skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My experience at IBM in the US (six years worth) was that management "strongly suggested" patent submissions as part of the review/promotion game.

On one occasion at a meeting of a second-line managers entire org (4 or 5 teams), an employee questioning the utility of making patent submissions a numbers game (e.g, everybody better submit some) was told - with limited paraphrasing - "Hey, 1,000 people on the street want your job and will do the work plus publish technical reports plus submit patents for less money. You should keep that in mind."

I suspect, but didn't really know enough people in other software group divisions to verify, that this particular managerial mindset may have been more tied to our specific division than IBM "in the large."
The human mind can't generate enough entropy to create a secure brainwallet in that way. However, the reverse is permissible: use Bitcoin Armory or Electrum to generate a wallet, and then you should memorize the BIP39 mnemonic: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawi...
I agree. The e-mail patterns here are so different that I don't think they belong in the same article.
This is trolling, and not posting the wrong answer. But for what I saw, trolling in Linux forums with mention of Windows can sometimes extract the best knowledges from people...
Nice reference.

1.29 happened to be exactly what I was looking for:

for subset in itertools.chain(*(itertools.combinations(a, n) for n in range(len(a) + 1)))

I spent way too much time writing a function to come up with these combinations.
Interesting interview with a former SR-71 pilot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeBu6mRDaro
The Collapse: How a top legal firm destroyed itself
I'm not a lawyer, but the documents look legally binding. They say to have a lawyer if you want to implement it. It forms part of their employee agreements and their patent filings.
This seems to be a common trend in the business world. Brilliant engineer/visionary offends coworkers with (perhaps deserved) criticism in an insensitive manner and the company flounders. It's only when said engineer/visionary learns to act more tactfully that the company flourishes.
VA-111 Shkval
Integers are also exactly represented in the standard floating point formats, so this isn't even a particular advantage of DEC64.

What is "int truncation" anyway? Overflow?
Show HN: Available .com's in /usr/share/dict/words
I thought the advantage of 2's complement was that we only had one zero and no additional conversions to do arithmetic on negatives, simplifying operations and ALU implementations.
Without normalization, how would that work with DEC64? Set both numbers to the highest exponent?
Something doesn't exist because these companies do try to pay out very reasonable bug bounties to people who catch bugs. The more lucrative it is to find a bug and disclose it responsibly on Google, the more people will actually take the time and effort to do so.
A community without some moderation tends to become filled with low quality spam, so I'm not against that.

But I think it would improve things if there was some more transparency about which posts were banned, which moderators or people flag posts, why they were banned, etc.
The Ultimate Ground Speed Check – Tales from the Blackbird
The blockchain can sit on a server. As long as you trust the server...
In honor of military hardware week on HN — some naval technology instead of aviation, though.

I'm pretty sure a motivated non-state actor can arrange to buy a few of these. A surface ship is a sitting duck against something so fast.
Why Russia Can't Afford Another Cold War: The Global Economy
> They are just exploiting rules made by humans.

This is capitalism. If you want a free market, you must live with unethical corporations.
OP here.

I understand the essence of your point and agree with it to some extent, but I think in this instance I wasn't clear. Google are transparent about their process and let me know they'd vote on it at their next meeting. I've clarified the language in my post.

The idea of an intermediary is an interesting one, certainly for smaller companies. However, for the company to be able to work out the value of the bug, they'd need to know enough details to 'score' the bug such they could maybe find it. Either way, you'd end up needing some trust.

However, the idea of a service to manage all that for small companies is a good idea. It reminds me of the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (http://www.first.org/cvss) for scoring such exploits.
Skyperious – Skype SQLite chat history database viewer and merger
This is using the ~100K American English wordlist.
As a german who has spent the past 5 years learning and constantly being surprised by how the USA differ from what i learned to know as "developed nations", i am quite glad to see this kind of article in american main stream media. It's an extremely concise, but still very accurate summary.
So is this primarily a performance vs. convenience thing?

If both base2 and base10 floating point are implemented in hardware, what makes base10 inherently less efficient?

Also, I don't have a good intuition for the difference in what numbers can be exactly represented. I'd love to see this represented visually somehow.

Double precision can exactly represent integers up to 2^53, then half of integers between 2^53 and 2^54, then a quarter of integers between 2^54 and 2^55, etc.

Dec64 would be able to exactly represent integers up to 2^55, then 1/10th of all integers between 2^55 and 10(2^55), then 1/100th of all integers between 10(2^55) and 100(2^55).

