skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> is it me, or are the Windows C++ APIs just horribly designed?

There's your problem right there! Windows does NOT have an C++ APIs (if you put COM aside). They're all legacy plain-C APIs and they're difficult to fathom in our increasingly object-oriented world.

Keeping in mind backwards compatibility and isolation of memory management (no objects or memory allocations are passed across memory boundaries due to architectural reasons in the Windows platform itself and not due to the design of the API) between libraries, the Win32 API is actually remarkably well designed.

You've got C-based declarations for literally a hundred thousand functions, each with varying functionality depending on what you want to use it to accomplish. And it preserves backwards compatibility. And it has managed to keep up with the latest tech and features. Plus, half-way through, they went ahead and re-implemented each and every function in a Unicode version while keeping the old ASCII version fully available.

I used to think the same. I used to look at Win32 and groan. But when I realized the extent of its complexity, the domain constraints it was under (OS design, DLL isolation, etc) the requirements (backwards compatibility, static functions for literally everything).. it all made sense.

What gets me is new languages that have way worse problems without the same good reasons. Take a look at PHP and its strlen vs str_pad (why _ sometimes and sometimes no?) and its str_replace(needle, needle, haystack) vs strstr(haystack, needle)... that's uncalled for, badly designed, and with no excuse.
Swedish ISP bars users from The Pirate Bay
Check out co founders wishlist, you might see someone that has ides looking for a techie.
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AgCvDTyBjHdOdDFfMEN...

On a secondary note, do you have a link to something you have done that shows your ability?
That's omega in its minuscule form. I was referring to its majuscule one.
iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 .... naming means nothing, every company gets wooed by slick marketers and pro naming people who mess up any consistency.
Big companies can employ tax specialists, attorneys and accountants, certainly, to do all these things - it's definitely an expense that a small company can't afford.

But small companies have advantages too - being nimble and able to innovate much quicker than big companies, to name just two. It's important to recognise these advantages and exploit them as well as possible.

Also it's worth bearing in mind that Apple was once a small company in a garage too. They had to grow big and become profitable before they could hire people to minimise their tax bill.
if you would spend your time actually visiting the site instead of updating us on your general state of drunkenness then you would notice that the top margin is now 40px instead of the previous 90px.
It might be, that you, simply aren't an "idea person".

You could ask for ideas (eg. here on HN). or you could join other people, who have (useful) ideas.

Either way, it might be helpful, if you provided some more info on what kind of work motivates you and what your technical skills are.
What does the following mean, on http://www.google.cn/landing/cnexp/indexd.html?

我们已移至 google.com.hk

请收藏我们的新网址
It's been a long time since Java was the future.
Salut ahs!

You probably heard people saying that you should focus on a particular niche.

Look around you, what are the professions of your parents? of your friends? Interview them.

With your technical background you might see solutions in their world they didn't know would be possible.
The state is bankrupt because it mismanages money and spends more than it takes in. It's certainly not Apple's problem to solve.
I care will google return my google-ads payment
Improve your jQuery Selectors: 5 Quick Tips
Given that you've drifted completely off topic, I presume that you accept that your initial comment was completely incorrect and needlessly inflammatory?
Tomi is wrong about iPhone economics
I like the design! Large, bright, positive. One change could be to have both right & left scrolling center image/text instead of just left. My mouse need to move a long way from the right sidebar, cause the page is quite long.

You could offer some form of help/guide much like how dropbox/zumedrive help new users on how to get started. It's a bit confusion with so many options.. Where do I begin.

Just wondering how is it better/simpler than DFP Small Business?
"We've shifted to google.com.hk.

Please go to our new address."

It's probably placeholder text for when the redirect doesn't work.
The Social Network trailer
What would be the second and third most popular sites to buy websites?
I would love to refute your explanation, but to be honest, I can't make heads or tails of it. "Active" water? "Inactive" water? EM "oscillations"? "Crystal seeds"? ...I give up. It's like pseudo-science buzzword bingo.

One thing though: people often complain that something "isn't scientific" whenever the science comes to a conclusion that they don't like. The editor of Nature -- a prominent science magazine -- was willing to publish the guy's article. That alone should be reasonable counter-evidence for all those claims that there's a some scientific "conspiracy" afoot to keep the miracle of homeopathy down. The thing is, they published his results, and then they tried to reproduce them. This is science. That's how it works. His claims didn't hold up, and that was that. He's free to go back and re-reproduce his results, this time consistently, and then they might be re-examined again. Until then, his results are bunk.
when you work on something significantly more complicated than a run of the mill django/rails type website, you quickly find out that a lot of the "bad practices" you taught yourself out of, can actually be actually completely necessary

inline styles and javascript are really really fast, innerhtml can be a lot faster than dom methods, doing everything with fancy css selectors is a good way to completely kill a page and destroying your markup by adding html over the place and id='' attribute on everything, can actually be the right thing to do.
dupe:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1460896
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1469520
The Yahoo Style Guide
Not sure if it's any useful... seems like the web app dun allow me to create an account prefix 'help', so I used 'login' instead. Once I encountered a web app which ask me to change because I shouldn't be using that specific prefix. Hope it won't be the case for your web app too.
Knuth's 'Earthshaking Announcement' due tomorrow
C++ in "it's a real language" shock!!!
"I present as evidence the entire body of science. Your move."

