skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What does this even mean? I have no clue who any of the past CEOs of Mozilla were, or that Mozilla was without a CEO for a period of time until Brenden Eich, somebody I've known about for years as a person in the Mozilla Organization, became the CEO.

You want the face of Mozilla? Look at http://planet.mozilla.org/, not the CEO.
Ribosome – a simple and generic code generation tool
I use mediacrush all the time on /r/hockey.

Didn't know that the Reddit admins didn't like it.
You are assuming that Colin did not make a number of different (but similar in spirit) decisions when he set up tarsnap the way he did.

But if you espouse like this on 'what you would do if you ran tarsnap' then you probably should be doing just that, rather than to list your own set of priorities that contradict the whole premise of your well intentioned public good advice.

I read this as a public offer to do better, excuses about how you're too busy shouldn't count. If you're going to tell someone how you would run their business you should be wiling to do exactly that. Otherwise your words lose a lot of strength.

Especially because running services is a lot harder than (publicly) posting about them.
According to the IFPMA, on average, a sixth of all sales in the U.S. pharmaceutical industry revenue is spent on R&D. To put things in perspective, according to WHO, this is roughly half of what they spend on marketing.

http://www.ifpma.org/fileadmin/content/Publication/2011/2011...
http://www.who.int/trade/glossary/story073/en/
Intro to Caching,Caching algorithms and caching frameworks
Ask HN: How would you structure the "perfect" tech newsletter?
Hey HN,

I'm currently in the process of setting up a new technology related newsletter, that'll mainly link users to relevant information on networking.

I was thinking of presenting only one or two paragraphs of text, with a "read more" external link. What are your thoughts on "Review of the day" type additions in a side bar?

Also, as a reader, how often would be ideal for you to receive the newsletter? Would every weekday be too much, but just once a week be too little?

And finally, would having an emphasis on making for easy-reading on your phone be an important factor to you?

Any comments, thoughts, advice or criticism is certainly welcomed as I'd like to make this newsletter service exactly what the user wants, rather than what I personally want!

Cheers.
My foreign language skills tend to increase between the second and third coffee, sorry about that..
the different port clearly visible since spdy URLs are https (which defaults to 443)
I imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to verify a bad review... they hated the experience enough to write about it, I can't imagine scanning a copy of a receipt would be too much additional effort.
The Senate remains broadly interested in the data broker industry, so this dovetails with other ongoing policy issues.
Is Literate Programming Dead?
I still don't use toilet paper. I used one when I had access to it(in a hotel). I knew toilet paper existed as once when I saw it in movies or read about it.
Games, like movies and music, is a "hits" business. You don't get very far with steady, incremental improvement; it's all about an explosive event that is usually extremely difficult to replicate without specific deliberation for this purpose.

We've heard about music companies using software to optimize their tracks for maximum "hit appeal", and I think that's what indie games people need to learn if they're looking to get rich. If you want to make it big, imitate and mutate the other popular games, don't try to get fancy. Minecraft is a very simple concept and garnered a large following despite major usability deficits. 0x10c was based on a custom assembly language and fared not so good.

There can be a method to getting rich quick on this medium, but most game developers won't like it.
Does Cloud school signal the end for teachers?
Self-Organised Learning Environments have shown that children are very capable of learning without being told what to do. With a little bit of encouragement and an internet connection children are taking learning into their own hands.
In Iceland you are required to wash before entering a swimming pool. you're likely to be stopped by an employee if you don't
I recently wrote some ARM (Thumb-2, for the Cortex-M4) code. It wasn't very difficult, and the code I wrote was much better than what gcc could produce.

Better in terms of code size, speed, or both? (Hm, does code size even matter anymore? Maybe for the CPU cache.)
You'll note http is specified there.
United States 16th in Livability
Don't use assembly, period.

I can make things go more than 10 times faster in assembly. My main job is as manager/entrepreneur but I could read-write assembly as a result of my experience and I help-guide other people easily.

