skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"there are more than 16 billion ways to draw seven tiles"

Wrong. Even assuming the order matter (which is false, ABCDEFG is the same draw as GFEDCBA) and even assuming there are 7 tiles of each letter and 7 blanks in a bag (which is false), that would be 27^7 = 10.5 billion ways. Because these assumptions are false, the real number of combinations is lower.
It's regrettable that some of the authors are losing sales, but I think that Amazon is basically in the right, for the following reasons:

1. Their arguments with regards to price elasticity are supported by (admittedly, Amazon's) data, and are intuitively plausible. Cheaper books sell more, yielding more revenue. The cost of production is substantially lower for ebooks, so passing on some of the savings to consumers seems fair, and further, so long as a literate public is seen as a good thing, there's intangible benefits to consider as well.

2. It's a dispute between two businesses, and Amazon has a legal right to not list/stock books. Honestly, it's like a caricature out of Atlas Shrugged-- you have to sell our books at these prices (of which authors get < 10%) or you're somehow the villain... as opposed to a business that just does not want to sell on those terms. Further, their contribution to the livelihoods of the authors is probably greater than the "value-add" of a publishing house. If sales and distribution from a website is such an easy thing to do, then how is it possible that a single company feels reasonably secure with delisting so many supposedly desirable books? The amount of effort necessary to make 2-day delivery so much cheaper than going to Borders is immense. They also built the Kindle (as well as its ecosystem) and sold the device at a loss, which has helped make the ebook market so big.

3. The "authors" are the only really sympathetic characters in this drama, but they appear to have no agency of their own. Why not move to a different publisher, or publish on Amazon? Because Hachette won't let them out of their contract? I can see why they would want to group together to avoid getting trampled between the two companies, but why side with Hachette? Unless their objective is "fewer books sold, higher prices, and smaller royalty payments", their collective bargaining power would seem to be better put towards forcing Hachette to either agree to terms or release them to find other representation. Agitating on Hachette's behalf is probably the easiest way to get money flowing again, but it's hardly the right thing to do.

Given that Amazon's suggested model could be more profitable for all parties, why are the publishers resisting? I suspect that it comes down to the fact that if ebooks become the main method of book distribution, the value of being a publisher would decrease substantially. Amazon (or similar businesses) could handle the printing and distribution, marketing, editing, type-setting, and similar tasks could be passed to firms whose sole purpose is that task.

Regardless of how this shakes out between Hachette and Amazon, I can't really see a future for monolithic publishers.
Yep, that's the one thing about the site that needs improvement.
How I created a set of Pantone swatches for the Mac OS X color picker
i believe we have something like this in Chicago, also.

here we go: http://www.pacebus.com/sub/vision2020/expressway_brt.asp
Like Reader Mode¹ in Firefox for Android? It's also planned² for the desktop version.

1: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-to-use-reader-mode

2: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=558882
Agreed! Another super cool 'innovation' I have only seen signs for in MN - http://www.dot.state.mn.us/zippermerge/ more coverage: http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/2014/05/the-zipper-merge-...
Hacking Facebook's algorithms
What is the difference between bus-only shoulders and the bus/taxi reserved lanes commonly found around Europe?
How To Fix Advertising Awards Shows
The other advantage a computer (probably?) has over a human, is the analysis of probabilities of words being available given whats known about the word play of the opponent given their current (unknown) tiles, and tiles already played.

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.

Are the games that players have played publicly available? While I presume that players at this level have memorized all 270K or so words, they might have tendencies to favor some words versus others, in particular scenarios - that's another advantage that a computer would have - adjusting it's play based on a players history.
I will take that as a compliment!
This is one of the most effective, informative and attractive landing pages I've seen as a Show HN. The video in particular is short, to the point and effective (aside: did you outsource it or produce it yourself? With which tools?). As a result I'm tempted to give the product a go even though I don't have a web site I need to build with it.

It's a shame, in a way, that the "your mother could do it" in the title is what's getting most of the attention here – really shows the importance of choosing your words carefully.
Does the Harvard make you smarter?
Well, the article does say "I try to score points. The goal is to score more points than your opponent." and "I’m not sure there is a secret. It’s just a matter of learning the words."

Perhaps that (incredibly unsatisfying) explanation is actually true?
@dreamdu5t in your view, it is acceptable to person to freely agree to be enslaved?
How people come up with such nice writeup? Is that by experience or by reading books? Just out of Curiosity, I'm loving it..

