skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Aphyr is amazing and we're very lucky to have him doing this!
Agreed on where the devil resides. I'm working on a follow up post that delves into that detail - it should be published in the next few weeks.
(I'm the author of that post)
Then, are mergesort and quicksort both patentable as specific, concrete ways of implementing the idea of sorting with desirable properties and trade-offs?
Congrats on coming back from the grave! If you need any help on the hosting/caching/etc. side let me know.
> Video files, even files compressed with modern codecs, are really big, and the concepts are generally really hard for most people to grok.

As the article points out, the video files are generally much smaller than the source gifs.

Similarly, while there are real impediments to transcoding for many developers, I'm confident that the Twitter engineers in this specific case are capable of building a VP8 pipeline. After all, they built one for H.264.

At that point, achieving universal support is as simple as having two <source> tags inside your <video> tag. It's not difficult at all: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/video/basics/#toc-spe...
Sales Hacking: A bootstrappers guide to turning $2k into $2 million in sales
Hardware Hackathon: Build IoT/ Datacenter Infrastructure stuff
Supermarket HTTPS Redirect Postmortem
THE NIGHT I BROKE BACK INTO PRISON
Not the OP, but I got contacted on LinkedIn by a recruiter who appeared to completely miss my LinkedIn connection to the CEO of the company he was recruiting me for. That seemed like completely his fault.
What? No Sound?
Very cool! Found this by accident, press the number 0.
Well, my last attempts the idea was to make a Piet Mondrian pong...

But I tried to make a "better pong" too, and was still not that nice... although it was probably more or less the same amount of fun, people enjoyed playing it a bit (Also my AI was much better...)
Google / city council does that. The SEO actor does nothing to the target, only to influence google.
Is the Web really free?
Hofstadter's butterfly
For a performance reference similar to Moore's law, check out the quantum version (Rose's law): https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-AZFZhBUmwds/UHT2yF39AHI/AAAAAAAAI...
It seems a lot like what the Russian Scientist Altshuller [1] did and modeled as TRIZ [2]

There is another one very useful scientist take on problem solving (more math related) : Mr. Polya [3]

[1] http://www.amazon.com/s/?_encoding=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=3...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ

[3] http://www.amazon.com/s/?_encoding=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=3...
I handled Perfect Audience support for the first 5 months after launch until it just became overwhelming. We then tried moving to a rotation of engineers and that was also overwhelming. Then we hired someone who's done a terrific job of it. Nevertheless I still read maybe 50% of the support requests that come in and help with support on the weekends to keep my head in the game.
It's not a replacement. My opinion on this as a stakeholder is that is meant for different audience that Yeoman serves. Ultimately we have produced a highly opinionated stack that developers can start with and customize as they like (or not if they don't want to). This lets developers who are experienced quickly start and manipulate it, and lets developers who don't know what a good workflow looks like be set up for success straight away. Yeoman on the other hand gives you complete control over how you want your project to be started and assumes that you know all the answers to the questions the generator poses.

I also like that Web Starter Kit is just a simple download that you can extract and be good to go with.
Ahhh, I'd never heard that before.
Something similar to this (but automated, of course)?

http://video.bobdylan.com/desktop.html
Still doesn't make much sense to me. A tank, helicopter or fighter jet can all move in 360 degrees, allowing for the full use of a joystick or two. A car would only be able to use about 50% of a joysticks positions, since you can't go sideways, and a car has a non-zero turning radius.

We can't use two joysticks like a tank because it would sheer the rubber from your tires, and maintaining independent throttle control for two sides of a car is silly and unneeded.

That and it seems confusing and unsafe to have both direction and throttle controls on one device, especially when that device is as sensitive as a joystick. When you slam on brakes in a car, the force pushes your body further into the breaking system. If you were to slam on the brakes with a joystick, the force would push you (and the joystick) forward, disengaging the brakes and applying throttle. Very hard to control.

To me, the pedals seem like a good compromise between fine tuned adjustment and rapid, emergency control.

The wheel is kind of annoying but I can't think of anything that would work better. A joystick would be too finicky in its controls. Something like a rudder might work, since you are really only ever steering a car different degrees of "forward"
Obviously it's not "very clear" as I was not the only one who took at as a more general statement. Just read through this thread.
I'm working on a startup[1] that provides internal & external site monitoring[2], and I hadn't thought of that feature... good call! Currently it shows 2 graphics: the response time from each location and the aggregate for the week by day. We only have New York and California locations, but we plan on expanding to Europe soon.

