skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems to me nobody has properly explained the issue, including the original article or any of the comments so far. The problem with adverbs is best viewed through the lens of information theory. In the sentence ""Well, I guess if you had grown up with it, you would understand polo," Minx said snobbishly.", the reason snobbishly is a useless adverb is that absent any other context, the most likely way in which that sentence was said was snobbishly. Yes, it is true that the sentence may not have been said snobbishly... in that case, use the adverb because it will be adding information. For instance, I can imagine that the sentence was said "sweetly", in which case we are not probably in a very sarcastic context. "Flatly" puts another spin on it. Etc.

Doing an adverb search over a document is a good idea. It is something I'm doing more routinely in my larger writing work now (but not HN comments, so please spin down the hypocrisy detectors, I'm not claiming perfection here). If an adverb disappears from a sentence and the most likely meaning is unchanged, toss it out. If on the other hand it puts an unexpected spin on the sentence (and "the degree to which something is unexpected" is a reasonable short summary of what something's information content is), it's equally important to leave it in.

When your adverbs simply reinforce the already-most-likely meaning, they are visual noise. When they draw you away from it, they can breathe life into the drollest of scenes.
On the flip side, there're people out there who will be telling his daughter her circumstances are profoundly unfair because other people are even more advantaged than she is.
Interview with Ovuline's VP of Product on what the future of health tracking and wearables will be, why she thinks there’s big opportunities in Google Glass, and how she’s helping to get more women into tech and engineering.
If you're pre-allocating you can just turn the GC off ;)
Yes, that's what I was talking about. Dave Patterson was giving a talk in Portland about three years ago on heterogeneous computing, and he mentioned Chisel. And now it seems to be relatively mature. I am happy to see innovation in both the HDL and uArch space.
I actually built this exact thing myself last year: https://github.com/southpolesteve/deploy_button

Here is a repo that has the button included: https://github.com/southpolesteve/lucre

Obviously I never really promoted it and I'm glad to see that Heroku built something official. But maybe someone far in the future will see this comment and remember :)

Quick edit: Here is the announcement email to the local railer's group https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Mad-Railers/-1MkbbkX... To be clear, I have no reason to believe that Heroku used anything I made. Just wanted to self promote a bit.
I actually built this exact thing myself last year: https://github.com/southpolesteve/deploy_button

Here is a repo that has the button included: https://github.com/southpolesteve/lucre

Obviously I never really promoted it and I'm glad to see that Heroku built something official. But maybe someone far in the future will see this comment and remember :)
"But that's rarely good enough"

Yes it is. The vast majority of Bitcoin services and users wait for only 1 confirmation. Waiting for 6 confirmations is "excellent" whereas 1 confirmation is "good enough" (when was the last time we saw a Bitcoin double spend attempt? Never!). But arguing whether 1 confirmation is good enough is a moot point. Bitcoin competes with traditional international payment systems where it is common for transfers to post in 1-3 days especially across weekends or bank holidays ("post" has a specific definition, look it up). So even waiting for 6 confirmations makes Bitcoin faster than traditional systems.

On the other point, true, many people rely on 1 exchange, or place their coins in 1 online wallet service, which makes them vulnerable to incidents typically affecting centralized systems. But this is not a problem inherent to Bitcoin. Not at all. This is solved by educating users, by new services (eg. hardware wallets like Trezor), and by "natural selection" (eg. people who lost coins on MtGox tend to learn their lessons, weak exchanges die, secure ones remain in use, merchants can very easily use multiple Bitcoin processors at once, etc).
Someone saw the movie 'Her', hehe
2-3% of the invoice value seems high to me. They aren't providing any additional value for larger invoices, so why should they receive a percentage of the total?
Adrian Hon: A History of the Future in 100 Objects – The Long Now
Azul3D – A 3D game engine written in Go
I do have a suggestion! Not sure if it's any good though.

It's called TagTime (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=bsoule.tagtime...) and pings you with random surveys similar to reporter.

Let me know if you use it and how it works out! @thomasmeagher on the twitter.
Not sure if it's related, but LuaJIT can remove allocations all-together in a lot of cases. This[0] talks about how it works some.

[0]: http://wiki.luajit.org/Allocation-Sinking-Optimization
And yet that doesn't stop some children of poor, divorced parents, growing up in educational backwaters, from achieving success far beyond what they could have extrapolated from observing their parents' situation. So what are we saying, that it's the stupid kids who get ahead?

Hmm... that actually may not be as ridiculous as it sounds at first blush. Not "stupid" though, more like "unreasonable". I'm reminded of the George Bernard Shaw quote "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Maybe the most important thing is exactly being unreasonable enough to shoot for vistas that are seemingly unreachable?

