skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I must be confused, but isn't stochastic gradient descent a bit of an oxymoron? A stochastic search space implies independent points in the search space, so the Lipschitz condition doesn't hold.

Does gradient descent apply to problems with many local extrema, or is it restricted to purely globally convex problems?
We don't.

It's more than possible to write good software in C. It's more than possible to write bad software in any other language. Particularly where security is concerned C can give you control of operation timings and various other side-channels that others don't.

C has not caused a single buffer overrun. Lazy coders have.
"Native Client avoids these issues by using sandboxing."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Native_Client
Can you re-take the final year?
The article mentions, a bit unclearly, that there are two types of slots: the slots used to implement method dispatch in the interpreter and __slots__ [1-2]. Armin's article is about method dispatch.

__slots__ are useful to reduce memory usage when you're instantiating lots (tens of thousands or millions) of Python objects. Since objects defined in Python code support the addition of arbitrary attributes, their members are internally represented as a dictionary which isn't necessary when your tens of thousands of objects have a limited set of attributes.

Defining a sequence __slots__ tells the interpreter that your Python class will only need memory for the members defined in that sequence and restricts your ability to arbitrarily add new members (see [1] for details).

[1] https://docs.python.org/2/reference/datamodel.html#slots

[2] http://code.activestate.com/lists/python-list/531365/
PRODUCTIVITY of 100 TABS?
When it comes for FF performance, what is the market share breakdown of number of tabs open versus those who scream the loudest?

# of open tabs - % MarketShare
1 50%???
2
3
5
7
10
12
15
20
25
50
100??
200 tabs open?

And also do it by browser type?

Plus Why not show us how productive you are with hundreds of tabs open in FF? Or for that matter any other browser?
You can always pass online job interview and if it get well the company will get you greencard and all.

Don't regret and work and learn
But how much of that growth is true growth and how much is about sudden new income streams because of purchases.

e.g. they buy a company like Nest, which has a commercial product. Suddenly they have a lot of extra non-ad based revenue, giving the appearance of growth.
Unless the insurance falls through entirely or partially, and then the patient is stuck with some or all of the massively unreasonable bill.
No memory leak was fixed in 2.5, because there was no 2.5 release[1]. What firefox then became famous for was a team of developers who adamantly insisted there were no memory leaks in firefox... right up until some of them admitted there was a problem, and the healing process began[2]. Any software product of this size is going to have SOME memory management problems, and that's fine. Firefox's history of even admitting these exist is spotty at best.

[1] Go ahead and check. I'll wait: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/
[2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink
I'll chip in another view; and that is to read the book "Flow: The Psychology of Happiness."

It's based on a lot of research about when people find them selves to be happy and builds it into a logical framework that's so simple and obvious you'll wonder why we don't teach this in every high-school.

After reading the book I'm quite confident you'll know where you're going wrong and what is the best, most effortless, way to fix it and get back on track.
I don't disagree with that either, I'm just pointing out that universal coverage, done well and efficiently (a massive qualifier, I know) wouldn't require any tax increases at all.
Street-Smart Entrepreneurs Need High-Tech Partners
Lawsuit - Google employee forgets to remove Post-it notes
"We will tell you how much your product fits customer needs." maybe... We will tell you where your product excels, and where it can be improved.

"How much time do you loose on unnecessary features?" - LOSE

"Maybe huge part of your customers don't buy it because your product don't have some small feature.
Don't worry. We will find out this." - We can identify scenarios in which some customers don't purchase a product for lack of a small feature.

"Every change in your website is firstly tested with small count of people. And only when it's successful, we show this change for all your visitors. So you are safe." We test each change with a small portion of users, and show it to everyone only once we have used the data gathered to determine it is beneficial.

"At the time when we will finish, even you will be astonished with the results and happily counting money you are going to earn every month, the job for you will not have been finished, because your goal is to grow, grow, grow!" - When we finish, you'll be astonished with the results. Your job isn't over yet, but you'll be well on the way to incredible revenue growth.

"We understand this, so we will pass on to you all the infrastructure we will have been prepared. Even more, we will teach your team to continue our work with it and consistently have better and better results." - We understand that your business keeps moving even after we're done improving your website. We'll provide all the resources your team needs to ensure consistent growth, month after month, year after year.

....WHEW....

I did my best to try and give you some more natural/native English sounding copy here, hopefully this will be a good starting point!
Show HN: Flashbackr – a simple way to capture and organise digital content
Hi everyone,

We've just released our v2 and are finally ready to show HN

flashbackr is meant as a solution to make it easy to capture all your important or meaningful digital objects (as we like to call them). Save webclips, files, Tweets, YouTube videos etc... We don't use folders to organise these, instead we use different categories of tags which we haven't seen anywhere else: we believe this makes searches more intuitive, flexible and scalable.

