skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This wasn't a handful of innocent mistakes. This was such severe ignorance that it was actually negligent to publish the book at all. He made a living of misinforming a generation of programmers.
I think it uses web standards (HTML5), that's why it only works on Chrome (webkit) yet. HTML 5 has made/is making Gears obsolete btw.
I wonder if one could use gait recognition software in a situation like this, to identify a person? When do we want software "proof" to be used in court? Do we already?
Ah thats one of the gems I read today. Awesome, the same can be done for git I guess. I'm going to try it today.

P.S: I have a wicked-cool thought. A nice web interface to browse (shared-)git repos on Dropbox would be cool. I'm going to try writing one this weekend.
Well, she's young but living in Silicon Valley, with a rich venture capitalist father who can provide her money, advice and contacts in the business world.

You can't consider her a normal 18-year old.

I'm 27 but I live in Italy, with blue collars parents. I discovered the startup world and began thinking it can be done only recently.
The Big Bang Theory Season 3 Episode 21 The Plimpton Stimulation | Breaking News
You hit the nail on the head. I bought the HTC Hero 6 months ago and it is really, really laggy at times. I wish I'd bought an iPhone. To insult to insury, HTC has been delaying updating it to 2.1 for months now, all whilst claiming that the update is 'ready in February/March/April/...'.

Yes, Apple behaves like a paranoid control freak, but they get stuff done.
Best Usenet post ever.  From Comp.STD.C  (check post author)
>> what will we have learned?

When given the chance, take the $750 million.
Agreed, Linpack on ARM sounds ridiculous since ARM by definition doesn't have a true FPU (ignoring VFP and NEON).

Then again, maybe it means more on ARM because it's an indication of low level software optimizations rather than actual hardware, and might be more relevant for applications that don't actually require floating point math.
Yeah, git can work similarly too, though I can't remember the clone flag (--bare I think?). My dumb brain hurts whenever I try to do something moderately complex with git, so I tend to stick to hg.
I'm sorry to be uncivil, but this is melodramatic nonsense. This article is not HN material and my relief at seeing it killed has been replaced by distress that it was resurrected. Perhaps the mod/pg who rezzed it could explain why?
That's really annoying - I've been working on a similar thing on and off for about two years but never had the time to commit to it properly ... oh well, I guess I can just check the google code and see where I could've improved.
Thank you for clarifications, everyone (including Cyanogen himself). I've updated the article to reflect these.
This isn't bad, but why wouldn't you also host the live code on Dropbox as well. One of the biggest bonuses I see about Dropbox is the fact that I am, essentially, backed up all the time. If his computer blew up before he hit "push", he wouldn't have a copy. If my computer blows up, as long as I hit save, and Dropbox is synced, I'm good to go. If anything, I'd host my repo somewhere offsite that doesn't use Amazon S3, so that I'm extra backed up.
The big expression in the middle is effectively unpacking a 2D point encoded in z. z % 9 is the x coordinate and z / 9 is the y coordinate:

x = z % 9;
y = z / 9;

putchar (
x + y > 3 &&
x + y < 14 &&
y < x + 6 &&
y > x - 5 ? '*' : ' ' );

if (x == 8)
putchar ( '\n' );

Wolfram Alpha plots this inequality nicely:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=x+%2B+y+%3E+3+%26%26+x+...
The problem with the Humble Bundle, as with Radiohead's pay-what-you-want album and other, similar efforts, is that they clearly work once but it's not at all obvious that the effect could be repeated, let alone sustained. For example, almost all the games in the current Humble Bundle were games I'd known about for a while, and wanted to play, so it was a pretty easy decision to shell out. If there was to be a Humble Bundle 2, what games would be in it? For most of the creators involved in the current Bundle, they have no other non-freeware works.

I hope there's a Humble Bundle 2 someday, maybe in a year's time when people have had time to play all the games from the first Bundle, and maybe feel a bit nostalgic for the crazy "indy-gaming-yeah!" vibe. I don't think they could stage one more frequently than that; not without an amazing uptick in the number of eligible games.
It seems Leo Laporte was Zucked by Jason Calacanis.
F# in ASP.NET, mathematics and testing
The servers were indeed melting after engadget, gizmodo, HN, and reddit all ganged up on us simultaneously but the fires have been put out and we're now happily serving anyone interested.

