skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
uh, so not a single person has mentioned memory allocation issues yet?

the pointer to the 0 terminated string could have been to a statically allocated array or memory allocated from the heap using malloc. If you just shorten the string without reallocating the memory, the extra bytes that got condensed are still marked as allocated and are wasted.
A banker and a bank-account are two different things.

Pro-bono lawyers aren't going to be pro-bono for long when they figure out you can actually pay them. That doesn't really help his cause though.

The serious lack of any understanding with regards to how difficult a situation not having responsible parents that give you a serious leg up is betrays both your youth and your own upbringing.

I'm not attacking you, I'm just saying that it pays to remember that not everyone has all the options you do available to them. Certainly not to the extent that it means they would never see the benefit in asking HN for advice.
Small Teams Need Redundant Skills
I find them annoying as well. 1600x1200.
Impressive web page and neat idea. Would be nice if you included a live demo of a course. It would give me an idea of what else you provide besides the "Hoot!" sidebar.
One word, thanks!
:) Nice, I'll consider that one.
Actually I was thinking about them while writing this... it's one of the things that annoy me. I'm actively trying to reduce stuff by not having a 1000 mixers and a glass of each kind. I even use an integrated spoon/fork/knife thing daily (and actually enjoy it).
Exactly. It's not like BP suddenly is a different company; they're just experiencing some bad publicity, and have some costs for cleaning up an oil leak. Sure, that should make their company less valuable, but there's no way BP has suddenly shrunk 25%. So either they were overvalued before, are currently undervalued, or a combination of both.
Why should it make laptops and smart phones completely obsolete? I do think that the new breed of iPad-like tablets can replace quite a few computers but probably not all of them.

With computers as cheap as they are and families usually owning several computers (kitchen or living room laptop or netbook, a few laptops or netbooks for the kids, desktop for the office and so on) I really fail to see how a device which can replace one or two laptops in such a household is a bad thing or one more thing to buy.
Spring 2010 Linux Distro Scorecard
Only slight linux issue is you can't switch from nvidia to onboard graphics card without restarting X (last I checked).

I have an older model 11.1" vaio TZ running linux atm, it's great.
I always wondered why iTunes for Windows is Carbon based. NeXT had a full OPENSTEP stack capable of running under NT (I did it) and that is what Cocoa is based on.
This is exactly why I contribute tens of thousands of lines to F/OSS projects.

Your mettle has never truly been tested until you have hundreds of developers, from around the world, pointing out your idiocy in an excruciatingly specific manner. After your ego has been throughly decimated, then you can improve.

This is closer to how I would do it in practice.

void condense_by_removing (char *z_terminated, char char_to_remove)
{
char *next = z_terminated;

while (1) {
while (*z_terminated == char_to_remove) ++z_terminated;
if (!(*next++ = *z_terminated++) ) break;
}
}

EDIT: Fixed bug
I deal with it by setting aside time. Setting a date night. And agreeing ahead of time that we will spend 3-4 nights/week together.
If and only if you are targeting Windows and Windows only.
I would also bet on BP having really good lobbyists.
I find the notion that any branch of the government has done a good job securing sensitive networks pretty much laughable. Since you could mean a lot of different things by "classified networks", I'm happy to concede your specific point while reiterating that you haven't addressed the core issue.

(I've done network security stuff for DoD and for some agencies, but you may have more experience on the classified side than I do, and what relevant experience I have I'm not going to give up to Hacker News and the Google index.)

And again: the NSA has done absolutely nothing to ensure that adversaries can't shut the power down in major cities, disrupt the GSM infrastructure, or cause billions of dollars in economic damages by messing with electronic markets.

And again: we have no specific knowledge that any branch of the military or intelligence has that capability to inflict on an adversary today.

Is there substantial overlap here with NSA? I'm 100% sure there is. But NSA is managed very differently than DoD.
Not all of them ... with both MonoTouch and Unity you need to have a Mac OS X running with XCode installed, otherwise you can't sign, package or test your application in the IPhone emulator.

If this announcement is about developing, packaging and testing iPhone/IPad apps with only a Windows workstation within Visual Studio, then that's certainly good news.

Not to mention that MonoTouch and Unity are legally both in a gray area right now ... because they are explicitly disallowed in the new SDK EULA and Apple hasn't mentioned their official position on them (AFAIK).
Iirc, first generation iPod did not work/sync on Windows, so what is so unbelievable about Apple having the iPhone SDK working on Windows with Visual Studio now?

Although personally I don't think this is going to happen. As a hardware company, i'm sure they make many extra sales from companies and developers purchasing for the sole purpose of targeting the iPhone/iPad/iTouch and Mac OS X users.
And about 10% of men have difficulty telling red from green.

No.

"Red-green colorblindness" is an inaccurate and misleading name; "green weakness" is a better description, and is what every doctor I've talked to uses as a casual name for the condition.

