skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Working on GCC is like taking a big step back into the dark ages of programming. Unless you've been tracking its development for years, it's next to impossible to dive into the code and get anything done. Little to no documentation on how to build your own backends, how to build optimizations, etc. Even once you figure out how to actually write code for the project, you end up looking things up at every turn just to get things working. If you need to make a serious change to the compiler (e.g. using SSA), you end up touching effectively every part of the compiler to make it work, hence why this change took so long.

It honestly amazes me that GCC is as far along as it is; it says something about the developers' dedication to free software. However, with compilers like LLVM+Clang becoming better and better by the day (largely due to the fantastic design facilitating efficient development), I doubt we'll be seeing much of GCC in a few years.
I think you missed the entire point of the article: living is as much of a gamble as smoking, statistically speaking. You inhale carcinogens daily. Your mind is slowly decaying, along with all your other organs. You could die tomorrow crossing the street or next year from a random cancer, a blood clot in your brain, or the common flu. A friend's mother died while in the hospital recovering from a routine procedure, due to a drug allergy nobody knew about and no Doctor could diagnose quickly enough.

If all it takes for you to "feel lucky" is not smoking, you live a naive life indeed.
It is not a promise, or even a goal, of SHPAML that it will relieve you the burden of understand the final output syntax, whether that is HTML or HTML combined with some template language.

SHPAML users are expected to be literate in both HTML semantics and syntax. The semantics of HTML are not abstracted away at all. The syntax is only abstracted away where it is redundant.

As a couple folks have pointed out, HTML is a pretty simple language. The problem with HTML is not its lack of simplicity; it is its verbosity.

So, if you use SHPAML, you undeniably get the terseness of SHPAML and the powerful semantics of HTML. So the question then comes down to simplicity. Does SHPAML eliminate too much of the simplicity of HTML syntax in trying to achieve terseness?
Writing tests before the code can have advantages. Specifically, it forces you to look at what the code's external interface is, rather than how it will be implemented. This is important, because the simpler the interface is, the less cognitive load it puts on someone using it, even if that person is yourself.

But I agree that being dogmatic about requiring all code to have tests written beforehand is silly. Being dogmatic about most things is silly.
This really is not news. This stuff is taught in primary school.
The whole snap judgement based on passed impressions brings to mind something I've been suspecting for a while now.

I'm tired of beta. I can't get up the energy investment required to check and re-check web applications other than a few I've already internally flagged as important. Am I alone?

When I miss-label Fret War it's unintentional. I'm just being rationally lazy to save some juice for other things.
Y Combinator Startup Library
That's true . . . but it's also true that if you want to have more equals to trade with, one good way to do that is to mentor younger employees, and that requires sharing time and knowledge with people who are not yet equals.
If you are to get a neutral reading, you must work to create a neutral setting first.

I find this is very much a function of the reader/listener. People who have a high degree of curiosity, and what I call "intellectual integrity" are always working out implications from multiple viewpoints. My archetype for this sort of person is my old Automata professor. I find that it was zero effort to present something as neutral to him.

I also find: the less effort required to get a neutral reading, the more productive the discussion.
Perhaps it's okay to use the up/down arrows to express agreement/disagreement, but then the ranking of comments can only be seen as an indicator of popular comments, not necessarily thoughtful, quality ones.

That's the inherent issue here. It's that the arrows used to represent quality in theory are actually used in practice to indicate agreement. And then with the down voting, you effectively have a system of negative reinforcement because your comments are being downvoted because you're a dissenter, but interpreted as a sign of bad quality and discouraged to speak further. It's interpreted as a sign of bad quality because all the signs say so. You get grayed out if it's too negative and your comment gets pushed to the bottom. Perhaps you'll become alienated and leave the community, making the HN community slightly more homogenous.

I agree with you in that it's a good idea to allow people to indicate their agreement and disagreement, but to have it clearly defined as an indicator of popularity.
I like this idea alot. It gives community values explicitness, visibility, and teeth.