For the curious ones, when the reqs/s number reached about 220 and the server melted, I had to figure out a new solution.

No problem, as I have selected Linode to be our VPS provider and was able to upgrade from a 360MB RAM Linode to a 1080MB one in about 15 minutes of downtime. Some apache tweaking was needed, of course, but now we're pushing all the traffic that is required with quite a bit of room to grow.

Thanks for all the upvotes.
Ask pg:  How do you want us to flag submissions?
The past few weeks, I've found myself flagging front page content more and more frequently. I'm inclined to believe this is mostly due to the site's front page content changing, rather than some change in my own attitude. But I don't want to...dilute the meaning of my flags (and by extension, flags in general, unless you have a way to weight by user the attention flags receive).

So my question is this: what approach to flagging spurious content is most helpful to keeping HN signal:noise high?
Satire: The Internet as a tool for peace-making
I consider Perl's data structures to be genuinely inferior. Lists that cannot contain other lists are not reasonable in a high level language. Pointers are not reasonable in a high level language. Explicit function signatures are a superior language design.
Home fabrication is very inspirational to read about. The fabrication process maybe extremely time consuming at the moment, but it's a glimpse of what to come. Video on the internet was ridiculously slow once, now it's becoming our main source of video. You saw this video on YouTube, not on your telly. The advantages of 3d printers are so many, that it will only be a question of time before the'll get cheaper, faster and better enough to go mainstream. Amen.
The estimated Union budget for India this year is 10,20,838 Crore Indian Rupees (1 crore = 10 Million). Yes, building an OS is hardly an expense.

I was commenting on Pluggd.in article being written badly.
The program is drawing on a grid 9 wide by 10 high. The loop is going over each space in this grid. It puts a * in each cell that falls within the equations described by the four inequalities. Here's a slightly more simplified version.

int putchar ( int ) ;

int main ( void )
{
int z;
int width = 9;
int height = 10;

for (z = 0; z < width * height; z++)
{
int x = z % width;
int y = z / width;

putchar (
x + y > 3 && /* top left */
x + y < 14 && /* bottom right */
y < x + 6 && /* bottom left */
y > x - 5 /* top right */
? '*' : ' ' );

if (x == width - 1)
putchar ( '\n' );
};
putchar ( '\n' ) ;

return 0;
}

It would be clearer to separate the main loop into nested loops for x and y, but I've left it as is to show a closer resemblance to the previous version.

The fun part is that you can now play with the various settings. Try increasing the height and width and scaling the equations appropriately. Replace x by 2 * x or x * x for more interesting shapes. You can bound the picture by any equations you like. Example: http://ideone.com/53Qh3
Thank you for the details.
That was very interesting. I added a pointer to your article to the OP.
Sorry, I'm not equipped for that sort of public discussion. Talk to Matt. ;)
You can't play Lugaru all the way through. "We have included enough of the game data to run the demo version. Please note that the game data is not under the GPL, and forbids commercial redistribution." from http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Lugaru-goes-open-source
Jupiter loses a stripe.
why did the Usenet die?
> it could pass bits of memory to the user land process

> by sharing a capability that gave it write access.

> Then the userland process could populate it,

> once it had finished and the kernel wanted to read it,

> they could revoke the the writeable permission.

> This would prevent this sort of attack [apparently,

> confusing auditors with TOCTOU attacks on system call arguments]

Virtual memory mapping hardware is already roughly a capability system. The CPU doesn't maintain a list of ownerships and permissions for every page of physical memory; it puts capabilities to those pages into page tables. That's how KeyKOS was able to run efficiently on stock hardware.

Capability systems are indeed better for security in several ways, but this isn't one of them. The problem here is that the memory page is shareable between different user threads. You can solve this problem in a variety of ways, including the one you suggest. However, unmapping the page that a system-call argument lives in before invoking an auditor does not constitute implementing a capability system.