The best explanation I know of is to imagine the following: you're looking at a screen onto which is projected a square of pure red. Then, gradually, green is added, which will eventually cause the square to appear yellow (yes, red and green make yellow). When a person with "normal" color vision sees it as yellow, a person with the common forms of green weakness would still see it as a bit orange-ish.

In other words, the common form of "red-green colorblindness" doesn't cause a red sign to look green, or a green light to look red, or grass to look red, or any of that stuff. It mostly causes problems in the yellow part of the spectrum (one reason why I tend to avoid earth tones).
Agreed, all the more reason that this statement:

> > Generally, someone smart enough to build a $5 million company should be smart enough to manage his own money.

is false.
Women can have wives and girlfriends! (It's true, there are pictures on Google)
Like all things in life, this is a question of priority.

All conflicts can be resolved in one fashion or another so long as you have a proper understanding of what priority things in you life are at, and you refuse to allow two competing interests to occupy the same space.

Choose wisely.
I've been looking, but there has to be a list of who was on the platform (survivors and deceased) when it exploded.

EDIT: There are links that confirm SLB folk were off the rig, but SLB isn't saying it was any kind of emergency evacuation at this point. It was a "scheduled flight".
Or, assuming this is true, Mac OS X or iPhone.
Not sure how open is it by default, but my colleague bought it, to put linux on it. So, open enough probably... No idea about the app store rules though.
Some problems are just hard. No one blames calculators for the difficulty of calculus. Classifying relationships is something we don't normally do consciously.

People use email and Facebook messages for the small groups you've mentioned. Attempting to shoehorn that use case into the news feed and the post workflow would complicate things. Most things that people share outside of work don't need to be limited to few people.

Cringely is basically saying, "I wish Facebook solved this problem that I have, but few of its other users probably have as well." It makes no sense.
DRY is a principle of writing programs.

I don't think it applies to human communication in general and I have never seen the term DRY applied to questions of human-to-human communication.

My blog posts aren't object oriented either...
I'll soon be finishing up a project myself, and will be looking for work in a couple of weeks. I'm a Rails coder (freelancer), with sysadmin chops and close to 6 yrs web dev exp (major part of it Rails related). Please mail vamsee AT viamentis D0T com if you're interested.
I tend to tile windows so I'll have two browser windows, two Finder windows, mail, some terminals, etc. all visible. I rarely overlap windows.
Don't get too excited, although I don't personally have authority to dismiss this, I have word that this is a completely FALSE rumor (sorry, I can't back that up-- at least do yourself the favor of being skeptical).

Edit: Confirmed http://twitter.com/Microsoft/status/14850981422 (Microsoft official Twitter)

Quote: "Steve Ballmer not speaking at Apple Dev Conf. Nor appearing on Dancing with the Stars. Nor riding in the Belmont. Just FYI."
What happened to vidly?
Bob Walsh/Micro-ISV from Vision to Reality (2006) - has a big chapter with interviews of starting "niche" companies from just launched to very successful(HubSpot/FogCreek). It was interesting to revisit their websites and see how many of them survived. Some are dead, some had failed products but they came up with new ones and became successful.

http://www.amazon.com/Micro-ISV-Vision-Reality-Bob-Walsh/dp/...
Question: How many Macs do you think they have sold to developers who (a) wanted to build an iPhone application but (b) didn't already own a Mac?

That's the market they are 'sacrificing'. I doubt it's significant.

update: Apple reports that they sold 3.05 million Macintosh® computers in Q42009 alone. I can't see them giving a damn about selling Macs to iPhone developers.
That part was disgusting.

If they stop all of the oil immediately, they've already done damage that we'll be cleaning up for decades. They've probably destroyed about 100 billion worth of revenue in the fishing business alone over the next 10 years.

And will they be held liable? For causing 100s of billions of economic damage over the medium-long term, let alone the environmental damage? Of course not, because they have good lobbyists and 65% of congress is either corrupt or an idiot who thinks "drill baby drill" is all you need to know about energy policy.

Yeah, that's admirable. It used to be we cared about justice in this country, and now we just admire those who evade it the best while they're screwing us.
just imagine what kind of access you'd get if you plugged it into a mac? and PS. does this mean you can sync music to an iphone in linux? if so, cool!
Let's hope so.

I don't think the outcome of this procedure is going to be be as clear-cut as the media have been reporting. "Roll the dice" seemed to be the story as of last night.

In reality, we'll only know if top kill worked in August when the relief wells are completed. Until then, we'll only be able to say the fix hasn't failed yet.

