skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am going to defend myself. Then, I am going blow my argument out of the water.

Backstory: I am a fifth year comp sci student. I have worked part-time as an SDE for most of my college career. The python crash I referenced earlier was in class, the java problem at work. I have written an optimizing compiler before (C subset to LLVM to SPARC MIPS), so I hope that you will at least agree that I am not a complete moron in this area.

Java story, more detail: To make a really long story short: I wanted to move a really really long stored procedure (~2k LOC) into a JDBC query. Don't ask why, it was a very scary legacy issue. So I copy and paste the stored procedure into one long const string in eclipse, and it compiles just fine. I run our ant script against it, and it explodes with a stack overflow (IIRC). The solution that I found was simply to replace newlines with \n" + (newline). No stack overflow on compilation anymore. From this I could only assume that I had fubared the compiler (which would have been a reasonable way to fubar, being as I was trying to create an absolutely massive const string directly).

Now we could quibble over whether this even counts as a crash in the sense we were talking about, but the underlying premise is: you never want to have to work around your tools. As computer scientists we do it a lot, but it is never fun and its worse when something goes down in production because the tool crapped out. Theoretically, a VM or OS should never fail and bring the entire system down. A compiler should never outright crash.

Now to debunk my own defense: I just sat down for about an hour and did everything I could to reproduce the bug in JDK 1.5.6 (the original JDK I broke it on). Well, go figure, I can't get it to break in the hypothetical way I wanted to. I might one day do exactly what I did with the stored procedure, but setting that particular environment up again would take quite some time.

In conclusion, you can assume I was an idiot because I can't show you the code. I would in your shoes. :)

P.S. This all assumes you are using tools given to you by the platform itself. Using JNI to dereference a NULL doesn't count. :D
Visual Studio and XCode don't either. You start them up and you get a gray screen and a few menu items like "New..." and "Build...".

At least Emacs starts up with a screen containing links to the documentation and an interactive tutorial.
IE is probably tied with Firefox as the most secure browser

Meaning both are more secure than Chrome? What about the process sandboxing Chrome does?
I wonder if tall clothing has the same dimensional problems as mass-manufactured fat clothes. I've spoken to a few friends who are in the fashion industry, and what I've discovered is that as clothes get larger, the proportions are increased linearly .. This would work well if people's bodies were squares, but not so much given that ratios change vary dramatically from one person to the next.

The process itself is pretty amusing. You take a template for a pair of jeans and put it on an enlarger. You enlarge that template some percentage for every increase in size. Everything gets bigger, including the pockets. Let me tell you, I can fit a bottle of champagne in each pants pocket.

Maybe the room for innovation here is something along what Nike was trying to do with it's in-store 3d body scanners for jeans a few years ago. Apparently that process failed because women didn't like seeing accurate visualizations of themselves, since everybody has body issues thanks to the media.
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How about categories for the posts? Something like the ones jacquesm used.
I'm sorry to hear it is that bad. Is the trend worsening or improving ?
The Red Cross has a large operating budget, and knowing the donations are coming allows them to draw down their level of cash on hand.
That's actually an interesting comment, are you an angel investor?

For co-founders, everybody wants to pair up .. but for investors and entrepreneurs, the dynamics would appear different, right? In the sense that there's more entrepreneurs than there are investors, and since investors have a finite amount of money, they don't want to be too easily accessible since they can't invest in everybody (and don't want to be pitched to all the time)?

If you are on the investor side of the table, do shed some light :)
JavaScript in Firefox is compiled to native machine code (if you enable content.jit, that is.)
Vimperator and Conkeror do some pretty complicated manipulation in pure JavaScript. (Sure, the rendering core is in C++, but that's because C++ was all they had when it was first developed.)
Right, I'm asking "when is he saying things close to that which is not allowed?", and "when is he saying things unrelated to what is unallowed?". For example, when he talks about the distinction between the attacks on GMail and the malware on user machines, he's very comfortable, even though he's clearly off-script. When he's talking about Google's desire to stay in China, he's downright confident.
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Looking at their most recent Form 990, the American Red Cross has over a billion dollars in liquid cash/savings, with another 1.5 billion in more fixed assets, and cash flow of over 3 billion.

