skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My preferred method—well, actually, my preferred method is to use std::uniform_int_distribution—but in lieu of that, I prefer to use an adapter that builds values in a target range bitwise from values in a source range.

The basic idea is to drop off the top of the input range so it's a power of two wide; this makes the bits of the input values independent (i.e., each bit has equal probability of being 0 or 1). You gather enough bits this way to span at least the target range, then again drop off any values exceeding the range's bound.

The drop-off method preserves uniformity because any variable uniformly distributed over a set is also uniformly distributed over any subset of that set. Breaking down and building up the binary representation works because uniformity is preserved by the Cartesian product (i.e., X is uniform in A and Y is uniform in B iff (X,Y) is uniform in A×B, where X and Y are stochastic variables) and the binary representation of an integer is just {0,1}^n for some n.

The advantage of this method is that you can adapt any input range to any output range without introducing any nonuniformity, cycles, or other "flaws" in randomness (though it will certainly preserve them, if not amplify them).

Another interesting thing to note about this algorithm is that you don't technically have to use binary or even a fixed base; given X in A and Y in B, where A and B are subsets of the natural numbers and |B| ≥ 2, (X,Y) ≅ X * (sup(B)+1) + Y. You can, if I'm not mistaken, use this property to derive the first "more reasonable answer" in the first link you gave from the algorithm above, assuming a smaller target range than input range. And if you look closely at "X * (sup(B)+1) + Y," you'll see a relationship with quotients and remainders and, I think, the LCG itself.

This is quite interesting stuff.
I hate to repeat myself, 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.

That's my last word on this matter.
http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10?op=1 steve jobs was an asshole.\
I'm learning Haskell and I find this project very helpful and educating.
There's one thing I'm wondering about, and that's the lack of (unit) tests. I'm coming from the Java world and I'm used to write unit and integration tests for most of the code I write. But I have noticed that in Haskell projects this is not so common.

Why is that? Is it a cultural thing, or is Haskell's strict type system and immutability so helpful that unit tests are not so necessary comparing to for instance Java?
What Clang can tell you about your Visual C++ projects
Full News: https://ellislab.com/blog/entry/your-favorite-php-framework-...
Yes, but its finite storage. (You could argue that with infinite float precision, you would could get infinite storage. Some old proofs that RNNs are as powerful as a Turing machine work that way. Of course, in practice, it's very much limited.)

Also, it's somewhat hard to train the network that it can remember much information. (Not sure if much was done to measure this, but from my gut feeling, I would say, a RNN layer with about 500 neurons can be trained with the standard methods to maybe store 10 bits of information effectively.) The problem is that it can become easily very unstable.

The LSTM cell is already somewhat better in this regard. But of course, this is still finite memory then, and you cannot have much more than 500-1000 LSTM cells in one layer, because training becomes too computational expensive then. (You could introduce some bottleneck projection layer as Google did recently, and then get it to maybe 2000 LSTM cells.) Maybe count one LSTM cell as one bit of information (again, this is very much taken out of air).

This is much less memory than what your PC has (which of course also has finite memory, but it's so huge that you can count it as infinite and as powerful as a Turing machine).
Mechanism behind nature's sparkles revealed
This is a great step forward for continued approaches to lean hardware development.
3 Brutal Retargeting Mistakes
This really gives very little information on what your app actually does. You should add an about/FAQs page, and really, really elaborate on what Howard does.
In Taiwan, Korea, and many other Asian countries, job applicants are expected to provide a color photograph in their resume. In Korea, many new graduates get cosmetic surgery to improve their employment prospects. Face-ism is common and unfortunate. It harms the efficiency of societies.
Each layer might only have some subset of the objects in the scene, but the lighting on those objects might still use the indirect contribution from all other scene objects.

So for example if your scene has objects A, B and C, you might break it up into a layer for each. Then to render the A layer, your primary rays would intersect with object A only. But any secondary/indirect rays would intersect all of A, B and C, so you'd still get the correct global illumination on object A. Breaking it up this way just makes things easier to adjust in compositing. Also the indirect for each layer often will be rendered as a separate pass entirely so it can be dialed in comp independently, or regenerated if the scene geometry changes.

It's also important to understand that almost all the lighting in feature rendering is incredibly faked and not physically-correct at all. This is particularly true in animated movies. It's just important that the end product looks plausible, not that it's academically correct.

Global illumination helps add a bit of realism and nuance, but its contribution to the final image is pretty subtle, especially between objects that are far apart. Nobody would ever notice if the indirect lighting wasn't perfectly correct in all but the most close-together objects. So a lot of the time it won't be re-rendered if the scene changes slightly, as long as it still looks decent.