I don't know, but personally, I think "work ethic" is one of the most important things one can glean from your family environment growing up. I grew up in a single parent household through a chunk of my childhood, and a poor, rural "white trash" sort of environment through the majority of my childhood, but if I learned one thing from my dad, it was drive and work ethic. And to the extent that I've been successful in life, I'd credit that (and a boatload of perseverance) more than anything else.

I'd be curious to know if those factors are actually largely attributable to genetic factors, or if they're more "learned behavior". shrug
This level of 3D was not really done on Apple II's, however. There were wireframe games like Stellar 7 (similar to BattleZone) and flight simulators. Walk-down-the-streets between-buildings type games were 2.5D; no real perspective, 90 degree turns only, from what I remember. These machines run at 1 Mhz, with multiple cycles per instruction, and no cache. Not that it would help, since memory keeps up with the CPU, lock step.
Ask HN: Which license for an open-source sci-fi book?
I'm writing an epic sci-fi novel. Well, I hope it will become epic. I have the whole plot and an ending (and possible ideas for sequel) and I wrote a large chunk of the first chapter so far.

I'm not a native English speaker, and I'd like to encourage others to chip in with editing or writing new parts of the storyline I have not envisioned yet, by making the book open source.

My main goal is to sit in a theater one day and see a blockbuster movie made out of this story. Because I love blockbuster sci-fi movies, and quality ones are in short supply.

I assume that studios would only make a movie if they can secure exclusive rights to the material.

To sum all this up, an open source license is needed that:

1. would allow anyone to read it for free

2. would allow anyone to contribute to make it a great sci-fi story

3. would allow me to sell the story (for, say $1) to the studio we as a community deem best equipped to create a great movie

4. would prevent other studios from doing the same

The closest I could find would be to use Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. But if there will be many contributors, we could face problems with item 3. above. I'm thinking maybe I should require all the contributors to assign the copyright for their contributions to me, so that I could sell the commercial rights to a studio at some point. Similar to the way GNU works, IIRC.

Any ideas?
So cool. If anyone is interested, I've spent the summer going through "The History of Rome" podcast from Mike Duncan (http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/), and even as someone who thought he knew a little bit about Roman history, its been fascinating - ie, we're just getting to the end of Caesar's reign, and we spent as much time on the Tarquins' as we did on Ceasar. I've heard great things about Dan Carlin, but I wanted to start from the beginning.
The rules you've consciously learned about language constitute a tiny fraction of the rules that govern our use of language. Many of them ("don't split infinitives!", "no prepositions at the end of a sentence!") fail to be descriptive.

Not that it matters, but "biweekly", "biannually", and "bimonthly" have always only had a single meaning for me. I've heard the debate about them, but I don't think I've ever actually seen them used to mean "once every two weeks/months/years".
I also don't like the "up" in "caught up". Claude Shannon is rolling in his grave.
Thanks!

I learned Node.js by watch some of Pedro Teixeira's screencasts: http://nodetuts.com/

I'm using Express.js as the backend framework and read some tutorials on that. Can't remember which ones.

I learned Backbone.js by reading the docs: http://backbonejs.org/ along with reading source code of projects I was familiar with.

This best practices article came in handy too: http://geeks.bizzabo.com/post/83917692143/7-battle-tested-ba...

For layout design, I tend to sketch my UX ideas on paper. For this site, since it's so minimal, I designed straight in the browser using HTML / CSS (SASS)
3D Body Models From The Kinect in a Snap
Yeah, lots of opportunity here for sure. One thing I've been getting good feedback on from some fashion bloggers is the "shop the look" feature on each photo. Affiliate links is how many fashion bloggers monetize.
This Guy Tracks Everything About Himself
I'm not sure if that thread is the right place, that's why I'm asking. May be someone has contacts with Google XMPP team and can deliver this bug to them. They probably don't read these groups.

I agree, that Google doesn't care about XMPP. Not because it's not suitable for mobile needs - it can be made suitable. Google could work on needed XEPs.

Google just became selfish and turned their back to the whole open IM movement. It was a complete reversal, since Google advocated strongly for it before. Explanation from Eric Schmidt was really weird - something like "since others didn't join, we quit".
This thread is going to contain a lot people complaining that even though today's hardware is orders of magnitude more powerful than twenty years ago, our computers seem to be just as slow.
I think the folks who make the game modules usually ask for permission from the game designer first. I know that's what happened with the Dominant Species module.
http://www.vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:Dominant_Species
I can understand RISC-V's use in academic settings or if you truly want open hardware.

But what's the commercial benefit? Its an open core, its lacking patents because the performance critical aspects have been patented by others in their designs, so how does this stack up in terms of performance? Can you make a processor design as fast as proprietary ones like the Linux effort?

Second comes the issue of fabrication, is there somebody ready to fab this? Or are you just going to throw this on a large FPGA? If you're throwing it on a FPGA, then why take jabs at the other ISA's when you'll be running this on non-open proprietary sillicon anyways.

