skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pretty disappointing critique.

There are manifold differences between couchdb, datomic, rethinkdb and more traditional sql databases, but the author can't see past his pet issue. He doesn't seem to understand the use cases, or the infrastructure differences. In terms of use cases, there are plenty of analytically datasets that are strictly monotonic. There is no opportunity to reclaim overwritten storage in this case.

But CoW index write amplification you say? Well now let's talk about infrastructure differences. Datomic can use s3 as a storage layer. Cold data storage is then $10/month/terabyte. And compaction is trivially non-blocking in a CoW dataset. It can be done by EC2 spec instances whenver is convenient with zero impact on the production system. Don't generalize the experiences of a few folks running couchdb on a couple in house servers to people working with a fundamentally different approach on fundamentally different infrastructure.

Back to the cheap cost of cold storage, for most businesses that's well into "who cares" cost territory, but having the data also allows them to preserve full lineage in the advent they discover a data loss bug in their application. That could potentially be quite valuable. One way to think of these systems is that they have integrated backup data. MySQL folks generally don't count the size of backup sets as part of the database footprint, and common backup schedules (eg father, grandfather) provide only a limited ability to dig back into the past.

By way of simple argument: would anyone advise using a source control system that only kept the last few hundreds of commits? Why do we treat our data differently? The answer is largely one of implementation constraints: text is cheap, vcs doesn't index the way databases do, etc. But as storage and processing densities continue to grow more datasets shift to the trivial category. As much as many HNews posters dream of being in a 'big data' shop, the vast majority of startups have maybe a couple GB in MySQL or Postgres. Our status quo toolset and approach is discarding value for these folks. Maybe you think that's fine, but some of us are going to keep pushing to enable new capabilities and advantages. Increasingly these implementation constraints will disappear as people attack them. It'd be nice to not suffer scornful surface criticisms from people who base their career around the status quo.
Indeed, for me it was a page turner and inspiring.
In some Italian cities the situation is no different: taxi licenses are issued only on a fixed, limited number and are sometimes inherited from father to child, often sold for mind-boggling amounts (comparable to the price of a house). The service as a result is quite crap: long waits, high prices per km and all the most contrived surcharges you can think of (5 additional Euros for the airport and some tourist destinations, etc). Each time a deregulation is proposed (and it does happen) there are immense backlashes from a small category that would be not only stripped of a privilege, but actually, properly ruined: some cabbies have to take 10 yrs mortgages to buy a license. It's a legacy state of affairs that carries on only because it's difficult to remove, not because it's of actual advantage to anyone.
There is a Sega Genesis emulator, blastem, whose premise is that that even when extreme accuracy is the primary goal, it can still be done efficiently.

http://rhope.retrodev.com/files/blastem.html
In this case, I don't think the emulator would be "programmed" in OpenCL; instead, what would be programmed in OpenCL would be a generalized cellular-automata-style FPGA "emulator." (This would be deep magic, but it would only need to be done once.)

Then you'd "flash" the trace of the chips you want emulated to this virtual FPGA, just as if you were deploying it to a real one.
It might instead be a sign that Rackspace is a public company, and that Barrons doesn't bother much with privately owned businesses since their audience can't invest.
Medium, The Magazine
Which of the 3 allow you to reach an actual human, quickly, on the weekends, even if you are spending less than $5K per month?

Asking for real, my guess is RS does, but I don't know about the other 2.
Replying on a $249 ARM chromebook running https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton

it runs Firefox, vim, BitTorrent Sync

A key chord and I'm back on ChromeOS

Updates on ChromeOS are clean and easy

Instant on just as fast as iPad
ChromeOS: Flip the lid open and there you are
Linux: + sudo startxfce4

Your data is yours.

The Win7 updates to my old netbook which i don't even use anymore take like an hour.

Windows can run TurboxTax; I'll give it that.
The one that stands out is Cookie Clicker. I don't know why that was so addicting.
The bet Google is making is that the long tail of Win apps will be dwarfed by the longer tail of web apps. As always, the future will tell.
> The secret was kept despite being available in OSI (if one knew where to look).

