skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The way I see it, languages like Ruby aren't meant for high performance computing: one can pick from a dozen statically typed languages to implement time-critical algorithms. The power and beauty of Ruby is its flexibility, "fluidity", and ability to glue services provided by an operating system and a million OS-native modules. Just look into your /usr/lib.

JRuby lacks that: it only "glues" JARs together and it introduces a shockingly huge startup lag which makes your development feel like you're compiling C++ code between test runs. And even gluing JARs is kind of pointless: Java itself, with its plethora of autocompleting IDEs, is a much better environment to learn and experiment with APIs like Batik or Apache POI.
A related and unsolved question (and thus legitimate) could be: what is the smallest c such that 1000x1000 is c-colorable.
The problem with open sourcing their IP is that Fusion Garage could then turn around and start manufacturing the devices, cutting Arrington completely out of the loop. They would just have to be careful that the separate Arrington IP doesn't taint their existing proprietary parts of the Crunchpad.
Done
http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/haifu.html
The "netbooks of servers"?
I see now! I completely missed this part: "Second, he's not trying to color a simple planar graph. He means every rectangle on the grid -- for example, a 7 x 8 rectangle in the middle somewhere. This is much, much harder to do."

Otherwise the problem seemed trivial.

On the other hand... how many possible 17x17 4-colored grids are there? Can this be brute forced?
Going from 1 to 1000 open source projects and still enjoying yourself
Integrate early, integrate often
Stock options and the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT)
JRuby has been invaluable at scaling out our web scraping. Specifically, we've managed to leverage its concurrency support very effectively.

We're scraping many millions of pages, so a single-threaded scraper wouldn't be practical. Since most of the time, a given thread is waiting on IO, we get our highest throughput with a few dozen scraper threads running at once.

Trying to use multiple threads in MRI is pretty much a big mess. For whatever reason, it starts falling down after three or four. Ruby 1.9's fibers might be a good solution but it wasn't out of beta when we started this project.

Using EventMachine with MRI might get us the same effect, but changing a relatively large synchronous codebase to work asynchronously is a big task for an uncertain benefit. With JRuby, we simply pointed our (synchronous) Ruby code to a event-driven HTTP client which uses futures to block each thread. Threads are certainly heavier-weight than some concurrency primitives, but with only a few dozen the JVM is great at holding all the relevant state.

We've also been able to leverage tools in java.util.concurrent and use Scala actors with pretty great effect. JRuby (and the JVM) isn't without its faults but when it comes to concurrency it's the Ruby implementation to beat.
you'd need a code obfuscator that can turn it into an executable, otherwise the source code could just be modified to disable the licensing checks.

http://www.rubyencoder.com/ is one such product, but i've never used it.
4^(17x17).

I think that's quite a few. Your mileage may vary based on the force available to you for bruting.
how many possible 17x17 4-colored grids are there?

There's 289 points on the grid, and 4 options for each. So... 2^578 options.

Can this be brute forced?

That depends. Do you have a kilobit quantum computer available?
The problem with that is knowing that you have the minimum. The good thing about the question as asked is that it's asking for something specific and not a proof of impossibility. Your question is legitimate and interesting, but requires a proof of minimality.

That's difficult.
Perhaps MS word was worse 10 years ago. I think there is only one argument in the article that has stayed relevant, which is that word is a big complicated crash-prone program, whereas it's preferable to have a lightweight text editor. There are three possible required levels of expertise, depending on how important having a properly typeset document is:
(1) using word
(2) understanding TeX
(3) understanding word.

If your document can be ugly, you can just open word and get cracking. The occasional weird formatting problems that show up in word aren't a huge deal. But if having a proper document is important, you need to either actually know latex or actually know word. Knowing latex is way easier than knowing how word works. MS made word easy to use by hiding all the gears. This is a problem when the gears don't work how you need them to (which sadly still happens too often).

The number of people for whom formatting matters this much is probably limited to publishers and academics, so I guess it probably doesn't matter much in general.
Please let me know when you find a language that doesn't have "8 reasons not to use it". I will switch immediately.
Hold on, let me check my other universe.
Is this trend generally true of large brands, or is it specific to the Starbucks brand? Starbucks was somewhat a victim of their own success, in that their rapid, headline-making expansion gave their brand shades of "corporate drone" and "cookie-cutter" and suchlike in the popular culture. In the current economic climate it's not surprising that people would reject large brands in favor of local producers, but I would expect that to be a more industry-specific tokenism that a general consumer shift.

On the other hand, if the non-branded stores aren't succeeding either, maybe the coffee's just bad.
Um, no. The rectangles are aligned with the X and Y axes, so you choose two rows and two columns, giving 17C2x17C2 rectangles in total: 23409 possible rectangles.
> On the other hand... how many possible 17x17 4-colored grids are there? Can this be brute forced?