Without global illumination, to get the illusion of light bouncing between objects lighters would have to place spot lights for every bounce they want to fake. Like a ground light pointing upwards below a character to fake light bouncing off the ground etc. People really used to do this, and it's a real pain. This is the "time consuming manual lightning" they talk about. Global illumination tools make that process automatic and are able to get much richer light interactions than anyone could set up by hand. But they're still just tools. And like any tool, artists will break them apart and use them in whatever hacky way they need to get a shot to look right. Getting the exactly correct solution to the rendering equation is just not important.
Google Plus returns 500
In case they fix it soon, I also attached a screenshot;

https://plus.google.com/

http://f.cl.ly/items/1l2C1c2N3R0S410V3M1q/Image%202014-10-22%20at%209.24.26%20am.png
> Word fails for a very simple reason: they've shoehorned structural editing functions, with styles and sections and so forth, into an editor that traditionally worked like WordPerfect

In that regard, Pages is (was? didn't really use the new one) really awesome. Although it allows for arbitrary text settings to be applied percharacter, its UI actively encourages use of styles thanks to the now defunct drawer and various UI nudges and hints. As a consequence you were actively defining structure of your text, and intuitively understood that appearance is only applied as a side effect. Combined with styles being assigned F1-F12 shortcut keys and you had a wonderful piece of software that allowed my then-student girlfriend to type lectures and have them structured and typeset properly on the fly. It really highlights how the whole style-thing management in Word is absolutely horrendous.
Fascinating. I've been pondering this problem for quite a while and this is an entirely unexpected solution. Such a system can potentially be very small because there's no refractive optics.
Just noticed this when I tried to read usenet... http://groups.google.com/ is also down; server just says 404.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=falcon+1
I was super tempted to photoshop the iOS share icon with wheels and post it.
Pretty sure he used the word faceism to highlight that the behavior is essentially the same as racism. Your idea about generalizing knowledge based on past experiences gives to much credit to the human thought process. People are happy to think whatever the people around them think and then, after they have already picked their position, come up with arguments supporting that position.
How do you expect the courts to respond if the government prosecuted AT&T for obstruction of justice for refusing to execute a wiretap without a warrant?
No. My first thought was "Will you misuse my personal details if I sign in with google?"
Back when I used to have to deal with word processors a lot, my perception of Word (coming to it from WordPerfect) was that it felt like driving a very sophisticated car, except one that had no brakes - you could always ultimately get it to where you wanted to be, but there was no point along the journey where you actually felt like you were in control.

For no particularly good reason, I'm tickled that the author here has such different a metaphor for the same problem.
PBS News:When to pull the plug on a dying startup company [Y Combinator mention]
Groups also appear to be down https://groups.google.com/
And contacts: https://www.google.com/contacts/u/0/
Google Contacts temporarily unavailable
This is like the 4th "Google is down" story submitted in 10 minutes; I deleted my own submission when I saw this. Can't the first-posted one be the one to float to the top?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8491748
Game Design on a Budget (With the Help of GraphicRiver)
Probably not as much as a Setun? This is the only ternary computer emulator I could find: http://tunguska.sourceforge.net/
Segway still has a transformative future potential, though. Once they're completely autonav, along with all the rest of transportation, they become an important part of the overall automated system.
Determining if that algorithm is secure against attacks which steal value is going to be tough. Even if the algorithm is secure, the implementation may not be. Building a general-purpose interpreter into a money system may not be a great idea from a security perspective. Could someone put hostile code in the block chain? Cause overflows? I don't know.

This is a really complicated consistent-eventually system. It's possible for parts of the network to be out of sync, possibly due to attacks. Eventually, the inconsistency is discovered when two out-of-sync subnets communicate. Then there's a complex dispute-resolution strategy which ultimately results in some blocks being invalidated. It's not clear how long this takes. Since the application is money transfer, a substantial delay may offer the opportunity to take the money and run, which is almost standard practice in the Bitcoin world.

(A long, long time ago I looked at a similar problem - keeping routing tables in sync in the presence of bogus data insertion. I never had a really airtight solution; the best I was able to do was to come up with a way to detect attacks. If there's now a good solution to that problem, perhaps it should go into a successor to Border Gateway Protocol, which has route forgery problems.)

Checking out the security of this thing looks like a PhD thesis sized project, with a really good crypto advisor.
You may have just looked at some poor projects. In fact, Haskell has a two really great testing frameworks:

HUnit, directly based on JUnit: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/HUnit

Quickcheck, which uses randomized testing: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/QuickCheck

HUnit will be very familiar to you, Quickcheck is definitely more interesting. You specify some invariants and the heuristic algorithm tries to come up with random inputs to break your function. It's potentially less accurate as good unit tests, but it's also a ton less work.

