skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> what's your problem with bitcoin?

It doesn't interest me. For various reasons which mainly includes political ones.

> maybe you just have to accept that a lot of the HN and crypto audience is interested in bitcoin.

I entirely accept that (however I'd remove "and crypto" from your sentence to make it closer to the truth). I'm not complaining that people on HN post a lot of Bitcoin related content. It's a community website, not my own. If Bitcoin interest people in the community then it should be there. There is too much Bitcoin for my taste, but I just don't click on it and look for the other stuff that actually are of interest to me. And there are still a lot of interesting discussions on HN that are not about Bitcoin.
Thanks, I saw that. I thought maybe Ersatz was complaining about a spec I couldn't find. It seems he may be addressing the linked description instead.
This is taken from the accompanying video on the page and explains more clearly what the report is about:

"We look at 14 different indicators - 13 of those come from publically available sources...and we pull all of that information together using an index called the Global Gender Gap Index and the idea is to look at gaps. So we're looking at gaps rather than levels. The idea is not to tell a poor country that they have less education for women as compared to a rich country; they probably know that already. But what we are trying to tell them is what is the gap between women and men in that country regardless of the level of resources and opportunities. So, how equitably are you dividing whatever you've got in your country between women and men."
First, Twitter didn't pay off IBM for trolling here. They outright bought a set of patents in the hope that Twitter's own new portfolio would be enough to discourage other companies from suing Twitter in the future.

Defensive portfolios of garbage patents used to be the key to preventing competitors from suing you with their garbage patents. After the eBay v. MercExchange [0] case in 2006, it's not as dangerous to be sued but defensive portfolios are now much less useful also because you can't threaten to shut down aggressors' businesses with injunctions. The Apple v. Samsung and Microsoft v. Motorola cases also recently demonstrated that vague garbage patents are much more useful in court than technological patents. Juries and judges understand them better and are inclined to award hundreds of times more damages.

Second, IBM is the least awful kind of patent troll. They generally ask for small fractions of revenue or investment in companies that have established themselves. The IPO phase is a favorite time for them to ask for a few million from growing companies. The worst kind of trolls -- such as Microsoft's Intellectual Ventures -- ask for much more money from companies and often go after startups. IBM exercises restraint with the idea that they might have an ongoing relationship with companies someday in some other context.

And IBM, unlike most trolls, actually does real research. Most of the new ideas in Google Search were first published in an IBM research paper that Larry and Sergei read. IBM didn't patent those ideas, though; they mostly seem to accumulate scattershot patents at random. I think IBM's primary goal is to top the list of prolific grantees every year.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_Inc._v._MercExchange,_L.L.....
In the Qt idiom, these smart pointers are irrelevant (as mentioned in the other poster). Here, when you are passing a pointer, it's going to be a pointer to an object on the stack which is always going to be good - the pointer argument shows you that you are dealing with something outside the functions local scope, the variable allows you pass information back, etc.

Qt also has used its own smart pointers for a while but these generally are declared within some container class, so the idiom basically allows you to do allocation entirely within containers and so never use the new operator directly.

Now, there may be situations where you have a complex chain of multiple connections that don't fit to an existing container. The sloppy way then is to use new and the good way to write a custom container. The idiom can also when dealing external libraries that allocate memory directly or somehow demand you use the new operator.
20 years is a long time.
I did an analysis of Mathematica benchmarks on the Raspberry Pi and found it to be 15x slower at best and much slower when there are CPU specific optimizations:

http://adereth.github.io/blog/2014/01/06/benchmarking-mathem...
The other, late submission of this article got flagged off HN.

For a site that's much about objective performance measures, some people sure had their big foam "We're #1" finger on as they hit the "flag" button.
The unparalleled Think Like a Grandmaster by Alexander Kotov explains not only planning and strategy in chess but also the methodical use of time.

Assess the position. Identify the variations to consider. Evaluate each variation for a roughly equivalent period of time. Choose the strongest. Sanity check you haven't missed something. Move.

Repeat, exhaustively, without losing focus, for a multiple of hours.

