skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One cheap (in time and money) complement to A/B or multivariate testing that the author doesn't mention is usability testing, specifically remote testing. Before we launch a test, we always run remote usability tests.

Feedback like this should be taken with a grain of salt, since these people are testers, not necessarily like your users in all respects. But it's still really valuable. I've caught numerous errors that test data would not help me understand easily.

Combine remote usability testing through something like usertesting.com with prototyping, and you've got a really rapid way to get feedback on the cheap, even if you don't have enough site visitors to get statistical significance on a reasonable time frame.
That Cryptolocker virus demands payment in Bitcoins.
Being pretty naive to the space, I'm assuming the killer differentiator from Microsoft's own Power Query (which looks like it can pull from Hadoop) is that this pulls a subset of data as an initial workspace, while Power Query pulls all of the data? Any other key differences?

Really cool tool! Wish I had some large real-world Hadoop cluster to try it out on...
China discovered Bitcoin, I believe it was featured on its state news recently, and the main Chinese bitcoin exchange (which is only 2 months old or so) is already the largest in the world. China has been hurting for any kind of financial investment vehicle of late, and historically they are big savers.

This is what happens with global phenomena. The soil (global internet) is already there, anything that will grow in that soil (like bitcoin) can spread VERY quickly like a wildfire.

What happens when India discovers it is perfect for remittances? What happens when Africa discovers they can exchange payments with just a mobile phone without even having a bank or credit card or any credit period? What happens when parents the world over realize this is a perfect way to give their kids money to buy stuff online with? Or for online retailers to be able to sell to the unbanked and to those who don't have good credit or a credit card? Anywhere in the world, to anyone with BTC? What happens when new uses for Bitcoin that haven't even been thought of yet, are?

Trivia: The head of the Chinese exchange is a Stanford graduate and his brother invented Litecoin.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_Days_Destroyed
Banks don't exchange wealth with physical shipments of gold and cash. Large scale digital transfers of money is nothing new.
I would say iOS. I want to build simple app for plan sharing (i know it's been tried before multiple times) but right now seem great timing. email me for more info.
For interested people: Here is the discussion about the mentioned pool package: https://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=4720
New Podcast: Small Business Content Marketing
Reverse Engineering the Z80′s 16-bit Increment/Decrement Circuit
The terrorists taking over the government won't do any good for the terrorists. It will just lead to the US having to once again unmercilessly completely demolish the country's government and let someone else step into the power vacuum.

If that someone is more terrorists, rinse and repeat.

There is not an infinite supply of terrorists. And if more terrorists fill the power vacuum, you're likely to eventually get a groups that decides they'd rather keep being in power than be aggressively wiped out.

Moreover, this greatly incentivizes all non-terrorists to cooperate and work together to form a government that will not be subject to US attack and will not cause their country to stay in a permanent state of war.

I think these incentives are so strong, that only 1 country would ever need to be made an example of.

If it weren't for Obama destroying American credibility to act on its threats, it would likely take 0 actual examples. But since nobody believes America will enact its own foreign policy anymore, it would now probably take 1 example.

There are only two ways to deal with force: cower in fear forever, which is what the US is doing now, to the massive detriment of its citizens' safety (mainly due to overgrowth of government such as the NSA), or just eliminate the threat.

And there is nothing morally wrong with responding with force to someone who threatens you with force.

Foruntately, the US military is so overwhelmingly dominant that pretty much any "terrorist threat" is like a fly to a giant. Even eliminating Saddam, a professional warload with a whole country at his disposal, was a sure thing---it was just a question of how few lives the US could lose.

Unfortunately, the US leadership will not adopt this doctrine in the short term, and probably never. The current Republicans and Democrats are totally opposed to using the kind of rational, moral clarity that is necessary. They would prefer to waffle and "negotiate." It would take a sea-change in the structure of the Republican party for America to ever adopt this doctrine, and is even less likely for the Democrats.
You have a people problem. Technology won't solve your people problem.
I wonder how much of the recent BitCoin run up is driven by CryptoLocker?