So the "holes" are different, so-to-speak. How would this affect accuracy of complicated expressions?
If a document is something not hashable, you can make results a dictionary

Huh? Dictionary keys have to be hashable. Oh, maybe you mean coming up with a hashable key for each result, then just taking the values at the end. Something like:

# A set of all the documents
all_docs = dict(doc.key, doc for doc in dictionary.all_docs())

# A set of the documents matching `operand`
results = set(doc.key for doc in get_results(operand, dictionary, pfile, force_list=True))

return [all_docs[key] for key in all_docs if key not in results]

(This loses the "sorted" property the author has in the original comments. If that's important, just make all_docs an OrderedDict.)
Pandoc is actually a really powerful tool for converting between different formats. As an example, I recently wrote a book using Markdown (Pandoc's version) and was easily able to export .html, .pdf and .epub from my markdown files. The addition of footnotes and built-in syntax highlighting (with optional line numbers, etc) was also very useful.

Pandoc can be as simple as `pandoc input.md output.pdf` but can also handle things like a Table of Contents, different highlighting styles, latex engines and fonts:

pandoc --toc --variable version=0.0.1 -N --highlight-style=tango --latex-engine=xelatex --variable mainfont=Helvetica --variable monofont="Meslo LG L DZ" --chapters $(ls -d -1 `pwd`/_input/*.*) -o _output/book.pdf

I tend to set the more complicated command as a build file or alias and I've been considering using local markdown files and then using pandoc to convert them to .html for my WordPress-based blog.
While i find the binary incomparability with with decimals somewhat annoying.

In the bigger picture what i fell we are generally missing in most programing languages is an EASY way to store and handle fractions.
An open source license to increase your street credibility
Any insight on what's killing your server? I've been recently looking into socket.io's issues with scaling.
All the API's available in JavaScript are not accessible from asm.js, you can only use asm.js for numerical code. Emscripten has to wrap all those JavaScript libraries. Pepper makes the need for wrapping obsolete, since you just call directly into the functions provided by the sandbox.

GL is easy because it requires no types. Everything that is required is included in the intersection of JavaScript and C++. More highlevel API's are harder, and that's why we don't see any wrappers for e.g. WebRTC in Emscripten.
Ask HN: Open source version of close.io?
Let me just say I love love close.io but open source version or anything that resembles it would be great (even if it's a small fraction of what they do).

Any suggestions?
As a "specification" this document is laughable. For example, rounding modes and overflow behavior are not addressed. The comment that object pointers can be stuffed into the coefficient field (usually called 'mantissa') is completely non-sequitur. Frankly I am surprised to see such a big name behind it.

I imagine this project is inspired by the sad state of numerical computing in Javascript, but this proposal will surely only make it worse. The world certainly doesn't need a new, incompatible, poorly-thought-out floating point format.

Compare the level of thought and detail in this "specification" to the level of thought and detail in this famous summary overview of floating point issues: https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~dwharder/NumericalAnalysis/02Numer... ("What every computer scientist should know...")

> DEC64 is intended to be the only number type in the next generation of application programming languages.

Jesus, I certainly hope not.
"correct horse battery staple" is a reference to xkcd [0]. Its not meant to be "random" and not meant to be used by anyone. I assume that people who send funds to that address are fully aware that anyone can access them.

[0] http://xkcd.com/936/
The Whales Report and What it Means for Your Game
We're using that same book, sixth edition, in my networks course right now. It's overly verbose like every other textbook, but the content is solid.
in pandoc-markdown a footnote[^1] would be written like this.

[^1]: My footnote here

Here's a link to pandoc's markdown flavor, which includes tables: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/demo/example9/pandocs-markd...
Generative web fonts with JavaScript
really really nice! thanks for creating it. the problem with the "hanging" games must be fixed though. you definately need clocks. so the enemy canmot think forever.
it may be useful to get the probability of a yes, even if it's .0001% chance for things like rare event detection
This is an interesting piece of trivia but there is rarely a reason to cover most of these cases.
> I understand that it'd be fairly irresponsible for a large company to ignore patents, or to ignore actual, real infringement that affects its bottom line

Bingo. This is a corporate organization and your needs, or really anyone's needs but the company's, are not in its best interest to consider. From the perspective of profits, playing the patent ransom game is the best decision, especially for entrenched business giants like IBM.
Funny, I'll be in Redwood City tomorrow. Didn't know you guys were based there. Question for you: did you write your own implementation, or are you adapting something like ECL? Do you have any articles posted on how it works?
Why Fish Need Bicycles
Directory.io first of all does not contain all private keys - it's more of a joke.

Anyway, if a brain wallet has a weak password, you have quite a good chance of cracking it easily. But you have to know that it's a brain wallet. But using a brain wallet is just silly.

Also, don't forget cracking private keys using weak signatures, although good luck finding someone who has a wallet and a weak signature...

http://www.nilsschneider.net/2013/01/28/recovering-bitcoin-p...

