skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I doubt anybody is going to miss media support in Java.
This article is one of the more thoughtful ones on this.

I think Facebook is running up against human nature. Yes, humans are social, but we are also exclusive. Software that provides an outlet for the former but not the latter is betting against human nature. That's not a strong position to take, particularly when your success was built on both of those factors. Relying on lock-in to support these changes is hoping that the superstructure will compensate for removing a girder. It may work, but the fundamentals are against it. And there's a tinge of recklessness about it.
When banks are offering 1% on deposits you are going to have weird situations arise where actors in the market are seeking yield on their money. Even Geithner acknowledged that.
Now it can be said!

J Allard's name is really :) Allard; outside Microsoft, the bug of mangling the smiley into a J for people without the Wingdings font installed will no longer happen.
Pretty horrible interface though. Can't just right click on an open site to toggle block/allow.
no they can't.

unlike real gambling where there are real odds of success, startups are a crap shoot each and every time. There is no science, no formula for success. Even the best investors, the ones who get the BEST deals like Ron Conway, don't have a perfect track record.

And unlike big time investors like YC/RC, these are the people who'll be investing into 1-2 companies max(no diversification), who won't know what they are doing. Who'll be gambling with money they can't afford to lose.

The networth requirement isn't there to stop investment, it's to stop investment from gullible investors who'd likely be defrauded by snake oil salesmen pitching their startups.

OF COURSE the site will make $5 million in 3 years. OF COURSE you should invest in us. YOU CAN'T lose. Hockey stick, hockey stick, hockey stick.
Using Haskell to control a Segway robot
See my reply here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1377750
> You can thank me for subsidizing that low cost with my Boston - NYC trips which cost well over $100 each way. Often you can fly from Boston to LaGuardia for less than the train. High fares on the east coast routes subsidize those cheap cross country "named" trains.

Thanks, but federal and state tax dollars are also a major subsidy source (especially on the Empire Builder which is one of the main sources of tourists for Idaho/Wyoming/etc.).

> Pro tip: Never buy a ticket on a named train i.e. "Empire Builder", "Vermonter" when just trying to get between cities - they are frequently many hours late.

You're right, but they've been getting better. Especially since winter, when the weather wreaked havoc on the system. See http://www.trainweb.org/capt/AmtrakMapsForward.html for "real time" calculated location of the trains and how late they are.

> Oh, and that Verizon wireless commercial that shows a guy spotting a good looking girl already on a train and he quickly changes his ticket using his smart phone; that can't be done, not even with a voice call. To change an Amtrak ticket you have to physically take the ticket to a ticket window.

I've changed tickets several times over the phone and online. They ask you to go to the counter to verify ID, but if you swipe your card at the FasTrak station you can get the new ticket printed just fine.

> Just about every time I take Amtrak I get pissed-off by the high cost and indifferent service.

I've had the exact opposite experience. On the Empire Builder, the staff is always courteous (even to unruly passengers) and is genuinely interested in the wellbeing of the passengers. I've made friends with some of the workers at the smaller Amtrak stations along the EB route -- they make for great conversation when you're waiting for the train.
His first example for tail recursion is grossly wrong, it is an almost canonical example for a fuction that is not tail recursive, as the last thing it does is consing somthing with the result of calling itself recursively.
The challenge is that there are two orthogonal issues here: Sympathy for users and criticism for businesses.

If someone spends thousands of dollars on hair implants because they believed an informercial telling them that they will get laid every night of the week, I would sit them down and have a long talk about tooth fairies, santa clause, bridges, and swamp land salesmen.

But I would still despise the businesspeople preying on the gullibility or naivité of their customers.

So perhaps it is a very good idea not to put anything online that would ruin you if it leaked. But it's still reprehensible to leak things after setting an expectation that they are private.
"since the same, easy-to-discover key is used in every client"

OH, COME ON! Seriously? Like even beyond some external attacker, if the key is the same on every client, students could wreck havoc pretty easily if they find it. That's like setting every locker in the school to the same combo and hoping no-one notices.

"If the attacker knows the IP address of the server a client is trying to contact, he can just impersonate a freshly-booted client and ask the server to send him the correct SeedValue."

OK, no. If you have to have it like this, at least install the SeedValue when you set up the computer.

"If the server is unreachable from outside the firewall, clients that are rebooted away from the local network will be unable to obtain a SeedValue. In this situation, the clients insecurely default to accepting arbitrary commands without even the protection of a SeedValue."

:HeadDesk:
http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/military/b52-strat/b52_5...

It's a story about a b52 that lost its vertical stabilizer. It flew to the nearest base and landed normally, six hours later at a different base because of wind problems at the first base.
Sun's stars: Where are they now? Why did they leave?
Repetition is key to Network Automation success
I like this because he is demonstrating his technical ingenuity by designing and building the thing - from scratch - by himself. A great lead into getting an interview or being called in to quote for some work.

