skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If you took a dynamic methods class in school, you know that big-O notation is pretty much meaningless in the real world. Which is to say, it doesn’t matter how an algorithm operates on an arbitrary set of data

I once spent a day or two trying to figure out why our network simulation was grinding to a halt.[1] The research guys, of course, blamed us engineering guys (you're writing slow code!) Turns out that one of them changed a key algorithm so now it was exponential in the number of nodes in the network. Worked fine when he did a quick 5-node sanity check on his machine, but wrecked havoc on the 50-node full-scale simulation.

Yeah, you can get a surprising amount of stuff done by just derping around. Doesn't mean the educational system should encourage that.

[1] This was a few weeks before a major milestone demo, and days were precious.
I've been mostly unimpressed with MaidSAFE approach to the storage problem.

They (last I checked) are approaching the problem by using quadruple redundancy, no erasure coding. This opens some attack vectors, because an attacker only needs to control 4/4 pieces, something that takes a probability of (attacker control)^4 . Their proof of storage also seems to use nonce's, which require precomputation before uploading the file, and means a limited amount of proofs before you have to fetch the file and compute a bunch of other nonce's.

The biggest problem with MaidSAFE's stuff is that it's all over the place. There's no concise document that explains proof-of-storage. Their approach seems enormously complex, which to me indicates a huge likelihood of undetected vulnerabilities (complexity is bad when you want security).
I recommend the Turks and Caicos Islands. English is the national language (though many people also speak creole), the currency is USD, there are no income taxes and you can get residency with a real estate investment of as little as $75k. It's also one of the most beautiful places to live in the world. Cost of living is comparable to the midwest (they do have 15% sales tax), and the internet is fast. Great place to do a tech startup.
The document is probably old. Some target may have been using SL as a method of communication.
Jet Engineer Designs a Saucepan That Boils Water Ridiculously Fast
Geohot Recruited to Google Security Team Project Zero as Paid Intern
I think you mean Pangloss, who was a parody of Leibniz in Candide who was written by Voltaire. [0]

Is there some connection to Molière that I was unaware of, or was that just a brain fart?

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_of_all_possible_worlds#Cri...
Looking at the landing page on my iPhone and all I see is a bit of copy and a still image of a forest. Based on the comments in this thread the app seems worth downloading but not so much based just on the landing page. Are other people seeing video on the landing page when viewing on the iPhone?
Well I suppose if you're just doing basic web programming you're not doing math. But even that (animations, etc.) can involve a ton of math.

Low level programming, the programming high languages are based on, use a lot of math. Using ruby on rails is just abstracting you from the math you'd have to do if you were actually programming something hard.
Honestly curious, what is the alternative to PTO? I don't see why this is such a bad thing - you get X days off, you can use them for whatever reason you want - sick or vacation - as long as X is a reasonable number, what's the issue here?
Sloth Fur May Help Fight Cancer and Malaria
This is what Linus Torvald's office looks like
Forgot to mention Internations, a social network for expats. You can sign up there and read the forums of your choice destination. There will typically be a thread with advice for interested immigrants, and helpful people to answer your questions.

http://www.internations.org/
> What has your experience been?

Great, I really like it here. Mostly because for the most of my careers I've been working next to highly educated people, so my perception is that the Dutch are much smarter than the English. Plus I'm usually not the smartest person in the room (thankfully!). None of that small-minded idiocy that I see at home.

The culture is great; they're direct like the Americans, commercial like us Brits and diplomatic like the Scandinavians. The directness suits me, and I can use my British politeness when needed too. More tools in the toolbox.

> What is your particular career?

Software Architect (the good kind, who can code) though I'm trying to start up for myself.

> What were your moving expenses?

About 10k EUR, moving was 1k but you need 5k for a cheap 2nd hand car and 1k for health insurance and other costs.

> How much is your rent or did you buy?

Buy, 1.2k EUR a month mortgage on a house in an average town.