It doesn't work that way, and you know it :-)

It seems the guy from Nature was not as well informed as you, because rather than arguing that it is impossible because of established laws of nature, he actually did the experiments. Weird.

As for gravity, I know there is debate about HOW it works. I meant there is probably no debate that it "works" (by whatever mechanism).

It seems scientists felt the need to invent "dark matter" and other esoteric stuff at times to explain their theories, so I am not sure how established some of our modern theories really are (some weeks ago I think there was an article on HN presenting a theory that would explain away dark matter). It also seems difficult or impossible to prevent particles from affecting each other. So I suppose "no memory" means "all effects are washed out in chaos" or something like that?
Not necessarily. Other people in this thread have stated that google is unlikely to see its license removed. If that's the case, there is some benefit to going through the motions of compliance, to make the eventual denial seem less reasonable.
The canonical URL for the distribution: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Marpa/

The author has also blogged quite a bit about Marpa: http://blogs.perl.org/mt/mt-search.fcgi?IncludeBlogs=63&...
Is there a demo anywhere? I don't want to download, get an account on Heroku/etc, just to see if I want to go through and implement it.
> Apple's (or Linux's) share in the corporate segment is still tiny.

Yes, but ever since the iPhone it's growing. My old Java/.NET corporation now has teams doing iPhone/iPad applications. This is huge! Long ago it was all Windows with Linux/Solaris on the server. Now they are actually buying macs for developers.
But while it isn't blocked, why doesn't the whole of China just surf through Hong Kong?
I'm right there with you not wanting to learn a new shell, however PS is written against the .NET Windows API. The new stuff you'd have to learn would be Windows specific, sort of like learning AppleScript. Also, PS has traditional unix shell commands built in now, like grep and ls.
An Internet 100 times as fast: A new network design could boost capacity
title should say "Knuth's..." not "Kuth's..."
The WinAPI is horribly designed. The choice of language has nothing to do with it. A plain C API can be a joy to work with (e.g. pthreads, or any POSIX API). There is just no excuse for the myriad of WinAPI functions that take 13 parameters in random order, most of which need to be set to 0, -1 or NULL to get it to work.
I agree with you. As long as you're passionate about a subject, you can start your own micro-school. I couldn't get a job as an organic chemistry professor even with an MIT pedigree and a long list of papers, including one in Science. So I said screw it, I'm doing this anyway, and I'll treat it like it's my own business. So I started a blog devoted to teaching undergraduate organic chemistry, and I make money from funneling a small portion of the people who read the site into online Skype tutoring. So much fun to be my own boss and not have to deal with academic bureaucracy. Good luck to you.
When I see this, I get the urge to create a movie trailer about a little boy who grows up with a angry java programmer as a father. During the family dinner the young boy says: "Father I am a Rubyist! Primitive datatypes in java are just so...primitive. I want to do metaprogramming, and create beatiful code in dynamic languages with type inference and real closures. Besides almost none of the most visited websites in the world uses java."
Every job I have had a contract that told me how much I would be paid and when. (NB I am in the UK).

No way would I take a job without reading the contract.
I think approaches like this should increasingly replace the need/desire to go to business school. Not all forms of higher education can be short-circuited so easily -- you wouldn't want someone forgoing medical school and just staying at home and practicing brain surgery on his neighbors, making mistakes (ouch) and learning as he went along. But I think it clearly works in the fields of business, software and writing.
Actually, they do. Most homeopathic remedies are just dilute herbal remedies-- note that it's fairly rare for homeopathic remedies to be "strong" (i.e., weakly diluted) enough to be completely inert.