The worry is that if the fix is reported to have worked and problems materialize a month later, they won't get the same attention as another blowout tomorrow.
This actually makes a lot of sense considering that right now if you want to develop for the iPhone you need to do so on a Mac. However, there are many developers who use PCs and who would also make good iPhone app developers, but legitimately have no means of doing so.
That's how our mind works, it's very difficult to admit complete failure. You will always come with some reason to feel better , I guess it's for the better :)

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."
- Theodore Roosevelt
Is This Really The Future of Magazines or Why Didn’t They Just Use HTML 5?
We like to spend a fair amount of time at cafes together. I work with the free wifi and she reads a book. Every 30 minutes or so I stop and take a little break and we talk a little. Sure it's not as good as doing something directly together but at least we're out of the house and not just sitting in separate rooms.

Also it's really important to try and go to bed at the same time each night - staying up until 2am while she goes to bed at 11pm definitely has a negative effect on some obvious and not so obvious aspects of your relationship.
Italian birthrates aren't low because of Il Duce. Once people reach a certain level of wealth, they voluntarily stop having lots of kids.
Sure, here's one way to do it. The PIN is handled by hardware, which sends a longer decryption key (128 bit, say?) to encrypted disk hardware, then yes. You'd have to disable the 4 digit PIN decryption if more than 15 or so attempts in a row fail. (But perhaps have a much longer passphrase for recovery.)

With this scheme, the data is protected by a 128 bit symmetric cipher key. There is a small chance that the PIN could be guessed by luck (0.15%) but this is much better than nothing.
The problem is that other countries can't tell whether an ICBM has a conventional warhead or a nuclear one. Russia wouldn't like it if the US launched an ICBM and said, "Trust us, it's just carrying a conventional warhead.. or ten."
It might have been a different condition, but I could swear I saw a page of a guy who made a side by side comparison of images that for him looked the same.

I clearly remember two pictures, one depicting very bright red berries on a bush and other with the berries colored green, almost invisible now.
I posted this over there, but it relates to HN as well:

---
These are good thoughts, and of course, it seems clear the devil is in the details when it comes to defining 'success.' : ).

With the exception of YC, which as you say, has markedly changed the startup landscape without mind-numbing returns (so far), many of the concerns you mention are financial, or sort of finance-expectations outcome oriented.

There's a whole other category of outcomes that businesses traditionally provide: employment, social, civic and cultural improvement. While it's nice to get rich, and nice to have a successful exit, and even nicer to do it in such a way that other investors wish you would do it for them, almost everything you mention above is focused on the outcomes for a really small number of people: founders + investors.

This strikes me as venture capitalist thinking, and makes me think you've spent a lot of time with VCs, and not as much time with people trying to say, invent new water filtration technology, or build out a wind farm with a 50 year ROI, or maybe just make it as farmers in the developing world, .

There can be an element of small-minded profit focus in the VC world, a focus which can choose to ignore the 'but so what?' question -- 'So what if we got our clients 35%, ourselves 2/20, and the entrepreneurs 5x their salary potential for the period?' The billionaires I've met rarely seem to think about money as a measure of success; they are typically extremely engaged with the question of how to put that money to actual and good use, applying the principals they've learned along the way -- not wasting it either in a social sense, or a financial sense. They are typically extremely people focused, whether they live simply or extravagantly.

So, to me, there's a possibility of a sort of higher calling in business and entrepreneurship; moving past the 'make money for our close-knit stakeholders' idea to making a change in the world, in the lives of employees, actually moving job creation numbers, and so on. In a way, whatever floats your boat.

I believe that if, as an entrepreneur, you optimize only for financial success -- e.g. first your own exit value, then investors, you run the risk of hitting that 'so what' question hard -- perhaps when you've gotten rich, perhaps when you failed miserably.

On these terms I would call YC an unqualified success -- PG didn't need the money; he needed to do something useful with the money. He and his team have done that, and helped re-spin tech entrepreneurialism in America. I think that's awesome. But, I think it would be great if the work that's been done on showing young 20-somethings how to launch could be extended on pitching them on 'why' with a long-term view. Most mid-life entrepreneurs spend a lot of time thinking about the why, even while they continue to enhance their skills and ability to deliver good financial results.
>> Secondly, Apple doesn't make that much money off app store sales, they make by far the most money off of the hardware.

Do you know this for a fact, or are you speculating? They don't break out app store sales in their 10-K, but consider quarterly hardware sales from Q4 2009:

- 3 million Macs
- 9 million iPhones
- 21 million iPods

In the same period, users downloaded 400 million apps, although it's unclear how many were paid. App sales are almost 100% profit, compared to the 20% net margins on hardware.
Market Research is more or less Customer Development. So all the Lean Startup stuff is a good place to start learning how to do market research.
An article on saving Cleveland without the mention of LeBron James? Ironic.
The dominant source of low birthrates in rich countries is people choosing to have smaller families.
CNN had Bill Nye The Science Guy explain it yesterday.

