skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is a fun experiment. I studied linguistics in college, and I do not think anyone ever discussed textual density of different languages with the "same" content (the latter part would be its own terrifying chestnut; if you have not studied machine translation and semantic eval and good luck ever confirming such a statement).

I studied Arabic a lot, and Chinese about a year. I cannot speak to Chinese with only one hazy year under my belt, but I can speak to Arabic.

Because Arabic has lots of syntax realized at the morpholgical level, you can encode a whole sentence (subject (with declension inherent and gender variable, verb conjugated (to passive/active, past/present/future, standard/subjunctive) and direct object (declension inherent and gender variable) all in one word as we know the in English.

أضربه (A-dr-b-u; a (I) dr-b (hit) u (him/it): I hit him (present tense)

And that is a super simple example. I have seen much more compicated setences in one word, and even better in two or three. So, I hypothesized Arabic is very, very dense. I think and Russian and others could be considered similar.

However, with this level of density (maybe we argue "compression" from a CS perspective) I noticed books and their translation were routinely about the same length in pages. Never identical mind you, but never something crazy like 50 pages more (I am guessing; it has been a long time since I made such an experiment and would have trouble agreeing with someone on what is significant).

Now, one could hypothesize a shitload about what this means, but computation is realized as the same "stuff" (machine code instructions) in programming languages, where no parallel exists in human language for mapping human language to computaion, as far as I know from my between minor and major courseload in linguistics, specifically computational linguistics. If someone can contradict me, I would LOVE to read about measured cognition and language constructs.
> Having to share what should be private personal details with my employer and coworkers in order to get fair compensation is unreasonable.

First of all, there's no "have to share personal details to get a fair compensation" involved. People share personal details because they work closely with other people who become their friends.

That said, your overall attitude is perfectly reasonable, and it's great that you're aware that that's your position on this - because we would definitely not want to employ someone who is uncomfortable with transparency. I've found that the reaction that some people have to transparency is a great hiring filter.
I need a co-founder
From what I can see functional programming is significant but not only part of javascript allonge and javascript spessore contains references to fp but it doesn't seem to be focus of this book
>Kdb+ has sharp elbows.

No shit. I used to work as a quant, and while I was an okay quant and mediocre trader at best, I survived for three years in the industry because of my kdb+ proficiency: the firm I was at spent a couple of million dollars on kdb+ only to find out that most people could not wrap their heads around kdb+ let alone debug it effectively.

My (former) colleagues were definitely smart people. In many ways, they were way smarter than myself. But I somehow could get a much better handle of kdb+'s idiosyncrasies, and my ability to stare at dense k/q code (usually no more than a dozen lines) and figure out what's wrong with it earned me the reputation as the "q guy" - and some level of job security.

The firm eventually phased out kdb+ completely after my boss and I left (the two proponents of kdb+).
Thanks. I'm glad to see the David Pogue review, but it looks like it's not considered compatible with Yosemite and crashes for a lot of people. I guess I'll wait to see if they release an update later this fall.
CTO of NSA is moonlighting for Keith Alexander's blue-chip rent-a-cybercops
While I agree about SNL, I strongly disagree about The Simpsons, and I recommend reading Zombie Simpsons [0] if you're interested in reading about the downfall of The Simpsons (and how in many respects, it's not The Simpsons at all).

The show absolutely did not suck. You may have never liked it, and that's fine, but the show has had incredible impact, was well written, and was groundbreaking. There are legitimate reasons for not the change in The Simpsons, notably a drastic change in showrunners and writers.

[0]http://deadhomersociety.com/zombiesimpsons/
I reckon the feature that is missing is not the ability to pick and choose, but instead to automatically assign people trying to help preserve something to one chunk, with the idea of getting full coverage of the entire data set.

If there are 100 pieces, and 500 people, you want each piece to be held by 5 people for 5x redundancy. And, if nodes leave the swarm, the system automatically rebalances which nodes are maintaining a particular piece of the dataset.

The only solution being worked on out there that does this is IPFS

https://github.com/jbenet/ipfs
https://github.com/jbenet/node-ipfs
https://github.com/jbenet/go-ipfs
Congrats on a cool product! Is it possible to expose this somehow as an RESTful API that people can POST to with the images as links, etc and get a link to the formed html? Is this on your roadmap?

This would be so nice in sending emails in an automated fashion.

Also, it is awesome to provide full functionality to test without jumping through signup hoops.
I disagree: Translations are rarely accused of being as good or as comprehensive as the original. The fact that you can tell a story in 300 pages in Arabic and 300 pages in English is irrelevant.

Iverson received a turing award[1] for his work on this subject.

[1]: http://www.jdl.ac.cn/turing/pdf/p444-iverson.pdf
I'll give some insight from the PivotDesk side - I've been working there for over 2 years. We actually have a great feedback culture - he even mentions several times in the post how there was an extended period of time where this was a known issue that was being worked on.

