skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An alternative to using 64-bit pointers would be to use something like the JVM's "compressed OOPs":

https://wikis.oracle.com/display/HotSpotInternals/Compressed...

Where the pointers are notionally 32+k bits long, but the bottom k bits are always zero, so they can be stored in 32 bits. This would mean that records always have to be aligned to a 2^k-byte boundary. If the data has some natural alignment anyway, this could be arranged so as to not involve wasted space, and even if it doesn't, for large keys and/or values, the amount of wasted space would be relatively small.

Alternatively, there was a way to reliably locate the start of a record when scanning through data, the records could be packed without padding, and the 2^k-aligned pointers could simply be approximate, pointing to somewhere in the 2^k bytes before the start of the record. Retrieval would involve following the pointer, then scanning forward to find the actual record. This would be a bit sketchy, but something a bit like this is done in ATM:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRC-based_framing

CDB doesn't include CRCs. However, you could think up various schemes to identify records based on what you know about the record format, the key you're looking for, and its hash. It's probably not worth the effort!
If you are at an early enough stage to re-think the UI, one my my main gripes with existing forums is that when I hit reply they navigate me away to a login page. I mostly give up and close the tab. Instead of this, make the login form a simple popup, and log me in in place. Even make signup in place. You'll win hearts and users :)
I'd be particularly interested to know why there are 256 hashtables, rather than one, or some other number. I don't think i've seen this hybrid trie-hashtable before.

I wonder if there's any mileage in using a perfect hash function to build a database like this. It seems suited to the operating model of being slow to build but fast to access.
> the utilitarian view would focus on benefiting everyone

That's the precisely the general tenor of the Jeffersonian view, according to a canonical Supreme Court opinion, Graham v. John Deere Co. of Kansas City, 383 U.S. 1 (1966), starting at page 7 of the opinion [1].

Here's an excerpt (with the Court's citations omitted and emphasis and extra paragraphing added):

<QUOTE>

Thomas Jefferson, who as Secretary of State was a member of the group [three Cabinet officials who served as what might be thought of as the first U.S. patent office], was its moving spirit and might well be called the "first administrator of our patent system." He was not only an administrator of the patent system under the 1790 Act, but was also the author of the 1793 Patent Act. In addition, Jefferson was himself an inventor of great note. His unpatented improvements on plows, to mention but one line of his inventions, won acclaim and recognition on both sides of the Atlantic.

Because of his active interest and influence in the early development of the patent system, Jefferson's views on the general nature of the limited patent monopoly under the Constitution, as well as his conclusions as to conditions for patentability under the statutory scheme, are worthy of note.

Jefferson, like other Americans, had an instinctive aversion to monopolies. ...

Jefferson's philosophy on the nature and purpose of the patent monopoly is expressed in a letter to Isaac McPherson ... He rejected a natural-rights theory in intellectual property rights and clearly recognized the social and economic rationale of the patent system.

The patent monopoly was not designed to secure to the inventor his natural right in his discoveries. Rather, it was a reward, an inducement, to bring forth new knowledge. The grant of an exclusive right to an invention was the creation of society—at odds with the inherent free nature of disclosed ideas—and was not to be freely given.

Only inventions and discoveries which furthered human knowledge, and were new and useful, justified the special inducement of a limited private monopoly.

Jefferson did not believe in granting patents for small details, obvious improvements, or frivolous devices. His writings evidence his insistence upon a high level of patentability.

As a member of the patent board for several years, Jefferson saw clearly the difficulty in "drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not." ...

</QUOTE>

[1] http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9105652591497305...
The engineer’s disease
The Internet Raised $44,000 So a Homeless Man Could Have a House
Notice cordite said a Github mirror, not the Github mirror. You don't need to have your main development happen on Github to have a mirror there, just someone mirroring from the main server.

See, for example, the Linux kernel.
Those points are irrelevant. You claimed the article is a hit piece.

