skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you hope to make money from trading (beyond the quite respectable gains you can get just from buying index funds or whatever), you basically have two ways to do it. (1) Make better predictions (or better adjustments for risk, or better hedging of one asset against another, etc.; these are all closely related) than others. (2) Buy and sell without any attempt at predicting the future; be willing to take the other side of any trade anyone wants to make, in return for which you get to buy a little low and sell a little high.

For #1 you need quantitative finance. #2 is the activity known as "market making" and HFT is what you get when you automate it and then let the people doing it compete. The algorithms in HFT are pretty simple-minded; the goal is to offer as thin a spread between buying and selling prices as you can while still making a profit, and to offer it faster (when someone comes looking to trade) than anyone else. The latter is genuinely useful when it's the difference between (say) 5 minutes and 5 seconds. Unfortunately the same incentives that make it worth while for high-frequency traders to offer sub-second response times then make it worth while for them to keep chasing faster and faster times, until the most important asset a HFT shop has is a bunch of computers positioned slightly closer to a big exchange than anyone else's.

There's not much of what people mostly mean by "quantitative finance" in a typical HFT system, I think.
I just finished the Javascript and JQuery course at codecademy.com three weeks ago and since then I take challenges at coderbyte.com to continue learning.

So I was very interested in your site and signed up. Here are some of my first observations and comparisons:

- codecademy.com lists lots of males and females from young to old, from different countries with all kind of professions on their Success Stories pages. I felt very welcome their site.
The name of your site and the constant use of the word Kata indicate to me that your audience are young males. As a woman in my thirties I don't feel I fit on your site. It seems a bit to aggressive to me.

- The second Javascript problem description was not very good. The second problem basically says "Something is wrong - correct it". I like clearer instructions like "write a function to reverse a string".

- Compared to codecademy.com the site took longer to check my code.

- I have no problem giving my e-mail address to anybody that provides a service I want to try. I like to get the onboarding mails from codecademy.com and think they should send out more because they are motivating. So I think that it is good that you are asking for my e-mail address and I hope you make good use of it by sending me interesting stuff. If not, I just filter you with a click.

I'm going to spend some time on your site. If you want further feedback, just send me a message.
An Interview with Jason Fried on 37signals and Basecamp
One thing that irritates me is that Apple still don't support WebGL in iOS Safari. Even on the desktop version it has to be manually switched on as a 'developer' tool.
And it's clearly technically possible - iAds can use it!
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7186293
Huh? I've ordered from Amazon several times over the past several months and they either ship same day or next day and it has always arrived 2nd day after that, as advertised.

Are you sure you're ordering from Amazon, and not some two-bit vendor that isn't Prime eligible?

You're either totally making this up, or it's due to differences in how your nearest Amazon warehouse is handling things.

I just checked every single one of my orders in the past 6 months, and they all shipped same day, arrived exactly 2 business days after ordering. There was one order that took 3 days to arrive (shipped next day instead of same day), but it was two items sold by third parties.

In fact, I ordered something (computer case) TODAY (2/5) and it has already shipped and is scheduled to arrive on Fri. (2/7)!

Do you even order, bro?
Too long, insufficient structure. Wall of text.
ARM: Assembly Language Programming [Free ebook]
Ruby Fight Club – NYC 02/18/14
Wow, I'm more surprised that they had $100M "cyber" insurance.
I've used NewEgg for about 9 years now, and have built several boxes during that span. I did receive some bad RAM once, but they shipped the replacement the same week, and have been really good about refunds in the past.

Mistakes happen, but they've been really good to me when I run into issues. Much easier to return stuff than Amazon, where they often only refund a percentage of the value of the item being returned (plus shipping).
Theremin – A Playable Touch Synthesizer Using Web Audio API
From the FAQ:
"Can I still register my Card for the American Express $10 Card Member Offer for Small Business Saturday?"

"Unfortunately, the enrollment period for the offer has ended."

Looks like this the enrollment was only available Nov 24-30.
There's a bit of a stereotype about labview that it is graphically beautiful but its not visual programming because it inevitably results in more typing of text than anything else, otherwise you get a bowl of spaghetti. With textual languages you can interpret it to figure it out, perhaps a billion times slower than the computer, but exactly the same. Visual is a little harder to figure out.

Or in summary I've seen large complicated Labview that's totally write once read never.

You might be interested in screenshots from GNURadio. Same effect. Spaghetti bowl of a schematic where a plain text version would be a lot clearer. Google for a simple WBFM radio with squelch and AFC aka your $5 walkman broadcast radio, and you get something that looks like its launching the space shuttle.
Nothing unusual about the lock-in strategy. I would argue Apple does the same with iTunes/App Store walled-garden, same for Facebook, and Google - their Android playstore, GMail/GDocs esp. for small business.

