skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Coming to terms with the realisation that you have created your successor, not just in the sense of mother and child, but in the collective sense of the species recognising it has become redundant, this paradigm shift is, for many species, a shift too far. They baulk at the challenge and run from this new knowledge. They fail and become extinct. Yet there is nothing fundamentally wrong with them - it is a failure of the imagination."

"I hope that if I can get across the concept that I am a product of just such evolution, it may give them the confidence to try."

I vote for staying human, and not obsoleting ourselves.

The idea of becoming like the god of this story reinforces this conviction. He reminds me of Q from Star Trek, toying with species for his own amusement, having some arbitrary conception of what makes a species worthwhile, mainly revolving around that species ability to shape the material universe around them.

To me, what this story demonstrates is that Atheists are not actually opposed to God like beings. But they are scandalized by a God who does not regard technological advancement as the highest calling. They cannot possibly take a God like Jesus seriously, for example, because he was not at all concerned about correcting the scientific misunderstandings of human beings. He only cared about how people treated each other, human relationships, attitudes of the human heart, and love. For me, the verse that demonstrates Jesus nature is also the shortest in the Bible: "Jesus wept." True, he did not (and does not) always intervene to eliminate suffering and tragedy, like the being in Talking to God. But he does empathize with us, to the point he was willing to literally share in our suffering alongside us.
Seems Feynman had an excellent father, seeing from the interviews I have seen with him.
This is kind of beating a dead horse here, but Despammed.com was my baby (still is, in an embalmed and pathetic sense) for six years. And we had Web-based anonymous email for real, written into our policy. We tossed the logs every day - the only way anybody could get fresh logs, before tossing, was to subpoena us for them. One - exactly one - law enforcement agency did that, for a user who was using us as a dropbox for credit card fraud. The Italians never managed to get us a subpoena for the freedom-of-speech abrogation they attempted. And nobody else ever tried. They'd bluster a bit, but when it came to getting us paperwork, they went away.

I should probably reinvigorate that someday.
Had it fixed. Thanks.
I like the idea. I actively look for "I wish there was a [website, app, plugin, extension...]" threads in forums sometimes just to get some inspiration.

In Chrome 4.0, there seems to be white "vote now" text running down the left side of the page, barely visible against the gray background, after I maximize the page. It might be a bug that only shows up upon resizing the browser?
Nitpick - Jihad does not translate (in its original arabic) to "holy war". It translates to "struggle".
Could you please grace us with a code sample for all of these? I'm not intimately familiar with Haskell, Lisp or Ruby.

>>> from decimal import *
>>> Decimal('0.3') == Decimal('0.1') + Decimal('0.2')
True
>>> Decimal('NaN') == Decimal('NaN')
False
>>>
I found an optimizer bug once. I can't remember the exact circumstances, but it had to do with some fancy inline incrementing I was doing. The very concept that I'd found a bug in somebody else's code floored me.

I was young.
Facebook can have these features too, but they don't seem to go for them.
My experience goes in a different direction: when you see different behavior when compiled with and without optimization, suspect a memory allocation error or overrun. While compiler optimization bugs do exist, I've more often found that the problem is real.

If you are working with your own code and care if it works:

1) Turn on all compiler warnings
2) Change your code so it compiles clean
3) Run under Valgrind (or equivalent).
4) Address all reported errors, specifically
whitelisting them if necessary.
5) If you find a bug, don't stop until you've found
the cause. You're done when you understand what
caused the bug to appear, not when the symptoms go away.
6) Use open source tools, since otherwise you'll be
tempted to blame some unspecified 'bug in the compiler'.
(not that ESR would be using any other)
7) If it is a compiler bug, report it, along with
the smallest test case you can generate.
-O3 isn't "riskier". It's just harder to debug under.
How are all those projected jobs in software and computer systems going to be filled when CS degree enrollment has plummeted and it's so hard to import skilled foreign workers?
It would be very difficult to fit labels in for all of the smaller circles and have this not feel very cluttered. That's another 41 labels that have to go somewhere.
Thanks.