>> In a statement provided to the Guardian, Hachette US said that while it is the publisher's "normal policy not to comment on negotiations under way with any retailer", it had been asked "legitimate questions about why many of our books are at present marked out of stock with relatively long estimated shipping times on the Amazon website, in contrast to immediate availability on other websites and in stores".

Hachette said that while it is "satisfying all Amazon's orders promptly, and notifying them constantly of forthcoming publicity events and of out-of-stock situations on their website", the retailer is nevertheless "holding minimal stock and restocking some of HBG's books slowly, causing 'available 2-4 weeks' messages, for reasons of their own".

Clearly it is not.

The online shopping site has a history of adopting tough tactics during negotiations with the books industry. In 2010, Amazon removed the "buy new" buttons from Macmillan titles as the duo wrangled over terms for the price of ebooks. In 2012, it clashed with independent publishers over terms and removed thousands of independently published ebooks from sale.
Thanks for this library!
Monster had the idea to do headphones. But Iovine and Dre came to them with their idea to do electronics. Monster didn't go to them, they came to Monster.
Silicon Valley HBO actor dies
Great prep for a technical interview
Condoleezza Rice is not wasting anytime, is she?
I was a frequent Quora user with a relatively well-regarded reputation.

During an Ask to Answer session a user took offence to being proved wrong about some fact or other and threatened a retribution.

Over next few days emails began arriving in my personal inbox which the User had incorrectly identified as the email of my business clients.

The emails were pure vitriol accusing me of fraud etc telling the "clients" to jettison me.

I immediately contacted Quora as the information he had access to could only have come from an Administrator (which I had previously clashed with on the thread). Quora denied all knowledge but the Administrator refused to engage with me personally.

At that point I realised it just was not worth the exposure.
Oh schucks, I completely missed that! Thanks for linking to it! It doesn't hurt to be wrong occationally, then you get to learn something.. :-)
I'm not used to rabbit or roo, and how I characterize the taste is probably not very sophisticated. I thought it felt sour, but there were lots of other tastes going on that I wasn't able to process very well, and...I'm very familiar with east, south, southeast asian food...Europe is just weird to me in comparison.
Why You Should Care About Net Neutrality
Coke Uses Drones To Deliver Refreshment To Singapore's Migrant Workers
>>came at a terrible price on human health

http://www.thelazycaveman.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/cav...
I've found the Quora community to be great, but the register-walling and the robots.txt is very close minded, especially to the Internet as whole. Most of the time I find a link to a Quora I am turned down by the fact I can't read more than half an answer without having to sign in. Imagine if Stack Overflow did the same thing? They'd be dead.
Measuring Apple's failure in the cloud space
Haven't heard a thing from him since http://jesuschristsiliconvalley.tumblr.com/post/50931471868/... ..

But yes; that post is all I can think of when I hear Quora.
Yeah. Quick sketch of proof: Any prime is 1 or 2 mod 3, and 1, 3, 5, or 7 mod 8. Squaring each value means that every p^2 is 1 mod 3 and 1 mod 8, which must be 1 mod 24 (Chinese remainder theorem).

Or you could algebraically bash it out.
This is also a typical example about why it is difficult to get time estimation right on software task. Every so often you get a long tailed problem that takes more than 3 times longer than the original estimation, due to unexpected difficulties...
Ironic, considering the OO 'peculiarities' of Java...
If not hiring people like me is your goal..

edit: I sincerely hope you were making a joke.
Wouldn't this be a business-to-business deal and hence no VAT is applied?
How Activists Fooled The Internet With These Convincing New Google Nest Products
A comparison between funding education in Nordic countries and the USA
> (1) if you are expecting a lot of load you will likely get more throughput out of the JVM

This is true but not really a reason to move away from Ruby. We've found a really good medium between doing Rails on MRI and writing Rack services with JRuby and Torqubox when we need a lot of throughput.

>(2) You may need to use a particular JVM library (there's a lot of really good ones).