It is been a dream for many companies to own the full stack - client onwards all the way till the server. MS tried with Active-X controls in their browsers which only worked well with IIS servers. Apple is pretty much doing the same with their offerings.

Full-spectrum dominance.
Plus, the choice of Dijkstra algorithm implementation depends on the graph size, type, and even CPU. See http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~rezaul/papers/TR-07-54.pdf , with 10 different implementation variations and several different benchmarks.

The 9th DIMACS Implementation Challenge from 8 years ago (see http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/challenge9/ ) served as a way to gather the best algorithms for the shortest path problem. I don't see how this project can be significantly better, or even close to, a traditional effort like that.
I really liked this quote - "Programmers just starting out today never had to squeeze, so it’s a little harder for them to get the right religion because they always think of resources as being immediately available. Ten years ago every programmer ran into resource limitations, so the older programmers are always thinking about those things."

And --

"I still think that one of the finest tests of programming ability is to hand the programmer about 30 pages of code and see how quickly he can read through and understand it."

Does any company run "code comprehension" tests for hiring? Any thoughts?
Yeah, it depends on the use case. For home directories and large risk items like financial stuff, testing that barrier writes are happening is a good thing. You don't want a storm to knock out a DC to learn that the hw/sw fs stack was lying to you at some level.
I was happy to see this from the link in the email:

Vendor Prefixes
Historically, browsers have relied on vendor prefixes (e.g., -webkit-feature) to ship experimental features to web developers. This approach can be harmful to compatibility because web content comes to rely upon these vendor-prefixed names. Going forward, instead of enabling a feature by default with a vendor prefix, we will instead keep the (unprefixed) feature behind the “enable experimental web platform features” flag in about:flags until the feature is ready to be enabled by default. Mozilla has already embarked on a similar policy and the W3C CSS WG formed a rough consensus around a complementary policy.

I remember people getting worried that app developers might tell users to dig through their about:config equivalent to access the "full version" of this site. Glad that things are moving away from vendor prefixes. Kind of sad to see web audio still vendor prefixed (and the O'Reilly book shipped with the old API, lol!), but I assume that was implemented before the webkit/blink split.
I guess an intuitive arguement for why the gravity should be nonzero is to consider the limit as the major radius gets bigger and bigger. When it is very big, for a person on the surface it seems as if you are standing on the surface of a cylinder (the rest of the torus is far away), so you feel some gravity. So it can not be identically zero.
Your threat model doesn't represent the current state of the world.

We don't just have have governments passively listening on wires is ways that are thwarted by encryption. The contemporary threat profile is

- Wholesale compromises of devices if they meet certain selectors.(Jacob Applebaum and Der Spiegel's reporting)

- Self replicating government malware with stockpiled zero days.( Flame and Stuxnet)

- Secret court orders for parties to turn over their encryption keys.(Lavabit)

- Cell phone tower dumps ( Verizon transparency report)

- Comprise of networking gear for large scale traffic analysis.

and more.

Edit to fix formatting.
Yes, you do have to enroll every year, but it is easy.
2 girls at a seattle Seahawks party
Well, for one thing, div-soups are hard to read, create deeply nested DOMs, and lack semantics or transparency. If you're trying to preserve the nature of the web, which is transparent, indexable data, one where "View Source" actually has some use to you, then having a big ball of JS instantiate everything is very opaque.
Bitcoin: How its core technology will change the world
I'm not arguing that we're having different discussion, though the person who seems to be trying to control the direction is you.

"Interesting to think about" and "productive" are distinct. I'm focused more on the latter.

You ultimately can't control what other people are going to do, say, or think. You're the one here expressing frustration with the discussion (and others interpretations of what you're saying). You can engage or not. I try to express myself clearly and cogently, and, if it's clear that there's not going to be some meeting of minds (which can be great, useful, and productive where it occurs), at least try to gain an understanding of where the other person's coming from. Though often that too fails.
Maybe she'll start fixing all the horrible ui garbage that's either accumulated or been left unattended. Youtube is barely usable, I only use it due to its ubiquity.
Hilarious: Love In Paris (France)
I tried flightfox when I was planning a vacation last year. I had thought it was more like taskrabbit where people would compete for the lowest price and was confused/disappointed when it told me I had to pick someone. Unfortunately none of the results seemed particularly promising.

In the end, either I should be working for flightfox or the service isn't as good as it should be, because the "expert" results were worse than what I found on my own... and I had the impression that the lack of competition was part of it.
An Invisible Burden
A broken system more like, where nothing can change until a critical mass of people is sufficiently pissed off. Proportional representation or GTFO.
Wow, Iceland really likes Macs. Can anyone explain why? I suppose the population is small enough that it only takes a few adopters to drive up the percentage, but still.
btrfs has online scrubbing.

btrfs is the response to sun picking an incompatible license. when that is removed zfs might get more interesting for a lot of people.
"Apple (at least this one Apple person) doesn't want it standardized yet."