If people have no incentive to refrain from bad behavior except the occasional posting of the commenting guidelines to the front page, then they will engage in bad behavior. People respond to incentives.
Iran protesters: the Harvard professor behind their tactics
Once again I find myself wishing that less active tone was used of evolution.

It is not that more girls are born because they have a better chance of reproducing in a famine or other stressful condition; it is that genomes that exhibit this tendency have become prevalent precisely because of that effect, which is why we see it now.
You're probably already aware of it, but Founders at Work is worth a read.

http://www.foundersatwork.com/
I'm not sure they so much loaded the game as deliberately circumvented the Warden http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warden_(software) to copy portions of the WoW memory space (locations of toons, etc) into their own address space... but I think they were busted more on violation of the DMCA for writing code to circumvent warden
That may be so for the short term, and certainly inside national boundaries, but I don't think the "rich countries own all of the ideas" thing is going to be a sustainable global equilibrium state.

This will become the norm: http://www.scidev.net/en/news/brazil-breaks-patent-on-hivaid...
"Startup" by Jerry Kaplan. http://www.amazon.com/Startup-Silicon-Adventure-Jerry-Kaplan...
Your argument might come across a little selfish, but I wholeheartedly agree with you.

I've found that there are an enormous number of people out there who are really just looking for the quick fix and want it cheap (aka free). You'll invest and start explaining something to them and once they realize you're trying to show them how to do it themselves and that you aren't going to just do it for them, they quickly lose interest.

If they instead place some sort of value on the knowledge they want from you, and realize it isn't free (I.e. it will at least take some time and energy for them to apply), the more receptive they are.
who should be the judges, though?
People who have trouble considering this idea because of all the conditioning can take a couple of hours online to investigate the scientific evidence for the dangers of second-hand smoke. When I did, they fell into the noise ... within statistical error.

What is the measured, documented percentage of smokers who contract lung-cancer? I never found that number. Furthermore, what other environmental factors were controlled for?

These numbers may even exist somewhere. My point is that they never come up as part of the arguments. Because "everyone knows" ...
Study: Rumors of Written-Word Death Greatly Exaggerated
They are not what they used to be. In the 2000's, during the telecom bubble, they were basically god. In 2003, they were still somewhat credible among the VC's. Today, I am guessing that they are basically irrelevant.
Communication can be used for emotional stimulus as much as intellectual stimulus, so it is not necessarily ideal that all arguments fit into some rigid ranking valuing objective refutations over emotionally driven spasms. "u r a fag" says a lot with a little: it's efficient. I mean, if everyone always strove towards perfectly clean refutations of central points, think about how boring the internet would be! It's simply not the case that everyone should just be looking to refute arguments with specifics. And besides, this way of looking at it reeks of elitism, like most Paul Graham articles. How can we trust what he's saying anyway? It's just to get hits to his blog. What a self-important dilettante.

:)
Google Nexus One Phone Likely to Launch Jan. 5
Yes, you could definitely gather non-anecdotal, statistical evidence, but I think you're missing dschobel's main point. I think he's making a point about the inherently subjective nature of "quality of recommendation", not suggesting the obviously stupid idea that it's impossible to gather statistical data on a recommendation engine.

And to that point, I have to agree with him. At least, most of the obvious choices for a quality measurement seem quite flawed. Here are the first few I thought of:

- Apps downloaded (this is more about how good you are at getting people to donwload an app, and recommendations are only a small part of that)

- Subjective direct rating (averaging subjective experience doesn't tell you what's good, it just tells you what people perceive as good)

- Length of usage (measures how much fun you made the rating "game", not how good your recommendations are)

This isn't an accident. Recommendation quality is inherently tricky, because if you knew how to figure out what you should recommend to any given person...that would be your recommendation engine! So you're always using a proxy for goodness, rather than a direct measurement, and that abstraction tends to leak.
It was perfectly clear to me.
Wikipedia founder on keeping a civil cybertongue
An other problem is when GCC drops architecture support -- say some old arch which Linux doesn't run on but which the BSDs do -- then the BSDs are forced to maintain multiple old versions of GCC...
u r a fag
Apophenia: Race and Social Network Sites: Putting Facebook's Data in Context
Small hands: yup, lovely concept, needs to come in larger sizes.

