skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's feels like a shame to me that the one Python maxim that Nim has chosen to reject is "there should be one and preferably only one way to do it" - from this flows so much of the other goodness of the Python ecosystem. I worry that some of the metaprogramming magic that Nim allows will result in the loss of that feeling that I can view source on almost any 3rd party Python code and immediately feel like I can follow what's going on. Maybe community standards can help restrain this somewhat.

Also:

> mapWidth, mapwidth and map_width all map to the same name

Why or why? Editors and IDEs now need Nim-aware search code!?
Community is working on a few successor projects. Search for Trillek
Eh. The point is to not handle things you don't need to.
There is of course a point in handling special cases (like the ones you cited).
But compare Erlang's declarative & to-the-point style with Go's `…,err = …; err != nil` and you will quickly realise how much defensive programming sucks to read.
>Did you stop to think it might possibly be true before complaining that your own interests - having the trial be a showcase for libertarian ideals - may not end up being served by this particular man's prosecution?

Nope. My opinion is that it's a desperate ploy from a guilty man who knows that the strength of the evidence against him is so great that he's resorting to a defense they wouldn't use in a movie plot because it's so unbelievable. I'm entirely unapologetic about my opinion, because that's what it is, an opinion. Fortunately I'm neither judge nor jury in this case.

Also, don't put words in my mouth and don't ascribe motives to me that I don't have. The very first sentence of my comment says explicitly that I understand he's free to mount whatever defense he likes - it's his freedom to lose.
It's amazing how so many people are concerned about the dollar price of Bitcoin. If you believe in Bitcoin, you want Bitcoin and not dollars.
It's not just learnability. In some cases, Fortran can be considered to be faster than C since it can apply something like -fno-strict-alisasing by default.

Not to mention that most compilers have OpenMP suport built-in. Also, there's the tons of heavily-optimized Fortran math libraries that make it easy to take advantage of big machines and big clusters.

Those scientists that are still using Fortran after all these years know what they're doing. It's not that they're ignorant of new technoglogy. A well-informed and open-minded CS person would probably end up using Fortran for these use cases, too.
That's actually a quite tragic number considering that the Bitcoin market cap is around 2.5B, if the other poster in the thread is right. It is a serious disparity at the moment.
Cool story bro,
I can't agree. MongoDB 2.8 with WiredTiger is a performant NoSQL solution.

The way you solve things in document dbs like MongoDB is the key - not the fact that you get competitve performance in RDBMS as well.

I like Postgres and the possibility to easily use JSON data. But I still prefer to build applications the NoSQL way...
Pricing is a very subjective thing.
Thanks for your idea about the samples. I'll think about it! :)
Have you a link to see it ? I have curiosity.

Also, you should check FUZIX (unix clone for 8 bit machines), there is some working to get it working on a 6502 cpu
I mined about 200 BTC in 2011 and I must say, they have changed my live. I still have 150, so during the passed 4 years, while bootstrapping 2 startups, those mere 50 bitcoins I sold have meant that I have been able to keep both companies running. Without those 50 coins, I'm not sure how I would have continued.

But the most important thing was not the value of those 50 coins. Which really isn't that big a deal. It was the knowledge that "I have a buffer, a reserve" and that knowledge has allowed me to make deals in the interest of future growth, instead of short term continuation. I got to decline offers, that I otherwise would have needed to survive.

Now that both companies are making a profit, I have learned how important it is to have a big buffer and I thank Bitcoin for that. I also thank Bitcoin for the financial independence I now have, even though it is an indirect result.

I still watch the markets and hope some other honest hardworking guy out there gets as lucky as I got.
MongoDB 2.8 (in RC4 right now, due out "in early January" last I heard) has the WiredTiger storage engine, and as well as high performance and compression also gets document level locking and multi document transactions. The roadmap says this'll become the default storage engine in 3.0 (3rd quarter 2015). I think the blog author's claim that for basically those omissions "MongoDB can still beat TokuMX on a future release. But only in a future release. Today it can’t." observation is only true if you ignore the development releases completely, and will be incorrect within a week or two.