Downthread it's clear that Mozilla and Adobe are also against it.
Obesity System Influence Diagram
The details of both the semantics and syntax in question have been widely discussed and understood. It's pure hyperbole to appeal to "reverse engineer Blink's implementation" (which, as you might be aware, is Open Source).

Here's a refresher for those who missed it: https://docs.google.com/a/chromium.org/document/d/1cxW4MtsDb...
What about BroOS?
It's still alive and pretty vibrant.
And of course, Perl is used extensively at my startup, Semantics3(yc w13) :)
ICloud: iCloud security and privacy overview
I never personally used LabView (well, maybe in a Physics 101 lab in college, but that was a while back). The people using it in the offices I've worked in have generally been electrical engineers, perhaps the schematic view meshes better with their mental model of computation. It seemed to work well on most of the projects.

EDIT: I should add, when I did look at the LabView stuffs, it seemed to make sense to me (as a reader), but I'm not sure how easy or difficult it would have been for me to jump into and start working on after someone else has constructed a lot of parts.
I hope I can put your worries at least partially to rest: as you mention a vegetarian diet for everyone would use about 90% less water and energy to produce.

The problem is corporate welfare: the big meat producers in the USA get $50billion a year in water subsidies -- that must stop.
An Interactive Sky Chart in Pure HTML/CSS
Interesting.

"...our present thinking is that we won’t have to increase the size of our development groups, because we’ll simply be making programs that sell in larger quantities. We can get a very large amount of software revenue and still keep the company not dramatically larger than what we have today."
Yes, imagine if you code part of a product, your company makes three branches and in the middle of the deadline to release a new version they call you to fix some bugs and merge the code into the branches.
At the 71% schedule point, one day after coding on the perfectly designed spec has commenced:

Programmer: "@%*#! We didn't think of that, the design will have to change."
This is the Borowitz report, a satire column in the New Yorker, for anyone not in on the joke.
you should check if there are Amazon lockers in your area or lockers from other companies you can receive packages in, so you could pickup the stuff yourself.
Depends on what you mean by "sustainable". I agree that Johor has already been turned into one giant palm oil plantation, but as far as I know the current plantations can keep operating pretty much indefinitely, and peninsular Malaysia is not stripmining its national parks and remaining virgin jungle the way Indonesia is. (The Borneo side is a bit of a different story.)
It's bigger than that. Theoretically, anyone can use the law to go after anyone, anywhere, for anything. For example, the government of California, where I don't live and have never once been, could accuse me of trafficking drugs there, which I haven't done. Or, I could sue you for personal injury, even though we've never had contact outside this comment thread. Indeed, you could do the same to me.

Our legal system exists to resolve these claims. Ideally, when an absurd claim is made, the courts toss it. But crucially, that doesn't prevent the victim having to waste time and resources on a defense or response.

What's the solution to this problem? Usually, it's to create some disincentive against outrageous or frivolous legal actions. Sometimes, this can take the form of sanctions, which can involve a monetary penalty. But what happens when a state government is the one initiating the action? Theoretically, sanctions might be possible in some scenarios. But I'd imagine that in practice, governments get sanctioned only once in a blue moon, if that.
"In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system."
>If you use a debit card, go to your bank and have them turn off the "feature" that lets you overdraft (and get charged a $35.00 fee each time).

Better yet, have them issue you a new card that is only an ATM card and cannot be used without furnishing the PIN. That's what I did back in the 90s when "check cards"† were first introduced. I phoned the bank and asked if the Visa logo meant the card be used without a PIN. When they said yes, I told them to close the account. Instead, they said not to worry and sent me an ATM-only card in the next day's mail.

I use my ATM card for banking only. Everything else goes on my AX (or DS or, in extremis, MC or VI).

†https://www.usbank.com/checking/us-bank-visa-check-card-debi...
Anyone using Docker on 32-bits?
having used labview I'd say that if that is the pinnacle of visual programming, then it has quite a bit of improvement needed.
Barriers are also used in btrfs.

and from what i can tell clone operations are also handled atomically

though i kinda wonder what exactly is meant by atomic writes.
Exactly! Except the entity that feels the most pain isn't the credit card companies or the banks. It's typically the retailer or the payment portal.
What SOC would you believe to fit the project?
"INTERVIEWER:: Where do you see Microsoft in ten years?