90 days is nothing. Agitating for clearing the funds faster is just going to add overhead.
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I had an excellent experience with rentacoder.com. The best part is that the website holds your money in escrow and builds up to the programmer as she meets milestones. The website also arbitrates when there is a dispute.
> If Apple comes out with a tablet that succeeds because Apple has figured out the right use-cases & metaphors for it, that might mean that they could have done it ten years ago. That's something.

Maybe. If its core functionality is at all tied to the way people use the Internet today, then no.
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Yes. They still use Rails (and Ruby) for the majority of their service. They use Scala for the highly concurrent / heavy lifting stuff.
JQuery 1.4 released
New features can be found here:

http://jquery14.com/day-01/jquery-14
How did they do that? Seems that not all big companies are suffering due to global economy.
It sounds like they drew a lot of inspiration from the book Five Point Someone by Chetan Bhagat, which follows three similar students making their way through IIT Delhi, one of the most prestigious (real) universities of India. It's a great read, quite light and slapsticky at times, sad at others. I spent six months at IIT and it's really quite realistic.
If Dijkstra was still alive and well, and you put him...

No harm, Dijkstra never struck me as the kind of person that would want to spend a day in a room with anyone, either. Computer Science is about studying the computation which can be done in hardware - not just Python, not just on one chipset, not just on a von Neuman machine, but in general. "Programming" as I think you mean it is a very small subset of that.
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If a tablet does materialise, what will make it successful?

Being large enough that reading web pages is not a chore, but small enough to be easily held in one hand and poked at with the other.

Many (, many...) elaborations come to mind, but thats the minimum viable product. Its kind of amazing that tablets haven't been more successful. Unless you are actively editing text (not the norm on the web), that keyboard is just there to prop your laptop monitor up at an appropriate angle. And the mouse? Cocoa Touch has made that seem pretty silly outside of pixel editing.
My first language was C, my second was C++, my third Java. I lost all love for them the moment I learned Scheme, and the all practical use the moment I learned Python.

I don't think it really matters what language is first/second/etc, just that you keep searching and finding new ways of thinking.
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Jeff Bezos wanted to start Amazon.
Bill Gates wanted to start Microsoft.
Steve Jobs wanted to start Apple.
GDP per capita (World Bank, 2008):

$24,742 Trinidad and Tobago (28th)
$1,177 Haiti (146th)

What's possible in a rich country isn't much of an example of what's possible in a dirt poor country -- the poorest in the western hemisphere. (What other expenditures should Haitians have forgone to afford in-advance disaster preparations and rich-country building standards, for an earthquake that might never come?)

Poverty is the ultimate killer here. An event like the earthquake just sets the time-of-death. Blame the poverty, and the policies which perpetuate it, sure. Blaming the Haitian government for not buying insurance -- building standards and disaster preparedness -- they couldn't have afforded anyway is silly.
I'd recommend Partners in Health, which has run a well-regarded hospital in Haiti for decades. More here:
http://www.standwithhaiti.org/haiti/news
> If Dijkstra was still alive and well, and you put him, Guy Steele, and Don Knuth in a room and asked me to pick two of the three to spend the day with

Or -- and more relevant to their professional competence -- to develop a large, complex and safety-critical system, such as air traffic control; I wouldn't choose Dijkstra over Knuth or Steele for that job either.
I seriously doubt aid will continue. It's a passing fad in a month or so we'll have another concern.
But that is the point of a directory listing of people - people who enter their info want to be found and contacted.

If you don't want to be contacted, then don't add your information. I'm not sure what you're suggesting is the problem, but perhaps you can suggest a solution?

You obfuscate your email addr so that it's human-readable and not spam-bot readable. Or just add your twitter username instead, or whatever choice you prefer.
Consider this: replace "acid gradient" in the experiment description with "air pressure": Imagine constructing a larger version of this maze from cardboard. A vacuum cleaner is placed at the exit of the maze. Sucking the air out of the maze creates a pressure gradient such that there is higher air pressure nearer the entrance and lower air pressure nearer the exit. This pressure gradient causes the ping pong ball to roll through the maze to exit.

This is a brilliant application of a novel idea BUT the physical process at work only seems miraculous because we do not deal with acid gradients every day. Consider: would the same claims that it "performs a computation" be as credible in the vacuum cleaner and air pressure version?

