skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>That is, I suspect it's possible, but difficult for a human player to surmise the probability of tiles hidden in an opponents pieces based on the words they've recently played (or not played) - but being able to do so, based on a count of which tiles have already been played and are visible on the table, is probably more challenging - but straightforward for a computer.

I have played a very small amount of competitive Scrabble and a few of my friends are playing in the National tournament that this article references. What you describe is utterly standard by even mediocre tournament players.

Tournament Scrabble players do a lot more than memorize good lists of 2s and 3s. It is truly impressive how deep the game can be.
Well, if I buy two books at $15 each I would probably buy three at €10 each. So the individual book has more readers and some other book has more readers.
On exercises where one really struggles (yes, I'm super stupid when it comes to Chess -- I can play Go which is supposed to be harder but for some reason anything beyond the utter basics of Chess eludes me) it's very frustrating to be shown the same hint over and over again when it's irrelevant or unhelpful (e.g. "Think about the name of the tactic - the windmill... it goes around and around!" Yes, I'm thinking about it! Now give me a hint!)
A niche news reader for startup people. Seems like a very useful app idea. I could use such an app everyday if you can execute it well.
Yes, from 10% (current state) to 50% (the "limited" state).
>>There are good reasons Quicksort is largely being abandoned for standard-library sort implementations.

Maybe I am not up to date on that but there was some fuss lately about implementation of dual pivot quicksort in Java standard library which was to replace the old implementation (http://www.docjar.com/html/api/java/util/DualPivotQuicksort....)

My experience is also that quicksort smokes all merge-sort hybrids on partially sorted inputs but of course that might be because my inputs had something very specific in them when I tested it.
Quicksort is very cache friendly (pivot sits in a register, and you keep comparing to what is already in cache assuming you sort small structs with key in them).

My intuition is that mergesort hybridgs being faster in some languages is very specific to implementation of those languages and they will lose once you are down to sorting C structs.
"register"?
A better link would be: http://lcamtuf.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/a-bit-more-about-ameri...
I think I'm a pretty good chess player but a lot of the times I'm just playing the game without tactics or strategy but I win most of the time. Do tactics actually help against
a great player
This made me sign up for HN. I just finished reading it and needed to see who was discussing it.

While I agree with some other commenters that it seemed a tad manipulative, it seems that the authors seem to be against Hachette in this instance. I read the comments as of the Author's Guild post as suggested and there were some pretty strong feelings about it.

Basically the small time authors are getting screwed while the big time authors aren't really bothered. This doesn't really affect me but it'd be fun and great if Hachette did accept that second offer and author's got 100% of the sales, if only for a short while.

As also stated, I don't really get why or how Amazon can change the pricing of Hachette's books. If someone would kindly explain that.
I'm also an actuary, but do some coding in my own time. I'm primarily here due to interest on current technology and programming trends and generally interesting articles.

Our team does a lot of analysis programming in R rather than taking the more common Excel/VBA approach. This allows common practices in software development such as version control tools (and the collaboration they can help with), testing, deployment strategies, etc, to be a major part of the usual workflow that would otherwise be missing from the usual speadsheet world so exposure to HN helps promote this in my mind as good practice.

The main draw of HN for me is the consistently high quality of posts and comments. I can be sure that were I to see the same content posted across general news sites, or other aggregators such as Reddit, then HN would be the only place I'd care to look and be certain that I'd also be learning plenty (often more than the original article) from the HN comments alone.
Those function names are almost certainly set in IDA by the reverse engineer (I think it's "n" to rename a function).
Programming Language Composition
Maybe the ranking system is flawed? I don't think Nigel played directly against the computer.
I was noodling around to find the correct answer to this question, when I found this. It has nothing to do with why Nigel is the best Scrabble player.

"It is very hard to draw a rack that does not contain a valid word" - http://stats.stackexchange.com/a/6075
This statsSE answer includes an R program.
LOVE it!
I have been in love with shortmail but never used it much because they were very unreliable, and finally closed. My e-mail overload comes from singups and newsletters not people, but it is a great tool to hide e-mail on a blog or twitter.

One request though.
Could you check your gender form. I have twice changed to female, and it still shows male and refers to em as male.
For people who don't have time to watch the entire talk, the highlights:

- An editor which allows near-arbitrary nesting of languages (for example, SQL in Python in HTML, then exporting the whole thing as Python code to generate a web-page from a database query)

- A "bridge" interpreter implemented in RPython that allows communication between the PyPy (Python) and HippyVM (PHP) runtimes.

- As an example, they had a 'hello world' script where "hello" was a global variable in PHP, "world" was a local variable in a Python function, and the string concatenation was done by a PHP lambda defined inside the Python function, and then invoked by Python. Note that PHP doesn't support dynamic scoping, so that was added by their glue code.

