skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For far more of same, there's Koenig's _C Traps and Pitfalls_. Heck, the article (http://www.literateprogramming.com/ctraps.pdf) that grew into the book is even free online.

Also, for anybody doing modern C work, I strongly recommend both Hanson's _C Interfaces and Implementations_ and Ierusalimschy's _Programming in Lua_, 2nd ed. The former nails writing good C libraries, and the latter covers one particular library that provides a portable, C-friendly, mature, efficient (http://luajit.org/), ready-made scripting language that is a cleaner incarnation of JavaScript's "good parts".

Also, both are good reading. The former is a shining example of literate programming, and the latter is IMHO one of the best programming texts that wasn't co-written by Brian Kernighan. :)
Downturns are often an excuse to lay people off. If you do layoffs in a booming economy people immediately assume theres something wrong at your company. In a downturn its considered "acceptable", since everyone is on hard times. So it's a great excuse to cut the "fat" and get rid of dead weight.
I have 2 semesters left, but I'm in the same boat as you. Mechanical Engineering undergraduate, looking at a graduate program, already doing occasional freelance development, and a strong CS background even though I opted against that as a degree.

Is this common? I haven't run into anyone in my department that is doing something similar, and often get asked why I did not simply get a CS degree.
Just a suggestion - say if I skip ahead to the 20'th page, then Scribd will load all 19 pages and the 20'th page.

That might not really be necessary and it does make the loading slower.
I have not seen anyone predict that Facebook will last forever. I personally wouldn't say that about any company.

I myself predicted that apps would be the demise of fb. I received so many invites that I couldn't keep up - and it was accelerating. But they solved that problem by taking apps off of peoples primary pages. App developers complained and some probably missed showing what kind of ninja they were, but looking at it now, it looks like they made the right decision. I wouldn't be surprised if they manage to fix current problems as well.
Happiest countries list by facebook
This article makes a few good (but separate) points.

1. Hostnames are backwards. com.ycombinator.news makes much more sense than news.ycombinator.com, because the rest of a URL goes from least specific (protocol) to most specific (path components, query, fragment). The only case where the current form of hostname works is email addresses (user at sub dot domain dot tld). IIRC, one of the founders of the WWW (Tim Berners-Lee, perhaps?) already admitted that they got this wrong. I'm all for fixing it, but how? There would need to be easily machine- and human-identifiable differences between old- and new-style hostnames, or there's massive potential for confusion and collisions. There's also an unthinkable amount of software out there that understands hostnames in their current form.

2. The TLD system is broken. Hierarchical hostnames make great sense when you want to refer to the host foo, owned by building four of the computer science department of Caltech. The TLDs we're using today are hacks, a valiant attempt by ICANN to conserve the domain namespace. I hate to admit it, but I think that registering TLDs based on trademark really could work. It'd mean the end of fun websites like http://unicodesnowmanforyou.com/, but would bring a huge amount of sanity to the top-level namespace. It would create to a huge new market for private subdomain reselling (whoever gets .www is going to make a killing) where resellers would have the power to be selective about registrations, and to pull domains out from under squatters. Spam-heavy TLDs would lose credibility.

It makes today's internet feel like the Wild West.
Well, something can only grow exponentially for so long.... It's growth might be dying. It might be reaching its teenage years. Unfortunately it's only a matter of time before its a big company that can't keep its startup mentality.
Private APIs
There is certainly a culture of micro-optimized C++ in the finance world, but it's not all like that. (It's easier to do easy things than it is to do hard things, and so there is going to be more easy-to-write software in existence than hard-to-write software. Hence why you see so much bad C++ -- it's really easy to write bad C++.)