Ok, got it fixed (text-indent problem). You must have a really big screen.
Except multi-thread programming, I didn't find any compiler's optimizer related bugs. The truth is, most heisenbugs I found are somewhat related to memory access. It is just too risky to assume it is a compiler bug. I always think in the other way: unless you can prove (by generating assembly code and a possible scenario), the bug is in your code.
Exactly. Select is probably not broken.

If the program works in some compiler optimization levels and not others, then think about what the optimizer is doing and how this may change the circumstances that the bug may appear. I agree that it is probably a memory corruption issue and that by turning off optimizations, you are hiding the sympton and not fixing the bug.

I think there should be a law that states: if you use a language like C or C++, you must ensure it compiles cleanly with all warnings turned on AND runs without error under a tool like Valgrind.

There are simply too many places where bugs may creep in to leave it to chance. The tools exist - use them!
Great app!

Some time ago I was thinking about creating something similar. I am one of those developers that finds figuring out what people want extremely difficult. But I did not think about it in terms of twitter, so it appears you implemented it better than I would have done.

A possible way to expand it could be the possibility to tell people when something already exists or if you are developing it. It could become a good promotion channel.
Sometimes I'm out at a restaurant with my engineer buddies and we all want to know something. So I whip out my phone and start Googling. In that case I'm not just diverting attention from them, I'm serving them.

I think similarly there will be moments to check Buzz for the group.

If you're on a date with a hot chick/dude, just do it when s/he/you go/es to freshen up.
Unwitting Distributed Genetic Programming via AJAX
Very true. It doesn't prove anything that -O0 works while -O3 doesn't. It's still almost certainly a bug in your code.

I don't think the percentage is 99.99999% though. Compiler bugs do exist. I have seen several more than four in 12 years of C programming.
Interesting theory, but I thought the secret was "Never pay more than 20 bucks for a computer game."
Of course C++ has RAII, as you must know. Allocate the object on the stack or, if you must, use a stack-allocated auto_ptr if you want it to last as long as the block, as the destructors for stack-allocated objects form the hidden "finally" clause of every block. Otherwise, it is stored somewhere, and the object that stores it should manage it. If you store an object in many different places with no master location, you are starting to wander into automatic memory management territory.

As for my rationale, reference counting is by most accounts an obsolete form of garbage collection. The smaller your object is, the more space you waste. If your references are at all cyclic, you have to introduce weak references, in which case you must understand your memory structure to the point where you should be able to manage your memory without garbage collection. (Languages such as Java contain weak references, but are never needed and only should be used for things that the programmer is willing to lose such as a cache.) Cyclic references will creep up on you when you least expect it.
Apple’s top 10 issues: AT&T, the App Store, and … computers?
What’s Better: Saving the World or Building Another Facebook app?
Most people don't realize that the major cost of a launch is labor. Fuel is less than 2%, while the standing army of people and infrastructure is well over 80%.

Rather interesting that. I'd always thought the main expense was fuel.

I still think it's a long way off, it's not enough for a half kilometer wide asteroid to be worth $20 trillion, the minerals within have to be less expensive than earth bound alternatives.
It's seems strange me to instantly suspect that your compiler's optimizer is at fault. Which is more likely: you've found a bug in a compiler used the world over, or you've screwed up memory access?

Since C makes it easy to overrun memory, it's pretty easy to make horrible mistakes and have those have seemingly random consequences.

The fact that the bug changes when you change optimizer settings, add trace statements, or add debug code would make me suspect memory corruption first.

In fact, I think it's a good assumption to always begin suspecting your own code.
It's not quite the same as the 'heisenbug' but I've seen a couple of cases over the years where a mysterious problem was resolved by moving to the latest update of the C/C++ runtime. It's weird how many enterprises are fine with running years behind on maintenance on that.
I'd actually say that commercial entities would be better off than the government, as the government is made up of people who:

a) have to pretend to care [1]

b) don't have any personal upside from space missions succeeding.