Edit: the parallel with startups is clear. In chess, you can only think so far ahead. This may be one or two moves, or for a strong player it may be five or six. Either way, you have a visibility horizon but you have to move.
Tale of the Teletank: The Brief Rise and Long Fall of Russia’s Military Robots
I'm of a similar opinion. My 'work' playlist is almost exclusively trance music and black metal. Both are repetitive and don't demand your attention, great for concentration.
I tried finding out whether that "having a single number type" actually were true (the microcomputer versions used a percentage sign suffix (I%, J%) to denote integers).

From http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dartmouth/BASIC_Oct64..., that appears to be the case.

Off topic: in that PDF (page 4) the letter "Oh" is distinguished from the numeral "Zero" by having a diagonal slash through the"Oh". Yes, that program printed "NØ UNIQUE SØLUTIØN".

That made me think of the periodic rants here on HN about the supposedly neigh insurmountable inconsistencies in mathematical notation.
On the other hand, if you don't have a reference specification you shouldn't declare something standard.

(re: all the web standards that had very wide "interpretation" by different browser efforts, leading to chaos and a whole industry based on fear an uncertainty)
tingliest.com - The 9GAG alternative the world has been so eagerly waiting for!

tinglier.com - oh shoot!
Well, to be fair, I don't have 15 years of experience (professional experience anyways). But I do believe the fundamentals are important and they seem to be glossed over.
Where do you get, from the network effect, that "necessarily the thing that gets chosen to be scaled up cannot be optimal"? The network effect just means that whatever is currently scaled up is hard to displace.
Probably counting \n as a character since Python is pretty good about never dealing with \0's.
Bookmarked to save forever. That must have been incredible
Show HN: Anon App – Anonymous Instagram
Ripple allows you to move USD, BTC, or any currency using distributed ledger system. You dont need to use "the coins" created by Ripple.

As a separate point -- by your logic, bitcoin is a complete scam created by Satoshi Nakamoto who created a currency then gave himself $400mm worth of it. [1]

And Google is a complete scam created by Larry and Sergei, who created equity and gave themselves all of it.

[1] http://mag.newsweek.com/2014/03/14/bitcoin-satoshi-nakamoto....
ESB Does Not Equal SOA
Ask HN: Remember a Reverse job site for developers offers
Hi Guys,<p>Hope your memory is better than mine, a year or so ago I remember visiting a job site where you listed your details and then you received job offers. I think it was targeted to US/London companies only.<p>Can anyone remember?
I enjoyed it a lot. Not quite as good as some of his others, but better than some others as well. I don't feel your characterization is quite fair w.r.t. JavaScript, but to each their own.
Not yet, but coming soon ...
Ha! If it is not mere lore, I'm sure it is framed and lovingly admired regularly somewhere safe in Sweden.
A specific thing I haven't seen anyone mention is that NaN is equal to NaN in this, which is quite different from IEEE FP. Although it's a thing that often seems counterintuitive at first glance, doesn't this kind of ruin the error-taint quality of NaN?
> I'd assert that decimal floating point in no way changes the scope of concerns or approach to numeric programming compared to binary floating point.

Agree. What problem does this solve? That I can now represent 1/5 precisely?

All the other problems of representing floating point numbers and numbers generally are maintained.
Not to trivialize the process, but here's some step-by-step suggestions:

1) First and foremost, verify that you're solving a problem that's truly a pain point for some significant number of people. Don't ask your friends, they'll almost always say yes. If you don't have direct access to someone who would potentially use your service, use an online survey (SurveyMonkey, for example) to sample your audience. The most important question you should be asking yourself right now is "Why would someone want this?" You're not your own customer.

2) Use your network and get intros. The chances of someone responding to you are much higher when you're connected by a mutual (and trusted) 3rd party.

3) You should have two pitch decks. The 1-2 minute pitch, and the 5-10 minute pitch. The 1-2 minute pitch deck gets attention. The 5-10 minute pitch deck tells what, why and how in more detail. You should also highlight yourself, and why you're the expert in this area.