Sure, if you want SQL or traditional relational database, a traditional relational SQL database is a better choice. Using Postgres or Oracle for workloads better suited to tied hashes or BerkleyDB doesn't automatically become "right" though.
> These are the same countries that drink the most coffee.

I travel to Sweden a bit and was introduced to the concept of fika. I like it.
Well stated, and I completely agree. I think there's a balance to be struck between personal liberty and social responsibility and DPR's writings don't address that balance at all, not to mention his alleged actions.

But there are some core arguments about freedom of choice that Silk Road addressed in some ways, and DPR was a figurehead for those arguments, and to see him ignore those ideals in exchange for a half-hearted defense like this is disappointing, that's all. Whether or not he's guilty, DPR is dead and Silk Road achieved nothing.
U.S. Can Reach 50% Renewable Generation by 2030, Says IRENA
1. Thought it was a scam.
2. looked into it and realized I was wrong.
3. Looked into building a mining rig.
4. Worrried about ROI, after energy and hardware.
5. Seems like everyone was mining.
6. Knew I competed with entities with deep pockets.
7. T.V. news started to treat bitcoins like gold quotes.
8. Started seeing bitcoins accepted here.
9. Wish I didn't procrastinate years ago.
10. Glad I didn't invest in bitcoins.
11. I wish it well though. Anything is better that credit card transactions--with their fees. It is still a great idea, and I hope this is just a market fluctuation!
I don't think you can really call something "a dinosaur" when the standard that is supposed to supersede it hasn't even formally been published yet!
The reason could be that Russia started banning bitcoin websites. https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/russia-blocked-several-bitco...
> Your card is irrelevant.

My card is very relevant.

If someone steals it, they can use it but it doesn't impact me in any way except having to wait for the new card to come.

If someone steals my bitcoins, it means they have a copy of my private key, and there is nothing I can do about it. Zich. Nada.

Transaction fees pay for this insurance (among other things, but still).
What do you mean 'a bank account is exactly storing paper currency digitally'?
I do it pretty regularly as I move countries frequently and have bank accounts in 3 countries at the moment. I generally do international transfers 2-4 times a month. The last ~20 times I've transferred money overseas it has been in my receiving account the next morning and it usually costs ~0.3%.

Bitcoin isn't better for remittance. Actually moving the money has never been the expensive parts of remittance it is giving people a way to receive money on the other side and compliance. The current bitcoin remittance companies advertising lower fees are doing it entirely by ignoring compliance and that will work great until they have any volume and then they will be shut down.

I've heard people say "BTMs save money on not needing a store" but do you think if an automated machine was doable WU wouldn't have replaced most of their partner branches by now?
I have now :) I disagree with almost everything, but that doesn't make him a bad programmer.
It's not at all about the price for me -- I just had no idea what my money would be getting me or how I would be use it. Kind of like being presented with a mystery box labeled "calendar/planner" with a price tag.
> Unfortunately, for reasons that are hard for me to understand, it has become pro forma to pretend that it's just fine if adults talk and act as if it is, even if they only "kinda-sorta" believe it.

We act like it's just fine to believe in make-belief things because our society is built upon the concept that it is; you're free to believe in anything you like, be it a God, Santa Claus, or pixie-dust unicorns. Our society functions as well as it does because of the presumption that you're free to think and feel whatever you like. Otherwise, trying to prevent people from believing in magical sky fairies quickly transforms into preventing them from believing in forms of government other than democracy, to creation theories other than the big bang, to the political ideologies of any party other than the one in power- and the progress and betterment of society in all areas grinds to a halt.

We've built a society predicated on the notion that you can't prevent people from having stupid ideas without preventing them from having brilliant ones as well- and it's proven an overall good approach so far.

