skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are not taking the entire hash, you are only taking the first 33 bits of the hash. Since there are only about 8.5 billion different values for the 33 bits and there are about 7 billion people, the odds are astronomically low that each of those 7 billion people will receive a different one of those 8.5 billion possibilities.

This is the birthday paradox with instead of 365 days you have 2^33 possible answer values and instead of 23 people you have 7 billion people. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to fill in these values into one of the formulas to calculate the probability of successfully giving each person a unique 33 bit answer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
Ripple is officially open-source
In chess there are hundreds of annotated databases out there where I can study how the masters play, read analyses of different playing styles, and try to follow along and improve my own intuition.

Is there an equivalent for programming? Github and Stackoverflow are good resources, but it would be interesting to see something more structured. Perhaps a DB of a fixed set of problems such as projecteuler.net with voting and analysis of the submitted solutions.
Or maybe not?

http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/2549...
I've never seen any either. Most offices tend to be open plan with fairly limited size rooms, varying from 6 to 20 desks.
Um APIs have been around for a long time. Maybe cloud hosting apis are "new"... but other than that, it ain't new.

What could really take off is an API server platform that's decentralized and does authentication, api console, throttling, billing, etc.
I hereby promise that once I've had my kidney transplant and I am once again capable of lifting things that are heavier than my cat I'll blog about lifting :-)
What kind of Internet connection do you have and average speed?
"Unless you are craigslist." Isn't that the crappiest design ever?!? And isn't it the greatest website idea...and even more interesting since it's so good and it looks like (what he said) :=)

Alice has a right to be skew and whacked out. It is odd, though. Still, ravishing. Thanks for posting.
Techies must nip growing scorn in bud
Yeah, those solutions do work, but they are definitely borderline grey area and not always going to work on locked down machines (say in a corporate environment or public computer in a airport or library).
It is interesting to see your comment way down the thread, even though it is by far the best.
> OO is designed and really good for modeling a complex system that involves lots of mutation

I'd argue that this is where OOP struggles the most. Because mutation in OOP is implicit and unconstrained, it's more difficult to manage than in FP languages, which typically have more sophisticated controls and constraints for handling state.
Popularity does not define importance. Unless we want to add 'Toddlers and Tiaras' and the pet rock to the list of 'important' things.
> What disturbs me, is that use of insults have become too common these days.

It doesn't disturb you that, for example, the USA and its allies have been carrying out or supporting unnecessary military action resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in south-western Asia and the Middle East for the last 13 years? It doesn't disturb you that those countries have granted vastly increased power to the state, greatly reduced personal freedoms, and reintroduced torture as an acceptable procedure, in the course of doing so? It doesn't disturb you that they think it is okay to kill people, away from the battlefield, along with any family members that might be nearby, by remote control from the other side of the world?

No, apparently what has been disturbing you is that people are using vulgar language in ways which could be perceived as offensive. If you don't like it, then don't have them as your friends, and/or don't read the things they write. No one cares about your prudishness.

EDIT: I see your profile says you live in New Delhi so you're probably not paying taxes to directly fund the last decades butchery. Still, I imagine that New Delhi is not short of phenomena more disturbing than vulgar language.
This is why it baffles me, day in and day out without fail everyone speculates Apple are going to revolutionise TV with Apple TV. Television is a dying medium, I download and consume all of my media on my phone and computer. The only time I ever use my TV is when I want to watch downloaded content on a larger screen and copy it to a USB drive to watch on my TV. Good riddance.
Interesting point about using the MBA as a career break. I suspect this is not rare.
Secondly, we have sunk costs. If you buy a game or $1 and after 5 minutes you are stuck, bored or confused, who gives a fuck? Just uninstall it. But what if you paid $25 or even $50? At that price, you often ‘force yourself’ to keep playing

Nope. If I'm bored or confused by a high-price game it just gets binned. There's a ton of other stuff out there. Make a mental note that the publisher of the game is probably crap in terms of future purchases. The days of sticking with a game because there's no other options are over, thanks to digital distribution, broadband, and a glut of games.
The slide below describing "Type it to the max" seems to describe what you're referring to. It's powerful, but I don't think they are beginner languages.

http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/ralf.hinze/WG2.8/31/slides/martin.pdf
Apparently HN style is broken, as your comment is between 22-28 words per line.
In every open office I've worked in, desks were huge, and personal items were welcome. (Well, maybe not at my current gig; I haven't seen any personal items yet. But it's a pretty new team of mostly externals.)
A bursting of the current tech bubble will be fairly significant for those of us in the tech industry, e.g. many of the users of this site.

When the dot-com bubble burst investors didn't just get scared away from companies with weak fundamentals - they got scared away from all types of tech investments. So it won't just be the groupons and zyngas that get burned - the amazons and apples and googles will drop in value too.