[1] I'm not saying that they don't care, necessarily, it's more that pragmatism is not popular in political leaders.
Craig Newmark did one simple thing: He thought about what his users truly wanted
That has to be the most satisfying theory yet. The "it's just a theme park" theory robs MI of its wonderful story-telling.
Twitter & FB have incontrovertibly shown that millions of people want to "post crap on [their] phone[s]" when they're out.
Obama Is Hiring a Twitterer
4HWW anyone?
The top item from this search will get you access to the full article: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Bill+Wyman+Last+sum...

"What Newspapers Can Learn From Craigslist

"Craig Newmark did one simple thing: He thought about what his users truly wanted.

"BY BILL WYMAN"

Good essay on site design philosophy.
[E]verything we hold of value—metals, minerals, energy and real estate— [is available] in near-infinite quantities in space.

Yes, and there is a pot o' gold at the end of every rainbow. A pity you have to bring it back here to be able to get any use out of it. If there were a pot o' gold in earth orbit and I had a space shuttle ready to go up and snag it I'd be better off canceling the launch, letting the gold rot, and pocketing the money saved. It doesn't matter if that pot o' gold were the size of an aircraft carrier.

How long before bored billionaires figure out that being on a souped-up jet with sucky cabin service has lost its $X-million-a-pop "story you can brag about to your friends" cachet, and we actually have to start extracting value out of space? Private industry is then going to go back to exploiting space via the only thing we can move without incurring fuel & etc costs: data, via satellites.
...Screamed the blogger.
Ask HN: OS / Hardware choice for a software startup in Africa
I'm starting a software start up in Rwanda. One question I'm struggling with is what hardware/OS platform to provide my employees with. I have been on OSX for the past five years and love it, the perfect blend of polished apps and real unix underpinnings. But Apple has almost no presence in Africa, so all hardware would have to be brought in. Another choice is Ubuntu, but having run it at various times, I know that there is a good bit of frustration involved now and then due to hardware drivers, especially on laptops. But it is probably the most transferable skill for the employees, which is part of the goal. Lastly, Win7 is a choice, but that makes my skin crawl just thinking about it. I'll be training them on Python/Django/etc and it just doesn't feel right running those environment in Windows.

What would you pick and why?
Ashley Madison vs Affordable Online Dating
While the Ashley Madison married dating website may be more of a household name due to their recent publicity, Married Secrets beats Ashley Madison in service and in price.
Very good advice. I assume my C code does have memory blunders until I have run extensively through valgrind, after which I might begin to believe any other analysis I have done that suggests the code is correct.

I also tend to test a build linked with gcc’s mudflap:

gcc -g -fmudflap -lmudflap

Your program will run much faster than under valgrind. I have had bugs that have been missed by valgrind but caught with mudflap and vice-versa. Don’t try to link with mudflap and run under valgrind at the same time though, valgrind won’t work.
http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2010/01/building_ipad_a...
Why Google Buzz Should've Been Released Like Wave (and vice versa)
This article was disappointing. I was expecting slightly more in-depth analysis into the workings of Craigslist and instead I got a rant about Newspaper websites.
The two needn't be mutually exclusive. The masses and networks of Facebook could be leveraged for public good.
Especially if it involves multithreading. Altering the timing of things means everything.
>I'll be training them on Python/Django/etc and it just doesn't ...

If you are going to provide the training the hardware does not matter. You can just extend the training to cover the OS. My preference - having worked in the Continent - would have been for Windows, since it can accelerate the training and introduce Ubuntu at a later stage. At the end of the day it depends on what the software start up is involved with.
Our primary means of monitoring is to do fullpage requests to different parts of the application every 5 minutes and check the results. We have a historical record from multiple locations around the world that we can use to see if changes were made that had a negative impact as well as automated alerts when the full page load takes longer than expected.

