skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> As it turned out, a purely randomly selected puzzle would 99.9%* of the time give you a puzzle with multiple solutions.

Ah, I see what you mean, you're not talking about generating the intended solution, you're talking about which cells TO BLANK before giving it to the user.
I'd settle for reliable, fast, cheap Internet everywhere :)
Thanks for the correction! I wasn't aware it had changed that much.

I am well aware of the treatment you get as an English speaker in Quebec. If they think you're non-Canadian, they are super friendly. If they think you're Anglophone Canadian, watch out!
That's libertarian bullshit. Prostitution is regulated in Thailand, and there is a tremendous amount of human trafficking. Even in a legal market, it's cheaper to get the product for free.
I disagree.

Tourists wandering round Edinburgh (or London) can stick out their arm and be guaranteed someone trained, vetted, and able to give them service at a standard price.

Locals can decide they want to take a risk and phone up a hire car company for a non-regulated price without guaranteed training, if they so wish.

The former is _totally_ worth it from a reputational point of view, as far as London/Edinburgh council is concerned.
How is that official? I thought that was Algolia's API, not YC's
To be honest, I don't really get what this is for. Everybody I buy things from, and everybody that buys things from me, has no idea who I am. I don't know who they are either. I'm not "famous" so no stranger is going to afford me any "reputation", and I intentionally have zero financial interaction with people I know. (money and friendship don't go together in my opinion.)
Programming is math, in that (at least at some level), a program is formally equivalent to a math problem.

Programming is not math, in that most of the time, when I'm programming, I'm not thinking about it at all like a math problem, even if I do some formal reasoning about some aspects of the program. (Maybe here's where it shows that I'm not a Haskell programmer.)

So: Yes? No? Depends on what level you're looking at it on.

This becomes one of those discussions that's really pointless because it turns on the definitions of the terms involved, and just winds up wasting peoples' time.
An interesting point of comparison is with finance. Most people going into IB/private equity/etc. make no bones about the fact that they just want to make money (and "win"). Wanting to just make money is a positive trait. There are lots of people going into finance (non-quants) that have the mentality of just getting in, earning millions, then leaving the field in their thirties.
I've bought a ton of tickets over the years on StubHub - almost all well below single-game market rate for the same seats (what the venue charges for the ticket directly). The original purchaser often bought a season ticket package and was unable (or did not desire) to attend all the games. Many of these the original purchaser is taking a loss on vs. purchase price, but they were forced to buy them in order to buy some other goods they wanted.
My opinion is that the US should have "won" any kind of war they had in mind with the Arab world by putting the trillions spent on Iraq and Afghanistan into energy research.
That would have been far more damaging to their targets and immensely beneficial to the world at large.
>The uncomfortable hypothesis is that prostitution fulfills the same urge to exercise power.

one can also see that for many being a manager (or a state senator, or a police, etc... ) fullfills the same urge to exercise power.

>It's uncomfortable because of what it implies about the nature of prostitution.

and about the nature of any situation where people exercise power. Some people definitely do it for power, some - for other reasons.
But you didn't already pay for the on-disc DLC to pay more later.
This is undoubtedly cool technology, but before anyone gets too excited about holograms floating in space, understand that this is not some sort of breakthrough into the volumetric 3D displays you see in sci-fi movies: You still have to be looking directly into the screen to see the image, just like how a traditional hologram can't escape the boundaries of its frame.
> Why? There's no need to traffic humans for prostitution if prostitution is legal.

There'd almost certainly be reduced demand to traffic humans for prostitution if it was legal but trafficking humans was not, compared to the situation where both are illegal, but that's not the same as no demand.
Url changed from http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/186537-biologists-discove..., which points to this.
"Large amounts of effort are spent on tedious tasks in industry for no reason other than that we haven’t figured out how to automate them yet. And novel automations of tedious tasks involve interesting mathematics by rule, not exception."

Not closely related to the article's subject, but nevertheless a good point, it's one of the reasons I consider academia to be a good place to be. At least for those at the 'top' of the pyramid...
Flipboard for Animal Facts
A magazine Android App to learn about a new animal everyday. Explore the animal kingdom through beautiful facts and photos
What's the big deal with tickets? I don't understand why tickets are unlike any other commodity.

If you aren't willing to pay X for a ticket simply don't buy it. I'm not willing to pay $100 for an NHL game so I don't buy tickets either from the box office or scalpers, however, I am willing to pay $50 so sometimes I'll go by the stadium 10 minutes after a game starts to see whats around for cheap from scalpers.

