skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right. Version numbers can't work, which is why Nix avoids them and organizes packages by the hash of their full dependencies instead - thereby making every package unique and immutable - reliable upgrades and downgrades can be performed because there's no "unfortunate" side effects that can be introduced - such as the example I gave above where you need to introduce new packages "A10" and A11" instead of "A", because you need both, and you already mutated "A" to mean something other than it originally meant (hence, rollback is a breaking change with most PMs).

If we're looking for a way to "communicate" working DAGs for other people to use, I think the best place to look is existing in DVCSs - submodules/subrepositories basically provide what we need - because every commit to a repository using submodules refers to exact commits in exact branches of the submodules. If we managed to use git ubiquitously in such way that all of our dependencies were submodules, and in turn, those dependencies used submodules for their own dependencies, we have the entire DAG that would otherwise need to be written as Nixpkgs.

This also solves the version explosion issue, where there could exist dozens or hundreds of derivations of the same packages with slightly different configurations, bug-fixes or other changes - because a "derivation" just becomes a specific commit in a specific branch of a repository at a known URL, and to utilize the different version from a dependent software, you just update the submodule and point to the desired head.
Sibling replier Cyther606, you have been hellbanned and most poeple can't see your posts unbeknownst to you.
So basically treat most of your JavaScript logic/functions as if you were writing C?
Problem-set PDF: http://icpc.baylor.edu/download/worldfinals/problems/icpc201...
The write-up misses postage as an issue for any startup moving a physical product or trading anything physical between customers. Postage prices within Australia are rough and even worse if you're trying to ship out of the country. People buy from Book Depository (free shipping, at least in the past, from the UK) and Deal Extreme (free shipping from Asia) often getting products more cheaply than they could even ship them here.
Indeed. I feel like languages/scripts dying out has some advantages too.
Oh no, what did I do? I thought it was an interesting point
For anyone interested in more thoughts on copyright and (the killing of) culture, I highly recommend this video on the Amen break: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac

Additionally, this comic is informative and fun: http://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/
Short-term rental supply may well be, though.
Pro tip: Mughul India is not the Middle East, and neither is Pakistan or Iran.

There are arabic derived scripts at least as far east as China and the Philippines (jawi), but describing them as Middle Eastern is plain wrong - just as you would not describe Balinese or Cambodian as Indus Valley.
As an aforementioned passerby, i laughed audibly when i read his comment. Then the irony of you calling out his sarcasm instead of the OP's comment slamming startup news was itself refreshing. Well done.
Monsanto's spin on the honeybee crisis
Well, there's a lot of bits missing - this is a microkernel!

But I've seen seL4 before, and this is a very solid (if slightly weird-looking) foundation to work from.

I hope they choose a good licence; MIT or GPLv3 or GPLv2 or something. (It's a microkernel, so my general impression is GPL wouldn't be intended to spread between kernel components.)

This could be a QNX-killer. Eventually, one day, maybe a worthy replacement for OpenBSD or hardened Linux, but it's got a long way to go. It's ideal for anyone developing embedded hardware, however, and L4 variants are already very widely-used there.

Are you developing an open-source trusted security coprocessor? (I know at least two teams are.) Then this is probably what you want to run on it... of course, we'll want to check it ourselves as a community first, too, just in case.
Every system has its own set of drawbacks. A non-voluntary system has the drawback of forcefully extorting money from people with proven capability[1] and then handing it over to possibly incapable / lazy people.

[1]: Assuming an uncorrupted system. Else, all systems are equally bad.
Good. What a terrible, terrible idea. Imagine these things falling from the sky a few times a day in major metro areas.
You're missing a couple of points:

- The militarization of local police forces is largely thanks to the War on Drugs.

- The effects of a "SWATing" are amplified by the militarization of the police. If, for example, someone called in a murder in the 1950's, would the police come in guns-blazing shooting anything, and everything in their path, dropping flashbang grenades on sleeping children?