In the real world 10 times faster is nothing. You should spend the time understanding the problem in a mathematical way, and VERY IMPORTANT, documenting your work using images, text, voice and video.

This way you could make things go 100, 1000, 10000 times faster as most algorithms could be indexed, ordered in some way as to make it extremely fast, like doing log() operations instead of n squared or cubic or to the elevated to four or five(when you manage several dimensions like 3D with time or video analysis or medical tomography).

More important than that, 10 years from now it will continue working in new devices or OSs and will be something that supports the company instead of being a debt burden because the original developer is not here now(or you don't have the slightest idea of what you did so far away in the past and did not document).

The main problem is that people is not self aware that they forget things. And your brilliant idea that makes everything go 3 times faster is nuts if it makes everything way harder to understand, or if it could be forgotten even by you.
VC's generally hate when people "cash out" early.

Most VC's only make a decent return when at least one of their companies has a large (>$100m) exit. So VC's will generally be pushing their companies not to exit early, and to try riskier tactics to grow more.
I payed $99 for VS2013 Professional, as did many others. Which is probably a key factor in why it is the fastest selling release.
Sometimes having your own cash to spend as you want lets you do something bigger and better. There would be no YC without Yahoo and Viaweb.
I upvoted this post (not enough IMO) when it was in the "new" page and glad that it made it to the front page, many good posts dont.

A persistent peeve of mine is this vapid commentary that would invariably show up in programming language related discussions

"what's the point of this language, if one needs speed, it will be written in C".

Some would replace "C" with "assembly" in that sentence.
The point is that if a piece of code is doing something non-trivial, it is extremely hard to have confidence in the correctness of handwritten code that is written entirely at a low level. Smart compilers apply drastic, and sometimes unintuitive transformation to optimize code. To do the same manually and using low levels of abstractions would require a toure de force to pull off correctly. This simply is not going to happen often. Its precisely for speed that we need a high-level, yet optimization friendly, language so that we can delegate the job of optimizing the code to the compiler. Compilers are much better at applying large correctness preserving transformations than we humans are. The "write it in assembly" works in the small, not in the large.
> I think the issue that causes a lot of this emotion around money is the fact that we as a society like to think that the harder you work, the more money you make.

Yeah, that's a stupid and harmful myth. Hard work will make you a living, but nobody ever got rich from hard work. To get rich, you always need some degree of luck. In mobile games more so than others; you need the right kind of exposure, some critical momentum.
AAP National Manifesto 2014.pdf – File Shared from Box
Windows Management Framework V5 Preview
did we speak with other non sapiens sapiens species co-existing with us for a long period of our evolution? did we feel they were lacking something?
Well the previous discussion was centered around the same assembly implementation as this one. The only difference is, in the previous discussion the fastest C/C++ implementation was 1.1x slower than the assembly. In this current discussion, the author managed to write a C++ implementation that runs faster than the assembly version.
Introducing the ACLU's NSA Documents Database
Introducing the ACLU's NSA Documents Database
Elevator dispatch algorithm choice
Yeah, you usually don't go asking strangers for a good dentist, you ask friends, or maybe their friends. That's the whole point of recommendations.
I am amazed at the portrait of Steve Jobs, in so few pixels is still recognizable, I think here the true talent shows.
for example
Install Sysinternals from PowerShell via OneGet
http://www.thomasmaurer.ch/2014/04/install-sysinternals-from...
Or you can just buy direct from Amazon for $400-1000:

http://www.amazon.com/Toto-SW574-01-Washlet-Seat-Elongated/d...
Something in OSX paging is broken. See http://workstuff.tumblr.com/post/20464780085/something-is-de... for details. Apple refuses to fix this for years. This rendered my old Core2Duo/2GB RAM/spinning disk MBP useless even for web browsing. This sort of system rot is one of the reasons I'm running Arch on my Haswell MBP/16GB.
Okay, but as far as I can tell he changed the algorithm (recursive c++, pop/push to global array, etc) ... doesn't that kind of negate the argument unless you change it in the assembly version as well?
> I'm pretty sure that generating perfectly efficient SSE from SSE intrinsics is an NP-complete problem. So a clever programmer will always be able to boost performance more than a compiler.

