skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If licenses don't get enforced, "free" game engines like Unreal can't operate. You get the world where the only available code which do not require long meetings, massive upfront cash, lawyers and NDA's are those tiny exceptions which are given under public domain. That is not a future anyone should wish onto the software industry.
Here's how I think about our contest:
If you only had backtesting, you could win by fitting.
If you only had 1 month of paper trading, you could win by luck (taking excessive risks).

But our contest is 2 years of backtesting + live trading for a month. I don't think it is likely you can both overfit and be lucky with one strategy.
Right, inference is essential to any attempt to build an intelligence and DeepMind in particular doesn't do inference (AFAIK). I just wanted to clarify what the parent commenter was saying; I work in the field, and in conversations around AI, I very often hear "reasoning" used as an ill-defined, unattainable (for machines) _je ne sais quoi_ that's used to prognosticate about the potential for AI in general. Being specific about what one means by "reasoning" (in this context, inference) is useful for removing those kinds of useless, unmoored-from-logic[1] perspectives from a conversation.

[1] To be clear, I'm not dismissing a viewpoint that I think is wrong as "unmoored from logic", I'm specifically talking about the very common situation where people confidently assert this with no attempt (and no ability) to back it up in any way other than confidence that intelligence is simply natural and non-biological entities can never get arbitrarily close.
I would, but then again, how do you handle the api_keys?
They way I view it, GPL is free provided it's the status quo for everything to be "free software", and it is the goal of GNU to make such a world. BSD / ASL is is free in the mixed environment that is our current reality. I admire the idealism of the GPL and believe it has achieved much. But for getting work done right now, I find the BSD / ASL is more appropriate.

edit: side note - I know many customers are very happy to adopt BSD / ASL software, but more hesitant to adopt GPL because not everything they do can or will be open-source. If, one day, everyone is using like BSD or ASL or GPL, switching to an all GPL world becomes more feasible.
In this case, the issue is with using + for string concatenation, a very bad idea IMHO.
Two things:

1) The grammar and writing style has some problems with run on sentence fragments. Perhaps this is not the OP's main focus, but learning to code well is similar to learning to write well (in fact there was an article about this posted to HN a few days ago).

2) By focusing on the idea of 'the best' code, the OP implies some kind of fitness function, but is pretty vague about what that might be. The most obvious fitness function in this context would be that the code works and was written faster than anyone else. Why talk about best-practice and industry standards if your fitness function is speed of writing and correctness?

Experienced programmers don't talk about the "best" code in general, but rather the best code for a given purpose. Code clarity, speed of execution, elegance, reuse, size in memory... these are all different fitness objectives that have various trade-offs... even saying "yeah, I want ALL of those!" implies trade-offs.

It's like saying you want a D&D character with all max attributes... it doesn't work that way.

But there's also a problem with this model of learning. The fastest coders are going to likely be the coders who already know what they are doing, or who work out cheesy ways to game the system. Likely, their incentive for playing will be showing off, not genuinely helping others learn.

Meanwhile, coders who are learning will always be slower. Yes, they will see a lot of other possible solutions, but without critically understanding the differences between code examples, it all becomes a sea of noise. Stack Overflow is already like this in places -- many answers don't demonstrate an expert analysis of a problem, they simply devolve into: "I tried this", "I reinstalled", "Yeah, it works!", "I'm still having issues".

Now, if bitlean's 'tail' in the game was a nice social community built around commenting and critiquing code AFTER it was written and judging its fitness for various stated purposes -- then I could see that really building a community of value for learning programming similar to the ways that we learn critical reasoning in writing courses by contributing to critique and discussion.

'Fast' has its purposes. For example, in Shamus Culhane's book "Animation: from Script to Screen", he talks about the advantages of sketching fast without critical interruption to maintain creative flow. He was adamant about not even erasing one wrong pencil line because it brought critical analysis into the process and disrupted the flow. However, after the sketches capture an idea, that work was always followed by extensive analysis and critique to see where ideas and execution could be improved.
Depends which Pascal you mean.

The Extended Pascal ISO standard which does include dynamic arrays is from 1990.

Turbo Pascal and other Pascal dialects also had them.
> He also 'cheats' a bit by keeping part of the program on tape and never loading it into memory so it doesn't count toward the 672 byte limit.

I'm missing something here, but if something is never loaded in the memory, why should be counted? Why do you consider that a part of the program at all?

Can you please also provide more technical details, since I don't understand what you mean?
I noticed a lot of younger people at my office tend to eat lunch at their desk and watch netflix ,youtube or hulu on their phones.
I suspect that there is generational gap at play here as well.
I rather like this line:

You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.

A lot of the rest seems like self-contradictory mumbo jumbo -- which may just mean that I don't understand it. But it both implores you to spend your time on that which is important and also dismisses having material ambition. There are good points to such ideas, but, bereft of context, it really tells me nothing.