> Where did you move to/from?

UK to Netherlands to be with my dutch girlfriend (now wife). That was 8 years ago.

> How are the schools?

Excellent, because they're split by capability (vocational, technical, university).

> Have you become fluent in the native language and was the language barrier difficult to overcome?

I'm fluent through a combination of not fearing saying something stupid and investing 3k EUR in courses at a local university.

> How long have you lived in this country? Are you a permanent resident or
> do you plan on moving back to the US?

I want to bring my baby up here. Much better than the UK.

> What was the process like to become a permanent resident?

EU to EU is very easy.

> Did you have to already have a job when you moved to that country?

I had a low-level job arranged, found a better job within a month.

> What's the cost of living compared to where you moved from? Has your quality
> of life improved or not? How and why?

Cost of living is much higher: the social system here is better, the taxes are higher and more progressive. My income is high enough that it means that I'm paying about 25% more tax. Plus in the UK I could probably earn more because I could easily switch to Sales.
I'm always surprised to see Thailand on a list of cheap places to live. I live in Bangkok in the CBD just behind the Four Seasons. While that's admittedly one of the pricier neighborhoods to live in, I've also lived in some of the "artier" lower cost neighborhoods here. Overall, this is what I've found, compared to my place of origin:

1. Rent -- 0.5 - 1.0 what you'll pay in a top-tier US city.

2. Groceries -- anything resembling what you'd get in the US will cost 1.25 - 2.00 of what you're paying in the US.

3. Cars -- 1.5 - 4.0 what you'll pay in the US. Insurance is somewhat cheaper however. Ditto maintenance. Gas is about the same.

4. Eating out -- really depends but say $30 - $200 for two people, possibly with drinks. You can eat cheaper food on the streets. You may or may not want to.

5. Electronics, watches, designer goods, etc -- significantly more than what you would pay in the US.

6. Domestic help -- if from a neighboring country very affordable, starting at $20 - $30 per day for maids and nannies.

7. Health care -- pretty incredible value here compared to the US. It would not be insane to go to a top-tier hospital without insurance here. My wife and I just had our son here. Excellent care for a fraction of US prices.

In other words, anything you might save on rent you'll make up for on everything else, with the exception of healthcare and domestic help, which have very high quality vs cost.
Small world. Pretty sure I've merged some of your PRs into saltstack. I'll give it a shot :)
>Will books end up getting unskippable "updates," or even being deleted at the whim of the publishers or Amazon one day?

Amazon can already do this.

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/oct/22/amazon-wipes-cu...
Agile product development for Startups (Part one)
All transmissions are end-to-end encrypted, unless you use the "shout" or "emergency" features which are, by definition, messages to everyone within range of you.
You might find it interesting to read some Seymour Papert, e.g., Mindstorms and The Children's Machine.
In that case, wouldn't it be nice to have a website that identifies every politician's main focus? Based on their votes and maybe with interviews on that page supporting it?

Such a website would be very useful to society, and can be done on city and state levels all around the world.
This really is a testament to how badly technology is needed in the medical field to document and cross reference these sorts of cases. It's hard to think of such an important industry being so disconnected in such a highly connected era.
Question for the OP

"we’re not exactly running a standard MongoDB instance here. Our dev team is very familiar with Mongo, we’ve squeezed quite a bit of performance improvements out of it over the years" --> Curious to know what was done to see those performance improvements. Thanks for the information
Quick, before you go, write two scripts and corresponding cron jobs that convert tabs to N spaces, or N spaces to tabs. Then, set them up to commit to your favorite repo on alternating days.