To a great extent, it seems like the move toward web apps is exactly a move toward a different security model in order to reduce the maintenance the user has to do, a model in which most apps are fairly limited in their authority. The same-origin policy still falls far short of full POLA, but it's a step. The project in this area I'm most excited about is Caja, which is what MarkM's working on these days.
Here's the entire original thread in case anyone might find the quote funnier in context, without the horrid highlighting:

http://groups.google.com.au/group/comp.std.c/browse_thread/t...
> Sadly, more often than not, at least in my experience, aforementioned execs take all that for granted and the secretary remains a secretary in terms of pay and appreciation.

True story:

A friend of mine is a broker to a guy who is/was a major real estatement developer. Billions of dollars of developments. The guy is a maniac too, he'd develop multiple sites in different ways at the same time and he had a pretty small staff. Just infinite amounts of work and energy. Immigrant parents, came up from nothing, developer was just a pretty amazing guy.

My friend was one of the brokers he used. One year, secretary's day was coming around. Normally, the developer would give his secretary like a $200 gift certificate for Tiffany's or to a fancy restaurant or something like that.

This year, he thought - you know, my secretary has been with me for 20 years, she's been amazing, I should do something really special for her. My friend was just about to trade his car in and get a new car, and so he sold it to the developer for a pretty good bargain - something like $12,000. It was a nice sports car, only a few years old.

So he gave her the car, and she was thrilled, really really happy. Very grateful. After a couple weeks, the thrill wore off, and it was just business as normal, and she was still the very good secretary she had been for years and things were going well.

Next year, secretary's day rolls around again, and he gives her... a $250 gift certificate for Tiffany's. Like every other year.

And she was TICKED. Very upset. Her work quality suffered. She'd been very excited about what she was going to get, and then a slightly bigger than normal gift certificate was very upsetting.

Long story short - many people have thought the same way as you and tried to rectify it, often with undesired results. Everyone in the world isn't necessarily stupid - if something is done almost everywhere a certain way, it might because that way works the best. When deviating from the normal way, things should be thought through carefully. I do agree that a top notch assistant is invaluable though, and often times underappreciated.
If you're too lazy to compile it yourself, you can run the code online: http://ideone.com/QKQG6
This website reminds me why I should never browse without Tor. And why I should make my proxy block Feedjit.
Signal to noise ratio mostly.
-> reddit.com/r/funny
I just thought of an analogy:

If what happens in the article is correct, it is very similar to what auto-bidding shill bots do on auction sites, eBay, they obtain information on the highest price you were willing to pay for an item.

Is this the price we(investors) are willing to pay for 0.03sec liquidity? I am not sure it is worth it.
The most (largest qty of) available FOSS libs anywhere

Do you literally mean anywhere or compared to other GAE languages?

If so do you have a rough estimate on how many Java/Clojure FOSS libraries/modules/packages there are?
People need to adjust to the presence of HFT. For many traders it breaks the model they may have used successfully for some time and they just don't want to go out and update their model.

As typically happens, they go crying to the government to stop the evil villains from forcing them to change the way they think about a changing world.
Ah, good point, my mistake. So if I've got it right, the common usage would be "government official" for administrative positions, and "politician" for elected?

Cheers for pointing that out.
Goldman and a World We Don't Understand and Shouldn't Bother With
Wait, am I missing something or is Jason really labeling fb's clamp down on crapville spam as a stab in the back? Not a zuck defender by any means, but defending zynga... Come on.

Guess it takes a spammer to defend a spammer.
That's true. You make a good point.

Ok, I'll avoid devolving to insults in the future (though for this specific conversation it's a bit late). Thanks for taking the time to make that point.
Sorry for the long quote, but I have tried to reduce its length as much as possible while retaining meaning:

""
[...] the idea that things ought to be designed in a 'just' manner means, in effect, that we must abandon the market and turn to a planned economy in which somebody decides how much each ought to have, and that means, of course, that we can only have it at the price of the complete abolition of personal liberty.
""

This seems to me to be a false dichotomy. If the state sets artificial prices on some goods, say basic foodstuffs, this does not automatically lead to the complete destruction of market forces, it simply produces an artificial input in the market, leading to an equilibrium that likely to be different from the natural equilibrium.