If any computation is being done, it is a search space being covered in parallel by billions of independent agents (the molecules of the medium). The movement of the water droplet (or ping pong ball!) merely serves to display the answer.
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How does our language shape the way we think?
Ushahidi aggregates, disseminates Haiti crisis info
It's Steve Yegge again. Nice to see him not totally gone in the google black hole.
I don't know much (or anything, really, besides basic some basic concepts to avoid writing vulnerable code in my languages of choice) about vulns (0day or otherwise), however, this doesn't sound like a particularly exciting exploit. Its just a mistake with pointers, albeit one that had some serious consequences.
Your "perhaps they should" reasoning verges a bit into "no bread? let them eat cake" territory.

You can't make buildings safer by decree. It takes resources. Haiti is the poorest country in this hemisphere, by far. (The next poorest countries, Guyana or Nicaragua, are each twice as productive by per capita GDP.)

Even with an accurate idea of the chances (but not certainty) of such a major earthquake, the people and government could quite rationally have decided other more pressing needs deserved all of their meager expenditures.
I guess it's necessary in order to see the blocks at the bottom, but the ultra-wide field of view makes it hard to tell visually when the blocks have reached the top two levels.
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I think that having complementary skill sets is important, but I'd say that after technical skills, interaction design skills are probably more important than business skills. Like they say: first get to product market fit, then grow the business. Getting to product market fit requires someone who understands user needs and interactions (product design) and someone who can implement the solution (technical). A product/interaction designer, though, will probably have some frontend development skills, so perhaps I'm arguing for two technical people.
Maybe you should clarify your posting. It reads as

"Well I never had any problems learning to program. I am pretty much the smartest person in the world I guess. My "problem" is that I am so great I have too big of a head."
Could you try whether Coral Cache works by appending .nyud.net to domain like this:
http://wattsupwiththat.com.nyud.net/2010/01/14/more-on-john-...
Very poor movie. Trivializing some important issues affecting the educational system in India. Additionally, filled with cheap gimmicky jokes.

In one scene, an expectant mother feels her baby kick when the hero says 'all is well' to the mothers womb. Later, the child is born, but isn't crying and so everybody is about to cry about the stillbirth. Then our hero says 'all is well' and the baby starts kicking and subsequently springs to life.

really? and think of the mother in the audience who had a stillbirth.
Google Talk. There's a native client on her end, it runs all the time, uses little battery, and works fine with EDGE and she won't miss calls, and its very robust. On your end, buy Beejive IM for the iPhone and enable long logins and push notifications. It works very well.
So where is the dividing line, then? When does incidental observation (but stored for all time in a database searchable by the public, say) become stalking?

In particular, is it possible that no individual act of recording personal data observed in public would constitute an unreasonable invasion of privacy (whatever we choose to call that in law) yet the combined total still has the effect of stalking? Because that is the real problem that, IMHO, the law hasn't caught up with yet. In a connected, database-driven world, you can't judge everything in isolation, because it is often the cumulative effect that is the dangerous thing.
You have to serve a lot of content to make $1.5M in advertising.
Okay, let me say this again in here, because it's more applicable: a hacker is an aesthete. No more, no less. That's where both the positive and the negative connotations of a "hack" come from--hackers judge things on their beauty/elegance/cleverness/Quality/whatever other term you want to use for an aesthetic scale, not on their moral or ethical worth/utility. Both the amateur crackers who break into systems for fun, and the FOSS writers, are "hackers" in the truest sense of the word, because they're both doing things that appeal to their aesthetic senses.

Of course, artists are also, by and large, aesthetes. The differences between "hacker" and "artist" are sort of fuzzy, really: hackers don't necessarily create, while artists are usually expected to; artists usually specialize in a given form or medium, while hackers aren't expected to—in fact, a hacker is usually interested in as many forms of aesthetic expression as they can get their hands on (although, for some reason, they usually don't like the fine arts—this is probably more to do with the connotations of fine art and its relationship to intelligence in Western culture than anything else.) More precisely, though, a hacker is mostly interested in new forms of aesthetic expression, where the "classics" haven't yet solidified and there's no canon skills or methods required before one may dive in. da Vinci would be both a hacker and an artist in his own period, but brought forward to today he would merely be the latter.