Now you can enjoy your vacation while pissing off your fellow contributors at the same time!
$112 is a lot of money just to save a minute boiling water.
How Yo became one of the most viral apps of all time
MH17: Cure for AIDS might've been lost forever
There are actors that grew up in many different countries you have seen in movies that pass just fine as americans. But it's impractical for most folks to work with a dialect coach for years, but it clearly is possible. And outside of LA the demand for dialect coaches is almost zero.
Bootstrap Grid WYSIWYG
> 2. It’s easier to discover what to add than what to remove

> Seeing that very few people had a problem on this step enabled us to hide the help text behind a link – making the screen simpler for the majority.

Awesome. So often I work with people who don't have the courage to at least try/test a solution that doesn't treat the people who will use the product like an idiot and instead populate as much instructional text as possible.
>>Summertime in Norway is holiday time. People can take up to the whole month off.

As a fellow Scandinavian I should clarify this:

Despite all the jokes about spending an afternoon in bed sleeping off a hangover and missing the summer, the summer is longer than one month.

I should also say I loved Bergen, the little I've been there. Despite the weather. I see a suitable job there, I'm going to apply for it.
Show HN: Open-Source Real-Time Invoice System with Feedback for Bitcoin
Great advice. I moved to Thailand last year by myself (and moved back in March). I absolutely loved Thailand, but there many stressful times trying to get things set up. I had a good friend already there (American who spoke some Thai), which helped immensely, but he was around only so much to help.

One of my funnier memories was getting set up for Internet. After I waited for a rep who could speak English well enough to help, I sat down and got her pitch for a 6 month up front payment deal.

I listened politely and when she was finished talking about the extras I'd get, I thanked her and declined the offer. Then she said that they require all foreigners to pay 6 months up front.

"Oh, well in that case I'll take the 6 month deal"
That list looks awful. If you do want to go the scientific route, you'll have to work this out yourself, based on the metrics that are important to you. You can find individual indexes (Healthcare, Journalistic freedom, political neutrality, risk of war, risk of natural desasters, etc.), then weigh them as per your preference and calculate a total score. The outcome may surprise you :)
Precise English is "Legalese" - lots of definitions, qualifiers, and words having precise technical meanings.
This is the best news I've heard in a long time, but how do they filter the "disable ads" IAP vs the "oh you spent 3 hours getting invested in this game, but you can't reasonably proceed further until you buy xxx"?
I wish icon fonts used ligatures to select the right glyph, rather than meaningless codepoints (e.g. you can make font automagically replace characters "git" with the Git logo).

Otherwise these fonts end up being used in a non-accessible way (I browse with webfonts disabled and keep seeing boxes instead of images, with no fallback or a useless display:none'd fallback).
I actually really don't like this. I took a look at the source and the images are being loaded from the original sites.

For the content creators that pay for hosting with ad revenue you're still hitting their servers and depriving them of the way that they support themselves.
Wow, that is one of the craziest lists I have ever seen.

Several of the places there would be interesting to live (I have a soft spot for Georgia, for instance), but I wouldn't recommend them to somebody coming from the US and looking to settle in easily.
I took a programming course where we wrote a number of programs in assembly language. We were given a set of rules and operations, a starting point, a goal, and we spent our time carefully assembling sequences of statements that took us from the starting point to the goal while obeying the rule system.

I took a math course where we did a number of proofs in natural deduction. We were given a set of rules and operations, a starting point, a goal, and we spent our time carefully assembling sequences of statements that took us from the starting point to the goal while obeying the rule system.

I'm dense, but I wondered about the strength of the correspondence between the two. It turns out that there's a nice paper by Philip Wadler [1] that illustrates the equivalence of natural deduction (math) and Church's lambda calculus (math, but programming).

[1] 'Proofs are Programs: 19th Century Logic and 21st Century Computing', Philip Wadler
Betaworks is participating in the seed round of Yo
The weeks are for vacation.
Vacation doesn't have to involve going anywhere exotic, by the way. A vacation should really just be a time you are free from your main responsibilities and free from stress. So that means you could do it from home, but hacking away on a side project you've been stressing about finishing may not be the best idea (unless, of course, it causes you no stress).
Similarly, sometimes your sorting algorithm takes linear time because the input was a sorted list. That's the lower bound, but lower bounds usually aren't as interesting as upper bounds.
It seems mildly insulting that someone of his talent is a "paid intern" after winning a $150,000 prize although I'm sure the money is better than most people earn "full-time".