Being NP-complete doesn't really have anything to do with whether humans can solve a given problem better than computers or not. It just means that it (probably) takes exponential time to solve.

I believe there is no distinction whatsoever, in principle, between computers and humans (our brains are just big, complicated calculators). As such, it's only a matter of time before computers beat humans in compilation at every point, just like the situation in chess. People claimed for years that humans will always have some edge in chess, because they "understand" the game, or have "ingenuity", or something like that. Nobody claims that anymore, since computers absolutely massacre humans. And similarly to chess, computers have been getting better and better at a very fast rate, while humans have stagnated more-or-less.

As an aside, computer chess got quite boring for me, due to the homogeneity of current programs, but it did help to show me the limitations in current programming languages and compilers. So I'd like to do my part to put humans in their place in another field. My still very-much-not-even-close-to-finished contribution, that I haven't found much time to work on in a while, the Mutagen programming language: https://github.com/zwegner/mutagen
Exercising Freedom of Speech and Association shouldn't open one up to trial by public opinion - we did this once before, McCarthyism and the blacklist in the 50's - I'd rather not see us ever return to an era where there are bogymen lurking in the corners.

As much as I strongly disagree with the Prop 8 folks, I think resorting to trying them in the court of public opinion is fundamentally wrong.
This is a good idea. As far as I know, HN is Google's primary support channel. I am looking forward to the post.
Mozilla CEO Steps Down After Anti-Gay Marriage Controversy
The pro-prop-8 side spent $39M. The passage of the amendment caused the state to stop recognizing 18,000 previously-legitimate marriages. So if you count only immediate effects, his $1000 contribution works out to 0.46 marriages, or destroying the marriage of about one person. Is the emotional harm done to that person worth hundreds of thousands of dollars? It's at least comparable.

In fact I think the harm done to Californians and other Americans by the passage of prop 8 is vastly more than is implied by that simple calculation. I'll just link to my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525692
I meant to edit, you're right - I was corrected by someone else that it's only the thin client that's open source.
Why spend time developing a feature when the solution (moving it to a different position in the room) is relatively simple and also safer? How many people are going to hit snooze and then be called away for something and not get alerted when their kitchen catches fire?
That which is not necessary is prohibited.
On Deadlines and Death Marches in Software Projects
Incest?
Thanks.

Please add a change log so we can quickly know when features get added/rejected/shipped/...

Also I found that sorting by status was broken (a block of IE10+ features in the middle of IE11+ ones).
No-Fault divorce has done more to harm heterosexual marriage than gay marriage ever will.
Making a great job for many years. Forced to step down by social justice warriors.

Such is the dictatorship of political correctness. A scary world to live in.

Learn from his mistake as it might happen to you. Today's witch hunt is about gay marriage, in ten years it could be polyamory, underage drug usage or being forced to wear a burqa. You just cannot predict.
Human price of making billions of "n-hexane"smartphones:Benzene poising and cancer
IRC. Solving problems we shouldn't have in the first place since the dawn of the Internet.
California does have gay marriage now, Prop 8 was overturned on appeal.
I'd rather US lawmakers have to justify themselves.
Yeah, CJefferson probably expressed her/himself badly in what s/he was trying to say, but there are better ways to express that - your response comes across as snarky and trolling (and yes, I know who you are).

For certain definitions of "merit", it is obvious and plain for everybody to see that class has a great impact on "merit". From conception, the children of upper class parents have an advantage that ends up being visible in fairly objective measures of e.g. intelligence.