4) If you don't have something built, at the very least have very detailed and polished wireframes. Ideally something that's interactive.

This is basically a mashup of how to raise money and how to pitch and sell your product (since you seem to be focusing on acquiring a client who will pay you to build this solution vs pitching to a VC in order to build a company).

If you (or you and some friends) can build an MVP, do that and give it to someone you know to use (most startups are more willing to try out these types of products, especially if you know the founders). If it's a good idea, and it works, you now have 'proof' that's actionable (mainly, numbers/metrics and user feedback).

Also, you should be able to explain how this is going to help company X. Are you going to increase productivity by 50%? Are you going to lower costs by 25%? You should be able to explain, with fluency, what you're optimizing and the analysis behind that (that may be in the form of P&L analysis, for example).

Most engineers going into this get hung up on the how. Companies rarely care how (although again, this should be in your pitch deck) you're going to build this because they have little or no technical background. They just want to know why your thing is better than the thing they have, or the things they thought about using/buying.

BTW, don't say you _think_ you can help employees save the company time/money. Say that you can definitively save the company time/money by making process X for their employees Y times easier/cheaper. Use real numbers that show real gain. Make a very simple to understand chart/graph.
Scala Git Hook Handler for Continious Integration
Skybuffer LogongPad for SAP Business One Client
So I tried registering outfoxes.com. It was available and in my cart... I get to check out and it is no longer available, but is now "up for auction" by name.com. WTF?
I hated carrying the reader in my pocket, so I made a keychain for it.
What's the problem with Google Glass?
Netflix for pirates
Good catch, I just mentally assigned meter unit to 2^-160.
It's been a real bummer using sass the last 6-12mo with no sourcemaps support in chrome. It used to work, then Chrome changed something and it all went to hell.

I'm using it with rails, anyone able to get things working with sprockets, etc?
So, I've always had a bad feeling about brain wallets. They make me uncomfortable. The fact that some folks consider them more secure than a random private key is even more worrisome. There is the fear of an exploit of your computer, which is valid. It's very, very common. But, if your computer is exploited the exploiter could still obtain your brain wallet if you use it on that computer. Cold storage of your private keys, protected with a passphrase, on a couple of USB flash drives in two locations seems the obvious choice for safely protecting your cryptocurrency. Yes, there are still potential exploits. When you plug those drives into an exploited computer, you're potentially exposing yourself.

I think we need a lot more security awareness among the general population before Bitcoin becomes a mainstream thing. Right now, it's simply too dangerous to use Bitcoin with most people's security practices and their understanding of security.
4th post about the SR-71 Blackbird
How can 3 posts (4 with this one) about the SR-71 Blackbird make it to HN's main page, on the same day?
If you're interested in doing more of this stuff, I recommend getting in touch with verisign - they can give you free FTP access to copies of the .com and .net root zonefiles.
Explore the Top Web Frameworks out there
As someone who used to work at IBM and generated 36 patents for them, I can tell you that the incentives at IBM are HEAVILY in favor of patents at the expense of your "real" work. At IBM, you can bust your A## off all year, work 60 hours a week, and get a PBC rating of 1 (top 10%) and get rewarded with a bonus of 5% (if you're lucky). Or, you can slack off and spend the majority of your time ducking assignments, getting a PBC rating of 2 (middle 50%) and get rewarded with a 2% bonus, and using your work time to submit patents, where you get $1000 per patent. Which path would you choose? Is it any wonder they have so many patents submitted by their employees?
Ok, get why this is downvoted. It's a bit of a throwaway comment, and the problem is not with the users I guess - although I do feel in this case people should know better. but let me elaborate:

Really the only way people now get educated is by using enforced formats on password fields [1].
That is not are not solid in any way, nor is the proposed 4 random words method (although better).
But both are still better than allowing people to use weak passwords when it's involving money.

Every bank these days has 2-factor auth to allow transactions.
Sure someone can phish your credentials from whatever, but the transaction authorization itself is only one-time, while with Bitcoin you can transfer money if you've stolen the wallet.dat and can bruteforce the key...

