skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not speaking for Marco, but another issue with dollars is tax accounts (and especially VAT accounts) for British companies have to be in pounds, so there's overhead in doing the conversions, tracking the exchange losses/gains, etc. We also have to reverse charge the VAT on those transactions as well (though I'd be surprised if the majority of business owners know they have to do that).

About 90% of my company's expenses are in dollars, so I've had to become proficient at dealing with it, but I imagine it's more annoying for companies who only make the occasional USD transaction, especially as they may have smalltime accountants unfamiliar with or unwilling to deal with the exchange rate stuff properly.
I've cancelled Comcast a few times before when ATT had a better deal and it was never this bad. They usually try to give me a better deal but sorry I've made my decision thats why I am calling, if you gave me a better rate to begin with I might not be leaving.

With Comcast you can usually just hang up and call again if you get an employee with an attitude. This method works with tech support too, hang up and try again if you get someone who just wants to keep reseting your router or doesn't have any idea.
Ouch. Seems credit cards out of the US are nowhere near as good, common there to have no foreign transaction fees (apart from probably some margin on the exchange rate).
It does point to the soundcloud recording.
Proof that Comcast really does care! I'm switching to Comcast.
The Coming Microsoft Cultural Revolution
The improvement is only theoretical. The Fürer algorithm is quicker than Schönhage-Strassen only for impractical numbers and no arbitrary precision toolkit use it as far as I know.

The Fürer algorithm change the loglog term of the complexity to 2^log* which doesn't change anything in practice for workable numbers but it also add a lot to the constant term which is not counted by the big O notation but is very important in practice.
2 days of calorie deprivation: effects on cognition, activity, sleep
This might be an unrelated problem, but I find that when I copy a large amount of text and paste it into iTerm, it takes a long time to paste. This often happens when pasting into Vim, so it could be a vim issue. For example, copying the code of a Javascript library. When I do this in a text editor outside of iTerm, it's nearly instantaneous.
Most good US cards don't charge an extra fee for non-USD transactions.
Imgur does a lot of weird things like that from growing up to be just for reddit onto being a huge entity on its own. Maybe they're using ads to help pay for the site from sources that can afford their own image hosting anyway like twitter.
On the other hand, one of the nice things with using US services that bill in USD (apart from the current exchange rate benefit) is there's no VAT to pay. So, UK retail customers at least, get a 20% discount compared to using home grown offerings.

Personally, I love being able to spin up Linode (and now DO) vms in London but pay USD prices.
Firstly: getentropy(2) is a /dev/random substitute, not urandom. You should call the process-context CSPRNG arc4random(3) in lieu of /dev/urandom. That should be in the standard library (and hopefully will be added). (It uses ChaCha20 nowadays, not RC4.)

Secondly: It can fail with EINVAL (bad pointer) or EIO (>256 bytes requested), but does not fail even in a condition where file descriptors are exhausted. I don't know of its behaviour if it is called too early in the boot process to have been safely seeded, but I hope it either errors loudly or blocks.
What to do about reputation inflation?
I'm amazed at how calm he remains during this. I would've called the guy - regardless of whether he's "just doing his job" - every name under the sun and probably threatened to pay him a visit in person...

That said, I guess if I were recording it to share on the Internet later, I might've been able to control myself slightly more than usual.
Digital Ocean is the promoter of low prices VPS, many thanks!
It's too bad that cancer can't be taken away from all the kids who don't deserve it and given to this sales rep.
your IPs are resolving to Netherlands :(
Chargebacks are no different than simply ceasing to send in payments for a service: It sounds pat, but can haunt you years later when massive penalties and interest appear on your credit report.
I just cancelled my Time Warner Internet a few minutes ago (switched to FiOS). The call took all of 8 minutes and the rep didn't put up a fight at all. I joked that it might actually be worth continuing to pay $50/month to avoid the hassle of canceling, so this left me pleasantly surprised.
Elevator Allocation Algorithm
Native launcher for Java applications
“You WANT to be pigeonholed. I'm #1 on Google because of being pigeonholed.”
"When a program is being tested, it is too late to make design changes"