"Hacker" could be replaced in this day and age with "aesthete" and lose almost none of its meaning (or "neophile aesthete" and lose none at all.)
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Exactly; thanks for clarifying. :)
The way I look at it is... if you refuse to learn something, you are only hurting yourself.
That's all fine and good but the 'popular' use of the word hacker is uniformly negative.

That is the whole problem here there are two disjoint sets of people that use the word in an almost opposite way. The popular use does not have room for a creative angle or a 'for fun' element, it associates hacking with criminal acts.

That you and I would not use the word in that way is lost on the large majority of the English speaking world.

On HN if someone would call a defacer a hacker I would likely point out that that is improper use of the word, but if it were a mainstream publication I would not because the word has changed its meaning too far to turn it back (or at least, I think it has).
Actually your question perfectly illustrates the limitations of thinking of this as a computation device: I doubt it could be used to find the longest path, for the reason that whatever way the oil droplet responds at one intersection, it will employ the same type of response at the next.

The oil droplet is able to (usually) find the shortest path by always moving in the direction of higher acid content. Would you expect it to find the longest path by always going away from the higher acid content? That's wrong; that's not the longest path to the exit, it's the SHORTEST path back to the entrance!

OK, so how about the least acidic path that it hasn't already taken; i.e. not allow it to double back? Also wrong: that will lead it into the first blind alley that faces away from the exit, where it will be trapped.

So given that 1. We cannot use the highest acidic value as a criterion and 2. We cannot use the lowest acidic value as a criterion and 3. We cannot use the lowest acidic value not already visited, that leaves us with expecting the droplet to neither always take the most acidic exit from an intersection nor the least acidic. However, surely SOMETIMES the least acidic exit might be the longer path, and SOMETIMES the most acidic exit is. Then we are forced to conclude that the droplet must act differently at different times with the same stimulus!

That implies it has to maintain some kind of state, or memory. As the droplet is undifferentiated oil, it seems unlikely that it has a large enough state space to solve the longest path problem.
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So does HN.
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I think most people that use Ruby put something in front of their servers (like nginx or Apache) that can handle SSL and serving of static files...
Very perceptive. I have not thought of this angle!

I think it is important, however, to note that a hacker, the way the word is usually understood, is necessarily part engineer, part craftsman, not just an artist (and, frankly, not necessarily that much of an artist at all). In his book Coders at work, in which Peter Seibel interviewed a number of prominent coders (really, hackers of software), and one of the question he asked all of them was if they thought of themselves as artists, scientists, engineers, craftsmen, etc. Answers varied, but in general they suggested a mix.

Thanks again for an interesting approach.
IPhone 4G concepts out.. are they real or not
Maybe their motto is "Do be evil".
I had heard earlier indications that it was the Javascript in PDF vulnerability that was partially at fault. That began getting publicized a bit before the Google newsbomb, so there may be some truth to that.
As always, it depends what your app is doing. I've got a realtime event hanling solution where the performance dips close to 50% when you turn SSL on simply because of the handshake times.
That to me is the real message from this: That twitter failed to implement and integrate this feature into their own service, and are missing out on a pretty decent revenue stream.
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I think you're being deliberately obtuse.

Take the Performance of .css() and .attr() chart. I can tell very easily that in FF 3.5, time to execute cut in half, ie 6/7/8 and Opera 10.10 are ~2/3 what it was, and safari and chrome about 1/2. You can also see that in 1.4 FF comes in third, behind safari and chrome and ahead of opera 10.10, and that ie is the slowest in order or 8,7,6.

It also shows that FF 3.5 has great gains with this release, as it was behind opera in 1.3

That's a lot of information packed into one tiny chart. Yes, diving into the specifics takes some doing, but the primary purpose of the chart is to show the overall gain in 1.4 vs. 1.3. Breakdown by browser is a bonus.
AFAIK web development uses SQL, SQL is relational algebra.
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It's an attempt to spin the discourse to one of "Google's can't handle the standard operating environment" rather than "Google took a principled stand." Nothing more, nothing less.
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I don't even understand the broken window fallacy. The broken window repair does seem to increase GDP, as long as G means Gross (Gross Domestic Product).

Of course the net gain is zero, but that's not what GDP mean, I think.