Where's the Magnum Mouse?
Walking the High-Tech High Wire: The Technical Entrepreneur's Guide to Running a Successful Enterprise by
David Adamson, http://www.amazon.com/Walking-High-Tech-High-Wire-Entreprene...

The best tech startup book I've read, by a founder of a company that came up with a unique semiconductor device. They had to create their market (it had great advantages but they had to convince EEs to do something unconventional), they had to discover what made them money (selling parts or services (consulting)), etc.

If your company is going to have a lot of people and has repeatable processes (i.e. you're not developing software) The E-Myth by Michael Gerber or I suppose its revision (which I haven't read): http://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-Abou...

He suggests that you build up any company of this nature as if you're going to franchise it.

He also has a lot of other good advice; one that comes to mind is to make sure that there's a head for every "hat", i.e. make sure every critical function is the responsibility of someone, don't let anything fall through the cracks simply because of oversight.

At the other end of the spectrum, it's no accident that Robert X. Cringely's Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date is still in print: http://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Empires-Silicon-Millions-Co...

Read/skim it if for nothing else but the lesson of how Intel, after it had gotten quite big almost died due to the innocent well intentioned actions of one man. He makes the point that high tech companies, even if they enter the Fortune 500, aren't like "normal" ones.

There's the conceit that when a company gets big enough, no one person can kill it. His example is only one of many you can find where screwing up at the technical level can with frightening speed put a high tech company on a terminal path (see the recent "When the elves leave Middle Earth" HN item for another example of this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007750).
It's there. Check your tab settings.
I can't speak for all accordians, but the chords at the left-hands of piano-accordian players are arranged in circles of fifths. F is below C is below G is below D ...

As a result, buttons for all the (non-chromatic) intervals are within 2 buttons of the tonic ... for every tonic. Once you've got the pattern, it's the same for every key, no matter how remote.
Leadership lessons from principal of a New Orleans charter school
You just cost me $70, goddammit. Thanks.
capstone

edit: for those who ask, why did I do it backwards, the answer is simple, and a good life lesson: make sure you have a punchline.
DoneTask - Make the new user registration and earn $ 10 per user
Article was interesting. Finding Readability... fantastic. Thanks, callahad.
The caption on that image is usually "You make kitty scared" (http://www.hollow-hill.com/sabina/images/you-make-kitty-scar...). I took that to mean that Lispers see Haskell and get scared by it's seemingly unnecessary complexity.
A thought I had after reading the original (http://www.totlol.com/t/story):

FTA:

The very first prototype of Totlol had an upload button and no YouTube integration. When it was done I contacted a content creator with a good YouTube presence and showed it to them. The response: "Great idea for a site" but "we have limited resources when it comes to distributing ... so our participation isn't a sure thing." They never uploaded. I got replies along the same lines from others I contacted.

/FTA

Maybe there's a business plan in there somewhere. I.e., create a tool that distributes videos to various channels (YouTube, Totlol, Revver, Vimeo, etc.)
Aren't we better than imgur.com on HN's front page? :/
I have a suggestion: Make it compulsory to leave a comment explaining a downvote i.e. when a user clicks on the downvote button, he is asked to comment. You can't downvote unless you provide a reason.

