skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The reason you see people using yacc instead of hand coding it is that its really annoying to hand-write a bottom up parser for an LR grammar. If you are going to be writing things by hand then its more intuitive to use a top-down recursive-descent parser instead. However, top-down parsing requires more "tricks" to parse usual languages (for example, you need to rewrite the grammar to an equivalent one without left-recursion) so most introductions you see use bottom-up parsing instead.
"The results of hard work and dedication always look like luck to saps."

-- leveling up in Morrowind (no idea who to attribute this quote to)
With a C binding, this library is usable in more or less every language under the sun without messiness.

Written in the correct way, a library like this will compile and run on a 15 year old OS, and will probably run on plenty of OSes in 15 years. The dependency hell of building old language binaries with a dozen badly supported other libraries doesn't exist when you link to libc/libstdc++/etc.

There ought to be a speed advantage, but it definitely isn't the only motivation.
But for commercial purposes... I think that takes a lot of the argument away.
That's an interesting question and I'm not sure I have a particularly good answer for it. I would say that there is something about how the system arranged that makes it so that people within the government are in general incentivized to serve the people despite those problems. But even if I can't say why it works, I would say that it seems clear enough that it does, if your government is set up well. There are problems and it doesn't necessarily work particularly well, but overall it does work.
The thing is, this is how they sell the law to us, "it's for everyone", but in the end, the ones who really benefits from it are the big players.

It's a lottery system, basically. A few lucky rock stars cash out. Everyone else doesn't win. And lotteries are also a good way to convince the population to pay more taxes, with the promise that anyone can win, where in reality few people do.
It seems at that point that it would be down to your power cost per hash.
Two-Seat Electric Octodecacopter Completes Early Flight Tests
Fairly obvious: 4, 5 & 7 request factual answers. The rest are asking for opinions.
Well, no system could have a perfectly accurate merit assignment system... but the fact is that tech has much, much lower barriers to entry than other domains.
That's why the eventual value of bit-coin is supposed to be the value of the energy required to maintain it (because the cost of doing a transaction will be the transaction fees, which have to cover the miner spending the energy to process the transaction, but because anyone can compete in the market supply will always place the value at the cost of energy). Honestly in the long run bitcoin may be cheaper than credit cards or even cash in a pure energy sense. No matter what we do we'll have to spend energy to maintain our financial system.

* With cash we have to print and distribute cash, and move it around, and run hardware to validate it, and image scan it, and count it, and destroy it. Etc.

* Credit cards require servers, massive backups, authentication procedures, production of specialized hardware, and the same networked infrastructure as bitcoin, as well as server ops, bank managers, customer service. Etc.

* Bitcoin can use any machine, and the same internet as any other program. As chips get faster and more efficient the energy cost goes down.
Obviously you're just dragging your feet here. He is not saying whether the discrimination itself is correct, but that if the validity of the tests is not correct this can lead to incorrect discrimination here, the chance of this data ruining someones life in the wrong hands is very high.
Show HN: Doge As A Service
If you use Bitcoin ONLY as a currency.

The biggest part of the network (imo) is that it is also a payment processing network. You buy something with BTC? You can then repurchase that same amount of BTC with USD.

Or you can hold zero BTC in reserve, and only buy BTC when you need to spend it.

On the merchant side, you can instantly cash out to USD, making it a simple transaction over a payments network, using BTC as a unit of value specifically to transfer.
I mined 14 coins last year with a GPU I had anyway. My only regret is selling them immediately. At this moment, they'd be worth $11,704
What did they do? Hopefully nothing similar to Verbling (YC S11)!
Hi, Leif. It's not hard to get to the throughput limits of a single log device, even on a fast array. I've done it on Sybase, WebSphere MQ, Oracle, MySQL, basically on enough platforms that I assume it to be the general case. The log writes don't saturate the array itself--but the log file has a limit to how many blocks can be appended--even on fast arrays. But imagine getting rid of the transaction log entirely--the entire code path. That will be faster even than a transaction log write to memory-backed filesystem.

But I agree that other write (and read) activity going on in the background and foreground, also limits performance--and in fact, I've seen the index write bottleneck that you describe in real life, more-so than simple transaction log writes. So, you're correct.

I've read about Toku, but I really doubt that it writes faster to disk than writing to memory. Are you really trying to say that?

I think it would be great for InfiniSQL to be adapted to disk-backed storage, in addition to memory. The horizontal scalability will also apply, making for a very large group of fast disk-backed nodes.

I think your input is good.
Simply verifying the certificate is not enough, it is simple to decompile and reverse-engineer an IPA to bypass certificate checks.