Honestly, this is more of a reason to stay on the Ruby/Rails side instead of the JVM side. In Rails there are libraries that can help you with anything dealing with web applications. I've been in the Java ecosystems: Play Framework, Spring, and Java EE(JSF), and I have never seen anything like the Rails ecosystem. It allows you to iterate much faster on a project. The JVM never really attracted me(on the web side) with it's libraries. We do however use JFreeChart which we use as a fallback to javascript charts, because it outputs an image really fast. For that Rack and JRuby are enough though.
What do you think about adding a QT session to Lubuntu?
I think it's perfectly fine for interested citizens and journalists to investigate those cases, too. There is quite a bit of investigative journalism like that that happens at the local level, at least in some places. For example, if a previously unknown company suddenly starts buying up a lot of local land, it's natural that residents would want to look into what this company is and where their money comes from. Is it a front for another company? Who are its investors? Does it have ties to politicians?
IIT Delhi graduate develops toolsto counter cyberattacks
> anonymous donors should be encouraged

This story is disturbing in that it shows how little financial privacy we have left in the US (and Western Europe and Canada too).

Just look at the incredible lengths these guys went to:

http://images.bwbx.io/cms/2014-05-09/billionaires-970-popup....

to preserve their privacy.

That the federal government and thousands of random people that work for the federal government have all your finances at their fingertips is bad enough, but then they also make this information available to basically anybody (a reporter with no subpoena power) if you're willing to make the magic incantation (FOIA request or whatever).

Transparency of government is good, but personal data government should be private. (Even better if we gave a whole lot less personal info.)
btw, I don't know if it's just me, but I found it confusing that you had main.go in the subfolders... I generally assume main.go is only used in packages are that are executables, so it looked like the project had 3 executables in it.
Ah. Little clever realisations like any prime is 1,3,5 or 7 mod 8, that's something that comes very hard to me even though when I see it it looks so trivially true. Did you just realize that property for solving this question or was the property taught to you (directly or through solving some homework assignment)?
Wouldn't this break Wine?
You might reveal your location but the person spying on you would have to be a stalker and a total creep, who basically have no life and nothing interesting to do. That's more scary than taking pictures with reflections IMO
Thanks for the link. Didn't know I could hack on VIM on my iDevice. Balance restored to the universe.
Luckily the justice department protected competition in ebooks so this will take care of itself...

Oh.. wait.
I don't feel particularly disturbed by it, I guess. What proportion of a country's resources are controlled by whom seems like something the citizens of that country might legitimately want to know, especially when the proportions are large enough to affect matters of public policy.

Incomes aren't public here (Denmark), but our neighbors to the northwest publish lists of everyone's income and net worth once a year, which doesn't seem to have ruined Norway. I don't think I'd find it disturbing if Denmark did the same, though I don't know of any plans to do so. If anything it might increase some government transparency— there are some very large family fortunes (Mærsk, Carlsberg/Jacobsen, etc.) that have longstanding and often rather cozy relationships with the government. It might add some insight into things if the public better understood who controlled which parts of those fortunes.
I believe Java will look up methods etc by name (and signature) at runtime, so anything missing will just produce an exception when you try to use it.
I definitely agree. I think it's really important to have your entire engineering team cycle through support at an interval that makes sense for your company.
This is awesome. fmt all the things!
That's tricky, because C++ is statically typed and you've selected a varying value type, but here's the closest thing in real terms.

#include <map>
#include <vector>
#include <string>
#include <boost/any.hpp>
using boost::any;
using std::map;
using std::string;
using std::vector;

int main() {
map<string,any> x = {{"foo", 34}, {"bar", vector<int>{1,2,3}}, {"bar", "quux"}};
}

Syntax overhead amortizes to constant factor ;)
And it still wouldn't be done.
Of course you don't have to believe me, but I'm genuinely puzzled why apparently most tutorials spend such an disproportionate amount on these more theoretical explanations.