I can just say something like "This function takes an array of integers as input, and I expect an output array of the same size, where all numbers are even, and there are no duplicates" (in math-y form, of course), and quickcheck will try however man random inputs I specify to try to find a case that breaks that invariant.

Consider a well known Haskell library, attoparsec. It has extensive tests and benchmarks: https://github.com/bos/attoparsec

That being said, there are those in the Haskell community who take Haskell's referential transparency and equational reasoning to a whole new level and don't write tests, but instead write proofs.

For an example, see the popular Pipes library: https://github.com/Gabriel439/Haskell-Pipes-Library/blob/mas...
True, but we have our own version of "three strikes" via Yelp, Angie's List etc... Also, I hang out on a lot of home improvement forums where cleaners, contractors and customers frequently trade information and recommendations about each other.

For all the hoopla about Facebook et al. the old-fashioned forums are still a hotbed of activity for services like this.
Really? Never had problems with them. Where do you host?
Android Development Purely in Vim Possible?
I think it is true that unit tests are not so necessary compared to Java, but I think many in the Haskell community (myself included) have a tendency to rely too heavily on this. Tests aren't unnecessary in Haskell.

gamegoblin is absolutely correct that there is some great tooling for tests in Haskell.
Didn't know NoSleep extension. I will try it.
New API: Breathometer Connects Drunks to Uber via API
I will try Madmimi :)
how does it compare with Mailchimp?
In addition to the libraries mentioned above, there's also some very good testing frameworks (which can run test suites composed of HUnit and Quickcheck tests), such as HSpec and tasty (and various extensions such as tasty-golden for golden tests and tasty-quickcheck for quickcheck tests). I've used these in various projects of mine; as with other languages, sometimes TDD is the right approach, sometimes you write a few tests afterwards to make sure everything works, and sometimes you can get away with no testing at all.

That said, I do feel that the type of testing I do in Haskell is often quite different from other languages. Due to the strict type system, some types of errors can be eliminated at compile time, and thus do not need to be tested for. Of course, as the parent pointed out, some people take this to a (very awesome) extreme, but even in a less rigorous form the static guarantees can eliminate many things that I would write unit tests for in other languages.

Finally, you may also be interested in SmallCheck, an alternative to QuickCheck. From its documentation:

> The big difference [between SmallCheck and QuickCheck] is that instead of using a sample of randomly generated values, SmallCheck tests properties for all the finitely many values up to some depth, progressively increasing the depth used. For data values, depth means depth of construction. For functional values, it is a measure combining the depth to which arguments may be evaluated and the depth of possible results.

This means that SmallCheck will often find small and interesting counterexamples to the properties you wish to affirm. (As an aside, note that writing property-based tests is a skill, just like writing good unit tests.)

tl;dr: Testing can sometimes be less necessary, but is certainly not unnecessary, and there are some very high quality and well-documented libraries for testing in Haskell.
If anyone here is interested in the topic I can really recommend the survival courses run by Ray Mears company called Woodlore. They are brilliant. The guys there are so good it becomes less about survival and more about living!
Drones: Concern over increase in use
Audi claims self-drive car speed record
Sure you are still a developer if you don't know algorithms or programming puzzles. You can hold a job and be competent and churn out quality code. However, you are a BETTER programmer if you do know these things.
Most people I know buy second hand TIs which aren't expensive. They are around the $20-50 (GBP conversion) mark here in the UK.

The Pi is not exactly a good proposition for a calculator either based on form factor and power usage. Also you really do need a tactile input system for calculators as they help avoid costly and confusing mistakes.

I'm not sure why there is so much hate for TI to be honest; they are very functional, very robust, have very good battery life and good resale value. I myself however use a $20 Casio 115/991ES PLUS.
There's apparently a massive multi-service outage:

"Gmail, Google Docs and Google+ Suffering Service Outages Around the World"
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/gmail-google-docs-google-suffering-...

I'm bumped out of my G+ profile. IMAPS access to gmail still works, so I suspect something on the Web front-end.
I saw one of those posts which had a direct link to plus.google.com,

I guessed that google would fixed it soon, that's way added a screenshot too instead of directly linking to plus site.
Gtalk is certainly down as I write.
Google+ and hangouts are down
Well, here's the thing. I'm curious about it. I want to see what it is and what it does.

But the fact that it directed me to the sign up page first and not the home page, coupled with the fact that the home page not having absolutely any information about the product makes me not want to try it out.
This is so good. Among many things I didn't know: the first stored program computer (EDSAC) was programmed in assembly language. So for programs that were actually executed, assembler predates binary.

He also says that they'd implemented higher-order functions on that same machine by 1952. That's astonishing. Can anybody tell us what form they took?
Firebase? Their customer database was stolen in September 2013 (I started receiving phishing emails), I reported it to them but never heard back.