And those questionably sustainable startups are soaking up a lot of the supply of young techies, keeping salaries high. The seller's market we tech employees currently enjoy won't last for ever.

Still, markets can remain irrational for a very long time under the right conditions. Or perhaps Snapchat really is the future of communications and I'm just too old to recognize it.
> That wasn't an insight he had in advance, that was an interpretation forced on him by the test results. In other words, he was cornered into accepting a picture of himself, clearly at odds with reality, through personal dedication to his experiment and its outcome.

Whether he in particular is a well adjusted psycho is actually irrelevant. He's trying to sell a book, he may even be completely lying about how he behaves just in order to spice up the story and sell more books. The point is that what he is describing is based on solid current knowledge about psychopathy. The behaviour he is describing is congruent with current best scientific knowledge on the topic. His behaviour and brain scan, whether true or just imagined, is not evidence to support anything and he isn't implying it is. It's just an illustration.

> If we accepted modern psychology's basic premise -- that there is a normal behavior toward which we should all aspire [...]

Just what on earth are you talking about? Please, stop the nonsense.
I have vague memories of trying the Democracy 1 demo, found it promising, buying the full game, and finding that the demo was basically 90% of the full game. No extra depth - and the demo by itself was shallow. I didn't bother with Democracy 3 because of this 'burn'.
I'm surprise no-one mentioned ALICE - aluminium + ice (water). A paste-like substance that's quite a powerful rocket propellant.

http://news.discovery.com/tech/nanoaluminum-rocket-fuel.html
Why bitcoin will make it and the NSA won't
With 50% of the bitcoin hashrate located behind the Great Firewall of China (GFC), the only way for the NSA to take out the majority of bitcoin miners, consists in operating deep behind the GFC.

According to Edward Snowden, the NSA is already planning on thoroughly disturbing Chinese infrastructure. The Chinese defense response should simply be a long overdue thermonuclear strike on Fort Meade, Maryland. If the Chinese don't do it, then the Russians should.

In fact, it is not in the interest of neither the Chinese nor the Russians to wait until the NSA wreaks havoc on their infrastructure. In terms of their own national security -- as the NSA already attack their population -- they should do the world a favour and launch a thermonuclear strike against Fort Meade right now.
Perhaps there are greater long-term gains from some collaboration that don't seem as obvious as the immediate gains from "cranking away" in an office alone.
Yet no other search engine suffered from these problems. Excite, AltaVista, dogpile...everyone else managed to successfully spider, index, and filter the web. I'm not seeing how infrastructure or data management was any particular value of Google's, and have seen absolutely nothing declaring otherwise. Indexing/deduplicating/managing data didn't seem to be a problem for anyone.

And FWIW, Google's real strength -- I guess I'm not everyone and their dog? -- was that they made a business case for the individual searcher. In the collapse of the .COM bubble an individual searching was seen as a close to worthless commodity, which is why every once-vigorous search engine had largely abandoned engineering advances. Google at the time first saw being the premiere search engine as a way of selling search appliances to business, and then with their text ads reinvigorating web ads after, again, the .COM collapse.

Alas, herein we see the magic of the survivorship bias: Google won, therefore Google must have done everything right. Anyone who lost must have done everything wrong. This is cargo cult thinking that does nobody any good. How you so casually write off the engineering challenges of Pointcast (an incredibly popular, multimedia-rich product, including pooled and queued subscription for millions of people, when bandwidth and computing power were very limited. A whole industry of Pointcast caching appliances appeared).

It's also interesting how you create the caricature of executives decrying the Google interface, as if it were the vindicated underdog after all of those years. Yet in those early years, the simplistic interface of Google was overwhelmingly the number 1 lauded feature of the site. Even before it was featured for good and quick search results, it was heralded for its simplicity.
I care about his prudishness, and share his sentiment despite my displeasure with Amercian foreign action.

Don't put words in my mouth.
Warning: Some generalizations and hyperbole...

It was typically true that engineers have high leverage, productivity and scale, whereas sales people do not. When traditional enterprise software was sold, it was done primarily through the "hunter" sales model and sales people were compensated accordingly to bringing in big deals. Sales grew revenue, which meant that if you hired more sales people at an established company, you'd have more revenue. This is why in the 1990s, if you met a tall white guy at a bar in San Carlos driving a nice car, he was probably an Oracles sales person (a bit of hyperbole).

The nature of enterprise sales is changing, not just because it's gone to SaaS/subscription. One of the key changes in the last few years is the growth of measurable analytics in marketing. You see, marketers and sales people are not the same. In the old days, marketers couldn't measure the impact of their marketing investments. There were loose correlations between marketing and the leads they generated for sales. But now, because of analytics derived from marketing software, you can actually draw conclusions on which marketing campaigns were the most effective from impression to conversion.