Not the first time something like this happens
A taxi license cost over 240,000 euros in Paris.
I can only speak for Rust, but Rust does actually give you the flexibility and unsafety of C, but this is an escape hatch; you can write most of your program with the memory and data race safety that Rust provides, only dropping down to the super-low-level C-like code when absolutely necessary.

I.e. you can rely on the compiler to verify most of your code, only the explicit `unsafe` blocks (which are normally very rare, especially with some considered abstractions that keep all the unsafety in one place) absolutely need auditing for things like buffer overflow and use-after-free (unlike C/C++ where any code in the whole codebase can have these problems).
Amazon, perhaps. But AWS is already crazy expensive, adding silver spoon levels of managed hosting would price them right out of the market. The reason Amazon is competitive is because they can offer a different product than other folks. The value of that product comes from software development, not customer service staff.

As for google, they couldn't interface with a real customer if their life depended on it. And the idea that they could suddenly build out a massive managed hosting service on a whim is not reflective of reality. Your claim is basically saying that no company in the world has a competitive advantage because anyone else could just start doing what that company is doing on a moment's notice.
Paul Graham Isn't Keeping Women out of Tech
>but then again maybe all those measures are only meant to minimize the casualties of progress, more than just being an obstacle to progress.

They are one in the same.
The term "french fried potatoes" was in print as early as 1856. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_fries#Etymology
I haven't really looked at D in a long time, so I'm not clear on what's going on here.

Is D allowing you to write the function call "days(2)" as "2.days"?

(As an aside, Nimrod allows you to do specifically that; first-arg.function-name(...) == function-name(first-arg,...).)
Bitcoin has a funnel, just like any other business or technology platform. Branding is a form of marketing, and it's marketing's job to raise interest. This is the first tier of the funnel. Interest gives way to being able to understand how a given technology is important to us. This is the second tier. Next, those of us that fully understand how Bitcoin works begin to spread the word about how it's reliable and how it could possibly change the world. This is the third tier. As implied trust comes online for Bitcoin for the general population, it will move to wide-spread adoption. That's the fourth and final tier.

We're still in the second tier, which means people are still asking "why should we care?" and vocalizing their fears about something they don't understand. With technology adoption rates increasing over the last year (due to the greater interconnects we have via the Internet) I'd suspect we'll see the start of the third tier in 3-6 months, tops. As fears give way to trust, we'll all settle into a routine with the technology by the end of the year.
The real world is quite as simple as that. Whatever roadblocks the government has put in the way are better implemented elsewhere (through social safety nets, retraining, etc.)

You might have a point when different industries with different built-in subsidies compete (taxis vs. buses or trains vs. planes). That's not the case here.
A comparison that this article makes 'Ah yes Amazon has the best most excellent Virtual machines but Rackspace has the best most excellent public cloud'. I make the best tomato sauce, but my competing friend makes the best tomato sauce.
Mastery by Robert Greene is one I mentioned in another post. I don't want to say its life changing but its extremely good and it's the closest thing I've found to a self help book that isn't full of fluff. Edit "Who owns the future" by Jarron Lanier was good too.
I have a sneaking suspicion that there is a big overlap of the early adopter core user bases from kuro4hin, slashdot, reddit, and HN - i.e. a lot of the same people moved from one to the other and created the editorial direction (so to speak). By that measure HN is 'the next Reddit'.
Collected Poems
~ federico garcía lorca
Agreed.

The shift towards a more affordable machine that can meet the most basic productivity needs will attract businesses, especially since we now live in world with more mobile workforces.Bloated OS's are a thing of the past and no longer needed as much now as they were 10, 15 years ago.
> Who cares?

I care. Semantic HTML is easier to work with when creating, maintaining, interacting with, or consuming HTML.
I got a Chromebook (XE500C21) as a gift and I didn't think it'd see much use. I set up crouton on it and I'm using it for browsing, IRC and some (very light) programming. I've come to use it far more than I thought I would.