Jane Street Capital is a good example of a company that advertises their interest in writing good software: http://www.janestcapital.com/technology/ocaml.php
Most importantly, does it have Vi key-bindings?
Sorry Verizon Subscribers, no iPhone this year
I just checked out your site. I wanted to see if there were any programming books. I found a book, but I CAN"T read it on your site because you have such annoying flashing ads. I took a screen shot, http://davidmidler.com/scribd . . . you can see there are two flashing adds, bright green, and pick, it makes it too annoying to read.

I love the site though, just fix the ads...
> Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could have an HTML renderer plugin? And some kind of system where you could -- with some clear and dumbed-down descriptions of the differences/advantages -- choose between alternatives? And get upgrades?

I've wondered for a long time (perhaps 10 years) why this basic idea wasn't done, especially with my eyes looking Microsoft's way.

This has been a problem for far too long and is now only getting worse. The thought of all of the lost productivity and inefficiency of those working with these issues makes me sick.
> There's no JRE on the iPad. No bundling your own interpreter either.

I wonder if anyone has plans for an IDE written solely to run on jailbroken iPads.
Court win for comedian sued by in-laws for jokes made about them
HN died for you in 55 days?
Stupidity and high speed, just as with cars, is a terrible combination.

After a few years in banking, I have learned the following phrase applies well here: Mistakes were made.
There is a lengthy history of Box-and-Line programming languages. Some people find them easier to understand than traditional languages.

[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_languages ]
> result doesn't reflect the car's actual value and will almost definitely be canceled.

Unless the value of the car is defined as whatever someone on NYSE or NASDAQ is willing to pay for it.

As the result of this there were some losers and some winners. Losers will want the trades reversed, winners won't. Reversal of trades could start a dangerous trend. Who gets to decide which trades get reversed? I wonder if many HFT firms will start to incorporate such kind of behavior into their trading model, so we'll see more of these "accidents" in the future.
I believe Visual Basic was spectacularly successful in part because it did visual layout; and there several tools that do the same thing for webpages.

I guess you're saying the difficulty is doing it in a webapp. Maybe with faster machines and better support etc and RIA this may now be workable. There's certainly no intrinsic reason for it not to work.
I'd like to bet against the notion that Facebook is dying. I suggest this metric: on May 7, 2015, Facebook will still be one of the top five websites in the USA, measured by Alexa traffic ranking (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/Facebook.com), and it will still be the most popular social networking website in the USA, again measured by Alexa traffic rankings.

USD$200, winnings go to the winner's favorite charity? Feel free to suggest different terms, metrics, betting amounts, or to make it a personal bet, not a charitable bet.
Free speech not protected for gripe site owner blasting former firm
* goes to dig unloved breadmaker from the back of the cupboard
The market broke today. However, as you pointed out, the _way_ it broke and the way it was fixed has been observed by all. So everyone just learned a new piece of information about the market behavior. This kind of behavior will certainly end up being encoded into the HFT models -- both as a way to react to it, and (perhaps what is terrifying), as a way to trigger it.

I am afraid we might seeing these kind of things more often.
We can bitch about how language implementations never live up to our ideals every day of the week, but people trying to get good advice on where to start get caught in the crossfire.

Heck, I started with BASIC, followed by C++. Now that I've got those out of the way, I know I can tackle all kinds of bullshit.

Python still seems most reasonable as a first language, to me. Not my favorite, these days, but local maxima, you know? (Probably followed by C, then Prolog. Lua and Erlang are practical syntheses, and should be picked up easily afterward.)
The only reason we hire people to do any given job is because we haven't found a way to automate it yet
It depend on the resolution of the chart. If the resolution is minute-based, then it could have hit $0 then come back up to $39 within a minute. You wouldn't know. You'd have to have a special high-resolution stock feed.
Double click to edit any existing attribute; move cursor after semicolon; type new attribute; press Enter.
This reinforces what I've been telling people for the last month or so - the iPad is disruptive to the PC. Maybe it isn't as good as a PC in a lot of situations, but it provides sufficient functionality and speed that people will choose it for its ease of use and portability. And, in a few generations, you will be able to do anything you can on all but the highest-end PCs.

