skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Look, I'm not even disagreeing with you. I never said StarCraft is as deep strategically as Chess is. I think Chess is certainly more strategic. I also happen to think StarCraft is a much more interesting game because it has tactical, psychological, and physical aspects totally absent in Chess. These statements are not incompatible.

The only issue I took with your original post was that you seemed to be claiming that 4 pool openings made the game less strategic when in fact the opposite is true. It's a common mistake made by people who do not understand the game.
XRP is essential as the native currency of the protocol.

All other currencies exist on Ripple in the form of balances. (Similar to how I store my money at Citibank in the form of USD balances. This is how our traditional financial system works).

The protocol needs a native currency (XRP) in order to pay the anti-DDOS fee. Every payment or trade requires the user to pay a 0.0001XRP fee which the protocol destroys.

It's purpose is to create a cost to sending "transaction SPAM" and make it extremely expensive to DDOS Ripple servers for any sustained period of time. This transaction fee is dynamic and scales higher in terms of heavy server load.

It's important that this type of fee be paid in a currency that is native to the protocol. This allows the protocol to remain neutral and global.
Ask HN: How can you make a MacBookPro keyboard productive for programming?
I presume these charts don't include watching pirated shows on their computer...
Right/left brain dominance is a myth!

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/16/left-ri...
Indeed and I wish this was closer to the top than here at the bottom.
AA batteries are a negligible risk when you touch metal with skin. That resistance is very high. Resistance inside your body is much lower -- 100 ohms is typical. If you were to get 0.5v between you arms, you could get unsafe currents.

With electrodes, the current can be /much/ greater than touching metal wires with a finger. Single-digit kilo ohms is typical. The big ECG paddles are tens of ohms, probably.

Another way to think about it -- have you ever felt even a 24v battery? No. Now You know that 9v tingling on your tongue? That's saliva and a tiny contact area. Now think of a large patch of engineered electrolyte can do.
Heck, you don't even need to pick numbers in advance. Just pick a number the first time you go in the room, that isn't already on the wall.

Or use names, symbols, it doesn't matter. Just wait until there are 99 different ones on the wall.
Just to save someone searching ZRS is on pypi:

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/zc.zrs/2.4.4
I would like to see a re-emergence of this keyboard design, with some added modern enhancements like function keys, command/control/option/etc. modifiers, and media keys.
If you want to go for cross-platform compatibility, you'll specify your dimensions in ems. Especially line lengths.
Pro-Israel groups have been using this trick for years. They will equate any criticism of the Israeli policy with anti-semitism.
Ripple Primer
Already Anticipating ‘Terminator’ Ethics
Do put your object in classes, but don't put behaviors there. Use classes to allow static type checking so that functions taking them can guarantee certain field exist.

Why not just use algebraic data types and modules? Classes are such a verbose, jumbled, complected mess compared to those simpler tools.
If you're a programmer, I highly recommend trying to implement your own (toy) Bitcoin client -- just as a learning experience and not for general use or distribution. (Just be sure to advertise it as such if you put it up on Github). I've been involved with Bitcoin since early 2011 and am just now understanding the protocol in depth, having started to implement my own Bitcoin client.

You're best bet to do so is probably to just skip the reference client and its complex C++ implementation, and learn the protocol from the Python implementation [0], combined with the protocol specification on the Bitcoin wiki [1].

If Java is your thing, I've also heard good things about the readability of Bitcoinj, which is used for various Android Bitcoin clients. Just note that Bitcoinj implements SPV, which is not the full reference protocol. But it would still be a great start to learning about Bitcoin.

If you're not a programmer, there are a 101 different intro to Bitcoin sites. I think I've heard good things about the Khan Academy's intro videos, but I've never watched them myself. And yes, and Satoshi's original paper.

