skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whatever it is, apparently next-generation JavaScript tools are needed for its implausibly excellent dynamism.
Not really a fair comparison. From 1972 until 2000, C was the most performance/expression balance that industry could bear. Lisp sacrificed raw computational performance for increased readability and writability, but that's a tradeoff that was unpopular in industry. Hence, it was never a viable competitor. (I like it, but I am not industry.)

A fair comparison is C to C++ or Java to C#. C has been around longer than C++, and there are more C apps than C++ apps on UNIX. (Windows is another story; MS pushed C++ pretty hard back in the day. Same for Obj-C on Mac.)

Java has been around longer than C#, and there is more stuff written in it, even though it is technically inferior. Time always beats language features.

If you want an accurate measurement, start a totally new project today that depends on nothing. Clone yourself. Then start writing it in C, and in $some_other_language. Then see which one meets your expectations soonest. It will probably be $some_other_language. But add in some dependencies on historical code, and C becomes competitive again.

Standing on the shoulders of a giant is faster, in the short term, than becoming a taller giant.
Only got mine a few minutes ago, could be slightly delayed.
Such a good design...
No Kindle version?
Tesla's uphill battle
Silverlight is proprietary and does have support for DRM, I'll give you that. However, it is technically quite impressive.
An EVO 4G Salesman Confronts An iPhone 4 Shopper (NSFW)
> which option I should use to accept client payments

whichever is easiest for your clients, most likely. you saving 0.5% won't likely be worth making clients angry over paying a bill.
I wouldn't mind knowing what's more expensive: all that you mentioned; or the public liability insurance.
try this:
(SQRT(200)/(4.5 + 158/99900)) + 5/(9x10^-9) = pi!

(SQRT means square root)

I came up with this approximation to pi on my own ;)
No contempt directed at Carl because this sort of thing is exactly what the internet needs more of- but I would like to remind everybody of the excellent opencourseware offered by most major universities.

http://www.academicearth.org/subjects/computer-science
Lua is very small, mature, stable, interesting, and implemeted with a small footprint. There is a new JIT based system which improves performance.

For a video introduction by the creator, Roberto Ierusalimschy who is a professor at the PontifÃ­cia Universidade CatÃ³lica do Rio de Janro , watch the video: Small is Beautiful: the Design of Lua at http://ee380.stanford.edu.

Roberto has done several books on the language which are very helpful and interesting.
This is cool: Thinkcode's ad has a puzzle/code. First person to solve it gets their full catalog.

http://skitch.com/jackowayed/dk1ws/thinkcode-puzzle
Free Samsung Corby Games | Technology I/O
A short analysis of 1m Twitter users' websites
You're looking for me to bring a wealth of academia and research to the table to match your high knowledge of economics. That isn't going to happen.

I do not have a high knowledge of economics. I just graduated high school. I'm not asking you to bring any superior academic knowledge to this discussion. I simply want you to do some bare minimum research. You are remaining willfully ignorant in your understanding of economic systems. You have admitted that you have not studied any of this in any detail (whether rigorously or in passing).

Likewise, I do not know a lot about the human body. Yet, I would be extremely happy to hear about a process that would eventually conquer cancer.

As would I, but I wouldn't get into an argument with someone about cancer research because I have never studied cancer in any depth.

I say this because in the framework of Capitalism, there must always be an element of misfortune; which isn't just a byproduct, but a prerequisite to it's success.

That is simply not true. The core principal of capitalism is that people engage in mutually beneficial transactions without the threat of physical harm. This is the core idea of the free market.

Please go read some literature on this. And I don't mean that in a negative way. You seem genuinely open to new ideas but you seemingly are not willing to seek those new ideas.