For things I really want to see I don't have time to stand in line or fuck around refreshing a browser madly / keeping track of all the events in the city, so I pay someone to stand in line for me, and work out an optimum price to keep tickets available.
The Evolution of a Harvard Education
> turning sex into a commodity

But prostitution doesn't do this. A commodity has full or near full fungibility, i.e. "one sex" is (almost) substitutable by any other "one sex". Obviously this isn't true for sex.
I'm saying that decisions made in the face of economic coercion must be scrutinized and potentially voided, not because they don't directly make the individual better off than they would otherwise be, but because they normalize the coercion and make it harder to prevent a race to the bottom in society as a whole. No transaction is entirely between two individuals. Every transaction happens within and creates signals within a larger market.
I, spy
Url changed from http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/18/5914497/darwin-personal-co..., which points to this.
If you have used a model checker, you probably don't have a proof either. You have a model that might not be accurate, and testing all its inputs may be combinatorially prohibitive.
I'm sure I've bought laser pointers at Dollarama before (for $1 CAD) and those included batteries: Even if the total BOM is $3, it's still pretty cheap.
Some Lego mosaics I made from 37,301 pieces
+1 for a creative and entertaining post on possible uses, even if it cannot work out :)
In case it matters, michaelmior and Splognosticus's solutions are both POSIX shell compliant, so they should work anywhere.
(eg, busybox, dash, tcsh, zsh)
"Propositions as Types" by Wadler is a great introductory history of the interconnectedness between logic systems and programming languages:

http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/propositions-as-...
Well Dropbox/Gdrive/Skydrive etc. all offer free storage in the range of 15-30gb, which is enough for most normal users. For professionell use there is S3,glacier, box etc. and they all offer known security and redundancy.

Most businesses won't touch anything related to bitcoin and things lacking a reliable SLA.

While a lot of people have unused storage space, many lack usable upload bandwidth and have low availability, so I would assume a lot of copies would be needed.

It's gonna be very interesting to see if stuff like this or storj, which was posted earlier today, can compete with current services.

But as someone with a lot of servers with unused space I sure hope so.
…compared to similar control states wherein South Dakota, Idaho, and Iowa are the control states‽

For those not up on their US states, Rhode Island (388 people per km^2) is a fly speck of an east coast state. South Dakota (4 people/square mile) and Idaho (7 people per square mile) are large rural western states, Iowa (20 people/km^2) is a giant cornfield with some insurance company headquarters hiding in the middle.

I don't have time to check the FBI databases today†, but it smells like a cherry picking.

␄

† Ok, a little time. The selected states are definitely on the high side for forcible rapes in 2009.
I'm at work and don't want to read either of the papers at the moment, but if A asks B to provide proof of having stored some bytes, could B proxy that request to C and replay the reply to A ?
Looks like their papers have accepted for conferences. A link from the site following one made up submitter: http://diehimmelistschoen.blogspot.com/
"Transaction issuers must pay for all rewards up-front"
Will there be a way to make ongoing payments for data retention? With a proper API this could be used for secure distributed backup, that would be a killer use and something I would gladly pay "miners" for.
I find prostitution to be a very sad thing. I believe that many women are forced into it. Either overtly, by physically violent boyfriends/pimps who threaten to beat them, or more subtly by being raised in an environment with few options and/or becoming addicted to drugs. I would like for it to be non existent but it's pretty apparent that it's always going to be part of our society for the foreseeable future. I therefore want it legalized and regulated. The majority of the problems around prostitution are because it's run by criminal elements and not the State. Do you want to ensure basic physical protections for prostitutes? Create well managed brothels where they are safe. Next step up. Want to ensure they have reasonable health and nutrition? Pull them out of the shadows and let brothel's or the state offer benefits and look after their ladies around nutrition, rehab, keeping more of what they earn (economic interests align!) Final step - want to offer them a way out? It's hard when they're hiding in the shadows. Decriminalize it and you can target the industry with new skills/training/work opps etc.

If you're against prostitution I think the worse thing you can do is want it outlawed.
Industrial Automation here....

I'd kill for a TDD framework in the tools I use. While you label many things as "hip programming" my industry is several years behind the fast paced methods of more popular platforms like the web.

For the record, TDD was taught in my university education course as a pretty core testing methodology. The reasoning behind it is sound as it really helps you program to contract and forces the programmer/engineer/manager/whatever to make critical thinking decisions ahead of time. Working "On the fly" isn't always practical.
Well, not to get myself flagged as anti-AI terrorist but:

Tldr;

If one believes life right now is already one eternal torment

And if one reads about Roko's Basilisk

Then wouldn't one be compelled to fight the development of AI and the coming singularity?

That's the real world objection that the LessWrong people (Witches! Or at least tools of the future...) are afraid of.

Otherwise, well worn HN singularity talking points/metaphysics.

But at least the article gives me something to consider further -- needlessly using up cycles in the Universal Super Computer. But does that make the simulation stronger or weaker? Doh!
We break them.