Since we are just dancing on this earth for a short time, what is wrong with taking some time to enjoy life, to smell the roses? If we prefer that to seeking great accomplishments and we are all just dust in the wind, we can decide which we prefer, can we not?

(Edit: And now my own comment doesn't make sense, because I can't make sense of what Seneca wrote. What "great accomplishments" does he value? He seems to simultaneously implore people to be ambitious workaholics and lambaste them for the same.)

Edit #2: If it makes any difference to how people interpret my above remarks: I spent about a year at death's door. I am nearly 50 years old and have a condition with a life-expectancy in the 30's. I have been living under sentence of death a long time. If you don't enjoy life at least a little here and there, if it is nothing but unremitting misery, seriously, give me death.
P-zombies don't exist, so they are not a counterexample to anything. In fact, they cannot possibly exist, so they don't even point to the possibility of anything interesting.

>There's no reason to believe that consciousness is a necessary feature for an organism to respond to its environment in a survival-enhancing way.

The reason to believe this is that systems with "consiousness" are a strict superset of systems with "responding to the environment." They are not unrelated ideas, and in fact, the ability of an organism to survive is closely tied to this kind of behavior.

I have never heard anyone try to defend P-zomies unless they were simply unaware of what the word 'meaning' means, or how our words acquire meaning. If you know how this works, you should be able to easily see why P-zombies are a meaningless idea -- an incongruous hypothetical. (Like "what would we be talking about if I didn't exist?")

Same goes for Searle's Chinese Room argument. If you assume something that is impossible, it is easy to conclude any ridiculous thing you like. P-zombies are impossible. They are not anymore useful than any other self-contained contradiction.
The thought of being able to abolish death as soon as you have a working BCI by running one's mind on silicon hardware is, if not ludicrous, at least really really far out. So, you hook your brain up to a computer, and get basic input and output. Great, you now have an upgraded keyboard / mouse. It doesn't get any better no matter how many capabilities you add. Direct memory access, changing the contents of programs on the fly, none of it will abolish death any more than being able to do by 'hand' does. The best you can do is create a really sophisticated program that will continue acting deterministically after the programmer goes away. You will live on in the same way Tolkien lived on after he died in his books.

You're not going to be able to abolish death until you can get neural networks to run at the speed of your current brain hardware and at similar capacity. In other words, you still have to be able to simulate a brain. To take the functions of the brain currently has, and get enough of them working electronically until you can start to build an identity on top of it.

Even once you do that, it won't feel like your brain without a lot of training, both on your artificial hardware and on your biological hardware. I envision an era where early adopters have hybrid consciousness, where we slowly incorporate an electronic identity with our biological one. Going from "This is my brain extension" to "this is another part of me, some of my thoughts are here, some of them are in this piece of hardware."

I suspect this will be a highly individual process that we will slowly gain mass competence with in a similar way we're doing with software now. We'll have to grow our ability to simulate neuronal processes and replicate our psychologies computationally. Even then, it will feel like an artificial prosthetic until you have enough capabilities to where if you suddenly lost the other side, you wouldn't feel trapped in the most hellish solitary-confinement prison ever devised.

Then after they're fully integrated, start prioritizing experiencing through the mind prosthetic. I suspect one would need many many years before cutting off the biological part wouldn't cause grievous trauma to one's sense of identity. Especially since our legal system will need a long time to figure out how to fit non-biological beings into society.
Down for me... :/
Because of cheating? How can you use the Raspberry Pi (in a calculator shell) to cheat, in such a way that you can't use a ti-89 to cheat? Most cheating will be by either storing crib notes on the device (which won't do you any good in math if you don't understand the concepts), or by running a program to solve a problem for you, both of which the ti-89 is more than capable of doing -- that is its whole purpose, is to run math programs.

The ideal situation would be where the RPi foundation uses its existing clout to get a PiCalc accepted as a standard calculator in school.
Not true, otherwise Wirth would have had an hard time to write "Algorithms and Data Structures".
Skiing and app testing in the French Alps
Red Hat Introduces New Linux OS for Containers
> Taking games as an example, in todays AAA games most have a long list of licensed work, with everything from personal permission slips to standard licenses like proprietary licensed third-party, lgpl, apache, bsd, mit and project specific ones. If they mess up on any single of those license requirement, they risk inoperation for the whole product.