We've got a Chrome extension, android app and the iOS app is coming out soon.
For anyone using Icebergs (which just got acquired by Pinterest) we also have an import tool to migrate your account.

Feedback would be greatly appreciated, you can make an account by signing up on the home page http://flashbackr.com and here is a link to the welcome tutorial video if you want to get a feel for the product first https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQUn5Gjo8f8

Cheers!

Jeremiah (co-founder).
I follow Ronacher's work, open source and posts and I agree with his arguments.

This post remember me of Spolsky's one (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...) though. When you get to a point where you get to know what's under the hood and why it's not working the way you are trying to use, however in a majority of cases you are just fine and don't need to know what's happening under the hood and maybe if this majority is big enough that's just fine.
I had a similar experience with Chrome (or rather, Chromium) on my netbook. It consumed so much memory with normal usage that I had to switch to Midori[1] so I could do other things while browsing.

[1] http://midori-browser.org/
People here are predominantly American or European, which means they already have good visas and even if they don't live in a big city with lots of computer industry jobs they can at least move there.

This is probably not how it works where you're currently living. Without an engineering degree or a lot of money, it will be really hard for you to emigrate to North America or Europe.

Your life is not ruined, in so far that you can probably still get a job in your current country.

I don't know about your education system, but can't you retake the university entrance examinations?

To my knowledge, that's usually possible in most countries. Quit design school, study for the exams, and apply again. You'll lose a year, but that's better than being shut out of the rich country emigration stream.

Ideally, if your parents can afford it, study abroad. Here in Canada, for instance, it's easier to attain permanent residency if you went to school here.

Good luck,
Oh, I stopped using Chrome some time ago.

They're actively making it worse. It's slower and more bloated than ever.

Not to mention it caused a small periodic interruption in MacOS (you were typing and then it would stop the whole system). Shut down Chrome and voila, no more interruptions.

I'm using Chrome exclusively for GMail, and I keep logged out of Google on FF which is used for everything else.
Other than the grammatical errors others have pointed out it has some responsive issues (viewing it on my Android phone).

Especially around the "How to Solve" section where the text overlaps and goes outside of the bounding box etc. It is mostly still legible, but with so much traffic being mobile I'd work to fix those issues as they are low hanging fruit fixes.

Also, I wouldn't have links that just always go to the contact page. Just remove the links until you have content or create the content. Specifically your about us section in the footer. I personally wouldn't even fill out your contact form to ask for details without knowing something about who you are, what you have done that makes your opinion something I should listen to.
I never mentioned security. Their whole approach with both this and Dart are perfect examples of how they are following the old Microsoft playbook.

"Your browser does not support Flash/Java/ActiveX/Bert and Ernie's latest bullshit, please upgrade to X to continue"
Thanks, your comment is really helpful for me. Yeah it looks more like a draft than finished version.
> (bookmarking a link I haven't visited/open?),

Yes, to read it later. I don't, but I know many people use it this way.

> The first item annoys the hell out of me.

It's not that huge to get around. I have yet to use any share button in any OS or application or website (I copy the link to chats or forums or where I need them if I want to share anything), but I don't really mind it either. Would love to see stats on how often the UI options are used, though. I don't know anyone using those share options. But then again, I don't have many "mainstream" (non-techies) friends :p
Indefinite lifespan
Perhaps we can learn from PGP adoption and evangelism. One reason why it's not widespread is it simply doesn't "just work" in the minds of a non-technical end user. Sure there are longer, detailed causes to debate over but that is the bottom line to a non-technical end user.
Now why would I need to use this tree style tab versus just setting bookmarks?

Plus, show me how productive you are with hundreds of tabs EVEN with the tree style tab versus say just using bookmarks?

With bookmarks I can save it, export it, move to another computer.

But lets go back, how productive can one be with hundreds of tabs open even with a tree style versus bookmarks?
So? It's a matter of degree.

Creating an add-on for a product with a smaller market share is not that bad. But for a product with 60%+ that also belongs to a company that "owns" Search, Maps and Email and is known to play dirty it's a different story.
I would love to switch to Firefox as my primary browser, however, I cannot get my tabs to properly line up with the top of the screen in Linux Mint Cinnamon. There is the ever present title bar that just doesn't go away, not matter what hackery I have tried. (Without breaking something else, that is). I use Chromium, because the tabs are where they should be. Any suggestions on how to fix this would certainly be tried.
> That being said __slots__ as a performance enhancement is crazy useful - and I'd like to see more things in that area. Though for most people, the thing that would lead to cleaner code would be a more powerful and elegant standard library.

