skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the really ambitious, there's always Knuth's treatment in TAoCP volume 2: Semi-Numerical Algorithms. It runs about fifty pages, covers such interesting topics as the statistical distribution of floating point numbers in order to determine average running time, and of course, includes exercises like [42] Make further tests of floating point addition and subtraction, to confirm or improve on the accuracy of Tables 1 and 2.

http://www.amazon.com/Art-Computer-Programming-Volume-Seminu...

On the more social side, Dr. Chuck's interview with William Kahan on the history of the IEEE standard is a good read:

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/ieee754status/754story.ht...
What are some of his other anti-science stances? (genuinely curious)
Probably Front
http://blog.frontapp.com/email-will-last-forever/
Hmm ... what we mean by `exactness' - in physics, for instance - has been changing ever since the advent of quantum mechanics about a hundred years ago.

There are two points to consider: (a) the principle underlying the hypothesis is sound vs. is not, and (b) the computational model of the hypothesis is deterministic vs. probabilistic. These two have to be considered separately when performing an evaluation/verification.
Still, I'm assuming all layers of your cache are running 10% faster as well. Definitely useful for some work. I'm working on a JavaScript JIT compiler and I would say that dynamic languages tend to generate much bulkier code in terms of instruction count because of dynamic type tests, inline caches and such, but they don't necessarily need to access more data (outside of program instructions). For this kind of bulky code, faster single core performance definitely does matter.
A response to a similar question on Quora (https://www.quora.com/Tom-Harrington/Posts/Why-Im-Losing-Pat...):

We require that people join because many of those who join like the service and end up contributing back to Quora, which makes it better for everyone. People spend a ton of time making Quora great by sharing their knowledge on here, so we think it is reasonable to ask that others who want to get to all the free knowledge here take the first very small step toward contributing back which is creating an account. That is the only reason we have the policy: to get more people to join who will share more knowledge and make Quora even better for everyone in the long run.

The community at Quora is pretty good, so they seem to know what they're doing.
For instance, I can mount the filesystems on my Android phone on my laptop running Linux and copy music over.

Can I do that with an iPhone? Maybe, but probably have to put up with a lot of Apple garbage, trying to make things "easy" for non-technical people and/or keep you in their ecosystem.

I also like that Android uses Linux because I think the proliferation of Linux is good for me. (For various reasons, not that I have a financial stake in it, although I do indirectly due to my technical areas of competence.)

In that sense, I prefer that it uses Linux marginally over, say, using FreeBSD, which I would still prefer infinitely more than a proprietary OS.
As sama answered above (below?) Angel investing is likely not going to help your cause. If you are already successful to the point that you have enough financial viability, then it's a lot easier to walk away from something that isn't working. Which is bad for YC. Scrappy founders will work their butt off before hanging it up. That said. Financially successful or not, great founders (2nd time, 3rd time) and a great product/company, is what will likely get you in.
> That sounds a bit on the high end, considering that 65 is the highest my system (early i7) goes when fully loaded

But their i7 is probably stuffed in a room with 10000 other machines.
Ok, everyone here is bashing Microsoft and making doom and gloom predictions but let us think about what the possible benefits could be:

* A bigger development team that could optimise and speed development of minecraft improvements

* Maybe actually make an official, well-designed, modding API.

I agree that the scope for them screwing it up is huge, but lets try to think at least a little bit positive.
James Pearce (Facebook Open Source Person commenting in here) gave a pretty interesting talk about Facebook's internal Open Source process at OSCon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzL6Zoy_ndk&list=UUP_lo1MFyx5...

I think things like this are a good way to get companies more aligned with contributing to open source, even aside from the mammoth technology companies already involved. I know that for many companies, the decision not to open source parts of their software isn't based on any idealogical disagreement with open source, but because their software projects haven't been designed with open sourcing as a goal, and if they can now take that into account when starting new projects, I'd expect that you might see a lot more open source software. So I think an organization that helps foster that can provide a lot of benefit.

And I'm not even a big open source zealot, but the number of companies who "get" the fact that participating in open source can be useful for lots of reasons (many better than "get the community to do work for free for us"), could certainly stand to be higher.
This is one of those cases where browsers are different from the spec. (BTW, the spec you are looking for is here https://url.spec.whatwg.org/)

It really depends on the browser. Here are a few test cases to consider. http://jsfiddle.net/8e525ne9/

Leading nulls used to work in common browsers. Most recent browsers don't support it. However, most do continue to support fun things like newlines and tabs in the middle of URL schemes.
Just tested all browsers installed on Android 4.2.1 tablet:

Opera Classic OK
Opera Mini OK
Tint Vulnerable
Default Vulnerable

Opera has usually worked OK, though sometimes rendering is a bit off. Better than the default browser, especially now.
I love the Toshiba Satellite series. They are cheap, light, robost and can take a frigging beating. Have had 2 for over 5 years now (mine and my wifes) and just got one for my Mom as well.
Appending ?share=1 to a Quora URL should let you view it without logging in.
Come up with something that can represent every number then? IEEE754 may be a pain in the ass, but dumb is not a word I'd use to describe it
I wish I remember who said this: If you could predict business success correctly 51% of the time, and acted on your findings, you'd soon be the richest person ever.
I had no idea the Intel 8087 was so related to the IEEE standard until I saw your comment. I had to look it up. Very cool.
If my company doesn't have anything open sourced but I would like to see how others do it to help pitch the idea, would I be welcome to join as an individual? Or should I just wait for the group's output?
Using Gestalt Principles for Natural Interactions
Allowing people to try it for free would definitely help them attract potential users.

IMO they should just use a cookie to let you try it out for a couple of days, and then tell you that you need to buy the product. It's easy to circumvent, but a ton of people would just choose to pay for it.

I also think that they should have some kind of student pricing. Many students couldn't afford $15/month, but they might be able to afford $15/year.
We had several Hispanic/Latino founders in our batch. Were they specifically of Mexican descent. No idea. Doesn't matter.
Intel's New Edison Is as Small as Stamp
Here are two orange triangles.

https://github.com/gopherjs/webgl#example

When iOS 8 comes out in two days, I'll be playing with that on my iOS device. It's pretty exciting.
If you have a copy of the source code hire someone else to finish the project. If you do not have it you might have lost time and money. The freelancer will come back if still alive and if there is some good payment left on the contract. Lesson: never hire a dev unless he/she comes well recommended. I am a freelancer with 15yrs of experience, never have I advertized my services b/c this is a business of reputation through word-of-mouth.
Probably discovering the New World and movable type printing together had the most impact in ending the "Middle Ages" in Western Europe.
I grew up in Houston.

East Texas is very different from the rest of Texas. The accent, food, culture are all much more stereotypically southern than north, west, central, or south Texas. Even the BBQ is different - you put sauce on everything.

That being said, my comment offers no real information. I just thought that it would be fun to post.
BuildZoom (YC W13) is hiring full-stack Ruby engineers
We're a marketplace for remodeling and construction services that is changing the way people approach home improvement. With over 650k monthly users, we're one of the fastest growing start-ups in an enormous market.

We're looking for engineers who can work throughout the stack. Responsibilities will range from server configuration to front-end implementation and everything in between.

About the team and our culture:

1. Product-first approach to the business with a dev team lead by talented, experienced engineers
2. We move fast and engineers are expected to write exceptionally clean, functional code
3. We're metrics driven: everyone on the team is able to contextualize their effort against key business goals and indicators

Examples of problems we are currently working on:

1. Building a clean, simple user interface that sits on top of millions of transactional records, allowing consumers to see current remodeling projects and contractors in their neighborhood
2. Enhancing the accuracy of our machine learning classifier, which infers what types of work contractors specialize in, based off their transactional histories.
3. Developing a budgeting app to help consumers understand the cost and value associated with their home improvement projects

Our ideal candidate will have:

1. Extensive experience with medium-to-large scale RoR deployments
2. Strong fundamentals: OOP and application architecture
3. Experience with scaling for exponential user growth
4. Appreciation for quality, maintainability, and performance
5. Attention to detail and personal pride in your work

Pluses:

1. Familiarity with system administration, database design, full-text search engines, HTML, CSS, JS
2. Experience designing and implementing APIs for web and mobile
3. Experience developing online marketplaces

To apply, e-mail jobs@buildzoom.com with whatever you think would help us best understand your background and accomplishments.
Your point about the domes is quite interesting. Can you imagine what it was like to be a citizen of Rome in the year 800, looking at a dome that is hundreds of years old and having no idea how people could possibly do that. I can't think of a modern analogue.

It would be like finding the monolith from 2001 on the moon.
Nice! I did this a few years ago as a class project but didn't take it as far as this project is doing. Impressive.
I seem to answer the age question every application period....[1]. That said. We were 36 & 37. Not the oldest they'd ever seen, but one of the oldest in our batch. But there were a few of us over 35...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7342396
Crazy! I had no idea they did stuff like that.
In 2014, Rails is not leading-edge software.
It would be really interesting to see which (public) gems the Github front-end app itself uses. Would it be possible to post that?
Sales will, at some point, start dying. He has, as far as I can tell, relinquished control of the source in a manner that will forbid him from open sourcing the game at that point.
Could We Ever Build a Death Star?
Sometimes called 'long double' by the compiler.
Reminds me of the book "Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal"
http://www.amazon.com/Hatching-Twitter-Story-Friendship-Betr...
Unfortunately yes, but one of our enterprise clients has just mandated Chrome only for all their internal apps(their new head of IT really gets it). Another one of our enterprise clients has just allowed all users to run Chrome and/or FF alongside IE. So while it is still around it is losing ground IMHO.