My primary reasons for reaching for it rather than a "real" laptop (got a couple of Thinkpads around as well) is that it's got great battery life and that it's so cheap that I don't care if it gets wrecked. It's been beaten, stepped on, splashed on.

It sits somewhere between a tablet and a normal laptop. It doesn't replace any of them, but it's a great complement.
If not the NSA then who should store phone data
A better way to look at the object's structure/values would help a lot. Seems like the first step would be to generate a list of vertices from the 2d array of tiles.
That's great, I wasn't aware of those frameworks, thanks.
SkyNET becomes self-aware.
True, and as I said, it does seem ridiculous to me. At the same time, I understand that progress has often broader implications that might appear as a price too high to pay for the society. So, I just abstain from casting stones in that case; even if on the whole I am quite happy I am not in France anymore.
Thanks for sharing (broadcasting?) your thoughts!

I struggled a bit with the positioning of the share button - I'll think about it some more. I hadn't considered that it's the first thing a new visitor sees, and I agree that's undesirable.

I used the wrong word when I said "menu". I actually had "palette of sounds" down before changing it because it sounded too pretentious. I was thinking of menu in the restaurant sense rather than the UI sense. I agree I don't want to overload the interface with more options.

I'm not 100% happy with the visuals or the audio samples either, particularly humans and rain as has been pointed out, so I'm going to look at cleaning them up.
This thread seems like a good place to vent anonymously about something that's been eating me. I want to see if anyone can relate or will even have any idea what I'm trying to say.

I have this friend. We've been friends for a long time. I think we must have had a lot in common some time ago, but it's hard to remember for sure. Around 1.5 years ago, I began to notice a change in this person's way of speaking. They became perfectly inane, as if in a studied, practiced way. They never say anything the tiniest bit controversial or opinionated, or revealing they slightest bit of personality. It's as if they became a P.R. department for themselves. They utter many trite well-wishes, a lot of overt gratitude for very simple things, simply phrased banal questions, and absolutely nothing else. Nothing that any civil person could disagree with ... and to my ears, nothing worth spending the breath to say. A continuous stream of equivalents to "nice weather!"

I don't understand it. As a somewhat eccentric person, my reaction to hearing this kind of talk over any length of time is like I'm quaking with frustration bordering on rage inside. I don't say anything about it, because I feel like that could only be hurtful.

Explanations I've come up with include the fact that this person has adopted Facebook very heavily, seemingly getting a significant amount of social interaction through it. So perhaps they've adopted the voice that you have to when you're constantly speaking in front of an audience full of all your friends, family, co-workers, and even bosses. But it's like this person carried that voice into their offline life, and never, ever breaks out of that bland, trite, soul-less mode. It's all, "Happy about this nice weather!" and "This pie is yummy." forever and ever....

Ah well. I just thought I'd drop this here and see if anyone has ever encountered something like this. I feel like I lost a friend.
I wonder when they will introduce a bill to force Google to wait 15 seconds to serve search results.
Most of the programmers I know use MacBook Pros. Some have hackintosh desktops as a backup, but concede that the hackintosh setups are a pain in the ass compared to an actual Mac. So I'm not sure where you're getting that last part.

Are these people not computer enthusiasts?
Yes, I have seen traditional taxis drivers logged into Uber.
>the taxi industry is "heavily regulated" for the benefit of the customer

I get your point, but people decry the regulation that Uber is fighting against...until Uber implements free market "surge pricing". Then people are more than happy to leap back into the yellow cabs, which have their price regulated. Just read through some of the fallout.

In other words, all the free market vs regulation talk is lip service. People want what's best for themselves.
A Feminist && A Programmer
Yes, I would be more likely to play in Python, though I guess I do need to bite the bullet and learn javascript at some point.