Clearly never used HyperCard.
Well, sure, but the question is how you do "123 * 456". In binary you have the multiplication

111001000
x 1111011

and the traditional grade-school algorithm looks something like this

111001000
1110010000
00000000000
111001000000
1110010000000
11100100000000
111001000000000
---------------
1101101100011000
122222221

so the answer is 1101101100011000, or 56088 in decimal. This method takes O(n^2) bitwise multiplications, where n is the number of bits in the larger of the two integers. Clearly if you're multiplying very large integers (say you're doing cryptography - the kind of computation that computers do millions of times every day) then there's clearly an interest in having faster algorithms for multiplication.
Yeah, this is actually amazing. I don't think I would have lasted more than 2 minutes answering the same question over and over again.
Flying from my city in Poland to where I live in the UK costs me 50-100 pounds,depending on the time of the year. Taking a car costs 300 pounds in fuel alone + ~150 pounds to take the ferry across the sea. Of course the car works out better than plane if you have it filled with people,but that is not always the case.

>>and always cheaper than train.

That is the only thing where I will disagree with you - Europe is not one large country with the same rules everywhere. In the UK trains are absurdly expensive and sometimes it's cheaper to rent a car, fill it up,drive to where you need to be and back than to take the train. But again, in some countries, like Poland, the trains are state-owned and cost tiny sums(taking a 2 hour journey costs literally a pound, taking the longest, 10 hour journey from the mountains to the seaside costs slightly more than 10 pounds).
Mouse reporting. You can scroll text with mouse wheel, you can click on text and move the cursor there, so you can have say vim essentially behave like graphical vim (silly example I know, but still it's useful to some people). You can resize vim split windows with a mouse.

iTerm exports its color profile as shell variable, so you can have vim adjust its color theme to match the terminal theme.

It has better full screen support.

It has support for foreground/background color of the text the cursor is over, which Terminal.app does not have at all. This is why in vim if you cursor is over syntax highlighted element whose color is similar to the cursor color, it become incredibly hard to tell where the cursor is (esp. on large screen).

iTerm has "highlight cursor feature", to quickly show you where the cursor is (CMD+/). This is useful if you went away from the screen for a while and you come back, and can't immediately spot the cursor.

iTerm has better font rendering (more like GUI Vim) because it is a Cocoa view.

iTerm allows you to split terminal windows both horizontally and vertically.

The list goes on, but these are some highlights. Essentially, you have more control over your terminal.
Reminds me of this clip Will Arnett's Guide to Playing an Arrogant Idiot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYs79z75MX8
On the downloads page, the link text for the stable release says "iTerm2 2.0 (OS 10.6+, Intel-only)" but the description below it says "It requires OS X 10.7+ and an Intel CPU."

Can anybody confirm whether it works on 10.6?
From the article:

We’re so focused on revenue from the app store, that we ignore some facts: lots of apps support other platforms, and generate revenue on other ways. My phone has a great SalesForce CRM app on it – it’s free. But of course our company pays for the CRM! Apps also often drive revenue on other platforms. In Android apps, you can freely send users to another platform to do a transaction – how much revenue is generated that way? iOS blocks this, by the way, and insists on a 30% cut.

Other apps are ad based, and that revenue can come from any one of hundreds of ad exchanges. Again, none of that revenue is part of this graph.
I want to sign up for Comcast just to cancel now.
Comcast/Xfinity is the most dishonest company that i've ever been a customer with.

We signed up during a promotional deal and when the deal ended I got a bill for 2x+ what i normally pay. I called customer service and they explained that the roll-over from the promotional service into the new service was billed at the start of the month and the last bill from the promotion was at the end of the month. The net effect was a double billing.