CryptoLocker demands 2 bitcoins (10 after initial deadline has passed) and there are only around 12 million BitCoins in circulation. I haven't seem any good estimates of how many people have been infected but it seems like it is quite a few. This additional demand could easily drive the price up although eventually the CyptoLocker extortionists would sell those BitCoins driving the price down.
Look at the 2y chart. Then look at the oil price chart from 2000. This spike will have a matching downspike with recovery.
Check lit http://www.corslit.com/
I bought some at $30 and sold at $260 right before the last crash (literally, 2 hours before). I felt all smug…
I know it's a cliché to bring this up but even with BTC being (arguably) instruments for speculation, it helps to keep Ben Graham's "Mr. Market" in mind when you're worrying about what the current exchange rate is. If you went to a store and they discounted your favourite [grocery item], would you rush home and sell all that you had in your cupboard, or buy it up while you can?
> What would you do if you were facing those charges?

Are you asserting that suicide is the most reasonable option in a situation like this?

I've noticed this sentiment a lot lately (you hear it all the time in discussions about youths who commit suicide after having been bullied excessively); as if outside forces are overwhelmingly responsible for when a person takes their own life, and any personal culpability that that person might have had is thrown out the window.

I'm not saying that the events that contribute towards a suicide should be ignored, but it's important to remember that suicide, by definition, is always a personal choice. We should be doing more to assist, or even empower, those who feel as if they have to make that choice.

Instead of doing the easy thing and blaming a scapegoat (to say that "[Aaron] was practically murdered by the state" is ludicrous, and not at all productive), why don't we look at the root of the problem - what really caused Swartz to do what he did (i.e., a poor state of mental health, something that currently affects millions of Americans) - and work towards preventing it from happening to others?
Locally in git you have the HEAD@{n} notation to step back n steps through the reflog, so after a bad rebase a `git reset --hard HEAD@{1}` should be all you need.
Can Excel open a 1-billion-row data file?
On a related note: Is the bitcoin infrastructure mature enough to support short selling in a sane way yet? I've yet to find a decent way to do this.
Right, question time:

Market cap is now $5 billion. Wealth can't be created, so where has that money come from? Have other currencies fractionally devalued?

The cost of mining has been negligible until recently.
That's fair but I highly doubt it will drop that low. I really, really hope it does though, wouldn't mind popping a few grand into it.
Out of even more curiosity, have you unloaded, if not, why is a 10000% return insufficient?
Quantmod - Quantitative Financial Modelling & Trading Framework for R
Why is it more expensive in Brazil? Is it subsidized in the US because of expected add revenue?
I use BTC-E. Too bad I'm an idiot and traded over 50BTC for litecoins. I'm legitimately stressed.
Not learn it?

Certainly an option; keeping the syntax recognisable helped rather than hindered adoption, which was slow enough as it was at the beginning.

JS+DOM could have lost to Flash rather than vice versa.
Also, "Suite 18A" in your address doesn't really impress people. Anyone can change "Apartment 18A" to "Suite 18A" in their address, and their mail will still be delivered to the same place.

And it's pretty obvious to a customer that if the "CEO" answers his own phone and they never meet any of the CEO's employees, they're dealing with a one-man operation that's putting up a fake front.
@wil421 The Skulpt Aim is actually unlike any other device on the market. It uses a technique called Electrical Impedance Myography that my co-founder Dr. Seward Rutkove began developing over a decade ago at Harvard Medical School. Four years ago we combined his background in neurology with my engineering background to refine this technology and develop a system that not only gives you information about your fat content, but also your muscle quality. The first system we developed is medical in nature and is being used by pharmaceutical companies and academic researchers at some of the top hospitals across the US. The Skulpt Aim leverages all of the knowledge we have gained over the last decade to provide consumers with a tool that gives them fat percentage and muscle quality for individual muscles. The device uses patent-pending sensors and algorithms licensed from Harvard and MIT and others developed internally to calculate accurate indices of muscle fitness. Because the device is placed directly on the muscle you measure, it gives you very accurate data on that specific muscle. I'm curious, when you say "sensors like these", what in particular are you referring to? Regarding your second question, this first generation embodiment is a stand alone device, but we are certainly looking at other implementations for down the line.
"I want full week battery life"