Lastly, who cares? I'm guessing embedded is out as they care out the cost of each chip, the cheaper and more performant the better. Perhaps you're running something mission critical or are totally tied to a architecture, but then you're a dinosaur, the industry's trending towards abstracting the hardware away anyways. Do you really care which piece of sillicon your app runs on?

All of the above's probably really biased, misguided and wrong, but I'd like to hear what other HN'ers have to say.
The lack of auth and encryption is only part of the problem with Stratum's implementation. At Toorcamp 2014 I presented about the vulnerabilities discovered when looking into common miners and their impact on the network. More details available in the associated white paper:

http://www.dejavusecurity.com/blog/2014/7/15/bitcoin-researc...
That was particularly informative. [1]

[1] youtube.com/watch?v=xECUrlnXCqk
I've been in that thought train before, and I don't have kids.

When I think of my future parent self, I want to try to walk the thin line of granting advantages to my kids without coddling them. It's easy to fall into this trap, where the kid seems to think only the nice things in life are worthwhile. I think most people would end up more resilient if they didn't think this way. However, I know how the world works, and it loves to reward those whom have already been given much. So, the goal is to have shiny things so you can get more.

It's disgusting, really. I hate that I'm complicit in it all. Really just want to quit all the stupidity.
See above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8150695
I love everything linq. I love how I can be more expressive and do more with less. I'm assuming you've had exposure to C# otherwise you wouldn't have ported the main functionality over to Go. What are your thoughts - I know that Go has its special use cases but do you find that the more "verbose" nature of their lamdas junk up your code? Is the extra verbosity offset by Go's other redeeming qualities?
Well it is slow because programs have been built to use all of our processing power. Like flash.
It's worth remembering this the next time you hear some hysteria about Iran's "nuclear program" which they have been supposedly working on for the past 30 years without actually producing a bomb.

Basic nuclear weapons are really, really simple to build. This is especially true of uranium bombs. Is there any case of a weapon being deployed operationally without ever being test-fired, other than dropping Little Boy over Nagasaki? That's how simple uranium bombs are.

Gas centrifuges (when not being sabotaged) make uranium enrichment pretty simple, and they have been around since the '80's as a fairly well-understood technology. There were warnings back then that they would lead to a wave of proliferation, which to an extent they have.

So the only plausible way Iran could have been "working on" nuclear weapons for 30 years without producing one is if they aren't working very damned hard. Their economy is about half the size (GDP per capita) than the US economy was in the early '40's but much more concentrated in terms of the state's ability to control it.

So it isn't lack of resources that is holding things up. It is most likely lack of political will: Iran would like to be seen to be working on a Bomb, but for whatever reason isn't actually doing much toward building one. If they were, they would have one by now.

A team of competent high school students with a billion dollar budget could manage it in a year.

[Edit: this is not a defense of the theocratic monsters that run Iran, I just don't think they are as big a nuclear threat as is commonly assumed.]
That there is this level of investment is not particularly surprising when the item is fungible for cash (even at a fractional rate to market). There is the added kicker that often the failure/loss will go unreported if the victim has more to lose than the attacker (see early Mt Gox moves at 'covering' the fact that bitcoins were stolen).

It is difficult for me to imagine a better way to incentivize the creation and deployment of malware than Bitcoin today.
Mathematical Pattern Live Wallpaper
"the CTU research team provided the BGP evidence to the upstream ISP closest to the origin of the malicious activity."

I think this likely means it's a smaller ISP.
A Good Way to Wreck a Local Economy: Build Casinos
I would like to see a study that follows the kids of poor immigrants. Almost everyone I know who came from poor immigrant families, including my own and my wife's, is doing well. We're all middle to upper middle class now. In fact, my family and relatives were so poor, they literally came to American with zero money. My wife's dad came here with only $50 to his name.

It would be interesting to see some statistics on that.
Well, we got rid of flash and replaced it with Javascript and HTML5 and whatever, so your theory holds.
> How about we develop public policies and environments where the family thrives?

Do you think that society purposely develops policies to harm families?
This is true for the internet companies. For Apple, the innovation is organic (much to the chagrin of VCs [0][1]). Google and Facebook are constantly baited into buying startups because their business fundamentally has a shallower moat than Apple's. There's no fear factor that VCs can prey on with Apple - there's not many hardware startups being funded that can ever hope to threaten Apple. When they do make an acquisition they'll almost certainly never overpay.

[0]https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/464741929356230657

[1]https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/427602474086584320
:-) Thanks for that share!
> If an adverb disappears from a sentence and the most likely meaning is unchanged, toss it out.

Indeed. The same basic principle—get rid of junk—covers every other bit of text (or any composition, really). I don't like the essay because it fails to point it out and view adverbs as a specific hard-to-get-right case of this general rule. This muddles up the idea and makes it look more complex.