And whoever is downmodding every reply I post, please explain why. We are engaging in a discussion. The downmod does not exist to express your disagreement with me. You do that in your replies.
What sweet stuff could foursquare choose to do with its money??
Now that foursquare received such a nice round of funding, what is the HN community thinking as far as cool things that foursquare could do in the space? Geo-location is turning into a white-hot market and with Facebook looming, what cool innovative things could foursquare do to cross that chasm into appealing to a mainstream audience? Looptstar is doing some cool things with getting into the loyalty space with physical rewards...any thoughts???
Python Internals: Adding a new statement to Python
How much do the ads in the magazine cost?
i'm very naive about what makes concurrency so difficult. am i right in thinking the core challenge is sharing memory resources between threads, and using shared memory to communicate between them?

can we imagine an abstraction layer now which would solve all our (concurrency) problems, but which would simply be too slow on current hardware to actually use?
On MySQL replication, again…
Never received #1 in the mail.
May I ask what tools you are using to create the eBook ?
GroupSpaces secures $1.3 million and brings Valley players on board
tl;dr? Reddit is helping Carl to rank in google higher. Apparently there is an undeserved rip off report that has been damaging his reputation for a long time.
Right, but with a well-written distributed brute force application, it could probably get through a lot of password cracking. No need to break AES-256.
I had the EXACT same experience.
Same situation, same results.

Although I never called my credit card company to do a charge back.
In fact, right until this moment, I did not even know I can do this.
It's been a year now.
I am a cofounder and sole developer of a startup, and I am working full time to pay my bills and for immigration purposes.
Basically, I figured I would rather not waste time at all, since I am really out of it.
So do you think it might be worth a shot to even try to get that charge back from my credit card company, after almost a year?
In my opinion, it might lead to more issues.
It's 50 bucks.
What do you suggest?
Worth my time?
Now including comments!
3 in 1 free Samsung Corby Wallpapers | Technology I/O
Millions of cores would be useful to a handful of "bright" people. It would not hinder them at least.
I'm going to emphasize what david and many others said: Avoid debt whenever possible.

Being in debt feels like slavery (for example, I can't quit my job or get some unpaid vacations because I'm in debt).

Not to mention there can be some unforeseen catastrophes: a former coworker had her money frozen during the bank crash of 2002 (in Uruguay and Argentina), and had her credit card maxed out. She became almost homeless and now swore off credit.

Savings work in reverse: they allow you freedom - to take time off, to start your own company or even to indulge.

Being generous also feels good.

And lastly, the advice about stuff vs experiences posted here and higher in the thread is very good as well.

A disclaimer: I don't believe in being a luddite, and there are things I value A LOT - for example, having my own car after not having a car for 28 years - but the marginal improvement from an old clunker to a newer car is nowhere near as no car vs any car, and the same happens for Iphone 3 vs Iphone 4 or whatever - I'm not advocating having no cellphone or car or whatever, only that the difference between brand A and brand X where the price is substantially higher is probably not worth it except as an indulgence.
Yep, it was the usual GMail delay. Thanks guys!
I did literally the same exact thing and started a business in my free time.
Samsung I9000 S Galaxy - First Impressions | Technology I/O
In Anti-Theft Effort, Officials Seize 9 Domain Names
He forgot at least one... In my case:

Medical Issues: +1 to +inf points, depending.

i.e., I have migraines, 5+ docs to see about them, lots of pills and meds to buy, etc. Definitely getting good use out of my megacorp insurance plan & psuedo-unlimited sick leave.

Ignoring the migraines, I only have 1 point in his system, but there's no way I could do a startup right now... I had more sick hours than work hours last week.
Having been in a similar situation ("I need to resign or work part time"), I think the best thing you can do is show awareness of the effect it will have on your coworkers and suggest ways in which this will work out.

For example: "I suggest I keep the 60% of my job that is the most onerous for someone else to take and/or requires the most prior experience and/or is best matched to my skills. As for the other 40%, I suggest task A should go to Fred - he is ready for more experience, it will be good for him. Task B can be phased out when the new project is completed anyway. Jane has agreed to roll in Task C with the similar Task D that she already performs".

I have been doing this for several years, and it has worked out great for everybody. The only issue is whether the tasks you give up are important for your career development - sometimes they are, so you will have to make some serious choices.
But that makes for a boring customer service case study.
There is also http://www.khanacademy.org/ and http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm. In fact, by now there is probably a aggregator for these websites.
I see what you're saying, but notice I said your business is like a "person," not a "personality." Whatever problem you are solving is being solved by the business, not by you, even if you are a single founder or small team.

