skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the media covered Iraq/Afghanistan like they covered WWI/WW2/Korea, there could be burning cities (well, burning crappy towns in the case of Afghanistan), tens of thousands of dead civilians, etc. (I don't actually think that would happen, outside of Fallujah, Baqubah, Shahikot, Konar, etc.)

There are a lot more embedded reporters now than there were in Vietnam. The main difference with Vietnam was the draft. For almost all Americans, the wars now are something on TV which happens to other people, which they might feel intellectually one way or the other about, but which has very little direct impact.
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Clojure finally on SPOJ
I've worked at two startups.

There's nothing wrong with being cheap. That's why I included the phrase "beyond practicality."

How much are you spending to fly out the applicant? How many man hours will be spent on the interview process? If you're willing to risk these investments to save $50, I consider that impractical.
This may come as a shock to you, but the manufacture and sale of automobiles is regulated by the government at nearly every step of the process.

One of the biggest reasons why you can be so casual about buying a car is that the government has gone to great lengths to ensure your safety as a consumer and a driver.
If you're a citizen of a country at war wouldn't hindering the war be considered treason?

Besides that. Why would you want to potentially harm someone when a tiny bit of effort would prevent potential harm?

There's something good to be said about been good. We are not robots.
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Tipfy 0.6 released, a little framework for Google App Engine
Inception's Usability Problem
Not productive enough ;)
"One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code." -- Ken Thompson
FFS man, who on earth would be happy for some military power to invade their country and setup shop wherever they like? No one wants to be occupied. Talk about "objectivity of distance", you apparently have no concept of what being occupied means.

If some military super power invaded your country but a base in your neighborhood and a member of your family was killed during one of their operations would you say "well, my brother was innocent but the army was within their own self defined rules for legitimate engagement. Bad luck for us" or would you say he was murdered?
Although you eliminate null pointer exceptions, lazy evaluation does introduce another subtle and very similar class of errors.

Consider a program that takes a leaf-labelled tree of Ints and replaces each int with the maximum found in the whole tree. You can do this in two passes over the tree - one to find the max value, one to re-write the tree.

But you can also do it in a single pass using lazy evaluation:

----------------

data Tree = Branch Tree Tree | Leaf Int

label :: Tree -> Tree

label tree = t2

where (t2,k) = thread tree k

thread :: Tree -> Int -> (Tree,Int)

thread (Leaf v) k = (Leaf k, v)

thread (Branch l r) k = (Branch l' r', max lv rv)

where

(l',lv) = thread l k

(r',rv) = thread r k

----------------

The idea here is that `thread` runs through the tree replacing the values with some input value `k` and also calculates the max value of the tree. The function `label` then uses the output of thread as its own input.

This all works fine as long as you never look at the value of `k` inside `thread`. If you do, you go into an infinite loop as `k` then depends on itself.

This is similar to `k` being a pointer to an Int that doesn't get initialised until the function `thread` returns. If you examine it before then, you get a null pointer exception.
No, single precision, as in "the fastest way to multiply a double is to use floats instead". I've seen more than enough C programs unnecessarily using double that I wish floating point constants would just be float by default.

(Although it seems like clang does something special here, as I don't see many double-to-float conversions in its output.)
I am guessing here: once we are proficient at reading we start recognising word shapes, not letters. In the mirrored writing the word shape as a whole does not change - it's just mirrored, which makes it easier to recognise than if the letters are reversed.

Here's the text from your link. Which is easier to read, this or the PNG?

'This example of boustrophedon text

eht rof yllacificeps nettirw saw

Wikipedia article on this ox turning

txet htiw llaw a gnirevoc fo dohtem

in ancient Greece and elsewhere.'
My guess is the current source isn't particularly valuable, and there's little chance of building a community without the company's blessing.
It's funny that I prefer mechanical buttons, but not a physical keyboard. At least not any implementation of a physical keyboard that I've tried so far.
I think that the reason that Luddism is a more frightening spectacle than it was shortly after the Industrial Revolution is that due to compounded population growth the competition for the automation jobs is going to be much more fierce.
They actually use IRC? That's very interesting to me... Do you know where I could read a bit more about that?