(Edit: tried to tidy up the form.)
The Age of Supply, not Demand
Great read. I'm a huge advocate of using files and version control (specifically markdown and git) for published content, so I hope this workflow catches on.

Two improvements that are worth thinking about:

1) A public repository for content, separate from the main codebase. I was excited by the inclusion of "anyone" in the post title, assuming that they accepted pull requests on existing content (typos, improved documentation, FAQs) from outsiders. Turns out anyone, in this case, refers to anyone on the Pixlee team with access to the private repo.

2) Adopting the GitHub Flow [1] for content. I didn't see any mention of approval before publishing, which is an awesome freebie from piggybacking on git. They did mention that a technical member reviews all changes before deploying, but this is hardly a substitute for an editor or manager overseeing content.

[1] http://scottchacon.com/2011/08/31/github-flow.html
You can do a lot with that many bytes you know :) http://minfwk.com is only 9 bytes more (I'm the creator)
So what eventual became of the ISP, if I may ask?
Upvote the parent!
It doesn't even take those examples. Several more Obama type presidents, with a willing Congress, a few more security events / tragedies, an ever more invasive homeland security and police system - would do the trick. We'd be deep into a real police state.
I understand the compulsion for people with knowledge of linguistics to wield their descriptivist stick at any and every opportunity, but your complaint is completely irrelevant here. This article says nothing of grammar; it's about style and the art of prose.
Node Version Numbers
I have this problem as well. Only advice that worked for me is to practice, practice, practice. Practice so much that muscle memory takes over. It's slow, it's tedious, but that worked for me.

Make it a point to use to-do lists, although I find that sometimes I forget to check my lists...
'This' debate has kicked off over at Node again, on whether a mature, developed project should be versioned in major.minor release numbers, or whether it's acceptable to stick with 0.10.20 and so on indefinitely.

I know there are a ton of developers in HN, so I'm wondering what the community's views are on this debate.
What's wrong with "caught up"? It's perfectly grammatical. And what does that have to do with Claude Shannon?
No, the "up" in "caught up" is part of a phrasal verb. It's not an adverb.
This seems like a great article, but I missed the part where it's relevant to hacker news. Did the community's focus shift or broaden in the months I've been away?
The article directly addresses your exact point immediately after that example:

"Readers can't be shown everything that happens to a character, or novels would be 800 pages and cover 15 minutes in the protagonist's life. Sometimes adverbs help to move the story along through summary or time compression. But for young writers, learning to do without them is a good first practice."
They do mention an alternative where you can set stuff in the query string. I'd probably rather do that instead. Especially since you could easily end up putting that button out of the context of your repo at some point and have it end up completely broken.
Or one of those weird cassette systems that I vaguely remember struggling with.
The Day That Death Saved My Life
Anyone else having a lot of problems getting it to work. I keep getting a "Something went wrong" message with no additional information. Even if I create a minimum viable app.json, nothing seems to work.
Perhaps if you hadn't dismissed the article so quickly, you'd have realized that it's not about everyday speech but rather written prose. Try again.
Unnecessary abstractions and expensive context switches are my favourite pet peeves.
If you want to dive into self-employment and it seems daunting compared to steady income, you gotta make it so that change can will be easy, then make that easy change (got that from a Twitter quote somewhere).

I’m not running a product company, I do UI consulting instead, but for me the ways I made the change easy was: saving enough money so I didn’t have to worry about feast & famine times that naturally occur with freelancing, reading a bunch on running a consulting/freelancing business and letting people know that I will soon be available for work. Then when the right time came I just made the easy change.
Well we know as fact that a carefully designed system about 5cm wide and 5cm tall can have amazing capacity. Now precisely because CPU speeds are stagnant our architecture is we're way overdue exploring new paths towards this capacity. Although it's hard to tell if it's even achievable in silicon.

Personally I believe digital computation has only a niche applicability in the limit, the degrees of freedom from analog processing are just so much higher, even in the presence of noise.
Funny, my 2nd job was as employee #1 for a local ISP. We had a very similar arrangement (USR modems and all) for dial-in until we financed out and bought proper hardware, I wish I could remember the details. We hosted something like 3000 users, all their websites, shell access, Usenet, everything off of just 2 or 3 Pentiums with even fewer specs than what you describe. Everything ran quite well. We even ran a couple very high volume corporate websites for some rather famous television shows of the time off of this arrangement.

I'd point out that it appears even a high volume site like HN hasn't knocked this ancient system offline.

It drives me nuts when I read about figuring out how to handle some couple hundred requests a second on racks full of modern hardware with Gigabytes of RAM. Any clearance bin laptop you can buy at Costco should be able to handle thousands to tens-of-thousands of requests per second. We're clearly doing something wrong these days.