Commercial engines generally have a clause in there that you are not allowed to bring any GPL code in contact with the engine, no exceptions.
For a Facebook user like me, this is awesome. It's really irrelevant how much I trust Facebook (if at all) - I trust someone's random startup less. Giving me an option to use something while not giving the other side enough information to spam me with crap or milk me for marketing money is a win.
Many people believe that medical control over aging will be stunningly expensive, and thus indefinite extension of healthy life will only be available to a wealthy elite. This is far from the case. If you look at the SENS approach to repair therapies [1], treatments when realized will be mass-produced infusions of cells, proteins, and drugs. Everyone will get the same treatments because everyone ages due to the same underlying cellular and molecular damage. You'll need one round of treatments every ten to twenty years, and they will be given by a bored clinical assistant. No great attention will be needed by highly trained and expensive medical staff, as all of the complexity will be baked into the manufacturing process. Today's closest analogs are the comparatively new mass-produced biologics used to treat autoimmune conditions [2], and even in the wildly dysfunctional US medical system these cost less than ten thousand dollars for a treatment.

Rejuvenation won't cost millions, or even hundreds of thousands. It will likely cost less than many people spend on overpriced coffee over the course of two decades of life, and should fall far below that level. When the entire population is the marketplace for competing developers, costs will eventually plummet to those seen for decades-old generic drugs and similar items produced in factory settings: just a handful of dollars per dose. The poorest half of the world will gain access at that point, just as today they have access to drugs that were far beyond their reach when initially developed.

Nonetheless, many people believe that longevity enhancing therapies will only be available for the wealthy, and that this will be an important dynamic in the future. Inequality is something of a cultural fixation at the moment, and it is manufactured as a fantasy where it doesn't exist in reality. This is just another facet of the truth that most people don't really understand economics, either in the sense of predicting likely future changes, or in the sense of what is actually taking place in the world today.

[1]: http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research

[2]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3616818/
Can't do that. Web sites rely on it.
There is no reason anyone should search a phone, because anyone smuggling "illegal data" can just transfer it directly over the internet undetected.

This is horrible and ridiculous.
From reading the linked article, it read to me like the complaint asserts that VMKernel itself is a violation of the GPL. If I'm wrong, please feel free to correct me, but these statements seems to point in this direction

Conservancy discovered that VMware had failed
to provide nor offer any source code for the
version of BusyBox included in VMware's ESXi products

But ESXi is not a purely open-source product;
it also contains a proprietary component called
"vmkernel."

VMware's developers appear to have taken a
substantial amount of kernel code, adapted
it heavily, and built it directly into
vmkernel itself

If so, that would be like me finding some code on Github, changing it a little, and then including it in my own closed source application, clearly a violation of the GPL.

Obviously though, I'm not sure how to prove that without the source of VMKernel

Again, this is honestly just how I'm reading it, if I'm wrong feel free to correct it.
How Copycat Songs Are Getting Your iTunes Dollars
Show HN: Helvetica Neue – Sortable / Filterable Hacker News Built with Firebase
I humbly submit that many folks "driven by distraction" may have an attention deficit disorder. The creative sorts described in the article strike me as people with AD/HD.

"Driven to Distraction" by Drs. Hallowell and Ratey [0] changed my life. The big moment for me was learning that AD/HD doesn't mean that you can't pay attention ... it's that you have little conscious control over where your attention goes unless the novelty factor is high.

Seriously. Changed my life.

[0]: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0307743152/
Going to read that in earnest, did a quick scan (not my native language) and yes: i want to differentiate here between the not-asleep and the i-think-i-know-i-am-thinking type of consciousness. It's not only experience, but knowing or thinking to know your own experience.

Furthermore, it seems only to exist or pinpoint when you're communicating with another person. In total solitude, boundaries between your self-image and the other(s) just don't hold up, and the whole thing becomes almost meaningless.

Edit: the concept of time seems to be connected to it as well, but i really need to read this paper first now, i think :)
I knew a guy in Canada who had built a drag racer out of a Monza. Custom roll cage, tuned up 350 small block making probably close to 600 hp. Too bad it had been inoperable for years when I knew him. Hope he's gotten it running again (I should ask him).
> VMware is providing the core kernel routines like scheduling and memory management

According to the LWN article someone linked[1], they're actually using modified versions of the Linux scheduling code in their hypervisor, along with the Linux implementations of fundamental data structures like radix trees. They're probably in deep trouble.

[1] https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/635290/e501ce0264c182f4/
Does it matter? It's compulsive. That's why whales will spend $40k of money they don't have on in-app purchases.
Appraising Amanda Palmer’s New Patreon Campaign
This Is the Man Behind the Jameson Whisky Flavour
Sure they can except in the most extreme corner cases. You an contrive situations in which it's difficult to sell stock on the NYSE or NASDAQ, but it's basically always quick and easy (e.g., you can move $100K of FB stock in seconds using your phone during just about any market hour and often even outside of them). That is definitely not true of private markets, at least at the moment.
You were supposed to know why a particular implementation of a tool was fast beforehand? Or they gave you GNU grep and BSD grep to compare?
You can play it, but to compete well you need to spend money. Pay to win, like any other game. So no, it's not good. It's based on wallet size, not skill.
I thought that one could register to the service, and have a dashboard where you could add your own API keys.