0. https://github.com/jgarzik/python-bitcoinlib

1. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_specification

2. http://code.google.com/p/bitcoinj/

3. bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

EDIT: s/legibility/readability
Whatever excuse works for you for not lifting...
Twitter protects users with 'impossible' encryption borrowed from GCHQ
Why? The reason you don't really see them in most well written C++ code is because you don't need them. If/when you do, you have them. What's the problem?
Browsing Satoshi's mailing list and Bitcointalk posts is a good next step.

http://www.mail-archive.com/search?l=cryptography@metzdowd.c...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3;sa=show...
Bogus Accounts Dog Twitter
No excuses.
You are correct. C is lexically (a.k.a. statically) scoped, through and through.
1) It is really hard to be a sole startup founder. I would advise against being a sole founder. 100% of 0 = 0. startups have binary outcomes (most of the times).

2) A product really doesn't mean anything unless it's a 1 in a million amazing. Marketing and growth strategies as xwowsersx pointed out is extremely important (you will not succeed without great strategy) and I would imagine if you are a sole technical guy, you don't have time to think about coming up with marketing strategies because you'll be busy developing.

3) You have to realize people are smart and people have domain expertise in their respective fields. I'm a business guy. I'm pretty sure that I can pretty much take any hacker and come up with case study after case study of various marketing, managing, growth, hedging strategies that's worked/didn't work. That would save you hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars in opportunity cost. But that's my expertise. That's what I'm supposed to be good at. And even though in 12 months, I could probably learn coding, I would be at best middle 50 percentile (probably not even there). So instead of doing that, I would easily give up a huge chunk of equity to bring in someone who is an expert in coding and managing development. That's because all I care about is winning and maximizing my chances to ensure a successful outcome. And along the way, I'd learn various part of tech end and vice versa.

4) Some would argue that business skill is easy to acquire. I would highly doubt that. Unless you are an exceptional outlier, you can't be good at everything and you're brain isn't designed to. A backend specialist who is amazing at UI/UX design who is creative to come up with awesome marketing strategies and knows how to manage a team through the ups and downs? I haven't met anyone in real life yet that can do that. I'm sure some of these tech billionaires are, but that's why they're billionaires.

What kind of business do you want to start? I have some ideas too if you want to trade notes / work on it together. Don't worry about getting business experience before starting. Get a good team. Then you'll learn on the fly. And for some businesses, you may be able to start without a business guy. For most, you'll need one whether to create the deck, go raise funding, sell customers, execute strategy, get PR, schmooze for connections, etc etc. I can help out on the business end. Btw. ideas mean nothing. Execution is everything. And marketing/sales execution is a lot harder than novice entrepreneurs want to admit.
This graph of VC funding is probably the best evidence I know that we're not in a bubble: http://gigaom.com/2013/10/18/how-has-vc-funding-changed-sinc...

Compared to the dot-com era, companies are raising negligible sums. Maybe you can get $2M for a failure, but you're not seeing pre-traction companies raising $300M. Similarly, every IPO we've seen has been of a company which actually has real value. Facebook is already profitable and Twitter is seeing real revenue.

Even the Snapchats of the world have a lot more going for them than their dot-com cousins: people actually use them.
> Substitute each problematic byte with equivalent percent-encoded form. This does not touch bytes over 0x80 - they are assumed non-problematic.

You know what's crazy? Currently, in Unix, control characters are allowed in filenames. Like, \t and \n and \b and even \[. Those shouldn't be allowed, percent-escaped or not. Everything else you said is sensible.
I'm note a huge fan of column layouts, but first time I saw that particular trick.

Might split out the header separately.
The Big List of Visual Content Creation Tools
Some programs from that era have keyboard shortcuts that were comfortably done on those ancient keyboards, but are unnatural enough to cause injuries on modern keyboards [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs#Emacs_pinky
But why do we need special Ripple servers at all? Couldn't the system have been designed with a larger collection of nodes in mind and simply done without XRP?
"download in secure PDF format"
(from the ebooks.com page linked from feynmanlectures.info/docroot/buy)

Is this some sort of DRM'ed format that's not readable on non-Adobe supported systems?