I find it fascinating that these people are typing to each other? Is it to make sure the commands and information is 100% clear? Is IRC the most efficient manner to do it?

Do they use mIRC?
There are more embedded but either they have more constraints on what they can/will say (I've heard this but can't find a citation so I wont stand on it) or they are siding with what's going on. You don't get the same feeling of senselessness from the reporting that you did from Vietnam.
I'm glad I migrated that huge application from MySQL to
Postgres back in 2000. I'm glad I did not touch MySQL for
serious stuff ever since then.

You should refrain from commenting on MySQL then. It's amazing (and sad) how many pro-PG-anti-MySQL folks don't even know basic things about MySQL but feel entitled to rant and call it "toy DB", "not real RDBMS", etc.
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People can actually switch back to "green threads" if pthread implementation is not satisfiable. However, green thread implementations like Erlang are even less popular (by my guess).
PHP for Android
Mark Shuttleworth needs to step into the mobile platform realm with an ubuntu type android distro.
It depends entirely on the context.

Obviously, I would be unhappy if someone I liked got killed.

However, if my house were on fire with 10 of my family trapped inside, and the firefighters racing to the scene accidentally ran over one family member in putting out the fire, I would not consider this to be "murder".

There are definitely people in Iraq and Afghanistan who have had family members killed, but who overall are still happy the US invaded. There was one report about a guy who had a US bomb hit his house, killing several family members, who then went to the US commander, told him what had happened, and asked that we be more careful and continue to get rid of the Taliban.

It's not like we invaded Canada. Afghanistan and Iraq were fairly horrible places to begin with (especially Afghanistan), and in a lot of ways, even at the peak of badness in each place, outside of localized areas, quality of life is better for most civilians.

The US has killed maybe 200 Afghan civilians in about a decade of operations. The Taliban would kill more than 200 Afghan civilians in a single month.

US medical assistance provided to Afghans (not injured by NATO/US), e.g. kids in car accidents, has probably saved more Afghans than have been killed by the US.

There are definitely grounds for not wanting the US to be there, but they're more "moral" or "honor" than practical quality of life, for most people.
Start-Up Nation
Companies wringing huge profits from software and improved business practices. Good - I did not spend years cranking out Enterprise Java for the sheer fun of it.
The US killed more civilians in one afternoon on 16 MAR 1968 at My Lai (and, unlawfully) than have died in the ENTIRE AFGHAN WAR FOR TEN YEARS.

The reason there is no news reporting of numerous horrible atrocities committed by the US in Iraq or Afghanistan is that...there haven't been (m)any. There have been potentially needless but non-criminal incidents, and accidents, which are documented. There have not been many genuine crimes. (I believe there were more in Iraq than there have been in Afghanistan; in Iraq there was a military unit running a brothel, several cases of detainees potentially being abused, etc.)

The crime in Afghanistan and Iraq, if any, is that we're wasting huge amounts of "blood and treasure" for a mission which isn't in the US vital national interest. As far as how the actual war is being conducted, it's about as bloodless as an occupation can be. We're effectively trading combat effectiveness and huge amounts of money for casualties on both sides.
re 2: The mailing lists http://www.postgresql.org/community/lists/ are a good place to ask questions. Core devs are frequently answering questions there.
If they're anything like my workplace (or my brother's), they've managed productivity increases by giving everyone twice as much work and firing everyone who couldn't keep up.
Is there any way to escape? What depresses me is that I really don't like the spending habits of my government (Germany). Already the "theoretical debt" (what the government owes per working citizen) I have is higher than what I own. I don't have any hopes of it getting any better.

The problem is that the government can just confiscate everything I own to pay off their debts with my belongings, so saving or investing does not seem to provide a way out.

By the time it might happen, I'll probably be too old to build something new. Otherwise I would say investing in skills would be a good idea (after the breakdown, capable people will still be in demand). Social networks might be good, too.

Gold? But I don't really like it, as in theory it is useless. And the government will try to seize it, too. The logistics of hiding gold somewhere make it impractical.
"Besides that. Why would you want to potentially harm someone when a tiny bit of effort would prevent potential harm?"