You should NOT be sending such sensitive information on other users, encrypted or not. Unless of course you want to continue this trend of violating your user's privacy.
That's interesting info about the dataset, thank you.
People spending bitcoin can also consider their purchase an investment into proving bitcoin actually has value as a currency, along with supporting those retailers helping from the other side.
I've taken a couple Coursera and other self-led courses and it's not a good fit for me. I recognize my deficiency at self-directed learning, and I imagine many many people share it. I just can't learn that way.

A good chunk of people will require social, interactive, and hands-on learning led by people to whom they can listen and converse. Until that experience is sufficiently reproduced online (and surely even after that), "professors" will not be out of a job.

Also the title is hyperbole.
Sure, but it could also go to 0. It sounds like you're saying that you believe bitcoin is undervalued by the market, in which case you should buy bitcoin until it's a significant percentage of your assets (based on your risk tolerance and other factors).
It's odd to me that you're saying HIV tests can give definitive devastating diagnoses to people alone in their homes, yet they are OK; but genetic testing provides a range of possibilities and recommends further investigation, but they are somehow so devastating that they would drive someone to despair or suicide.
The data on that page isn't loading for me but either you're interpreting the data too naively or their study is missing some very important factors. With zero cost (money or otherwise) to enroll in a course the number of students who will sign up should be ridiculously inflated. There are people who just want to get their feet wet and try the first few assignments, some who just want to download all the videos, etc. Even if you only measure the people who did all the assignments or exams it's still not a direct comparison to a traditional classroom because there are: no curves (yet– though a few courses drop the lowest assignment grade), a hugely diverse student body without any verified qualifications/prerequisites, varying English (or other) abilities, etc.

Characterizing the completion rate as 'absymal' suggests that the number is intrinsically significant which really isn't the case outside of a traditional school– where the enrollment pool is already carefully filtered and there is external pressure to keep rates at some arbitrary level.

Edit: Forgot to refresh before submitting my reply so this is repeating some things which have already been said.
Its more geared towards ML but I found Appel's Compiling with Continuations very interesting.
Also from that same paragraph:

> The design and implementation of algorithms constitutes the vast bulk and difficulty in developing software.

That's just a crazy statement to me. In my experience, the bulk of developing software is anything but the design and implementation of algorithms. And I've worked on some pretty algorithm-heavy projects!

I don't even know where to start rebuking the rest of this article's discussion of data and I suspect that the author and I simply have dramatically different definitions of the word.

Regarding your comment:

> One of the biggest criticisms of OOP is that it tends to obscure data layout, which isn't always an implementation detail.

I'd argue that OOP obscures data representations more broadly than just data layout. Encapsulation is great, but it's simply the wrong default: Representations and the scope of their exposure should be carefully considered. Further, immutability greatly reduces the value of encapsulation.
In order to protect our holdings in Bitcoin, we need to find a way to get the Chinese to finally do that thermonuclear strike on Fort Meade, Maryland. We all know that the Chinese have re-targetted their thermonuclear warheads already and that they are on sharp. I wonder why they still hesitate to finally press that button? Are they still waiting for another provocation? Press that button already, will you!
Thank you for your feedback (and the links).

Changing "Article" to "Entry"—noted. As for doing away with the custom schema and using the Atom serialization you posted: it's worth noting the protocol is meant to sync with Atom _and_ RSS transparently; to keep things simple and consistent, a middle ground has to be found.

`since_date` is something I'm working on.
There is no "artificial scarcity". Original creative works don't drop out of the sky.
Sol Trader teaser trailer #1 - a story to tell
Mozilla's argument is that all of that functionality is better left to plugins. People can make just as compelling arguments for all kinds of functionality and consequently firefox is moving in the direction of becoming a kitchen sink.

I think we could use a better middle ground, like a mozilla-endorsed "pack" of vetted plugins to improve privacy. As it is now, Adblock is the #1 plugin and NoScript is the #4 so this stuff is definitely important to users.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/extensions/?sort=us...
I don't understand this common criticism.

If I buy something with bitcoin, that means I'll have that much more USD to reinvest in bitcoin if I so choose. Besides, if the price goes up x1000 then I'm not going to complain.
Yup, that's the one! Thanks!
"90% of what is being said takes 5% brainpower to process while the remaining 10% takes 300% of available brainpower."

I'd argue that's the result of poor communication, not any deficiency in human speech generally. Granted, it's very very hard to construct something with the right level of addressable information at every moment. But when it's done right it is glorious. I think one of the things people implicitly recognize in good communicators (not necessarily good orators, but good communicators) is their ability to tailor what they're saying in this way.
One benefit of being a separate project is that it can be used with non-Ruby wrappers. See node-sass https://github.com/andrew/node-sass as an example.
I don't understand how GoldieBlox are positioned as the victims here when they were the ones to initiate a lawsuit and accuse the rightsholders of being bad actors. Getting a letter from a rightsholder when you use their work without permission for PROFIT is not exactly an unexpected turn of events.