Amazing Knowledge it is, Amazing Article.
checkout fortheon.com/extensions
Great stuff. Finally something that makes it worthwhile to take apart those trojans.
If you're in London and enjoy talking about topics like this, consider joining the London Ribbonfarm Readers meetup group http://www.meetup.com/London-Ribbonfarm-Readers/
Researchers always think of ambitious applications for their work. Somehow the presentation didn't show how it's easier for the legitimate manufacturer to do than for the counterfeiter. If it's nothing more than an expensive process they might not be able to afford, then why not short circuit it and attach money directly to the drugs to prove they're real?
I too, just got mine. As someone who is still kind of confused (and unaffected) by this issue, Amazon may have had on me the opposite effect of what they expected. The following just rubbed me the wrong way:

- Opening with George Orwell (it felt like a milder form of Godwin's)

- Boiling the issue down to "We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not." I thought there was a lot more to it than that?

- "We have noted your illegal collusion."
Yes. That's not the point.
I'm not doubting that's the case, I honestly don't know - but Amazon could have been much clearer about that. Using the language "when we took action to reduce sales of their titles in our store." makes it seem like a deliberate and voluntary action on their part and seems really dumb if your claim is accurate.
It's for bigger roads that already have a hard shoulder.
When was the last time you tried Firefox? Its performance has improved a lot lately. Many people find that it is as good or better than Chrome in that regard, though it depends on the particular workload.

If you do try switching back, please use the "Reset Firefox" feature if you have an old profile hanging around. This resets the profile, while preserving your history, bookmarks, passwords, etc., and it can fix lots of weird problems that older profiles tend to suffer from. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fi... has more details.
I sell a framework for Shopify theme development (http://bootstrapforshopify.com). It's free to use on sites that have been set up with my affiliate link.
Because he can make a word out of O X Y G E N ?

Edit: see one of the earliest Simpsons episodes

Edit: it is interesting that the articles assumption has been he is better than current algorithms and so better than algorithms can be. This just indicates to me a lack of time and research into the correct algorithm.

That's not meant as a trivial throwaway comment but that in pretty much every area of human endeavour we have lots of headroom for new algorithms.
> I like that they're trying something because complacency is never a good thing. You have to try things to see if they work.

That's an admirable way of looking at things. I wish more people were as open-minded about software changes.
It is implemented in C but it doesn't sort small structs without any pointer dereference. That quicksort have n^2 worst case scenario doesn't matter in practice at all. First you can make it nlogn (by either running heapsort at some point or taking median out of 3-5 random elements instead of once at predermined positions).
I don't know about standing behind an offer so much as simply wanting the best team I can hire...
I seem to be stuck on the first tactic (not in the chess sense). I complete it, hit the green "Next Tactic" button, and it just gives me the same one again! It's Tactic 20628, which is the first one I was given after telling the site I'm an intermediate player. Reloading the Train page puts me back on the same tactic too. Any ideas?

Loving the site so far apart from the above problem, though! Getting back into chess was one of the items on my to-do list for 2014. The Learn resources are looking like they'll be pretty useful. Great job!
Doesn't work on latest Chrome at all, but works beautifully in my Firefox Nightly.
It could just be bad writing, but Amazon's point about elasticity reads like a sleight-of-hand trick to me. They say:

> So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99.

So, 74,000 people choose to buy the cheaper book. Great! But without the price cut, those people might have bought other books. Maybe some other $9.99 book, maybe some $12.99 book, maybe none at all. Growing the market for an individual book is only impressive if you're selling the book to people who would not have bought a book at all, not if you're competing with other books on price.

> The pie is simply bigger.

The 'pie' they're referring to here is not publishing revenues in total, but revenues for a single book. This feels sneaky because when people refer to the 'pie' as an economic metaphor, they generally mean the total across a sector or the economy as a whole. That's probably not codified anywhere, so it's not possible to say that Amazon's usage is definitively wrong, but it's something that can be easy to misinterpret in a way very favourable to Amazon's argument.

Now, maybe Amazon really does mean that revenues across the whole industry would go up if prices were lower, as books take market share away from other sources of entertainment and information. If so, their example case is a bad one, because it doesn't demonstrate this. It feels a bit like they're talking a big talk about promoting books against other forms of entertainment, but when talking facts and numbers they're giving a subtly different story.

EDIT: I should say that I broadly agree with the rest of the OP. Ebook pricing does look high to me, and I would like to see lower prices. The general 'vision' that the OP puts across is one that I like, I'm just not sure how much it aligns with the reality of what's happening.
Report this tactic (using the exclamation mark button) and it should give you a new tactic. Thanks for the feedback!
It does not seem all that even. As I understand it Amazon is demanding Hachette to sell their books at a certain price. This is highly unusual. Amazon can demand higher percentage of the sales, etc. but controlling the price of your product? As a business I would never agree to such conditions. And due to Amazon's massive reach, this starts smelling like blackmail. Why do author's side with Hachette? I'd speculate that people are concerned with having a single player with such massive power, and this episode confirms their worst fears.
> I can't really see a future for monolithic publishers.