To prevent greater harm to others.
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The Reading List from a NoSQL Summer
It would be awesome if redis supported a "bigdis" type that one could use to archive things that should still be reachable by key, but don't need any of the fancy datastructures that redis provides.
tl;dr - No.
GNU high school: teaching kids by contributing to open source
I recall that the Moai (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Moai) were transported horizontally quite a ways from their quarry to their pediments. >IF< the inscriptions are on these prone stones then perhaps it was so that two stone carvers could carve two lines simultaneously thereby halving the time to complete their work. By inverting the second line the second carver doesn't have to write upside down. The carvers just face each other while squatting on the stone's face and start at opposite sides of the face working past each other.

If this style of inscription occurs frequently on stone surfaces not likely to be transported then this theory is unlikely.

EDIT: answering the reply below - the above technique can be applied to any number of lines. As in pipeline processing for vector computers (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Pipeline_%28s...) the last operations do not fully utilize the available capacity of the system. In the case of inscribing in stone - the last line only needs the labor of one carver.

As for frustrating - I'd find carving in stone quite tedious in any case.

I may still be mistaken but I don't think it's for the reasons you gave.
Then again, he also says that the laws don't apply to most AirBnB homes, either.
Lawyers are important and well worth their cost... if the transaction goes through. You don't want to be in a situation where the deal fell through and the lawyer fees you owe are going to bankrupt you.

Assume the deal will fall through and plan accordingly, whether that's through a provision in the term sheet (like a cap on lawyer fees or a penalty for walking away from the deal), or working something out with your lawyer.

Related: deals do fall through.
Clojure notation for me. In my view, it's a lot more appropriate for today's programmer world than the traditional math notation, because computer parsing is an issue. So I prefer the moldable Lisp version.

Many programmers dislike math notation; they have bad experiences of school, and gloss over anything which reminds them of dull homework and tests. On the other hand, programming notation symbolizes a feeling of freedom.

It helps that I'm more used to Clojure's notation than traditional math notation. Also it's easily executable for me. No need to execute precise arithmetic mentally; the computer can do it.
Very well, point retracted. But I think that the media should work harder to make people realize what hell on earth occupation is for the occupied in the same way they made people realize what a hell Vietnam was.
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I see this #whatever notation a lot. What does it refer to?
That's not practical at all. It could be applied only for an odd number of lines, if they even happened to know in advance how many lines it'd take. Also, it'd be amazingly frustrating: imagine having to "switch" your focus from the start of the text to the end, and then a little further from the start, and then a little further from the end...

I don't think our ancestors were masochists or dumb, really.
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Barmstrong was making a legitimate comment about troll tech journalists, in a legitimate place (i.e. following its mention), which Projectileboy seems to have grossly misinterpreted.

Both PG's comment and Barmstrong's make sense and flow to me; the "yep" signifying agreement with the AirBnB complement before extending commentary on the linkbait aspect: an addendum if you will. I don't see why, or how, Barmstrong's reply to PG would be read in the manner Projectileboy objects to - perhaps the dash could lead to such a reading but it's fairly difficult to arrive at.
I regularly see entry level positions around £15k - often a little less. From looking around relatively recently, if you want £30k+, you need to be project managing at the very least (in a buzzword-compliant sense that is).

Things have picked up a bit lately if you're a Rubyist. Interestingly, the same companies paying £15-20k for perl/PHP coders have no problem dropping £30-40k on ruby.
Amforth: Atmega Forth
Thinking about death always puts the triviality of my seemingly dire day-to-day problems into proper perspective.
Ask HN: Share your experiences of IT at non-tech firms?
I recently learned that a clever bit of technology developed for a program analysis is being used to manage discount offerings at a prominent supermarket chain. I've since realized that there are whole realms of technology use that I know nothing about (e.g. Business Intelligence). Does anyone have firsthand experience of these?
irc chat, generally on the 'freenode' irc server - http://freenode.net/
You know you're getting old when Java people complain about speed of scripting languages.
Indeed, because otherwise, erasing a line, specially from the top or bottom would have caused major confusion and wholesale change in meaning.
I'm sorry I gave you the wrong impression with that article. My aim was to outline how important this kind of separation is, and I then provided an example of a strategy that I don't employ myself, but other people do. Unfortunately, instead of a discussion based around separation of accounts people and the service providing people, the discussion turned to the ethics of creating fictional employees.

