skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ditto. I have no idea what I'm supposed to be looking at.
:) well mostly I was countering this point:

> It's amazing how many problems resolve themselves when given sufficient neglect.

True, but there's a big downside.
What I learned from starting a non-profit and sending 126 individuals, 1 million in medical supplies, $120,000 in funds, and 40,000 lbs of cargo to Haiti.

If you would like to come on our next trip or for more information: www.therelieffoundation.com

Thanks,

-P
Google: Ad Clicks More Valuable Than Organic Clicks
and not nearly as cool as YouTwitFace!
see also Cassidy Curtis's Best Homework Ever (pdf):
http://www.math.brown.edu/~banchoff/BHE.pdf
Squared Circle Blog Karma May Have Killed Orton’s Career | Socyberty
You have to know that -Wextra exists, which I for one didn't until just now when I ran a sample program. All my projects just compiled with -Wall, which doesn't catch that error.

Also, unless every programmer on the project is being scrupulous about finding and correcting such errors, it quickly becomes line noise, and a lot of it completely unimportant stuff.
I've seen that before. Interesting technology. Spring Roo shows some improvement in that regard too (although not the compiling after changes part).

I've actually gotten to use groovy/grails for a lot of new projects/enhancements and that is making my job much nicer.
Forget the typo. This is the slowest, most naive implementation of memset possible.

Is this actual shipping code? I've followed the changeset up to the top and it looks like it's in platform/bootable/bootloader/legacy. Hopefully this isn't actually called anywhere, but the review date says May 13th.

What's the point of optimizing the Java VM when functions like memset, malloc, memcmp, memcpy, memchr, etc, etc haven't even been optimized for the platform.

EDIT: I understand that 95% of your time will be writing in a language like Ruby, Python, Javascript or a C based language. But dear god, please add Agner Fog's Optimization Manuals to your reading list.
http://www.agner.org/optimize/
I've noticed that gedit is a little sluggish to start and somewhat buggy. All that same it's a great editor.
I'd need to be paid a lot more than that to use JIRA.
Yes this is awesome! I have no need for an app like this but I've still always thought it would be a great idea.
Amazon.com's Kindle fails first college test
But doesn't this attitude screw the merchants? If an online merchant accepts a payment from a stolen CC they have to foot the bill for the product they sent out. Thats how I thought it worked?
As a bit of reasoning behind why I go directly to the site (and I assume others as well)

1) On twitter, I don't get the num of votes, and comments

2) there are too many articles to use in RSS. It fills the rss reader.

3) Aggregator? could you clarify that one?

4) I tried a firefox extension just to provide feedback, but it wasn't as natural as going to the site proper.

Out of curiosity, is there is something you were looking for? A more direct question?
Huh? Any halfway decent software shop will have a policy of compiling with all warnings enabled, and fixing all sources of warnings (with only very rare exceptions). It is extremely unprofessional to disable or ignore warnings such as the "unused function parameter" warning. If you disagree, I respectfully submit that I would never let you near a C project that I was working on.
An interview with Martin Gardner (1978)
Does it work seamlessly through wine? I've been missing textmate snippets lately but it's frustrating to work around little problems?
Miles 2 Go B4 I Sleep...
Aren't there are processor-specific assembler versions of memset for common chips? There are usually assembler versions (for example using REP MOVS on Intel which is light years faster) or even unrolled C versions (typically setting 8 or 16 bytes per iteration) that are used. I suspect this might be "fallback code" that doesn't actually get executed on any chips that anybody really uses.
Yeah, that's why every programmer on the project has to be scrupulous about finding and correcting such errors. That's professionalism 101 -- if your team is not keeping the build warning free, things like this slip through.
Do you have any references for your "as fast as C" part? That seems like a very dubious claim.

If your ultimate goal is performance, I believe PyPy is fundamentally flawed because it already introduces two levels of indirection that cannot easily be removed. Of course their goal seems to be to simply be faster than the python interpreter and remain maintainable at the same time. They appear to be succeeding at that and I congratulate them on that.

LuaJIT takes the right approach w.r.t. performance. The interpreter for LuaJIT 2 is well-optimised and not actually that hard to understand. This goes together with a well-chosen set of interpreter instruction set and intermediate representation. All these layers require careful design, and Mike Pall didn't come up with this over night.
Most of the core code is C++ or Java, though there is plenty of Python.
Is this a better representation?
http://www.google.com/trends?q=php+programming,+ruby+program...
While hanging around with all those nerds, be sure to ask them about the difference between jpeg and png.
I've looked around for something like this quite a bit. The best I found were via eNom, InternetBS, and GoDaddy - but they were all pretty terrible and / or felt skeezy.