And, if it is, is there a way to buy a non-DRM version?
Why does the author refer to IA-32 and x86 as separate architectures? Is there an actual technical distinction or are they aliases for the same thing?
The Internet of Islands
If you like ZODB (like me), you might also like DyBASE: http://www.garret.ru/dybase.html

BTW I used ZODB to add persistence and acknowledgment to the Python Queue class: http://blog.databigbang.com/adding-acknowledgement-semantics...
It's funny that you bring this up. The only reason Elvis and The Beatles were able to make money is because of the distribution format of music at the time. This distribution format has drastically changed in the past 10 years. Everyone nowadays pretty much streams (and copies) their music which means that music isn't sold in "units" anymore. Hence why the all so mighty record companies were, and are, in such an uproar.

I think it was Mick Jagger who said something like that the time we've lived in was kinda special. There has been no time in the history of humanity where musicians were able to make such amounts of money and those times are pretty much gone. If you're an emerging artist, whether a musician, movie maker or what ever, you're pretty much to par with the troubadours of the middle ages.

Going back to Google, I think Google pretty well understand the ad market more than anyone else on the planet and if there's money to be made they will and it seems that your view isn't aligned with theirs.
So I am guessing that we have some people that collect data, and then others that sort through all that. God that job would suck so bad. They get to look through trash for treasure. They are pretty much dumpster divers. If I had that job, I would quit on my first day.
I agree; his comments really do cover why I am a huge fan of them. Feynman's lectures are less about the actual physics, and more a tour de force in how he approaches problem solving and intuition of problems. He just uses physics to deliver it (and in doing so, gives you an excellent primer to a large amount of physics topics at a level that an interested party could find accessible).

Having done some tertiary level physics, I've covered much of the content but I still find the Volumes an excellent read not only as a refresher on the subject matter but also a demonstration of how to really nut out a problem and think about it in a way that supports a fuller understanding of the principles at play.

Feynman lamented that his lectures, in and of themselves, were a failure when he presented them to the Caltech classes. I think that misses their true worth of teaching the prospective student how to think through problems. That's a skill that is incredibly valuable to learn and improve upon no matter what your level of physics understanding or indeed what discipline you choose to pursue. To me, the material is largely secondary to that.
yeah thats kinda my beef with this stuff too. the transaction fees you pay have a purpose its not just like banks declared they can steal from you. Bitcoin doesn't offer these services, therefore no transaction fees.

and the transaction-scripting possibilities described in a lot of these comments are interesting but why couldn't banks implement the same thing? mainly because they are trying to protect you & intercept fraud etc.

My ideal version of Bitcoin is more like this -- you put money in the bank & then it becomes crypto currency. You can pass it around as much as you want & then at the end of the day if you ever want cash you submit coins to the bank & get cash. It's so simple & negates a ton of Bitcoin's problems. But it's not as romantic & get rich quick-y so the community will hate it. I think the allure of the black market, "f__k the systemmm", and pyramid scheme is 90% of why bitcoin is defended so intensely.

I think it's complicated legally though and that's why financiers want nothing to do with it. After all, if banks told you you could go 0% transaction fee if you incur some risk of losing your account altogether (if your wallet gets deleted or an admission that they might steal it or that you'll have to sell back your money at a new market price, plus the fact that you're entering an imbalanced market where early adopters have greater hordes of wealth for the same buy-in price) I think most customers would flat out reject it anyway.

It's also a very strange approach that a lot of the arguments take where they claim that because of the distributed nature it's safer than dealing with corporations. The Bitcoin network has its own points of failure (exchanges, hello?) that users have gotten burned for trusting. They are establishing new Gods, not eliminating the concept entirely. A public record does not mean that the system has no possible points of fault. A big part of banking is controlling these possible fault points to protect customers. As with lots of corporate/gov services, they are trying to design it so that it is strong/reliable/simple-to-use/stable.