When we called comcast to disconnect we got the same run around as to why we are disconnecting. It wasn't nearly as bad as this call however.

Honestly, the worst company ever. I will never do business with them again.
Rinorea niccolifera, a new, nickel-eating plant species from the Philippines
It's wrong to steal.
At NASA you're an intern for the first 18 months after you're hired. Could be something similar going on here.
There is VAT to pay and these companies are required to register for VAT and charge it I believe. Eg see http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110202144320/htt...
Just because they ask it doesn't mean you have to answer; I'd just say "I'm not continuing this conversation until you inform me you've canceled the service", then put the phone on speaker and do something else until he came around.
For me it used to be two reasons:

* 256-color support. This was added in Lion I believe.

* There's a really weird bug with word-wrapping that only manifests itself in Terminal.app: http://superuser.com/q/46948/5966 As of 10.9, I believe it remains unfixed.
Usually takes a bit of time for the registrars to update the Geo information.
Answering my own question: I downloaded it on 10.6 and it seems to work correctly.
This is great news. I've read about so many great nuclear projects in the past few years. Three thorium initiatives in China, India and Norway. ITER in Europe. Bussard Electrostatic Fusion. Travelling Wave Reactors. General Fusion's Steam Hammer Design. And there are many more. So it looks like an increasingly bad bet to say that they will all fail. Which is good, because we're going to need lots of energy in the future.
Honestly, I would still take this conversation over a frustrating service call with someone who doesn't understand what I'm saying.
How DreamHost is reinventing itself with OpenStack
I was able to cancel my account with comcast, just two weeks ago, in under twenty minutes.

Are you saying that if he had hung up, and called again, he would have faced an equally long phone call?

My point is that he did not have to put up with this. Obviously there are going to be some bad apples amongst the thousands of comcast customer service employees. He could have hung up on this guy, called back, and gotten a much more reasonable employee to cancel his account.
> Wow, being downvoted for suggesting to hack something yourself on Hacker News ... that's a new one. I guess I'll take a time out.

You'll also get downvoted for complaining about being downvoted. That's almost verboten here, and explicitly mentioned in the guidelines.

When you get downvoted, accept that possible your comment detracts from the conversation. It doesn't just not add anything, but takes away. It's noise.

If your first reaction is to edit your comment and complain, then that's a clear sign you aren't in the right frame of mind to contribute meaningfully.

Your original comment was, if I may be so bold, cliche. Maybe that's the wrong word, but it comes up by someone with your attitude generally every time a thread about an open source project comes along. It literally is something that can go without saying.
Any ideas why he actually wants to cancel? If it's for a lower price surely Comcast would match that? I've done that with mobile operators here in the UK, phoning up to switch to PAYG because of a new deal that comes up then the "retentions" agent offering me the same deal on a contract for half the price.

Edit: My point is although it is none of their business why he wants to cancel, it's probably less effort, and helps them out by saying "The customer service is poor" than declining and arguing with the agent who is just trying to do his job (and probably getting paid $10/hour).
Whether or not VAT is payable is independent of what currency is used to bill in. If you're using a VPS in the UK then there's almost certainly VAT payable by the vendor.
If they are in another EU country, and you're VAT registered, and they have your VAT number they can zero-rate the transaction.
Antarctica is surely always an option..?
Yeah I don't care about the specific technology. Hydraulic is fine by me because my needs are relatively speaking low volume. One piece a minute is plenty for the foreseeable future and that isn't challenging in the slightest.

I'm also partial to having a couple of machines instead of just one because of the reliability. If I spend $250k upfront (which I don't have) I get one machine that's going to be extremely reliable but if it does break I'm losing you know $500 an hour or whatever it is.

If I spend $20k on one machine and $30k on another and $50k on a third I end up with no single point of failure. Yeah they will break more but I'll (probably) never be stuck with no ability to make parts. It's easier capex too since revenue from the first finances the second and revenue from those two finance the third.