This is not what the debate is about, though. Actually, anatari already pointed this out; I quote: " Also depends on what you define as merit. [...]"
If you force a company to cut the price of a drug you're sending a message to this and other drug companies - 'think carefully before you decide to embark on new research; the development of this promising product may not be in your employees'/shareholders' interests and you're not a charity'.

I guess you're not considering forcing a drug company to manufacture a drug but where does this application of force end? Many would dispute that the examples you quote are net positive.

You may know that NICE is a UK National Health Service committee that regularly votes out expensive drugs where cost/benefit analysis indicates that they cost too much. If they do then patients can pay privately (but I believe the drug would not be administered by the NHS - you have to pay for a re-diagnosis) or (as in reported cases) die. What is a life worth? Depends but it certainly has a fairly modest price attached to it much though we don't like to admit it.
I'm with you on that it's cheap and also run by someone trustworthy. However, what happens if he decides to retire or something similar? At least S3 is almost surely going to be around.
There's no way email work like IM. You're missing the I part, instant.

Start two conversations on two different devices, one convo using email and the other using an IM program. Look at how fast they get out of sync.
> Does code size even matter anymore? Maybe for the CPU cache

Cortex-M4 implies microcontroller. Quickly looking, the cheapest M4 chips have 32KB of flash for program memory.
Microsoft has released the source for a .Net VM (CLR) in the past:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Common_Language_I...
It supported FreeBSD and MacOS X. This suggests it would not be impossible for them to make a multiplatform .NET in the future.
> There! Just add that I'm a Zionist homosexual free-masonic Illuminati overlord. Perhaps you are that OWS supporter I mentioned above? In which case, I don't even have to invoke one as a literary device!

I wasn't being personal, instead I was referring to 'Assuming I am an individual of significant wealth with altruistic motives' part of your comment. But since you have taken it personally so it is better we stop here. I will clarify one thing, though: I am not from USA so I don't know anything about OWS. I don't even know you or what pushes all the wrong buttons in USA. I saw a bent towards the ugly side of Nietzsche in your comment which is why I felt compelled to reply.
The "civil right" phrase is a red herring. You can define any arbitrary item as a civil right - let's say unborn children deserve not to be killed, and thus we should ban all abortion. Then we can talk about any CEO who's donated to Planned Parenthood as stripping civil rights from fetuses and should be unfit for CEO-ship. Gay marriage is at a similar level of contention. Many believe it to not be a a civil right at all until very recently, nor is it accepted by many cultures. Or some accept civil unions but not semantically marriage. If you think you're always going to be right, there will be a definition of "civil right" or just plain "correct" that is diametrically opposed to you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7526663
This is not true exactly because there is a "core communications standard that guarantees interoperability", which is what the article asks for.
If they have deals with hotels, school and offices, then easily.
As pointed out by another commenter, Cassandra is not a column store. Its storage format is quite inefficient for compression and for large scans of subsets of columns, which is what columnar stores are designed for (Cassandra and HBase optimize for different use cases, which are much closer to OLTP).

You can find a brief description of why and when you want actual columnar formats in the introduction section of this blog post: https://blog.twitter.com/2013/dremel-made-simple-with-parque... .

You can read more about columnar databases here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column-oriented_DBMS

A columnar storage format for a database engine that does not have operations specifically tuned for vectorization and taking advantage of data being cheaply available a column chunk at a time instead of a row chunk at a time is only half the battle -- you can get massive perf wins on top of the work CitusDB did by doing things like operating on compressed data / delaying decompression, avoiding deserialization for column values based on a filtering scan of another column, pipelining operations on column values to fit better into your cpu architecture, etc.