"Over the past six months I gradually lost the confidence of my teammates."

There were actually several different 'experiments' in different tools, methodologies, and feedback loops that happened over the course of those 6 months to try to help create the right team dynamics again. David (the CEO) is always very honest with employees if there are issues, and every attempt to resolve them is made before anyone leaves the team.
Russian is actually less dense than even english, but compensates it with flexibility. The phrase above could be written in a lot of different ways, which would emphasize different parts of the sentence, and give it a different tone.
Show HN: Flask-Dance - Easy OAuth with Flask
Probability Distributions for Algorithmic Artists
a little OT, but related: is there a good Outlook or Office-composed email cleaner? something like HTMLpurify but that has enough knowledge of css/html to largely retain original layout?

i'm making a small web-based smtp/imap client for an internal app and there's a lot of crappy email in mailboxes that i'd want to clean before dumping them into the browser for display.
I wonder if anyone has tried to use CloudCracker to sniff MS-CHAPv2 VPN traffic.
Have you talked to any Simpsons fans?

I have a couple dozen close friends who are simpsons fans, and we pretty much all agree it got worse sometime season 8 onwards. We watch old episodes again.

We've also occasionally watched new ones, and the movie, and find them worse than the old ones.
Not if you understand Bitcoin. What is stored in the blockchain? If something else were stored in the blockchain, what would be the motivation to do the work necessary to add new blocks?
Agreed. But in practice the larger
banks have no choice but to become
Member banks so that in effect they
are creatures of the Fed.

1913? A story went we didn't want to have
to depend on J. P. Morgan again!

To concentrate on the crucial bigger
picture, I omitted mention of Glass-Steagall
or its revisions that helped bring on 2008.

So, banks are regulated on their reserve
ratios, etc.

My post boils down to a dirt simple but
still basically correct: For banking
regulated good, unregulated bad, very
bad. For something this important, something
dirt simple but still correct has some
advantages.
Yeah, but desktop Linux is not really relevant. systemd brings tons of improvements for servers and thats the main drivel for in.

And it's written "systemd", not so camel-case monstrosity.
Ask HN: Who hires french JAVA developers in Shenzhen (China)?
I haven't tried PyLint -- I use flake8 for static Python analysis: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/flake8
It wasn't one blog post. I don't see why she is a lunatic or dangerous? I'd be interested in finding out what motivates a troll too.
Snapchat will roll out its ads this weekend
The information loss of 'classic' Exception has always bothered me. I never used CL conditions but the first time I read about it it felt like a saner thing to do. I don't know the drawbacks ? maybe leaks or too high memory usage.
I disagree fundamentally.

I have noticed every page I scroll causes a comprehensive loss of around 90%, so in reading something that is 10 pagefuls long, I might only be able to produce a tiny part of the program.

Your milage may vary.

I find not scrolling, and just moving my eyes, I rapidly absorb the program, and I find most bugs just by reading the code. This practice is absolutely impossible for me if I have to scroll very far and made difficult by scrolling at all.

It is for this reason that I find simply counting the actual words to be an excellent estimate of complexity.

By the way: There are several temporary variables in that code; c:: creates a view called "c" which automatically updates whenever the dependent variables on the right side change.
> Isn't that how language works though? If everyone calls this music theory aside from a small minority of people, then it is music theory.

That's not really how language works in specialist fields though. For example "theory" and "proof" mean different things in science than they do to the general public (which is part of the reason why the general public misunderstand science so much). Or, for a more relevant example, the problems with how the term "hacker" is misunderstood.
What is scary to me is that Michael Scheuer[0] is not mentioned at all [1], judging from my first obvious search for his groundbreaking Imperial Hubris.

Now, I know he does not count as military professional, but as a 20+ year counter-terrorism and counter-intel officer who lays out clearly our policy is fucking us and how we will inevitably lose the so-called GWoT.

He wrote it anonymously, at the time. So if you like Snowden, you will love him. I would hope a reading list about the most important combat operation of the 21st century for USG armed forces would read harsh criticism in an attempt to win something so important.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Scheuer

[1] http://militaryprofessionalreadinglists.com/search?keywords=...
I remember around 2000 or so discussing that part if the problem was that the writers then had pretty much grown up watching the show, leading to it staling a bit. 15 years later that's even more true now IMO
To me, what's really interesting -- and depressing -- about the article is not just how easy it is for a mob to get whipped up by a dedicated troll, but by the (alleged) identity behind the trolling.

We're used to thinking of trolls as teenaged or twentysomething male denziens of 4chan, reddit or Anonymous' IRCs, and yet this article suggests that behind a troll who (again, allegedly) whipped up a hate-mob against a 14-year-old girl could lie a seemingly well-adjusted, gainfully employed middle-aged woman with a couple of dogs and a neatly tended split-level ranch.

