skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's been a lot of ruby code written on commercial projects, I think the developers (and customers) would disagree with that.

I also think you're way off on the amount of difference between C# and COBOL. The fact that COBOL requires good tooling to be usable is telling in and of itself.
"Code Monkey" lyrics in job listing - Have you ever wanted to be Engineer #1?
Yes, but in such a system, one would also probably lose a dollar every time they said that mistakenly.

In a way, we are in such a system. This is what makes startups so dandy!
I wish this was about comments in source code, instead of comments on blogs.
hint: You might want to do some image manipulation.

another hint: After 8, this is really really simple.
However, the impact of appreciating something and having communal pooling of appreciation affirms the intent ...

While I also like the same HN features you like, I didn't upvote your post because it just felt too obsequious.
No explanation within the article. That was annoying.

Any ordinary sailboat sails faster than the wind when going roughly perpendicular to the wind direction. But this is apparently something different.
Stack Overflow has an expiring undo and it seems to be a good compromise.
Even better solution: separate the up and down arrows:

[up] 7 points [down] by alanh 35 minutes ago | link | parent | flag
Call stack traces are not generic. They point to specific places. Those places are aggregated and counted. You're free to disbelieve that Apple is reporting their #1 source of crashes honestly, but you should take a look at the Top Crash link provided by ZeroGravitas. If you're not seeing the same pattern, you're not looking without bias.

http://crash-stats.mozilla.com/topcrasher/byurl/Firefox/3.6....
Buffet's estate won't be taxed because he donated almost all of it to charity.
The security hole you probably forgot to close
WebGL Camp
That nails it exactly, when slashdot and digg were small they felt just like HN does today (well, maybe digg not, but reddit certainly did). Digg always was more mainstream oriented.

The biggest turn-off for me on digg is not so much the complexity of the site but the level of the discussion.
I don't know I still find it a bit confusing. Read a thread and come back to it a few hours latter. The vote rearranging makes it feel like an entirely new thread with some deja vu thrown in especially when people reply at the wrong level either to defeat reply aging or just by mistake.
A good visual analogy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7vcQcIaWSQ&feature=relat...
as evidenced by a lot of the people in this thread, the first few answers may seem obvious in hindsight but 1. they need to warm people up for the puzzle, 2. everything seems obvious in hindsight, its very easy for smart people miss simple thing.

calling them idiots for making the first few questions easier and for using asp is miles away from what I see hacker news as, bit sad to see this upvoted.
T-Mobile and AT&T 3G services require different antennae (and possibly chips). You can use the same device to access their GSM networks and get onto Edge, but when it comes to 3G a device either supports one or the other. To my knowledge there are no phones (or devices) on the market that support both AT&T and T-Mobile in the same device.
If it was a mutex contention issue, moving it to a single core wouldn't change anything -- there would be still be contention. I'm guessing it has something to do with CPU cache hits.
I've been thinking about this in terms of my own (7-year-old) educational website: http://eMusicTheory.com -- interactive online drills for music theory students/teachers.

The entire experience would be much more interesting for students if they could compete with friends (like with apps on facebook, for example), but I'm not sure making yet another FB app is a good idea here, plus you'd be stuck competing with other music theory students.

My half-baked idea is a central educational social networking site in which you could earn education points by achieving scores on lots of different member sites, not just mine... so a music theory whizkid might use their stats/achievements/reputation/karma/whatever to compete with their math nerd friend, even though they're focusing on entirely different specialties. There'd have to be rough equivalency in the effort involved to achieve points on different sites, but that's not a big hurdle (and weighting could be adjusted automatically based on students' relative speed of advancement.. if students tend to go tearing through achievements on a given site, the value of its points would be reduced in the global stats).

I'll dig through some of the sites linked above when I have time, but at the moment nothing seems to match up with this concept.