I've edited the article in order to keep the focus on the point I was trying to make. In any case, thanks for taking the time to comment.
"So new languages with different abstractions come along and things are
simpler to do in it. That simplicity is then used to build even more complex
things, which then expose how the abstractions doesn't work in the formerly
new language."

This is true for mathematics, but not in the same way for computer languages,
because we haven't unlimited computing power and memory space.

Yes, with a more abstract language you can solve a problem easier on the
implementation, source code side.

But with every abstraction you're loosing flexibility, because to get an
abstraction you're putting the lower parts in a concrete combination.
Thus every abstraction has it's costs.

Yes, you could use two computing languages, one for the performace/memory
critical part, and one for the other parts of the programm. But in practise
it's not that easy to combine the two.

There's a reason why people are still using C/C++.
#whatever in the context of a 'channel' means IRC (Internet Relay Chat), generally on the Freenode.net network.
Wow, really? Chat? In 2010??? That would never have occurred to me. Thanks!
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I have worked at various levels of several different kinds of companies - everything from epoxies to hospices to ship management to pure software houses to educational institutions. I never learned so much about running a company as I did after reading Gerber's "E-Myth Revisited" and then starting out on my own company. Rather than go corporate, I recommend poring over the org charts and business models of several different kinds of businesses and follow the money. Figure out why they have hired the people they do and what function they serve in the nitty-gritty to serve the overall vision of the company. How do they make a customer? How do they deliver? When you can map each of these out on paper in the nitty-gritty, then you are ready to think about your own company, I say. But working in the corporate world will not necessarily help you with that. It will, however, give you contacts and a network that you can leverage. In addition to Gerber's book, I encourage you to take to heart Felix Dennis' "How to Get Rich", wherein he takes up the matter of working for someone else only enough to learn the business inside out so you can compete with them.
It would be interesting to see someone do for ERP systems what salesforce.com did for CRM - the potential market is huge.
Depends on which pattern you're talking about. I was talking about inverting everything and using the magic of $_ everywhere.

If you mean just the idea of using a hash to mark things you've seen before, though, that is very, very useful. But I would write it as:

foreach $item (@list) {
# Print every item in the list skipping duplicate items.
print $item unless $seen{$item}++;
}

Because then I don't have to think about what's happening with all the magic $_ variables Perl is tossing around. Sure, they're convenient. And I do use them some of the time. But when things break, I'm usually glad that I was explicit about what I was doing rather than relying on Perl's magic to know what I intended to do.

Maybe that's why I like Perl so much? I tend to code in as strictly disciplined a manner as I can manage, so I don't end up regretting it later.
> There are definitely people in Iraq and Afghanistan who have had family members killed, but who overall are still happy the US invaded. There was one report ...

Very dangerous statement to make. Unless you're citing something, please don't... I'm not saying such report is a lie, but it's a risky thing to say if it wasn't true. There are many stories which need a lot of context to understand properly. There isn't much more that person could do, is there?
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Can't get diseases from Twitter.
It depends. You cannot have a "good enough" with rapid iterations approach for a mission critical project. e.g. A software to control chemotherapy or a missile controller program

However for consumer facing products or in some cases for enterprise products, you can start with a minimal working version and then improvise.

Personally, i prefer A because the real feedback comes in from your consumers and you will find lot of your assumptions going wrong
I think the parent means to imply that a lot of bad stuff in Iraq would have surfaced sooner than it did at the time if wikileaks had been around.
I don't understand why binary Oracle compatibly isn't the number one effort in the OS DB market. That would significantly move the FYO-point.
The point is that if you offer a price first, this is the HIGHTEST the buyer will pay

This all depends on your negotiation skills and tactics. It is almost trivial to throw out a low-ish number and then build that up to something 2x or 5x that number after you've added on all the "extras".

While I'll concede that the prototypical hacker is probably not also a keen negotiator, I'll also say that you shouldn't get so caught up in absolutes when talking about something than is in the end more about emotion and personality than absolute value.