The problem isn't with ideas, it's with the way you apply those ideas to your behavior in the physical world. You're free to believe in unicorns as long as you don't try to stab an aluminium horn into a horse's snout in an attempt to coax them out of hiding, just as you're free to believe in Jesus as long as you don't use it to force me to denounce the teachings of Buddha.

You're free to mock silly ideas people have -- including the concept of an omnipotent deity, if you find that idea silly; but the reason we pretend it's fine for those people to hold those ideas is because it IS.
>Bitcoin doesn't experience inflation like that

Bitcoin inflation is at 10% per year right now not even considering the dropping price.
Still no swipe animation/indicator for OS X.
Think of an Amazon like product catalogue.

I don't want to create a schema in a relational database for that kind of use case. A MongoDB fits as well.

Edit: Sorry for my short and unprecise comment. I regret posting it, loosing all my Karma. Yes, of course I would use a schema, but I may use hundreds to get my products presented with all attributes and variants available. There is a set of attributes that will remain for all products, others will vary, some will change and will be dropped. Some may be conditional, depending on size or color. I could model that in RDBMS as well, adding those properties in an additional JSON or something else.

Yes, I'm also mainly using relational databases and just wanted to give an example of a use-case for MongoDB. I regret, sorry.
Shivkar Bapuji Talpade
In case anyone is not familiar with it, the story of the Eudaemons[1] is absolutely amazing: a bunch of UC Santa Cruz physicists and computer scientists decide that roulette is, in fact, beatable with computational assistance and build wearable computers to help them do it -- and Tom Bass's "Eudaemonic Pie"[2](referenced somewhat obliquely by the linked article) is an excellent book. Indeed, Bass's book forms something of a trinity for me with Kidder's "Soul of a New Machine" and Levy's "Hackers" as painting the computing scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s -- an exciting time that provides many inspiring stories and timeless lessons.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaemons

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie
> a 3rd of the lower end of their claim

$5M USD in Bitcoin sales is pretty astonishing, actually.

EDIT: 1/5 of $15M is still pretty astonishing. I expected something around 250K in BTC-denominated sales.
Not at all, the string actuated spider just uses strings because they're flexible (i.e. they can make linear actuation go around a corner aided by a pully).
Titon Toolkit – Extensible Front-end UI Components
bitcoin regret, a sign of the times
Semver specifically stipulates that pre-1.0.0 is for unstable work.

> Major version zero (0.y.z) is for initial development. Anything may change at any time. The public API should not be considered stable.

It also allows for identifiers/metadata after the version eg 1.0.0-alpha or similar.

It also specifically says:

> Version 1.0.0 defines the public API.
A bank account is numbers in a computer saying that you have $x. You have access to digital money which you can convert to paper money at a bank branch/ATM or one of their partners but until you do so you hold digital currency.
What happens when my family, let's say in Mexico, receives the $500 and needs to buy food? Is there any way, currently, that they can they do so for less than $20? (Seriously asking, I don't really know.)
> I always feel like mainframes are off in some weird parallel universe.

This parallel universe is called reality and you live in the matrix.
On 6502, JMP uses 3 cycles. A branch uses 3 cycles if no page boundary is crossed, and 4 cycles if a page boundary is crossed. So there, JMP is "faster".
> Snar2 not only outperforms our first <Snar> version, but also easily human players

As a drummer : they took our job !

I couldn't find any video, which is a bit disappointing. As the drilling of a vintage Ludwig Supraphonic.
I made a mistake in typing that it was $3m. 1/3rd of which was in the first week. I'll correct it above.
Deploying HTTPS is next on the todo-list for today :)
I think you're confusing the kernel and userland, as the post mentions that OpenBSD's kernel ASLR support (i.e. position independence) is currently limited. When it comes to userland, W^X is a much older feature, which OpenBSD pioneered, but which by now is essentially ubiquitous (except when a JIT is in use, e.g. in web browsers), along with ASLR.

