skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What do you mean by "string manipulation"? bytes are not text strings. If you actually mean text operations, then converting them is something you should also do in py2.

Edit: now that I thought about it - since you're able to decode the bytes you're using, it means you are operating on text - why not convert it then?
This brings up the interesting problem that educational expenses can be paid by parental home equity loans and credit cards.

The official student loan market quantity is nothing more than how much of a subsidy the .gov wants to pay off to the .edu. That doesn't necessarily imply much about the total cost of education other than its probably at least that much although it could be much more.
Crowdfunded??
I think the Monkees fit the bill of a "pop band manufactured by a business person" more than the Beatles do.

And they're better.
Definitely holding off until the open source release (and hopefully it won't just be dumps of old versions like Silent Circle's.)

Agree that TextSecure and Redphone are great tools, albeit in different categories, and as far as I can tell their implementations are sound.
clicky: http://letspaste.com
You certainly do notice that the same "argument" would apply to yourself?

Also, suppose some new appliance regularly killed its users due to bad electrical isolation. Would you use the same argument when someone criticizes the manufacturer of that appliance? People doing things in a way that harms others is beyond criticism unless you yourself are doing things better? You wouldn't complain if your doctor treated you incompetently unless you could do it better yourself?

Also, your basic premise is flawed: Making valid criticism is not "very easy", but also often requires considerable expertise, which in turn takes considerable work to acquire. But that doesn't matter anyhow: Criticism either points out actual problems or it doesn't, it's completely irrelevant to its validity how much work went into it.
Does anybody really care about smart watches?

I've talked to many friends who are generally delighted about their mobile phones, and they have minimal interest in smart watches that cost close to a mobile phone.

I suppose a category disruptor like the iPad could emerge, but I'm not holding my breath. I think we're getting device fatigue.

(On the other hand, Google Glass and related devices are a bit different, and may have more applications)
Ask HN: is Clojure a good all-purpose programming language?
Motive for question: I really need to get out of my current language rut (PHP+Javascript) and am looking for a powerful all-purpose language to study and learn deeply over the coming years. I would rather just focus on learning one thing very well than try to pick up a half dozen new languages.

Current best candidate: Clojure+Clojurescript. From what I can tell, the differences are so small that they can almost be considered the same language (is this correct?). Which gives me the same benefit that JS has: no mental context-switch between client-side and server-side code.

Using Clojure(script) I can do a lot of stuff:

* Command line applications, think everything from simple cron jobs to daemons to command-line utilities (replaces: clunky PHP scripts)

* Backend servers (replaces: PHP, NodeJs)

* Web client stuff using Clojurescript (replaces: browser-side Javascript)

Potential bonus uses:

* Mobile apps, using either Clojure proper or Clojurescript+Phonegap (replaces: clunky Phonegap apps). I don't know how feasible this is in real life, though.

* Desktop applications (replaces: nothing that I've ever tried). Again, don't know how feasible this really is.

Language features that I like:

* Functional programming

* Good concurrency support

* Homo-iconicity, macros

* Lexical scoping, closures

* Good REPL

* Elegant (AFAICT), not a pile of weird hacks, quirks and gotchas like JS and PHP

* Compiles to JVM (Clojure) or JS (Clojurescript) which makes it/them very portable and able to interact with a huge array of existing code/libraries

So, Clojure/Clojurescript would be my current best bet for a really powerful all-purpose language. It would also be a welcome challenge: I've been doing a lot of functional stuff in the past years, but Clojure would really up the ante there.

Feel free to chime in if you have a suggestion of a different language that could also fit the bill :)
"In the long run, we're all dead."

Speak for yourself, mortal. I'm taking this new immortality tonic...
As a benchmark, I tested computing exp(1) using the binary splitting algorithm (gmp/mpir code: https://gist.github.com/fredrik-johansson/8198480 -- bsdnt code: https://gist.github.com/fredrik-johansson/8198432).

digits mpir bsdnt
100 0.0000126 0.0000176
1000 0.0000803 0.000113
10000 0.000945 0.0015
100000 0.0171 0.037
1000000 0.266 1.19
10000000 4.37 40.52

Not bad for 1.0!

Edit: python's built-in bignums for reference:

100 0.000125
1000 0.000290
10000 0.00518
100000 0.292
1000000 26.1
10000000 long
> Tearable Cloth Simulation in JavaScript

Not just that, but horrible, no good, and very bad, too.
The Genesis of Doge: Wow
You can solve the fiddling by replacing the whole UI with markdown. Oh, how will he push images to his liking then? Easy: {{image: cat2.jpg, left}}
Ok. and howto make it fit the page and baseline without stretching out of the aspect ratio? {{image: cat2.jpg, fit}}
Make a button for that like the Left,Centered,Right aligned text buttons and you're done. Even better remove the button and make the whole shit context sensitive, so that after dragging a picture you can do actions on it without having to mess with drag&drop. People don't get drag&drop, really, just trust me here. Most people aren't as aware as you about drag&drop and it doesn't always work too. Buttons help.