Ironically, no matter how hard Project Zero works we are probably all subject to the biggest security hole of all, a backdoor to US Government, that encompasses not only software but hardware components.

Note: Apologies for not linking to the source, Wired
http://www.wired.com/2014/07/google-project-zero/
I've often wondered whether we should think of things the other way round; ie, whether secondary education in mathematics could benefit from a programming component.

Certainly, for my part, becoming a developer kindled an interest in some higher maths, when ten short years ago I was slogging resentfully through my A level. I now love playing around with things like Haskell, precisely because of the 'mathsiness' of it, although I'm at a disadvantage from having not pursued it further before.

It seems to me that a bit of simple code could make the stuff seem more 'real' and interesting than it did to a lot of my peers back then. (And, of course, there was the whole 'try it in basic!'[0] thing in American textbooks.)

[0] http://www.salon.com/2006/09/14/basic_2/
[HOPE X] Streaming Live
Irmin: Git-like distributed, branchable storage
> Areas claimed by two countries are simply included in both contexts.

If I understand this correctly, it means that any address in a disputed territory has multiple mapcodes, one for each claimant, and therefore whichever one you use you are implicitly backing one political claim over the others.

If so, this is a potential can of worms that many people won't want to open.
That's sounds like example of someone with math skills applying them to make an awesome bit of code.

But I've also heard about math PhDs write the sloppiest code code imaginable: functions 1000+ lines long, copying and pasting functions to add a parameter... (in production code for a software company, not a research project).

So like you said, math helps but I'd like to extend that thought and say that you can make bigger gains elsewhere. For example, if you're a sloppy coder and don't know math, go out and get a book like "Code Complete," "The Pragmatic Programmer" or "Clean Code" first.
Why math should be done by programming
Also Expatistan for looking up cost of living comparisons: http://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living
No. Nothing beats hoarding vacation days.
Most people miss this important point:
the most important part of MapReduce is the shuffle step, which is a global, partitioned disk-to-disk sort. See the FlumeJava for a bit more discussion on why this is relevant.
Everything else about MapReduce is just framework to make programmer's lives easier. BTW, not having strong typing in classic MR is a major pain point. Flume goes a long way to addressing this in a practical way.

BTW, this point elucidates the importance of this classic Google Interview question: http://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Sort-a-million-32-bit-int...
For those put off by the first few chapters, I highly recommend you try to stick with it, or skip the first 10 chapters. This story starts out with a rather insufferable tone, but after that, it becomes a lot of fun. It's what the author calls "rational fiction", meaning that there are mysteries in it that you can solve, given enough thought (unlike most of the mystery genre).
The .NET logo is wrong, this is not the C#/MS logo. The logo used comes from a Brit publication called ".net" which has nothing to do with MS .NET.
You are presupposing a basic level of proficiency and access which is 80% of the way there. Anyone who has made it, can make it.
Learning a programming language is a lot like learning a human language, but understanding math is how you learn efficient programming.

If you don't use mathematical reasoning, then you'll produce O(n^3) when you could have produced O(n). Any hack can throw together a script that will hobble along with 4 rows of data. Throw a million rows at the same script and it might terminate properly in a few years. Or maybe it just runs out of memory half way through.

Another problem is winding inefficient boolean branching. If you don't understand boolean algebra, you either over specify cases which makes code cluttered and disorganized, or you under specify and some cases are not considered at all... The result in either case is always buggy code that crashes. It becomes like a virus. Other lesser programmers are afraid to fix it, because it's so complicated. Instead, they just tweak the mess to accomplish their own goals, adding more bad boolean logic along the way. It infects everything it touches.