Take your colleagues out to lunch and explain that in order to determine if there is any on-going wage discrimination that you think that the group should share their salaries with each other, and that you're willing to go first if they agree to share their salaries as well. Follow up by posting your salary to GlassDoor.

My understanding of the law in my country is that discussing salaries for the purpose of preventing wage discrimination is explicitly legal, but this is not legal advise and I likely do not live in your country.

Edit: The group you take our to lunch should not include your supervisor/boss. For some reason my experience tells me that they view this as undermining behaviour no matter how you broach the subject.
Having my book available on Amazon didn't require me to change or avoid doing anything on an other outlet. As far as I can tell you can publish a Kindle version of a book on Amazon at whatever rice you like, and sell it elsewhere at any other price you like. So, at least in that case, there is no price parity requirement.

It's their optional Kindle Select[0] special promo arrangement that says that to be eligible the work cannot be offered anyplace else. Joining Kindle Unlimited requires first joining Kindle Select.

Does anyone here know if the EU Kindle Select program has the same restrictions?

0: https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A6KILDRNSCOBA
> Personally I have the impression that many web programmers, especially those who has never worked with anything other than the web, are ignorant of the existence of other branches of programming.

I see this again and again in the articles that show up here. Occasionally, mobile apps are acknowledged (although they usually mentioned when the author is trying to make a point about trivial social media apps).

> I have a feeling that most of complexity in web programming is incidental. It's a result of how poorly the web is designed as a platform. Of course it's very successful commercially but from a technical standpoint it isn't good.

It seems that most of the technical challenges that people run into in this field can be divided into two categories:

* Needing to accomplish something difficult by developing, implementing, or otherwise employing novel techniques, algorithms, data structures, automation, etc.

* Needing to hack around poorly designed or obsolete software, such as CSS hacks to get older versions of IE to render a page element correctly.
The time one of my colleagues debugged a line-of-business application
Last Show HN: http://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=story,show_...

Last Ask HN: http://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=story,ask_h...

Front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/rss

You should be able to build something :)
Alternately you could keep the same number of characters and use the "extra" to encode more accuracy. Trimming it from 10m accuracy down to 3m sounds very useful for finding stores and homes in denser cities.
Bring it on, many of these are great services.

I guess in today's economy being a jerk means understanding the time value of money.

Why is paying people to look for parking spots such a big deal? It reminds me of when the City of Vancouver arrested an old grandmother because she would go around adding nickels and dimes to people's parking meters.

If cities would invest in the kinds of infrastructure people actually want this would be far less of a big deal. Many people want parking spots, therefore if you reduce the number of spots it increases the value of them to the point where it becomes worthwhile to act as a parking scout.
Typhoon Neoguri by PressureNet
One who uses short term spikes to make their long term data look better? We can(and have) gone back and forth on this a bunch.

That reply is actually to me in a previous discussion. As I said before Bitpay has known to do the exact same thing(use short term spikes) and attribute it to daily volume. They did it during the last holiday season along with Coinbase then both ended up deleting all the blog posts when called out on their figures not matching up.

So until I see a long term trend from them that is >$1m/day or I see merchants coming forward and saying they are seeing increased sales I'm going to take that figure with a grain of salt.

As for the rest. Half your stats there are increased employee and office count which come from them raising money.

The other half is an increase in merchant adoption which makes sense. Everything about bitcoins in legitimate transactions is beneficial to merchants by putting all the risk and fees on the consumer side.
How do you know? Seriously.

It intuitively appeals to me that people in cults might not have the self-awareness to debate their own cultishness, but, then, I don't really know anyone in a cult. At one point I did meet a couple at a party who were involved in... something... that involved homeopathy and a spiritual leader. And they chuckled and said that they might be in a cult.
Bof, French does change, all of the time, and the Académie française only codifies and regularises these changes 30 years later -- it is irrelevant to the development of the language. What is different is that 'loanwords' are frenchified almost immediately, my favourite example being the regular -er verb 'liker', to like on Facebook, je like, tu likes, il like, nous likons, ...
The popular understanding of "math" very much is "performing the correct sequence of calculations/manipulations to solve a given problem". This is because US math is taught this way, from addition of fractions to symbolic differentiation of functions in high school.

Most people never grok that math is really about building abstractions of various levels of sophistication and saying (proving) useful/interesting things about those abstractions.

Programming fits more with the latter notion. Even web programming: we have abstractions like user interface, color theme, database table, scripts, etc. The web programmer has to construct these abstractions and then do useful things with them.