__slots__ as PyPy shows is completely unnecessary.
Yeah, if I ever get a call from a collector I'm just going to ask them if they have my signature on a contract. If they don't they don't actually own anything and I'm free to ignore them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2674337
It's possible to install extensions manually without having to go to the Chrome store. That's what I do. The only "inconvenience" (which is actually a convenience to some) is that you have to update the extension manually.
> I can't work without a degree

Why not?
Lithuanian. But no, we don't have them.
I didn't finish high school even.

I'm 23, programming since 13 and working professionally since 18. Working at a startup at the moment -- my second job ever. Never worked outside the computer engineering area.

Go for it, apply to startups in EU/USA.

If a startup don't hire you because you don't have a degree or whatever, they're doing it wrong. Work for them for 1 week and see how things go.

Do whatever works for you and be happy.
the discount reflects the likelihood of collecting any money, which is extremely low.
How my startup got to #1 on both Product Hunt and Hacker News
It doesn't matter whether you can download the source for the devices you buy in the store. Not in the context of this discussion about vendor lock-in. You're using a red herring.

The point is: if you don't like devices on sale with Chrome, Chrome OS or Android, you can download the source code and make it run on your own devices. Google really doesn't mind at all if you do that.

The point is: Google doesn't profit from "selling" Chrome, or profit from "selling" Android. It profits whenever Chrome is used, or it profits whenever Android is used (most of the time at least for both). Similarily, it profits whenever Firefox is used and whenever iOS is used (most of the time for both). Therefore, although Google likes that you use Chrome or Android to access their services, what it wants is just that you use their services regardless what platform you use.

It has no reason for it to desire a complete lock-in because their products are just means to an end, not ends in themselves.
Build a Twitter Bot With Node.js
More specifically, it uses namecoin and the information you store in there [0] [1] and makes it accessible to non-namecoin software through DNS and HTTP.

Best use-case, to me: put your TLS certificates with DANE structures, and you can be sure they aren't spoofed by anyone when someone gets your records. No need for the heavy and centralized DNSSEC.

[0] https://wiki.namecoin.info/index.php?title=Identity
[1] https://wiki.namecoin.info/index.php?title=Domain_Name_Speci...
Oh yeah. See their recent abuses of perceived power to shut down web sites they (or their supporters) don't like:

https://www.techdirt.com/blog/?tag=city+of+london+police
Can you share a link to Flatland. Never heard of it.
Of Oxen, Carts and Ordering
It depends. For in-house software, I can fully understand that wasting a few developer hours less may well be enough to justify buying beefier CPUs for the couple of users who need them.

On the other hand, if thousands of people need better CPUs to load imgur comments (e.g.) instantaneously instead of forcing the browser to a grinding halt for a task that should be essentially trivial, things may look different.
An Aphex Twin Blimp Is Flying Over London
I think it's a great way to put it in perspective for me at least, light is the fastest thing in the universe it's the ultimate constant for reference. We could measure computation in light-cycles similarly as we do with lightyears for really long distances. I don't get frequencies like I do distances, I think it's because I deal with distances all the time but less so with frequencies.
Ask HN: If given the option to replay your whole life
...from the very beginning to the present, exactly as it happened, would you do it?

If so, what age are you now? What age would you skip directly to?

Or if not, why not?

I presented this question to a coworker recently when she asked me why I didn't want to have kids. She is "happily married with three kids" and she still answered "no."
Why does this article keep getting reposted??? It's just sad, desparate FUD from a company that has it's day and squandered it.
I agree with everything b6 said.

I too had delt with this problem when I was a freshmen in college for cs. Most of the papers were utter bull shit. I had to make a choice and I, somewhat cowardly chose grades, although I did try to do things that really matter (reading books that are good not the ones they want to you mug, writing open source code etc etc), grades were always my priority.

Well, guess what, it is the most stupid decision I ever made. I am out of college, I work in a start up and been to some other companies and none of them ever asked me my grades.

So my advice would be:
- Build more things
- Contribute some couple of Open source projects
- Have a grasp of CS fundamentals (readup on algos, DS, basic computer design)
If you make software (which people want to use, of course) and notice a mainstream open source browser (in this case Firefox) being slow at something in particular, wouldn't it be advantageous to you and everyone else if some of you could briefly look under the hood to see what the problem is? Maybe not fix the bug, but at least let Mozilla know that there is a pain point somewhere (perhaps with specific source files or functions which take forever). Probably gets it fixed much faster as when you just keep using Chrome and disregard Firefox completely.
Separate process tabs? Rendering and javascript speed? UI features? I know it's popular on HN to focus on technical features, but that entirely misses the point of this post.

Technical features will continue to improve over time. The browser that is "best" in any given area will change as the code evolves. Most of the other reasons to like a given browser are the subjective opinions we all have or the particular use cases we have in mind.