- The combined VM, after being processed by RPython into a tracing JIT, could process monolingual PHP code about as fast as HippyVM (still many times faster than ZEND PHP).
I may use it if only you could also filter Startup Buffer ;)
It is hard to draw a rack of Scrabble tiles that does not contain a valid word
Isn't that pretty similar to the "Merge in turn" that the UK Highway Code recommends?

> Merging in turn is recommended but only if safe and appropriate when vehicles are travelling at a very low speed, e.g. when approaching road works or a road traffic incident. It is not recommended at high speed.
Pretty cool, although it keeps crashing my Safari on OSX Yosemite beta somehow :)
Ebola is a public health emergency, WHO says
Launching a StartupFrom Afghanistan
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8156581

This is the problem. He/She conveyed it better. A single hint buried under verbose reading, and then a freaking pop-up saying the same hint.
The course you recommend (it's good, I've read it) involves writing parsers and some bits of Risk; the follow-up includes another university course, LYAH, and RWH.

You also have a lot of good resources for Cabal and for development environments. That's appreciated.

But a lot of developers' bread and butter is "this data is here; I need to grab it from this place, make appropriate changes to it, and put it in this other place." They might use an HTTP client and a JSON parser for it, or FTP and an image processing library, a database or two, etc.

Unless I'm mistaken, the first place new Haskellers would run into the first inkling of that kind of stuff would be in chapter 5 of RWH, which you describe as a "thick book" and a "reference". The first appearance of a database is in chapter 20.

This is stuff that you can find about PHP, Ruby, Python, etc. by drooling into the keyboard while Google is open. It is comparatively _exceptionally_ hard to find the same kind of nuts-and-bolts material about Haskell.
Two questions: What are the 1 % wizards? :D And how can I block ads without add ons?
Yes, please. There's a dearth of this kind of material.
The rule to limit meeting sizes is interesting. There's nothing more irritating than sitting in a meeting you have no reason to be in just because everyone else is there, especially when you're eager to get something done! Conversely, nothing derails a meeting quite like someone who has something off-topic but important on his or her mind. Limiting the size of meetings should, in addition to giving people more time to work, make the meetings themselves more focused and efficient. However, there's a price to be paid. Sometimes the best ideas come from the person who has the least reason to attend the meeting. Also, it's often advantageous for everyone to have a big-picture view of what's going on.

I wonder if a different form of meeting structure might be a good middle ground. Perhaps meetings should have "principal" members and an "audience". Call a meeting with a sharp focus and as few principals as possible. The principals are expected to speak the most and form the consensus. The audience still has the ability so speak, but not to bring up new topics, and don't necessarily have to agree with the outcome for the meeting to conclude. If a meeting is meant to cover different topics, the principals could change for each topic.

I suspect this format of meeting would be difficult to get people to buy into. However, depending on a company's needs, rigidly limiting meeting sizes might not always be worth the cost.
Slides from 500 startups' distribution conference
Can he actually beat the AI in a head-to-head match?
When I use firefox it says 'too slow? try chrome'
- it is much slower on firefox - is firefox that bad or is it just optimized for Chrome?
I submitted this to /r/Haskell and chrisdoner left you some praise and feedback (he thought I wrote it).

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/2d1dpg/λ/cjlakwi
Gulshan bellina
...the incentives being the contract.
R00t-Services.net Now Uses HTTPS Only With PFS, HSTS and SPDY
Tired of looking up lyrics? Genius Lyrics ext for Chrome
After repeated request about their API and no replies at Genius (formlery known as RapGenius) i decided to make a Chrome extension that uses it.
When viewing a video on YouTube it automatically looks up lyrics for in on Genius and adds an extra "Lyrics" tab to the UI.
Well, it's easy to know how good you are in chess. What's your rating? If you mostly play friends&family, and they don't play much chess, just having played more will be enough to win.
Russia-linked cyber attack on Ukraine PM’s office
If you are a "pretty good chess player" you are most certainly playing with tactics and strategy, you are just not aware of it. Becoming aware of it would make you a better chess player.
of course we will :)
You used coffee shops, which is a bit of a strawman. How might a small competitor even begin to compete with the iPhone?
Good idea! I'm excited to see it available on the Android.
New upcoming RC crawling/trailing youtube channel . Come check us out
We will improve the app with your feedbacks. Please help us find out what to do next
The Twin Cities had a lot of catching up to do with transit, and only recently have we started to see the fruits of our labors.

Both Minneapolis and St. Paul used to have very active streetcar systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_City_Rapid_Transit_Compan...) in the first half of the 20th century, all of which were dismantled when they fell victim to politics and hostile tactics by the oil and auto industries. Unlike Chicago, for example, the Twin Cities have no subway or elevated train system — busing has been the only form of public transit for 50 years. (I think that might explain the article.) Only in the last 10 years have we seen light rail, bus rapid transit and commuter trains. (In fact, like him or not, former governor Jesse Ventura played a significant part in getting the Blue Line built, the first light rail transit in the Twin Cities.)