EDITED - I didn't read the post correctly, my apologies.
i am in the process of releasing "zen markup language".

it's "lighter" than all the other light-markup languages.

it's more _powerful_ than the others, including asciidoc.

it's also far more agile, and much easier to understand.

and i won't allow it to be fragmented, like markdown is.

i've coded converters in javascript and other languages.

the javascript minimizes well for inclusion in web-pages.

i have cross-plat apps, and a web-app converter with a.p.i.

output formats include .html, .epub, .mobi, .pdf, and more.

if there's anything i haven't thought of, do please tell me.

you can reach me at my e-mail address given in my profile.

-bowerbird
Too bad that thing is unmanned. For sure, it massively reduces the complexity (no life support, no need for high-temperature-stable glass, more agility in flight due to much higher g-force tolerances)... but just imagine flying it!
I like this explanation. A friend said it helped him. http://betterexplained.com/articles/a-visual-intuitive-guide...

Basically, multiplying by i "rotates a number" 90 degrees.
For those who didn't notice, this is an initiative of Douglas Crockford, the inventor of JSON (among other things).
While I don't dabble often in markup, I'm curious.

Is Sass still mostly entrenched in the Ruby world (any alternative implementations?) or has it picked up adoption with other devs compared to Less?
A good reference, to be sure, but man, do I resent the term “trick” in programming. It implies a deception, or something clever that you wouldn’t think to look for, like opening a wine bottle with a shoe. These aren’t tricks, they’re (largely) standard library features that you would simply expect to exist. But maybe I’m underestimating the NIH effect.
Trying to figure that out now. DB seems spiffy, and express is logging requests just fine. Thats the trivial stuff - now I need to start getting my hands dirty.

EDIT - OK serious issues now. getting a range error on redis and the call stack is blowing out, recycling node every 15 seconds or so. Will let you know when its back up.

EDIT2 - Turned out to be an exception due to an invalid date string. Fixed!
I doubt it, they've sent almost 5BTC over 2300 transactions to that address so far. I personally know somebody who got caught out with it, and another with the static change address in the transaction view of the same site.
AI Could Kill Us All: Meet the Man Taking the Threat Seriously
Can't vouch for what's on directory.io but it goes as far as http://directory.io/9046256971665327767466483203803742801002... & beyond... have you tried paging through?

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Private_key

"In Bitcoin, a private key is a 256-bit number, which can be represented one of several ways. Here is a private key in hexadecimal..."

Edit : The bitcoin private key being a number was in response to your redacted comment.
The article isn't wrong, but it's a new situation when content providers start paying to peer explicitly. Netflix and other large players already pay for CDN structures to get content close to the last mile. Now they are going to be paying for the last mile in some sense also.

Fine for Netflix to do, but if prices rise and the thresholds where this applies lower, new services will get shut down due to cost.

Hopefully some ISPs will not charge and market "fast access to whatever you want" and not "fast access to whatever we chose based on what they paid").
At the least, overflow is addressed:

> nan is also the result of operations that produce results that are too large to be represented.
'DannyBee, an attorney specializing in OSS licensing and, just to make me feel worse about my life, expert compiler toolchain hacker, does not like these licenses:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5733050#up_5733477

Two big problems, whether your "cool" license says "maybe give me a beer" or "what the fuck ever":

1. Risk to users: when a license makes answers to questions implicit rather than explicit, that license potentially leaves it up to a judge to decide what the "reasonable" terms of the license are, and resulting enforced terms might not be the ones you want.

2. Risk to the developer: the obnoxious all-caps disclaimer of warranty is there for a reason. The law says warranty disclaimers need to be conspicuous. Leaving it out altogether makes it possible for you to get sued --- as I understand it, you might probably win that suit, but being vague about your license might make it harder to get that suit dismissed up front.
When I hear people saying, "I can do what takes someone else a day to do..." they're not thinking that their coworker is also doing it in an hour or two, and wasting the rest of the day. So everyone thinks they're more productive than the next person.

And I'll look at that code and go, "You have no tests. You didn't think about these three things. There are two bugs waiting to happen. This code is messy and is going to be hard to change later. It took you two hours because you didn't do the other six hours of work required to get it really done."

This is why I believe pair programming ends up not being a waste. Perhaps for the most disciplined programmers, they can go 8 hours without stopping, but most people don't.

It's much harder to slack when you're pairing. However, it's also much slower when you pair because you keep thinking of things to check, you write more test code, you write more robust code because two people are trying to attack it rather than one.
Just upload the dissertation when it's done. We all have ADD :)
Most of them are recent high school and college dropouts. What did you expect them to know?

They learned programming by reading blogs and pirated PDF files on BitTorrent. Of course they don't got a level of understanding most hackers here have.

You want a good programmer you need 15+ years of experience plus a good understanding of computer science, recent high school and college dropouts don't have that.

You hire a cheaper labor source, you won't get that level of quality a more expensive labor source will give you and you get what you pay for!
Free markets and patents are incompatible.
Does look interesting.