Sure, most people will still use PCs at work, but at home, you will just whip out your tablet.
Eye Creams Blog
This displays shocking ignorance of how DNS works.
One flat namespace? Your DNS infrastructure is going to resemble Google. And it'll never scale as well as it does today.
Lessons from a failed startup
For someone who is completely new to programming, "statically-typed, compiled, run on the JVM" means about as much as "made-of-whale-bones, faster-than-light, and eleven-pounds-to-the-dollar". Just a thought, as long as we're still talking about telling new programmers where to start.
No one is saying you'd stop using these things. You'll still use them.

You just might not use thrum every second. My sin use for my iPad, in s programming context, is coupling with Papers.app. I basically sit down at a coffee shop in the morning, do my morning email routine, and read an academic paper. If I'm riding the train, it's an easy way to fill wasted time with productivity. I find this much more desirable than using a tiny smartphone. What's more, I try not to waste smartphone battery on reading, I need to husband that for calls.
I like the idea, I hate how he uses 'ridicules' instead of 'ridiculous'.
What about the situations where you have two different companies operating in two different industries with the same trademark? Apple Records v. Apple Computer?
About 10 days after getting my iPad, it's hardly been turned on in the past few days. I think the ergonomics of it suck - it's heavy, and it gives me a crick in the neck when I use it.

YMMV.
Be careful what you wish for. While that would kill off third-tier domaining, most domains worth owning are worth pulling a Demand Media type strategy on if you have no other option. If I had a hundred thousand domains like, I don't know, clevelandcars.com, I'd get myself something conceptually similar to Wordpress MultiUser (WPMU) installed so that they could all be administered centrally, hire swarms of low-wage freelancers to thicken them with less-than-awe-inspiring content, and slap adsense ads on all of them.

This would quickly be turned into a turnkey solution for parking -- it would cost $50 a domain a year, sure, but that is mouse droppings next to what a decent domain earns in a commercial niche.
Open source R in commercial Revolution
Yeah. I think if a very top level domain was very expensive (say, $5m) then only people who really needed one would be able to get it. www.ibm etc. Providers could resell under their domains (Verisign or whoever would keep .com) by whatever contract they want. Differing domain legal regimes would allow the "right" set of rules through regime competition. And so on.
- Text selection is really awkward, drag too far and you select unrelated stuff from nearby elements instead or as well

Same in Chrome. Perhaps making images into CSS background images of the slides would fix this.
Thank you for writing that. That's why I love HN. That was better explained than most articles I've read so far.
I find it ironic that more than 108 people have apparently hit the 'like' button on an article about how facebook treats people who try to cancel.

Even better, this article from yesterday http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/diaspora_project_buildi... regarding an anti-facebook gets 229 likes.

I would think that the people that 'like' an article against Facebooks new tactics wouldn't hit the button which puts those tactics into play.
What are they doing?

Ad sales. It isn't a very headcount-efficient endeavor once you get past self-served options. A lot of the big corporate branding accounts who have huge amounts of money to burn and don't track conversions (I believe in poker these are referred to as "fish") require someone to chat up the media buyer for a while.

Branding campaigns are only a backup strategy, mind you, in case that Digg doesn't sell out their inventory of inflated page views by rabidly anti-commercial poor adolescents. For some unfathomable reason.
I would love a coding buddy.

At my current work, I am the only programmer in an office of designers and sales. We (I) make CMS and other custom systems for clients. We really want to move to a generalized platform instead of one-off custom systems, but due to a number of issues, we can't.

One of those main issues is that there is no one like a programming buddy to "talk shop" with. I feel I am an OK coder, but everyone gets those times when they think "Should I implement this with A, or use B? Does this need to be extensible, and if so, to what degree?"

These are questions that usually cannot be answered by someone who is not deeply involved in the project, and someone who knows what the resource costs are for implementing features, as well as the cost for needing to implement those features down the line.
Similar question to mine about different global locations where similar business have similar names.