The consumer market is a totally different game though, IE is being crushed in that market. I have made several consumer facing apps in recent years that do not support IE at all, users can still log in but a warning notice is shown informing them it is not tested in IE and they need to upgrade to a "standards compliant browser".
If you wanted to throttle certain apps can't you just do it locally? If your neighbours ask for favouritism toward certain apps that you don't want that's functionally no different from the ISP doing it for you without consulting anyone.
For a large codebase, these upgrades will be a pain, especially on ruby/rails. To scale in the long run, it'd probably be wise to modularize & split the codebase into microservices, and at the same time, port to, say, a scala or java based framework (like Play).
What Job Postings Say About Developer Evangelists
No, for the first point, you are doing it exactly the opposite of the way Illustrator does it. In Illustrator, you click for your starting point, and you drag in the direction you want the curve to go. In yours, you click for your starting point, and drag in the opposite direction.
(TLDR; YC has published diversity numbers - see references. It might be useful for you to read some of the YC essays to understand what they look for.)

Note that originally YC was based around the idea of funding college students to try a startup instead of an internship over their semester break. At that point it was physically based near MIT & Harvard, with a winter (?) campus near Stanford.

As you'd expect, early intakes were dominated by people from those places (ie, mostly white and asian males who attended MIT, Harvard and Stanford). Also as you'd expect, success takes time, and so we are seeing those early successes moving into roles within YC.

I agree that increasing diversity of the YC partners, but it is important to understand the reasons why it is like that currently.

I think it is excellent that YC is aware of this problem, and is taking steps to correct it amongst the companies they fund[1][2].

[1] http://blog.ycombinator.com/diversity-and-startups

[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/women2/2014/02/03/y-combinators-...
The black Victorians: portraits unseen for 120 years
> unless they don't understand how startup equity works.

Which is, in my experience, most of them.
Robot cheetah run off its leash
And this is why you should switch to another ISP. Really. do it. Stop giving AT&T your money. They are out to screw you. Leave them right now. They are not your friends. They hate you and want your money. All of it. Stop giving it to them. They will use your money against you to extort more of your money.

Encourage your family and friends to do so.

Smaller ISPs will treat you better. They do exist.

I switched to one (sonic.net). I got a call a week after switching from them, "Hi, your internet speed is slow. We can do better. Can we come out there and fix the line noise?"

And they did. Faster than AT&T ever was - no data caps, and $10 cheaper to boot. Totally unprovoked, totally unasked for. It had been so long that I forgot what solid customer service looked like.

AT&T has been sending me junk mail offering me first $35, then $29 and now, $19/month for 12 months. Sorry --- my bar of acceptability has been set back to where it should be and you simply do not reach it. Your pricing points do not matter when I no longer value the services you provide. It's like McDonalds trying to sell a cheeseburger to a vegan.
Fun fact: to find the fraction closest to a number with a denominator that doesn't exceed a certain amount can be generated using the following algorithm:

(1) Find the N/1 rationals corresponding to the closest integers on either side of the number.

(2) For rationals a/b and c/d, calculate (a + c) / (b + d). This is not a common operation, but you read it right. It'll be between a/b and c/d, and be the number with the smallest denominator between them.

(3) Reduce the range to the segment from above containing your number. If the new denominator exceeds your limit, choose the smaller-denominator value. Otherwise, go back to step (2).

[There are some delightful proofs of this using tessellation that I strongly encourage you to try to figure out, one of the most interesting puzzles I got from a guy named Anton, the first user of MathOverflow and current Googler.]
very helpful, finally an excuse to start using my copy of Sketch ;)
We used it to build an enterprise app for the fishing industry. Real-time was the key feature. 4mb downloads on simple table view with real time edits by multiple users. At the time we were reading Discover Metoer book by Sascha Greif and trying to figure things out using Atmosphere packages. Derby.js was another consideration but since Meteor was more popular we chose it.

Anyways looking back, we used so many exotic new tech stacks to do really simple applications which cost more and didn't really give other edge. I quit using Javascript on the server side and started to pick up Python.

I don't plan on going back to Javasscript from Python but Python really lacks a real-time framework like Meteor and still Python to Javascript compiler has not really picked up momentum from what I can see.