But just having the IO wins is nice, too.
I have an android so I can't download the app. Looking over the linked page and your website, here is my initial read:
1) I need this stuff on the web. I spend most of the day on my PC and if I'm doing freelance stuff I need emails when new things pop up and pc (preferably web based) access.
2) WAY to generic. Yelp started with restaurants, salesforce.com started with sales people. Both built generic tools that transcended the needs of those narrow verticals,but did something that IMO you have to do. Define your target user and build something they will love. Network Effect matters a ton with this kind of app and without tight focus and tight marketing you will never get it.
Does anyone else have an issue with the world population map claiming the Russian steppes have a population density on a par with the South East of England? Or am I bad at reading keys on maps?
You need to disconnect the argument from the person making it, they are not one in the same.

Most of the people who argue against gay marriage are fine honorable people, who are very sincere in their beliefs - but totally dead wrong when measured to any objective standard.

Being wrong doesn't make you reprehensible, it just makes you wrong - to borrow from judeo-chrisian ideology "Hate the sin, not the sinner".
Sharp Develop – Open Source Alternative to Visual Studio
It's not the application but a man's need to be an animal again. Frankly, writing Ember.js apps via CoffeeScript which has roughly 11 layers of abstraction feels like a metrosexual man eating a processed food with organic marketing on a IKEA furniture (CoffeeScript -> Compiled Javascript -> Ember.js -> jQuery -> JavaScript -> Chrome V8 Engine -> WebKit Layout Engine -> GTK+/Cocoa/Chrome Windows View -> Linux/OS X/Win32 display API -> C/C++ -> Assembly).

There was a time when a man can eat raw meat (machine code) but he can start again today by eating bloody beef.
Impressive numbers.

VS2012 was shockingly bad. VS2010 users who dodged it were now 2 releases behind.
I would stop using the product if that was the pricing model.

I originally used Tarsnap for a small amount of really important personal data. Data I already have encrypted, and backed up. But data I felt strongly about having a trusted off-site backup for.

It's small data, my billing account shows me I spend around $0.20 per month on this.

Without having been able to try Tarsnap, use it, come to trust it... I would never have had my business sign-up for it and I would continue with home-baked solutions for disaster recovery.

For a startup, being able to translate that utility pricing model to the backups we initially made meant this was extremely affordable and increased with usage (and theoretically our revenue).

I wouldn't have dropped $50 or $100 per month and so would have delayed, avoided and built our own system that was nothing as good as Tarsnap but fulfilled the basic requirement.

Later I'd be in the realm of thinking Tarsnap was reasonably priced, but would I change everything? Probably, but only when it was overdue.

The proposed pricing model introduces a big cliff to climb.

I wouldn't climb that cliff until it was long overdue.

It is precisely because the pricing scales with our use that I could try it personally, and for the startup, without fear of a surprise.

Perhaps I'm no longer your market.
It's a good sign
I'm not sure why I'm replying to this, but to point out some very basic things:

Are you aware that sexual orientation is set and can't be changed by puberty? It may or may not be entirely controlled by genetics, there may be an environmental component as well. But one has about as much control over it as one's height.
When you first signup it automatically puts you in the Business Trial plan. You can switch to the normal Free plan in your account settings.
> Well obviously you can eventually run the code on any platform that supports the CLR. At present only Windows and Azure support the CLR but the rest of the world has to depend on Mono.

I don't understand what you're trying to say here. The roslyn compiler can generate code that can be run on the Mono VM. It was even demonstrated by Miguel on stage.

You'd also need something to run the roslyn compiler on linux, and that again would be mono.

Visual Studio will be using the roslyn compiler in the next version also.

Azure doesn't really have anything to do with this. It's an open source compiler that can run on the .NET VM or the Mono VM, and generate output for either.
The top quintile is huge, though. Our household (my wife's incoem and mine put together) makes a bit of EUR 100,000 per year, and that apparently puts us in the top 2% in Netherland. Not the top 20%. (And globally I don't doubt we're in the 1%.)

The top quintile is probably closer to $80,000 or something. It's not that hard to get into if you have some talent and the right education. But what chance does a poor but talented kid in your country have to get that right education?
It's a good sign.