Getting the domain name is an important aspect of choosing your business name - how much harder will that be when you want to open "Computer Solutions" in Kalgoorlie and can't get the domain because of an equally small "Computer Solutions" in Timbuktu?
+1 for IB - that's what I've been using for the past year, and they're quite solid from what I've seen. It's not a very elegant API (or trading platform [Java based + clunky] or documentation [brief at best], for that matter!), but they've got Java, C++, and Excel APIs that work, a solid selection of products, reliable performance (data kept flowing to me just fine throughout the whole mess today), and fair commissions (unless you're doing massive trades, it's usually around 2 bucks, so you can profitably offer liquidity against some pretty tight spreads). As far as algorithmic trading that's accessible to the average Joe, IB is as good as I've found. I think you need 10k to open an account, and have to maintain at least 25k to day-trade equities (a legal requirement, not an IB thing - you'll probably need at least this much if you're algo trading).

Just don't expect hand holding. You're supposed to be an experienced trader to even sign up with them (for a few products, like options, you have to pass a ridiculously easy test to trade them), and they won't save you from yourself - they'll happily let you buy 500k Euros with only $20k in your account, so be warned: if you'd made that mistake today, you'd be flat broke right now, though IIRC they do close out positions for you so at least you shouldn't end up too far in the red once your account is dunzo...

...which, to reiterate fnid2's point, it will be, unless you make sure to paper trade your damn code first! I'd also suggest that until you're really sure it's working, you never ever EVER leave it running unless you're watching it like a hawk. And code yourself a big bright red "PANIC" button that closes all your positions and shuts everything down, because you're going to end up in a situation some day where things go wonky and you just want to get out, but you'll have a dozen open positions and you don't want to have to click around to close them all.

Also, it's always a good idea to put in "everything's gone to hell" stops and place orders that time-out, even if your strategy doesn't require them (algo strategies don't typically use actual stop orders for exits): you never know when your connection might die, and you really don't want to end up stuck with nasty positions that you don't even have any way to track or close out b/c your cable went out...the positions that you hold when doing algo stuff can on occasion end up frighteningly large, which is only acceptable if you're holding them for very short period of time.
I'll take the top 5 metric charity bet. I bet that by May 7, 2015, Facebook will not be in the top 5 sites as ranked by Alexa.

I think it's an easy metric free of dispute. In 5 years, we may argue, "What is a social network?"

But I highly doubt facebook will be in the top 5.

I choose my high school as the recipient of your money when I win. :) I'll be back here in 5 years to see who the winner is. Adding an item to my calendar now. Will respond to this post with the identity of the recipient institution.
Long Bets - The Arena for Accountable Predictions
I feel like the biggest issue with visual programming is that they strive to eliminate code. The visual aspect of GUI design and even logical organization needs be augmented with code, perhaps a simplified pseudo-language, that would really help tie together what's going on beyond box and pointers.
Could you give an example of how you're using it please?
This is sure to create a global blackmarket for organs.

Chinese execution harvesters will now be able to export their wares globally.
What if Alexa is no longer around?
Old Scribd used to wrap open-format documents in a proprietary, platform-limited viewer. Old Scribd was evil. New Scribd takes documents and makes them even more accessible and open. New Scribd is good.

It will take awhile to get the bad taste out of my mouth, but this is a huge step in the right direction.
I always wondered, how come other countries didn't just unanimously vote to jump right in? EU just seemed to make a lot of sense. Well now I know why. Good for the Swedes.

Another problem with EU is that it seems to lack a clear external policy. The E in the EU might as well stand for 'Economic' as in 'Economic Union', as politically these countries still have different & sometimes divergent interests (both externally and internally). Especially, as some members are also in NATO while other aren't.

