skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The former chairman (Davis), and the two administrators (DiCarmine, and Sanders) are now facing criminal charges for fraud: http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-06/four-ex-dewey-of....

The Dewey collapse is a fairly typical story of greed, too much leverage, and borrowing against uncertain future earnings destroying a company. Its also a great example of cargo cult thinking. Law firms see their clients merging and think: we need to get bigger too. Thus, there has been a huge trend in law firm mergers the last couple of decades. Yet, law firms as businesses bear almost no resemblance to the sort of traditional companies that benefit from mergers. There's very little economics of scale in a law firm. They have little to no physical capital, and almost all their value is wrapped up in their people, who are only there as long as it suits them.[1] And legal ethics rules penalize larger firms, because they impute conflicts of interest for every lawyer onto the whole firm.

The only value to merging beyond a certain size,[2] is for the managers and administrators, who can use the mergers as an opportunity to funnel more profits up to themselves. At Dewey, Di Carmine and the CFO, two non-lawyer administrators, were making over $2 million per year. They also had golden parachutes and clauses saying they could only be fired if they committed crimes. Their justification for all that was of course the role they played in the merger. Its notable that at lockstep firms, where partner pay is based strictly on seniority, and there is not a huge incentive for partners who take on managerial roles, merger mania has not taken hold.

The collapse is also a wonderful example of how intelligent people can make dumb decisions based on the narratives they create for themselves. Prior to the merger, LeBouef & Lamb was financially sound, while Dewey Ballantine was facing declining revenues. The folks pushing the merger, Davis and the consultants, painted this narrative of LeBouef merging its way into a prestigious brand, and Dewey shoring itself up with a profitable marriage-partner. Of course in hindsight the narrative was ridiculous. The pedigree of the brand wasn't particularly valuable in the end, and LeBouef was not large enough to successfully absorb an ailing firm that was almost as large as itself.

[1] Law firms face a more extreme version of the "talent exodus" problem that plagues tech companies. At a firm, almost all of the value of the business is wrapped up in the partners. If they leave, they take their billings with them and your bottom line is in trouble overnight. The top partners might want to stick with the firm through a rough patch, but they have an enormous game-theoretic incentive to jump ship because if the firm does implode, the folks that don't leave will be left holding the bag.

[2] Practice areas ebb and flow, so you need enough lawyers to support diversified counter-cyclical practices and to be able to cross sell clients internally. The point of diminishing returns for that are probably a quarter of the size Dewey ended up after the merger.
Along the same lines, what are some of the metrics of your traffic that caused socket.io to choke (total connections, # concurrent, etc)?

or was it the other pieces in your stack that caused the bottleneck.

BTW, great idea.
Q: Why do programmers confuse Christmas and Halloween?

A: Because DEC 25 = OCT 31
'Lazy lists' are called generators in Python. Just use (...) Instead of [...] in your example.
Python does have generator expressions, for instance what you wrote above is written (lazily) as:(x for x in xrange(1, 10000))

It doesnt have functional style pattern matching though.
Pretty interesting and humorous write up about the e-mails between the financial leaders of the firm: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-03-06/law-firm-ac...
I read it as a simple statement of fact. Not an argument for or against anything.
They don't draw from literally the same pool, though their pools are fed through a common mechanism.
This is Bruce Schneier's favorite explanation of the blockchain: http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-protocol-a...

Comparing it to a "traditional DHT" is like kind of like comparing SQL and NoSQL. This is a good start on why that doesn't work: http://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice-partition-tolerance/
cough content farm cough cough
Sure - because if you can spoof someone's username while they are playing, you can see their moves :)
VP8 encoder in ffmpeg is slow, for now I use h264
The secrets of successful website content
Do you know why book stores are closing at a frightening pace? Because people don’t read books anymore.It’s a sad fact but what does it have to do with my website/blog content? Everything, because it’s a trend a savvy businessperson will heed—consumers aren’t reading!
well, there are ca. 100 clones. here are the current top ones, measured by value. from these only nxt has its own codebase.

bitcoin 7600M$
litecoin 400M$
peercoin 70M$
dodgecoin 50M$
Nxt 45M$
If you're creating music-related startups or software, you're probably better off getting a .fm domain, since it is easier to find good domains there and users are accustomed to it.