There is no protection (throtteling, locking) on bruteforcing wallets.
Usually with banks, or most 2-factor auth implementations, there is.

[1] http://xkcd.com/936/
Not really at all. This was just a 20 minute morning hack for fun. Thanks for the info, though.
I've been seeing ads for this on tv here in southern California. Seems really intriguing.

I'm curious if there are any long-term commitments? Can you redomicile 9 1/2 years in, etc?
Don’t Quote Me on This
Read the fine print. Not only are there the below requirements but there is also debate on whether or not the agency running the program has the ability (due to poorly worded rules) to kick a business out of it for no reason at all.

A Start up...

Start ups must locate on college campuses. (Renting unused office space or vacant land.)

MUST BE NEW to New York State, recently graduated from a state-recognized incubator, be returning to the state, or be an existing business that's starting a new operation.

ORGANIZED as a corporation, partnership, limited liability company or sole proprietorship.

IN COMPLIANCE with worker protection and environmental regulations

ALIGNED with the interests of the hosting university.

BE ABLE to create jobs in the first year.

BE A STARTUP business or in biotechnology, information technology, remanufacturing, advanced materials, processing, engineering, electronic technology products or other high-tech industries.

CANNOT BE AN accountant, business services company, law firm, medical office, hotel, financial services firm, personal care business, Realtor, restaurant, retailer, utility or wholesaler.
Tax free zones have proven to be highly effective. In Dubai there were a number of tax free zones started 13+ years ago just before their economic boom. India's rise to dominance in several service sectors was accompanied by a number of tax incentives.

I'd bet money that this attracts new business to New York especially since New York has people talent in place. Also, if you're competing against a NY firm, they'll have an advantage in their ability to accumulate earnings at a faster rate than an equivalent firm that's burdened with more taxes. Too bad NY can't wave Federal taxes...that would be nice.
I think the cluster at the end of July/beginning of August of 2013 was me. I am not entirely sure because it was during BlackHat/defcon and I was drunk. Was a few thousand sampled from the rockyou list? Post a pgp key I have a question for you.
"Technology Provides an Alternative to Love" by Jonathan Franzen
Salary, from an employee's perspective
Observable universe.
TITANFALL: Story Of Xbox One's Cool New Game
1. Correction on #1 - technically you "invent" whatever the patent is, and then assign its rights over to IBM, whereby the compensate you. That's why the inventors' names are on the patent.
Some interesting numbers:

$ wc -l domains.txt
2024
$ grep -Ev "(ing|s|ed|ly|est|ier)$" domains.txt | wc -l
127
$ grep -E "^.{1,7}$" domains.txt | wc -l
119
$ grep -E "^.{1,7}$" domains.txt | grep -Ev "(ing|s|ed|ly|est|ier)$" | wc -l
15

The 15 words from the last command:

almohad
ayyubid
boneyer
chaitin
copulae
dourer
eagerer
layamon
livia
muawiya
neglig
shlocky
unriper
unsafer
vilyui
Videostream, www.streamchromecast.com
Hired.com?
Agree. I've been a subscriber of the newsletter for a while now, and the contents is almost always excellent.
Edward Snowden and Julian Assange top Bill at SXSW
it's amazing how much work and effort almost any of this examples would take to implement in C
Dead link on "a Google a day"
Has nobody heard of Videostream?! It plays it with perfect quality without transcoding right as a Chrome App.
http://www.streamchromecast.com
That's great to hear! If you have any questions while you're investigating how to integrate Animatron into your existing workflow, get in touch with us at feedback at animatron.com - maybe we'll be able to help.
As an ex-IBM'er who is a Master Inventor (36 patents), there are no royalties offered ever for any patent submissions. They grant you $750 per patent, with a bonus of $1500 on your first patent and $1500 every additional 3 patents.
I'm exactly the same. Images are what stick with me the best, and I've learned that what makes me remember notes the best is to have them well-structured so that I can remember them visually, which becomes associated with the thinking I had to do to put them in that structure to begin with. Taking notes in Markdown is amazing.
Memex: Your Search Will Never Be the Same
flimflammed.com is available, if you are looking to make an old-timey version of Snopes
He's the creator of Javascript, so obviously it is.
Abandoned Outdoor Movie Theater in the Desert of Sinai
http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/03/end-of-the-world-cinema/
This is technically, and therefore the best kind of, correct, but in practical usage there's Ruby and JRuby and, uh...does it run in IronRuby?

