skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure that there would be much call for that. Surely the time taken to parse the input is a tiny fraction of the time taken to perform analyses with this data?

The one calculation given that's long-running is parsing the entire (textual) PDB, in 14m cpu time/50m I/O time. Firstly, this is I/O bound, so do you gain anything from optimising the code or even from running in parallel? (also: that disk is capable of loading 16GB in 64 seconds at peak throughput. What's going on for 50 minutes?)

Secondly, the use case seems unrealistic: if this was a bottleneck, you would do this exactly once, to load your data into something that can be read faster? mmap'd data is ready to use immediately, for example (and there's a haskell package for this).

It seems likely from the benchmarks that most of these parsers are 'fast enough' for their uses cases, but the motivation for needing this to be faster is lacking from the paper. I'm sure your code is much cleaner for being in Haskell though, and it sounds like it's been worthwhile to get yourself a better API.

edited to add: so I looked at the code, and I see it does mmap in the data, but from a compressed text file. My next question would be, what is the overhead of compression here? I recall git having problems with zlib being a bottleneck
http://marc.info/?l=git&m=117400704304354&w=2
Now it gets interesting. For a long time the lack of an open-source server and the associated centralization was a big point of criticism against Ripple.

Personally I don't think we'll see much grassroots adoption of any cryptocurrency technology that can be categorized as "pre-mined" or anything less than full decentralization, and that includes both Ripple and Mastercoin.

Now if they're able to get the existing banking system on board they could have some chance. It sounds like they're handing out large chunks of XRP (the Ripple cryptocurrency) to companies that implement Ripple integration as an incentive.
This is very, very pleasing visually.
I've done similar, but without any need for Raportive (though I guess my method would have a higher error rate and not work for MEGA corps).

You want to get Bob Smith's email at example.com, but you don't know it? Simply find as many @example.com addresses as you can find then use name dictionaries to guess the address format.

For example, if you find njones@example.com, pjohnson@example.com, ffitzgerald@example.com and jane.doe@example.com we can quicky deduce that example.com uses <firstinitial><surname> as their email template. The Jane Doe address doesn't fit with every other address we found so we can ignore it.

Now send an email to bsmith@example.com and you're most likely talking to Bob Smith.
Distributing information through a gossip protocol is well known. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_protocol The hard part is deciding on the contents of the ledger.
+1 for stardock strategy games and an owner of Galactic Civilizations also.

I think I've bought nearly all of their history games on steam. Victoria 2 is great if you want a unique military/economic strategy game that focuses on 1840 to 1920. When I get bored of playing one of the larger players in imperialism, I delve into the "what ifs" and play as a more minor 19th century power like Italy, The Ottomans or China. Arguably, I had more fun bringing Japan into the industrial era than I did colonizing Africa with the UK. Also, uniting Germany is also quite fun. Plenty of great user mods out for it as well.

If you have an interest in 1920 to 1950, hearts of iron 3 is great. You can even import your end game from Victoria to it and continue playing an alternative reality 20th century.

Galactic Civ is turn based while Victoria and Hearts of Iron are continuous time, where you can speed up or slow down (or pause) time. It's a little weird at first if you're used to turn based, but the game flows much better as there aren't 5 minute pauses in gameplay unlike civ5.
Exactly, these companies aren't profitable yet.
As a person who majored in Computer Information Systems but is considered a "business person" (ecommerce manager) I can confidently say that this problem does exist in the workplace by most "business people". It doesn't only happen at small/mid size companies. This problem exists even at the enterprise level. We are very highly ranked in the IR500. (top 100)

The way to overcome this problem is make very clear to executive "business people" how risky/costly (change management, bugs, etc.) a relatively small problem could create.