But does this show commercial ingenuity ? Perhaps less so. People will be terrified of plugging a random USB device into their machine. And anyway it's pretty easy to buy things just like this - you see them quite a lot at trade shows these days. (eg: http://www.flashbay.com/wafer_usb_card.html)
And how does the owner of the social network get that money to pay Ning?

They exploit their users all they can.
> google.browser.engine.IE = false

Tsk, tsk. Browser detection instead of feature detection. ;\
The investment required keeps the supply relatively low. It's not fair to call it a sunk cost when it's an annual $1b. Keeping up with the state of the art in printers (note the disparity in quality even over the last few years) is a significant ongoing expense.

And the reason not to leave it caveat emptor is obvious: your brand suffers. When someone's printer goes bad they don't blame the manufacturer of the ink, they blame the manufacturer of the printer. This is part of why Steve Jobs doesn't want Flash on the iPad. He spent enough years denigrating Windows for crashing due to third party programs to not want the same thing done to him.
Yeah; he needs to give some care to who he hands them out to. At smaller firms where the person doing the hiring has some sort of technical background, it would probably work. But at a big company where everything is going through HR people who couldn't tell a microcontroller from a hole in the ground? Probably a waste of solder. At best someone might think it's kind of neat looking, but the real cleverness will be lost.

It'd be a neat thing to have around to hand to other engineers, maybe encourage them to pull some strings from the inside for you. At some companies an internal recommendation can count for a lot.
FM Scout - Football Manager Community | Dropjack
I don't use Arc at all.
is it only in India that I see such binding agreements, or are they prevalent worldwide?

Holy crap, no.

In Sweden, you start out with one month notice on both parties. The time increases for the employer based on how long you've worked, but generally doesn't for the employee. The only exemption is for "critical" employees where it's hard to find a replacement and losing the person would endanger the company. In such cases I think the notice time for the employee can increase to three months or maybe six months.

Labour laws in the rest of the EU are pretty similar, what you describe is completely unheard of. If a company wishes to train new hires, they take the full cost, and they take the gamble of it working out or not.
New WakeMate support site
With that reasoning Ballmer should also be gone. The bottom line for MS may look good but after a decade of him not being able to come up with a game plan for mobile devices, which is where the future is, I am surprised the board hasn't shown the door for him. Clearly at this point their usual approach to licensing their OS to mobile devices in large quantities for cheap isn't going work (Android is free) but they still seem to be pursuing the same strategy. Pretty soon it might be hard to keep MS relevant. With all the talent they have a strong leader is what they need to turn them around, I don't see that being Ballmer.
Would systems that use trace trees (e.g., TraceMonkey) have the same sort of issues?

I have a feeling that they would notice repeated calls to the same if-statement and optimize accordingly. They may still have the same sorts of issues, but would the used benchmark (looping and querying the if-statement n times) have completely different results in a JIT system?
You make it sound as if it was bad of them to do so. Any financial organization responds to only one stimulus very quickly, that is financial. If they are responding to such stimuli and moulding their services accordingly where is the harm? The customers are at a net gain anyway.
The only difference between memjet and the other inkjet printers is that the print head doesn't move. It uses ink like all the others, and will probably still have the same razor/razor blade business model. If they ever productize it.
S-Expressions Instead Of Raw Html
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1376075

Good article though.
The Secret Life of Elevators[2008]
Ending Poverty through Education
Just to highlight an interesting quote for discussion:

" believe we can solve the problems of urban education in our lifetimes and actualize education’s power to reverse generational poverty. But I am learning that it is a radical concept to even suggest this. Warren Buffett framed the problem for me once in a way that clarified how basic our most stubborn obstacles are. He said it would be easy to solve today’s problems in urban education.

“Make private schools illegal,” he said, “and assign every child to a public school by random lottery.” Think about what this would mean. CEOs’ children, diplomats’ children, many would be going to schools in Anacostia and east of the river, where most of our schools are. I guarantee we would never see a faster moving of resources from one end of the city to the other. I also guarantee we would soon have a system of high-quality schools."
'Anybody and their dog can make a medical app,' doctors warn patients
Anyone else take offense to that ?
And the funny thing is that the quote is from a nurse, not a doctor...
the essential complexity of the code ... will manifest elsewhere

By using a different language or by writing simpler code, you can avoid every complexity mentioned, so it's not really essential complexity. And programmers in any language can create these problems, except "the intrinsic Python OO worldview," and maybe "weird library APIs". So this sounds like it's really just a criticism of Python.
Just out of curiosity, how applicable is this to optimizing a higher-level language like python or ruby?
I actually posted this as a sort of test, forgive me.