- Had the package of drugs arrived without Krebs being 'in on it,' then he would be in violation of the law because he possessed an illegal substance. The War on Drugs has given us the idea that merely possessing something is enough to get you jail time. This allows malicious actors to arrange for an illegal item to find its way into your possession... The police and prosecution hear "I was set up!" a lot. I'm sure they wouldn't pay much attention to just another cry of innocence (though being a white male in good social standing probably increases the odds).
Yup, thanks for the comment. I think FPGA has interesting potential for sequencing (and we need more sequencing compute), I'm not sure what's ahead for the simulation machines.
No, not the street: you will be kicked out of the hospital to die at home.

But true, if you're shot in the street, an emergency room will accept you.

But no, there's no chemotherapy in the emergency room.

> You must be of such superior intellect that thinking of an original argument is beneath you.

Wow, an ad hominem attack, what a surprise.
It seems to support GPG.
1900s: Imagine these bulky cars hitting people. ;)
I like very much your idea of making it as easy as possible for someone to consume and re-use as far as whatever is possible permits.

But I would think that the Internet Archive or some Google text/video/image search with "scraped on:yyyy-mm-dd" would essentially give you permission if the scrape date was less than (Now() - <X years original reproduction is prohibited>) or (Now() - <Y years "substantially" derivative works are prohibited>); where Y is probably less than X.

Then someone could have exclusive rights to publish their works for (say) 10 years, while an artist could potentially make a different work after (again, say) 5 years.

I only follow this enough to make highly illogical conclusions, but it seems like a blogger shouldn't have to register every single post with a central authority to retain a very limited length copyright. They should have some time to publish a "Greatest Hits", and if they don't during tlicensed", then "Greatest Hits PLUS today's take on past events" would seem to lure the die-hards.

Ultimately though, I don't feel it should be on the creator to register every creation.

In your example, I would hope the person that "licensed" it to you would be responsible, and not you, but I've heard possession of stolen goods can be a tricky area (at least in the U.S.) even if you have no prior knowledge, so I don't hold high hopes for reasonable property decisions concerning intellectual property rather than physical.
The author of the article mentions that Naskh does not contain all the letters that Nastaliq has, so if someone types an Urdu text in Naskh it would not have the same underlying Unicode if they had typed it in Nastaliq. Correct me if this is wrong.

My assumption is that not all OSes will adopt Nastaliq simultaneously. So assume that the website is storing data in complete coding for Nastaliq and they want to send it to a device that cannot render Nastaliq so the Unicode should be converted so it is properly renderable in Naskh.

The other half is just to make one's Urdu language web experience completely in Nastaliq. Even unimportant stuff written in Roman Urdu and then converted to Nastaliq might help promote the use of Nastaliq.
Origins of Software Bundling [audio]
If I was limited to staying in North America - Vancouver, BC. Proximity to natural resources, great music, gateway to Asia, short trip to Whistler.

Europe - if I didn't have to worry about work, Paris. The culture, the food, the history. If I was being employed (tech) - Munich or Stockholm - a bit of the above, green, access to nature, good public transport, though less multicultural (though Stockholm is said to have a vibrant immigrant population, Munich is a big village).
In addition,

«GPG for data at rest. TLS for data in motion. … If you're typing the letters A-E-S into your code, you're doing it wrong.» — Thomas Ptacek

https://web.archive.org/web/20090911032333/http://chargen.ma...
Imagine them delivering supplies to rural farmers.
Went to a bootcamp myself. These are fairly profitable businesses. I can see it making sense for an acquisition, especially for one that's as recognizable as Dev Bootcamp.