If anyone is having a slow day at work and wants to play, feedback is always appreciated: https://www.metrink.com/whitelabel Shameless self-promotion over :-)

[1] https://www.metrink.com
[2] https://www.metrink.com/whitelabel
Well, 'ascii' is ' ' to 'del', above that I can't even type on this keyboard with any reliability so that gives an upper boundary for me of 96 characters. Of those the actual information is carried mostly by the letters, A-Z, twice if you want to count uppercase and lower case for 52 letters, 10 digits, a space. So that's 63 letters. Round up to 64 (maybe add the @ character or the # if you want, those are pretty prevalent in tweets as well). That's approximately 2^6. If you drop the lowercase/uppercase distinction then you can fit all the other ASCII glyphs and punctuation marks in the second half of your imaginary 6 bit code. You can't enter anything below <32 in a tweet, other than a linefeed.
I talked to one of the authors of this paper at ICLR and he said that it wasn't really worth the time to compute the adversaries and train, though it did improve results. He said that in the time it took to generate adversaries and then train on them, the net was better off just training on more image data, since there is a near infinite supply of it. Perhaps if you didn't have an infinite dataset, this wouldn't apply.

Also, the really interesting thing was that adversaries generated for one network topology/data set were still adversarial even for other network topologys/data sets, which might imply that the nature of the adversaries is universal rather than highly specific to that exact network trained
> I mean, I appreciate the concept of what she's doing here, but that self-assessment sounds reasonable to me.

I would use "realistic", as opposed to "reasonable", look hard enough and you will see that everyone has gaps in their knowledge.
What laundromat doesn't have a change machine available?
I can see how that would be more ergonomically satisfying to the HN crowd but I don't get how it would improve the experience of actually driving a car. A steering wheel and two (maybe three if you're not an American) pedals and a gearshift is not that complicated.
> That seems a bit semantic to me. She's basically saying "I never studied or worked extensively with X, so I have knowledge gaps about Y [which is tightly related to X, and often comes by studying X]".

You can apply that to professionals in certain scenarios. Referring to my original quote: “Every time I'd come across some concept, some data structure in the kernel, I'd have to go educate myself on it.” The only difference between someone who has a formal CS background and someone who doesn't, is that the former is given a lot of guidance by one of the most sophisticated data processors on Earth - the human brain, the latter has to bootstrap their knowledge.

You didn't mention your area of research, I would be interested in knowing.
Discover Startup Tools Faster
But you can image the logical filesystem on the SSD, do the free-space wipe, and then restore the image to the wiped SSD. If you could find a way to automate on a Mac with FileVault then you'd be popular.
Great tip. I will keep that in mind next time I go surfing on the world wide web.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=728046
That's good to know. How and where are ACLs handled?
Seriously though, I sure hope they spent as much time on the business model and idea as they did on their design and UI.

> Grocery and convenience stores aren't always willing to give out more than a few dollars worth of quarters at a time.

Since when did that happen? I live in TO and as long as you buy something from the store, they're always willing to give back change.
That link made my day. I can't get enough of retro-style computer graphics.
This is what modern support gets you with this method:

http://imgur.com/Qr3tohD
http://imgur.com/Qr3tohD,8okaMlP#1

So... Flash.

This has the added bonus of stealing focus if you click on it, making the "GIF" a UX nightmare.
Solid State Disk Drives. :)
Just a stupid question ... what is it?

edit: Answered in other people's comments - it's somewhere between HTML5BoilerPlate and Bootstrap - a basic "hello world" bunch of HTML / SASS / js boilerplate code. This one has an emphasis on mobile.
Change that dang font!
There will always be people that are better than you. Don't ever let that discourage you from doing whatever you want to do. Use those examples as inspiration, not a disincentive.
Many apartment building laundry rooms don’t have one.
Development Tools

1. An HTML/CSS editor (FireBug for FireFox)

2. Network Traffic Monitor (Foxmeter for Firefox)

3. Cookie Manager (Advanced Cookie Manager)

4. User Agent Switcher (for Firefox)

5. Modify Headers (optional)

6. Javascript Console

Those are your tools for debugging, writing some things.

Technologies you will have to learn...

1. jQuery

2. MVC framework

3. API/JSON content calls

4. AJAX

5. Cookies (same/cross domain)
> IMO, the 256-color dithering was more of a necessary evil for most gif creators, although some took advantage of it.

I'm under the impression that the format only specified 256 colors per palette, and that you could use different palettes on a per-frame basis, including frames with 0ms delays between them. and I know some software existed to make this possible, though I don't recall if it made it possible with animation at the same time...
> Again, I am not saying they are not related, I am pretty sure they are.