Funny enough, I actually considered some of the terms you suggested (my software fades out music when you play a video) before I started thinking about .fm. The obvious problem with the terms you mentioned are that they are long, difficult to spell, and obscure to non-musicians.
Interesting approach, rather than normalize to 1 it normalizes to the largest whole number. The positives of this are that you don't run into issues with encoding things like .1 that you do in binary (or any repeating binary fraction), the downside is that you lose precision when you have more than 16 digits of precision. And the of course the complaint most folks will throw at it is that it fails differently depending on what 'end' of the number you're losing precision. The largest decimal number you can represent in 56 bits is 72,057,594,927,935 so the largest decimal number you can represent will any digit value is 9,999,999,999,999 (16 digits), and you have "extra" space at the top (0-6).

However, to Doug Crockfords credit, the number space it covers is pretty useful for a lot of different things and in scripted languages and other uses that aren't safety related I can see the advantage of an 'fractional integer' type.

Edit: Mike Cowlishaw, who is also quite interested in decimal arithmetic has a much deeper treatment here: http://speleotrove.com/decimal/
It's a shame, then, that ripple is a complete scam created by people who created a currency and then gave themselves all the coins in it.
How does he explain storing simple integers in a reasonable amount of space? Any decent programmer will avoid using too many bits for a variable that never exceeds a certain value (short, int, etc). It seems rather foolish and arrogant to claim this one half-implemented number type can satisfy everyone's needs in every programming language.

Next week he'll have a number format with 48 mantissa bits, 8 exponent bits and 8 unsigned base bits to define a base value between 0 and 255. Look at all the performance and simplicity involved!
Check out invictus.io, I wouldn't call their work "cryptocurrency" as much as more general "next-gen blockchain tech." Ignore the shitty website, it's a disaster - read the whitepapers.
Did they actually say that theory, or was that his theory for why they "never listened to him"?

I'm biased because I've been around boards where some guy says "you never listen to me!" and it's not just because we are all precious snowflakes.
[Language design] Getting rid of keywords for fun and profit
That was depressing to read. If he accepted that he still has something to learn, and he asked for help it would have been great.

But the fact is that he's arrogantly TELLING other people how it all works, and even boasting that banks are coming to him for advice about Bitcoin

When someone called him out on this in the comments on his blog, he insulted them.

Also, he still hasn't figured out that mining Bitcoin with a PC is not going to make him more than a few cents, because he's competing with people with custom ASIC rigs that are hashing a million times faster than him. And mining on a pool, he's not even going to reach the payout threshold this year, so he will basically get nothing.
Two Stolen Passports Used to Board Missing Jet Malaysia Flight 370
Thanks for the backstory, I may have been a bit naive then about how easy it would be to convert.

Good to hear about RC efficiencies, I assumed they were basically shared_pointer, I haven't tried using them and will give them a look.
I think this is great, I've been doing Python for a while and I knew many of the features but I also learned a few new ones.

I don't understand how this one to flatten lists works:

a = [[1, 2], [3, 4], [5, 6]]
[x for l in a for x in l]

Can somebody explain what the order of operations is here and what the variables refer to in the various stages of evaluation?
Disconnect your channel from the G+ profile and link to a G+ Page instead: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2897336
Yes. A large portion of the state is state ran parks.

http://www.state.tn.us/environment/natural-areas/natural-are...

http://tnstateparks.com/parks/about/fall-creek-falls

http://hikingchattanooga.com/

http://www.appalachiantrail.org/hiking/find-a-hike/interacti...
Especially with more cutting edge and Not Machine Learning based statistics, R has packages where Python does not. I've found SciPy/NumPy and statsmodels to be an adequate "What if I need a GLM in my Python code?" solution, but less of a great solution to heavy stats work.
thanks, I know those. the problem is that the current venues for discussion new concepts are suboptimal. too much noise. so I thought somewhere, somebody is working on really new stuff.
Create book cover with MS Word – I didn't know that
Sure, I posted these articles because they are basically a review of what it's like to run that common codebase.
> The site is likely generating the pages on the fly.