As others mentioned, cycling turns out to be a decent alternative for commuting. The area has an excellent park system (which is part of the reason why the Twin Cities ranks at the top of livability indexes) and this has benefited cyclists, as almost all park and waterfronts are interconnected by separated bicycle paths. Buses and light rail are outfitted with bike racks, making it easier getting about.

Despite all this, the larger metropolitan area is still one of the least dense in the nation, much of it brought on by significant urban sprawl in the 1990s. A car is still practically a necessity, especially if you live further out than the first-ring suburbs.

Still, we’re seeing positive change. We have a huge apartment boom going on, with a scary low vacancy rate. The population of people living in downtown Minneapolis has grown from almost nothing 20 years ago to over 30,000 people today. And with more people living in the city, particularly in projects built next to the light rail, this means more are utilizing public transit — each public transit addition in the last 10 years has been a success, which has fueled future projects (you could argue the North Star commuter rail has underperformed). The Green Line (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METRO_Green_Line), which opened only 6 weeks ago finally connects the downtowns of Minneapolis and St. Paul via light rail. And it looks like the Southwest Corridor is going to happen, too.
I think what you're missing is that Amazon's point, that lower ebook prices are generally good for all parties, applies to all ebooks. They do use the phrase "a particular e-book" in their example, but I assumed that the real desire is for all ebooks to get a similarly proportional discount.

Of course, even if we just consider a price drop on a single ebook, it's still a valid point that this helps that ebook compete against other ebooks that don't change their prices, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Android is in our to do list but now we focus on the iOS. keep waiting
As opposed to say, younger people more familiar with technology.

It's a humorous stereotype, not everything is sexist.
Saw Andrew Ng and thought it was for machine learning.
I'm around 1000 on chess.com blitz (5min games), and found a lot of useful stuff here. Especially the positioning is what I feel like I'm losing on at the moment. I don't do big blunders anymore, but somehow I'm often in a worse position than my opponent.

I started a few months ago, and have progressed nicely. But lately I've been stuck. Looking up resources, they have often been too simple ("learn chess, this is how the pieces move") or too advanced ("5 variations of opening X" isn't very useful at my level of play).
Now, eridius, you are starting to repeat a point you already made and that I already rebuked. This is a sign you have no way to "win" this argument and you are merely trying to have the last word :)

So I will repeat the rebuke I already told you, but I will repeat it only ONCE. After this, if you repeat yourself again, I am done here, since you are wasting our time. You are bringing up scenario (3) and my rebuke was "nothing inherent to Bitcoin PREVENTS the merchant from taking all the same precautions he takes for credit cards: for example he could check your ID (like some supermarkets do in the US), check your credit score, verify your presence in his own database of high-risk customers, etc" Therefore Bitcoin with 0 confirmations is no more risky than credit cards to accept in brick-and-mortar stores where the customer can run away after paying.
I study psychology. I have a masters in computer science and I am amazed every day anew how much of my old skill is very usefull within other domains. I don't label myself a hacker.
Pixate, Inc. (YC S12) is changing mobile interaction design. We need you
I'm not in the software industry per se, but was. Up until last August I was running my own software development company that had just taken a big hit when our biggest client pulled out with no real warning.

Fast forward to today, I'm now a qualified secondary school teacher in the UK, teaching Business, Computing and Japanese. I get the urge to come back to full-time programming from time to time, but genuinely love being out of 'burnout' mode.

I really enjoy coming here because I still love keeping on top of tech and entrepreneur news, want to stay ahead of the curve, and hey, you never know, I might find a company that is looking to 'disrupt' secondary education in a way that I 100% believe in. Haven't seen it yet, but some companies are getting close (Khan Academy, looking at you!).

It also keeps me from spiraling into my "I'm not doing enough!" mentality that I have for myself, and inspires the wantrepreneur side of me.
There's a 'how to play chess' book I can't recall the name of, with similarly useless advice:

Rule #2: Make the right move.
As I read the article, the very first chart lies horribly to the reader. Its scale doesn't cover 100%, it's just a zoom over 30-70% and nothing warns against this.

And why mere 60% of the workforce is called "so many"? If it was 80%, it could be called that. The article tries to create a problem where I think is none.
A quick google search seems to indicate that 21320 is a port commonly used to setup a proxy after an infection. It's probably the attacker trying to use the honeypot as a proxy after a "successful" infection of the machine.
I started working on a python script to monte-carlo the problem, but it's pretty complex.

Even if we assume that you always start with a full bag of 100 tiles, every tile drawn changes the odds of the next draw in a different way.

Right now I've got a series of "unique draws" that grow slightly slower than the number of tries, but I'm not yet sure what single number it would converge to at infinity tries.
The article claims there are just shy of 200,000 scrabble words.