We then have secondary monitoring that can allow use to isolate issues within different areas if primary monitoring indicates a problem.
Yet we have the greatest minds and the deepest pool of investment capital in the world focused on building Facebook and Twitter apps.

While it certainly may appear that way if one's only source of exposure to the world is Techcrunch, all venture capital in the Valley (a fraction of the ~$30 billion per year in the entire US) is, ahem, literally less than rounding error next to world investment capital.

I mean, fixed income securities in the United States have face value of about $30 trillion. That's one asset class. (The biggest one, granted.)

Ditto the brainpower thing, although that is less instantly measurable.
I know little about C compilers, but if -O3 resulted in segfaults while other settings did not, how is it not riskier? Are the different optimization levels independent such that this bug could have appeared anywhere, but just happened to be in one of the strategies used by -O3?
That app lets you mark the screen and select the area of the screen to screenshot just from hitting the PrtScrn key.
There's something really inspiring about creating something quite as enduring as Monkey Island, that still has people talking about it all these years later.
The best way to deal with exceptions is to disable them. Arbitrary interruptions of control flow will screw up just about any algorithm. Otherwise, you will have to reason about everything using RAII semantics, which work well much of the time. Smart pointers have the same problem. You may believe that everything is cleaned up properly with your smart pointers, until a cyclic reference happens one day.
I'm seriously depressed by the number of requests for social networking aggregators (Twitter+FB+Wave+Buzz or whatever).
It's a bit of a false dichotomy. While I'm not completely familiar with the setting, a "hack-a-thon" seems to be a place where cool solutions are applied to cool problems. Using computers and the internet. Quick and fun, forgotten next year.

"Saving the world" has a completely different set of challenges to be addressed. The SMS idea is a very good idea, and using one of the very few vectors in third world countries that aren't bogged down by systemic issues.

I'm not at all sure that a "save-the-world-a-thon" focusing on SMS solutions in the third world wouldn't have very interesting outcomes. Maybe TechCrunch can't see the forest for their eagerness to call the youth of today shallow?
Well the interesting thing is that there is really very little familiarity even with Windows. I mean, yes, they've used it, but hardly to such a great extent that it is a big advantage.

Really, I suppose it is almost more of a practical question of hardware.. My preference is clearly Mac's, but how do you manage a company with hardware that isn't even available on the continent, much less the country. Keep a spare I suppose?

There is a humanitarian angle to the startup, that is to train and enable the Rwandans in a way that is very difficult to get here. But is that a wasted effort if you train them on an OS/hardware that is completely unavailable to them outsider your company? Is the added pain of Ubuntu worth it because of that?
Is this somehow running natively on the underlying ARM cpu instead of in the Java VM? Can you put an app in the Marketplace that does such unholy things?
http://squeak.org/ results in

Bad Gateway

The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.

what is squeak?
Some notes from the OP author. ;)

(1) Neither PVFS2 nor Lustre requires shared storage except to do hot failover for a failed server. I've personally run both in configurations where the only storage was node-local RAM. Disk failures can be avoided using host-based RAID, while node failures can be handled either by software disk mirroring (e.g. DRBD) or by physically moving the disks to another server. Are these approaches optimal, or even acceptable in a typical production environment? Of course not; there's a severe performance hit for the first and an even worse availability hit for the second. I do believe this is a positive differentiator for GlusterFS (though the AFR translator does exact a high performance toll) but it's not quite accurate to say or imply Lustre or PVFS2 can't be used without shared storage and it's a bit unfair to mention that for one but not the other.