It's useful to ask who your business is going to be because it's a concrete acknowledgement that you are not your business. Once you do that you can decide which parts of who you are should be applied to solving the problem you're going to solve, and what contributions you'll need from others to complete who you want your business to be, whether they're contractors, co-founders, employees, advisors, or whomever.

Your business will also have a personality, but that's only small piece of the picture, just as a person's personality is only a piece of who they are. A person has skills, abilities, a point of view, values, etc., just like your business. And the way your customers will relate and interact with you as the provider of a product or service, is more similar to how they would relate to a person than anything else. So I think the lens is useful.

Thanks for the comment! :)
Naturally, it wouldn't necessarily be able to enter any given secure network, database or machine.

But it quite possibly could enter quite a lot of them ... if the conficker masters are indeed as cryptographically sophisticated as the article describes.

Just imagine the attack on Google supplemented by a botnet. Modern attackers already have many vectors with which to attack private networks. Having a botnet can only give an attacker more opportunities.

So I think it's entirely correct to say the virus is worrisome at the least.
A Sneak Peek At Windows 8 Features
Indeed. Worse is better, and I use Linux and not Hurd because it does what I need even if it doesn't look shiny on paper.

I'm not convinced that Hurd's translator idea is a hack, or that it's doing it in the wrong layer.

That every program that presents FTP on my system (GNOME, KDE, lftp, Emacs/TRAMP) has to implement its own VFS is a hack, so is having to use iptables or another forwarder if I want to run a non-root daemon on port <1024. And that I have to recompile and reboot if I want to enable some minor feature in the kernel.

EDIT: The last two paragraphs are redundant because I misread rbanffy's reply, and I oddly can't reply to his new one so I'm putting this here.
Indesign CS4.
Ask HN: Why Hackers?
Hi All,

I think I've missed something.
When did software developers, project managers or any IT related persons have become Hackers?

I've googled it and found no information on how it come this way.

I've never been a Hacker in it's old meaning. Wanted to be in my 11-15th, but everything ended without any serious hacks or anything like that.
But in those days, to become a Hacker you had to reach some level, you had to get approval of community. Someone never could call himself a Hacker by himself.

Nowadays it looks like anyone can call himself a hacker after a "Hello world!" app.

So the question is why do you call yourself a Hacker?
Hmm, yeh good reminder mine never came either (must chase that up...)
Coming up.
This is not the place.
I'd love to read a good, impartial post-mortem of Pets.com. It's brought up in so many conversations about the .com era, but never with any concrete details.

I would assume that the big problem with pets.com was their execution. Just the amount they spent on advertising alone must have been almost impossible to recoup.
Stallman: The Full Interview, Uncut
The title of this article is a bit confusing.

Given that the blog itself is called "Planning For Failure," I expected it to be about how Greyhound "knew" how to fail in a graceful manner. I read through about halfway until I realized it was just a rant about failure at various points in Greyhound's ticketing system.

Nothing wrong with that, just not the article I was expecting to read.
As plain text:

# The fastest person to solve this will win our entire catalog
bThvW3JKYz16bXpUWDIufkl2OllseC4maV1gMjtVYXNtb2RyZ3czbkQzQDtn
ZnRdMVZuZkIqVTJpIGlxa2xubkAoaTRueGdQaGN0YyRjTGN1WGlUbzF5VU5q
cz50KmRwZXlncGN0dA==

I added whitespace as in the picture, you probably want to remove it. (I transcribed this by hand, let me know if I messed anything up)
Yes. In addition, LLVM provides a much nicer interface to get symbol tables and things like that---another boon to Xcode.
Spreading jobs to reduce worker contention
Youtube Download
I just found my receipt. Replied to the email saying I didn't get mine and the auto-reply email opened up a case number and it said they'd look into it.
Try watching a music video on the iPad. Even the ones on Youtube don't work. (They don't even come up in searches from the iPad app.)