If you didn't want to provide your own, the script would revert to using the script's (the one used in the example).
Reminds me of yvain's "Negative Creativity"[0]. The gist of it is that maybe building "creative machines" is actually an easy task - because even if our first AI will have zero creativity, humans seem to have a negative amount of it - because we need to induce random noise in ourselves to get out of a mental rut.

[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/05/negative-creativity/
Speaking for myself - no. I compose music and write creatively, and Adderall (and Vyvanse) give me the ability to choose where my focus/attention goes.
Copy detection for maps: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
Exactly. And even when you receive data from your "own" services that you have type definitions automatically generated for, maybe there's a version mismatch in a deployment somewhere and so on.
Ah, I thought that might be the case. I wasn't sure. Thanks!
Doesn't this become self reinforcing? As long as the developer keeps adding silly things to his work the PM will be forced to ask for them to be removed, thereby reinforcing the developer's mindset that the PM always asks for changes. The PM is put in a position where he has to okay something unusual in order to stop the Dev from adding little unusual things.
Doesn't mean all the code that was used to compile that binary is used though.
As programmers we're in a unqiue position to get a sense of this, actually. It's very very old spaghetti code. Some of it essential, there are even some cleverly re-used common routines, some of it is just ballast, some of it can't be taken out but isn't getting executed either, some of it now serves a different purpose, and none of it comes with annotations that allow us to easily find out which is which.
Quite right.

Before UNIX became part of the enterprise workforce very few cared about C.
Kids being medicated - now that's an unfortunate generalization. Please don't assume that all medicated children are being fed drugs to make them conform to a group norm. There are some kids who legitimately have problems with managing their attention, and who could benefit greatly from a medication that offsets the neurotransmitter imbalance that prevents them from doing so.
Bias Suit Puts Silicon Valley Culture Under Microscope
Assuming you blackbox test the algorithms, you could include some signatures of past data. If those signatures are detected, you know the future and can trade optimally. If they are not detected, go for blind luck.
They can read through the person's text messages to look for evidence of illegal activities. This happened to one of my friends while trying to enter the US, and she was given a 10 year ban from entering the US because of things written in her text messages. They essentially accused her of trying to engage in immigration fraud because she had texted with one of her friends some jokes about getting married for a green card.
And read "Driven to Distraction", seriously.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0307743152/
In Firefox you can right click it and change the play speed. It only allows you to change to 0.5x, 1.5x and 2x but if you want some other speed you can simply open the console and do `document.querySelector('audio').playbackRate = 1.3`
> Does "not looking at every byte" really matter when the strings being searched for are typically so short that you're gonna hit every cache line anyway?

You're not skipping bytes of the search string, you're skipping bytes of the file being searched.
Remember Angular Dart?
Can you elaborate? I thought the answer to that question was to scale up if you can, because its much simpler and therefore cheaper. Similar to how you don't give up ACID unless the scale you're working at doesn't permit it anymore.
Some benchmarks put MySQL 5.7 at 645k QPS [1] and if you're using the MySQL memcache plugin [2] then you got well over 1m QPS [3]. Update performance is up to 100k QPS as well [4]. Note that in these benchmarks they are using some expensive hardware (40 core ht).

[1] http://dimitrik.free.fr/blog/archives/2014/09/indeed-mysql-5...

[2] http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-memcached.html

[3] http://dimitrik.free.fr/blog/archives/2013/11/mysql-performa...

[4] http://dimitrik.free.fr/blog/archives/2014/11/mysql-performa...
I'm guessing they knew the text messages existed before they requested to see the phone.
Is there any competitive simulation game for mobile that is not pay to win? I'm looking for something along the lines of League of Legends business model.
At least South Park has taken criticism of their model into the mainstream.

http://southpark.cc.com/full-episodes/s18e06-freemium-isnt-f...
Or on a USB or other device that's easily hidden.
It's just the new way of things: The game is free, but the fun costs extra.
Wow, that's amazing. I love programs written in less than a kilobyte. Personally, I developed a CSS framework that is only 995 bytes (not to compare it to this program) - http://mincss.com/.

In the same vein as this program, there's JS1k. Some of the stuff on there is also really amazing.
In a funny way it's players teaching game developers bad lessons.

Consumers don't wanna pay 60 bucks for a phone game. Or even 6 bucks. They do want to make in-app purchases.

The saying may go don't hate the player, hate the game, but its a funny turnabout one level up, where players influence developers.

Don't hate the nature of the game, hate the nature of the player.

Tant pis.
On the topic of fast grep-like program there is jrep too: http://lwn.net/Articles/589009/