If this were just some sort of educational or satirical video then I'd be more willing to be on their side about this, but it's obvious they're looking to sell product. If they're going to use someone else's work without permission to make money, they should be willing to face the consequences (or at least pay the normal royalties you pay when covering a song).
Snowden stashed “doomsday” cache as insurance policy against harm
You probably just left it out, but what was the effect on traffic to the website and as follow-on, sales? I'm thinking the goal was not to have more email subscribers, the goal was probably to sell more stuff via the website.
To clarify, sensitive information is no longer transferred at all. This was hotfixed earlier today.
I think most people would call the rock stars cashing out "talented." Why not treat entertainment creativity the same way you would code? (Especially since both fall under the same copyright law?)
I live in Japan and I find the housing here completely abysmal. The construction practices are very poor and even if you shell out for an apartment in a new mansion, expect to find paper-thin walls, no heat insulation and overall very shoddy construction quality. In the winter my (fairly new) apartment gets almost as cold as outside and getting up in the morning always requires running the AC for half an hour first. Single pane windows are standard, there is no central heating and walls are hollow and very thin. I can literally hear my neighbor taking a shower every night, and don't get me started on being able to hear passersby on the street all night long, despite the fact that I live pretty high up.

This is an absolutely amazing 1st world country with 3rd world construction practices. I blame it on several factors:

1. Cheap and scammy construction companies that try to maximize their profit margin by using cheap materials and poor building practices.

2. People who don't know any better. Most Japanese people assume that what they get is standard and fair.

3. The pervasive Japanese mindset that everything is disposable, replaceable and ephemeral. In Japan, little value is generally placed on long term value of things.

The house where I grew up in Europe is built like a castle compared to even some of the best houses I've seen here.

If this doesn't sound crazy enough, there are a lot of carbon monoxide related deaths every winter in Japan because many people (especially elderly people) use an ancient heating system called /kotatsu/, where they burn coal under a small table that's covered with a blanket. My girlfriend once got burnt badly because she fell asleep under her kotatsu and accidentally touched the heater. Don't get me started on electric blankets and similar nonsense, which is all over the place.
And if you're very, very lucky, the new look is an improvement: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/22/lachlan-connors-mus...
Loneliness sharing. I can see teens using this app :)
What do you mean by "written in the correct way"?
>FWIW, many vision researchers believe that the resemblance of the first convolutional layer to Gabor filters is perhaps more a case of selection bias than anything else. The argument goes that were they not the output of the first layer, that paper wouldn't get accepted =)

well, i can see the temptation - the orientation and spatial frequency selectivity are the major characteristics of cells in V1 and the receptive field for the first layer there does look like Gabor

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Area_V1#Receptive_fields

I agree that such a good resemblance of the learned kernels to Gabor is too good, this is why i used "uncanny" :) If it is real then i think it manifests very interesting and, no pun intended, deep emerging properties of the neural net learning process (something along the lines "maximum entropy kernels while still doing the job" as the asymptotic state)

Btw, is it really selection or confirmation bias?

And to expand on previous point of convoluting the input with many-many kernels - happens to be at the order of 40 per "pixel":

"V1 contains a vast number of neurons. In humans, it contains about 140 million neurons per hemisphere (Wandell, 1995), i.e. about 40 V1 neurons per LGN neuron. Such divergence gives scope for extensive processing of the images received from LGN."
Inelastic demand doesn't imply infinite price as long as there's competition among suppliers.

Government subsidies on the demand side would put upward pressure on prices, but government subsidies on the supply side put downward pressure on prices, and there's a lot of supply-side subsidies.
So I don't know enough about NYC to define what a expensive neighborhood is. However, $2300 is about mid range SF neighborhoods. Not highly desirable ones like the better of the mission, Pac Heights etc but something on the intersection of less desirable (deep inner sunset) and actually livable.
TLS/SSL will be a requirement soon, with some form of "bearer token" auth scheme. At least for the reference implementation.

The MD5 hash is there to mitigate two issues, currently: some (or most) common users won't pay for a certificate, so instead of sending the password in cleartext, it's hashed as an MD5 to avoid exposure—all of this, of course, is no guarantee against MITM. Which leads us to the second issue: most [non–techie] users re–use their password for a _lot_ of things. At least, if the password is intercepted, it won't be reusable.

It's also worth noting that bcrypt is used server–side to store passwords.

Auth (and very possibly a crypto scheme too) is yet to be tackled. Haven't even decided if it should be part of the spec, or left up to each implementer.
GoldieBox is a toy company right? so they are doing that ad for profit, i dont think the BB will lose their case. It's not fair use if it is commercial.
Thanks for the comment. I hope it becomes a safe and supportive place for people to share this experience.
> is there a ruby gem which can use this and drop into the Rails asset pipeline to speed it up?

Often the source of slowness in the asset pipeline is not the compilation but the asset pipeline itself. It does some weird stuff.