Is this a good idea? (Is there anything out there heading in this direction? I don't have the time to develop it myself currently, though I'd happily offer tons of advice).
OpenOpera lets you open your iPhone links in Opera instead of Safari (jailbreak)
Full text search is the best part of this thing. It was the only thing keeping me from adopting gae whole sale.
I wonder what it says about the human psychology that people feel that they "have to" digg, submit, friend, comment, etc. You can use Digg just like you use HN - just browse for articles, read them, perhaps comment or not. I always found this interesting when points or achievements were in a game - there is a subset of people who feel that they "have to" do those things, even if they are not fun and don't really want to. They get mad at the designers for making things less fun when the entire thing is optional even to the general gameplay of the core game.

Actually the more I think of it, the friend system is the only thing that HN doesn't have that Digg has. Or maybe I just haven't looked that closely when I visit Digg lately.
So long, unlimited data
What Dating Has in Common with the LeanStartup
It's even worse. I started an entertainment website in 1998, when the Internet had a competitive search and advertising landscape. I didn't rely on a single source for traffic or revenue.

Today, Google Search sends the vast majority of that site's traffic and Google Adsense pays me for that traffic. I wasn't tied when I started, but I sure am now.
How much COBOL is there still out there?
I also do quite a bit of writing, but the videos are a nice change of pace. A few people have suggested transcribing the videos - and I'll look into doing that. I realize video isn't an optimal medium for everyone.
Here's what it looks like in the iPhone app I built: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4595/hn-vote.png

You can see a demo video of the app here: http://michaelgrinich.com/hackernews/
Cool game but was it the intent to have an unlimited supply of food at each node? It seems like this could be abused quite badly.
Well, if you're backed up by professors, then this sounds promising.

What I would start with if I was working with this issue, is how to present the information for the students in the best way. At least for me, linear algebra and physics becomes way simpler with good visualisations/videos. If you could somehow make it easier for professors to present the content well, then you have a good start for a good website. So, all in all: Find out what makes people learn the easiest - I'm pretty sure there are some studies out there elaborating the way to teach students. If you make this way of teaching students easy to do on your website, I'm pretty sure that this idea might work out well.
> If nothing else this seems like a huge breach of trust between Apple and their customers, even if it is AT&T's fault.

Exactly. Apple should have had some sort of contract with AT&T to maintain their pricing for at least a reasonable period of time (e.g. 1yr) rather than changing the pricing structure immediately after launch.
Not sure if it applies to all startups but writing case studies or producing info-graphics are great ways to attract attention. http://www.flowtown.com/blog/ are doing great job at the latter and we (http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/case-studies.php) try to do a good job at the former
Google is certainly the biggest platform that people build on. How many businesses would die if their business had a catastrophic SEO failure tomorrow?

The point of platforms is that they make things easier, which is something that most businesses desperately need. You just have make sure that you understand the risks-- but they are oftentimes worth it. Zynga would never have built what they've built without Facebook. Yelp would be a tiny fraction of what it is without Google. Quickbooks would have a rough time without Windows.

That said, picking a really early platform has more risks (read: Twitter). Picking a platform run by a company that isn't really experienced being a platform (your Ventrilo example and, again, Twitter) has more risks.

But punting platforms as a concept is just dumb. 85% of venture-backed startups are dead in 3 years. More than that, likely, in the bootstrapped world. You need every advantage you can get.
I think you are on to something. His example code uses AtomicLong, a class that needs to synchronize on itself if the architecture has no native method to update 64 bits integers. Too bad Paul doesn't mention if he is running a 32 bits or 64 bits VM.
It's amusing to read the documents now, but this was serious stuff during WWII. I first learned about it when I read "IBM and the Holocaust" (http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/) by Edwin Black. There was a French bureaucrat who was part of occupied France's government who practiced this form of bureaucratic sabotage. I wish I could remember his name. He was eventually found out by the Nazis and died in a concentration camp.
> Android is a bitch to program for, but the app story policy is great.