If you find something good, let us know!
551 Exploit Baru Di Metasploit Framework Express 3.4
Yeah, mainly the pub, but also any situation where you want someone to do something that seems risky:

"Trust me, I'm a doctor!"

And dealing with unhelpful customer service:

"We're sorry Mr Smith but we can't do that..."

"Actually that's DOCTOR Smith"

It won't help you get what you want, but the amusement factor will make you feel better.

A friend of mine has Dr on all of his credit cards. He claims to have received free upgrades on rental cars from time to time as a result. Not sure if I believe that.
SciTE seems really solid but it's missing some features I like in other editors.
Media Temple Nameservers Down due to UDP flood
Maybe this is a sign that someone is porting android to a new CPU!
That's being pretty generous. If anything, I'd assume that a YC-backed company knows less about hiring than BigCo HR departments (assuming we're talking about software companies). Most BigCos got to where they are for a reason. A lot of YC-backed startups have never hired a single person before.
And http://hackerne.ws/

Back-story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=84039 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=524470
I primarily read the HN RSS feed, and also try to look at every headline that comes across the feed to make sure I don't miss any godo stuff. I became curious about how much in the minority I am in doing this.
"Pretty severe" lack of professionalism? It's not unprofessional not to turn the warnings all the way up and sift through each and every one. Some of us work code inherited from other people with different coding guidelines, and some of the warnings will generate loads of messages for code that is not only technically correct but stylistically correct as well. The unused parameter warning is one of the biggest offenders in this area. And if you have a hundred warnings for unused parameters, which ones do you pay attention to?

Another potential issue is that the code in the patch might almost never be called in the first place. Most libc implementations (three that I know of, where I've examined the "memset" source) have a "memset" like that as a fallback only for platforms without an assembly version.

I'd say the problem is that there are several different ways this error could have been detected sooner: warnings, test, static analysis tools, and review, but none of them worked. But again, it's also possible that the code is never called because assembly versions are always available.
I think the difference in this case is around 40kb, haha.
Cuil founder gives Wharton Business School interview
The unused function parameter warning is usually one of the most annoying and least useful. I routinely compile with "-Wall -Wno-unused" because I don't want to litter my code with casts to void.
I find your pedophilia strawman to be completely and utterly distasteful.
Well, the main difference is you won't end up with blurry text and artifacts.

http://imgur.com/GkCbP.png
First Dates and One Night Stands for Co-Founders
Only works over VoIP. I wonder if you could do analog audio encryption over the standard cell network.
I should also point out that the Times CMS has needs beyond just publishing a web site.

A short list of points to consider are a sprawling detailed and curated taxonomy, aggressive editorial publishing schedules, community integration, feed generation for partners, topics, venues, articles, various multimedia types (slideshow, interactive, audio, video, audio slideshows...)

I could (but won't) go on. No CMS on the market or from the open-source community meet the very unique set of needs (as well as the ones you can't predict).

I moved elsewhere in the company from the CMS group as this was playing out. Previously we'd used a highly customized version of FatWire's CMS which wasn't sufficient for current and future needs.

Hope that helps clarify things.

(Hi bkudria, sorry I missed you at GoogleIO)
Open source software has a hard time being opinionated.
I'm on my second FAILED HP printer. I got them for their better support for Linux drivers and network printing.

One was a higher end all-in-one and it eventually acted up as if the firmware actually failed on purpose (acting somewhat erratically!).

The other one failed, out of the blue, with some mechanical gears issue. Their phone line recognized quickly the issue ("jumped super quick to conclusions," I'd say) and said it was not covered. They would ship me a new one fast and cheap!

After seeing how fast the ink went, we did buy ink and refilled them. It was not too hard, though it was a hassle.

Needless to say, now we're going for some other brand!
Back when that deal was being floated, it was pretty obvious that most of the potential buyers would probably cause users to leave in droves. Especially since the most likely buyer was looking like Microsoft.

Facebook is very dependent on being a single entity. If it sells, it has to sell to a company larger than itself, and that's about the only thing scarier from a user standpoint than what Facebook has already done.
Any halfway decent software shop will have a policy of compiling with all warnings enabled

FWIW, your definition of "halfway decent" would exclude most software shops in the world.

It is extremely unprofessional to disable or ignore warnings such as the "unused function parameter" warning

Unused function parameter warnings are often noise (e.g., due to #ifdefs, unimplemented APIs, backward compatible APIs, etc). I agree that code should compile w/o warnings, but the benefits of tracking down and squelching unused function argument warnings are pretty marginal in my experience.
holy smokes, chaosmachine, you just changed my world! (not being snarky either, I seriously never knew that in all my days of amateur photodoodling)
on Google code search: "lang:c memset\(.+,\s[^0]+\s,.+\)" return 32k results and "lang:c memset\(.+,\s0+\s,.+\)" returns 335k.
Given that it is in "platform/bootable/bootloader/legacy", I'm not sure there is much point getting all worked up about performance -- presumably something much more efficient would be used for the vast majority of cases.
No, audio codecs will destroy encrypted data. It makes more sense to do encrypted voice over circuit-switched data (e.g. Voylent), but I don't know if the carriers even support CSD any more.
F13 is running KDE 4.4, which I've heard is actually a significant improvement. Not as big of a deal as 4.2 -> 4.3, but still worth noting.
Open news.yc.