One explanation of course might be that a lot of the crowd looking into this are coming from a computer-science background where they are more enthusiastic about the basics. And to them, the fact that (after a lot of coding chores, writing up libraries) it eventually will make sql-injection harder, or parallel handling of web-service faster will be seen just as a logical consequence not worth making a lot of fuzz about.

But for attracting a larger community one has to make the gains for the average programmer more visible.
I'm a bit stumped as to why I'm getting down-votes for this. Judging by the discussion that followed I am not wrong in pointing out the creepiness here. Also I never said I won't read it, only that I feel as if I'm crossing a strange line by doing so (difficult does not mean I won't do it. in fact it usually will mean the opposite for me)
An extensive interview with Haiku developer – Paweł Dziepak.
I have carried a 2nd "development" phone for more than 5 years. Currently an S3.

Not only provides sandbox to play in, it has twice provided an acceptable backup during repairs to primary with only a simcard swap.
The [1]'s article wording is a bit wrong, "Gendarmerie" is not "French national police". Gendarmerie is a part of the military but acting as a police force mostly in rural areas. French national police, operating in cities has not migrated to linux. It is still an massive migration though.
That argument would have more weight if you iPhone apps were distributed as Objective C source code.

They're distributed as ARM binaries. I think the standard definition of "native" is "binary". I would argue that Firefox OS apps are not native, and neither are Android's Java based apps.

That said, I don't think the distinction necessarily matters in practice. I'm excited by Firefox OS--Mozilla tends to do cool stuff.
Is there something notable about this block like a change in mining reward?

With a relatively controlled block rate of 6/hour, can't we predict when almost any block will be mined?
I'm not into Bitcoin. So could someone explain the significance of this to us laymen?
I just checked it on DuckDuckGo,Yahoo,Bing
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=birthde

https://in.search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0SO82JB9G1TPxoAHL.7...

https://www.bing.com/search?q=birthde&qs=n&form=QBLH&filt=al...

And they all shows correct results.
Great. Guess the next step is to launch genetically modified mosquitoes that do not carry the disease and can replace the other ones.
Simply a shell / terminal TUI instead of a window/mouse GUI
I think the article raises some legit questions on how nearly $50B of tax money is being managed, not by the government, but by the criteria of private donors. The author also implies some lack of coordination in between scientists' and donor's priorities. I wonder how the public could measure philanthropy's performance. Having competing or independent research groups a productive thing? Or is it better to centralize efforts? Could it end up raising health care costs due to increased demand on biotech resources? Are there flaws in Gates' education initiatives? How can the public get a better saying on how this money is funneled into public institutions or even politics?

Not that I think government is immune to uncoordinated, flawed spending. Or that we need regulation. Or that we need to tax the rich to the fullest. Charity is a great thing. But imagine the absurd: that private donors donated to road construction foundations, and you end up getting two parallel highways that go from A to B. Wouldn't that be just a plain waste of a country's wealth, even if it belongs to private donors?

This reminds me of the story about how certain NGOs took used clothes from rich countries straight to Africa, only to realize how that was damaging these countries' textile industry. Nowadays many NGOs have adopted a more constructive approach in Africa or countries simply banned these shipments [1].

TGS Management's money is also somewhat exaggeratedly, if not suspiciously, split into many cascading foundations and companies, which also should raise an eyebrow or two whatever their reasons may be. Investigative journalism, and hopefully the transparency and insight it provides, can be powerful for setting long-term, effective goals for donors and charity that are in everyone's interest.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/mariah-griffinangus/africa-char...
Danny Hillis: Seven Wonders of the World (1995)
Maybe Shuttleworth is right. In a few years time we will have cheap smartphones available with an OS that allows docking to a monitor/keyboard unit with automatic switching of UI. Cloud + local storage. SIM card in the device rather than a myfi like the school project shown here.
The github repo is from Alex Stepanovs course at A9, which is largely focused on data structures and algorithms. The point of the benchmarks is to compare 'FORTRAN like' code in many languages and to demonstrate that languages don't really matter if you pick the right DS&As.