However, one nit in terms of interesting architecture: The Burroughs 5000 series had a floating point format in which an exponent of zero allowed the mantissa to be treated as an ordinary integer. In fact, the whole addressing scheme was decimal. The addresses were stored in one decimal digit per nibble, so it was doing decimal at the hardware level.

While this looks interesting at first blush, good luck with DEC64 is intended to be the only number type in the next generation of application programming languages. I think float will be around for a while, what with the blinding speed in today's processors, and the availability of 80 bit intermediate precision.
Of course directory.io is a joke :)

A private key IS a number :
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Private_key
The one you shown was just encoded in base58 !
I seem to remember that "wobble" which is how the relative roundoff error relates to the absolute error, becomes worse as the base becomes larger (the ratio being the base itself). So that may be one disadvantage in using a decimal base.
What I meant by inbetween is something exactly like CL with a smaller footprint and possibly a smaller library. I believe CL more than covers today's practical needs (real threading, compiling to machine code, calling out to C, etc etc). I might choose Clojure if I was writing something highly concurrent that required a more functional approach, but for any other general purpose app I'll take CL any day. (Disclosure: I've never actually built anything in Clojure).
Why the Cold War isn’t back
It's not always obvious. Quite commonly one is used when the other would be better, even by otherwise good coders.

To beat the subject completely to death:

Pointers, References and Values

Passing Parameters, Returning Results, and Storing Member Variables with Musings on Good C++ Style

http://www.warplife.com/tips/code/c++/memory-management/para...
Brilliant engineer/visionary offends coworkers with (perhaps deserved) criticism in an insensitive manner and the company flounders.

IMO the criticism was deserved; but your argument is basically that if the company flounders, it doesn't matter whether the criticism was deserved or not, since the bottom line is what happens to the company. I agree with that in principle, but only if the coworkers in question would have been capable of recognizing the deservedness of the criticism if it had been delivered more tactfully. I'm not sure that was true in the ArsDigita case, because it doesn't seem like the coworkers in question--"coworkers" is a weird term here since we're talking about a Board member talking to other Board members--understood the business they were in in the first place.

(Btw, the fact that it was a Board member talking to other Board members also gives the point about tactfulness less force, IMO. People who can't separate valid criticism from the way in which it's delivered, IMO should not be Board members in the first place.)

It's only when said engineer/visionary learns to act more tactfully that the company flourishes.

It looks like that never happened in the ArsDigita case. Can you give some examples where it has happened?
New startup Bringz – billed as the Eventbrite of the Urban industry
"I just feel like we're moving too fast"
Sass 3.3 Maptastic Maple released with 35+ new features
Please link to the better analyses!
Conspiracy theory : Is directory.io phishing ?

It is possible that people would try to find their private key on directory.io for fun. You can do that by jumping to the relevant page. Meanwhile, the servers at directory.io would cache the GET requests and blast through the handful of keys on that page.

The site is likely generating the pages on the fly. You can type directory.io/<any number upto x>

x : 904625697166532776746648320380374280100293470930272690489102837043110636675
I absolutely agree. The ASL 2.0 is much better for anyone who doesn't care too much than these "cool" things
A lot of transactions can be pruned out of the Bitcoin blockchain (this isn't actually done today, but it is possible), so other blockchain-based systems would be wise to design their data formats to allow efficient pruning.
@asdfasdf, get back there and finishbour game ;)
Right, I understand that it removes excessive nesting, but the first example just looked ... wrong to me. Your example with above looks somewhat better.
Where's exp(), log(), sin(), cos()? He did the bare minimum amount of work and left all the interesting functionality out. We have relatively fast ways of dealing with these in IEEE754, but I see no equivalent here.

I really don't want to rehash the arguments that applied 30 years ago, as they do today. Decimal floating point is good for some things, but to be considered the "only number type in the next generation of programming languages" is laughable.
But it complicates things by having 255 different zeros which are all equal, and by defining

1 / 0 == 0 / 0 == (-1) / 0 == MAX_DEC64 + X == (-MAX_DEC64) - X

(X being the some number large enough to cause overflow)

I'd qualify the proposal as a midbrow dismissial of all the real thought that went into the IEEE float standards (I mean, there is no actual substance to his criticism, except "uh, look, it's so bad nobody uses it," which isn't even true, it is in IBM Power7, IBM zSeries, Fujitsu SPARC64, SAP ABAP and gcc). Floating point on a finite precision computer is hard, you can't gloss over the details and assume you have solved everything by that.
> I think float will be around for a while, what with the blinding speed in today's processors, and the availability of 80 bit intermediate precision.

...and well-understood numerical behavior...
Also about this incident:
"Nedivi (the pilot) reportedly was demoted for disobeying his instructor's order to eject and immediately thereafter promoted for saving his airplane—which two months later was repaired and flying again." [1]

[1] http://www.historynet.com/the-10-greatest-emergency-landings...