4^(17*17) ~= 10^173.. a bit too many to brute force, but I'm sure you could narrow the number down a lot with simple heuristics (though it would still be too large to brute force).
He asked how many grids there were, not how many rectangles there were. :-)
Thanks for the feedback! I'm still getting the hang of technical blogging.
Our memories are notoriously unreliable, and subject to outside influence. I want to see how this would hold up in controlled experiments. Simple experiment: have a person briefly appear in a room full of students. Run each student through this process. Quantify how close the produced images were to the person's actual face.

If the faces are more fleshed out but not accurate, then that's just as bad as having a generic likeness.

There's an academic paper on the work (George et al., EFIT-V: Interactive Evolutionary Strategy for the Construction of Photo-Realistic Facial Composites, Genetic And Evolutionary Computation Conference 2009, http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1389095.1389384), but it only mentions using the software as a trial with police departments. There's too many variables there to give me confidence in the results.
The biggest take-away for me is this gives you an oppertunity to (somewhat) rebalance the performance equation of the server.

Currently, your typical dual-socket, quad/six core CPU, is quite top heavy: LOTS of CPU performance, only a satisfactory amount of RAM bandwidth (and in certain cases not limited by bandwidth but by the DRAM command rate), along with piddling disk and network performance.

You could create a dual or quad-core ARM Cortex A-9 chip with a dual-channel memory controller (more memory bandwidth/ops per degree of CPU performance), dual or single gigE (more relative bandwidth per node), and finish it with a single SSD (lots of IOPs). Since these nodes are fairly affordable (probably $500) and relatively low power (probably 10-15 watts, you're left with nodes that 1) offer 1/3rd the performance but are 1/5th the price and use 1/20th the power 2) can be scaled cheaply and predictability, particularly as it pertains to laying out your datacenter power and cooling infrastructure.

Also, for people who don't have complete control of their data center (they're renting rack space), it eliminates a significant amount of headache finagling your datacenter to provide enough amperage to your rack, and eliminates surprise deficiencies in their cooling infrastructure.... lessons I've learned the hard way. Micro-servers let you scale at a much more granular level so that you aren't rolling out several kilowatts of servers at a time, and let you avoid carrying excess capacity as you wait to grow-into it (only to scramble to scale after you're full-up again)
Lots of Rubies, now what?
Ah - sorry, my turn to do a misreading. As you point out, I computed the number of rectangles that aren't permitted to have all its vertices the same color.

My bad - sorry.
There's several: Google "CSS sprite generator"

I'd categorically recommend against all of them, however. I feel it's a better practice to manage it yourself. Of course, if you need to convert multiple sites fast, they might be worth a try.
While these are truly horrible stories, it has to be noted that you cannot just explain them with some racist reference to arabs. This is just the logical conclusion of certain free market policies without regard for human rights and human well being.

In fact for every horrible story you read about in this article there is a politician in the US trying to bring that story to America. If you enact tort reform, reform the bankruptcy laws, remove worker protections and minimum wage laws, and remove environmental regulations, you will get exactly the same type of outcome as you are getting in Dubai.
Did Scott Adams just watch minority report or something?

The technology to automatically give people tickets for speeding already exists, yet it only is implemented in a few areas. I'm curious what other HN'ers think about this...
Ask HN: How important is it for a site to have its own custom search?
The link goes to a quick site a reddit user created to "solve" the persistent meme of "reddit search sucks". This brings up a larger question as to why so many companies seem to want to control search on their site with custom rolled search systems.

The question about this is, why doesn't reddit just do this? Why don't other sites do this?

It's free, the search quality is very good, and there is no cost for infrastructure, DBAs, developers, etc.
Of course you are right. I guess I pictured the 17x17=289 points forming 16x16=256 squares, which is why I felt it necessary to make the distinction.
The content/meta-content concept is pretty forced. The reason we technies know that something like Spotlight search must be creating "meta-content" (ie. an index) is because we know through experience that grepping 100GB HD is not going to be performant, so we know something must be going on under the hood.

I think the divide is simply that techies automatically think algorithmically about how everything works. Everyone expects technology to work the way the way they need for their use case, it's just that techies are quicker to think about what is logically feasible or why it might not be working. We are natural debuggers as well, so we rarely get stumped with technology for long.

There is also one other class of people... the technophobes, like my mother, who is scared to do anything with technology lest she accidentally sever her email connection and erase all her data by double-clicking something she was supposed to click or vice-versa.
Totally untrue.

Personally, I never use any of these constructs. I never see them in any modules I use. None of my friends use these. (And trust me, if you know Perl, you know my friends.) The only place I see them is during conference talks about "strange things that happen to be possible with Perl syntax".

Do I know what they do? Yes. Would I freak out if I saw them in someone's code? No. Would I add them to my own code when a clearer construct would suffice? Never.