In other words, trolling may be more of a universal phenomenon than we usually consider it to be. And if the woman in question was the true identity of the poster, her reaction suggests that she's not the kind of dead-eyed psychopath we normally associate with "swatting," "doxxing" and "the lulz" -- and that trolls may be otherwise normal people who are in thrall to a kind of psychological compulsion occasioned by social networks, pervasive pseudonymity, and the thrill of socially transgressive behavior. Call it something like "electronically-dissociated antisocial personality disorder."
This article contains good tips for building a GPU cluster with RDMA. One thing I would like to add is that there are two types of GPUDirect depending on CUDA versions. Previous CUDA supported GPUDirect through CPU memory, and now CUDA supports "true" GPUDirect between the RDMA device and the GPU memory. However, some chipsets may not support the "true" GPUDirect very well, and two of our old machines had up to 20x times of throughput asymmetry with GPUDirect (which is, send was much slower than recv.) There are several papers that discuss this limitation. Our work, GPUnet[1], overcame this performance issue with GPUDirect by using fairly recent chipsets, but you can probably imagine our pain when we saw around 150MB/s throughput with GPUDirect, when 3GB/s is the expected one.

[1] GPUnet: Networking Abstractions for GPU Programs, OSDI 2014
https://sites.google.com/site/silbersteinmark/GPUnet
Why were you a proponent of kdb+?
Sometimes, admission of wrongdoing is not enough.

There are CEOs of failed financial firms who should be sent a handgun, with one round, in a presentation case.

This is the price of failure.
That's cool, but I had a few very large links, which means all my comments are noise. I'd like to see just comments :-)
For evidence of the banality of these pseudo-intellectual studies compare how poorly Western militaries fare against impoverished, malnourished and illiterate insurgencies who lack a budget for scholarly research.

For each of items on the reading list, ask if it provides more or less justification for a growth in State power. Does it make Democide more or less likely?

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM

How in good conscience could this reading list be used except as a 'How NOT to live an ethical life?
Coincidentally, that's what I had for dinner shortly before coming here and finding this article!
If the goal of Tarsnap is to grow, the north star is Tarsnap's growth rate.

Well, Tarsnap's goal isn't to grow. I mean, growth is nice, but I'd be perfectly happy if it stayed at its current size; my priority is to have a good product.
A related problem in music is how rhythm is counted, e.g. in recording software. Each new bar in 4/4 starts on beat 1, 5, 9, 13, rather than 0, 4, 8, 12, which makes it surprisingly difficult to figure out where you are.
Precisely. A sequence of prefixes is chosen, and then a mnemonic that fits the prefixes. Note that random 18-digit numbers have 59.8 bits of entropy.
There are many great interviews by Scott Horton with Scheuer.
http://scotthorton.org/tag/michael-scheuer/
Webmail and Open Source
coercive

I have to say, I love this autocorrect.
>I mean the wikipedia article on Credit Card Fraud clearly states the average loss is just 0.07%.

That figure from Wikipedia is utterly wrong. The true figure appears to be about 15 times higher

I happen to know it's wrong, because I pointed this out to you on two previous occasions when you cited the same figure from the same Wikipedia page to support identical arguments against bitcoin. In fact, you even acknowledged that I was correct then.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7529461

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7506327

Yet, here you are again, citing the same number and the same Wikipedia page yet again. How many other times have you used it to bolster an argument?

This is deeply depressing. What's the point of having a discussion if you simply ignore or forget facts which don't support your preconceived ideas? You're never going to learn anything.

I hope you won't find this insulting, but I suggest you ask yourself honestly why you keep citing a number that you've repeatedly been shown is inaccurate, in order to support the same argument over and over again.
Show HN: QR Links – Share links from PC to smartphone
Easily open any URL in your smart phone by scanning the QR code of the URL.
V-tables aren't a very expensive abstraction. They prevent inlining, which isn't exactly ideal (hell, that's the main point of the post), but nowadays their cost over a normal function call is basically negligible.
I really just want him to pick better fonts.
This is also an interesting project http://libgen.org/scimag/index.php
You sound like someone who has made the mistake of not following @Pinboard.
For several reasons, some more legitimate than others.

1. kdb+ was (and maybe is) a good solution to the problem that we had: doing complex data manipulation/simple statistical calculations against billions of rows of time series data. Hadoop is the term du jour for data processing, but truth of the matter is that finance doesn't have really huge data. At best, it's a couple of terabytes, and most of the time, you are working with a small subset of it. Running KDB+ on a beefy server or two would usually do the job (rather well).

2. Maybe because I studied math, but I find k/q's vectorial/functional sematics appealing. I think the syntax is horrible, but the semantics is very neat.