The site is definitely generating hashes on the fly. There is not enough known storage in the universe for all possible 32 byte private keys. To be more precise, 1E77 is within a few orders-of-mag of the estimated number of atoms in the universe.
This already exists at https://dabble.me/cast. It was something I threw together just hours after the SDK was released. Mashable picked it up, too: http://mashable.com/2014/02/05/vidcast-chromecast-app/
App ideas for iBeacon?
I'm looking for something fun to work on. I am interested in some apps which are using Apple's iBeacon. Any ideas?
The vast majority of the good ones are taken, unfortunately. I am guessing he's not doing whois but instead looking at DNS records.

I have a daily cron job that looks at available domains sorted by word popularity. The vast majority are in some status that makes them not show up in DNS but are registered.

That said, I've been thinking of making some of the domain name tools I'm working on public...
PayPal adds Techstars to its Startup Blueprint program
These are some pretty shit domain names hehe. Here is everything with fewer than 8 chars. Lorded.com seems promising though.

with open('domains.txt') as domains:
for line in domains:
if len(line) < 8:
print line

befogs

cagily

dourer

drolly

gusted

livia

lorded

neglig

scrods

shirrs

soughs

tyroes

unmans

unsays

vilyui
P(key theft) is rather hard to calculate, given the entire universe is up against you and you have no visibility.

There are plenty of ways of avoiding losing a key, or generating pneumonics from secure keys.
Why no realtime tracking of airliners
In this age of technology, I am surprised, why we still do not have real time tracking of commercial passenger airliners?
The recent example of Malaysia Airline's missing flight is a reminder, when something like this happens, we are left with very little information about the flight's whereabouts.
>most people won’t tell teenage girls [...] that they are lazy and the quality of their work is unacceptable

Yes. If a male teacher, for example, were to 'rampage' around female pupils, he'd be sacked.
You can't see it in in Chrome on Android, and of course not in anything using the web component, such as Hacker News clients.
Seven asterisks is a really shitty password.
This is such a nerdy comment, and I love it.
> I hope that OP isn't seriously suggesting that “discrimination” was a factor, it’s too serious an accusation to be thrown around so carelessly.

Perhaps, but this isn't Google's first screw-up where tribes are involved[1].

> imperfect systems don’t imply malice

Imperfect system do imply malice when the only appeal that works is embarrassing a company via PR.

> I assume they’ll be more mindful of native American names

That is a rather large assumption given their customer care history.

1) http://www.att.com/Common/about_us/public_policy/ATTLetter_F...
3D printing meets Bitcoin: makexyz.com now accepting btc
ISTP - sometimes I score INTP. I guess I'm still waiting for all the facts ;). I'm bored ... moving on.
Show HN: Keychain for the Square Card Reader
I hated carrying the Square card reader in my pocket, so I made a key chain for it.
I'm using a modification of https://gist.github.com/peterc/63893
The Markdown ecosystem reminds me of shell scripts in a bad way. There are a bunch of subtly and not so subtly different dialects and environments out there, and not many people have a strong awareness of these while writing, so if something seems okay "on my computer" or in Markdown's case "on my preview" then off it goes.
Wontfix: Reset password facility leaks email addresses
I'm aware of generator expressions, but the fact that list comprehensions are not lazy can trip people if they are used to other languages with this feature, since they are usually lazy.
When working for a bank I was asked to maintain an ongoing list of approximately 1,500 prospective M&A targets, I did so in excel. I stored basic information about the M&A targets (approx. revenue, # of employees, etc.) as well as CRM type information (last contacted, relationship owner,etc). I then created a two documents that could be generated based on a unique identifier I had created for each M&A target. The first document was a "one slider" on the prospect. A user could enter the unique identifier of a prospect and what was returned was something that looked like a one slide summary on the prospect created in PowerPoint. I formed the "one slider" by re-sizing all the cells on the spreadsheet to 2 by 2, for design flexibility, and using a combination of vlookups and hlookups to retrieve data. Similarly, the other document produced was a questionnaire that an executive could print out before a meeting with an M&A target so that he/she knew what information we already had on the target and what information we still needed.
Where's the best place to be a woman?
And how about the 7 transaction/second limit? If Bitcoin really does start to be used for everything, it's going to hit that wall really quick.
These two would be good for specialized dating sites.