If you can integrate haste or fay and let people play in Haskell that would be indeed be epic, and I would definitely use it (as haskell is my learning project at the moment)
I appreciate your putting the distinction between Krugman's arguments into greater relief – I believe I have conflated them somewhat in talking about second order effects.

For the time being, let's ignore those and concentrate on the primary purpose of Bitcoin's infrastructure, to facilitate decentralized value transactions between arbitrary parties. It is the infrastructure's fitness for this purpose that I see as giving it its floor; this may seem a slightly circular argument, but by enabling what it does it will always have the value of accomplishing that goal, even if it's trading for vast fractions of a cent (like Dogecoin).

Adding the network effects of its installed base, this probably places its floor somewhere well above Dogecoin's current value, but certainly far below what it's currently trading at. And indeed, it could very well undergo further corrections until it reaches a level of stability appropriate for a value store.
Never mind PS3, we don't have Sega Saturn yet.
People don't care what a beta is, they care if it works or now. Be careful if you list your app in a place where people can review it. People view things for what the are, not for what the can be.
> Every time I see an Uber post related to Europe I wonder if in the US taxis don't need to pay the outrageous license fees (in addition to a whole lot of other things, like freelance income taxes.)

A single NYC taxi medallion goes for millions of dollars: http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/about/average_medallion_pri...

Most Taxi drivers have to rent one; which is not cheap. The medallion owners get to sit on their asses in rake in the cash.

Your concern is misplaced.
How many of the miners know how to evaluate updates? Most of these miners I read about, they bought some expensive hardware and just plugged it in. Is there some evaluation period before updates go live? Also, what if a seemingly innocuous change has unforeseen consequences? Nothing like Bitcoin has ever existed.
We use Rackspace, AWS, Pair networks and a local VPS provider.

Anecdotally, I would say Rackspace has the most intuitive interface and good telephone support. They've just released new performance instances which are cheaper than AWS: $0.08/hr for 2 vCPUs, 2GB RAM and plenty of SSD vs $0.12/hr for AWS 2 vCPU m1.medium.

Our local VPS has fantastic customer service and we know each other by name.

Amazon has the real truly global infrastructure (Rackspace UK is a separate entity to US, ASIA) and Route 53 Anycast is outstanding.

We'll be trialling out Google Compute Engine to see how it fares.

For now I see Amazon for global DNS infrastructure, but I can't see Rackspace going anywhere.

Seems like Gartner have previous with Rackspace: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/20/gartner_openstack_cr...

Also interesting reading: http://gigaom.com/2013/12/20/backbreaking-openstack-migratio...
"(b) that the Federal Reserve is a potential dollar sink and has promised to buy them back and extinguish them if their real value starts to sink at (much) more than 2%/year (yes, I know)."

I had not heard thing. Buy dollars back with what?
But without Rackspace, where will Scoble work?
Unless HN starts supporting sub“HN”s (or starts allowing porn, jokes and My Little Pony-related posts on the frontpage) I don't think it's a viable replacement for Reddit.
Web apps run on PCs too. The long tail is Visual Studio, SPSS, Excel, Illustrator, Photoshop, Audyssey, Matlab, Emacs, Call of Duty, VLC, etc...

Tablets are a great secondary device. I think Chromebooks are too bulky and not feature rich enough as a secondary device. And simply can't replace a laptop as a primary.

And with virtually no price delta, I just don't see the story.
Fukushima Radiation Hits ‘US West Coast’
For context, there's been some discussion over the last two months about whether Rust should use 1:1 or M:N threading or both. https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2013-November/00...
> This just adds to the list of why to hate Google.

Aren't all search engines susceptible to the same practices? How would you like to see them fixed?
One thing I wanted to do awhile back was create an interface that could only be implemented by a class that had already implemented certain other interfaces.

In retrospect, sort of a horrible idea, but I wonder, is there a type system out there expressive enough to allow that behavior?

After a few moments thought I realized why it wouldn't be possible in languages that use a fixed v-table, but it should be possible in languages that use more flexible calling techniques!

Or am I thinking about this too much and this is basically what type classes would buy me?
> Getting dollars requires going to a physical place to get physical bills.