What about monolithic retailers? I might be totally mistaken, but I think Amazon has a near-monopoly on selling ebooks at this point. Here is their Kindle VP saying they have 70-80% of the market (http://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-we-have-70-80-percent-of-e-b...).

I don't understand antitrust regulation very well, but could Amazon have some sort of obligation to accept Hachette's terms because they have this near-monopoly (on what will almost certainly be the dominant form of reading in the next 20 years)?
I think it is a very important detail to understand that new life has to grow in water.

When life moved out of the water, different life-forms discovered a way to take that environment away from the water to have their embryos grow: Birds keep the water in eggs, mammals in their womb.

While egg-laying animals create self-contained environments, mammals need much more energy to develop therefore have to be live-fed. So they feed this separate, new creature. Of course they have to protect themselves from them.
I kind of agree, though hidden powerful features aren't inherently an anti-pattern (see, e.g. keyboard shortcuts). You just need to provide affordances for everyone to be able to use an interface at some useful level.

I'm a fan of the style of gmail's advanced search (for example), which has all the various fields to fill in if you drop it down, but then when you execute the search, it converts them into the search operators, thus teaching you how to use them (if you care enough to pay attention...if not, the field boxes are still there for you to use).
For calculating the number of combinations, it looks like they are simply using 100 choose 7, or C(100, 7) which yields 16,007,560,800.

http://what-are-the-chances.blogspot.com/2008/02/7-letter-wo...
If you have Python 2.7.5, then print('hello') just works for you.
Did you sense https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingroup_bias
py3 branch is the Python 3 version, which is a ongoing work.
I find it frustrating that one can only rotate the view within a limited range. Otherwise great work!
Why Not a Three-Day Week?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8151180

Be warned - it's a lengthy debate ;)
Or they simply have a list of codes...
This is a killer library, it worked much better than our previous solution to gif-encoding on the frontend.

shameless plug: If you want to see a fun production use case of the gif.js library, check out https://imgflip.com/images-to-gif
Sounds like https://telegram.org/faq
Great Stuff!!
This is standard level reverse engineering, nothing too advanced. So, if this is a "tutorial" then it's for beginners, though the author uses terms like "unpacking", "fixing the dump", "OEP" without further explanation. Anyway, nice work.
I see what you mean - Amazon are different in ebooks to paperback etc because they want a Kindle walled garden. Their goals align pretty well with consumer good imo, but it's still a walled garden they control.

My guess is that they want to standardise pricing much better than they are able to rely on publishers doing (understandably on both parts). Even Apple's walled garden lets you set the price doesn't it? I guess maybe consumers see less variance in ebooks and Amazon want to simplify things.

Amazon seem to better support my best interests as a consumer - and I plan to buy a Kindle soon fwiw - but I think trying to compare Amazon to anything traditional is going to fail because their model is so different - and at the end is basically a walled garden they need to control as much as possible.
heh, someone in china just tried a masss SSH login to the US, looked like a shotgun blast.
I never really had an idea about reverse engineering, seems like it is a great subject to dive into.
How is it that this binary has all the symbols in it still? All of these trojan functions can't be Windows API calls.
Ask HN: Waking up to the app age. Now what?
I have a popular website - you might call it webapp these days. Been a hobby so far. Its been running for years now. It makes me some adsense money and thats it.

I closed down my last startup lately. Now Im tinkering with ideas what to do next. I will probably build this webapp into a business.

It has a fancy short name. Today I checked the ios and android appstores and to my surprise no apps with this name are out there.

Should I wait until I have apps ready (in 6 to 12 months I would guess) or somehow register/block the name with a quickly built app or something?
I was toying with Haskell a few years ago, and I found it unpractical.

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.
Common Lisp's condition system is much, much better.

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

All of this makes it very hard to write the minimal working code now and extend it later. Instead, you have to provide scaffolding for possible future changes, or risk having to change everything.

