skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One specific reason why they rolled a custom scripting language is that they needed vector/matrix types (i.e. vector3f, etc) exposed to scripts, and adding those through an interface like cpython or lua's embedding api would have produced scripts that were incredibly slow at manipulating vectors. Presumably luajit might have fixed this, but I can understand that they didn't go that far.
Flappy Bird is pretty much the definition of a black swan. I hope people don't take too much away from it other than: huh, that's weird.
Thanks for the info. I was familiar with most of that, but didn't think the difference would be so big. How much of a "safety factor" are we talking about between the ability to handle normal audio and the ability to handle this sort of catastrophic case? In other words, how much would you have to turn down the maximum volume limit? Is it a factor of 2, or 10, or 100...?

If it's a factor of 2, for example, just take the 3dB volume loss and move on.

I don't see why detecting the situation is so hard, though. Build a simplistic model of the amount of energy dumped into the speaker and the amount dissipated, run the audio through that model, and then limit the volume when the amount still in the speaker gets too high. This would let through small amounts and limit large amounts, just like you'd want. For a really simplistic model, run the signal through a high pass filter, integrate the output, then apply a running average to that. When the running average surpasses a value that indicates the speaker is reaching its limit, cut the volume. I take it that this doesn't work?
The goal needs to be _not_ pushing the button. You leave the app open, it makes light and noise. High score the longer you leave the app running _without_ pushing the button
What type of represantation is default in python to store Unicode strings?
Mark Zuckerber Biggest Giver In 2013
> A bus is a bus.

No, just no.

> because I might miss the last one.

We are talking about cities. There should not be a last bus. They should run 24 hours/day.

> now I have to get taxi to grocery shop on the weekends

In a real city, you can usually walk or at the very least, cycle to your grocery store. If you can't then you do not actually live in an urban environment.

> public transportation is often used by those that cannot drive, that unfortunately includes crazy people.

Right, again i'm talking about creating a system of urbanism in major cities. I'm not talking about Houston or San Diego. I'm talking about cities like Amsterdam, Edinburgh, or Stockholm. If taking a bus is slower than taking your car at rush hour, you'd have to be crazy to take the bus. If you build a good BRT system that is faster than using a car, people will use it. Not just crazy people.

>Why would they ever vote for that? Why would a small quiet suburb of some major city just decide to vote to punish themselves for driving?

We are talking about cities like Philly, and people that live in cities like Philly, we are not talking about some exurb that uses subsidized parking in major cities to facilitate their commute.

Why would they vote for that? Easy, because it pits competing interests together so that there is no major bloc that forces a candidate to change. Let's say you add a sin tax. Those that can afford it would benefit, because there would be less traffic on the road, and those who don't own cars would benefit because it would improve the public transit infrastructure. The slowly increasing it while slowly increasing the public infrastructure would never force a major bloc into political action. Something that definitely would happen if you dramatically reduce the quality of living for 1/6 to 1/4 of a city's population by trying to dramatically ramp up some type of subway system and digging up people's front lawn for 18 months, so that they can have access to a subway in 6 years.
More pedantically, shouldn't that be "just whom I've been waiting for"?
It's been tried as a joke not unlike yours, under the name ‘Click a cow’, and made a lot of money and many enthusiast (many ironically) players. Apparently, what you are set for life with are unending questions about the nature of what is fun, and designing meta-games.
Their site could maybe use some WP Super Cache :p
http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/

This looks amazing!
I think that only applies to the DT core not the GVRD / lower mainland as a whole.

In the last 5 or so years we have built a new bridge to replace the albion ferry (golden ears), replaced & widened the pitt river bridge and interchange, construction of a new 10-lane Port Mann Bridge, 37 kilometres of highway widening from Vancouver to Langley & the replacement of nine highway interchanges, widened/improved 176th to the blaine truck crossing & fraser highway, construction of the south fraser perimeter road, and iirc some improvements around white rock and the airport.