What does this mean for this post? 1. I think we're going to see fewer sales people per engineer. We likely won't see a huge growth in R&D spending; we will see less dollars spent on expensive sales people. 2. Marketers will become more hybrid product-sales-analytics people (like growth hacking), which means there's a great opportunity for data-driven commercially-focused engineers to transition towards this greenfield area in marketing.

TL;DR: Selling enterprise software has changed so the ratio of sales:engineers will go down in the next 10-15 years.
The economy has been so crappy that people are crossing their fingers and pretending a bubble doesn't exist even though deep down they know it does. After all, it can't get any worse, right? It's like people who have terminal cancer and are otherwise rational skeptics who decide to pursue alternative therapy. Hope, even false hope, is a powerful thing.
Swiss Voters Reject Strict CEO Pay Limits in Referendum
Many financial assets are currently at high valuations compared to fundamental indicators and historical ratios. Due to QE and other unusual post-crisis effects there is simply a huge amount of excess capital in the financial markets. Combine that with low-to-negative real interest rates and it is no surprise that a lot of risky seem overvalued (benchmarked to a world with normal money supply and interest rates).
The article doesn't break it down by demographics, but everything I've read on the subject shows an enormous generational split. The kids have already abandoned cable, so unless they somehow change their habits the clock is ticking on broadcast television.
How to Get Good at Chess, Fast
I think that was Rich Hickey's "Simple Made Easy" talk:
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

I think one of his most important points is that objects are good for representing, well, actual objects. As in, you have a mouse, or screen or some little robot that you are controlling through code. And that's all they are good for.

Need a way to define a bunch of static methods and avoid name collisions? - you want a namespace.

Need a place to store a bunch of data about something? - you want a associative array.

Need a way to call the same function on different types? - you want an interface.

I'm not sure about this, but I suspect part of the problem stems from the fact that object-oriented languages (usually Java these days) are the first language that students are exposed to. Once you start thinking in OO abstractions, it takes some effort to break out of the mindset.
ALIENS ARRIVE ON EARTH
That's more polymorphism than encapsulation.
I'm sorry but I hate ZODB with a passion.

- It does not scale.

- Poor support for replication or sharding.

- It is slow. Really slow. Un-pickle every time you get something from cache.

- It is error prone. Forget a commit or forget to handle conflict errors and you're in big trouble.

- No interoperability. Want to write a service in C++ to access your db? You're out of luck.

- As your system grows you'll have conflicts all over the place.

- Some server side stuff needs to have your objects, e.g. if you want to do conflict resolution.

- Migrations/change to schemas are painful, once you change your object you're no longer going to be able to de-serialize it.

- You have to roll your own if you want change notifications.

So if you're just looking to persist some Python objects in a small system, great. Otherwise I'd stay away from this.
"It's hard to transverse them, or to merge them, or often even to look up a list of keys."

That's exactly what I'm arguing against in my comment on making your important structs/objects and their relationships explicit. Randomly mutating them together all over your program might seem more flexible but at a cost of making you worry about your code rather than your data definitions. And that's without even getting into performance implications.

If you actually need a Map, of course, that's a different situation than the ones I'm thinking.
The amount of borrowed money on the stock market as a percentage of GDP recently reached an all time high. And with institutional interest rates as low as they are, money is cheap, and it's flowing into tech. In fact, one could make the case that the entire global economy is being propped up by central banks.

And there's no denying that the price of snapchat is bat shit insane. Plus look at facebook, running out of ideas, losing touch with the youth, desperately trying to buy up burgeoning competition. This is characteristic of the sector as a whole.
There is a historical pattern of overinvestment in a first bubble leading up to a crash, followed by a second wave which exploits the now-cheap capital assets and actually does fairly well. You can see this in railroads, real estate, telecommunications infrastructure at various points from telegraph to telephones to fiber, and arguably financial capital markets themselves when new investment vehicles open up.

The point of this is that second-wave investments often look a lot like the first, but with much higher-quality real capital associated with them (eg, gold mines that actually produce at least some gold, vs. the gold-exploration firms of the first wave).

Combine it with basically zero-opportunity-cost money dumped into the financial sector by the fed and it's a recipe for perhaps-inflated valuations, but mostly in the context of investments in actual assets. You might see very low returns for an indeterminate time, but large negative returns are something else.

TLDR: There's a difference between banks buying and selling fundamentally profitable financial investments to each other at inflated nominal values, and sinking large amounts of money into unprofitable real assets.
You've actually changed my mind here.

