skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find specially scaring the fact that one like idea of "Levels 9 Student" Is that the way education system should be fixed? Can it be fixed that way? Oooh really??? Seriously all the sudden kids will start studying math just for another "level up"??
I might be sounding old-fashioned but my school motivation was greediness for the new knowledge and i hardly can imagine high school students studing better just because simple teacher name them "Level 78 Master of Chemistry". Or maybe i am just too old and completely missing a point. To me guys is just overexcited about "Gowalla syndrome"
ok, i am a bit clueless here, but if 0mq has no persistance, how is it reliable (durable)? or, if it's not reliable (durable), isn't this whole debate comparing apples and oranges?

[edited to clarify i am talking about durability and not just reliability in the tcp sense]
Nuclear is an obvious next step for the company.

An early start on April Fools day?
Absolutely. I happen to need these bits so zeromq is a non-starter for me. I am mildly annoyed by the "we are faster" rhetoric without the "but we only support a small subset of the useful things you can do with a message queue" caveat, but it is a mostly meaningless bit of marketing so I can let it slide; anyone who really needs those sorts of speeds knows how to actually evaluate products and is unlikely to be suckered by a false dichotomy setup like the one on the zeromq home page.
Just by posting on this board you are kind of proving your own point wrong. If you don't get affected by the negative (because it's virtual and has no real risk), it's hard to argue you'd be affected by the positive. If your connection isn't real/risky enough etc to feel pain I don't think it's real enough to feel pleasure either. In which case I'd ask why you are bothering talking to us.
A lot of html to pdf conversion is useless if page-break-* properties are not followed. Shame, too. I've been building something like this all week.
Agreed, the code was a clear example of how to handle signals. I could understand it even though I haven't even dealt with signals before.
That's not actually the point of that article; it's the point of their next one. The linked article basically said nothing about security exploits other than "they happen and we'll talk about them next time". It's a pretty general introduction to virtual memory and a way in user space to avoid crashing dereferencing a null pointer. That said, the post is as much a response to the title on HN as anything:

Dereferencing a NULL pointer always segfaults, right? Not if you're clever...

Now, I don't actually know enough about the exploits they're talking about to know if handling the signal would avoid them or if the null pointer dereference has to actually be in kernel space and they were just starting with examples from user space, which was my assumption on the first pass of reading the article.
How is what you're designing any more secure than a typical website that communicates over HTTPS? The user can't prevent you from sending a broken Java applet or a webpage with broken encryption code, so the user still has to trust you. Look at what happened with Hushmail.
See my post elsewhere, and maybe your German friends aren't Web designers, but I've had problems with addresses on German forms - just because I speak German doesn't mean I live there. So this is a universal problem, not an American one: internationalization is hard, because there is a tremendous amount of domain-specific knowledge that is not convenient to find.
Gootodo (now called Goodtodo) is the best solution I've found. It's simple, without categories, tags or priorities (other than sorting by position). The differentiators for me are: calendar-based to-dos. I can create a to-do that I don't actually need to act on until next week, and it won't show up until then.

Also, awesome email integration, where I can forward an email to, for example, apr14@gootodo.com, and the body of the email will be attached to a to-do that shows up on that date. This is a fantastic way to get in the habit of emptying your inbox as well. Things you have to do don't linger there, you just forward them to your to-do list.

Simple and elegant, and more than worth the $3/mo I pay for it.
I guess I should be more specific. This is an actual problem I've had on actual German sites.
I have that as a print hanging on my office wall for this very reason.
I feel like this page is using "map-reduce" as magic juice. The problem described is enormous, and saying you're going to use map-reduce in this case is somewhat akin to saying you're going to be using CPUs. Yes, but so what? That doesn't magically move you to "feasible".

I also get the sense that, far more than usual, this is technology without a use case. I'm not saying it's useless or that the idea is bad, just that I followed a couple of links and didn't find an even cursory discussion of what this is for or why it is better than other things, existing or otherwise.