Why would it be so complex? The key is to use all 7 of your letters. The subset of valid words containing all 7 letters you hold shouldn't be that large, surely the board can be exhaustively searched to fit them?
nice idea but i think there should be prepared board for each demonstration instead of getting it created during the video.
It's not a huge leap of logic. Logic is logic. If a person goes and kills a bunch of people, or orders to kill a bunch of people - you call him what? Murderer. You don't care whether he also helps old people in the nursing home or teaches children or helps the poor - those actions don't make him less of a murderer.

And yet, when a government takes tax money by force or threat of force and spends them on bloody wars where many people die, you say "but it also builds roads and educates our children and enforces private property, so it's not that bad, it's not evil". Well, it is. You're just avoiding using logic when it comes to government, it somehow is exempt from logical thinking for many people.

If you can't come up with a solution how to build a society without government and taxation, you're simply not thinking hard. The fact that there is no country on earth without government (except for Somalia, which you cannot compare to, say, the US, but which you SHOULD compare to the surrounding countries) means nothing. In the 16-th century there was no country on earth without slavery. In the same century hardly anyone in the society could imagine how to organize it without God, because, supposedly, without the fear of God humans would go crazy and start killing each other. So, please, stop and think about this: if there was no way for anyone to form a government, how would I solve all the problems governments are currently responsible for. It's a useful exercise.
"Disruption" really means using technology to find loopholes in the law e.g. AirBnB "disrupting" hotels by providing services for people operating unlicensed hotels. Do how do you disrupt a bank? Insider trading? Fraud? Stealing deposits?
Sometimes it turns out you need to do something with IO somewhere, and now you have to change all the functions down the way to use it. Similar issue is lack of exceptions - Haskell just has a type enhanced version of 'return -1' from C. Exceptions should be completely separate from successful execution paths. Throwing exception from a pure function with type like Int -> Int requires changes in everything that uses it.

That's the price of static typing. There are a lot of tricks to make that more bearable (monads and do-notation) but, you're right, refactoring requires some work until you make all the type signatures work.

Exceptions are a pain in Haskell. It's hard to get them to work in an intuitive way with laziness, and it's unclear how they'd interact with a type system. In an ideal world, Int -> Int would mean a function that can't throw an exception. Of course, there are very few people who want to live in a world where division has a type signature of Int -> Int -> Maybe Int, and it's not clear what else to do (but throw an exception, or hard-crash) in the case of unhandled division-by-zero.

Haskell has an exception system but it's hard to use because of laziness and some other factors. The more idiomatic error handling is to use the Either type:

Either l r = Left l | Right r

where Left corresponds to the erroneous case and Right to the successful path. Either is a monad in the latter argument so you can use do notation to make it "look imperative".

The third issue I remember was that all fields' names are global.

They're specific to the module you're writing in. If you import a whole module (which you generally shouldn't, except in ghci) then you'll often have collisions.

All of this makes it very hard to write the minimal working code now and extend it later.

I wouldn't necessarily use Haskell for a small project. Python or Clojure are great tools, and dynamic typing (IMO) is perfectly fine until you get into thousands of LoC. Of course, if you like static typing (which I do) and want to learn more about it, you can certainly use Haskell for small projects and it will work just fine... but it's more efficient (if you're not familiar with Haskell) to use Python or Clojure.

Maybe there's some True Way of using Haskell which doesn't suffer from these issues, but I haven't found it.

It took me a while to "get" the elegance of Haskell. It forces you to program in a different way: small functions, minimal interleaving of stateful computations (IO) and stateless ones. It can be very concise and beautiful, but it's very different from other languages, even other high-power ones like Clojure.
Well, you can still jump in on the very fun and competetive Al Zimmerman's challenge (which ends in about a week, though), the current task is exactly about solving the given Scrabble sets in the best possible way: http://www.azspcs.net/Contest/AlphabetCity
This seems really nice. I've played chess on and off since I was a kid, but never really studied it. Lots of the basic tactics I saw in this course I remember using intuitively. It's nice to have a formalised notion of all those things, so you can consequently move forward to the more advanced stuff! :)
Hmm, that’s an interesting question. Most of the studies only focus on auto traffic. I know the Twin Cities metro area fares good enough to be outside the top 10 worst (http://www.forbes.com/pictures/lmj45mlei/no-1-san-francisco-... http://time.com/2849442/worst-traffic/ etc.) which I think it’s because of three factors — population size, lack of density, and highways with BRT and HOV lanes.

As far as the winters go… it’s kind of a roll of the die. Sometimes we have very mild winters where it barely snows at all. And then other years we get brutal weather like last winter, which forces rare parking restrictions where you can only park on one side of the street. However, when it does snow, Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Mn/DOT are incredibly efficient when it comes to plowing streets and highways.