That quicksort algorithm is about as efficient as it gets btw.
A Network Analyst's View of the Block Chain
Thanks for posting. Seymour Cray is one of my heroes. Great man with great vision. Such a great loss to the world.
There are helpful tutorials for all of the things you've mentioned. I think that part of the problem is that people don't go looking for these things. If you want to write a backend for a web-app, there are three frameworks that are all mature: Snap, Yesod, and Happstack. There are tutorials, books, and documentation for all of these frameworks. If you want to do 3D graphics, there are some pretty straightforward bindings to OpenGL, again with tutorials and documentation. If you want to talk to a USB peripheral, there's the usb-safe. For databases, there are a myriad of options and tutorials for those.

The tutorials are all out there, but one is going to have to have a pretty solid grasp on Haskell before one can understand them, just like with any other language.
Not sure of the significance:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Blocks#How_many_blocks_are_there....

What is the maximum number of blocks?

There is no maximum number, blocks just keep getting
added to the end of the chain at an average rate of
one every 10 minutes.

Even when all 21 million coins have been generated?

Yes. The blocks are for proving that transactions
existed at a particular time. Transactions will
still occur once all the coins have been generated,
so blocks will still be created as long as people
are trading Bitcoins.
Not for pure performance Fortran still seems to be king for that type of scientific computing.
I think my favourite example of a "dirty hack that gets the job done" was by the developers of the DOS game Wing Commander. The game worked fine, but when exited, it output a strange error message to the console, complaining about some virtual memory issue. They couldn't figure out the cause, and it didn't seem to be hurting anything - so they opened the executable in a hex editor and changed that message to "Thank you for playing Wing Commander".

-----------------------------------------------------

An anonymous comment on the Desperate Measures blog. I'm old enough to remember the message and wondered why it was so polite. ;-)
Google HP Chromebook 11 Awesome Specs, Features And Price
How a German Soda Became Hackers' Fuel of Choice
Here's an "elementary" proof :

If n is prime>3 then it's definitely odd.

n^2-1 = (n+1).(n-1)

But n is odd, so (n+1) and (n-1) are both even. So overall, we have a factor of 4.

But, since one of those two is 2 different from the other, it must also be divisible by 4.

Now, looking at this sideways too, we also have a run of 3 numbers {(n-1), n, (n+1)}. So one of them must be divisible by 3. But n isn't (since it's prime). Therefore at least one of the other two is.

So,overall, we have 2.4.3 as a minimum set of factors...
Australian government likely to standardise on Drupal
Looking at prices for queens would give an indication in an unregulated market. The honeybee industry is widely subsidised by government though, so the price may be being kept stable artificially.
How did this manage to get to the frontpage? Wasn't there some rule that would punish articles with bitcoin? Did pg change ranking rules again?
Hosting in the EU would not change much as far as the NSA's reach is concerned — as long as it is a U.S. company, your data is accessible to government agencies.

It's a very real concern, but I don't think hosting in the E.U. solves anything.
Well, I guess it's a continuation of Bitcoin mining being ahead of schedule. Discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5780861 and since that article is dead, here's another one http://www.dailydot.com/business/bitcoin-mining-55-years-ahe...
No, what the world needs is a system of finance where these "angels" could not earn a single dime by pushing around numbers instead of parasitically skimming billions off the real economy of companies that actually produce stuff, and where they would instead use their intellectual resources to do something useful.

That they use their gains for good is wonderful, but should not be necessary, and is not as great as transparent and accountable charity that is coordinated by democratically determined public policy would be.
Repeat after me:

Libertarians are not anarchists.
Libertarians are not anarchists.
Libertarians are not anarchists.
No one is arguing that parallelism is easier or more convenient than serial processing. (I think.) But clock speeds top out eventually, because power usage goes up with the square of the clock rate and eventually your chip just melts. So the only way to get more performance out of a piece of silicon is to put processors side-by-side.