Cmd + click all interesting titles.

Return to read interesting comment threads.

Absorb knowledge.

Rinse.

Repeat.
Stallman travels a lot, South America, Asia and in these conditions the only way to get internet is to go to a net cafe where they only run windows XP full of virus with IE6. It is a really slow, frustrating and annoying experience, believe me. More than once I wished I had exactly that, a daemon that would download all my stuff so I could get them on my laptop and get the hell out of those net cafe asap. So yes, what Stallman is doing here is not political, it's actually a great, useful hack that unfortunately always gets quoted out of context. It's actually the best way to surf the web when you're travelling in those countries.
Business models Reengineering in China
I don't think it loses too much ground...it's here to stay, at least for another decade.
Anatomy of the BP Oil Spill (Yale, Environment 360)
I don't get the joke, why is this relevant?
The image was originally a blurry jpeg. Now it's a nice crisp png, and the joke is no longer relevant :)
So what if the code doesn't get called? That doesn't prevent it from being built. Considering that memset() is part of libc, which is a shared library, presumably it's going to get compiled regardless of whether it's called.
The "unused parameter" error is one of the most useless of C compiler errors. There are dozens of perfectly valid reasons why a parameter would go unused, so the occasional error just gets lost in the noise.

It's more helpful in C++, which can omit parameter names to indicate that it's intentionally unused. But then you're using C++; not worth the tradeoff.
Well it wouldn't take much for something else to outpace the adoption rate of IPv6. I think something will come along that is backwards compatible with v4. We're already seeing things like carrier grade NAT that are just bandaids but we can live with bandaids for a long time...
| The unused parameter warning is one of the biggest offenders in this area. And if you have a hundred warnings for unused parameters, which ones do you pay attention to?

Well, so then you're exposed to this error. Do:

void foo(int x)
{
(void)x;
}

to silence unused parameter warnings.
Who says it would be in your area though? You could travel the country and probably find hundreds of instances of this sort of thing happening.
All I can say is than in 15 years (fuck.) I've never worked on a team that would have caught a bug like this in dead code. -Wall has been the gold standard on the teams I've worked on.
Hacker news is an important use case of ours :)

(edit to reduce snark)
I'll offer the tip that even if you have a fast memset, you can and should avoid using it when possible.

Seeing memset is usually a sign that someone is being lazy about watching the length of their buffers and/or verifying their copies aren't off-by-one.
Uh, how is java better at 'engineering' than scala. Do you know what Scala is?
Vodafone launches unlimited iPad plan
I would probably agree that most software shops in the world are not halfway decent.

The benefits of tracking down and squelching such warnings would have very likely caused this bug to never exist. The point is that you make "compiles without warnings" a policy, and you build a habit of maintaining that policy -- after a while it begins to take almost no effort at all.
Age of Conan Rise of the Godslayer
How would you write this function? Fully portable, so no ASM.
Thanks a LOT. Would you be interested in being a beta tester when I make the Canadian version?
I basically contacted any people I knew from US, or the ones I thought might know people from US. I am a part of few smaller programmer communities where we know each-other.
The thread doesn't actually make me come away seeing anyone in it in particularly great light. There seems to be a lot of bitter sniping from all sides, and compared to Jan Stary and Theo de Raadt's thread contributions, Stallman actually comes out sounding like the calm and reasonable one (in relative terms).
Except that BigCo makes arbitrary hiring decisions without flexibility. Isn't part of the benefit of YC-backing to get advice from people on things such as hiring?
Things like what, a blatantly obvious bug that would crash virtually every C program running on the system were it not for the fact that it was dead code?

This is practically a documentation bug.

[edit]

I kind of take it back, after mahmud's bzero() joke... out of oniguruma, Python, hexfiend, Apache, nginx, openssl, redis, regexkit, saxon, memcached, subversion, and valgrind, this hypothetical bug would have broken Python, redis, subversion, several apache modules, and memcached. The contents of my codebase/3p directory, FWIW.
Do you write C code?
> If you're trying to build disruptive technology, it seems obvious that you'll be better off using tools that are themselves disruptive.