Flags can play the role of downvotes for controlling spam and totally rubbish comments.
If the TSA managed to apprehend any terrorists at all at the security checkpoint, you can bet your ass they would be screaming it as loud as they can from all the rooftops and in all the newspapers they can get to print it. Since that hasn't happened, no, they haven't stopped a single thing.
How did Netflix evaluate submissions to its competition?
imgur, pointless language wars, 'lol images'

This is pointless on so many levels.

edit: 57 people voted this up??? If ever evidence was needed for how much HN has changed, this is it. Sad.
>Finally, it's time to re-examine the current legal system. Online hostility is cross-jurisdictional. We might need laws that directly address this challenge. There is currently no uniformity of definition among states in the definition of cyberbullying and cyberharassment. Perhaps federal input is needed.

I don't get it that people don't get that the internet cannot really be policed! How would a law in the States stop someone from Iran to bully someone in a forum.

Who can stop them are the website owners, moderators and other members. It is really like in real life, some websites are small like small villages and need only one policeman, others like Wikipedia are like cities and might need a stronger 'police force'. The 'punishment' is easy and swift you just ban the user!

What is needed are stronger algorithms to automate some of these chores, not more lawyers!
Web Development and Rails Tips - A Look Back at 2009
GSM encryption cracked
All of them have plans to support moneybookers since 2006... but they still think of it to the moment
I would be curious to see how much this actually gets utilized.

My personal approach is always to cut out any "middleman", you never know when someone will decide to NOT redirect traffic anymore, or insert their own ads or whatever.

news.ycombinator.com/new is 2 keystrokes in my browser (firefox). Hit "n", "enter".

It's a nice thing to do, just not sure that it's really solving any problems.
Smoking is anti social though. It's disgusting. It's like force feeding everyone around you asparagus, just because you love asparagus.

Please stop smoking everyone.
Wouldn't touch online payments. I was thinking you take cash at a store front and get a randomly generated key that gives you bandwidth for a certain time.
Yes. Especially when you have kids. It's horrible.
I read http://www.foundersatwork.com and it was not really bad. However I prefer to read articles and discussions about startups; I think they are the best resource of information.
Citation needed. Send us the link to this post.

I'm curious.
I'm on the dev builds: version 4.0.266.0. Linux is also on the dev builds
If this is pointless, quit surfing the web and get back to work.

Personally, I thought it was hilarious.
Within the niche of HN which is in itself a niche of 'tech'.

OK, point conceded. These people are truly 'famous' :/
Probably thousands. Most attorney things seem to always involve thousands. Why not just set it up as a corporation right off the bat. By the way, you will not set up as a C-Corp, only a corporation. The C vs. S thing is a tax treatment under IRS tax law that you can choose once the entity is formed.

Since you might want to raise money, to me it seems like the most intelligent thing to do would be to set up a Delaware corporation and operate as a C-Corp. After that if you decide later that you will NEVER want to raise money then flip it to an LLC on advice from your business tax person.
I've been using this for the last couple of days. It rocks!
The Best jQuery Lightbox Scripts
A good idea might be to put a "styles" principle into other vector graphics tools that alter the line style to conform to certain principles. (maybe they do this already, I don't use much vector graphics software myself).
I don't get it that people don't get that the internet cannot really be policed! How would a law in the States stop someone from Iran to bully someone in a forum.

The fact the internet is internation makes it difficult, not impossible for the Internet to be policed.

First, remember that even though the internet makes international dealings trivially easy, much of the interaction (most perhaps?) takes place entirely within the borders of one country. This makes it easily subject to that country's laws.

Further, even when it is truly international there are still ways of enforcing at least a large subset of laws through international courts, or by suing in a court with jurisdiction over the defendant, or in some major cases through extradition.

And that is what can be done right now. With time and work, international governing bodies and more detailed treaties can be written to ease those legal dealings. (What form those can or should take is well beyond the current scope, but it is safe to say they are possible and even likely.)