In other words, much of the time, what you are getting when you buy a homeopathic remedy at the local pharmacy is actually just an incredibly weak herbal preparation.
You have a point, but not all the failures of contemporary journalism are due to strict laws, or some such. Nothing coming out of anything owned by News Corp. falls into that category, for example.
Think critically & write critically in a critical lens essay
Critical lens essays require you to analyze a problem through a unique perspective. Writing this essay is a challenging matter for some as it requires you to get the reader to look at the issue through your viewpoint. Understanding the features of the essay will enable you to write in a critical manner.
Consider a tiered plan based on full-branding vs semi-branded.
Dextrose, the browser-based game engine, acquires Effect Games
How do you handle payouts (or do you)? I see on the "How it works" page that I can "Manage commissions" but how? Let's say that I have customers in Brazil, China, the US, and Algeria that need to be paid - do I do it through the site? If so, how is payment sent (i.e. check, PayPal, etc)?
Apple to Release Updated iOS4 to Fix iPhone 4 Reception Issue
I like that angle. I too figured that there's one thing that web SaaS can't really effectively replace well: feet on the street, and people interacting with other people they trust in 'meatspace'.
Cloud Testing: The Next Generation
sorry for the typo. that's a hard to control habit of mine, because in german it's ok to write 'Knuths'.
fixed it.
Oh absolutely (which is sort of what I meant with: that's not to say the journalism industry isn't pretty hopeless).

Journalism is getting worse (in general anyway) and more "trashy". Sadly that is probably less driven by constriction of press freedom (or whatever) as it is by the populace hankering after worthless trash :(
The main problem that I would have is that (a) I don't know you, (b) you don't have a track record, and (c) since my customers are my most important asset, I'm not about to turn them over to you easily. You just started - congrats - but that doesn't help me get "over the hump" of why I should use you. You will face this over and over: "How do I know you guys will still be around in a year? I'm not interested in doing a 'mea culpa' to my customers six months from now if you quit the business, get hacked, get acquired and the TOS changes, etc."

As such it isn't for me but I applaud you for getting it started - it looks nice. Stay focused on the small startups and you won't have to answer the above issues. After a year or so people will be more comfortable with you and hopefully there will be more substance about pricing/features/etc that will make larger companies more comfortable.

Best of luck!
Ask HN: Anyone Hiring Remotely?
HNers,

Excuse the fake account but I didn't want to use my normal one for the sake of privacy.

I'm currently looking for programming or development work. I'm highly productive in Django, Python and jQuery.

I've also worked extensively on App Engine and know its pros and cons (and possible workarounds) well if you happen to be on that platform.

I'm more comfortable with back-end work but I've recently shipped several complete development packages for teams that I've been working on.

I'm located outside of the US right now and am 12 hours off US time give or take. If you're looking for an extra set of hands and someone who works autonomously and quickly I'd probably be a good fit for your team.

I can be reached at remotely.hn [at] gmail if you're interested in discussing further.

Thanks!
Policy updated (ianal though), does it work for you?
Virtual Users/Domains With Postfix, Courier, MySQL, SquirrelMail (Fedora 13)
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Java is in heavy usage at Ebay, Google and now Twitter.

If anything, I would worry about the future of .NET, seeing that even die hard enthusiasts of the platform jump ship on starting startups ... does anyone have a list of noteworthy startups using .NET?
RailsMagazine Issue #6: All Stuff, No Fluff  is out
Dear Canon: Time to add communications to your low-end cameras
Does anyone know when a wifi version of the SheevaPlug (http://plugcomputer.org/) is coming out? This would be a perfect device to off-load tasks like screen-scraping that you leave a noisy server on all the time for.
Alternative: Learn to use Inkscape.
we have moved to google.com.hk

please bookmark our new address.
There's your problem right there! Windows does NOT have an C++ APIs (if you put COM aside). They're all legacy plain-C APIs

Ah. This brings back memories of checking to make sure the linker is de (or was it re) mangling the API names to make them work with C++

I've coded in C and C++ against the Win APIs. In fact, once I learned C, moved to windows (yay Petzold!) my first windows app was in Borland, home-grown C++ against the win api. Then I moved to OWL, then MFC.

One of the tough things about the C/C++/Win learning path is this: although it's probably 1/3 of the optimum shit to learn (functional programming, compilers, and algorithms are the another third, and set theory and databases the final third) it's also a freaking long haul from int a = 0; to Win COM programming. (And having said that I remain a C++ fan)
Any theories on what Knuth will announce?
How to Practice a Technology Talk
Well, I'm going back to bed for a few hours. I think I've presented my point as well as I'm inclined to, and our "debate" is starting to ring all of my diminishing-returns bells.

> It seems the guy from Nature was not as well informed as you, because rather than arguing that it is impossible because of established laws of nature, he actually did the experiments. Weird.

Cute. Do I really need to point out why, or are you just being deliberately snarky? Because the article pretty well covered all of this.

> It seems scientists felt the need to invent "dark matter" and other esoteric stuff at times to explain their theories, so I am not sure how established some of our modern theories really are...

And this is where it suddenly dawned on me that debating this further, instead of going to bed, would be foolish.

Physicists: "Hmm, this is odd. Given our current understanding of gravity, observations supporting an expanding universe, and current mathematical constants, we appear to be missing a huge amount of mass in the universe."

Astronomers: "Hey, don't look at us. We're woefully underfunded, but I'm pretty sure we would've seen a hint of that much stuff by now."