Oh, and duh!! Lots of Bitcoin services (exchanges, transaction processors) CHARGE FEES! It's only when it's floating around the ecosystem ether that it is fee-less. If it gets to the level of everyday use, I'd wager there will be as many protectionary fees as with USD except maybe in certain situations: sending money to a friend, or a no-refunds type of transaction where ordinarily you'd pay cash (which incidentally is more off-the-grid than BTC would be at that point).
Oh dear sweet good so much this.

Not that the site is beautiful as specified (I prefer margins, a slightly narrower text width, and slightly different color schemes). But if the motherfucking idiot designer doesn't overload the sites' CSS in the first place I can simply drop my default style on the page.

If the page is overdesigned, then I've got to tear it down and figure out what elements to re-style first. Worst: those Microsoft auto-converted pages with embedded styles. On. Every. Fucking. Element.

And for the people saying "but it should be XXX px wide". Don't specify line widths in px -- you almost certainly* mean to use ems. In fact, you probably want pt and ems for _most_ of your dimensions.
This is a really nice puzzle! I didn't know William Wu wrote a paper about it. I saw it many years ago on William Wu's riddles site[1] (highly recommended). It's one of the most popular problems there. The original thread[2] in the forum has 25 pages, covering lots of approaches. There is also another thread[3] summarizing the discussion.

[1] http://wuriddles.com/

[2] http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board...

[3] http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board...
I'm solving general AI, anyone wants to dive in with me?
This is an important point that everyone really misses.

Cable companies make (50M subscribers * $100 /month * 12 mo/yr)=60B dollars per year.
TV advertising is another $80B /year.
Overhead and profit might eat up 20-50% of that, but we're still left with a bill, to create the TV we want to watch, of a few hundred dollars per US man, woman, and child.

Why would people imagine that we can replace that market with a hundred million $8/month netflix subscriptions and not see a decline in the availability of quality programming?
Type code on it, productively.

Seriously though, where do you feel it's failing compared to other keyboards? As far as laptop keyboards go, it's one of the best I've used.
As noted in the article linked: "...88% of snaps sent to one recipient."

If the KPCB chart were adjusted such that one send = one upload (certainly a better measure) I doubt the delta between Snapchat and Instagram changes much.
Yeah... and doing it on the whole body would be fatiguing on long pages because you have to scroll up and down the whole page after each column. I'd probably want to do column-split content areas over a certain width (e.g. an <article> or something).
> Six months ago, Pinterest was valued at $2.5 billion. Today, it is valued at $3.8 billion — and no revenue there, either.

Fact check, please. It's extremely unlikely that Pinterest has $0 revenue, given how much advertising appears on the site.
Ask HN: anyone getting a lot of 400s when uploading to s3 today?
The simplistic answer is that they are cramming a lot more information into less bandwidth. Analog TV resolution was 640 × 480 (approximately)[1] where digital TV is 1920 x 1080 [2]. Digital also aggravates reception issues because it doesn't degrade gracefully. Instead of "snow" and color issues, it goes all blocky and then takes a couple of seconds to resynchronize... if it recovers.

The Shannon–Hartley theorem[3] relates the necessary signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) that is required to cram a given amount if information into a given amount of bandwidth. Digital TV uses a lot of compression to reduce the amount of information that has to be crammed through the pipe and extremely sophisticated encoding to cram a bunch of bits into each symbol (baud[4]), but, at the end of the day, you have to have an adequate S/N ratio (good enough reception) to decode the signal.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC "Each frame is composed of two fields, each consisting of 262.5 scan lines, for a total of 525 scan lines. 483 scan lines make up the visible raster."

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_television

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baud
That's awesome. To me it seems like a parity bit for RAID or an error-correcting code.
I subscribed to the email service a while back. Then on the day the Iranian embassy was bombed, what'd I get summarized?

Celebrity news.