Such features have helped make exploits more difficult over time, but far from impossible - it all depends on the type of vulnerability, as well as things like how much interactivity exists between the attacker/the attacker's code and the target (potentially allowing em to gather data about ASLR, stack canaries, etc. before sending the final code execution bit). For example, web browsers are a very good case for the attacker, where not only is there a lot of interactivity in the form of JavaScript method calls, but a JIT usually ensures RWX pages exist; on the other side, an inetd server that spawns a new process for every request, with new ASLR offsets and stack canaries, would be pretty bad, since there is little interactivity.

When it comes to the kernel, an important attack source is userland programs (already compromised or run by a malicious user in a multiuser system) trying to abuse the system call interface. In this case, not only is there a lot of interactivity (many system calls + complex low-level device drivers, if applicable + weird CPU features + high level of control over multiple cores/threads and timing + sharing the same CPU caches etc. with the kernel), on pre-Haswell x86-64 processors, there is actually no performant way for the kernel to prevent the memory of the currently running user process from being directly accessible from it (not executable as of Ivy Bridge though), making any kind of ASLR much less useful. So while kernels can and do get pretty far by having well-written code that avoids vulnerabilities, they usually only need to give an inch for userland to take a mile. There are, however, other, less favorable attack scenarios, e.g. remote attacks on network stacks, and in any case W^X can't hurt.
do tell? I can see a few game changers, new generation fusion reactors, a renaissance in nuclear, but none of these are just around the corner...
Great article. It puts into words something that I've been feeling for many years, but have been struggling to express.

It's not that frameworks are bad; they quite clearly have their place. It's that they are short term hacks, and as such there is a time and a place for using them, but they aren't a long term solution to a problem.
Unfortunately I didn't find much information in the article.

Basically I got out of it:

- he likes JS, and was comfortable with MEAN-stack (MongoDB/Express web framework/AngularJS/Node.js)

- he found that for document oriented purposes MongoDB could sometimes be a nice fit

- he found that replacing MongoDB with the drop-in replacement TokuMx (seems like a MySQL/MariaDB type of idea), he could get a big performance increase

- he found that with Postgres 9.2+ using the JSON/document storage there he could get some of the relational benefits and some of the document benefits, and ACID

- he likes ACID because of transactions/handling multiple documents at once

Ok, so I guess I was wrong, there is a bit there. But: this is all stuff that I've heard several times about MongoDB.

One of the things he got into was that he learned when MongoDB was appropriate and when it wasn't -- but IMO he didn't really go into detail here other than to say: joins and transactions. I wish there was more substance than that.

I also seem to recall reading recently that even supposedly ACID compliant databases have problems with transactions under load and that the only way to really get full ACID compliance is to treat transactions as serializable - perhaps I am wrong but I think this is the gist of what I've learned.

Personally, I'm working on a project right now that uses MongoDB and I definitely do miss joins, transactions, and schemas. I am not even remotely sure where one would benefit from a system that had documents with arbitrary fields in it. (I didn't pick the technologies for my project.)

I would really like to know when to choose which database - I feel like I know the bare basics of several, and none of them in depth. I really don't have time to learn them all. I feel like even when I'm building one application it's only some months after deployment that if I'm lucky or made a mistake that I will run into some actual performance constraint.
It was a really horrible event and I'm ashamed that it ever happened. Whilst racial and ethnic tensions [1] have always existed in Indonesia to a certain degree, the event should not be a reflection of the general populace.

I would like to offer you some context FWIW.

Indonesia was in a really bad economic shape [2], the people were frustrated and angry, and were looking for someone to blame. There were already a lot of resentment due to the wealth disparity between the minority ethnic Chinese and the rest of the population, and the riots and violence escalated very quickly.

The Indonesian army could have defused the situation right away through intervention (i.e. deployment of troops), however they was seen as rather complicit in this event for their non-action. Looking back, the more plausible explanation is that they were busy with their own internal power struggles (there were strong rumours of a Coup de Etat, splitting the army depending on their support of Soeharto).

