - why is synchronous SSD performance worse on most figures than HDD performance? Something seems very wrong with these benchmarks:

Section 5 (SSD) F (Synchronous Writes)

Random Writes

LevelDB 342 ops/sec
Kyoto TreeDB 67 ops/sec
SQLite3 114 ops/sec
MDB 148 ops/sec
MDB, no MetaSync 322 ops/sec
BerkeleyDB 291 ops/sec

Section 8 (HDD) F (Synchronous Writes)

Random Writes

LevelDB 1291 ops/sec
Kyoto TreeDB 28 ops/sec
SQLite3 112 ops/sec
MDB 297 ops/sec
BerkeleyDB 704 ops/sec

Really? LevelDB is four times faster on an HDD than an SSD with synchronous writes? BerkeleyDB is over twice as fast?

This smells.
The video for the lazy ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL_UD1oAF0E
extrapolating from my experience of netflix...something that you sit down at intending to do 'just one episode' and unexpectedly spend four hours on?
Interesting to ponder this in conjunction with this Fast Company article on Sebastian Thrun http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-thrun-u...

It's hard not to see this move as Udacity essentially getting into low touch (but not lowest touch), presumably high quality self-paced adult education that seems to be mostly focused on practical Silicon Valley-type skills and shifting away from trying to "disrupt" education.
I think that what is in a person's self-interest is to find a sustainable, enjoyable way to live that will last a lifetime. There is a lot more that could be said about that, but it's a high-level summary.

The proof of that is looking at man's nature and what life is. So all I can do is point in the right direction. To write it all down in a comment would be impossible, plus pointless, because it doesn't prove anything to you until you see it yourself, firsthand, by looking at reality.

> I would guess there are whole classes of people for whom stealing and manipulating is in their own self interest. Sociopaths for example.

I am certain that that's not right. Lying, cheating and manipulating will never be a sustainable mode of living. It keeps you dependent on luck and the whims of others, and eventually you will get caught. It's much better to pick any one of 10,000 honest professions and actually live by your own work. It's better to trade with "all of humanity" and live in harmony with others, than to constantly be at war with others.

> Sociopaths for example.

Being a sociopath would be horrible. (They may not realize that themselves--because they don't know any different and/or would rather not face the facts.) Why? Because you'd have to completely give up on all the values you get from enjoying other people---friendships, cooperation, and all forms of romantic love. (Sociopaths may outwardly seem like they have some of these, but in reality, everyone is not only their victim, but also a potential threat when the victim catches on to the game.) Plus the more general issues I mentioned above.

> Honest question: are you sure you aren't rejecting the parent's premise because you don't like the conclusion, not because you disagree with the premise?

I'm not sure what you are calling the premise and what you are calling the conclusion. But in general, I think that acting in your own self-interest actually results in cooperation with others and not victimizing other people. So we need to be arguing for more rational self-interest. We need to stop making the typical "moral" arguments that amount to, "If you want to be good, sacrifice for others; if you want to be happy, sacrifice other people." That is a completely horrible argument that will never result in anyone being good OR happy.
Qubit survives record 39 minutes at room temperature
Usually people say "minutes" when they are talking about time intervals of several minutes. The period you cannot use electronics is from the time the cabin door closes to the moment the plane reaches some arbitrary height on take off and the reverse sequence on landing. This can easily be anywhere from half an hour to several hours e.g. if the flight is delayed it will just stand at the gate with the closed door waiting for clear. You cannot use any electronics during that time.
Minecraft: The Story of Mojang (Official Version Now Available on YouTube)
Show HN: My side project, PDF Everything – convert files to PDF
Never say never, but, this seems unlikely.

The nature of the RC4 flaw isn't such that attackers grind on a single ciphertext with fast compute. The problem is rather a series of statistical biases that recur at intervals in the keystream. The time you spend attacking RC4 isn't due to compute, but rather due to the number of samples you need to collect to leverage the biases to recover plaintext. You can imagine improvements on the attack that would require fewer samples, but probably not improvements that would get you down to double-digit samples.