homeliest.com - A dating site where ugly people meet other ugly people.

outfoxes.com - Great name for a gay dating site.
great find for me! i am in design/dev for the learning and development industry, so naturally many teams have strong backgrounds in Flash, and lately Adobe Edge Animate and Tumult Hype (even Google has thrown something into the ring). Literally the only thing I did to determine whether I would investigate Animatron further was opening it up and dropping some audio into the project, and seeing whether the waveform shows up on the timeline layer. This is a MUST regarding WYSIWYG sync of animation to audio... its what Flash IDE had that Edge and Hype still do not! The next thing is determining the workflow for integrating with eLearning standards such as SCORM and TinCanAPI / Experience API... naturally this is the type of product I would also pay premium to integrate further into my team and client's workflow for Instructional Design, etc...
> DEC64 is intended to be the only number type in the next generation of application programming languages.

Is he seriously arguing that integer types should be eliminated? What the hell?

I really hope for the author's sake this is a joke.
You have a better chance of winning the lottery twice, getting struck by lightning three times, then getting snuffed out by a wayward meteor.
Thinking about it, I do have a question for the Google folks: When testing your "Real Name Detection Algorithm" did you use actual names from phonebooks (or other sources) that could have included Native American names?

I guess my big problem is the thought that "Yellow Horse" triggered your automated systems in the first place. It's not like "Yellow Horse" is that uncommon a name with the Lakota. You would think with the obvious resources of a search company that had to scoop up tons of addresses and vCards from the internet, Google would have found out some Native American style names. Did some programmer think they were just fantasy names and ignore it or did they not test this thing.

It was bad enough with the Google Voice crap, but this is just too far. Has Google made an official comment on it?
The expression is a list comprehension with 2 nested for statements. It is similar to this, which names its result:

result = []
for l in a:
for x in l:
result.append(x)
Always wondered how Pandoc MD, ReST compare when my document type is slightly more complex, for example: a question and answer session?

I ended up entering notes from such sessions into handwritten XML, which I am reconsidering. What is a good format to store one's notes? I am transcribing from handwritten text.
Pay no taxes for 10 years as a start-up in NY? Sign me up.
Coconut Crabs
livia.com would be the best of the bunch; whois shows it taken.
The cost and scarcity of ASICs will just centralize the mining power into the hands of a few groups. Not so decentralized at that point.
chancel.com - get a 50:50 chance of cancelling your process or killing pid 0.

cuddlier.com - our cushions are

marauded.com - rebuilt your home in this upcoming ios freetoplay.

besieging.com - the long awaited sequel to Marauded. Spent the rest of your money on useless hats.

gawkiness.com - exposing the shady business practises of the unmentionables

offstages.com - your stars in authentic interviews
Here you go: http://i.imgur.com/XmOqvvW.jpg

I have a few more but they are even more confusing.
Red nodes are brainwallets and blue nodes addresses that brainwallets transfer to. You will notice the massive cluster on the left, that is the 'researcher' who is actively probing the network.

The rest are standard brainwallet transactions and thefts.