OTOH, tools themselves don't how disruptive your product is. The iPhone and Android are disruptive, even though Java and Objective-C are as boring as tools get (although the Dalvik VM is quite wicked).

Find the best developers you've worked with and let them choose whichever tools they like. That being said, some of today's best Java developers will likely end up choosing Scala for a project they're building from scratch.
It's not hard to type a statement like "(void)v;" to explicitly say, "v is intentionally unused." I fail to see the drawback of this approach. Of course you should only do this when (1) you can't remove the parameter from the function's prototype and (2) there is a good reason for it to be unused. But once you develop that habit, the compiler can help you catch bugs that are otherwise easy to miss. Sounds like a worthwhile tradeoff to me.
Consultants Don’t Pivot, Founders Do
At Bizo (http://dev.bizo.com), we manage scheduled tasks via Hudson.

It works great for us. It's centralized, has a web interface, and is already familiar to everyone on the team (we already used Hudson for CI). It has a ton of plugins, so notifications, single sign-on, and a host of other desired features were no problem to bolt on.

Here's a quick post from a few months back on why we chose Hudson:
http://dev.bizo.com/2009/11/using-hudson-to-manage-crons.htm...
I'm not sure that Google trends graph is telling us that PHP is losing ground. I mean, it's a measure of the number of times someone searches for "PHP" relative to all other search terms, right? You'd get the same shape if the raw number of searches on "PHP" have remained more or less constant while the number of non-PHP searches have gone up, for instance, because the ratio of techies to non-techies on the internet has declined.

For example, if you factor out the seasonal fluctuations, calculus and physics have also "lost ground":

http://www.google.com/trends?q=calculus&ctab=0&geo=a...

http://www.google.com/trends?q=physics&ctab=0&geo=al...

In fact, Linux and Unix have lost significant ground by this metric as well:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=linux&ctab=0&geo=all&...

http://www.google.com/trends?q=unix&ctab=0&geo=all&#...

The langpop data doesn't go back as far, but suggests that PHP is more popular than 2-3 years ago: http://langpop.com/timeline.html

I don't know if PHP is more or less popular than it was 6 years ago, but I suspect Google trends doesn't either.
[SF] Justin.tv is looking for talented engineers to work on the world's largest live video site
Go look at Google code search, which includes vast quantities of code written by professional teams and (often later) open sourced. Very little of it casts expressions to (void). When I started at Arbor, I got rid of all the (void) casts. What an eyesore.

Very little C code is const-correct either. Most of the C devs I know make fun of const-correctness.
You'd unroll the loop. But knowing the average workload for memset(), it probably wouldn't be a perceptible win.
After this long, I'm starting to think we're actually more likely to see cataclysmic earthquakes and flooding in 2012 than adoption of IPv6.
Current codebase: 9734 warnings.

As a point of pride, none of them were created by me, but it is what it is. Some of them come from since deprecated functions and nobody wants to go back and mess with old code; some of them come from sloppiness; some of them come from java's collection handling.

And yet this codebase gets a lot of work accomplished anyway.
Isn't Chrome's "Create Application Shortcuts" better than this already?
I used to do this by exec()ing a shell with no environment. 'Twasn't perfect, but it caught a lot of irritating little errors.
However, that method is not getting him lots of girlfriends.
I'm going to go against the grain by saying I have created a startup in Java. Why Java? Mostly because it's what I'm competent in, not because it's the best "startup" material.

But what I have done is built a framework for a website which I can easily extend. The framework is robust and easy to adapt, so once I get my first startup up and running, I can punch out more in a much quicker turn-around.

I refrained from using a bunch of existing java frameworks/technology to speed up development because I didn't know what the end product would look like and don't like the way frameworks railroad you into a particular solution and prevent you from "thinking outside the box".

So it's very old school - Servlets and JSP.

I achieve agility by now just focussing on delivering new services, and calling those services from either JSP or AJAX calls. This gives me some flexibility in the UX.

I prototype very rapidly to prove that I can do what I want to do, then round off the edges if I'm happy that it's functionality that I want to include in the pool.

I can turn around new functionality in a matter of hours for the most part.

Pete.
Hubble Finds Star Eating a Planet
It's the WSJ's "Venture Capital Dispatch" blog. I doubt YC would (yet) appear in the title of a regular WSJ article.
Three years ago, sure.

But now he can get one of those 3G USB modems and change the simcard in each country.

I don't think he is hacking the network or whatever. He is hacking his time, and his attention, and that's more like meta-thinking.
-Wextra is total insanity. I just compiled some C code I've been working on with that flag, and got the following: "warning: signed and unsigned type in conditional expression." I was testing if a variable I declared as an integer was less than 0. To my knowledge, every number literal in C is assumed to be of a signed type unless followed by a 'u'. But now I know better. 0 is the exception.