I'd imagine dropping a libsass based SASS compiler into a Rails app wouldn't actually translate into much of a performance improvement.
Doesn't 100% risk imply that we die immediately? Not really "living" then.
a bit of optimization in $src/libsass/copy_c_str.cpp

char* copy_c_str(const char* orig)
{
size_t len = strlen(orig) + 1 ;
char* copy = (char*) malloc(sizeof(char) * len );
memcpy(copy, orig, len);
return copy;
}
> First, there are more medium-awesome areas to choose from close to town (head to Astoria or East Williamsburg and you might shave $500-1000 off that studio, but you can still catch the N train to get to work and the neighborhood's reasonably cool).

Would this be like living across the bay in Oakland or something? The flipside of such a situation would be that you get back home from SF at midnight before the last BART or you would have to be stuck when BART decides to strike.
Hilarious Doritos Commercial "WAR DORITOS"
Excited to read the rest of this series. No doubt they will get into the Video Toaster -- and Lightwave in particular -- which was used heavily in 90's television production. Fun fact about the Video Toaster: it was developed by Dana Carvey's brother who was the inspiration for Garth in "Wayne's World". (Garth actually wears a Video Toaster t-shirt in "Wayne's World 2".)
Yeah, I caught that :/ thanks!

I have been working on the project for 6 months now, and I even tweeted the author of that project when he posted it, but he just ignored me haha :(
Flagged for broken link...
An Android device running Cyanongenmod (or another AOSP ROM) without any Google services is still an excellent phone. You can get pretty much any app you need from F-Droid or the Amazon app store.
AdBlock + NoScript + Ghostery. kthxbai.
That is actually a great argument to use on anyone who espouses the virtues of a totalitarian, all-controlling state.

The difference is that you can actually find people with some frequency who espouse the virtues of extremely small or entirely absent government, while it's pretty hard to find someone who espouses the virtues of a totalitarian, all-controlling state.
Ehh...I think that can go both ways. I know folks who live a pretty isolated existence in NYC and others who have an active dating life in SF. The problem is that if you get stuck in a tech bubble of friends, you are going to find yourself short changed when it comes to meeting women.

(Of course, this all applies to meeting women through friends. I don't do the bar scene so can't really comment on it.)
no, failing at a startup won't prevent you from getting hired however making us feel like you're just going to collect a paycheck while waiting for your next thing to take off probably will.

tread carefully on how much you want to rep your startup experience.
Have you heard of the concept of increasing your luck surface area? If my memory serves me correctly is that all of the work, networking, etc. you do the more opportunities you have to get lucky. You can't have chance encounters in your basement. You can't stumble onto investors for a product that doesn't exist.

I think it goes along the lines of the quote from The entertainment industry that every overnight success is a result of years of hard work (paying your dues in the form of acting/music lessons, community theater/coffee house performances, tons of auditions).
A better example than Bank of America would be a payment system like VISA.
I normally side with the EFF (and donate a ton of money), but this is clearly an advertisement. It's commercial. That's the whole reason they're being sued, because the Beastie Boys don't want their stuff being used for advertisements. The whole beginning of the blog post is trying to deflect that by talking about remixing, and by accusing the Beastie Boys of being bullies.

This part in particular bothered me-

>But expect to hear this counterargument: that one of the most basic “copyrights” is the right to control how your work is used—including whether it is used at all. Proponents of this kind of claim will often invoke J.D. Salinger’s steadfast opposition to any adaptions of his works. But the argument forgets that every copyright set out in the Copyright Act is subject to numerous exceptions – including fair use. Copyright ≠ total control.

While the Copyright Act does have numerous exceptions, fair use explicitly takes into account whether something is commercial or not. Ignoring that is disingenuous at beast.
Logical fallacies? No. I take my logical fallacies very seriously. But factual fallacies? Perhaps, since it is based on some assumptions and guesses.
Seems like a private version of PostSecret [http://postsecret.com/]

EDIT: Just an observation.
Have you lived or travelled extensively in countries that don't have public health or regulatory infrastructure?

Organizations like the FDA and EPA were created in response to very real failings. The problem for many of us who grow up benefitting from these safety nets is that we don't have a sense of how hard-won these battles were. Life is good and so we start chipping away at the "nanny state" to get a tiny little bit more freedom. Actually more like a lack of inconvenience, not really freedom.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Is this just a natural social cycle?
I could see a usecase for Snapchat-esque sending of an image+note with a friend, where the note is private between the two of you (obviously it doesn't expire like SC though).
You can't necessarily know that a legitimate call is legitimate, but you can know that some calls are fake, though not necessarily until after you've checked out the situation, hence the last sentence my previous post: you may have to fund your way out of the problem until your enhanced deterrent (increased punishment, whatever) can have an impact.
"Rule of the best," or as one might also call it, aristocracy.