The Android Market policy is only great if you are from one of the few countries that can publish app on it. It amazes me that this aspect is always left out while discussing the topic.
i apologize that it wasn't clear. :(
Stop being judgmental about your friends’ money habits
sudo killall -9 emacs?

ducks :-)
It's not the interface or features - Hacker News stays interesting by being mostly hacker news. It serves its niche well.
You are wrong. There's no way for me to update my HTC Hero from 1.5. HTC promises to provide update since December but has not yet delivered.
That big juicy Go button made me expect some interactive applet. I am disappointed.
>>> You seem to be making the argument that Apple just decided to base WebKit on KHTML without much concern for the licensing implications

>I've always gotten what you've been saying.

Clearly you haven't.

OTOH, if you think I've misunderstood or mischaracterized anything you've said, you haven't said so.

Anyway, I give up.
Sort of agree, although my intuition tells me not that there's an excessively-coarse-locking problem, but that there's most likely a contention problem.

The essence of a contention problem, for those who don't know, is that some shared structure (maybe a counter, or the head of a queue, or something) is polled and updated for every message that needs to be processed. Since processors don't (usually) share their caches, updating a value in shared memory causes that cache line on the other processors to be invalidated, so the next time the other processor needs to poll that value it has to retrieve it from memory, which takes a lot of extra time compared to getting it off the L1.

This problem often arises with shared work queues and counters. For work queues you can solve it by giving each processor its own work queue and having it steal work from other processors when it finishes its own queue.

A textbook by Herlihy and Shavit, The Art of Multiprocessor Programming, discusses this stuff in detail.
I can see why it's a hard thing to come up with, but I'm puzzled as to people's problem accepting it.

The blades create backward-thrust, pushing against the wind, accelerating the car, creating more thrust, pushing harder against the wind, etc. It stops a seemingly-endless increase when you hit the break-even point.

The reason it goes faster is because, when it finally catches up to the speed of the wind (which is obviously possible), the blades are already spinning, thrusting the car forward beyond just the wind speed. If they weren't spinning at all, 1x wind speed would be the max, fairly easily approached (though not achieved). This video is particularly telling of this effect: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgHBDESd38M&feature=relat...
I guess 8 killed my brain. Figured it has something to do with the image, but I'm stumped.
Jeff Jarvis on AT&T's iPad Bait-and-Switch
It's interesting how the author notes a change in behavior, then immediately assume it is wrong based on previous assumptions and without even submitting his beliefs to the question.

Maybe, just maybe, it's older people could benefit from understanding there is nothing wrong with the depicted behavior.
Us Americans can be notoriously American-centric. But you're right. I'll have to remember that for future discussions, thanks.
Angel boot camp - summary
I only write programs in my own custom programming language that run on my own in-house operating system. It only runs on computers that I design and manufacture myself. All the components are specially fabricated by me out of raw materials that are either synthesized in my lab or mined from my backyard. To spare you from the tyranny of the power company, it runs entirely off solar power, but it also comes with an emergency fusion reactor since the sun can just decide to go supernova any time it wants.
I remember that one. And this comment:

The author does a good job of taking a complicated subject and explaining in such a way that it becomes extra extra complicated. [ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1323665 ]

which still seems accurate to me.
A bug in the code? That makes little sense.

The thing is this is a microoptimization, so the effect of taking a slightly different code path explodes and becomes significant. We could be measuring anything here.

Maybe we're measuring the internal locking mechanics of Java. Maybe we're measuring the TCP stack internals. Maybe it's just about the CPU cache. Maybe it's about context switching in his specific linux kernel.

It could be any number of things you're measuring here. Anything!