My original contention was that the only reason someone would care about a power-of-attorney dispute over someone they had never heard of and had been in a coma for 15 years was religious. You've proven me wrong and changed my mind, though -- apparently secular "go team" loyalty to party is enough on it's own, without sharing religious views or really any reason to care besides rooting for the home team.
Things I Learned In 2013
I agree. I mentioned in another comment -- he may be completely faking his state in order to write an engaging story and sell the book. But he is describing very well how a well adjusted person with psychopathic traits would behave. The book and this article are just good illustrations of the phenomenon written in a way that's digestible for general lay readership.
I was hoping this would be a post about javascript and variable hoisting
thanks for the share! I hadn't come across any real applications before. This is exactly what we (will soon) need.
<font size=+1>
i didn't know you could do that!
This is very interesting:

Bitcoin has a scripting language which enables more than a “send money from X to Y” transaction. A Bitcoin transaction can require M of N parties to approve a transaction. Imagine Wills that automatically unlock when most of the heirs agree that their parent has passed, no lawyer required. Or business accounts that require two of any three trusted signatures to approve an expenditure. Or wire escrows that go through when any arbiter agrees that the supplier sent the goods to the buyer. Or wallets that are socially secured by your friends and family. Or an allowance account accessible by the child and either of two parents. Or a crowdfunding of a Kickstarter project that pays out on milestones, based on the majority of the backers approving the next payment. The escrow in each case can be locked so that the arbiters can’t take the money themselves – only approve or deny the transaction.

The scripting language can also unlock transactions based on other parameters. Unlocking them over time can enable automatic mortgage, trust, and allowance payouts. Unlocking them on guessable numbers creates a lottery auditable by third parties. One can even design smart property – for example, a car’s electronic key so that when and only when a payment is made by the car buyer to the seller, the seller’s car key stops working and the buyer’s car key (or mobile phone) starts the car. Imagine your self-driving car negotiating traffic, paying fractional bitcoin to neighboring cars in exchange for priority.

I've been following Bitcoin since the beginning and had no idea it supported "transaction approved only when M of N participants agree."

How do you feel about those scenarios? Also, does anyone know of other little-known Bitcoin functionality?
Of course it is. HN is known for a lot of good things, but its visual design has certainly never been one of them.
I think the crap gaming (from our perspective) situation is there for a few reasons.

1. Mobile wasn't taken as seriously by AAA devs, and now when they try and break off to make something for iOS, it's drowned out by:

2. The horde of companies that came from Facebook which are making the games you and I deem as 'meh'. They have optimized the crap out of acquiring users and charting. Good luck if you're a developer trying to make a high quality immersive experience, because no one will find you (unless you have a brand name or lots to spend on acquisition).

3. The reality is probably that the mass market on iOS won't go for more hardcore games. They want Smurf's Village type games...

4. Many of the higher quality games we would want, end up not being done well. Baldur's Gate is actually a good example. I paid for it the first day it came out, and there was a lot of silly problems, related to controls, UI, etc... I loved it at its core so much, but it really needed more work/time :(.
FMGEM streaming music & video opens up for public beta
Take a look at some OOP C code sometime. Oh, C doesn't have objects? Sorry, I meant a my_struct{} and a bunch of my_struct_op(struct, otherargs) functions.

You seem to be pretty emotionally invested in FP vs any other programming paradigm. I'm more of a "lots of tools in the box" kind of guy.
"The Architecture of Open Source Applications" is a book written with exactly that thought in mind.

http://aosabook.org/en/index.html
Every time someone attempts to judge what other people work I think of this quote:

It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits -- like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing beautiful women, flying through the stratosphere, or landing on the moon. First-rate pursuits -- involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding -- inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, or a Roosevelt can feel himself to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, or a Blake. Understanding is forever unattainable. --Malcom Muggeridge
As the child of anthropologists, I think there's a lot of room for cultural analysis of technologies. Languages, for instance, have cultures as well as affordances, and a careful comparative analysis would be really interesting.
Debian uses dash as the default system (that is: scripting) shell, and what you'll typically find /bin/sh symlinked to (OpenBSD don't truck such nonsense and gives you statically-linked Bourne when you ask for sh, and there's a pretty good argument for why that should be). I actually got in the habit of writing bash (not sh) scripts some time back. My understanding is that the article was referring to commandline tricks, which would generally indicate bash.

Defaults do have their use, though from what I saw of the article it was hardly rigorous enough to even note what defaults it was referring to.

Agreed with you on the quantity of low-quality information out there. Google seems to be badly losing its edge in winnowing wheat from chaff (as does HN).
I would argue that FP is also about avoiding mutable state.
Good point, especially because at 33 bits, storing everyone's ID would only take about 29 gigabytes.

7,126,462,675 people * 33 bits per person / 8 bits per byte = 29,396,658,534 bytes

World population source: http://www.census.gov/popclock/