There may indeed be a lot of room for attacks on RC4 to improve, and improve in ways that outpace (nonexistent) countermeasures. I think RC4 is scarier than CBC padding timing. But a real-time attack on RC4 would seem to imply a radically different attack on RC4 than any the literature has hinted at.
> The LMDB statistics are very strange - why is synchronous SSD performance worse on most figures than HDD performance?

Could it be that most database engines are based on algorithms that were developed before SSDs were significant, and were extremely optimized for HDD performance?
Check out http://brandbucket.com
Yes, this is exactly what the author is trying to port to Python.

Mandatory reference link: http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/algorithm/nth_element . Note linear complexity.

There's also std::partial_sort:

http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/algorithm/partial_sort
I think nothing shows how big the space race really was than the fact that so many countries poured resources into building a national space program

See the case of Argentina: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en-419&sl=auto&tl=e...

Another case worth mentioning is a forerunner of SpaceX the West German company OTRAG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OTRAG
Good point, and thanks for letting me know you appreciate my commentary.
Somebody better call Kickstarter...
Ask HN: Are there ads on HN now?
I just saw a frontpage link without an upvote button and no points display.
POV-Ray 3.7 is released under the AGPL3
A lot of the complexity comes from this being the first case to deal with this kind of issue. That means a lot needed to be sorted out along the way (even such simple things as which legal issue should be considered first).

Now that this ruling has been made (and assuming it holds up on appeal), the next case along the same lines will be much simpler. Some of those cases might not happen at all (since the expected result will now be clear).
I think there's a difference between working with first principles to develop an idea, and reasoning with first principles to explain the developed idea to others.

When it comes to explaining the idea to others, using a first-principles line of reasoning is only one of your options.
Isn't that the case for all the youtube education series (khan academy for example)?
Hi,

1. One of the reason for using Facebook login was to allow user to decide what information they want to share including permission to share on user wall.
2. having said that, we will try to find a way to make it more explicit.
3. email us if you want to remove your a/c from joday.

thanks,
I guess taking on that quote was a pot-shot. And, yes, the US have a role to play in North Korea. After all the Kims, at least initially, built their reputation in Korea on fighting the Americans.
I noticed that too -- the job post. It's pretty unobtrusive and I don't think I've seen that before.
>> and also help out folks who need clothes for a decent price.

In your mind, does that mean it's immoral for someone well off to shop at a thrift store?
Where did that last paragraph come from? Sheesh.
That's akin to saying you're part of a 'social network' by virtue of having your own homepage. Sure, everyone can come to your site to see your updates/pics/etc but it's not a fair comparison to the things Facebook/twitter/G+ provide.
Spot on. Some research to back you up: http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?articl...
When two dynamic magstripe products appear on the front page of HN, I just had to find out how it works.

Protean provided a link on the front page FAQ but unfortunately that link doesn't work, so here's the working how-it-works entry[1] and a history of reprogrammable card technologies[2] from their blog. The "magstripe" is essentially an electromagnet that is able to sense the reader's swipe head and start the "playback" along the entire track. If you'd like to build a simple one, you just need to playback a waveform into a coil placed at the swipe head [3].

And regarding their answer on the card skimming bit, it's most likely just a form of software protection. If they can so easily duplicate a card's magstripe, what's stopping anyone from being able to do it (with their product)?

I would definitely buy one though.

[1] http://blog.getprotean.com/?p=124

[2] http://blog.getprotean.com/?p=396

[3] http://hackaday.com/2008/08/04/magnetic-stripe-card-spoofer/
> It's a tradeoff. I came into Coursera thinking that I'd like more flexibility. But I now see the benefits of a more structured approach so long as deadlines aren't too rigid. After all, if you want something totally unstructured, there is lots of video and other material on most topics on the Internet.

This is key. I still find myself wishing the deadlines were different here and there (or that they were better distributed... taking 10 courses with everything due in a six hour window Sunday night is annoying and takes being at least a week ahead to avoid). Still, I know that I do better because of it. The peer assessments aren't effective in every course but for some they're absolutely vital.