Maybe there's some True Way of using Haskell which doesn't suffer from these issues, but I haven't found it.
Forgive me for leapin in here, but one does not often get the chance to meet nuclear scientists (well on HN it's more likely which is I guess the point)

Anyway - I mentally write off nuclear power from the list of useful alternative sources because of the enormous pre-generation costs, the running costs, the politics of nuclear weaponry and the decommissioning costs (and yes this is almost entirely about traditional reactors)

How do you escape being in the nuclear industry dominated by the above seemingly negative problems - how much of your success is dominated by selling a mousetrap than building a better one?
Who, exactly, is saying amazon is acting illegally not listing or stocking Hachette books? I doubt you can find much of anyone; I'm not sure how debating strawman adds anything.

Further, cheaper books sell more yields more revenue is econ for tots version of capitalism. What book publishers are doing is classic price discrimination, and amazon is damaging it. Note that amazons statistics -- such as they are, and they certainly come with no backing data, and are hard to take at face value since they (stunningly!) support amazon's goals -- exclude sales off amazon.

Authors have seen how apple, amazon, walmart, etc behave towards suppliers. Where amazon to become more of a monopoly, they'll turn their price cutting on authors. It's well within authors' interests (and frankly mine, as a reader) to preserve a price structure that supports writing. Finally, assuming that authors somehow are agitating for "fewer books sold, higher prices, and smaller royalty payments" assumes that authors are all somehow stupid. Perhaps you should revisit your assumptions that lead you to assume that's what authors desire.

ps: since we're almost all developers here -- selling, in one form or another, software with nearly 0 marginal cost -- there's not a person here with any ground to stand on to claim that prices should reflect underlying costs.
I feel lost when it comes to economics. Yet, I think something of broader importance is at play in the state of economy which is overshadowed by social/cultural/political views.
As I see it, the climax of the capitalism/inequality dilemma lies in the fact income follow a long tail distribution.
As I said I know pretty much nothing about economics (or maths), but my programming-oriented mind tells me what's really relevant about long tail distributions independently of their current size (for instance the total amount of wealth) is that the head, the peak of the distribution grows exponentially faster than the tail in terms of what percentage of the cake you have in your plate.
I'm talking in terms of ratios, not absolute wealth. It is indeed important to distinguish between the two : wealth is redistributed (in terms of percentages) AS wealth (in terms of dollars) increases.

Everybody agrees everyone should be wealthy enough to live decently. To me, figuring out what that bottom income is concentrates most of what is argued about here.
If you consider our economic system as a way to level up human condition from the bottom, an algorithm that takes that bottom income and try to reach it, then it seems the root of our economic system (capitalism, shady behaviors commanded by our reptilian cortex, whatever) has a terrific wealth complexity.

Frankly I don't know if this complexity is exponential (seems like it to me, but again, I'm just a programmer), but you get the idea : is income inequality really a political or economic problem ? Or is it just mostly about maths ?
You have an extraordinary ability to read Putin's mind.

For one thing, Putin don't seem to have the ambition to dominate the world like the US does and for which the NSA's global eavesdropping is an important tool.
"As I understand it Amazon is demanding Hachette to sell their books at a certain price. This is highly unusual"

how is this different from Walmart deciding at what price it sells its suppliers' product. Almost all the retailers decide the final selling price of suppliers' products, that is the reason they are able to undercut mom&pop retail stores. Only exception on supplier side is Apple and to some extent Bose who have the brand leverage to dictate their prices to retailers.
Richard Feynman’s Letter on What Problems to Solve
Best to wait. why register the name now cheaply when you can pay an exorbitant amount for it later. :p
This article [0] seems to put B&N and Apple around 20% each earlier this year pitting for no. 2 - with Apple (and Amazon) gaining against B&N. While Apple have decent market share (that's probably roughly comparable to iOS smartphone share worldwide?) and continue to sell a zillion iPads probably with iBooks installed and certainly with iBooks the only app you can buy ebooks in Amazon are probably pretty protected at a guess.

[0] http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2014/is-apple-now-the-no-2-e...
You don't need to terraform a planet in order to inhabit it. Also, not all disasters are easily managed or predicted. Hypothetical virus with long incubation period that spreads quietly to almost every human on Earth before giving any symptoms could pose a huge danger. There are other scenarios where survival of civilization is doubtful or reconstruction is very difficult without off-world help. Given high stakes directing 1% of human energy into the long term goal of expanding our habitat beyond a single planet seems like a reasonable hedge.

Not sure where the figure of 27kly comes from. Depending on how you measure it our solar system is ~200 AU or ~28 light hours across (for comparison 1 ly is ~63241 AU). Our galaxy is ~100kly across and it contains hundreds of billions of stars.
Cmon. Say something constructive about the OP's work. Event 'it sucks' would be acceptable but nit-picking on title of the post is not good. Let OP know that his/her title is inappropriate or sexist, but please also help OP by answering the his/her's question