At the end of the day, it is not possible isolate the economy from politics and social issues. They are intertwined too tightly. It is like co-signing loans for the neighbors that you don't completely know that can go and spend as they please then you are stuck with paying for their extravagance.
You should be able to get any of this information - a good broker will always show you a), b), and c), and using tick-by-tick data in most markets you can figure out d).

Not so much secrecy; however, that doesn't mean there aren't errors, and it now sounds like today there were a few coming through NASDAQ re: Proctor and Gamble, which made the brief decline appear a lot more catastrophic than it actually was.
I doubt it. Insufficient demand for the amount of work it would require.
Definitely agree. Java's packaging does it right. Unfortunately large changes like this are just not going to happen without some drastic event. Changing around the order of TLDs would be no easier than switching the US to metric system.
This behaviour shouldn't be happening. Which browser are you using? How are you skipping pages?
An iPad is sure to make your children computationally literate.
"Codeless exists out of our desire to accelerate software innovation and thus its positive impact on society."

That's horse shit. And it's even worse by implying that you're a team instead of a one-man-show.

You can sell this thing as being cool and easy, but not as being one giant leap for mankind.
Somewhat surprisingly, Revolution's enhancements have been packaged for Ubuntu since sometime last year:

http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/revolution-r

So it looks like they're committed to playing well with the open source community.

Getting R to work with data sets larger than available RAM is going to be a huge help, too.
Until all of your traders get used to pressing 'yes' on your annoying dialog box, at which point you're back to square one.
Yeah, I thought about that, or what if HN isn't around. There is http://www.longbets.org This is the perfect bet for there.

If alexa isn't around, we can substitute the most popular website ranking website.
Gmail uses these keybindings too :)
Great idea, would be useful at uni for me because for some reason a lot of the time they have seemed to installed a latex specific editor, recommended latex, but not installed the compiler.
Nick Vujicic without limbs-no arms, no legs Worlds finest motivational speaker
Mean Street: Crash - The Machines Are in Control Now
That's true. Maybe policing domains would be a better strategy - use it and use it within specific guidelines or lose it.
Just like a decentralised web or decentralised email? The idea is to have lots of smaller silos interoperating, rather than a couple of big ones. Just because it's decentralised, doesn't mean that you have to give up control of your bit.
The only conclusion I could draw is that they must have been highly inversely correlated to a company that tanked. A trading algorithm would potentially have a pair trade going where the tanked company's shorted while being long Sotheby's.

That, or the whole system broke down in a very weird way.
This is poignant as I'm trying to figure this out for one of my projects right now.

I think the key is in being succinct.

Strangely, I haven't been able to find the purpose of Apple.
Speck CandyShell GIVEAWAY Case for iPhone/iPod/iPad
Why don't we just raise the price of domain names? If you doubled the price you'd make a lot of domain squatting unprofitable.

How is it that you need baekdal.dk but not baekdal.cn? Don't they pose the same security threat when it comes to phishing? It's really not necessary to own 20 different tlds to protect your brand. How many people mistakenly go to baekdal.biz?
chromium on linux - I skip ahead by clicking the small dashed bar (which has as many dashes as pages)
Ask HN: Review My Startup - Butter Camp
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You can also read a blog post at http://thintz.com/essays/butter-camp-launch, which details how I went from nothing to launch in about a day.
Are You Living Like a Prostitute?
Learning About Electronic Cigarettes
Learning about the benefits of using electronic cigarettes can be an effective way to help you make the choice between electronic cigarettes and traditional cigarettes.
LongBets.org is awesome! Thanks for sharing it.

This wager is tailor made for it.
Celery is pretty cool in it's own way. It is like the appengine Task Queues rather than message queues in general.
Lawrence Taylor Arrested in Rape
"publishing deal" is a warm and fuzzy way to say "monopoly".

Developers should be able to sell their software for a platform without being forced into using one specific distribution channel. The App Store is Microsoft's wet dream, even they have never managed to invoke Big Brother so completely.