That's what's wrong with dumbphones. I want multi-year battery life, so I stay with my solar calculator.
>M:N threading has been a great idea in theory for at least twenty years, but during that whole time actually implementing it has always ended in tears.

Not always: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/
Thin clients. Everything old is new again.
The annotation is critically important.

Seeing a link to [mozilla.org] with talk about threading, I assumed it was something to do with Firefox (which I care about) versus Rust (which I don't).
Hah, that's exactly why I did it. :)

I couldn't easily associate .xml with the designer in VS since everyone uses .xml.
Software patents are insane
Speaker here. Seriously, ping me if you want to chat about this stuff: greg@tablexi.com.

To those who were hoping for more discussion, check DevPressed [1], or the comments on this /r/programming thread [2] from a few months back. For help finding a professional check the resources page at DevsAndDepression [3].

1. http://www.devpressed.com

2. http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1kx5fx/devs_and...

3. http://www.devsanddepression.com/resources
Anyone here old enough to remember COBOL? It pretty much was rather plain english for a turing-complete language.

Not as elegant as Dogescript obviously
They'd be apt to hold on to the bitcoins if the CryptoLocker infection is exponential.
Don't forget the OS running on the NFC chip.
How to generate 90k per month in 9 months
You're thinking of Bitcoin like a stock. It is not a stock. Everyone agress that it is likely to either go up my orders of magnitude, or not do that.

"Not do that" includes local price fluctuations that aren't predictable anyway, which is what you are trying to predit--like a stock.

Either invest in it because you want to invest in something that will either be the next HTTP or will be the next Gopher, OR don't invest in it because you don't want to invest in high-risk obsenely-high-return vehicles.
Yeah, sure, but many don't even try, and as the root comment suggests individuality and lack of enforced common rules and paradigms help to raise insecure software and devices.
Sony Z, 1920x1200, 13.3".

Made in Japan.

Can't beat that, unless you forced to live in Mac world.
Oh, I understand. I just have a personal quixotic crusade about the distinction between the two. Computer programming and computer science are parallel fields that complement each other. Too many students who want to learn to program major in computer science, because nobody tells them what CS actually is. IS or IT with a CS minor might suit them a lot more.
By not buying, you're betting that the price won't go up. Good luck with your strategy of not investing in exponentially growing, disruptive technologies.
Already have been discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6724548
there is a limit and its no where near 1 billion.
> HN is not really the place to seek this type of advice.

Well, a cry for help isn't really a request for advice, it's just an alarm. There's good and bad advice in the thread, so hopefully some of the good made it to this person.
Lthread (http://github.com/halayli/lthread) is basically an M:N threading model.

You can run an lthread scheduler per core.
If you have direct language support, the runtime can either anticipate blocking ops and make sure there are enough other threads still running, or detect that an execution thread has already blocked (from a supervisor thread) and spawn a new one. How well that works depends on what you're doing. Computation is the trivial case. Network stuff is almost as good, because sockets are pretty good about not blocking when you've asked them not to. Filesystems aren't quite as good, so you have to use AIO and other tricks. Page faults are worst of all. Then you have to deal with NUMA scheduling issues yourself because the OS can no longer do it for you, and so on.

So yeah, if you have a really good runtime you can see some significant gains on some systems and workloads. More often you'll get very modest gains, and you'll have some extremely subtle bugs that cause a precipitous drop in performance e.g. when you start paging. That's "ending in tears" for the poor schlep who has to debug that stuff. It can be done but, as I said, it's not the best bang for the buck.
Yelp now identifies spammy/fraudulent reviews as simply "not recommended"
Technology is amoral.