After that I decided not to become a customer of theirs.
Businessman gifts cars,homes and jewelry to 1,000 employees
Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Drive, Google Sites, Google Groups, Admin Console, Google Hangouts all are down.
Is this on Android? That works a little differently than desktop logins.
What has this to do with Greece?
All services are working in Central EU. USA only?
MIT computer scientists can predict the price of Bitcoin
DecentralBank cash to btc transactions without handling Bitcoin – Citi Challenge
We are competing in the US Citi Mobile Banking Challenge. We are building an open source p2p offchain decentralized voting pool network where anyone can set up a node. Here is our pitch to Citi Bank to automate Cash to Bank Transfers without them having to handle the Bitcoin. Check our pitch at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dVw9dcHRW8

Feel Free to show your support at https://twitter.com/decentralteam. #decentralbank
For more details feel free to check out decentralbank.com

Any developers that know java willing to contribute please shoot us an email to decentralteam@gmail.com or message me at https://twitter.com/uwece.
I like textual markup formats and separated styling. But my experience has been that Latex is "unbeatable" when it comes to wasting countless hours fighting your tools. It is great in some ways, but incredibly bad in others. (Random placing of figures, unbounded reruns, incompatible package hell, no stderr / stdout separation, unfixable warnings bloat, ...)
I don't think puzzles is a higher level of programming anymore then running is a higher form of walking.

However if I see that you can run chances are you can likely walk as well.
Just when i wanted to show Google Spreadsheets as a simple CMS to a client... I couldn't use it decently...

Altough creating a new spreadsheet worked (thank god).
Yeah, except this is not domain-specific language. It's smart Python API, not a separate language.
This is really great news for AWS environments where compliance and user account management are an issue.
Well, we already know that Swift is not swift at all. Let's see if Phoenix will die and then resurrect.
By discovering puzzles you are still a programmer, and you are a better programmer for it. Make no mistake. Yes you don't need to know algorithms to be a programmer, but you are better programmer for knowing the algorithms.
Recently spent some time organizing my dotfiles and discovered fresh[1] which I've been using to great success. Both for servers I manage and on my mac.

The fact is that most people are going to be reusing (and probably be better of) a lot of code from other well tested dotfiles. `fresh` lets you pick and choose what you want directly from other's repos in addition to adding whatever you want and produces a single bundle (or multiple if you need it).

As far as I can tell, its a self contained shell script and does not have any dependencies (if that is a concern). Its definitely worth checking out.

[1] https://github.com/freshshell/fresh
Writing a path tracer in Rust, part 1
I only wrote one graphics application in Mesa, as a student at Stanford. I never used Cedar or SafeMesa or any of the Alto successors, although I visited PARC a few times and saw them used.

Xerox had to invent Mesa because they were previously stuck writing BCPL, a predecessor to C sometimes known as the British Cruddy Programming Language.

Xerox's world model was closed systems with a few beautiful applications written by experts. End users were not to be allowed access to the guts of the software. The realization of this was the Xerox Star, which was a nice, and very expensive, world processor with a few additional applications. (Visualize a system that runs Microsoft Office and nothing else.) The idea that ordinary people would write application programs was completely alien to Xerox. Their market was secretaries.
Aspiring Entrepreneur Reflects on Mariah Carey's "We Belong Together"
are any other airlines any better than Ryanair for that?

Much better. Swiss, Lufthansa, SAS and Air Canada for example have all been extremely helpful to me in the past with re-booking flights, dealing with lost luggage and generally fixing things when things go wrong (even when the thing going wrong was my fault).
It's up again now..
Down here in Poland as well.
Most businesses don't hire googlers and they will have a bad time if they implement Google's policies. It's not "cultural." There's quite a difference between someone who had been programming since they were 15 spending nights reinstalling linux and someone who "can use technology" where that means MSO and facebook.

How many people here serve as tech support for their families? And how many of your relatives are otherwise successful professionals?
> I write them because I like creating things, and it's a >lot easier to create things with programs than with a machine shop.

Exactly. This is one of the main reasons for me as well - creating things without buying or manufacturing physical materials.
Angel Investor Ron Conway's Recommended Reading List
"Two big reasons."

Cash and equity. Corrected the next two paragraphs for you.
Honestly, is functional programming really better for this type of game? I find the structure and nature of the game more fitting to an object oriented approach. IMO Chips, blocks, player character all tend to be better described as mutable objects, because that's what they actually are from the users perspective....
What's the K&R for JavaScript?
Yes, I know JS The Good Parts but there's so much noise out there about best practice, memory mgmnt etc. What's the bible right now? If K&R doesn't mean anything to you - you're young and haven't programmed in C.