My debit card/square/venmo might have something to say about that...
It comes with the territory, I'm afraid. Some users will try something once, find a bug or limitation, decide the platform sucks and never touch it again (and if the platform is worthless, why bother filing a bug report.) I've been guilty of it myself quite a few times. First impressions count for a lot, and they can be difficult to control.
Maybe I'm not as smart as french lawmakers, but I can't really figure out how they'd even enforce this?
This got me thinking about a more generalized approach to this sort of thing.

Given a task where you can check completion somehow, you can then solve it using the following procedure:

1. Generate a random program. (This could be a Turing machine, bytecode, C source, whatever.)

2. Execute the program on the input for n steps, where n is an incrementing counter.

3. Execute the given check on the output. If the check passes, return the output.

4. Increment n and go back to 1.

The restriction on n steps avoids running afoul of the Halting Problem.

The check has to be a little more rigorous than the one used in Bogosort. It can't just check to see if the output is in order, because the output may contain completely different numbers, since the program could be doing anything. You'd have to check not only for order but also that the output is in fact a permutation of the input.

I wonder what the running time of this algorithm is. I wonder if it can even be calculated.
Can't tell about WebRTC or browser-based. When it comes to software, I've tried everything from the Wikipedia list and some more.

Most are either
too buggy (Linphone) or
closed source (many) or
not multiplatform (so you can't talk to WindowsXP-user grandfather or vice-versa) or
development stopped (Twinkle) or
has no encryption (Ekiga).

The only one who passed was Jitsi.

It has more than 10 years of development, it's free / open source, very usable, multiplatform. It also accepts encrypted voice over XMPP, not only over SIP.

Look here - https://jitsi.org/Main/Features
'this' is quirky when you make your own functions. also Starcraft II runs more smoothly on my computer, no joke
I doubt McDonalds really cares that much about their trade secrets.

Even though I love McDonalds fries (you can almost taste the oppression and cultural hegemony), perfectly emulating McDonald's fries is always going to be a tiny niche. No competitor is going to want their fries to be exactly the same as in McDonalds since brands want to position themselves as interesting and unique.

That said, I don't really like the deception he (and his agents) practiced, but it seems like a minor sin in the scheme of things.
It's like Windows except it's gratis, more secure, more control (check out crouton [1]), and hardware that runs chromeOS is by definition linux friendly, which encourages more hardware support [2].

On top of that, almost all of it is open source.

[1] https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton
[2] https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/2205401/ (for example)
Very cool man. I hope one of these years I can make a similar comment!
somehow I don't feel that we really need Uber, but simply more taxi plates. Uber is just a radio taxi, it's trying to use technology where the problem is legal.
I am a bit confused about the argument about Expedia not being penalized because they are spending on AdWords, wouldn't great organic rankings reduce their paid budget? And if Google penalizes them for legitimate reasons I doubt they would cut their AdWords budget.

I am sure Matt will provide more info soon especially after what happened to RapGenius.
What a weird question.
Not as many as I was hoping I would...

League of legends - Been playing for years now, recommended.

Assassins creed black flag - Great game, think asscreed may be my favourite series.

Tomb raider - This was so much better than I was expecting, bought it in a sale while it was cheap. The story is good and its pretty intense in general, though the rope winch pulling down walls is pretty hilarious (also half price on steam)
Here is a "distributed" sorting algorithm that requires even less thinking - you don't even have to write a shuffling algorithm!

1) Start with an empty string.

2) Increment the string in such a way that will eventually generate all strings.

3) Give the string (and your unsorted array) to a processor that attempts to run the string as a program and go back to step 2.

When a processor is given a program, if the output contains all the elements of A and the output is sorted, stop everything! You've sorted the array.

It requires O(n^m) processors, where n is the number of characters possible in a program, and m is the string length of the code that finds the solution. Lots of the processors will be stuck in infinite loops.
The language is better, but the backend and ecosystem are not.