Translink is also considering replacing/widening the pattullo and george massy tunnels. And this is just what i know about and can remember.

However we have also increased bus service in general, built a new rapid transit line from DT to the airport (canada line), are now extending the skytrain to the tri cities and hopefully soon after down the broadway corridor to UBC.

DT Vancouver isn't building more roads, but theres not exactly room for any new ones. It has also converted some road space to bike lanes and is now considering removing the viaducts, but it only covers a small part of the region's transportation infrastructure.
Could be covering his ass on a cease and desist, making it seem like his decision.

Most people who get one don't know if they can talk about it publicly or not and just want it to go away.
> Considering that most businesses fail within 5 years

Business closure rates (at least here in the UK) are around 10% a year. So although your statement is technically true (it would reach 50% after 5 years) these are not necessarily "failures", just closures, and many businesses last 20 years or more. I started 1 business in 1992; have had 3 others that I closed after 6 months, 2 years, and 6 years respectively. 2 were unprofitable, 2 were highly profitable. How does that skew the figures?

Entrepreneurship has never been a young person's game until recently. Older people have more cash and fewer liabilities - children have left home and mortgages are paid off - so have more financial flexibility.

Investing 12K from savings is no big deal when you are older and actually have saving to invest. And as for paying yourself - you have a retirement income.
In spite of (because of) how stupid this sounds, I think there's a million dollar idea in here if you made it sufficiently frustrating and competitive.

Perhaps pushing the button increments a number that decays exponentially. And ads fly in your face to distract you, which you need to wipe away. I'm actually serious.
Joke all you want, ‘10000000’ is a Match-3 cum Hack-and-Slash with a similar Frankensteiny-let’s-sew-games-together feel to it, and it's amazing.
Are you not aware that flappy birds is a clone of a game of nearly 10 years old???

And even that is a clone of older games?
Reminds me of the old flash game "Don't Shoot the Puppy".
Agile Liturgy - Hacking away at the unessential.
Go is not even close to being any kind of replacement for C++. Also, not all "real programmers" think that C is a better language than C++.
Ask HN: Any tips for someone working from home for the first time?
I've been working at a variety of companies over the past five years and I've always worked in-house. I've just started as the Director of Sales and Marketing for a small startup with seven employees spread across the USA; we are all freelancers.

Some stuff about me:

- I'm 26 and live in the Bay Area

- Just moved into a new apartment with lots of natural light

- I have a decent desk but my chair is not ideal. Suggestions for office chair solution would be awesome.

- I will be doing a lot of conference calls and demos with clients

- We use Asana and HipChat for internal company communication

Advice I'm looking for:

- Productivity tips

- Organizational tips

- How to separate work from real life (one of the first things I've done is set up VirtuaWin with two desktops: "Work" and "Play" to have a physical separation)

- Setting up a home office

- Tools/hacks/applications you guys use

- Taxes/deductions/how to handle being a 1099-MISC employee

And basically any other advice you guys can give out. Thanks in advance!
Try Andor's Trail. Completely Free Software, no rights needed, fun for days (if you are into CRPGs, that is). http://andorstrail.com/
500px Prime: A New Licensing Marketplace that Promises Photographers a 30% Cut
I believe that chops was being sarcastic in ascribing a typical naive and useless attempt at "improving" randomness to "experts". Come on, "super random numbers"??
Don't sleep on this.
Don't forget this insanity
http://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/
Ironpants was written by the same guy, if I'm not mistaken.
Why don't they just fuck them all the way and only give them a 10% rev share. Unbelievable. Rev shares should be 50/50 (at worst). Without the photographers submitting, they have no revenue (and without the distribution network, the photographers have nothing, on that platform, at least).
San Francisco? Sounds about right.
It was Cow Clicker and it was a weird, terrible experiment.

http://www.bogost.com/blog/cow_clicker_1.shtml

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/12/ff_cowclicker/all/
>The worst part? Bad actors have an endless supply of fake identities and just sign up again and again and create new fake companies while legitimate people are completely screwed.