Physicists: "Maybe there's some other kind of exotic form of mass that we haven't seen before?"

Other physicists: "Well, that doesn't really violate any other principles of physics. It's worth a check. Let's see if we can find it."

The under-educated public: "LOL they invented dark matter!"

How about, instead of playing debate-hit-and-run by making weak accusations against science ("they felt the need to invent dark matter") and then immediately hiding behind ignorance ("I am not sure how established some of our modern theories really are"), you actually do some reading and find out? The internet is amazing, you can find an answer to pretty much any question you have on any topic. So I'll just leave this here then: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter

G'night.
It would be bloat if, as the author irresponsibly implies, all it did was display the basic data of a single text message. In the case of that single instance for the author it may do that (I didn't care to look that closely), but it provides for much more to be possibly displayed, and much of that presentation can provide extra information to a viewer (or a machine for that matter).
Also with modern javascript and html engine optimization, its not out of the realm of possibility that generating all of this every time is faster than only generating exactly what is required for each message.
P=NP
Why should I trust someone selling me magic water, to actually make magic water correctly? I'd have to doubt either their morals or their grasp of scientific principles, if not both. Does some external 3rd party like the FDA actually test these things to ensure that they only contain (at most) ineffectual doses of whatever they claim to contain?
Perhaps they don't care that much to make large gestures to get their license renewed. Seems like they've made the minimum gesture possible without comprising their earlier stated principles on this.
I had it on my list to post a reminder of this today as well-- looks like you beat me to it.

I'm curious to see other's guesses here. My personal hunch is that he is going to declare TeX complete, and move the version number to Pi (as he had planned to do upon his death.)
Don't ever doubt yourself and your ideas.
You will fail if you don't believe in what you're doing. You need to convince investors of your passion and conviction towards your ideas. They need to believe in you, but first, you need to believe in yourself and your capabilities and your own ideas.
Did GM hesitate to compete with Ford?
Did Pepsi hesitate to compete with Coke?
Did LSD hesitate to... well you get my point.
"Currently, the Gmail program is comprised of 443,000 lines of JavaScript, with 978,000 lines if comments are included. All of it was written by hand, he said."
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9178558/Google_to_use...

edit: "currently" with that article being published June 25, 2010
First of all Vignesh, imho you posted this in the wrong site. Has grammaton so eloquently put: you´re a suit, you´re in the other line. You should seek advice in a suit´s portal or whatever.

Don´t get me wrong guys, there great advices in here. And I learned and confirmed some of my believes with you. We, for instance, hired a developer and we work objective oriented. The only thing we ask is, somewhere in the day, everyone comes by the office for planning and helping.

I´m a designer, and work closely with developers and it works great , because our set of minds are very close (creative to creative). I mean, there are and always will be friction between production and marketing/sails. I guess I was hoping that Vignesh, as a minority in here, would be treated with a little more respect (troll? Prick?).

For those who truly helped, I apologise this rant.

Peace. :)
It has nothing to do with the layout, the "stiches" are groups of about 36 letters or 16 syllables. The author acknowledges the possibility of errors in transcriptions.
The homeopathic stuff is small/non-existant doses of herbs that cause some ailment. A herbal remedy would be a measurable dose of something intended to cure the ailment.

The latter may be woolly and untested feelgood hippy claptrap, but it's a lot less theoretically incoherent.
"Pepsi tastes better than Coke"
I guess something TeX related, since it's at the TeX Users Group anniversary.
A solution for the iPhone antenna problem.
Back when it was first announced, everybody made jokes about the new TeX policy and every document made using TeX will have to be reviewed before publishing :)
This thread is full of people who presumably aren't even significant apple shareholders clamoring for tax avoidance on principle, like it's some sort of honorable thing to do, sticking it to the man or something, and you hear the same in the real world as well. We do encourage them.
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Patriotic duty, heh.

Making sure you never give to charity either is a mitzvah?
Top Adobe Flash Evangelists to follow on Twitter
Well while it may not have an explicit C++ interface, I've found that you can go very far using ATL & WTL. These form a very nice and thin C++ wrapper to the Win32 API and also give you some handy smart pointers and STL container adapters. I've used ATL & WTL with STL and Boost with no problems.
You should add your email to your profile. I would like to get in touch with you
Well, it's certainly a reason to make them simpler.

But those same big companies with the same high priced lawyers, accountants and lobbyists never tend to actually advocate for making them simpler. Oh, they might say that in public and at your Ayn Rand book club, but it's not what they say when they're speaking to the congressmen.

EDIT: Hey guys, I wasn't dissing Ayn Rand, don't get so defensive. Just, you know.. who's got a really big interest in making sure people believe all this stuff? Might be worth thinking about.

Big corporations don't actually have an interest in a simple tax code -- more complicated means their accountants give them a competitive advantage.