His idea of running apache tomcat and apache bench shows that he didn't really think it through, because OF COURSE a 6 microsecond difference is not going to show up because processing HTTP headers takes miliseconds! Orders of magnitude difference here!
right, so it doesn't fit the needs of the OP, but for other users without the 64-bit requirement, version 1 UUIDs can be k-sorted without an additional column.
Ask HN: How to recover domains from squatters?
I run a startup that has over the last few years been aggressively targeted by domain squatters. We do reasonable traffic (~500K uniques/day) and seem to be a juicy target for typo squatters. We have owned the trademark to our name since before most of these domains were registered, approximately 4 years. There is no ambiguity as to our name and the squatters intent -- all are transpositions, extra letters, etc. that lead to ad pages running ads for competing/confusing services. Our name is very unlikely to be confused with other services and is non-generic.

I'm seeking advice on how best to recover dozens of domains from ~5 to 10 squatters. Actual experience in this process is most helpful, I can speculate about what might work with the best of you.

We could drum up funds to go through an arbitration process, but we're frugal and I'm curious if anyone has experience with direct or third-party negotiation with squatters. What do you offer? Do you try and hide your relationship to the actual company? Do threats of legal action or arbitration work at all? Is there a letter-from-a-lawyer option that would be less expensive than arbitration?

NB: this is a throwaway account. My real HN account is approximately 1k days old and > 1k karma. I don't want to reveal the domain name in question and potentially encourage even more squatters. It's a nasty business.
Rockstars are known for a lot of things, but commenting?

1. Flip the bird as often as you can.

2. Do your commenting at a press conference in your bedroom.

3. Compare yourself to a religious figure to assert your comment's authority.
Indeed, I'm on 14 at the moment, and having a blast with this. Some really interesting riddles.
As a performance boost, this used to work in my undergrad days on the VAX.
I'd say the true target of this criticism is content-aware platforms, as opposed to content-neutral platforms, which I believe are what people often mean when they talk about "closed" and "open" platforms. The author favorably mentions targeting Windows and Mac OS, which certainly are proprietary, but they do not restrict the user of any content, essentially dumb pipes from hardware to content; these content-neutral platforms would be OK to build a business on. Platforms mentioned as bad were the iPhone, Twitter and Facebook, platforms where the vendor can and does restrict their users' access to content via arbitrary changes to their usage licenses, and such content-aware platforms are shaky grounds to build a business on.
As an alternative to taskset, you can use 'tuna' (kernel.org git) which:

- doesn't require bitmask calculations

- handles IRQs as well as processes

- can also set realtime priorities of those processes if you'd like.
This one definitely took me awhile, but I figured it out.

SPOILER BELOW

(ruby - ru) + (foxpro - po - fox) + (python - p - t - (hay - a)) + s + (delphi - phi - el) + (java - va - j) + (ugg + h - g) + te + r + ?

For those too lazy to pull this all together, it reads "byrons daughter". You should be able to take over from here.
I'm totally stuck on level 13. It's been a breeze so far (fortunately my wife wears "uggs" that one took me a minute to figure out, it would have been impossible before I met her).

I'm guessing from the title it has to do with the CSS, but the CSS just looks odd, I'm not even sure why the text is showing up with display:none

[edit] okay I found something hidden in the stylesheet but no clue what it means
I got the video to play on my iPad but couldn't get it to show the controls again after fullscreen. Any idea why?
10e20 Acquires Brent Csutoras, Inc.
author's experience is creating an app around a "platform" developed by one person. you still have to pick the right platform to build for, you know.
Does Microsoft know that Bing lost? (Maybe from their POV, it's just waiting in the wings.)
They think the community is great but HNers aren't just saying it's great, they are saying why. I see this as inductive form of learning, we are trying to ascertain what goes into making an excellent community.
Okay, another hint: data URIs.
More of a plotter than a printer, really.

Well, it could be, with the correct software.
Pines Notify
Rethinking Rails 3 Controllers and Routes - PeepCode Blog
this does not actually help you if you are stuck with using chrome. but in opera, if i want to keep tab history i'll duplicate a tab (from the right click menu) and then hit my link in the new tab. the duplicated tab remembers the history of the original tab. perhaps chrome has some similar capabilities?

this plus the "undo" of control-z to reopen recently closed tabs (which retain their history) makes my forgetful life far easier.
My other niggle with tabbed browsing is that the history remembers the time a page was opened, but not closed.