3. Finally, because it helped me keep my job. It was rather amazing to me that all these Ph.D. statisticians that I worked with couldn't bring themselves to learn kdb+ effectively. Apparently this stuff can be very hard for even the smartest people (or maybe they thought it was such a niche skill with a low ROI).
That’s me in the picture: Kevin Berthia on the Golden Gate bridge
You could, but I find entering long passwords annoying. I use a 9-letter (3 words, 30 bit) abbrase for my Android password, and find it's a tolerable balance between ease and security.

There's no additional security in Abbrase-generated mnemonics.
I believe their API is open, and might be able to give you more info based on your actual route of flight. I use them for briefings and notifications, life savers.
> V-tables aren't a very expensive abstraction. They prevent inlining, which isn't exactly ideal (hell, that's the main point of the post), but nowadays their cost over a normal function call is basically negligible.

This is not true. Sweeping general statements like this are almost never true. It is really problem dependent whether a particular type of abstraction is 'too expensive' or not.

I have to actively avoid vtbl lookups in my domain, and this is because if I don't I lose about 15% in execute time. You might think 15% "isn't very long", but it is when your application uses several thousand MPI processes.
They analyze lots of music and try to make connections within and between them, using a wide variety of analytical techniques. If you're actually asking and not being sarcastic, the sibling post links to several journals that will give you a good idea what theorists tend to work on.

When I was in school it seemed like most of the theory PhDs would pick a composer to focus on, but there are other ways to go than just that. Certainly, the sorts of questions I listed (asked in much more specific ways) are part of analytical inquiry, but a lot of theory papers are descriptive rather than explanatory.

Edit: I was performance major, but took classes from some pretty great music theorists. A few examples of graduate-level classes I took: the string quartets of Bartok; the music of Stravinsky; the symphony in the 19th Century. They tended to be focused on an individual composer or repertoire. Obviously scholarship is done on a much more granular level than that.
Not knowing how to code is not really an issue because we can and do teach people how to code the same way we teach people how to count and do basic algebra. What we can't do well is teach people how to solve novel problems that they haven't encountered before.
I love Python and gevent and use them frequently, but unfortunately you can't deny that it's simply not as performant as using Erlang/Elixir or Golang. gevent is well-written but it's constrained by CPython's overhead.
No amount of financial planning is going to assuage the feeling of being a poorer person because one cannot afford what ones friends, family, or neighbours, all have or aspire to have, or appear to have. A better general education might have some effect. One doesn't merely need the financial planning skill, one needs an incentive to apply it and to suffer the consequences. Yes, I do mean suffer; for many people the facade they present to the world really matters. Standing out from the crowd is a luxury that a lot of people cannot afford. I can afford it because I am lucky enough to have skills that others will pay well for me to exercise. Someone who's only skill is efficient stacking of shelves in the local supermarket has less freedom of action. They cannot claim that the reason they don't have a sofa because they prefer sitting on the floor because that would mark them as being odd. Fitting in is a powerful desire in most people and more powerful when you need the support network. The US, and increasingly the UK, is a great place to be wealthy but it looks from here (Norway) to be rather uncomfortable if you are even a bit less well off than than average.
Building the Largest Ship in the World
Is there an "about" page? Can't seem to understand what this site does.
@MBlume - first and foremost, the installation process for me for fireplace was fraught with issues. I installed lein.vim, fireplace, and a bunch of other stuff from all the allied projects : as much as I love vim, it was too much overheard for me to just go through all that! Once I did get it working (and after having worked with emacs/swank/lisp before) - it was just very unintuitive to me. It also feels much slower than cider, and doesn't offer things like the inspector for stack traces and things that cider can. Most importantly, I think the inferior mode in emacs is just a pleasure to use in terms of functionality - I've used it with R, lisp, clojure, and ipython. It's a very neat/clean interface.

There's also the fact that all of these modes are a simple M-x-package-install <package-name> away and they just work. It's kind of like choosing OS X for me after using Linux as my main OS for years and years - I didn't have to worry about the wifi card not being detected or my dual screen display needing a lot of kernel modules : things just work :)
I wouldn't count on the US Supreme Court to agree.

For example they have ruled that it's OK for the govt to pick thru garbage you have left out on the curb. It's probably a crime for some random person to rummage thru your garbage picking out bottles and cans to recycle, but it's OK for the FBI to carefully scrutinize every scrap of paper (or drugs etc) that you threw out.

To me the garbage thing is a perfect "third party" situation, especially where I live (garbage collection is done by private parties). In locations where "the city" picks up your garbage one can perhaps argue that you're already giving it to a government agency.
So your hypothesis is that, despite massive changes in writers (and in the case of SNL, cast) over the decades, the level of quality of the two shows is completely constant?