For example in ecommerce if you make a "minor" change to the checkout process which results in the site not accepting orders, or even a small percentage of orders the damages would be substantial at a financial, and customer level.
Ripple is still semi-centralized. If Alice and Bob trust different nodes they may end up with different ledgers and thus they may be unable to transact. The only way to keep Ripple unified is for everyone to trust the same nodes, which is the definition of centralization.
Yes blibble's procedure has nothing to do with the actual calculation. The protocol says to treat the 256-bit hash as a little-endian integer, and then check if that is less than the target value. The target value is an integer value that is stored as a custom-format floating point value in the block header and adjusted every 2016 blocks. "Difficulty" per se doesn't actually exist at the protocol level, it's a purely human-interface concern.
The true test will be when someone forks a version and removes XRP. XRP seems like a pretty artificial add-on to the whole system.

I'd still prefer something like Open Transactions which supports blinded instruments, though.
Haskell seems pretty left brained to me!
It's still a problem with web user agents, not with the website.

> This page just needs max-width set somewhere on the text container.

So, set max-width on body in your user.css?

Personally I've long since stopped reading the web in "full screen" -- I'm more than a little surprised that people still do that. Assuming you're reading text, why would you want to have to move your eyes across the entire screen to take it in? Much better to have an appropriately sized window IMNHO.
Imagine you were on a BBS or walled garden in the early nineties, and every day keep seeing news articles about this HTML-based Internet. Is the correct response to ignore it and make trite "get off my lawn" responses?
Ever since I started playing around with Java (or even earlier with C++) having data co-mingled with functions has never felt right to me. It just never seemed very extensible to me, especially in a language like Java. Even in C# where you have extension methods, they are second class citizens.

But also the old question of where to put a method seems like unecessary mental overhead for solving a problem. Use modules and just pass things in. You could probably even put some syntactic sugar in the language so that you could use the "object".method notation on the first argument passed in if you really wanted to.

So someone give me clojure with optional typing, a Python-like syntax, and get off my lawn!
Custom scripts aren't run. At this point, scripts are just exceptionally long identifiers for predetermined actions.
They are not pure code. They come with a protein coat and a bunch of proteins/enzymes to bring the code to the cell or nucleus, and sometimes more functions.
Hacker Newsletter #176
Too often we... enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. //John F. Kennedy
The real question is why user agents don't set this as default, allowing sites to optionally change it to something else, rather than just presenting paragraph tags as wide as the viewport allows... I don't really think the idea is that the user should have to resize the window. This has been wrong for a long time (even 800 pixels is too wide for most text/standard browser style sheets)...
As oppose to what?

"Blah in X lines of javascript"

"Is college worth it?"

http://bradconte.com/files/misc/HackerNewsParodyThread/
Just about any OO system can do this using interfaces, abstract base classes, mixins, traits etc. Yes it is a good way to approach design rather than building unique behavior from scratch over and over. But you don't need to go anywhere near PERL to accomplish this.
I don't think that's quite the right interpretation. Let's say that the human population increased by a factor of 1000. Does that mean you have 10 more bits of uniqueness? You didn't change at all.

In actuality, you already had those 10 more bits of uniqueness, and people just need to ask more questions to find out which one of the many unique people you are.

This is about identification, not uniqueness.
I love this negative ending to a negative thread on a negative article.
I do agree the "noun" vs "verb" analogy when classes are taught are horrible..actually the way classes are taught in general are just confusing.

Ultimately, classes are about code organization and reuse. Done properly, it leads to a well maintained program. Functional programming...it still needs to be organized somehow, whether you put them in classes or namespaces, the last thing you want is spaghetti code. Now depending in the type of programming, you may need to preserve state, which can be quite challenging in a purely functional environment.
Not meaning to hijack, but would love to hear about an equivalent for mercurial that runs on linux.
agree to some extent.

not just programmers there are people who dont like fancy things, like my grandma dont like smartphones, she is still using those pesky telephones.
Well, if most users browse the web in full screen, I guess it's the browser developers that are idiots for not accounting for that with standard style sheets?