It is about as on-topic for HN as it gets and it is useful.

I was wondering if it would gain more or less upvotes than the next installment of the facebook soap.

Guess...
I wonder if this wouldn't be a good time for Microsoft to split itself up - I still think it is pretty crazy for the same company to be producing everything from the Xbox 360 through to Dynamics AX.
If this is going to HR-types, how do they know to tear off the corners? Is that in the cover letter?
Code Quarterly looking for writers
Wouldn't people who don't like autorun already have it turned off?
FortiGate flags this site as containing malware. Odd.
This was the technology platform they were born into

Erm...no. The technology this generation was born into was the internet, and it wasn't until barely 10 years ago that the social web became what it is. The aspects of social activity is the technology this generation was born into, and the only reason this is relevant for discussion is that just like we evolved out of IRC, ICQ and are moving away from AIM, too they will move away from centralized, top-down hierarchies of managing social interactions.
It's quite sad that this promo page doesn't mention KDE (spin, SIG, anything) even at least once.
From Homeless to Lawyer: One Woman's Amazing Journey
How about
http://upstart.ubuntu.com/
I find the Xerox (formerly Tektronix) Phaser solid ink color printers to be pretty awesome in this regard. They print fast and produce a glossy, professional-looking color print. I think the main problem is that they require more energy over the long term than a comparable laser.
@InclinedPlane

Hi!

That's true, there are other development tasks where the vast majority of developers should look at with greater priority.

Still, I'd like to suggest what is the main takeaway from the Igor's post, if you may.

I would like to put the emphasis on the role played on timings by the presence data-dependent branches, and not on how developers should try to optimize the performance by keeping the pipelines stages as busy as possible.

This have practical importance, for example, while implementing cryptographic algorithms or secret-dependent algorithms, as the timing patterns can be exploited by side channel attacks.

Nothing new, something already happened:

Predicting Secret Keys via Branch Prediction
by Onur Aciicmez and Jean-Pierre Seifert and Cetin Kaya Koc
http://eprint.iacr.org/2006/288.pdf

On the Power of Simple Branch Prediction Analysis
by Onur Aciicmez and Cetin Kaya Koc and Jean-Pierre Seifert
http://eprint.iacr.org/2006/351.pdf

Of course, Igor's post is not about cryptanalysis, agreed. Still provides some useful quantities relating mispredicted branch number to the spent cycles.

Cheers
It's also a common strategy for someone in an organization to make a big vertical leap or move across the organization in a way that would be nearly impossible internally. Basically, an infrastructure engineer leaves and comes back as a VP of Product for social wizardry.
I used to work at HP in the inkjet division, and I just wanted to point out that, down at the individual engineer level of the organization, we all kinda hated the business model too. You could imagine what would happen though if HP decided to raise the cost of printers and reduce the cost of ink. Everyone at Best Buy would see HP printers that cost more than Epson, Cannon, or Lexmark and guess which printer they'd buy. Kodak tried to go that route and made a lot of noise about how much cheaper their ink was, but they haven't taken a whole lot of inkjet market share (yet?).
Hmmm..you might have to include an instruction manual with that :).
Perhaps embellished or selective memory driven. For example, I'm sure he is aware of how people elsewhere quit, and I'm sure at CDBaby he had someone quit over his tenure of running it. But by leaving that out, the story is so much better and the point is made crystal clear.
> A PhD is required to do research in academia

I'm not sure what this means—no-one can stop you from doing research anywhere, regardless of your qualifications. Do you mean that most academic research jobs require a Ph.D.?

(I left the bit about industry out of my quote because I don't have the faintest idea. Maybe it's true.)
And for those of you who just want to play and not bother with the source, Google still hosts the game "legally" at :

http://www.google.com/pacman/
This article basically says that Facebook is making its product worse for users to make it more valuable to advertisers. I don't think that's the case. A Facebook where users share most of the things they post with everyone but restrict the privacy of the few items that they don't want everyone to see is a more useful and interesting product to use. They just need to make it clear who will be able to see the item you're about to post instead of hiding it behind the lock button. A more open Facebook is more valuable to advertisers and users.
A Response to 37Signals "We don't do Employment Contracts"
Statistics about Hadoop and Mapreduce Algorithm Papers
Upstart is more for replacing init. Its less suitable for jobs that need to be started at particular times since its designed for starting and stopping services during boot and changes in runlevel.
Is it unreasonable to expect that Scala's persistent collections will work comparably to Closure's when 2.8 final is released?
I think you're focusing too much on Ning. What I am really referring to is the business model that it uses. As you've suggested it's imperfect and maybe Ning hasn't run their business very well but I don't think because of that we should say that another company cannot implement the model successfully.