But yeah TinyMCE is DEAD.
And Mastering Perl is on there too! Very cool find john2x!
> 52% Aggregate tax rate (excluding 9% sales tax average).

No, its a 52% combined marginal rate, not a 52% tax rate. And, since we're talking about taxes on income, "excluding 9% sales tax" is a red herring, because sales tax is not a tax on income. (And California's statewide sales tax is 7.5%, not 9%.)

> In any event, this is meant to be illustrative only

And what it fails to do is illustrate that the claim "Personal income taxes are about 50% in the US" is true. the fact that if you choose one of the states with the highest state taxes on personal income (including both income and payroll taxes), the top marginal tax rates on personal income just exceed 50% does not mean that personal income taxes in the US are about 50%. In fact, it demonstrates that personal income taxes in the US are generally substantially less than 50%.
I also find the quality of answers, and of questions(!) poor. A little googling usually finds better information. And then there's the line-going-dead issue that plagues most question/answer forums (fora?): after some back-and-forth somebody suggests to try something, and the supplicant never responds. Did that work, and they went on with their life? Did they give up? Are they still trying to find an answer? Nobody will ever know.
"Do you think Python 3.x was a mistake?"

That's where I stop filling out the survey.

And that's the python community biggest problem. Moving forward, everyone needs to pick a version (and I'd pick 3). A new user just sits and spins his head. Even the training materials are all over the place.
Four business guys? That's four too many. Just learn how to code and build your own stuff.
Ha, yep. I think this is a phase he will grow out of. I expect travel to resume in a few years.
PCIe, which is reasonably standard.
I think it's unfair to describe those women as non-hackers without knowing them well.

FWIW, pg can be described in a similar (limited) manner to argue that he's not a hacker: a venture capitalist with a degree in philosophy.

And I don't think pg meant that you have to be hacking since age 13 to be a "hacker" (it was an extreme example), but that you have to be passionate about it.

From his essay:

> What I was talking about here is the idea that to do something well you have to be interested in it for its own sake, not just because you had to pick something as a major.
I don't understand that quote. Any scientist would tell you that perpetual motion machines of the first or second kind are impossible, and they're probably right. In general I don't know many examples of impossibility results in math or physics that were later overturned. Anyone?
So you're justifying Steam deleting the game, even though you won't come out and say it.
He doesn't distribute it though, only links to it. I am pretty sure I am allowed to link to netflix even though I don't have distribution rights for the content hosted there.
The most fascinating space event of 2013 - Meteor Russia
The busses make San Francisco into Silicon Valley's bedroom community. So what? Is it too good for that? This article is arrogant SF-resident bull.
Insider look at new payment app coming out of stealth launch
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ioq1jy9Pk
Private property ownership is essential for anybody to care about environmental issues. If the government owns all the property, citizens don't have any economic or personal ownership stake in protecting it from pollution.
Tearable, hoarable, no goad, very baed?
I'd suspect a much larger proportion of Twitter users are things like RSS feed bots, though.
Why's that your username in a different colour?:)
Wow, that thing is freaking cool.
"reducing eveyone's working life by 4 years isn't unreasonable."

Unless you're simultaneously raising the retirement age.. My full retirement age per SS is 67, along with most of the people here on HN. You have to be quite old (no offense intended) to have a full benefits age of 65.
Wrong. Personally for me a dead end criteria is a CMS without an API. But you mean most people don't need it right? I also think that's not right, because many companies want Mobile Apps, Intranet tools etc. and integrating their crap with the CMS through an API makes a whole lot sense.

I looked at http://prismic.io, but I haven't found anything that's opensource and comes close to it. Do you know something like that?
If you look through that thread, you'll find much of the community is pretty skeptical too (including me, same name). Even my citing of 1.5x - 2x was intended to be quite conservative; I'd be happy with rough-factor-of-magnitude. Being willing to add primops is a bit of a wildcard, though; since that means changing what the compiler outputs it means that with enough work, you could juts theoretically convince the compiler to emit the same code an optimized library does. It's not just "Haskell of today" that you're looking at (which I think we'd all trivially agree could not come close in performance on this particular task), it's "Haskell of tomorrow with newly-added features for this task" that we're looking at, and that's harder to guess what its performance could be. (That's nothing to do with Haskell, of course; any language implementation that went that route would see hard-to-predict performance jumps.)
The "details" _are_ the underlying story, and if they're effectively the same as what the graph purports to present: why not present the correct graph?