None of this matters. When comparing Firefox and Chrome, the substantive difference isn't which browser is faster or which browser uses less memory. The difference that matters is the power of monopoly and what their dominance means for our future. Supporting Chrome by using it is a vote in support of Google being able to dictate standards. Chrome already sends way too much data[1] for storage[2] and analysis.

Even worse, using Chrome instead of Firefox will eventually damage the Free Software[3] ecosystem. While most people focus one the availability of source code, barriers in interoperability is the more fastest and most effective way restrict both developer and user freedom. This is why the LGPLv2 puts a special restriction on static linking; you (usually) can't replace or modify the Free Software components unless they are dynamically linked[4]. We already see Google following Apple's lead in restricting phones. Do you really want the browser to end up with Android-style limitations[5]?

Even though I don't think it's a good idea to let anybody aggregate and analyze all the data we generate, I can respect the decision of someone who actually wants Google/Chrome to win over Firefox. I'm primarily suggesting that there are Big Issues going on around us and - intentional or not - there seems to be a lot of people being distracted by stuff that won't matter in the long run.

"...we have to create the future, or others would do it for us."
- Ivonova, B5/"Sleeping In Light"

[1] Firefox has problems here as well, unfortunately.

[2] Even if Prism and XKeyScore didn't exist, that data is still merely a subpoena or "national security letter" away from the NSA or any other branch of government.

[3] "Open Source" is not the same thing.

[4] (lack of) interoperability is also the problem a lot of us have with systemd. Too much focus on technical features that distracts from the threat to interoperability.

[5] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/android-and-users-freedom.htm...
Terminal degrees are pretty overrated if your goal is to build products or even to learn to develop/become a technical badass.

While getting credentials is a tried and true path for getting a visa, it's still dependent on getting a job offer - certainly in the US, most startups would rather look for exceptional ability/experience over a degree.

If you're really motivated, it's fairly easy to draw up a list of skills that you want to gain/learn focused on development. Then like b6 suggests, participate in some community projects that you are interested and start building up a strong public Github presence/history. If you were willing to dedicate 10yrs to get a PhD and spent that time on this type of personal development path, I think you would be much better off if you're goal is in skills acquisition/actually making stuff. Of course, this depends strongly on your internal drive/discipline and perhaps a bit on your penchant for autodidactism (personally, I think those are acquired skills, but they're rather foundational/catch-22 ones).

In the meantime you should be able to use elance/odesk to gain contracting experience/pay the bills once you're functional.

As you level up, you'll get a better idea of what exactly you want to do and get a better perspective on things.
Elastic tabstops are so named because the width adjusts based on the content, avoiding that problem. http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/
This article blurs the line between personal documents stored on remote storage systems (the email and Google Docs case) and business transaction records (calling data).

But that distinction is important. The latter case involves data that is not actually "yours"; it's generated by observations made from counterparties you do business with, and concerns only the details of those transactions, not the purpose to which those transactions are put.

And yet it's the latter case that represents the most outrageous transgression by NSA (the Verizon call records database). Which suggests to me that the "my data" / "your data" divide is actually not all that useful in the policy debate about where NSA's limits need to be.
There are several available (and some in the making).

That they aren't more established for this kind of work is both a historical accident (bad moves with regards to licencing, etc) and a result of the cavalier, worse-is-better solutions the industry takes to everything, even when it's counter-productive (e.g with regards to security) that didn't let them catch on.

For some known ones, used at one point or another for those purposes, Ada, Pascal, Oberon, Modula, etc.

New contenders still in development include stuff like Rust, as a GC-optional newer contender. One wonders why it took until 2010+ to see another attempt at these kind of languages, as if we didn't have any issues with C/C++.
Ask HN: Would you like to find sites you have forgotten about?
Hi HN,

On multiple occasions have I had the problem that I once visited a site and now I want to get back to it. I remember the site I was on before visiting this site and I remember a qoute from the site, but not the name or URL.

The qoute is to generic to find anything on google so googling didn't help me.

So, I thought to myself:
I should build a service that would record my browser history, encrypt it before sending & storing it, and allow me (and only me) to search it like I would search google. (I even have some really smart search details I think could help to discover the right site)

I know I would use this service, and I want to ask you, dear HN:
Would you like to use this service? Should I build it?

I intend to make it cost a small fee (like $1/month) to make sure that the user is not the product, and to make it clear for users that's the case.
I agree. Something about human nature, I expect.
A lightweight library to convert temperature, mass, speed, and length
Who is my baby daddy?
> We have PyPy now; why not use the tremendous advances there in the next Python?

Because PyPy as cool as the project is, is terrible to develop on unless you are a PyPy person. I would consider myself a reasonable programmer but PyPy makes me go crazy. Slow iteration times, super complicated code.