As an aside, I was really thrilled by his description of meeting Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
You're never going to work directly in the Dropbox directory,

That is never really backed up, and doesn't make a lot of sense.

I've been doing this for a while - but using Dropbox as my working directory [1]. All he is doing here is using Dropbox as a backup - but such services exist (e.g. BitBucket) and are easier to sync to (one push and you don't have to wait for Dropbox to then sync).

Dropbox is useful for maintaining a consistent working directory between computers. I can hack around at work, go home to finish up and then commit. Brilliant :)

1. http://www.errant.me.uk/blog/2010/04/a-nifty-way-to-manage-c...
Digg’s Biggest Problem Is Its Users And Their Constant Opinions On Things
I want to invent something that seems impossible and cause disruptive change.
I'm not sure how the fact that Dennis Ritchie (the R in K&R, inventors of C) made a one-line response makes this the "Best Usenet post ever". I don't mean to be negative or anything, but let's not go overboard here.

This post is of mild interest and possibly a tiny little bit amusing to a small cross-section of geeks. It's hardly the "Best X ever".
"Games are usually like movies: a lot of sales in the opening weeks followed by a quick convergence to zero as they fall off the radar."

Is that still true though? I can see this being the case with physical copies having to fight for top shelf space in stores, but it may have changed a bit with online distribution channels. A few month old games that get a price reduction, or classics that get a special campaign price, regularly go to the top of the Steam sales list for a couple of days. Especially those who have gained a positive word of mouth reputation online. Long tail phenomenon?

"HOTU is evidence enough of that"

Hordes of the Underdark? puzzled. Oh, Home of the Underdogs.
:)
Anybody that spends just a few minutes reading about privacy on the web, and hell, elsewhere, would most certainly care about this. This old fogey crap is very tiresome. As if having any sort of age to you immediately means you care more for things that don't matter.

They may not care about their privacy, but I do. The rights of others are also my rights. It's not theirs to squander away so easily.

FYI, I'm 27.
فلاشات Nokia N96 - شركة الصباحي
How To Grow Your Blog Through Customer Development
Note that they call it "horse serum" because antivenom is produced by putting venom into horses in tiny amounts over long periods and then extracting antibodies from them.
Calcanis is the ringleader in a racket. He talks more than he actually does anything. He writes posts like this to get traffic. He's like the Sarah Palin of the valley. Amusing to watch, but otherwise worthless.
"Confirms" is just a trigger word for "this is real and we're not just spreading rumors".
I always click on my competitor's ad, everytime I see it ;-)
Prisons are full of psychopaths and sociopaths. You've probably worked amongst some of them in your life. Think of the guy that everyone hates but has managed to get himself locked into the heartbeat of the company.

Sociopaths aren't out to get power through material wealth, but by exploiting character flaws. They'll find someone easily influenced, kiss ass until they have solid relationship and then exploit the shit out of it.
I think this is the wrong question to ask. I'm an old fogey - 44 - and I don't like Facebook. But, it's not about the privacy - there is no such thing on the Internet - and if you don't recognize that, well fool you. The question, me thinks, should be: Care that Facebook is sneaky?
Yeah, it's incredible. Had I had this idea, and had been considering my cut, I'd probably have plumped for 5% or 10% or 15%. After all this is what most online retailers charge. I would have imagined that at 50% everyone would have laughed at them.

Mind you, that's why I'm poor and those guys now have a billion dollar company.
Bleh. Perl + Acme::EyeDrops >> *
Nice try though.
A look at how malloc works on the Mac
Why doesn't Digg sell its platform?
If not, licence news networks like CNN and FOX to use the platform, hosted or otherwise. Most news sites now have a "user generated" section that could take advantage of "digging" natively.

Do what wufoo did for forms.

Should have sold when you had the chance :P
Microsoft Office 2010 takes aim at Google Docs
Prohibiting slander, libel, and inciting imminent lawless action are also technical violations of the first amendment. Society tolerates these rules because they provide even greater value than the freedom of speech alone.