It'd be fine to have a "proper" stylesheet and use it only for unstyled html -- and then a "proper" normalized stylesheet used for everything else...
How we teach our kids that women are liars
That's how I feel when sites expect me to have a phone number. I've moved on to use mode modern replacements of that communication technology (hint: it uses the internet and doesn't care where in the world you are).
Well they rather cheaply added on a currency that made no sense, which they issued to themselves and force people to use (or at least hold) to participate in the protocol. If it was open source from day one, the very first thing anyone would do would be to remove XRP.

So am I surprised? No.
This can't be serious. We are so screwed.
Ask HN: What is Your Email Signature?
Simply wrong. I suggest you actually look at the source code to bitcoind (start with script.cpp, and the validation methods in main.cpp/core.cpp which call it).
Sounds like a meaningful concept to me.

Based on the same hypothesis, I've been brainstorming on first how to gather people around meaningful discussions & ideas, and then on how to motivate them to implement them.
What I came up with is that people need to commit. And to make them commit, they need to be feel motivated, engaged and confident about their goal and their team. And to achieve that, we need recurring events in a trusted place whith trusted people where a strong culture reigns.

One way to implement this is to use existing structures, such as coworking spaces, and provide to their members the possibility to gather in the same place, after work.

Rather than expediting the event like a "startup weekend", I'd rather define a longer-term strategy separated in phases. That kind of program could start with one or two months of weekly discussions, inviting speakers, in order to set minds on the right track.
Then the second phase could be focused on the definition of teams and projects.
Afterwards, the third phase consists of the implementation of the ideas. People could work on them whenever they want, but a weekly event will still be held to keep track of progress and, more importantly, to exchange feedback.
Finally, the last phase would consist on some sort of demo day.

What do you guys think about that?
I think this will result in very poor conversions.

Getting someone's permission to email you will result in greater success. Find their Twitter profile or Google+ account, then send them a msg asking if you can email them about something. The ones that will reply are the ones that will be interested and read your email anyway.
I see that I'm too late to downvote you. You're talking about a hoax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_child_prostitution_rin...
Quiz: If your css/html/javascript looks like these examples, what should you do?

Change jobs.
I suppose anything is possible. The point is it would be better for the government to mandate results (lower emissions, which can be measured) than methods (spray kerosene on coal and hope it does something useful).
I caught a bit of the same, it felt like the introductory paragraphs were really meant for sensationalism and to create some buzz, which probably worked.
Totally. RSS was the beginning of RSS, in my mind, and I said so in 2003: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/RememberPointcastSmellsLikeRSS...
For those uninformed, "MasterCoin" is an impossible attempt at pegging Bitcoin to the USD (among other things). It of course doesn't work because there's a limited supply, which means that the prices are raised and you're no longer pegged. The whole setup is essentially designed by the creator to make him and his "donators" rich (buy some now and get 10% more! was the original post).

Due to the ponzi-like setup, the people who paid 4 million dollars for "MasterCoin" are very, very vocal when it comes to promoting it.

https://blockchain.info/address/1EXoDusjGwvnjZUyKkxZ4UHEf77z...
24 MOTIVATIONAL QUOTES FOR STARTUP FOUNDERS
I feel so behind / left-out of the Bitcoin phenomenon. I thought it was a fad a few years ago, but it seems as though it's here to stay and there are probably good opportunities for those who understand how it all works. I was wrong.

I want to start from the beginning and learn everything. What are the best resources for this?
Agreed, and in my primary language, C#, these days I would rather just write static classes with static methods and pass in other static methods instead of messing around with interfaces all the time. I write ASP.NET MVC so I don't use state for the most part.

Ok, so I don't do that with controllers for obvious reasons, but my business logic and utilities I try to.
Sure, but those are produced by the cell at the behest of the viral code; not produced by the virus. The freshly-minted copy of the virus doesn't get to react to stimuli by producing proteins once it has left its host cell. It's a lot more like the relationship between, say, pollen spores and the gametophytes they contain.