Then you have to explain exactly how physical particles interact with the supernatural consciousness, and for that you pretty much have to invent some new exotic physics.

>Why don't you believe they are two separate entities that interact in a two way manner?

Several reasons:
1) The theories underlying our understanding of fundamental particles and forces, have been empirically tested for decades to extremely high precision. We know they are correct in the domain of our daily experience.

2) There is no evidence that something outside the domain of applicability of our physics takes places in the brain.

3) Everything we've learned about the brain and consciousness thus far is consistent with our material understanding of the world.

So there is no reason to invent new physics to account for consciousness. If there is some evidence that shows our current physics don't work, we'll talk then, until that time, we don't need to.

In terms of specific evidence, I would point you to the Wikipedia article on Neuroscience and Free Will [1], which has a good overview of the field.

>When I choose to move my arm, my conciseness decides that, it somehow interacts with my brain, which starts firing neurons in the physical world. The consciousness becomes before the physical in that case.

That's patently not true. We know for a fact that is not the right chain of events. Neuroscience has known that for a while. In fact, your arm moves, and your mind becomes aware of it after the fact.

Sam Harris, in several of his talks gave a thought experiment in which he asked the audience to close their eyes and think of three cities, any three cities (you can try it yourself, it's pretty wild if you try to be objective). As you close your eyes, what you'll find is that three cities pop into your mind, it may be Paris, London and New York, or it may be something else. So then you ask yourself, why those particular three, and not another three? You may give yourself a reason such as "I just came from New York, so it was on my mind", but then, why that reason, and not another reason, and why not another city with its own good reason (e.g. "Istanbul, because you read a Wikipedia article about it last week).

What this shows you is that things just happen in your brain. Your unconscious brain processed the instructions in a deterministic fashion (following all laws of physics, mind you) and spat out a result into your conscious part, which itself is a product of natural processes. That you had some conscious input into this is an illusion, a very powerful illusion but an illusion nonetheless. It starts with neurons and ends with neurons.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will
I cannot deny that contingency recruiting is the crux of the issue, but the fact that companies think they have to pay someone 30k to track down a decent programmer is another major problem.
A short story about a lesbian who could
> Honestly? Using 512GB of ram is pretty hard.

It's extremely easy. Insert 512GB of data into postgres, there, done.
> This article explains what it's about in language that's easier for people who aren't legal scholars to understand

I really strongly disagree with this. Supreme Court decisions are usually quite readable and will give a you a nuanced overview of the legal background and justifications for the ruling. They're usually very accessible and not nearly as crammed with legal jargon as you might guess. I try to read as many important decisions as I can and I have no legal training at all. I only occasionally have to look up a term. I would say they're easier, on average, for me to read than a CS paper. And after reading a few Scotus papers, you'll have a much deeper understanding of how our legal system works, and of course a great deal more about the individual decisions. You'll even read news articles about a decision and say, "That's not what the decision was about at all!"

Supreme Court rulings are, of course, quite long, and there's nothing wrong with a summary article like this one. But my point is that you shouldn't fear the legalese.
U Washington students start ‘Uber for marijuana’ delivery service
as someone only casually familiar with node and and frontend dev generally, i'm curious about the instructions to install gulp and other things globally instead of local to the project. could someone illuminate the reasoning behind that? my thinking is that you're almost always better off doing things local to the project if possible.
Is this sarcasm?

He clearly knew that earbits.com was the desired destination, he's just pointing out how un-intuitive the process of getting there is for a potential new user.

You know, someone who might have wanted to try-out/explore the service after reading a blog post.
The video produced was extremely entertaining and insightful. I can imagine this tool being very useful for big data analysis.
Hahahah the author of this sounds like a shitbag.

Closed my gittip account. Sniff, I had fun growing my very own company ;_;.
This is what Gfycat http://gfycat.com/ is been doing since last year but as a service.
The Problem with Prediction Markets
Theoretically per app volume is one of the things you get from pulse audio on linux.

In practice it depends on (at least) your volume manager app(let) so you don't see it on say XFCE.
and I thought this was going to be for the hunted...
> I'd go one step further and I'd say: stop making sites that only exist by the grace of search engines.

You are aware that there are large (enormous) swathes of Internet users whose primary mode of navigation is typing whatever they want to visit into Google, trusting it'll correct their (terrible) misspellings, and click one of the first few links of the first result page?

There will type URLs there. Like "Apple.com". Because they don't know what URLs are for, any more.

It sounds to me, if you really suggest to stop making sites for these people, you're not actually aware how numerous they are. They are both the old, and the new generations.