The big red dot is a bug :P

Hope that was useful
An address is essentially just the public half of a key pair.
You can't compare 2^-160 with a number with a unit attached- it's meaningless. 2^-160 meters is smaller than the planck length, but 2^-160 isn't.

If your unit is "the volume of the observable universe" you get a pretty large volume (on a human scale, anyway):
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%282^-160%29+*+%28the+...

edit: oh, the units came from the grand-parent post to yours, but wouldn't the correct conversion be "2^-160 earth's surface-areas"? That's actually bigger than the planck area- but still stupid small.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28The+surface+area+of...
You seem to be counting \0 as a char, or meant to find words less than 7 chars. Either way, there are just over 100 names available with 7 chars.
Does anyone have a link to his full talk at SXSW?

I've been scouring the web, but can't find it.
WhyTf?
As a Syracuse, NY native and a current resident of NYC, I hereby welcome a flood of new business to the state. Come one, come all.

Just pay no attention to the fact that you're taxed to oblivion in every other possible way - state income tax, sales tax, property taxes, NYC residential tax - I think we've even got taxes for your taxes somewhere in the back - hopefully by the time you finish your 10th year as a successful, profitable, un-taxed business, you'll be making so much gosh darn money that you won't even notice your business finally being taxed into oblivion too.

Dreams really do come true.
Secrets, Lies And Startup Leaks
>The article cites the 1933 census, but things in Germany didn't really heat up until Kristallnacht in 1938?

"As the Nazi war machine occupied successive nations of Europe, capitulation was followed by a census of the population of each subjugated nation, with an eye to the identification and isolation of Jews and Gypsies. These census operations were intimately intertwined with technology and cards supplied by IBM's German and new Polish subsidiaries, which were awarded specific sales territories in Poland by decision of the New York office following Germany's successful Blitzkrieg invasion."
This is an excellent piece with a couple of important lessons on how to think effectively:

- The ability to think creatively

- The ability to substitute initially attractive moves with well thought out log-term effective ones.

However on the other side of the coin is what we hackers face more often - Analysis Paralysis.

Once you fall into the Analytical Mindset, there is such a thing as being too analytical. Sometimes if it feels right you just go ahead and F*ing do it.

Otherwise the fear of making a wrong decision will paralyze you into inaction - which is worse than a screw-up (usually). So it is a balancing act - think enough but not too much. Analyze but not to the point of paralysis.

Edit: Spelling
Does your Gmail account always consider Apple's marketing email as spam?
What's interesting is how many of the words are "negative" or have negative connotations.
The search for the Higgs boson – and why science will defeat stupidity
^Although I think the idea is that you shouldn't need to. Any recursive implementation can either be easily translated to work iteratively, or can be implemented in such a way that 1000 levels of recursion should be more than enough.

For example, 1000 levels of recursion is more than enough to count all the nodes in a binary tree unless the tree is extremely poorly balanced or inordinately large.
I suspect its karma building posts.

I noticed the phenomena when an off topic post gets popular real quick and makes the FP, other related stories quickly get posted.

Not that there is anything wrong with it, its just something I’ve noticed.

EDIT: Just saw ChuckMcM's post. Didn't mean to be redundant, but I'll leave it here anyways.
This is awesome, I've been programming python for about 8 years now and a lot of these still surprised me.
> Decimal floating point would hardly affect accuracy compared to binary floating point

The larger the radix, the more of the mantissa is wasted. Given fixed storage, base 2 floats will have higher precision over their range than higher bases, like 10 and 16.

The difference is easy to illustrate with base 16 and base 2, since we can convert between the two easily. Converting a base 16 float to base 2 will result in leading zeroes some of the time, which could have been used for storing data. The same is true with base 10, but you have to do more math to demonstrate it.
Never be embarrassed for the music you listen to. Some of us genuinely enjoy listening to shitty house music outside of work :)

I also recommend death/folk metal. It's very high energy, and while there are lyrics they're generally unintelligible or in another language. Equilibrium or Wintersun are good starts.