I think if Python does not bring itself to the browser soon it could mean trouble for future relevance. The fact that we have MEAN stacks and such pisses me off. You don't need that shit to write your god damn Facebook clone, just use Python or PHP. OR the famous writing a REST api before you write your website is the even crazier one. It's not too late to abstract out a restful backend from your web app until you decide to write blackberry, android, iphone apps.
>Which means it has many more opportunities to evolve

More opportunities to evolve doesn't mean a rapidly mutating virus, relatively speaking. It may be mutating faster now because of more opportunities, but the virus still mutates orders of magnitude less rapidly than influenza.
Lately I think charging per bit is the simple solution for all of this. Amazon does this. It gives them a great inventive to have a good network. If they slow things down, then you might send less bits, so they would get less revenue. There are of course a few potential problems. From the ISP perspective they need some way to figure out how to handle the peak load. Possibly select a short window every day where bits cost more? For users the biggest risk is variability from month to month, although we all handle that just fine in our electricity and water bills. The other trick of course is that absent proper competition the cost per bit may not drop as fast as it should, but I would say the competition part is sort of an independent problem.
Top 1k Coders using WakaTime
The JVM, who is several order of magnitudes better than the Ruby VM, constantly gets smashed in terms of performance and memory usage by a well designed C++ program.

Why? Because in theory, a VM should be able to do as well, if not better, than a programer.

The limit of a VM is that you are extremely limited in the amount of resources you can allocate to the VM to determine how much resources should be freed. See what I mean?

In the end the VM is nothing less than a program. With RAII, for example, there is zero overhead associated with the decision of releasing a memory block, because it's compiled into the program.

On top of that if you start to add some nasty memory optimization tricks allow you, you start to get why manually managing memory is still very interesting when performance and/or memory usage is important.
I suppose that you haven't read the letter he wrote(the link, the parent of this comment), he clearly says that I'll abandon anything if it gains traction... So, maybe this is it...
Unworthy of hacker news:

- Inflammatory headline irrelevant to content ("Nude" Body Scanners)

- 50% more than an insignificant amount of radiation is still insignificant, and likely difficult to measure precisely. The idea that the TSA would "lie" about this is silly.

- I'm not a fan of the TSA, however inflammatory articles are not what I look for on HN.
2 common alternatives not mentioned are Outlook and Mozillas Lightning Calendar.

Mail.com have a calendar function. I dont use it so not sure the quality.

Or could you set up a second Fastmail account for your calendar only? That way you don't get emails on the phone.
No, I'm not ignoring anything. It was a poor analogy based on the science. Naive physics means we understand pretty deep points about how objects move even if we can't express the formalisms. Exactly because we know deeply how objects move we can drive a car pretty darn well. And by the way, infants in the crib do study and experiment to understand physics.

He wasn't making that point about computer science. We need know nothing about how computers work to use them. A decent, correct analogy to driving is combustion engines.
This is a long fight and $15M will be burned fairly quickly. What they have over Uber is essentially nothing. The "hard" problems of driver and consumer mobile app and infrastructure/coverage have already been laid out. Investors would have to throw lots of money at a business and at legislation to out-pace what Uber and Lyft are doing.

I guess my point is anything Sidecar can/is doing, Uber and Lyft can do overnight with the same infrastructure and workforce for a fraction of the cost. What am I missing?
Been There, Done That..

yep, I've upgraded a hundreds of thousands of Rails 2 codebase to Rails 3 point or so and it is a real pain. (Not to mention Ruby 1.8.7 to Ruby 1.9.3 conversion, oh boy!)

The good thing about the experience is that I have mastered upgrading Rails 2's codebases to Rails 3 or so and Ruby 1.8's codebases to Ruby 1.9's or so.
> In the Third Century, however, there were major social and political upheavals that interrupted many aspects of Roman life, including scholarship

The 3rd century is also when the Chinese Han Dynasty fell, and was replaced by the "Three Kingdoms" (220 AD - 280 AD), a time of constant war and many deaths. Were the synchronized downfalls related somehow, perhaps shared diseases?

> The Christian church came to hold political power when the decline in learning in the west had been under way for over a century

The same happened in China from c.300 AD to 600 AD when Buddhism spread (although the textbooks tend to list lots of little kingdoms and emperors for that time). The Tang and Song dynasties (including the Sui and empress Wu) then took over and completed many engineering projects over the next 700 yrs. Why did the Chinese "Middle Ages" last for a much shorter time than the Western European?
[Originally a reply to a statement that "1.0" should be reliable on systems because of the spec]

Yeah, but all systems are made by humans, and all humans make mistakes - hence the GPU fragment shader error on the A7 that would occur sporadically over a "block-ish" region of pixels, even when I was drawing a square, values varied inside the square.

Generally, these types of faults (in the fragment shader) are unnoticeable, since you can only output color, and not debug on a per value basis (at least in XCode). 0.9999999999 and 1.0 would produce the same color on the screen. So even if a fault exists, there would have little incentive to fix it.
The string_view pattern is a pretty bad idea and useless with a decent compiler.