What I'm really looking forward to is seeing how some courses settle, probably after receiving a little more institutional support, into better defined roles. Instead of just splitting up the sequence in terms of "Part I" and "Part II" they could offer exclusively peer reviewed components for people who wish to write papers and a quiz/homework component which then give different certificates (it would be encouraged to earn both). At the moment EdX seems to be the strongest supporter of human review (either peers or TAs) with Harvard courses such as Copyright Law and National Security, but they can do it because the classes are limited to a few hundred people and everyone else must audit.
Which suburb? There are great suburbs (Evanston, Oak Park) and there are awful ones (Plainfield, Schaumburg).

Virtually nobody in our (sizable) office drives to work besides me, and I really have no excuse, since I'm a short walk from the Green Line. Public transportation is spotty in the suburbs, but in terms of coverage (both in space and time) the actual city of Chicago's system is among the best in the country. Is New York's better? Yes. But New York might be the only US city that can easily make that claim.

There is no comparison to be made between Chicago and San Francisco, or between Chicago Metro and SFBA.
I understand that this unsupervised approach is out of fashion already.

https://plus.google.com/+YannLeCunPhD/posts/UVT2fYTfoAC
I must have missed the meeting where libertarians decided that a free society would be a utopia.
The "lie detector" test that the CIA has is far more capable than the 50 year old tech you see in the movies.
Those types of links have been on here for a while for a while.
I said, "SnapChat! What you want?... He said, 'I need about tree-fitty'"
My main point is that a space exploration capability is more than just rocketry. You are right, the rocket boosters were originally military-developed, and even today, many launch vehicles have heritage in the military. But, as we move past the first phase of the space program (demonstration orbiters), and NASA started to design capsules for astronauts and complex remote sensing instruments, rocketry became a smaller piece of the technology pie.

I tried to amplify this point by noting examples where NASA-DoD partnerships have fizzled, mainly due to cultural/technology mismatches.

The reason I replied to the comment is that it referred to SpaceX not having a DoD minder, as if that distinguishes SpaceX from today's NASA. There is no DoD minder calling the shots at NASA, so this struck me as a weird thing to say.

(I have worked at JPL for many years...not on rockets. ;-)
Elasticsearch shard max size: Query times grow exponentially
I'm American and I never understood the back-pocket thing until I moved to the West Coast and started carrying my (bulky, remote) car key in addition to just house keys. Once you have those and a phone in your front pockets, something has to go in your back pocket.
On top of that, the force is spread over an area that is much more suited to withstanding that force (as opposed to the as-yet unfused parietal bones of the skull)
Have the chip version of the Amex Platinum. Since its the US version, its chip and signature, not chip and pin, and works almost nowhere in Europe.
Like a lot of early-stage technologies, it was easy to get in and do novel things when it was in its infancy. The early U.S. work had the same amateur characteristics as in TFA:

http://www.space.com/13463-nasa-jet-propulsion-lab-rocket-te...

Sand bags to hide behind, fuel lines strung up on sticks, and a case of Crisco. What more could you want?
There is more happening with R, D3 / Javascript info vis, and the iPython/Notebook stack around data science than Wolfram as a singular corporation can possibly keep up with. In a recent version R was embraced and extended, is this another step with those same sorts of strategies?

The value of these Open Source communities go way beyond the core language and arise out of the structure.

This will go the way of Linux/BSD (only Microsoft could justify rolling forward alone with its own OS kernel).
Disagree away you are not taking any demands away from anything it will just find other avenues and forums.

Just as in war on drugs.
I like how the labels obscure the fact that BART just cuts a line through the city of San Francisco. Also funny is how the legend at the bottom of the map blots out the parts of south bay where everything actually is.

Note also that the Chicago map is just a route map, and bears little relation to the geography of Chicago.
Am I crazy or do they not actually mention anywhere what the fee is?
I'm on mobile and cant quickly and easily search this but is there a good GUI for postgre similar or superior to phpmyadmin?
It seems that if you are publicly wealthy you are going to get 'pitched' pretty much regardless. I am always impressed by folks who are "rich" and do their homework. And of course being a tech guy, watching these multi-million dollar 3 - 5 year deals that sports players get, I do my share of "If I could open a fund with $15M these are the areas I'd put my money into." sort of arm chair VC'ing.