To put it another way--a post-code and stamp on an envelope will get the postal system to deliver its contents to the right destination. That doesn't mean the contents are functioning to deliver themselves there; they're relying on a working mail-transport system that wants to take them there.
Wow, I haven't heard of pathlib [1] before now, but it looks awesome! In particular, using the slash operator to join paths is brilliant.

>>> p = PurePath('/etc')
>>> p / 'init.d' / 'apache2'
PurePosixPath('/etc/init.d/apache2')

[1]: http://docs.python.org/3.4/library/pathlib.html
Sounds like bitcoins.

Disclaimer: I own some.
Duck typing has its limitations.
Hmm, good catch, I didn't notice when that was published.
The user is drunk - UI design [video]
In high-load but I/O bound tasks Hyperthreading (Intel market speak for SMT) is magic. If something is compute bound, you are correct and the benefit is often slim, but typically not for application or database servers.
Not only does a "one-sided" question like this get you "close enough", the worldwide male/female gender disparity (around 60 million more males than females in 2010) is almost certainly larger than the worldwide intersex/trans/etc population.

A question like, "Are you a male or a Mexican female?" gets you even closer, though.
Um. Napster?
> -- which was portals. One stop shops to capture and hold audiences. Horribly ugly things filled with desperate salesmanships and terribly packaged content.

Which seems to be the attractor that Google is tending towards now.

Not to detract from the cool things that Google does do, but their main web properties are looking tattered and the metooism of Google+ is not lost on the audience.
Ask HN: Why does Instagram ask users about their gender (in profile settings)?
It's not a required information but it is listed as a field in the Private Information section of the profile settings. Thank you
Good at lying with statistics. The plots don't say what the text does. Non-zero y axis makes tiny effects look big. Worst culprit are the age plots, which show retirees watching more tv than young'uns. It doesn't change over time, but text claims youngsters do not do tv.
http://xkcd.com/1279/

Why not just do searches for the person's name, and @company.com ?

That won't work for Gmail, but the XKCD explains where this Automation breaks down.
Spoiler ahead! Potential answer!

My solution is that the first prisoner states the color of the hat in front of him, the second prisoner states the color he just heard, and so forth with odd and even numbers until you get to the end. This saves 75% (even numbers are guaranteed to live, odd numbers live with 50% odds).

Is this optimal?
This is an amazing solution. Of course the light is needed or they couldn't see the wall!
I learned most of what I know directly from the original paper: http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

It's not too bad to read. Only the first six sections are really necessary to understand how it works.
OS X Hardening: Securing a Large Global Mac Fleet [video]
I'll concede that. I meant it more in the way people say "Rust doesn't exist." Yes there is software that actively runs, but by no means are either generally considered ready for "production".

My main issue though is that static languages are improving to the point where I start to wonder about the relevance of any dynamic language.
Skin resistance is quite low. You are thinking skin-electrode impedance. That is generally high enough to be safe, but with modern electrodes and luck, it can get somewhat low too. 5v 1k 5mA would not be unreasonable.
It seems like he was also objecting to the character of the ads...

I left the U.S. in the '90s. However I do occasionally see some American TV on trips, and it seems different than what I remember, full of creepy bizarre ads for drugs and the like.

TV ads in the old days obviously weren't great art, and were often annoying, but there seems something palpably ... wrong with the state of things now. "Creepy" seems the best description.
> TV commercials are impossible to put up with. They are almost painfully annoying.