For a bunch of people (myself included) bemoaning the state of analytical education in America, this is something that should be incredibly important.
I'm planning on my ebook at the end of january (http://firemeibegyou.com), based on a post I wrote that was #2 on hacker news (Fire Me, I Beg You) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3837264

I am not going with a traditional book format (at least not initially).

It is an ebook, and I will not be using a publisher. I'll be using it on my own website via gumroad. I really got a lot of my motivation from Nathan Barry & Brennan Dunn.

For this book, I"m going with all text.

When I publish it, I'll do a recap of income generated.

*also, the prices on my page are not accurate. I will be changing those shortly. It's just a landing page now.
HP Announces Another 5,000 Layoffs, For A Total Of 34,000
Show HN: My year in side projects
This is a great article full of truth. My respects to the author because it takes courage to accept one's mistakes, but it's critical for getting up and moving forward in a better direction. How many ideas are sitting in my brain, but all I can think of is how to exactly am I supposed to validate that any of them are worth my life?! I mean, really, a startup will mean I will have no life. With my loved one in a startup already, I don't know if I could really start something without the support. Looking back, were any of the big companies that started as a small STARTUP founded by poor people? I think not. I haven't heard a single story of an actually poor person, who founded a startup and is now rich.
Most of this is just a symptom of Stack Overflow being too successful. It was good when it was just a few thousand good/nice people. Now that it has critical mass, you have to deal with the rest of the people. I doubt that the problems are going to be solved by having good people leave.
He had an aneurysm, which caused him to choose comic sans. He had a second aneurysm which caused him to choose that thing he's got on there now.
Do you want to ask for a credit card with no deliverable?
A test drive of the new websocket-based ARI interface for Asterisk
For many games on Steam, Steamworks is the only DRM. Valve is technically (though probably not legally, unless there a provision for this in whatever contract they offer) capable of disabling this DRM.
The green username indicates that the user is new.
I wrote a book on software conversion optimization last year. It was an expanded, re-edited collection of essays I had previously written on the topic.

http://www.amazon.com/Sell-More-Software-Conversion-Optimiza...

I published it through Hyperink, which is not a traditional publisher. They bring the software and editors (plus associated trades) to get the book put together, I brought the words. No advance, more equitable royalties than traditional publishers would offer, and they handle the mechanics of getting it into Amazon and whatnot.

I haven't run the numbers recently but recall selling somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,X00 copies. I haven't done the math on royalty payments for the year, but would ballpark them in the $5k range?

It would be, ahem, extraordinarily difficult to get a traditional publisher to greenlight publishing on as niche a topic. If I had, I would expect them to offer me $5k as an advance, as that is roughly market for first-time non-technical authors. (At the standard prices and royalty rates 2k units would not nearly earn out a $5k advance, which means that absent additional substantial sales I would expect to never receive any royalty payments beyond the $5k advance.)

I didn't publish the book primarily for economic reasons. If I had, I would have done something a bit closer to the Nathan Barry / Brennan Dunn / etc model. Prominent elements thereof: email marketing as a distribution channel, markedly higher prices ($49 vs. $9), multiple tiers (e.g. book @ $49, book + supplementary materials @ $99, book + supplementary materials + some interactive component at $249), and likely self-published 100% because I'd need more control over the pricing / marketing / etc than any publisher would care to allow me to have.

Other authors on HN have been extraordinarily generous at writing about exactly what is required tactically for successfully marketing books. I'd highly encourage you to read their posts / comments, as they will make it wildly more lucrative for you, if that is part of your reason for writing the book. If you just want the published author merit badge, traditional publishers are a way to get it, and they seem to be totally willing to financially exploit you in return for offering it to you.
I personally would view building something for X client a viable option if it was going to be a large sum of money. Then use that money to fund the company and the product you really want to build and sell.

It can be hard to get that one or two clients who can fund the company, but it is a viable strategy as long as you have the right mindset. We, Datalanche, had this opportunity but unfortunately (like most deals) it didn't work out. Had we successfully made the deal, it would have been a multi-million dollar contract which would have easily funded the entire company and the flagship product and we wouldn't have given away any control.
I feel like, as far as this topic goes, everything that needs to be said has already been said. There's been a lot of talk about "class warfare" in San Francisco, and nothing new has developed. Until then, we're stuck with speculation from a handful of writers that (in my opinion) are dredging up news where none exists.
Simple question, many answers.

Also, don't ask this question so soon, it takes time to review code, and even more time to find vulnerabilities and come up with working exploits.

Second also, P2P system inner working are much more complex, and can be vulnerable to some other types of attacks which are specific to P2P protocols.

Having decent P2P security is not really easy. P2P is really exciting, and the advantages are great, but I don't know the specifics of P2P security.

Bittorrent and bitcoin can seem simple compared to a P2P messaging program.