What kind of stuff do you do? I don't interact with many people on here who have mechanical aptitude. Obviously products of some kind. Can you talk about it? I'm intrigued.
Troubleshooting hreflang annotations in Webmaster Tools
Ram-Man is a human account. The same person operates the Rambot bot account. You can click on their usernames on the history page to see their user pages, which usually describe these things.
First alpha of OCamlJava available
Indeed. When microsoft invented Office, productivity and LOB was their plus point ever since. Then they push the productivity everywhere with Office365 to web and mobile.
He, Satya, was only helping the company to remember it's core business line and it's vision.
>I actually believe this could distinguish Microsoft from the likes of Google, Apple and Amazon.
I like how they distinguish themselves from others.
He's just trying to make an honest, if annoying buck. He seems particularly dedicated, but then perhaps he's on a warning, or new.
The difficult part of programming is programming. I mean just sit and dissolve yourself into the code and it engulfs you in a timeless world. I often feel the urge to be on the email or internet or HN kills this sort of dissolution and very rarely I get this. When you get it, it is absolutely delightful!
Once you have identified the most significant individuals on a field, you can use google scholar alerts to get notified when they publish something new. (http://scholar.google.com/scholar_alerts?view_op=list_alerts). In the case of machine learning that would be Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, Andrew Ng (this list is not exhaustive of course).
Source please? Every time I've filed a chargeback on my credit card (American Express), they have been completely transparent with the status of it. When I submit the chargeback, I'm credited the amount of it. If I lose it, I also lose that credit, and I owe the amount of the chargeback.

Are you saying that comcast will negatively affect your credit score because you submit a chargeback to them after they failed to cancel your service?
How is there a benefit at the 'current' exchange rate? If the price isn't set in GBP, what have you got to compare against, regardless of the rate right now?
"The customer declined to continue with the cancellation process."
I am hopeful that these sensors will become available eventually, but the more realistic/pessimistic side of me expects that it will be two years or more (possibly much more), and that the cost will be very high, even with help from insurance companies.
The best kind of person. :)

((Members of) Tilde are writing Rust's awesome new package manager, Cargo: http://crates.io/ )
In certain parts of the world, maybe. In other parts differences in religion is the driving force behind conflict..
Do you use the rsync algorithm, so that bytes additions/deletions are efficiently handled ?
Twenty minutes? Did you maybe intend to say twenty second? Because twenty minutes sounds rather terrible.

Secondly, realize that this guy's entire job is to do exactly what he did: This is what Comcast trains him to do; It's what they pay him to do; His rewards are based upon him doing exactly what he did. His role is not to fulfill your cancellation request, but to do everything possible to stop you from cancelling.

Bad apple? He is probably the star of Comcast's retention department. Comcast will probably play this tape as training material.
I think you're proving OP point.
That's fair, but looking at the earth as anything but a sphere is unlikely to produce more useful results. One possibility is that a center-of-gravity of wealth just isn't all that useful a measure of economic history: A major historical shift could end up being represented by a dot budging a few hundred miles in the middle of nowhere.
This explains some very slow drifts in the middle
It is a huge problem, it's bullying people into staying with them. Not everyone would be capable or willing to go through what you say you should do.

If you're willing to go through it, good for you as it's a good form of protest (they'll get charged a lot for each chargeback). But if it ever gets to the stage where this it is now, it's totally broken.
"Am I being Punked?" Haha.
Having just gotten through the Knuth volume on this, I'm curious how this compares to many of the techniques he touches on.

In particular, I have to admit my mind was blown when he went over the "balanced ternary" method of representing numbers where multiplication was closer to addition.

Granted, I'm a complete outsider to this field, so I'm sure most of these techniques would blow my mind. Or, more likely, just go so far over what I'm used to seeing that it would be incomprehensible. Definitely exciting to grasp at, though.

Edit: I'm also more than a little curious/jealous for folks that have these sorts of concerns in what they do. The section on fast evaluation of polynomials, while ridiculously comprehensive and awesome, was so far from my field of work that it felt almost like I wasn't a programmer after a bit.