These aren't good signs.
Too bad nobody does this...

Quick example:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/program.php?test=threa...

Can you spot the non-compliant behavior in this? It actually relies on undefined behavior in the POSIX spec to work on linux!
I agree with your points but wanted to put special attention on 1 & 2 because I've found those to be the most important in my own experience.

Generally what I do is to make a class diagram and then hand it to an outsourced coder to create. That way there's no question of what is supposed to go in and what is supposed to come out and I can test it easily. Plus that way allows me to keep track of which pieces I outsourced so even if I get a bad coder who writes inefficient code I can go back at a later date and correct his work.
Ha Ha! Rofl! :-)
Yes, I have seen it but have not tried it yet.
Curious, any particular reason for colors.app vs Digital Color Meter?
For about 10 seconds I believed this. Given their power needs it would be a reasonable move to get into power generation technology, and nuclear would be the nerd's choice.
:( I don't think it can work for me tonight. I'll see how it goes. But I've had dinner slow cooking since 10 am for Lynette and I :) And she might be getting home kinda late. I'll try and get us to the next one.
It is reliable in the sense that it can deliver messages between two peers reliably, like TCP. What you're speaking of is durability.
You are correct, there is no persistence. 0MQ is basically just a step above socket level communications, while obviating all of the tedious BS socket programming forces you to do.

Here's a good intro to 0MQ from lwn.net, along with sample code: http://lwn.net/Articles/370307/
It's already April 1st in Australia; so I'm going to go with yes.
Thanks, really hope it helps freelancers find quality clients.
Worked great for me, good job. I'd be interested in a PHP binding too, and knowing what the eventual cost will be.
Ouch. A directed graph in a columnar store like HBase? I guess there are worse approaches, but I would like to see a justification for this other than "we have this hammer called Hadoop..."
This is awesome. I'm at once excited about using this in the future, and dismayed thinking of the time I've spent manually generating PDFs because none of the HTML -> PDF options worked.

I fed it my homepage, and it nailed it. I'm impressed.
Hmmm. No i think it's mostly equal in the real world. Chat roulette is probably a bad example.
Have not. I will definitely look into. Thanks!
I cringed a little at that too -- still, if F# gets a significant number of working programmers using an ML variant it would have some claim on being ground-breaking.
We love elance. We currently employ about 10 full-time equivalents on elance.

I'd agree with the linked article. For most serious skills (beyond basic HTML markup) you need to pay $15-$25, but the results we've got have been top notch.

Here's what we've learnt:

* Only hire people to do stuff you understand. You don't need to be an expert on it, but you have to be able to understand what you are speccing and what you are getting.

* For anything beyond basic HTML we've never had success with a company from the Indian sub-continent. For basic HTML stuff we've had good results.

* Our best results have come from Eastern Europeans, but we've used people from the US, and western Europe as well.

* For many projects we hire people on an hourly rate. There are exceptions - if we have a really clear spec, and it's a side project (e.g. we need some flash client work) then we may do it fixed price.

* Deal only with individuals - ignore companies. They only exception might be a small bunch of 2-3 hackers working as a team.

* As with any form of recruitment - there are good people and more bad people. As with buying on ebay - look at feedback, and use your judgement.

* If you're looking for people on an ongoing basis, then be prepared to interview and test them thoroughly. When hiring C++ coders we actually pay people (as a elance project) to do a 20 hour long programming test. This might cost us $400, but we prob take on 1 in 2 people who get this far. So an $800 hiring cost is cheap, especially if it gets people up to speed on your technology. We normally get them to right a cut down version of our actual project.

* You need to monitor people regularly and manage them as you would a physical employee.

* Give people respect, and deal with them fairly.

* You have to be good at working virtually. We make extensive use of Wikis, Trac, Skype etc and this enables us to manage a virtual team well.

The benefits:

* For about $20 an hour ($40k per annum) you can get a top class programmer that would cost you $100k an annum in SE England, or the West Coast. But you have no hiring cost and no long term commitment.