Yes it's sad this is the case. But they are people. What if they are searching for some niche information (like a disease, as another poster already pointed out), but the honest blog post that'd be useful for them has been torpedoed out of the water with this "negative SEO", in favour of some scummy SEO site trying to sell them ineffective fake medicine (or whatever).

Is that too far-fetched? I don't know, but it seems to me that giving evil SEOers the power to blast sites from Google's index by abusing "negative SEO", is a bad thing in general. Your argument seems to be that it'll give SEOers a taste of their own medicine, which I agree that will probably happen. But there will be collateral too, and I don't think that's worth it.
> “We believe,” he wrote, “that the interest — widely shared in the financial community — in maintaining New York’s status as one of the foremost commercial centers is advanced by requiring debtors, including foreign debtors, to pay their debts.”

So I guess that means this judge never lets companies or individuals file for bankruptcy either.

The one policy you can always count on our government to enforce is "protect bondholders at all costs."

The article talks a lot about how it's hard to be sympathetic to the Argentinian government, a perspective I mostly agree with. But who's the bigger heel, Argentina, or the idiots who lent them money expecting to get any of it back?
Ha! Resubmitted...
No, it does not. However, if you wanted a motorcycle that shifts for you, they have those, they are called scooters. In fact, Ducati even makes an auto dual sport bike. However, if the only thing that's stopping you from learning how to ride a motorcycle is the fact that you do not want to learn how to ride with a sequential shifter, I really do not want you to be on the road on a fast bike. Basically, learning how to shift a bike is far less complicated than learning how to properly take a corner or pull out of one, or shift lanes.

So, basically, if you are afraid of bikes because they have shifters, but otherwise willing to learn, give it a try. I guarantee you that you'll feel comfortable shifting the gears on a bike and starting with the clutch on the first day. However, if you just don't want to learn because it looks like too much work, please, stay away from bikes, electric or otherwise.
This is so completely absurd I'm almost speechless. You have so completely missed how the world works I can't even fathom it. The more arguments I read, the more delusional people sound.

People are not getting patents for some sequence of calculations, they're getting patents for producing a useful, new effect on the world. Yes all computers are universal in what they can compute, but I see no reason why coming up with a new, greatly improved and economically useful way of using such a restricted machine should not be patentable.

Furthermore, people seem to think that just because a computer program can be described as a sequence of mathematical steps that it is therefore a mathematical algorithm and shouldn't be patentable. Algorithms have no effect on the world, they do not improve anything in a tangible way, but software absolutely does (and it's why you can read this now!) and it is the processes that lead to producing these useful effects that is patentable. I can't patent an algorithm without specifying why it is useful to the population at large.

Finally, people seem to have got the bizarre notion that there are patents claiming computers which are capable of performing a certain task, which is just absurd and untrue. The claims are usually directed to a system which actually does perform the steps in the process, not one which is capable of it (therefore allowing them to exclude competitors who make their own implementation of some software process that has been patented and attempt to make money from it).
This article gives little attention to very major point. It says:

> But the courts say that interest may not be paid unless the country pays all it owes on bonds it defaulted on years ago, something Argentina says it cannot and will not do.

This is only true because of the terms of Argentina's debt agreement. Unlike the language of virtually every country in the world today except (I think) Jamaica, Argentina's agreements include what is called a "pari passu" clause and not a collective action clause. This fancy jargon just means this: under the pari passu clause, Argentina could not subordinate the debt to any future debt (that is, it cannot issue new debt that will be given a higher priority in making payments). All the courts have done is rule, sensibly I think, that Argentina has, in effect, subordinated the old debt by passing a law making it illegal to make payments on that debt while issuing new debt on which it will make payments.

Meanwhile, under a collective action clause, a country could force hold-out debtors to accept a restructuring. If Argentina had written such a provision into its agreement, this would have been over a decade ago. (Though, in fairness, when the debt in question was issued, such clauses were not widely used). The article does talk about this, but only briefly. It highlights arguments from a few nations that old bonds do not all have collective action clauses, and that, possibly, a creditor could buy enough of a single bond issue to block restructuring even with a collective action clause. What the article does not point out, however, is that it is entirely within a nation's control how it drafts its pari passu and collective action clauses (and whether it includes either of them). All the courts are doing today is enforcing the agreements the way Argentina itself drafted them. If Argentina, or other nations feel threatened by our courts' robust enforcement of those agreements, they should probably consider changing the terms that they commit themselves to.
It's been done and a little use of the search box here and on Quora will yield the answer you look for.

Your hunch is wrong.