God the stories I could tell... One of my favorites is to watch the SERPs for a hyper competitive term like "fast payday loans" or something in that realm.

The sneakiest people in SEO have seemingly figured out that they could make good money by churning domains into the top ranking through spam, getting deindexed a few weeks later, then just starting over with a new domain.

One guy even sarcastically mocked Matt Cutts, Google's webspam team lead, by ranking Matt's name for the term "payday loans" a little bit ago:

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-payday-loan-cutts-16940.h...
Greenwald will be/is a journalist at a company which pays him for his work (i.e. writing, researching) which is also a journalistic entity that publishes material that he (and others) happens to own.
To be fair, one of the party's own blog is hardly the most objective on the matter.
I find his arguments quite compelling and honestly, at this stage saying "the author does not understand Unix" just sounds silly.

Judging by his work and his writings, Lennart probably sleeps with a copy of "The Unix Programming Environment" or other such classic under his pillow. He probably knows Unix 10x better than you or me (feel free to point me to your resume/bio if my assumption is wrong :) ).

Just say that you don't agree with his design.

That's fine and it's acceptable. It also turns this debate into something kind of like Linux versus Minix. Working code (his) wins for now ;)
This is an interesting development.

Lesson for contract developers looking for work:

Pay attention to apps that gain hype, and build clones for people on e-lance.
Or not, because this is probably a violation of some Apple policy that you agreed with when installing anything from App Store.
Can always make:

final int[] a = {0};
list.forEach(element -> { a[0]++; });
It was a hoax. @1775sec later posted "Did anyone bother to do some research. lol. We made the Internet Reporters look like fools! That is what we did in your honor Aaron Swartz"

They've deleted most of their tweets, linked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7041212
> For example, there is sort of a magic number for SaaS businesses to achieve $100K MRR, which is usually a good benchmark for being able to raise a decent VC-led series A or B.

Wait, what? If you have $100k MRR, why do you need any venture capital at all?
I'd split Computer Science in two - the basic stuff and the cutting edge. While most CS graduates have the former, they are ignorant of the latter, unless they read up research papers.

It is good to have a foundation, and coding alone doesn't give it, hence the need to learn basic CS, but probably nobody can keep up with the cutting edge of it, being so vast and dynamic.
Thank you so much for saying that.

Of course, many of the fans of Y Combinator know that changing the world is more important, but those who have time to comment here and seem focus on extracting rent rather than creating value needed to read this.

But, more importantly (and I might show how old I am by saying this) I didn't feel like this since ’94 and Kurt Cobain’s death: same accusations of being a manipulative mastermind playing hard to get, lacking talent, copying, and the same glaringly obvious suicide warnings: “I want peace”? Really? Do you need anything clearer? An Instagram of the guy with a shotgun in his mouth, asking ‘Like if you think I should pull the trigger, comment otherwise’?

If it happens, there will be so much hand-washing here…
Then you don't really need the crocodile tears of "Why the hate, guis?". Just set phasers to Such Edgy and blast away!
I actually like the slice code for it's ease of readability. Functional methods are extremely nice and I hope they get faster and faster with the optimization of JS JITs.

I never heard of Dequeue [1], that is mighty cool. I agree that premature optimization is not good - but when it can be done cleanly without hurt to the readability of the code, I'd say to keep it in ones' repertoire, to effectively write more performant code, more often, on average.

[1] http://code.stephenmorley.org/javascript/queues/
there was also a short NPR story about it:

http://www.npr.org/2011/11/18/142518949/
EA's Dungeon Keeper is mired in IAP and shady review manipulation
for a long time the elderly population will be increasing exponentially

Not "for a long time"; for the length of one generation.

This would suggest that capita energy consumption of countries with cutting edge technology is well ahead of per capital energy consumption in countries where people have simpler societies and less manufacturing technologies, right?