Also wondering if the bootcamps sorted out their government issues.
Helps them get up and head the ball, I imagine?
The article is great, but I don't think it adequately captures one of the difficulties with this problem, and that is the very high minimum number of characters that must be designed for an Urdu font. I think it is an order of magnitude higher than many would guess it at first.
Agreed!! But still lot of functionality as you mentioned are there. You just need to dig around a bit as you keep exploring this new platform. They have some full fledged components too which could be directly dragged over while creating stories.
Maybe you replied with a big long post too quickly after creating your account and some auto thingy ganked you as spam?
Cyther, it looks like you just made a new account. Since your comment was autokilled, I'm guessing you're posting through Tor. HN autokills comments from new accounts if they're made through Tor due to past abuses. If you email hn@ycombinator.com and include a link to this subthread then they'll mark your account as legit.

Your comment was good. The autokill was unrelated.
Google's Sundar Pichai: King of Android, Master of Mobile–Profile
Apache HBase for the Win
All the Ways in Which it’s Bad – and Why it’s Still Great.
Do you trust your Google Analytics data?
I was wondering if you were merely trolling several comments back, but I decided to give you the benefit of the doubt. More fool me, I guess.
Well, I find Dad Meyer's talk to be helpful in thinking about math school education: https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover .
Competing in algorithmic programming competitions is an extremely eye-opening experience. I competed in 3 ICPC regionals during my time as an undergrad and realized that my level of knowledge in core/fundamental algorithms was (and still is) an absolute joke compared to some of my competition.

I realize I didn't exactly put a lot of time into practicing and learning new material, but now that I've graduated I'm hoping to practice more and eventually try raising my rating on TopCoder. If anything, training for ICPC drilled the basics of algorithms and data structures into my head and lead me to find tons of excellent resources for improving in these competitions (and consequently, programming/problem solving in general).
Yes, that's wrong. The author was talking about that fact that Urdu has more letters than standard Arabic, mostly additional diacritics etc, which makes entering it with an Arabic keypad/keyboard painful.

Both Naskh and Nastaliq can be encoded using the Arabic block in Unicode, it's just that Nastaliq's vertically stacking nature makes it difficult to deal with in computer systems that expect clean rows of text.
The militarization of the police predates Iraq 2 by at least a decade, it was happening under the Clinton administration, who authorized letting national guard equipment be loaned to police for any activity that could be plausibly connected to drugs.

I knew about it because my dad was a member of the NRA. The big, bad NRA used to write about police militarization and criminal abuses of force by federal agencies every single month in their member publication, they seemed presciently worried about the encroaching police state two decades before most people. Instead of reporting the same stories of government abuse the NRA aggregated from regional media, the national media painted them as anti-government for calling BATF agents "jack-booted thugs" (because they were) and for saying "in Clinton's administration, if you have a badge, you have the government's go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens." (because they did, and still do today under two successive administrations.)
I think that is the best argument you could make!
In Soviet Russia, pizza delivers YOU!
> is practically guaranteed to be set by the manufacturer at its optimal value

The optimal value for what? Speed? Performance? Comfort? Economics? I don't drive a car, but wouldn't trade-offs apply to car tuning just like it does to everything else?
You may like the documentary Rip: A Remix Manifesto. They have a particularly relevant part where they step through songs from artists like Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones and compare them to the songs they were (heavily) inspired by.
How A Single Tweet can get You FREE Advertising on Official WorldCup Website
If you want to play the VC/Funding game, don't do it from Australia. I'm okay with that.

That doesn't mean being a Australian startup sucks, my experience is that it's awesome. I wouldn't have it anywhere else.

Just do that crazy thing of getting customers to pay you money and earn more than you spend.
The prospect of bootcamps graduating tens of thousands a year instead of hundreds is quickly becoming a very real thing. Will be very interested to see how this affects the job market over the next few years.
Young Kashmiri girl makes an app to bring Kashmir on the fingertips
http://www.altschool.com

One way to get teacher engagement and feedback is to run your own schools, with your own teachers. Works like a charm.

Disclaimer: I work there.
There are lots of people who play blackjack in casinos who don't know the odds, or who at least fool themselves into thinking that the odds are in their favor.