If you think Bitcoin is genuinely new technology which might find a niche, it pays to throw a little money its way.

If you think the fact that people using a technology for nefarious purposes is a strike against that technology, then you should probably never handle cash, ever.
I can feel your pain. It's a very weird situation in Germany for people like us.

Legally it's not allowed, but you have to have ten lawyers backing you to make people in your company believe you that Office 365 and other SAAS Software isn't legally usable... Google Apps for Business, ZenDesk... We've just faced this situation with a customer who we've shown several lawyer inquiries we've sent about this topic and he flatout replied: "Well i guess your lawyers aren't very good then."
I refused an offer for my house in Aug 2007, don't sweat it.

Go into trades with a clear head not thinking about the past. Whatever you did you did, stressing about it will not help you make better trades in the future.

If you think BTC is going up, cut your litecoin losses and trade, if you don't stick with litecoin or something more stable til BTC reaches your price.
Ooops you are right, I remembered incorrectly the %
We're talking about the several-hundred-member body of people whose very job is to argue with each other? The one whose membership is up for modification every few years? The one whose purpose it is to create rules that persist across changes in membership?

That Congress?
To all those in this thread regretting having sold bictoins earlier because of some feeling. Don't be depressed, a lot of people did, and that's OK.

You can still trade, but you have to switch your mindset to a trader's one, and regretting a "missed" opportunity and feeling "tempted" to buy while the asset is on the rise is impulsive. Learn how to trade, there are countless resources around, even though this is not only math, learning seriously can protect you from impulsive behavior.

I'd say, if you want to invest in bitcoin, unless you're a serious believer (and that's fine, but in this case you probably already have some), do it like poker players manage their bankroll, use some money you can really afford to lose, so you can sleep at night and not feel too bad then the coin drops 25% over a day.

Anyways, what I think is that we are on HN, where people make money using their skills and by creating value. Investing $10k by creating your company today might not only make more money than the same investment in some cryptocurrency, but also create something of value in the meantime.

Want to join the bitcoin ride the hacker way? Build a service that uses the currency, or help people to use it.

Disclaimer: I have nothing against bitcoin, I just think it's a little sad to regret not making a quick buck on something you have no real control on.
That's the whole problem though. It's going up, but who's to say it won't crash?
Show HN: Meaningful jobs in software development
I would bet cash flow is more important to which phone someone buys than absolute value.
Every trade platform I've used provides two options: sell at current market price, or sell at a specific, unchanging price. So it sounds like he misunderstood the option he was selecting, or something.
That's just the kind of advice that could lose some keen programmers (with no financial background) a lot of money.
how do you go inside a building/cave to engage the enemy

That would be where the airstrikes and artillery come in, right?

any military tracked vehicle

Think smaller, like on the order of one of the Talon defusal robots ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster-Miller_TALON ).

~

real warfighting

Here's really the root of the problem. Thousands of years ago, real warfighting consisted of men in centuries and phalanxes, piking each other to death--it wasn't sporting to, for example, ambush a legion as it marched through a forest and cut them down ("Quintili Vare, legiones redde!").

A century and a half, "real warfighting" involved massed troops lining up across from one another and firing in volleys while ignoring civilians--it wasn't sporting to, for example, raze towns and crops and destroy railroad tracks in order to demoralize the enemy.

Two decades ago, "real warfighting" involved massing mechanized infantry, achieving air superiority, and engaging regular forces until their ruler surrendered.

The problem is that this notion of "real warfighting" is constantly changing. Once upon a time, real warfighting didn't involve violating neutral national borders and airspace and dropping munitions on civilians without having clear proof of the target or its strategic value. That is clearly no longer the case, as we've seen with the drone strikes that have been carried out.