No, because per capita energy consumption depends on how wealthy you are as well as how efficient your technology is. What it does suggest is that per capita energy consumption rises more slowly as a function of wealth than one would expect based on your assumptions about increasing use of resources, and that over time, the per capita energy consumption for some fixed level of wealth will get smaller.

Please define "wealth."

The best definition I know of is that wealth is choices: the more things you could choose to do with the resources available to you, the wealthier you are. One could also try to factor in some measure of the quality of the choices; for example, Bill Gates and I can both choose to fly somewhere, but he can choose to fly there on a private jet whereas I can only choose to fly on a commercial airliner. But the key is that nothing requires the resources needed to fly somewhere to be constant; as technology improves, the same goal--such as flying somewhere--can be accomplished with fewer and fewer resources. That means the same level of wealth--the same choices--can be achieved with fewer and fewer resources.
Games and IAP have destroyed innovation on mobile. :(
Fractal art creator with d3 + angular
Interesting. I'm swiss and usually our postal codes are translated to zip code. Would postal code be the generic translation then?
>...the first of what will be numerous digital magazines published by FLM
Seems like they'll be linking to subsequent magazines from that main page
Thank you. But do you mean Julia to replace R, Matlab and Fortran?
Cookie Clicker
http://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/
About focusatwill
I agree, now what is the correct notation so we all can learn? :-)
It's completely pointless to use such a notation here in lieu of description or benchmarks, but if you insist then use something like O(kn) vs. O((k+1)n)
Well, what if Torvalds can't get productive in Lisp or Haskell? Does that make him any less of a programmer?
First two reasons I can think of.

Imagine you're doing that on an expensive cloud hosting setup and your expenses are really high. An infusion of capital could allow you the opportunity to build out your own server infrastructure(or pay annually on the cloud infrastructure) and dramatically lower your expenses and push your margins up a lot.

It would also offer you the flexibility in your funnel to offer back loaded deals to get larger clients onboard.
For a whole bunch of reasons, ie to pick a few:

- you may have a NWC situation where cash isn't paid up front
- you may want to continue to invest in R&D / tech development on newer projects that aren't currently generating revenue
- you may simply want to grow faster / hire more than your current financials can support

It seems pretty logical to me - at that point, you probably have a solid stepping stone, and want to decide what to do next.
The arrays with holes are called Sparse Arrays, I googled for 'sparse array v8 performance' and didn't find much, but I've previously seen a Google Presentation on a slide-sharing site that did mention how poor sparse arrays perform when compared to normal contiguous arrays.
Heaven forbid they use these rented cars to stray outside of Honolulu!

Also: The reason there are so many cars, roads, and parking lots in Honolulu/Hawaii compared to SE Asia? Because the residents of Hawaii aren't poor - in fact they're quite well off by SE Asian standards.
For $2000, you could afford to buy a laptop from someone who understands how to pick the right $5 speaker or update its bios accordingly.

That makes a lot more sense than force software to not do something it can and should do "just in case Dell failed at their job".
Oh god. My office ruined an entire afternoon of productivity with this game. Not because we were playing, but because we were one-upping each other on hacking the game. Great fun!
ODesk flappy birds
Torch seems to be a concrete example of a numerically oriented luajit embedding that provides high performance linear algebra primitives. http://torch.ch/
Because you want 10m MRR?
Some of the edit-photo-by-swipe stuff seems neat for us power users, but I wonder as this app gains popularity, if they'll eventually be forced to add more discoverable controls.
Context doesn't always come across on the internet, but there were no crocodile tears. I actually thought it was amusing that what I thought was a relatively tame comment got such a reaction. (If anything I'm more happy getting negative votes. I get really uncomfortable when I say shit that gets upvoted to hell because it feels like I'm just shouting into the echo chamber)
artsrc,

Your post here is pretty hilarious.

Note that the message you were responding to started off with this:

> Unless you have a parent in the household who isn't working, life gets pretty crappy without a car.

And your response contains this:

> In my family the person who does not work does not drive at all.