* We typically can put an advert on elance Monday, be interviewing by Wed, and have taken someone on by Friday to start the next Monday. In the old world it would be arguing for budgets to hire for a month, spending 2 months interviewing, waiting 1-2 months notice period.

* We can very quickly bring in specialist skills. E.g. if I need a Silverlight developer, I can find one who can start within a week, and can terminate when the project is done.
How to hire a good Web Developer
The average Romanian programmer makes $646 per month (http://www.worldsalaries.org/romania.shtml) or around $16.65 an hour. I don't know what experience you could have that tells you prices converge because that's just not the case (and if it were sites like eLance would have trouble staying in business).
So, catching SIGSEGV is still a segfault! It is not fatal, so in that sense sure you aren't segfaulting, but the error still occurs, the signal is still generated, and you still don't actually dereference NULL. In the other article there is no error, SIGSEGV is not generated, and therefore there is no segfault at all. They are fundamentally different.
NICE!
You have beat me (and I am sure a dozen others hackers) to the realization of this idea...

Here is an idea for an extra feature: make a print bookmarklet -- clicking on it you get a nice PDF version of the page you are viewing right now. I can't stand firefox's print renditions of some pages... terrible...

(also you might want to set the page size to letter or A4 depending on the geolocation of your visitor's ip address)
thanks. this seems an awful lot like the nosql "debate" in that the two "sides" (typically) have different priorities (and the differences are similar, related to consistency and scaling).

[and also makes imatix not look that good, if any customers need the durability part, which is quite a common requirement]
Assuming my discussion above is correct, which is a big assumption, yes.

One of the other consequences of misinformed consumers is sometimes merely being an informed consumer allows you to sponge off a bit of value from the uninformed ones too. See also "being in the small fraction of people that turn in their rebates"; everybody bought based on the advertised price, but only you and a few others paid it. (If you're like me, you properly factor in time-to-prepare-rebate and risk-of-no-return, though I personally have had very good success. I don't bother with $2 rebates; take out the stamp, the time, the risk of missing it, and you end up with little or possibly even negative. But I've scored $50 rebates for things I might have paid full price for willingly anyhow. That's a win.)
Chess and Autism
Granted - You do need to trust the server to that extent.

However, the client-side code will be open source and digitally signed.

It's not perfect, and you shouldn't use it for state secrets, but it's a damn sight better than anything out there right now.
Parsing on the backend, even when only considering United States addresses is incredibly difficult and error prone. There are apartment numbers, rural routes, PO boxes, circles, streets named after compass directions (i.e. North, South, East, West), streets whose direction names appear before or after the street itself (e.g. N. Main St. vs Main St. N.), military addresses, and the list goes on and on.

It's a terrible system really, and the only solution that I've been able to rely upon is having the user parse their own address and supply it to me. At least that way I don't have to spend hours looking through regex statements and edge case detection logic to figure out why a street address was parsed in a particular way.
Thanks for the suggestions everybody.

For now, I decided to go with Google Tasks. It's very barebones and simple, but it's just what I was looking for and they even have an iPhone-optimized version (I will also look into GeeTasks).
Skydiver Aims to Jump from 120,000 Feet, Break the Sound Barrier
Google Easter Egg: "ascii art"
An interesting point about tone.