It's harder to estimate with startup investing in the case where you do your homework on both, but I think that if startup investing is heavily advertised as being a complete crapshoot with potentially huge returns, but most likely a complete loss, then people should be allowed to experiment with it. The proposed rules have spending limits to enforce that it's just dipping in, and not people dumping their life savings into things.
> But a lot of art is original, and speaking of someone's originality is usually one of the highest artistic compliments one can pay.

Um, this is exactly true in science. But scientists are generally required to make clear and explicit the influences for their work.
5 reasons Platform as a Service is hot this year
I'm more than happy to concede your point if you can point out where my exaggeration lies.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but if Apple and Android make a nastaliq font part of the directory of fonts that go into their devices from the get go, there wouldn't be a problem.

Such fonts have already been designed. The issue now is to find Android and iOS developers who can make them default in the operating systems.

When I talked to Microsoft they said that on the smaller devices every last bit of memory was precious so they didn't want to stick extra megabytes or however big a font is. I think that Apple's cheapening out is worse than Android's, because at least Android offers the entire Urdu alphabet (though in naskh). Apple doesn't even offer the Urdu alphabet, requiring Urdu users to have to make do with 12 less letters.
How to Succeed in Business by Bundling
Operational Tranformation: The tech behind Google Docs
I prefer to see these scripts on github, over https, with a commit hash specified. That's harder to hack.
Tracker is one thing that Labs offers, but our bread and butter is actually consulting and co-development. Tracker is the tool that was developed in-house and then opened up for outside developers.

I didn't really get Tracker until I started at Pivotal Labs. Now I wish everything else was more like it.
LIFX works better with Nest
Given that Australians have the highest per capita gambling losses in the world (http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2014/02/daily-c...), I'm surprised that the regulations around funding startups are so risk averse. Also ironic that angel investing from super funds is deemed "too risky" but using your super to get an interest only mortgage to buy an "investment" property with negative cash flow is just fine. Clearly there are powerful established interests at work...

EDIT: Given that Melbourne are currently 15th on the AFL ladder anyone would be crazy to bet on them winning on the Grand Final. Port Adelaide, on the other hand... ;)
How much swap space should you allocate for e.g. 16GB RAM?

Every reference I've read suggests there's no need for swap space once you have more than ~2GB of RAM, but I find that extremely hard to believe.
its an interesting read and I acknowledge the intent to keep the traditional and authentic writing system for Urdu.

I have a few thoughts on this though. One would be the legibility. Of course I cannot judge legibility of writing systems I do not like, but it seems that nastaliq would be hardly readable on a lot of mobile devices and I wonder how difficult learning the ornate script is. I am talking about alphabetization here.

Next thing is: I am learning turkish and turkish is written in the roman alphabet. As far as I know, it was written in a arabic/persian script before which was then reformed to use the latin alphabet. As far as I can tell this is today really uncontroversial and using the latin alphabet is actually the more suitable alphabet for turkish and its rich vowel system that is really important for grammar and meaning. Again I cannot really say anything for Urdu, but knowing it is not arabic but afaik a language of the indo-european family I wonder if there are more reasons to use the lating alphabet than just availability of nataliq fonts and rendering engines.

As a side note I would add a few observations relating to the cultural/heritage aspects. In Germany, the "Fraktur" was used widely even at the beginning of the 20th century (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktur ). Some authors, like Hermann Hesse refused that Antiqua fonts would be used for their writings until publishers convinced them that their works could just not be read by young folks. In a way, a lot of people argued against using non-gothic fonts, but in the end antiqua became quite standard. Nowadays we use the lating alphabet (and most people are not concious about that there ever was a switch).
> That linked 42Floors blog post is terribly self-unaware.

It seems it has been taken down (http://blog.42floors.com/interviewing-at-a-startup/), or is someone getting content?
I think you're imagining things that don't happen based on a single day's exposure.