(2) It's only somewhat surprising to me that Lustre still doesn't have distributed metadata. I knew they were making a very big push for it in 1.8. Then I left SiCortex, and after two years dealing with Lustre lameness I actively avoided it thereafter. Adding distributed metadata after the fact is Very Hard, so the fact that they failed (for at least the third time) isn't a surprise.
This reminds me of a conversation I recently had with some Berkeley graduates, who were mystified at how much I had accomplished, and how quickly, and by the fact that I might stay up into the wee hours of the morning working or blasting out an essay or coding or designing. These same people put in 50 hour sessions in Final Fantasy.

People want to work. Some people want to work hard. Most especially, people want to achieve. The question is where people put their effort; whether they 'level-up' in real life or some artificial one.
-O3 is indeed riskier. All experienced embedded systems developers know this: embedded compilers tend to be much buggier than compilers for desktop platforms. But desktop compilers are buggy too. Over the last couple years my group has reported 190 bugs to compiler development teams. A lot of these bugs turn up only at higher optimization levels. If you search on my email address "regehr@cs.utah.edu" as bug reporter in either GCC or LLVM's bugzilla, you can see plenty of examples.
please don't "git push --force" unless you know what it's doing, people - you will lose work and people will get really confused. the --force should never be necessary, even when using 'pull --rebase'. the push command normally will refuse to push unless the latest commit on the server is in your history somewhere. this means that if someone pushes since you last pushed or fetched, introducing commits you have not seen yet, and you try to push, it will not let you until you have pulled them down and either rebased your local work on top of it or merged your work with it.

'--force' overrides this check, pushing anyways, effectively losing (possibly multiple) commits on the server. it should only be used if you were forced to change your history somehow (removing files with a password in it, rewinding work in an emergency), it should almost never be used and there should be a really good reason for it. i've used it maybe a dozen times last year of the thousands of pushes i've done.
Just a 22" at 1680x1050, they're pretty common now.

http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
Is this somehow similar to compressed sensing, using a randomized basis to reduce the sampling rate / bandwidth?
Looks likes a generator or AC unit as seen in the first photo in the lower storage area.
You are arguing for a solution which works "99% of the time" and then argue that my solution does not work for programs which only leak on Thursdays. Smart pointers won't fix all your memory leaks either due to cyclic references. Any program that runs for 3 weeks should be built to handle restarts, and have a failover architecture in place.
Your app should have a "how much would you pay?" field. The answer is probably zero for most of these.
Because, like a number of other people have pointed out upthread, it can make the impact of memory corruption problems more immediate.
The meaning of public on any social network nowadays pretty much always means public to the entire world.
Your tax dollars at work.

I would be for this expenditure if it were likely to involve real communication. Instead, your money will be spent to pander to the proletariat and to oversimplify issues that align with Obama getting re-elected.
There might be a lot you're missing. Nutrition is hideously complex, but since we're evolved to eat whole foods and there are a lot of bioactive enzymes and or compounds that aren't well known or in vitamin pills you could be missing out on something crucial.
it's funny how some people hate merges and want to do everything with rebasing and fast-forwarding (like this) and others hate ff-ing and think everything should be done with merges to maintain branch history (http://nvie.com/archives/323 thinks the '--no-ff' option should be the default).

personally, i use a combination - i tend to rebase when it's only a couple of commits and i merge when there are dozens of commits off, whichever is easier/cleaner. if there are likely going to be conflicts to resolve, rebase is often a bit more difficult, and people tend to have a harder time understanding rebase conceptually so i tend not to encourage it's use to beginners. however, it's interesting to see how each person subtly differently sees how the world of VCS should be, and how Git makes it relatively easy to have such different workflows.
Nice, it's not usable yet but it launches and the speed seems acceptable on my Nexus One. Squeak would be a great learning tool on the iPad, if Apple ever relaxes their idiotic policy on interpreted code.
I am not surprised that there is going to be little familiarity with Computers and even Windows. I would definitely - not start with Ubuntu and forget about Mac's. Training will be the hard part. Focus on that and maintenability of equipment. Avoid laptops - they get stolen easily and battery packs fail fairly early.

Wishing you good luck!
http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/1.6_r1/index.html