It's as if the person you respond to had already accounted for your response!
Unit Testing Private Methods
This is a beautifully designed site. I'm happy that it works as well as it does on my phone. I'm very glad to see more of the minimal design elements like qz and less of the constant scrolling ... I mean 'continuous' scrolling.

Also, I'm glad this content has arrived...

(edit: not so impressed by the desktop version of the site, but I guess I can make it beautiful by resizing my browser)
You might want capital, but perhaps a cheaper form of capital than VC?
TeX is the name, just like 'xkcd' is the name (not Xkcd or XKCD).
Maybe Barbie doesn't teach them to worry about looks, but lets them relax about it? Barbie is pretty, after all. Like boys playing with batman figurines, they have a powerful actor that can do anything they want.

I don't want to defend them. I always chided my sister for playing with barbies, but she enjoyed it. She grew up to be a normal, non-pink woman with a serious occupation, so the damage from playing with barbies seems to have been limited.
I have 51 tabs open right now and this one is going to stay open too so I can share this poll with a friend who hates to keep anything open either in his web browser or in his taskbar lol. I love that as of right now at least 19 people have more tabs open then me!
Jacob Appelbaum has been saying this for a while already. They use NSA's data to do "signature strikes", i.e. strikes where they may assassinate someone only based on the "harmless metadata" they have on him. Talked to someone who may have talked to someone else from a "terrorist organization"? Well, you may now be on a drone target list.

This is going to get exponentially worse as they move to automated drone assassinations, where they just create an "algorithm" that's supposed to decide who is going to die next.

This is going to be their next logical conclusion, and to them it's "inevitable". Of course, it will be done in secret, too, probably for years before there are even leaks about it. Going by how "accurate" their algorithms are for determining who's American and who's not (there has to be only a 51 percent chance, which is almost like flipping a coin on whether someone is American or not), I imagine this algorithm on who to kill will be pretty loose, too. Better safe and kill more innocent people, than sorry and not kill the right target, is what they will choose for that algorithm.

You could say the rules for killing are already very loose right now, but the killing itself is done manually, and they are somewhat restricted to how many people they can hire for this. Once it's automated, expect the assassinations to rise by an order of magnitude, because it will just be "so easy", and also sending a drone should become much cheaper in 10 years.

Drone assassination defenders have been saying "but would it be any different if they just sent some guy with an F-16 in there to attack the target?". Well, even if such an attack wouldn't be anymore precise and it would still kill a lot of innocent people in that strike, the difference between killing people like that and killing them with automated drones or even manual ones, is about as big as spying on highly expensive targets, and doing "mass collections on everyone". It becomes so easy and so cheap technologically, that their rules for doing that action become radically more loose.

Just as for spying, they will do it simply because they can. Instead of attacking Osama's #2 with an air strike, they will be attacking a lot more people who are just very remotely associated with an organization, and in many of these cases, the decision to kill will be done by loose understanding of what is a target from the NSA mass spying (whether it's the understanding of the people deciding the drone targets now, or the algorithm for the automated drones in the future).

Recommended watching: Daniel Suarez on automated killer robots:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMYYx_im5QI
int sum = 0;
for (w : widgets) {
if (w.getColor() == RED)
sum += w.getWeight();
}
> car commuters are subsidizing public transportation via gas and other taxes, not the other way around.

Do you have numbers for this? Last I checked, gas taxes didn't cover the costs for road construction and maintenance, let alone have enough left over to subsidize public transportation.
For those thinking "oh, another piece of Microsoft bashing from some Apple / Google / Linux fan" (my own initial thought), look at the byline.

Paul Thurrott's been covering Microsoft, almost always positively, for most of (if not more than) two decades. He's been labeled one of the "notorious Microsoft shills" by Daniel Eran Dilger (http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/01/18/dan-lyons-paul-thur...) -- and that's not far from my own impressions of Thurrott based on some of his earlier Linux commentary.

So -- yeah, the rats are, if not fleeing the ship, talking loudly about its soundness.