The worst part is that TV ads are a major part of shared culture. People watch many different channels and many different shows, but the large ad campaigns transcend those boundaries. They squat in the shared mind-space and instruct everyone that 'buying your kids junk-food will make you a happy family' (or more insidiously 'your parents should buy you junk-food, because that's what happy, normal families do'). I actually saw one today which discouraged you from asking your friends for help, apparently it's better to pay the company to do repairs than go through all the hassle of having to repay a favour. These sort of campaigns beggar belief, either they are ineffective, or they must surely do serious collateral damage to shared values.
ability to rollback fraudulent transactions?

the knowledge you'll get most of your deposits back if the bank goes bust? (government mandated insurance schemes like FDIC/FSCS are really expensive for banks... this makes up a big part of your bank fees)

the bank's capability to match up long term loans with short term deposits?

people really want a 25 year mortgage, but also want instant access to their savings, the banks (mostly) match up these two incompatible goals: this is a useful function
So apparently one of my children clicked the Submit to HN bookmarklet...
Page 1: "One plus one equals three!"
There are tons and tons of wiki and blog posts about bitcoin out there, but in my opinion the original paper is really good, if you have a technical background. I don't mean like crypto-expert, I think it's something the average programmer can read, maybe with a bit of googling. I usually wouldn't recommend a paper, but I found it really clear and straightforward. Maybe it's because I already understood bitcoin pretty well, but here it is if you want to take a look: http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

The bitcoin wiki is also pretty good: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Introduction
I'm glad I'm not the only one. But how do you handle situation? My family usually takes offense, and I can see that I would seem arrogant for doing so. I just don't know how to communicate how intrusive and strident the TV is to me.
If nothing works 100% of the time, why go round pointing out that it won't work some of the time?
The Obama Twerk
I completely agree, I think there are many ways you could do things on a longer term basis. I think the idea of the "startup weekend" style event has a couple of benefits in this context.

1. It's a good way to try it and see what happens and learn so you can learn what to improve in the format.

2. It helps gain momentum because you're only requesting a small amount of initial time investment from people.

3. One of the key points I wanted to stress was the ability to have organisations on hand to help fill in knowledge gaps about the realties of the situation data etc, and also be able be actively involved in the process. I think it's easier to get them involved in that capacity for one weekend. Then build on there involvement after they see the value etc.
Your max width may well differ from someone else's.

Oddly enough, I've got a set of stylesheets I've created to deal with effed-up websites. I've also got an "unstyled.css" stylesheet I apply to websites that have no or very minimal styling. Chief among what it does: give me some motherfucking margins, because I just love my motherfucking margins.

A few other bits, but all told, it's pretty damned light (one gratuitous styling effect, but hey, that's me):

a {
color: #427fed;
text-decoration: none;
}

a:visited {
color: #6f32ad;

}

a:hover {
text-decoration: underline;
}

a:active {
background-color: #427fed;
color: #fffff6;
}

body {
background-color: #fffff6;
background-image: none;
color: #440;
font-family: georgia;
font-size: 15pt;
margin: 2em auto;
max-width: 40em;
width: auto;
}

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
color: #703820;
line-height: 1.2em;
}

img {
float: right;
padding: 10px;
margin: 20px;
border: solid 1px #888;
box-shadow: 6px 10px 8px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.7);
}

p, li, dd, dt, blockquote, span {
font-size: 15pt;
line-height: 1.4em;
}
If they decide the guy at the back indicates an odd number of black hats by saying white or an even number of black hats by saying black. Now the remaining prisoners all live and the back guy has a 50/50 shot.
Interesting problem. Some quick head-scratching and googling didn't turn up anything useful on merging templates with awk and sed... then it hit me --- m4 is used for that:

sed -r 's/FOO/include(foo.txt)/g' temp.txt |m4
Furthermore, I'd say the world of software has diversified greatly beyond what we had in 1999. Social media companies with no revenue may experience a bubble pop, but I don't see that being an issue for VCs, whose portfolio contains completely different kinds of tech companies like Uber or Liquid Robotics for example.
> "What I'm getting at is people used to go to movies to see a movie. But thats technologically obsolete and frankly with all the previews and ads and hyper expensive junk food its too offensive to experience"

.... in the U.S.