Just because you would never use these constructs in Real Code doesn't mean that this is not something that's fun to think about. Are you a code monkey, or can you step back from the "must implement maintainable application in 42 hours OR DIE" and enjoy the art of programming?
Am I correct in thinking his ideas on sniffing machines are totally ludicrous?

Are we not basically talking about a chemical-based air tester that would have to sort through ridiculously complex masses of data trying to pick out which subtle combination of particles applies to a perp?

The sense of smell of a dog is extraordinarily complex and makes full use of a brain. I don't see this being duplicated by computers anytime soon. We'll have full-on walking and talking robots before then... and those robots won't have a sense of smell for a long time.

Or maybe I'm just ignant.

Seems to me it would be cheaper to build a kill-bot that defends all your possessions from intruders than to make a device that can monitor the subtle smells in a room.
It seems the drug business isn't being impacted much. Big increase in arrests for possession but a flat line on sales/manufacturing. I guess if you want a life of crime it's a golden era to be in the drug trade:

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/dcf/enforce.htm
Agreed. All I need (and can't seem to find) is a spiral-bound notebook of faintly-colored ink graph paper at 10 or more squares per inch.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fawnproj/

tl;dr IO is the bottle-neck, not the CPU. So slow CPUs on lots of nodes gives you more cost-effective (in terms of power costs) key-value lookups.

Of course, this makes layer-7 load balancing a huge problem, which is my own little project in this world. More on that later :)
The police reports this was a raid on an illegal club, thy were primarily interested in illegal sales of alcohol.

In addition to the stuff taken mentioned in Hackerspaces post http://forskningsavd.se/2009/11/29/i-can-haz-moar-bout-teh-r...

Stuff confiscated.
* 860 beers, 33 cl cans.
* 39 bottles of booze.
* 66 liters wine

Other illegal or "problematic" things found and seized
* 6 improvised explosive devices. Of low explosive force, mainly used to make a big bang.
* 3 high power green light laser pointers. May need a permit depending on power.
* 4 Spring Billy Club or Collapsible Batons. Illegal in Sweden
* 3 Cans of pepper spray. Illegal in Sweden.
* 1 High Power Slingshot. Illegal in Sweden.
* 2 Items of police uniform. This cannot be bought legally
* 2 Devices for making keys and key raw-materials.
The real fundamental divide is between those who can deal with multi-layered abstractions and those who cannot.

"The Camel Has Two Humps":

http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/
maybe the coffee's just bad

That would be my guess, too, assuming that customers can't otherwise tell the difference between real non-Starbucks stores and the fake non-Starbucks stores. A Consumer Reports taste test in 2007 placed Starbucks's coffee behind McDonald's, with a mixed followup review in 2009:

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/food/beverages/coffee-tea...

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine-archive/august-2...
What a neat problem. I hadn't seen this before.

You don't need quite that many -- you could test 2^289 (and you can probably skip many of them) and look for the "rectangle free subsets" that he mentions in the slides, and then just look for four of them that don't overlap. Still gonna take eons.
BDD Testing Framework For C
I think it's a great thing as long as the punishments are reduced since the deterrent factor goes out the window if you catch 100% (or even 90%) of the law breakers.
I'm surprised there seems to be so much LaTeX hatred floating around the comments. I don't really know anything about typography, but typesetting my documents using markup is a pleasure. While I often fall into the trap of designing as I type, as soon as I get the styling right, it's consistent. Once I get BibTeX references to compile correctly, I can just \cite (even \possessivecite or \citeasnoun) and not have to worry about dangling bibliography sources that aren't used anywhere in the paper, citation style inconsistencies (where does the volume number go again?), making typos in separate references to the identical source, and so on. Did I change the order of some figures? \ref will still refer to the correct number. I could highlight some word and chord a shortcut to italicize something, then have the processor try to be smarter than me about what should and should not be italicized after that, etc. But I'd rather \emph a word and be done with it (and be able to do things like \usepackage{ulem} to change emphasis to underlines instead). Rather than tabbing back and forth to try to get the proper list structure when the processor gets confused about line breaks, I can textually mark where I want the list to begin/end, where it should nest, etc. Instead of wading through menus and searching for a picture of an A with an umlaut, I can just type H\"{a}agen-Dazs directly. I can do all of this in Vim, where I have productive text-editing commands and even spell-checking. Not to mention typesetting math!

The post's tone is objectionable, I suppose. I'm sure LaTeX is not for everyone. The learning curve's too high for your standard high-school kid writing an English paper, and the payoff is minimal in such cases since word processors have many of the same features for managing bibliographies, header formats, etc. But compared to just typing it in plain text, using a word processor feels horrifically obtuse to me.
It's the standard here in Australia. Many major intersections and highways have permanent speed cameras, hooked into a vehicle registration db, to automatically post speed tickets (with photos :) to the offender. A new camera pays for itself very quickly, in cost and arguably road safety.
It's great for math/science writing.