TLDR: It's the future, but it's not exactly there yet. I'd still use it with those vulnerabilities though.
It affects the opportunity cost.
That's an awesome idea. I looked into the implementation though... it uses the same software to mine litecoins, and you get a credit when running the BOINC program simultaneously. So I see that as easily abused, where you are running fake processing jobs instead.

Ideally, the BOINC processing would somehow be directly integrating into the mining itself. But again, I don't have any idea how that could actually be done. But it would be nice if that is possible.
Indeed, Apple's pro macs have generally been ridiculously upgradeable and user-accessible. (Modulo needing to "cover your hands in bandages" before opening up one of the full-sized Mac II series). The 7-series "sidecars", and 8- and 9- series towers, could be completely accessed without tools and had CPUs on upgradeable daughtercards.
I did a quick write-up of the top packages from the survey with brief descriptions of what they are and links to their respective Emacs Wiki pages:

http://adereth.github.io/blog/2013/12/08/most-frequently-ena...
I think the risk assessment should take into account more than just casualties.

The risk of terrorism that scares governments is not necessarily the casualties (though that undoubtedly is a factor), but longer-term consequences. For example, repeated terrorist attacks on U.S. soil may deteriorate the confidence of citizens in their government, increase the audacity of terrorists, make the U.S. appear weak, etc.

I don't agree with the U.S.'s response to terrorism, but I'm also not convinced that tallying casualties provides an accurate risk assessment. The political risk of terrorism is much higher than, say, automobile fatalities (or firearms, as digitalengineer pointed out in a sibling reply).
You sure are extracting a lot of things from my comment that I actually didn't say.

I don't think anyone is above criticism, nor do I think truly understanding how a piece of software works is "very easy." All I'm saying is that we see criticism of Cryptocat over and over, yet, here we are, with people still using Cryptocat.

The author wants Cryptocat shut down, but if that happens, what will the people using Cryptocat do? Communicate in plaintext? Isn't it irresponsible (and in line with your own reasoning about putting people in danger) to not present the users with a better alternative first?
If this stuff did start to enter the public domain after 28+28 years, the modern entertainment industry would be screwed because they would have to compete with it. Rationally, they'd rather it burned than free.
That could be cleaned up by having the system either flag or remove questions that have no conclusion.
As a passive observer of all cryptography discussions on HN, I can't help but think if security researchers spent as much time on creating usable, secure software as they did in proving that other's implementations were flawed we'd be in a much better place.

As a user, I just want to be able to message another person, over the internet without having to worry about setting up plugins or setting up any kind of keys. I want to add them to my friend list, click their name, send them a message and be comfortable in the fact that my communication cannot be intercepted.
On one hand, I'm happy to see the Linux kernel being used in all sorts of consumer devices. It's a real victory for the developers and for the open source model. On the other hand, it has only been successful because it has enabled major corporations to fight the mobile platform wars. Linux hasn't succeeded on its own merits but as an economical way for companies to bootstrap their own products to fight for Apple's leftovers.

The author isn't fooling anyone. We all know that the goal was for Linux to take the desktop. It was to be a win for freedom against the tyranny of Microsoft. That didn't happen. Instead, Apple stepped in and ate everyone's lunch, and now it seems the Linux warriors want to move the goal posts. Sure, Linux has spread far and wide, but most consumers still have no idea what Linux is, and nor would they care. Linux isn't something people want, it's something they use without being aware of it. Is that a victory or a tragedy?
This is a reasonable rebuttal, other than the fact I have savings, so I can probably sit in a room for 3 months and eat a little better.
The West has a love affair with the environment? Maybe about 2-4% do, half of them living in cities and the other half in the countryside (very different lifestyles but similar goals of a minimum environmental impact).

Another 5-10% care enough about the environment to make daily conscious choices for it, but most of those choices amount to lip service or marketing-driven "greenwashing". Most of these people live in cities.

The rest just don't care, and will continue driving their cars and eating >300g of meat per day until they die or become incapable of deciding for themselves.
The issues of priority and starvation are large issues. I see the OP implemented another ad-hoc behavior, which I predict will move the issue to another place but not eradicate it.

I believe priorities are a sucky way to express the developers desire to perform some tasks in a low-latency manner, while others are ok to delay for a larger time. Maybe latency would be a better thread parameter than priority. It has the advantage of being a hard metric, one you can easily measure and adjust your algorithm against.

But latency is slippery. Do you mean time-to-first-execution, or time-to-completion? Completion of what? The OS would have to be aware of some units of processing (message digestion time?). This is not a bad idea. I'm all in favor of the OS having a more complete model of what the developer is trying to accomplish.

Anyway my 2C worth.
I have to disagree there is more to a business then a product.

Somebody has to find customers, make sure there is a way to accept their money, ...
Grunt vs gulp