I've never seen personal drama at Pivotal Labs. Sure, I find that everyone has a different tempo, persona and so on. That means each pairing takes time to establish a workable rhythm. But I've never seen it come to animosity, either with myself and another pivot or anywhere in the offices I've worked in or visited.
Languages do evolve and die. English itself is changing all the time. Same goes for Urdu. The question here is whether the changes are organic or is there simple oversight going on. My view is that the problem is of oversight, and of disregarding the Urdu speaking and writing user. If the world's most popular operating systems were designed in Pakistan or Iran and they were not offering enough English language letters as a default on the devices, I think we would be plenty upset.
Another perspective: if you are a teacher, your natural habitat is the classroom, not a digital learning conference. That's where user studies should really be conducted, anyway; the learnings are more accurate and relevant.
>I understand the idea, but I don't have a lot of faith in the kernel to make the right decision under memory pressure--and neither do server application developers, hence the proliferation of massive userland disk caches in processes.

There is a school of thought which thinks especially server devs should just trust the operating system in this regard. One notable person of that school is phk of FreeBSD and Varnish fame: https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/ArchitectNotes
Absolutely, if the teachers are user testing products with a live classroom they discuss student engagement, learning etc and also give student feedback to the developers too.

"I was surprised how insightful my six year olds were." TinkerEd teacher.

"My students loved that they got to share their ideas with a developer, they thought it was really cool."
TinkerEd teacher.
Sad. I remember as a kid, growing up in Kashmir, I took special pride in my Urdu calligraphy skills. Writing each sentence was like an art project.
I am coming from an information theoretic standpoint. Let me start over: imagine the number writer chooses ANY two numbers completely at random. Knowing what one number is gives NO information about the second number since they were both chosen completely randomly. Therefore, the chance that the second number is larger is equivalent to the number of larger numbers divided by the total (i.e. 50% because a constant number is infinitesimally small compared to the infinity that lies on both sides). Therefore, to suggest that the probability can be swayed one way or another has to violate an assumption that I made in this argument. The assumption that the article makes which violates my argument is the assumption that larger numbers are less likely to be chosen by the number writer than small numbers. It is that crucial piece of knowledge that allows the probability to sway from 50%. That is the whole purpose of the coin flip or the gaussian equation: to reflect that piece of knowledge in your guesses. To take the idea to the extreme, if I know that there are only two numbers then I can win 100% of the time.

In conclusion, the point is that this method doesnt work in all, or even most cases; only in cases in which you KNOW that larger numbers are less likely to be chosen than small numbers. Furthermore, how much better than 50% you can do depends completely on how well your approximation function (the gaussian function or flipping coins) accurately reflects the smaller probability of larger numbers. Now if you want to deal with people, the number of ways in which people generate random numbers is so large that I am hard pressed to believe that you can find an accurate enough approximation function that will work across the population. For example, try playing this game with your 12 year old nephew who just learned about million, billion, and googleplex and you are likely to do no better than 50%.
Flatiron did a $5.5M round at a $15M (guesstimated) valuation, and DBC is probably 4x bigger, so this was probably in the $60M range, with a bit more thrown in for being a big player?
The UK has crowd funding in place. There are no reports of wide scale fraud. People are not stupid.
Well here are my 'improved' settings for sysctl.conf http://sprunge.us/dhgM. Most of the TCP stuff is to guard against server resource exhaustion by syn flood, etc, the vm settings are optimized for hot cache (vs cold cache but programs) and spinning media (page cluster).
Great point about German language. I have come across that again and again. And you're right, there ARE Urdu speaking youth now who are basically just as comfortable in naskh as they are in nastaliq, if not more so. This was a revelation to me and it added a wrinkle to my thinking. But I go back to my point, that we can't fully adjudge if nastaliq is meant to die off until we make at least a good faith effort to get it onto the devices.