I would agree that programming and math are cognitively very similar, and both very similar to using language. However, I also understand why programmers may like programming yet "hate math". It's because their understanding of math is derived from US standard math education, which is essentially about the memorization of symbolic procedures, with very little constructive abstraction happening.
Most of the job cuts in Microsoft will come from its Nokia unit in Finland[1] where, to use your own words, there are fewer gigs to go around. Compounding the problems is that Finland is in the middle of a long recession and unemployment is about 10.7 percent[2].

[1] http://online.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-layoffs-hit-nokias-...

[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-17/microsoft-job-cuts-...
The best thing about speaking bad French is that it makes French people speak English to you. Possibly because they don't want to hear their beloved language mangled, but I don't really know. All I know is that they kindly switched once they heard me speaking. :)
> As you may recall from high school biology, almost every living organism consumes sugar to survive. When it gets right down to it, everything you eat is ultimately converted or digested into single molecules of glucose.

This is an oversimplification. Some bacteria have very weird metabolism. (Or, from the other point of view, some bacteria think that we have a very weird metabolism :) ). They oxidize and reduce different kind of compounds to obtain energy. More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbial_metabolism

The [extremetech] article has very few details and I think that it's misleading. I can't find the original research article.

There are some interesting details in the video. (Is this a video of this experiment?) Apparently these bacteria use O2 (oxigen) and H2S (hydrogen sulfide). The metabolism is probably like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbial_metabolism#Sulfur_oxi...
That doesn't surprise me. I've seen these things (Aloha terminals) still running Windows 98. BOH was on Windows XP at least. From my experience, it's less about not having time, and more about being completely unaware of the requirement to patch the things.
I think we should just do away with the term 'programmer'. It doesn't really mean much anymore. A 'programmer' could be anything from someone deep into the algorithmic side of thing to someone who spends most of their time writing event hooks in a UI. I don't mean to imply any level of 'who's better' in that statement, just that they are very different concerns, often with little in common other than 'writing code'. Making any generalization of programmers is bound to be wrong.
Software Development Sucks
Partition Tolerance and Hadoop. Part 1: HDFS
I always wanted proof of work to be computation power which is saved up over time, which can be spent as computation bursts on a network, or sold. Perhaps using pnacl binaries to to the computations.

Rather than waste CPU power on mindless hashing, you could accomplish real computation tasks.

This is pretty cool too though.
That's just mindboggling. Perhaps before too long we'll grow computers rather than manufacturing them. The implications are staggering.

I'm surprised not to have heard more about this before now, but a search for 'shewanella geobacter' yields a rich trove of primary sources.
You're absolutely right, and I should have said that!

I was trying to contrast to the case of just typing it into some kind of map service, i.e. MapCodes. A lat/long pair unambiguously resolves to a single point in that service.
Cayenneapps – SWOT tool
While the software itself may be free and open, often the authors of the software provide consulting & professional services around the implementation of the software. If the software in question has a primarily commercial purpose, I can see this conflict of interest confusing authorities.

Open Source is a widely used marketing and product strategy used to gain traction &market share and make substantial capital gains by the owners Github, MongoDB and many other start-ups.

It's not clear to me any of this is "non-profit" by default.
Civ 5 mod lets you exploit migrant workers in 'first true' World Cup sim
SWOT Application can be most helpful in many different areas such as: startup idea validation, company market position identification or personal career development. It uses custom wizard, which utilize extended version of famous SWOT analysis method and can predict recommended strategies for user.<p>Intuitive wizard guides customer step by step and explains whole process of getting from identification of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to final strategy and meaningful insights.
Obviously, many comments confused with the following two:

Programming involves math != Programming is math

For example, john_b's comment confuses the use of math in programming with programming per se.
There is also the Maidenhead Locator System used by Amateur Radio. I always thought it was very useful and could have applications outside of Amateur Radio:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System
This is not legal advice.
My understanding of Canadian law is that discussing your pay for the purposes of preventing wage discrimination is explicitly legal. This information is from a senior colleague who helped me stand up for myself (them along side me) to a previous employer regarding a pay dispute.

Edit: Typo
This video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5E8kDo2n6g

youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5E8kDo2n6g -o 1.mp4 && mediainfo 1.mp4 | grep date

Encoded date: UTC 2014-07-16 19:07:49
Tagged date: UTC 2014-07-16 19:07:49

One day before ... Frame-up?
Why would a hired car company be non-regulated, and not have guaranteed training? I know that's the current state, but what's the reason for it? The only reason that I can come up with is that people who privately hire a car are expected to have done more due diligence about the company, therefore are more aware of the risks that they're taking. That is not necessarily true, and may not even be commonly true.

I say that raising your hand to hail a car and making a call to hire a car are identical acts, and that it was inevitable that someone would come up with a way to make a call that was as simple as raising your hand. Are those cabs being hired or hailed? Does it matter? Why?