I often find myself opening a bunch of interesting pages (say on Hacker News) in new tabs - cmd+click … cmd+click.

I then occasionally accidentally close two tabs at once. Or I decide that I need to go back to a page I've just read as I want to check something.

The page could by now have been open for hours.

A recently closed history would be useful (and for me, I suspect, more useful than recently opened history).
I think there is a defined line between obsequiousness and appreciation. I feel the tone of my post actually leaned on the side of appreciation than it did "obedient or servile". I suppose that any sort of "Thank you" statement could be taken for fawning, particularly in a community that values a karmic rating system; as I said in my reply above, I still think my post was submitted with a clear and intelligent choice.
No, that's not right. There is only one code path executing so there can never be another thread contending for the same lock.

A lock begins as a spinlock (busy wait loop) for a few thousand iterations before degrading to a full-blown lock that puts the thread to sleep. Because there is no other thread vying for the lock, the spinlock succeeds immediately and the thread keeps on running.
How about Amazon S3/EC2 Services?

Amazon seems pretty solid, stable, and flexible to me. And many startups are using them to scale.
Windows is less secure than other OS. But windows is better secureD than other OS. The only difference is that having 95+% market share, they are targeted by an awful lot more attacks.
Perhaps audience curation is a big factor in HN's success? HN attracts a very select band of people. I wouldn't say the same thing about Digg or Reddit (perhaps they were the same when smaller, I never used them). Hacker News, by virtue of its name, reputation, and association with YC is not open (not in the literal sense) to anyone and everyone willing to participate.

This, IMO, keeps the quality of posts and comments high and in a way, prevents it from going "mainstream".
>When you make your picture frame app look like a desktop.

Can you actually point me to anything in the existing developer agreements or interface guidelines that disallows this? I just looked, and I haven't been able to find anything - but it's not exactly hard to miss something.
But given that the voice plans for the iPhone are still Cadillac- and Escalade-sized, when I only want a Vespa, AT&T is clearly out of step with my needs.

On the bright side, a half-price data plan is a step in the right direction. The light email and Google Maps user finally has an appropriate plan as of today; perhaps the heavy data user and occasional caller will be the next addressed.
Ask HN: advice on rails
Hi Hackers,

I am a complete rails newbie, and I am working on exposing a RESTful API via rails. I had the following questions:

1. What stacks do you folks use (RedHat -based platforms), and why did you choose the stack you use?

2. What would be a simple book for a Rails beginner? I need to get the API up and running quickly, and I prefer hacking to reading (i.e., I don't have the luxury of doing a lot of reading).

Thanks!
Well, MacOS and Windows may be "content-neutral" in a certain sense but historically both vendors have gone into competition with developers... So from my perspective "proprietary" means sleeping with an 800lb. gorilla, and all we are debating is whether the gorilla wants to eat you or simply rolled over in their sleep and crushed you by accident.

http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/
The History and Origin Of Rock and Roll
Of course HN can't retroactively relicense existing comments, and that's not what I'm suggesting.
"Likejacking" Term Catches On
Yep. And this book is an excellent read and resource to have. It is saturated with great observations and solid data. Highly recommend it.
Don't give away the answer when you find it! =)
Is Aspergers now a little closer to the norm?
Ask HN: Legalities of developing "worthless" ideas on company time?
Does the law agree that ideas are worthless? Suppose while working for a company I have an idea for a great product. I quit and build the product - what does the company own, if anything?

What if I made drawings of the idea, or created a business plan before quitting?

I mean not actually on "company time" (while on premise between 9 to 5", but say, in the evening. But some companies have these contracts that they own everything you come up with while you work for them.