If this had been pitched as "sites do international addresses wrong" as opposed to "Americans do it wrong!", there'd probably be less defensiveness, less snideness, less "typical American can't read", etc.
Mozilla/FF: privacy-related changes coming to CSS :visited
Why is catching all the SEGV's more dangerous? What specifically can happen?
And expands to not just cover iPad, but: "We expect all ventures to have an iPad strategy."
it doesn't work in textmate (cmd+opt+<- and cmd+opt+->). seems to work in almost every other app though.
There already many apps and pieces of software that charge for the feature he already has so I don't see why it is a requirement for him to monetize. It definitely would be an easy feature to charge for but I think what he has already has potential.
I tried a relatively complex site - CNN - expecting the results to look bad, but it looks great
You could say our current situation is a bit like a game. We have silly achievements: world/country/whatever records (think Guinness World Records). You could say money is "points" which can be redeemed in various ways and merely having a lot of them is an end unto itself. And so on...
Some SEGVs will be from dereferencing NULL, which is a fairly innocuous error (you asked for something from an API and the API said "no"), but many others will be from derefencing wild pointers.
I don't know the exact status of how WebKit handles these properties. I know that at least "page-break-after: always" works since that is what I use when the user clicks the 'Insert Page Break' button in the editor (http://pdfcrowd.com/editor/).
If I'm a developer and designer, should I sign up for both as two separate accounts or only pick one?
Utopian thinking. If you needed a job, you would do the same.
Eating chocolate gives pleasure and comes with little real risk. Not everything needs to be deeply emotional.
So I guess CSS sprites won't work for :visited links anymore...
IIRC google has funded research into some "alternative" approaches to nuclear fusion -- so to that extent they are taking the nerd's choice. In contrast, fission is only a choice for people who like political quagmires; the technical challenges are tiny compared with the political challenges.
The primary threat this protects against that other services don't is that the service hosting your data cannot mine it, their engineers cannot snicker at it, and they cannot accidentally release it.

It's not tremendously secure from a client-side perspective: if the client machine is compromised, so is your data. But that's not the goal. This is not a tool for spies, this is a tool for everyday people so they can have an unimpaired communication tool while having complete peace of mind that nobody is mining, selling or distributing their data.
Hi Andrew. I've just registered, looks like a great service.

A few initial impressions: I'd like to be able to express my pricing in both an hourly rate and full project value. Also, support for multiple currencies would be nice, there will be plenty of users who want to bill in EUR or GBP.
We used an html->pdf conversion service (I believe it was http://www.htm2pdf.co.uk/ but I'm not positive) for awhile to do billing and our biggest problem was that it went down all the time. We ended up purchasing a (pretty cheap) license to a Java library that does pdf generation for us and is pretty easy to use. This is definitely a service that people will pay money to use - best of luck to you!
FWIW, they're already doing solar:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-5749586-7.html

http://www.jasonmorrison.net/content/2009/touring-googles-so...
Age and the Entrepreneur
for me happiness is:

- health for those around me and myself

- the ability to create

- music

- the freedom to travel and meet new people
I don't doubt that you do encounter more problems with BSD than Linux. But does everyone who works with the two encounter more problems?
A Personal Letter to Senator Dodd Regarding His Anti-Angel Investment Bill
Hiding the error does not mean that the error did not occur or that it is not a problem.. It was about to occur and there is still a fundamental problem in your logic leading up to the would-have-been segfault that was swept under the rug.

I would much rather know where my code tried to access a null memory space and what/why/how a null pointer was passed than to have it "fake" that it didn't ever happen! A signal handler for a SIGSEGV/SIGBUS is a great place to add a syslog() so you can find the error in your logic and correct it.
[insert purist designer OR developer rant here]
Hm totally forgot about this one. This does work in Safari and Terminal, but doesn't in MacVim. Cmd+{/} work in all three.

I guess pick the shortcuts that cover the largest subset of apps you care about.
It's not the turn-down, it's the "Ugh, losers". Like, I don't get the opportunity to turn girls down often, but where it has occurred I've certainly never thought less of them for having the guts to approach me.
Downvoted; really? What part of this reply was uninformative or offensive or off topic? FWIW, I'm one of the developers of Sass: http://nex-3.com/posts/78-chris-eppstein-joins-sass-team
Looks like a good idea. I like sites that base your location via IP, but when there is no results I think it is better to show at least the closest result so there is some context. I.e. do I need to put the next town over or do I need to put in the closest big city.
Brazilian websites are just as bad, if not worse than American ones about this, probably because websites that do online sales in Brazil tend to cater to a primarily domestic clientele. If you happen to live in Argentina, as I do, entering your address when you buy things in Brazil can be comically frustrating.