We can't ignore the probability that one day, "warfighting" will mean a text sent over IRC to an automated artillery battery to target a village and fire for effect, because the little killbots saw their one target disappear into a place with stairs.
And then bulldoze them flat, just in case any children might think they look like breasts.
no, he placed the order above market, didnt get hit, watched the price fall, lost his nerves and sold at market
Want to buy my webvan stock? They're disrupting safeway!

Exactly what is bitcoin disrupting? Those who want to take 10 minutes to buy a cup of coffee? Africa's stranglehold on unstable currencies? Thieves being able to steal your electronics and money all at once?
You can see it as continuum-ing up from a CA, or you can see it as a discretization of the continuum Boltzmann equation.

What do you mean you don't need Galilean invariance? In the real world, fluid motion is Galilean invariant (unless you're talking relativistic motion, which is a whole other class of thing that lattice gases have trouble with). You might be simulating something but it sure ain't a Navier-Stokes fluid.
It is not new, but it is getting worse now. The IBM case mentioned in the article is a good example.

btw: most western developers also work on simple tickets and CRUD stuff, which is, ironically, the major functionality of most software.
> if its available for this price in India

The blog says it will be available in India in January.
At command to schedule tasks
I think the title of this is mis-leading.... This might explain how MSFT implements exception handling but doesn't necessarily show how GCC or LLVM does it.
Basically just using display: table, table-row, table-cell CSS - poorly (It doesn't work in IE8.) Claims table-layout: fixed is "magic." Calls CSS classes "objects." Inconsistent and unhelpful indentation of CSS plus 47 blank lines added in the middle. Classes (with double underscores) are added to child elements unnecessarily. Grade: C-
There was an Ask HN yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6720789 about finding meaningful jobs, which got a lot of comments.

Our specialized listing of "jobs with meaning", new this week, is exactly in that line. We've worked hard to dig up jobs that directly help humanity. Our search engine finds tweets with the #meaningfuljobs hashtag, among other sources. Also, employers post their ads directly.

I think plenty of people want to get more out of the old 9-to-5 (or is that "10-to-7"?)--but the sense that your job helps people is a big boost.

On the other side, employers who can offer "meaningful jobs" should be touting that more vigorously. What a great draw for talent!
Rare Life Dating Back 3.5 Billion Years Found
It's not advice at all, and I'm not sure why anybody would take it to be.
Re: 10000% return...that's sort of a reverse-sunk-cost fallacy, isn't it? (Found gold fallacy?)

Whether or not bitcoin is a good investment is an orthogonal matter.
Stephen Wolfram: Something Very Big Is Coming
I'm pretty thoroughly pro-technology. It leverages human behavior, and people are generally trying to do something positive, so technology is generally a positive. But it can and does amplify negative behaviors. More importantly, it is orthogonal to a large and dangerous set of human problems. I think Gates' piece dramatically overstates just how much can be hoped for from technology, and shows a disturbing ignorance of some important basic problems.
> On a related note: Is the bitcoin infrastructure mature enough to support short selling in a sane way yet?

I work in finance so I'm very familiar with shorting but I don't know what you mean by "a sane way".

What way's sane or otherwise are you referring to?

Normally for shorting. you do the following:
1) borrow the stock from a broker
2) put in your short order
3) get your order filled
4) continue to pay a borrow each day for the stock you borrowed to short
5) buy back your stock
6) return the borrow and settle with your broker
This really needs to be upvoted and shared. In fact, I find the slashdot article to be particularly relevant:

"'While handing over data in response to a legitimate FISA request is a legal requirement,' the Times noted, 'making it easier for the government to get the information is not, which is why Twitter could decline to do so.'"

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/11/13/0358206/facebook-pate...
He'll face Groupon's fate.

Honeymoons of offers to overhyped entities tends not to last long, and competitors are not sleeping either.
The major difference is the ability to run queries on Hadoop in addition to the being able to pull data.