(edited to fix grammar)
We do this to the tune of a million events a day (not pageviews, actual UI interactions) and it works well, especially given the $0 price tag. What's lacking is event correlation of the kind that KissMetrics and others support: how many users who performed event X went on to perform event Y.
Yes, in the early days it would have been an image using cats and figures from popular culture to illustrate what proponents of major schools of macroeconomics think of each other.

Come to think of it... I'd still expect that to play well here.
Surprised to see How to Win Friends as one of the 4 recommended books just because of how old and infrequently mentioned it is these days. I just read it recently and it's full of some gems. Also surprisingly has got some good bits in here about persistence.
Compiler licensing is not enough to supersede the BSDs' pragmatism. We've been using GCC for years.

If you've had to maintain GCC for your platform -- or worse yet, tried to add even small improvements -- you'd understand why momentum is building to replace it.

Not that switching to GPLv3 helped GCC any. That's one reason among many that Apple stopped GCC development and put their weight behind LLVM.
If you put code in the code, it will capture user actions (such as clicks) prior to loading all resources. If it's at the bottom of the </body> and the user clicks a link, you may not capture that click. Thus, giving you inaccurate analytics.
Did you know that Newton's version was written to a dwarf (Robert Hooke) who had accused Newton of taking his ideas?

It is ironic that this pointed insult has become seen as a sign of his intellectual generosity.
Ask HN: Your favorite tiny feature?
While I'm working I occasionally encounter incredibly subtle features of applications I'm using that amaze me. Examples:

1. Emacs iterative search ignores case unless you type a capital letter in the search-string.

2.Vim's move-cursor-left/right doesn't go to the next/previous line.

3.This site: whiting out downvoted comments.

What's an application you use that has a subtle feature that surprises you?
A decent portion of the population against downvoting aren't against downvoting per se, it's downvoting without a comment or counterargument.

Uh, yes, that's precisely the opinion my whole comment was objecting to. How can that not have been obvious? Did I edit the baby out with the bathwater? Let me try again:

There are many occasions when a silent vote is the most appropriate feedback, for two reasons: (1) one doesn't always have time to type out a comment; (2) one's comment, if typed out, might not add value. There is a psychological threshold above which an explicit comment makes sense and below which it does not make sense, and trying to mandate otherwise will not work: it will only result in a lot more tedious comments. Indeed, many suggestions people are making strike me as rather schoolmarmish. There are few better ways to suck the life out of things than to make them mandatory.
Xakep is a magazine mostly about the other kind of hacking (the meaning journalists use). Which means there are lots of black hat and script kiddie materials in there, along with the white hat kind of hacks. Btw, 'xakep' is 'hacker' in Russian, but spelled using Latin characters.

This material is definitely on the black hat side of things, but it is still important to be aware of these types of attacks. Sadly, PHP include bugs and SQL injections are still very widespread.
I worry that having an explicit "agree/disagree" axis would encourage a popularity contest mentality, so I was about to say that this was a terrible idea... but then it occurred to me that by having it there, it might siphon off the people that are using the upmod/downmod function as if it were agreement-based. So maybe it would be good after all.
Some follow-up
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/29/totlol-youtube/
He's making a good point and I believe that protection against harassment on the internet should be better. On the other hand I think the huge amount of crap people post is a inevitable side effect of the ease of communication the internet has brought. You cant filter "stupid" stuff, after all, whos to decide what is stupid and what not?
Not on the list: Guy Kawasaki's "Rules for Revolutionaries". It's been one of my guides for a long time, and it's responsible for changing the way I think about business enough to make me want to run my own.
True enough. Obviously Affiliate Script is on shaky ground if Amazon.com adopts the features that I have developed, but then again it is my first startup idea, so while I hope for success there is the very real possibility that I may go obsolete. That said, I doubt that Amazon will update their system anytime soon.

At the very least Affiliate Script is a serious project and demonstration of my programming skill that may help me get a job later on, so either way I benefit.
Blackberry Internet Service and Blackberry Enterprise Service