Americans definitely don't have a monopoly on ignorance when it comes to other countries' address formats.
Working on this. We launched with zero freelancers yesterday (could have added the initial launch list, but decided to just quickly launch).

After we have a feel for the number of freelancers in areas, we can increase the radius of the search.
I haven't pushed it very hard. I'm only using it for personal stuff.

That said, it's pretty good at DWIM for a command-line tool. It works as advertised and doesn't require any fiddling once you have it set up.

cons: command line syntax is verbose. Enough so that there's a wrapper for it (http://duply.net/) which I also recommend. Access to backups isn't as straightforward as with forest-of-hardlinks approaches.

I'd be interested to hear how it holds up to production use.
The _New York Times_ has an idiosyncratic style guide; they follow each letter with a period when the letters are pronounced individually. So, "I.B.M", "C.I.A.", but "NATO".

(Naturally, how IBM itself spells its name is of no interest.)
Wow, that's expensive: http://simplegeo.com/plans/
StartUp 2010 Competition
Hi there. Wanted to make sure this got on the radar. Business Insider (Silicon Alley Insider) 2nd annual Start-Up Conference. $100k in start-up funds and services. Good luck everybody!
That was beautiful. Thank you.
Their solution to "Layout-Based Attacks" is trivial to get around, any visual style change can be detected, even if it doesn't trigger reflow -- the <canvas> API has pixel accessors.
Added to the roadmap, will let you know when we push it live.

The pricing for day rate is more on an estimate the freelancer can use as an example and build their custom hourly rate from there.

Project rate gets around the 'low hourly rate but lots of hours' problem.
they seem to be doing something interesting, but documentation and company statement is very vague. Even the demo code does not work out of the box. The video on their homepage doesn't make any sense at all..
Not too many would work on that kind of system. But you'd be surprised what you can negotiate for when taking a job. 6 weeks of vacation is not entirely unheard of, even in the U.S., even for U.S. companies.

But it doesn't scale quite like that. Ideally, your presence in the company is creating value for the company. And I don't mean in some kind of intrinsic sense. I mean in real dollars.

A person making $100k for a company better be making the company at least that much money - they should be making at least 1.5x their salary for the company to stay in business and the company is probably betting they are worth 2x their salary. It's not just your salary or salary + benefits, but the loss the company will realize by you not being there in terms of lost sales (which is what it all ends up as in general, it's what everybody in the company is working towards, even the janitorial staff). So negotiating a $10k pay cut for 5 more weeks of vacation looses the company $10-30k off the bottom line.

Vacation is there because it costs the company more to not give you vacation (burn-out, sloppy work, quitting, smaller employment pool, etc.) than to give it to you. So they strike a balance and say "2 weeks will keep our employees minimally happy without costing us too much money in the end".

If you don't like that, there are plenty of part-time jobs you can apply for -- some even pay pretty well. I'd wager most companies would be thrilled to hire most of their employees P/T because then they don't have to provide benefits and they don't have to worry about keeping their people occupied for every hour they charge. No work? Go home.
SwapYourShop: To Another Land
I would argue that we seek out communities where we don't have to do this.
Nice execution - as per the comment below, something like this would've saved me lots of manual fiddling back when I was doing lots of PDF stuff.

Given the focus on APIs I guess you're aiming it at those wanting to programmatically generate PDFs using a familiar markup, rather than conversion of existing (static) content into PDF? If so, maybe investigate the ability to overlay rendering onto an existing PDF template at some point - in my experience it's been a common requirement (think form letters, account statements, etc).

Interesting that it appears to execute Javascript; guess it's a sign of the times that you need to in order to render many sites correctly nowadays. I haven't poked it too hard, but suspect there might be one or two security challenges there...
That's still a terrible description.

What makes location data "rich"? And how do developers use "rich location data" to "leverage the location of their users?"

What exactly does it do?