I mean, libsass is a thing, but it's not nearly feature-complete. You end up bolting a Ruby thing into your pipeline somewhere, which is a bit of a drag depending on how you're used to doing things. (For me, I just let Play handle it, but if somebody hadn't made play-sass I probably wouldn't be using Sass at all.)
There was a short window in the early years of the Cold War when US spy planes could overfly the Soviet Union with impunity. But by the time the SR-71 came into service, that era was over, having ended in 1960 with the shooting down of a U-2 (an earlier Kelly Johnson Skunkworks creation) over Sverdlovsk. Of course, although the U-2 flew at altitudes comparable to the SR-71, it was subsonic. Arguably, the Blackbird's much greater speed would have made it harder to shoot down, but with spy satellites available, the Americans didn't want to push their luck.

Prof. Sergei Nikitich Khrushchev, who became a US citizen in 1999 and whose father was General Secretary at the time, wrote a detailed inside account† of the U-2 shoot down. By the time of the shoot-down, U-2s had been overflying the Soviet Union since 1956. Prof. Khrushchev wrote, "After the first U-2 flight, Father felt the Americans must be chortling over our impotence."

In addition to the U-2, Soviet air defense bagged a MiG-19, piloted by Lt. Sergei Safronov, who managed to bail out but died of his injuries. The incident occurred on May Day 1960, a big Soviet holiday, and it seems they were too drunk to change the transponder codes from April, causing the radars to misidentify the MiG as hostile.

†http://www.americanheritage.com/content/day-we-shot-down-u-2...
How much more so a sitting duck compared to slower but still rather fast torpedoes?

Especially depending on the quality of the newer terminal guidance, per the article, the initial version used inertial guidance and a nuclear warhead. Also, is the newer guidance and fuzing system able to do a under the ship keel attack?

As for "siting duck", our naval ships can be outfitted with Nixie decoys: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/SLQ-25_Nixie Don't think, well, any of these weapons have been put to the test outside of techno-thrillers; the history of early WWII torpedoes prompts a bit of skepticism.
I'd imagine a torpedo on its own does you very little good without the targeting & launching systems.
Does this mean, the employees working at these startups pay no taxes too?
>In the bigger picture what i fell we are generally missing in most programing languages is an EASY way to store and handle fractions.

I'm squeamish about that. I fear that a lot of new programmers would overuse a fraction type if it were built in, and this can quickly lead to really poor performance.

In most cases, floating point works just fine. Reducing fractions is slow, so you really only want to use them when perfect precision is absolutely necessary.

What I see happening is someone new to programming hits a point where they need a fractional number type. They look in the documentation and they see "integer, floating point, fraction" and they say "Aha! Fraction! I know what those are."
division/multiplication by powers of 2 is not the only thing people do with binary floating point numbers.
Google pulls Chrome extensions after new owners subvert web tools
Tweet – Neil Degrasse Tyson about what intelligence means (SXSW)
You've got the wrong person or you're being really subtly tongue-in-cheek.

Douglas Crockford is the standardizer of JSON and author of "JavaScript: The Good Parts", in which he popularized non-terrible Javascript. Brendan Eich is the creator of Javascript.
Good for them, but the truth is that every analysis group at CERN uses Beamer, Keynote or even Powerpoint for the almost everyday meetings via pdfs submitted to Indico (coupled with Vidyo). There's no reasonable alternative. Another completely different scenario are lectures or theoretical talks, there it never made much sense/it's a waste of time.
Every city should do this now, tax free for years (at least 3 but 10 is awesome). No other requirements because there are many other ways to generate revenue from young companies and you want them to succeed, i.e. Free-to-Play business model somewhat.