Living with some of the folks in college who would later go on to be "big stars" in the NFL it was clear that some were thinking ahead, even then, and some were winging it :-).
Works well until sh*t hits the fan and you need to cull teams or have a very angry customer.
The buck really does need to stop somewhere, it cannot be distributed.
How does that follow? Do you consider any company who has a hackathon to also have a laissez-faire attitude towards business? Since obviously the stuff built there isn't directly contributing to their bottom line.

There's a lot of aspects of Github I think you could use as an example (and you do) but the existence of a kegerator or alcohol in the office isn't really a good one.
"As much as its bought for" is a popular response when I've asked this question. I guess it comes down to sematics - is value sort of like Net Revenue Versus Revenue? Amazon makes boatloads of revenue, but still hasn't seen the return it wants. How does this affect the value of the company? The stock buyers apparently don't care...

I think these sort of app related multi-billion acquisitions with little or no revenue are a complete farce and do more harm than good - especially when it comes down to a product with NO revenue. It's basically disregarding capitalist business principles for shallow popularity.
>i don't follow your leap from the first part of that statement to the last.

To address this one specifically, on average, in the long run, if the sellers' listings could have been found/ bought, then the opportunity to do the arbitrage wouldn't have been there in the first place. To put it another way: the assumption would be that he could do the arbitrage because the deal otherwise would be very hard to find.

>instead he was rewarded for exploiting an asymmetry of knowledge.

We are always rewarded for asymmetry of knowledge - it's called comparative advantage in econ, I think. Everyone of us here has a job because there are not enough people to do whatever we're doing (grossly generalized, but I'm just trying to make a point). If we have 6 billions Donald Knuth alive on earth, I'd say a lot of us would be in trouble from a career prospective.

And I don't think it's a "winner take all" situation, more of a "we care about different stuffs in life" one. Financial decisions, despite its importance, isn't something that most people would strive to the perfect at. We don't always optimize for each and every single financial decisions (or any type of decision) in life.

And as for the part where he could have help the sellers or the buyers. Well, for once, if he didn't care about the profit, he might not have acquired the knowledge. Additionally, the question wasn't whether he could disseminate the knowledge, but whether he ought to do so. Let's say if the first time he saw it, he contact and let the seller know, and then that's about it. Why would he have any incentive (or obligation) to search for the other seller and let them know?

On a side note, there is the famous essay by Singer - "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" which argues that it's immoral if you're not spending every single effort you can to help the less fortunate (paraphrase by me). I certainly deeply admire anyone who strive to do so, but I can't really say I could do so.
Other than Javascript testing frameworks, I don't know of any offhand...

A few quick Google searches turn up some possibilities: Codeception for PHP shows tests in the browser with Selenium... or with a little hacking, you can show RSpec tests in the browser, http://blog.jcoglan.com/2013/07/01/running-rspec-tests-from-...
How to Make a Collage from Google Images
Guess they should have made a video, like Coin
Forests disappearing since 2000? Google cloud maps global changes
As long as they never allow anyone to talk on their cellphone during flights, I'm happy.
Scaling an education venture is a hard problem. You work really hard to figure out how to distribute quality content cheaply to lots of people and it turns out that, at the end of the day, it seems that we still rely on labor/cost intensive methods to teach. [1]

Clearly, Udacity, edX, Khan, etc are successfully solving many problems (quality content, automated grading, gamification, etc) and that we're moving in the right direction.

I've very much looking forward to the day were we start to see education costs decline because we've gotten so much better at mass producing knowledge/love for learning/reasoning skills/etc.

[1] As a side note, it's not clear to me if actually reasoning and talking with another human is really required for learning. It certainly seems that way at the moment, but is this because the content isn't good enough or are our brains built in a way that learning requires human interaction?
Thanks. I don't know of one that directly does this for Ruby, but see this comment for a possibility that I dug up real quick: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6737302