The model I envision is very similar to the shared hosting model employed on the web. You sign up for hosting and you install a CMS like drupal or wordpress and you have yourself a community and you pay a subcription fee. But instead of drupal there could be a social networking application. Each network creator would be responsble for it's promotion and marketing but I think it's a viable model because there are existing real world communities that would like to establish an online presence and something like this may be a great way to do that.
It is possible and we see it all the time...I am not denying that, but I wouldn't call it street smarts...maybe just "smarts".
The best way to handle exceptions
If you're on a Mac and use Gmail/Google Apps, I'd recommend Mailplane - it's essentially an SSB tuned precisely to Gmail, and providing some interesting OS integration features. It also handles multiple accounts relatively well.

http://mailplaneapp.com/
PAQ is a series of compression algorithm tests led by Matt Mahoney and a ton of compression enthusiasts who keep tweaking PAQ algorithm (be it for better memory use/speed or most importantly: compression ratio on a corpus).

Checkout their fabulous journey at

http://mattmahoney.net/dc/

PAQ804 says that it is fourth modification to the initial PAQ8 archiver.
Real odds of success? In gambling, for the house (or state lottery) to make money, the expected value of your bet has to be negative. This is not the case with investments in start-ups.
They also got something else (an exclusive contract of some kind, I can't remember exactly) for that $250 million, so the $15B valuation was always phony.
What the article fails to mention is branch predictors in modern CPUs are generally correct >95% of the time for real world benchmarks (usually SPEC).

Furthermore each CPU uses different approaches to branch prediction such that a bad pattern for one will not be in another. So spending time trying to optimize your code in this way will only optimize it for a particular processor which wont work if you're trying to make a distributable binary. (i.e. different x86 processors use different branch prediction algorithms. You will basically be optimizing specifically for the Intel i7 or specifically for the AMD Athlon 3)
I'm guessing that's because there's nothing new in KDE so that it can be considered a feature. They don't mention gnome either, even if it's the default and preferred DE.
They mention Gnome Shell which is something quite different and new that deserves/attracts attention.
I like the idea of these a lot. I've been looking for a way to make sure people don't just throw out my business cards, and making them useful over a long period of time (ie: usb key!) would definitely help...
Interesting...
How would you define power user?
(In this context)
I am not a lawyer.

If Zed does indeed release a Python driver under the MIT license, and you use that, it's essentially no different than using the LGPL in an end-user distributed app. You'd have to make any of your changes to MulletDB available to your end users, but your proprietary code could remain closed.

MongoDB takes this approach, and has written more at http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Licensing
Exactly. I'm glad someone's paying attention.

Additionally, it's mostly a project I started on a dare that I started liking to hack on. Not really expecting anyone to use it for a while, if ever.
wow you really took one for the "team",
now I don't feel so bad when my stuff gets totally ignored...
Man who banned himself from casino must forfeit jackpot
The turnover at MS seems to be intensifying. Whats worse is that it seems like the people that made The Cool Stuff (tm) are leaving. That's unfortunate because for a second there, I thought MS was finally getting it and starting understand what consumers want.
Actually, I figured if it's AGPL then basically everything has to be AGPL. We'll see how that goes.
Macro Economic Musings:  Pendulum Switches Back to Deflation
Sadly, people will just stick this, and any random USB device into their computers. I can't remember the company in question, but there was a story about a security audit where the hacker team got in by handing out free USB drives in the parking lot.
Doesn't mention how much it costs or how much time it takes to make each one. Certainly nontrivial on both, though. If you're going to have a business card like that then you it's a serious investment every time you give one out.
PG lists 9 points that made Lisp awesome. After using Clojure for a while, I would argue that a good approach to State, Identity & Value is point #10.
I disagree. If you are programming in C or C++, and you are not aware of this effect, you are probably doing something wrong, perhaps using the wrong language. And the article isn't suggesting that you should blindly optimize for it, rather it's giving you some background and telling you about which tools you can use to measure the effect of branch prediction.

I think that developers become better rather than worse when they start to understand what happens under the hood. Are we to protect people from the dangers of superficial levels of knowledge by keeping them ignorant? Teach them, and if that's not enough, then teach them more:

"Mispredicted branches can cause a conditional itself to run about 10 times slower. In very tight loops, this can be a problem, but most of the time this effect isn't even measurable. It's dwarfed by other effects, such as accesses to main memory, which are in turn dwarfed by disk access. If you read from memory in your routine more than a couple times, or touch disk even once, it's probably not worth worrying about branch prediction errors."

Or would you suggest that kernel programmers shouldn't be aware of these effects either? :)
Dell unveils new 5-inch Android tablet
A new Chrome stable release for Mac and Linux