I won't subscribe again unless there's a "nothing trivial" policy.
Scsh, a unix shell embedded in Scheme
Another vote for Wikipedia's Current Events portal. So much better than nearly everything out there.
Learning the relevant keyboard shortcuts and building that muscle memory.
It's intuitively obvious. Capital earns returns, generates more capital. If you think of it as a distributed systems problem, it's obvious how it converges.
I've found the most critical difference between OO and FP to be state. Objects are stateful from the moment they are created until they are destroyed. FP is remarkable for its general lack of side-effects - i.e. computations do not normally affect shared state.

I believe this distinction is a critical one because an application with a lot of shared state is more difficult to scale than one without. As another poster pointed out, in a shared addressed space such as a desktop app, this isn't a concern. But if you want to scale an application across multiple address spaces, communicating and synchronizing the state of objects between these spaces tends to be difficult.

So, my tendency is:

Small and shared address space? Tend to use OO patterns and implementations.

Big and distributed address space? Tend to use FP patterns and implementations.

Note, I don't consider OO vs. FP a language choice – I consider it a programming paradigm choice.
> Error establishing a database connection

For the love of god people. Please stop requiring a database connection to serve static content.
What if it was real and they are gods now.
Could you not have way more than 33 questions created, (maybe a couple hundred) but change what questions are asked based on previous answers? Use the previous answers to determine the strongest next question to ask?

If an early answer states the candidate lives in the north
hemisphere, there's no point in asking them if they live on a landlocked African country... or whatever much more complicated questions could arrive.
If you want to understand Ripple, the best way is to read the white paper which was released 2 days ago : https://ripple.com/ripple_primer.pdf
Sometimes keeping things simple isn't possible, when the site isn't as trivial as your examples.
This is EXREME advertising. I very much doubt he is angry.

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/extreme-advertising

http://extremeadvertisements.com/popular/advertising
Regards,

Shawn
Ripple could make bitcoin great (or destroy it)
Pointing out Google just shows us exceptions exist. That no one way beats all. If you don't believe that already then this is a great article for you.
The phages are applied after cooking, but before packaging.
Lack of single key Home/End and forward delete etc. All are somewhat possible with the Fn key, but that makes crazy combos and go to start/end of line also is a pain...
While we're at it, why don't we just switch to fax? But seriously, this article does have a bit of a point.
Note that this news is a month old.
Very nice. It took me a while to see why that works, so I wonder how long it would have taken me to come up with it.

Now that I get it, it seems almost obvious. It's basically the same as my solution, except I'm essentially using this technique on 50 separate lines of 2 people each.
Sure. Windows 7 laptop, Mozilla Firefox. Just wanted to let you know as it's possible others are affected. Good luck!
S&W is a masterpiece. Just one cursory look through it improved my writing skills. I remember I opened it in a bookstore many years ago, and 15 minutes later I walked out with several great writing style advises planted in my head.
I can't recommend that book enough.

Geoffrey K. Pullum is a jealous little man.
It reads to me like extreme advertising. It was popular on 4chan for a while.

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/extreme-advertising
As posited BitCoin is a mechanism for storing value as well as transaction information. If you have a liquid enough exchange, allowing you to enter/exit the currency within seconds, the implications of transaction protocol are pretty wide - instantaneous verified commission-free money transfers around the world. Those who choose not to use BitCoins for value storage can then safely exit into their preferred currencies.
Ah, now I understand. I believe the Stylebot extension lets you live-edit a page and then save the edits. Don't know about things more complicated than CSS though.
Double spending isn't really about trust. It's about transactional atomicity.

After reading a bit, I've concluded that Ripple doesn't actually solve the consensus problem. Whether it works or not depends on the shape of the graph of the core validating nodes. If the graph is too centralized (as it is now, and probably will always be), it can be controlled by fiat.
Mostly agreed, except that cohesion is good, but coupling is bad.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohesion_(computer_science)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coupling_(computer_science)