For instance, this seems like a normal YouTube link, except it doesn't work on the iPad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ95z6ywcBY

Edit: Wow, I hadn't realized how bad it was. YouTube is also blocking all the fan-made videos from the iPad. For instance, this one is a Lady Gaga song with lyrics overlaid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAoi_-_EVio
Unless your host is incredibly dumb and doesn't have suexec enabled [1], CGI scripts run as their owner [2].

[1] And, if they don't, you should run away. Fast.

[2] The actual rules are a little more complex than that, but that's what it comes down to.
It's the Arduino of cat toys.
There's ADODB for PHP. And it is a very good DB abstraction layer.

However, only some sites use it and big projects like Wordpress seem to be totally oblivious to it.
I'd like to see:

* a few recurring columns (eg: get ceo of startup to write half a page about "day in life of startup" each month for 3 months

* spotlight on a "review my startup" submission to HN each month.

* a page of curated pithy/insightful/fun comments from hacker news.

* oh, most importantly, links to the most recent "who is hiring/who is looking for a job"

also, iPad/iPhone app.
Academic Earth has a lot of lectures on computer science.

http://www.academicearth.org/subjects/computer-science
Getting started with RabbitMQ in Windows using C#
http://hackermonthly.com/ratecard
Should Apple Get Into the Auto Business?
What sweet stuff could foursquare choose to do with its funding??
With foursquare closing its round of funding, I was wondering what the HN community thought that foursquare could do to innovate and cross the chasm into a more widespread adoption (especially with Facebook looming). All us early adopters love it, but are there any cool ideas they could play on? LooptStar is doing some interesting things with getting into the loyalty rewards before foursquare? What if they applied some Groupon like tactics into foursquare?
The trouble with a spouse is the amount of time and attention he/she takes up in your life. If your spouse is ok with not seeing you for long stretches then I agree with you. If he/she demands a lot of quality and family time, then +1 is perfectly appropriate.
Github listens and lowers price for Organizations
What would happen if you shock an iPhone 4 with static electricity?
I've always thought of being a Hacker as more of a mindset than a badge of accomplishment. There are famous or great Hackers, like Linus or Stallman or whoever, but I've always thought of anybody who codes and has a passion for exploring new things, learning, pushing the boundaries, optimization, novel techniques, etc. as a Hacker.

And of course that's only within the context of writing software. The "hacker mentality" is really independent of coding. As far as I'm concerned, you can "hack" any sort of system, so there's no reason there couldn't be "hacker lawyers,"hacker librarians," "hacker doctors," etc.
You are confusing mutable state and state. Of course you need state. What you don't need is randomly overwriting blocks of memory when your program makes a state transition.

Instead, you want more structured state transitions. A FSM is one way of getting that.
Yeah, it is strange. Looks like a job for an ambitious economy phd student - explain how it's possible that a market exists which is a "market for lemons" on both sides :)
Throw This Stock Away: TSLA
Any resources for code challenges or riddles?
I've seen a couple articles on HN regarding aptitude tests for finding qualified developers during a interview processes. Being that I'm fairly new to the development world, I've found these tests to be an interesting way to challenge myself and gauge my own aptitude. I found a couple of these challenges through a recent article on HN http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmers-program.html.

Does anyone know where I can find more random challenges? Someone pointed me to codegolf.com but the site seems to be down.
No. HURD's translators are the right idea. The hack is reimplementing VFSs at the GUI level.
A few more revisions:
First kid: +2
Each additional kid after the first: +1
Single parent with weekday custody: +10
I had the same reaction to this story. It seems a bit below Salon's normal class.
I think you've misunderstood the comment. It isn't, "You are one single thing you've done." It's "You are what you do." If you paint, you're a painter. If you raise children, you're a parent. If you hack, you're a hacker.