In this case, I agree that prohibiting advertising is a first amendment violation. Instead, we should simply disallow all outdoor advertising and advertising that is broadcast on the publicly-owned radio spectrum.
For the purpose of this comment, I'm going to assume that you're just ignorant and not actually a neurotypical bigot.

Understanding Asperger's "syndrome" through the metaphor of a "disease" is pretty misleading. It has its advantages and its drawbacks. Without people with Asperger's, we probably wouldn't have an internet to discuss this question on.

Diseases are progressive; often they are curable; often they are acquired; and they do not convey advantages. None of these things are true of Asperger's.

Maybe the biggest difference is that it's not something that can be cured; it's a fundamental part of who you are. A person with cancer is still the same person as before the cancer; if they cure the cancer, they're still the same person afterwards. The cancer doesn't give them the ability to do anything other people can't do. None of these things are true of Asperger's.

So I think the closest analogy is, what if he had said, "Last year, when I realized that Zuckerberg was an amoral, Negro-like entrepreneur..."?

(This analogy is weak in a couple of ways: first, clear memory, near immunity from social pressure, and improved logical ability are probably more significant abilities in today's world than resistance to sunburn; second, people with Asperger's tend to be wealthier than average, not poorer, so it may seem a little strange to treat them as an oppressed group.)

Calacanis is a neurotypical bigot. The clear implication of his statement is that people with Asperger's tend to be amoral. This is entirely false.
Rule #1: when you can't scale is always your fault.
Ruby, oEmbed, and Embedly - all that was needed was a little love
AVG Antivirus Download - Well-known free antivirus protection software
Digg users are either power users who control what gets on there; or geeks who think they are the "cool" geeks, the ones that gets laid.
Working overtime increases heart risk, a study finds
The idea behind health insurance is spending other people's money. If health insurance provides no benefit over just putting money in your savings account, people will just do that instead. Then the system collapses.

(Pooling the money is more beneficial than keeping it to yourself, because the insurance companies can invest it better than an individual can. Think of the interest you get on $1000 vs. what you get on $1,000,000. One buys you a cup of coffee, the other supports you for life. When the insurance companies leverage your premiums in this way, it means that the actual money the spend is nearly free. It's a pretty good deal.)
I'm not sure there is a one-size-fits-all solution to that. But, in general, I think that what matters is the real damage done. I mean, if you do harm others, you should be punished/restricted, and if you do harm others repeatedly under the influence of some substance (be it snorted cocaine or internally produced adrenaline), you should perhaps be punished/restricted more.
But the punishment/restriction should always be a response to the harm done to others, not to whatever the person does to her own body.
Another prototype iPhone slips from Apple's clutches
Well, usenet isn't really dead per se, though it's admittedly not what it once was. Some of us still use it, and some newsgroups still have nice communities to them and are still good sources of information. True, many groups are overrun with spam, and in my experience it seems to attract a disproportionate number of lunatics, but it's still got its good parts, and I think it's a shame that so many ISPs are dropping it as of late.
Hehe, no, I was talking about grabbing a copy of the database. We are assuming no knowledge that the database carries copies of CC #'s, or he wouldn't have done it. ;)
Proving, yet again, that Arrington is the best writer on TC. He nailed it, right down to the Digg culture issues. The Eddie Murphy defence is well worth picking up too - we've seen Steve Jobs engaging in some of this in his recent spate of e-mails.
To demonstrate that the new edition is still crap.

It does not only warn (new) people to stay away from it, it also reflects badly on the publisher, who only seems able to bring out shoddy work.
Is Apple already using this compiler with OS X?

Its in use for some products in Snow Leopard; Xcode, OpenGL, (and, I believe) OpenCL and Automator are built with Clang.

Or is it mostly cool stuff for coders, but mostly transparent for end-users?

Mostly, this. However, the cool things it gives are subtly passed onto the user. For example, LLVM and Clang have a nice static analyzer to help developers find and fix memory leaks. There are other optimizations (for the size of the binary and speed of the program being run) that LLVM is working on, but they're not ready for primetime yet (or weren't, the last time I looked).
conspiracy theories, anyone?