Finally, certain fields of programming, like machine learning, are almost entirely math and statistics. So, yeah, you don't need math to (poorly) do programming (in certain fields).
I got a job as a Rails developer without knowing Rails. Here's how I did it.

I went out to local community events with a focus on software and networked with other developers. Word got out that I (a student at the time) was a competent developer with open source experience. When I graduated, a few of my new developer friends tried to recruit me.

I took a job at a local startup as a software developer. I was going to build a new product, though the tech stack wasn't decided yet. Soon it was decided to be Ruby on Rails. I worked through the Rails guide on building your own blog, then continued to learn it on the job by doing a small project that shipped. At that point I had enough experience to design the important project and start building it.

It's worth noting that while learning Ruby/Rails, I completely surrounded myself with resources. I would answer questions on StackOverflow, follow Rails blogs, watch screencasts, hang out in the IRC channels, read and review Ruby books, watch and learn from public projects on GitHub, etc.
Link for the curious:

http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/frege/frege.pdf
"Mathematics is a language plus reasoning; it is like a language plus logic. Mathematics is a tool for reasoning."

-- Richard P. Feynman, The Character of Physical Law

Programming and Mathematics are both language + reasoning. So we can't say programming is language thus Programming is not math.
Noticed this strange date entry form: http://imgur.com/fdaUEi1

I wonder how many people correctly understood that you have to select a month and enter a year in the second field.
It's interesting that you can still see the jitter in the second to last video, through the lens flare. The motion stabilization pans the image around, but the lens flare bobs around and can't be fixed.
I disagree. It starts with a rather insufferable tone and then, somehow, it manages to get worse.
Came here to say this. I guess that if devs want their games to be listed as free they'd need to have two versions of the app, a free ad-supported version and a paid ad-free version, instead of using IAP.

I have actually seen devs do this, but I can't remember any exact cases.
> Actually it's that those MapCodes are incomplete. They're missing the country/state designation. If you look up "Ireland 0C.T4" or "US-AK 0C.T4" you should get the correct results.

Imagine if a URL resolved to different addresses in each country you were in. Would that be a better system than what we have now, or a worse one? I think it would self-evidently be worse.

I'm surprised they didn't make mapcodes a globally-unique identifier.
At the post-secondary level, If you get stuck, to the point where you can't figure something out by asking intelligent questions or reading relevant reference material, then you don't belong there. Your journey should have stopped at high school. Maybe sooner.

Professors are not teachers, and they shouldn't be. They are there to expose you to knowledge and you are there to absorb it and expand on it if you can.

Don't go to university to get a degree so you can get a job. Go because you want to learn. If you do it for any other reason you're going to end up in debt and disappointed.

The commercialization of higher learning has perverted it. They encourage people with poor life planning skills to pursue degrees that just leave them poor and bitter.
Programming for the most part is about understanding program structure and modifying the said structure.

Different people view programming very differently. For example for me programming is mainly a way to understand things. I program things I want to learn about. My understanding of programming helps me understand computers and computing. Then I have a friend who couldn't care less about how exactly things work under the hood, or in theory. All he cares about is making a product, and programming is his tool.

There's a vast difference between computer science and software engineering. I'm afraid most people with CS degrees, let alone those who want to get one, don't even understand this themselves.
Programming should be a tool that supports exploration in other subjects, yes it can be its own subject, but that shouldn't be the core focus.
The Russians I know all fought to stay in the States. Things are getting worse according to them and they were already bad. The coming sanctions will make things worse but it is better than a full on war with Russia. Despite being backwards they are still well armed. Without Putin maybe they could become more like Europe. They certainly can't while he is in power paying off his cronies and supporting brainless stooges in Ukraine.

It may make feel better to pretend that the US is as bad as Russia but you probably know you are lying to yourself.
There is massive correspondence between the two and that research is a dominating theme in branches of intuitionistic logic and type theory!