EDIT: Here's a link to the video, he comes on at about 1:40

http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/bestoftv/2010/05/25/jk.bill...
Slap for Apple - Media firms tell Jobs they want Adobe's Flash
Also: "slow"
so far it sounds like at the very least, the oil leak has been slowed down. i thought it was neat that the 'mud' was really a non-newtonian fluid.
Palm loses their lead webOS designer to the Google Android team
The point of the Korean's story is not that he learned English but rather how well he learned it and how fast. He estimated that he learned 30,000 words in 2 and a half years, and if you followed the link to the phone interview, the guy has no recognizable accent at all -- he sounds like he learned American English as a child, even though he didn't start really learning the language until he was 16. This is actually fairly remarkable.
Microsoft has said Ballmer won't be speaking at WWDC...talk about getting it wrong:

http://twitter.com/Microsoft/statuses/14850981422
Swift.fm: To the Now
Study: Dynamic language developers looking to cloud-based deployments
That reminds me of a line of code I wrote the other day:

$result->RetrieveResult->DynamicEntity = clone $result->RetrieveResult->DynamicEntity;

it's to get around a PHP bug where the SoapClient returns a half-baked object. At least I preceded it with a comment.
Except about 200 years of science and math starting from the end of the Renaissance Period.
A Sitemap Makes Your Website More Google Friendly
An Investors View on Twitter’s Announcements – I’m not Abandoning the Ecosystem
Odd, since our ipad has hardly been used the last few weeks. After a couple of weeks of heavy use, it's now gathering dust. Wife is back to using her netbook, kids have gone back to their own computers.

Not saying it's useless, but it is far less used than I expected.
This comment was extremely enlightening for me, since I can't think of a single kitchen amongst my friends and neighbors that doesn't have a computer. It's split about 50/50 between notebooks and iMacs.

Also, when we remodeled our kitchen two years ago, the showrooms all included kitchen computers.

I'm not rich, either. My neighbors are mostly rank-and-file government employees or servicemen on assignment at the Pentagon. But kitchen computers are a de-facto standard.
Do you have any software that helps automate this or just manually move windows around?
Buy a few houses/condos near your local University campus and rent it out. Rinse and repeat. :)

Spend a few grand to renovate, put lock on each door etc. and just sit back and watch the money come in. (not much sitting back really, you need to make visits, collect checks etc) but still..

On average students pay $500-700/month for school housing and most of those are in homes with multiple house-mates to lower the rate. There's school all year round, no shortage of students.

You don't even need to buy the house outright inc ash. Put a modest amount as down payment to lower the interest, and pay for it with all the rental income.

Trust me this works. I was one of those students and the landlord was a 26 year old cop who had enough common and financial sense to do this with very little money down. He earns $3500-4500 a month in rentals, depending how many people you can legally (or illegally) fit in the house.

Congrats! Don't forget to look after the most important people in your life, and set aside a percentage for good-will and charities.
Scramjet bombers and cruise missiles would have the same problem.
Blizzard Calls DRM a "Losing Battle"
Joe, my point wasn't that people are literally applying the term DRY to their human to human communications. My point was that they unintentionally do it. I'll see time and time again a blogger or writer or speaker stuck. And one of the reasons they are stuck is that they feel they are out of material. What they can say has either been said by themselves before or someone else.

And I feel especially us programmers who are so used to not repeating ourselves are especially victim to this.

So my point is there is a ton of treasure in polishing and reiterating wisdom you or other have shared before, since the time or times you tell it in your own way may very well reach an entirely new audience (or old audience that really needs to hear it again).
Derek Sivers' Notes on The Art of Profitability
Pretty sure Jacques knows what he's talking about...
The better stop sign would be no stop sign.

The preponderance of stop signs on US roads is one of the most infuriating parts about American road engineering. (Along with such a large number of signs that it is not humanly possible to process them all when traveling at vehicle speeds.)

It really does condition drivers to look for signs instead of other people. If you run a stop sign, you'll get fined even if nothing happens. If you stop at a stop sign and then in blissful ignorance ram someone who didn't, no harm comes to you (unlike to the other person).

The book "Traffic" by Tom Vanderbilt is an interesting read about some counterintuitive things about how traffic works and about how differently engineers in different countries approach safety. I can highly recommend it.

EDIT: One of the most fascinating stories in the book is about how they redesigned some big 5-way intersection with a traffic light in some central square of a Dutch city by just removing everything and leaving a big empty square with some lines painted indicating the roundabout. Crashes went down, and traffic flow improved, because drivers were forced to pay attention to figure out how the whole thing worked.

Experience seems to indicate that the "safety" measures usually taken in the US (widening roads, removing pedestrians, etc) are totally counterproductive because they send subconscious signals to the drivers that this is a speedway which causes everyone to drive faster and pay less attention, which makes crashes more severe (not to mention relegates pedestrians, bicycles and other alternative means of transport to second-hand status.)