In the 15+ years since the event, the Indonesians have made significant efforts to repair the relationships with the minority ethnic Chinese, and some progress were made. Just to give two examples (which were unthought of in the Soeharto, New Order era):

Gus Dur (Abdurrahman Wahid), one of the President post-Soeharto, is a proponent of pluralism and provided significant goodwill by declaring Chinese New Year as one of the public holidays, and allowing the ethnic Chinese to publicly embrace their cultural heritage.

Ahok (Basuki Tjahaja Purnama) is the first ethnic Chinese Governor of Jakarta, the Indonesian capital. Despite constant opposition and smear campaign from fundamentalist Islamic parties, he is very popular and has a lot of support from the people.

Notes:

[1] - Indonesia has over 300 ethnic groups. Most people speak more than one `language`: `Bahasa Indonesia` and various local dialect(s).

[2] - Currency was highly devaluated (Rp.2000/$US down to Rp.10,000/$US), businesses closed down, and a lot of financial institutions went bankrupt and most of the surviving ones went to a firesale to foreign entities.
Yes, I think the upvotes would be restricted in the same way as posting thoughts.
And in the mean-time crush US-based companies investing in fracking and oil stands? We agree on the price going down to $20 per barrel, but disagree that this is some sort of additional sanction on Russia when it's clearly an anti-competitive move by the Saudis to maintain dominance during a time of political transition.
> Whereas Disney’s Magic Kingdom parks promise fantasy and wish fulfillment, KidZania is a proudly mundane municipality

For children that's the same.
Lately (and not so lately ;) there has been a lot of bad press about MongoDB. We use it extensively as part of our product (on single servers) and it fills this role nicely. It has a few drawbacks, most notably huge disk space requirements (MongoDB has no compression) which we are hoping to solve with TokuMX (haven't tried it yet). It has some other quirks too, but in general it just... works. And I love using a document DB because it lets you use relations just when they are needed. With relational DBs you often have to use complex joins even for things which should be incredibly simple. On the other hand, I do miss JOINs when I need them (though we solved that on app level). And I would appreciate a way to define schema... :) But would I exchange document DB for relational DB for that? No (for the current project).

Maybe I'm getting old, but I really want DB to just work (unlike HBase, at least a few years ago). Other than that, I'm flexible.
It doesn't make sense to release beta quality software as "v1.0.0" without any reference to being a beta in the version itself. Either use a 0.x version or use a -beta -identifier if the api is fixed but stability is not guaranteed
Hmm, if the author is right about "better behavior" over centuries, I wonder how much is due to larger groups, both in terms of raw population and social adaptations?

To draw upon the words of a fictional AI...

> The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment.

> The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization. The human being created civilization not because of willingness but of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning. God was a dream of good government.

> The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement same functionality with data-mining algorithms.
Dedicated hardware wallets help to some extent, and they already exist and work (e.x. Trezor). It's hard for people to understand backups, security updates, "don't open that funny-cat-photos.exe file from your aunt", but easy to understand "if this device is lost or stolen, my money is gone"

You have to trust the hardware (open source hardware/firmware will be an improvement), and verify addresses out of band (see https://medium.com/@octskyward/why-you-think-the-pki-sucks-b... for solutions), but otherwise you can safely use it on even a malware infested computer.

As a bonus, it can be protected by a pin (with firmware-enforced rate limits). And backups of the seed can be made in case the hardware wallet is stolen/lost/destroyed. They can even be split up using Shamir's Secret Sharing.

(Eventually mobile devices will be able to accomplish the same thing. You could imagine a more advanced version of Apple's "Secure Enclave" that presents the user with a UI (rendered by the Secure Enclave coprocessor) to authorize transactions)
An explanation about the downvotes would be appreciated. Thanks.
Care to elaborate? Beside maybe for the suggestion system, I really don't see what's the gain compared to a relational database.
Can you find another mainstream currency whose value is not several orders bigger? $2.5Bn is anecdotal at the world scale.