GATES: Our goals are very simple. We’re going to create the software that puts a computer on every desk and in every home. I don’t know if that’ll take ten years–that’s not my expertise, guessing those exact time frames. Microsoft also wants to participate in helping to make sure those machines are good machines, building the system software into them, and then doing a lot of the important applications they’ll use."
Intriguing diagram, really poor implementation.

Can't figure out how to switch the group focus, most click and drag attempts drag the image instead of moving it, and the zoom in/zoom out is not implemented in a usable way.

You might want to look at libraries such as jsPlumb, d3js or sigmajs.

Chrome Version 32.0.1700.107
It would get forked.
My favorite quote: "the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system."
Thanks Bill Gates for saying what I always thought...

"choose features to put into programs. To do that, you have to have a reasonable understanding of what’s easy and what’s not easy to do."

For those Product/UX/Tone Goons who can't actually build....

Also this gem

"and there were no what we called “technical inversions,” where a programmer works for somebody who doesn’t know how to program. "

"We still follow that philosophy: At certain levels we’ve got business managers, but we don’t have non-programmers really managing programming projects."

Bill knew it back in 86... we still do shit like that.
> You have to simulate in your mind how the program’s going to work, and you have to have a complete grasp of how the various pieces of the program work together.

> You’ve got to have somebody who’s super smart. A great programmer thinks about the program on a constant basis, whether driving or eating. That method takes an incredible amount of mental energy.

> Before I sit down to code something, most of the instructions have already run through my head.

> Programming takes an incredible amount of energy, so most programmers are fairly young.

It may be a bit anachronistic to look at statements like these in the light of subsequent revolutions in software development such as XP and Agile. But I can't help thinking as I read this that he's doing it wrong. All the talk about using lots of mental energy to "have a complete grasp" of the program is fairly useless when faced with ever increasing complexity and code base size. Test Driven Development and clean code organization goes a long way towards breaking large problems down into easier to manager parts.
"You’re seeing a lot more cases where people can afford to use C, instead of using assembly language"

God bless Intel Core i7 CPUs that allow me to use JIT'd, GC'd languages without a second thought.
What Snow Tells Us About Creating Better Public Spaces
Really wonder what others think about this line:
"INTERVIEWER: What do you consider the most difficult part of computer programming?
GATES: The hardest part is deciding what the algorithms are, and then simplifying them as much as you can."
This would be six years after he attempted to negotiate a three-way split of the computer marketplace with IBM and Intel (who refused his proposal):

In the autumn of 1980, Bill's unfamiliarity with his new purchase [of QDOS] didn't stop him proposing, in a story told by Stanford's John Wharton who was Intel's second point man for negotiations, a three way carve up of the market between IBM, Intel and Microsoft - then a company with 30 employees. If historians are to conclude that Bill "thought big", they'll be correct - but they may also conclude that he didn't always "think legally". Market carve ups are a violation of antitrust laws.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/17/saint_bill/

That said: Gates's comment that core programming teams are generally 4-5 devs suggests a pretty strong constant through the industry. It's rare for any specific module to grow much beyond that -- where you do see more people working on a particular piece of code, it's typically either highly modularized (and module contributors are working on sub-pieces), or the architecture is already highly refined, and the process is largely one of providing bugfixes or additional features to an established base.
You can read technical stuff there :

http://www.ovh.com/us/blog/a1171.protection-anti-ddos-servic...

And:

http://forum.ovh.co.uk/showthread.php?6661-URGENT-AND-IMPORT...

"Our surplus network has a capacity over 2 Tbps. We have three VAC in production, so we can manage up to 480 Gbps/480 Mpps."
I've had interviews that obfuscate some basic software system or algorithm. They were always just a page or two though, never 30.
"Maybe once in a blue moon a company with P/E of 500 is justified because they MAY be the next Google or Apple or Microsoft"

What about a company with a size of $100Bs and PE of 500? :) Everybody knows who I'm thinking of ...
When I interviewed at Garmin they gave me a couple pages of their actual code and asked me to point out the bugs they introduced to it. Thirty pages seems like a bit much for an interview, but I definitely like the idea. Most jobs you'll be looking at other people's code way more often than writing your own.
I know, it is like comparing Apples and Oranges, two other similar fruits that are very comparable.
Ahh, this.

> That is a very sad comment, but the moral of the story is that if industrial practice suffers it is largely due to the conservatism, technical incompetence, of the managers of those projects. If however the internal organization and hierarchy of industrial programming organizations can be changed, there is room for great progress. And I think it will change, because the pressure from below becomes stronger and stronger.
18% drop in after hours trading... ouch

https://www.google.co.uk/finance?q=NYSE%3ATWTR&ei=68TyUrjPF4...

Anyone who knows more about Twitter, how exactly can they make such a big loss? What exactly are they doing?