The only problem is that LaTeX is typically required for math/science publications.
A recent re-appraisal based on the idea that loads of journalists were bitching too much about it: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/29/dubai-world-dese...
Indeed. Perl has many sub-communities. Some "wizards" enjoy obscure syntax. Other people enjoy figuring out new ways to make reusing code easier. Some other other people enjoy talking about testing. Some people do all three. etc., etc.

Basically, "Perl" is a very large community, and different people in the community use Perl for different things. Some just want to have fun and others have real engineering problems to solve and are solving them with Perl. Perl is welcoming to everyone. It's a shame that people think the playful applications of Perl make it unsuitable for real work.
The model of the wysiwyg word processor is pretty much broken; but that doesn't mean that LaTeX or separate content/presentation is the answer for this problem set.

Instead, I think if more document processors took the approach of the early DTP apps, users would have a much easier time. Quark XPress 3.3 is an excellent model for how to do it: boxes, that you put on a page and then fill with text or pictures.

If you're just bashing out text, it can works largely as a word processor does today, just with one text box filling the page. But if you want to position or format things with any accuracy, you can manipulate them directly into boxes without the heartaches of doing so in any contemporary word processor.

It's a very simple conceptual model, easy to grasp and easier to use. I skipped both of my parents straight past word processors and after the vaguest of introductions to XPress they're now both producing complicated documents that are effectively impossible to create in Word.

Of course, something like XPress takes processing power, and it wasn't available in the early GUI days -- typing a document straight into XPress or Pagemaker was an exercise in frustration. So developers and users went down the "enhanced typewriter" route of MacWrite.

If we could start again, however, Mid-90s-style DTP would be the way to do it -- you don't need the complexity of something like InDesign: just a few simple tools and a floating palette for fonts and styles. Most of the common frustrations people have creating documents today would just vanish.

Apple has taken steps towards this model with Pages, but they haven't had the gumption to go the whole hog just yet, and what Word Processor DNA remains hampers it a bit. But it's going in the right direction.
I agree with you with regarding the poor state of math education in the US. I think our kids need more practice at home and in the class room. That is why I do something about it. Please check out this site http://www.mathmaster.org.
Die sexy Agnes ist aus Polen zurück ...
Black Friday deals still going until christmas.
Post up any on going Black Friday deals.
Word Processors are stupid and inefficient, but the problems have nothing to do with including formatting options. For a one page business document, MS Word is just perfect. You need to be able to create the right formatting (bolds, headers, bullets, numbered lists) in order to get your point across at a skim.

For long documents, there is a big opening in the market.

An ideal word processor would have powerful features for organizational structure. This means drag and drop organization of chapters, subsections, and the ability to add meta-data to them—main characters, affected departments, whatever is appropriate. Color codes attached the the metadata would allow at-a-glance determinations of length, flow, etc. It would also be able to create visualizations of use of names and terms, and assess reading difficulty. The table of contents of your document should be a map that helps shape the work.

It would also need a context-sensitive thesaurus, powerful grammar tools, and revision control in the tradition of programming revision control. I should be able to cut a chapter and effortlessly bring it back in later in the manuscript two revisions later.

There are a few programs that attempt the basics of this for Mac, and nothing that I can find for Windows. Not including typesetting is just the beginning, and only necessary because it gets in the way of the rest.
This is no surprise. If you build a whole investment empire based solely on the value of housing, those cheap bricks you build turn against you one day.

No social investments, no technology, just plain luxury and housing. Have you seen that artificial palm drawn on the sea? For me, that symbolizes how artificial things were in Dubai, and good old karma gave them what they deserved.
This site is still offering 50% to 80% off games. http://ads.pcgamestore.com/thanksgiving_09/index.html
My guess is that most white collar crimes are already being detected, and the perpetrators are generally getting caught, albeit not as quickly as society would like.

I don't think this is any where near the truth in the finance world.

It's well known that wall street has long drawn the brightest graduates from the best universities in the world.
If you read up on how many times the SEC came close to busting Madoff over the years but couldn't quite connect the dots it's pretty shocking and also very clear that the smartest guys go to make the money, not play cop for the SEC.

From the NYT article about it:

In the interview, Mr. Madoff said that the young investigators who pestered him over incidentals like e-mail messages should have just checked basics like his account with Wall Street’s central clearinghouse and his dealings with the firms that were supposedly handling his trades.

“In the interview, Mr. Madoff said that the young investigators who pestered him over incidentals like e-mail messages should have just checked basics like his account with Wall Street’s central clearinghouse and his dealings with the firms that were supposedly handling his trades.

“If you’re looking at a Ponzi scheme, it’s the first thing you do,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/31/business/31sec.html