They're not mutually exclusive: You might be a hacker-painter-parent. You can keep adding roles as long as you have time to do things. They're also not necessarily permanent: You can stop being a hacker if you don't like hacking anymore. But if you don't do any of those actions, you aren't any of the accompanying things.
Ask HN: Option to invest as a condition of employment?
A question for founders: what would you think if a prospective hire agreed to accept a position on the condition that he be allowed to make an angel investment in the company?

To clarify, in addition to the employee getting X salary + Y amount of stock (vested over 4 years), he also gets to purchase Z amount of stock immediately (at the normal investor price/terms).

Here is the background for such a question: you've saved up money for the purpose of funding your own startup, but before doing so you get an interesting offer from another company. Unfortunately, the company is later stage than you're looking for (i.e. raised money and paying salaries to employees). This is a way to take the savings, and become more founder-ish in the new company via increased ownership.

Thoughts?
I'm not talking about working at a normal job, I'm talking about working at a startup. At a startup you have a tremendous amount of responsibility because a large portion of the companies success/failure rests on your shoulders. You also have other people who have put a tremendous amount of faith in you and rely heavily on you.

If you would rather take month long vacations to go backpack around exotic locations, go work for a big company. If you do this at a startup, chances are you are putting your company, and your co-workers, future at risk.

If you want to work at a startup, especially as an early employee, there are certain responsibilities that you must live up to. This author, like the founder of the failed YC company, is selfish. Either life gets in the way of a startup or a startup gets in the way of life, but its not often you get both.
That same thing happened to me. I sent my extra, unused ticket reciept in to their corporate office in Texas and they sent me a refund in a mere six weeks.

This company seems to have a monopoly in the long-distance bus service market. I also think the majority of their business is done offline (in-person sales at stations). So, unfortunately, these terrible systems
aren't likely to change anytime soon.
It certainly has a lot of inertia. But most of its big projects started in the old days are huge monolithic codebases that are starting to lose favor for various reasons. Emacs because not everyone likes the UI (and it's impossible to replace it, unlike other parts), GCC because Clang+LLVM are more modular and reusable, automake because it's a huge and hard to learn mess while newer systems aren't etc.

It's also losing some users like Apple and the BSD's due to the GPLv3 switchover.

I think that in the long term the GNU project will become increasingly irrelevant due to most of their crown jewels being hard to maintain, and there being political opposition to changing that.
"You'd want to be pretty sure of your value to your employer before trying this stunt."

No, you only need to be sure about your value on the job market.
AMEX are very good about refunding transactions up to 3 months old - after that it is more difficult. (very good == one easy phone call, instant temporary refund, they send you lots of letters (for months)(bad), they eventually decide to make the refund permanent).
> The US Govt is going to be more likely to loan to businesses where the underlying economics just aren't there

Dot com boom? Something like 30-60% of venture backed businesses outright fail, and only 5-17% are hits. I'd say you're not looking for a much better outcome on venture funding being a predictor of 'how well the economics are there'

Truth is, governement loans + earlier IPO lets them keep tons more equity, and allows more measured growth (both of which are important when creating real world products, as opposed to electronics/software, which have a smaller manufacturing footprint than say, experimental cars). The transmission issues alone would have been hideous to deal with under a VC.
For similar reasons I use almost no abbreviations (in variable/method/class names).
I got 5 shares as an experiment. I managed to get in on the low end, so they're doing quite well. Day 2 was looking up early this afternoon, but right now it's dipping below today's opening (but still up). This was my first stock purchase, and really more of a "why not?" kind of thing for me. Just wish I'd had a bit more capital. Probably could have made a small fortune. :)
In case the rows play a role, I have it (OCR'd and manually corrected) as :

bThvW3JKYz16bXpUWDIufkl2OllseC4maV1gMjtVYXNtb2RyZ3czbkQzQDtn
ZnRdMVZuZkIqVTJpIGlxa2xubkAoaTRueGdQaGN0YyRjTGN1WGlUbzF5VU5q
cz50KmRwZXlncGN0dA==

The == at the end make it look suspiciously like some kind of base64, but no luck.

Edit: updated for s/0/O/

Edit 2: it isn't a simple rotation of a base64 string either. Maybe the == is a red herring.