Edit2: I should say I did skim this paper, and I see they make references to Knuth's tightening of the bounds. So, I should clarify that I'm more interested in knowing roughly how this compares to all of methods given in the 3rd edition. And I'm mostly interested in whether this sees any usage and by whom.
Sounds like a good drinking game or at least a bingo game for pre-noon meetings.
It's not likely; the authors checked,

"We have implemented an unoptimised version of the algorithm
from section 8 in the Mathemagix system [29] and found our
implementation to be an order of magnitude slower than the
Gmp library [23]. There is certainly room for improvement,
but we doubt that even a highly optimised implementation of
the new algorithm will be competitive in the near future."

As the other people point out, when an algorithm has asymptotic complexity improvements (like here), it's often much slower on small problem sizes (the constant factor), on real hardware (i.e. memory locality).

And check out the table of multiplication algorithms in the paper's introduction, and the table in the GMP manual [0]. The FFT (Schönhage–Strassen) GMP uses is O(n log n log log n), and the algorithm in this paper is O(n log n 8^(log* n)). Those functions [1] diverge a bit slowly: they have the same value at n=2^2^2^21 (2^2^2,097,152).

[0] https://gmplib.org/manual/Multiplication-Algorithms.html#Mul...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterated_logarithm
I was swearing while listening to the conversation.. having one would have given me a hemorrhage.
Fun read. However, it seems to promote a very strict philosophy - the most a novice coder can hope to achieve is the mastering of Programming Tao.

I disagree with this.

Programming is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. Coding in the shade of a great tree might be all well and good, but how will you ever see the world if you stay in the shade of the greatest of trees?
And cheaper if you use a lot of bandwidth. They throw in 5 TB of outbound with their cheapest VPS. ~$28/mo compared to $70 with DO.
I see the Comcast agent has found the HN thread :)
It's actually half of that, $25/hr.
Scientific ideas that should stop being misused
This could be simple case of regression to the mean, too.
I just went past one on the train to work. They're everywhere!
Very true. I truthfully told Sprint I was moving to Ireland and they let me cancel with no ETF.
Tornado 4.0 released
Scary Boston Dynamics Robots
If you still have IBS you might want to try http://nordicrebalance.dk/en

I was told about it recently and am going to start treatment in a couple of weeks. They claim a 95% rate in chance of improvement amongst test subjects according to [1]. There are also a few more studies on their website supporting the product. They do however seem to be a relatively new company and I haven't been able to find much information besides their website. I have been told that the doctors behind it have been researching IBS and CD for about 20 years, so that seems to be a plus.

[1]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11711768
I feel programming is only an act like painting. The point is when you are fully into something, it does not matter if you are sitting in the shade of a tree or otherwise. You begin to flow.. and outside disappears.
I read somewhere that some men do this at speed-dating: tick every box so they get to find out all of the women that ticked their box.
I'm only halfway through but this is driving me crazy. I'm actually feeling extremely furious.

This is why I hate to pick up the phone to talk to companies and instead want automated systems where I can fill out forms and get my job done under 3 minutes, no questions asked.
Your credit card company is not an arbiter of contracts. They are nothing more than a payment method, and the only reason they have any process whatsoever is to try to maintain relations with the vendors who they also deal with.

If you have a contract with a vendor, decide that you don't like the product any more and decide to cancel through a chargeback, that has literally zero influence on the status of the contract with the vendor. You've simply failed to make a payment. Whether the credit card company likes your recording or not is irrelevant.

So those vendors, which in this case is Comcast, can absolutely destroy your credit rating in such a case. I mention this because invariably when payment disputes come up, someone says to just do a chargeback, yet this is no different than simply deciding to stop paying for something.
I went to school next to THTR-300 which was built from 1971 on and is now defunct thanks to incompetence and huge failures in crisis management.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300