skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This seems very significant to me. So far, there has always been this opposition between algorithmic extraction of meaning and modeled structed data. It never made sense to me, because using both leads to so much better query results. I've been doing it for years and I was starting to wonder why the idea isn't catching on. It's been a really tough sell. I hope this is going to be a real breakthrough. Managing spam will be difficult though.
And now if anyone else dares publicize these routine facilities it'll look like they're copying Apple.

(edit: simplified)
On the second page of the article:

>Program the system to take the same amount of time to return both correct and incorrect passwords. This can be done in about six lines of code, Lawson said.
If you cut a couple wheels off of an 18-wheeler, you could travel the 3642 km of the Tour de France in about 36 hours of driving, which would be about 3 days on a leisurely, safe schedule. The bicyclists take 22 days to do the same thing.

So, there are really only a couple of problems:

• if you're Zed Shaw, you apparently want to cut two wheels off an 18-wheeler, and if you're Zed Shaw, you're likely to screw up and choose the drive wheels for your demented sacrifice. You do that, the sucker won't even roll.

• the stupid hatas who judge the race won't acknowledge your achievement. Something about the allowed types of bicycle. Is that analogous to how you can't run Ruby on a microcontroller with 1024 bytes of RAM, maybe? Because you can sure as fuck run C++ on it.

Anyway, direct pointer manipulation has been part of OO environments since the beginning. The purest current incarnation might be SqueakNOS (ever seen an IDE driver written in Smalltalk?) or SBCL's alien, but the most practical one is probably C++. Rust, Golang, and ATS seem like up-and-coming contenders.

Edit: oh, I forgot D. D's been an up-and-coming contender for more than ten years now.
I do a search, open all the items in new tabs, check briefly that they really are the same thing, then copy the links in. It's faster than it sounds, faster than you might think.

Also, every now and again I run into something I haven't seen before and which is of value. I use this, then, as a means of adding value by cross-referencing, but also of gaining value to me by a directed random search.
I have an HTC Hero and it also drops quite a few calls, but somehow I've just learned to live with it.
You have to understand that Wikipedia is what would happen if your liberal arts faculty committee meeting had a fling with StackOverflow: it is both a community with implicit status/karma, it has a (contentiously) consensus policy where academic papers and newspapers matter and the rest of the world is a bunch of pajama-wearing amateurs of minor significance, and it totally fetishizes adherence to the defined Wiki process.

If you really feel strongly that Yegge should be included, the effective way to do it is either get someone at the NYT to sneeze about him in print or hone your rules-lawyer skills, learn all their policies/acronyms, and outlast the other guys.
He wrote js2 mode, which I love:
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Js2Mode

Other than that, I've heard he writes great blog posts on programming and works at Google.
Has anyone played geoDefense Swarm for the iPhone? It is a really well done tower defense game. I would be interested in any comparisons someone could draw between Sol Survivor and geoDefense Swarm.
Nope. You ignore that the constant factor is removed (i.e. all factors but the one that is dominant for n going to infinite).

More precisly, it tells how the relative speed difference between 2 algorithms change when n goes to toward infinity. An O(n) will win over O(n^2), but the latter case might have a huge constant factor that makes it slower than the former for e.g. n <= million.

And very often, n is smaller than a million.
For our launch, we also tried reaching out to tech / travel blogs to write about us. I found the time spent following-up and convincing them that your product is awesome wasn't worth it when you can be coding or improving the product (it was probably 10% conversion rate for us). A month later, I found a lady with good PR network to help us draft a press release and reach out to her network. Within weeks, we were on Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, and other tech blogs. If you don't mind spending some money, I'd suggest you save time & frustration and hire a contractor to help with the news splash.
I agree that unions can be blamed for a lot of the issues. I'd add that a lot of the issues are caused by conflicts between the administration and the teachers. If you remove the unions then you'd have to reform the administration as well.

What I mean is that in a normal environment you'd start off as a teacher, and if you were capable you'd get more management responsibility, and could conceivably smoothly transition from junior teacher to senior teacher to department head to assistant principal to principal.

The way it works now is that they are two tracks - basically the workers (the teachers) and the management (the administrators), and the two don't mix. Teachers will organize staff parties, and it is controversial if administrators dare show up. In the past administrators would also teach a class or two - that practice is really frowned upon now.

So the above is a long-winded way of saying that there is a bizarre structure between the union and the administrators, and the whole thing would need to be untangled, not just the union side of things.
But the OP's contention is that he isn't a very good programmer, while some of the qualities he says he has sound like they'd be good for somebody in an oversight role.
No offense, but could we leave the tangential joke and meme-reference comments to reddit?
Both Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood have Wikipedia pages and consider Steve Yegge to be important enough to have as a guest on their podcast.
"The FCC has indicated that it is unlikely to take action on Wireless Carterfone beyond a possible rule requiring carriers to unlock handsets at the end of their contract periods."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone
Your comment made me think in a different direction.

I had originally gotten in programming, as you said because of the excitement of hacking, "hello world"; it was an intrinsic joy that I had that I derived although extrinsic rewards (striking it rich) was in the back of my head. But it wasn't the extrinsic demands that was driving me day-to-day, otherwise I would have gone into accounting instead of programming.

But it was all of these extrinsic demands that pushed me to climb the corporate ladder, deal with maintenance & management etc. In so doing, I was telling myself that I had to plough through these minutiae to get to my big external validation of climbing the ladder, becoming rich, etc - when in fact, it was my intrinsic motivation that got me to where I was from the get-go. And if getting to the and staying at the top means sacrificing the internal joy for external validations, then it's not worth it.

I used to think that dropping your obligations to the ladder is counterproductive to your career. But not anymore when I spend more rationalizing and calming myself down from all of the angst of writing TPS reports and posturing/covering my ass during meetings. I don't even have anymore energy/time to actually write code. And that's pretty damn counter-productive.

I always have taken a broad definition of hacking and I see this pattern everywhere. You could see playing guitar as having fun creating music & expressing yourself, or memorizing sets & rehearse & network to get your band signed to a huge label. You could see making friends and picking up women as having fun meeting people & expressing yourself, or memorizing sets & rehearse & network to up your social worth, etc.
What Devops Means to Me
Similar to the N900, the Palm WebOS devices (Pre & Pixi) are a joy to 'root' - enter the Konami code on the keyboard.
Actually Boost::Python makes python and c++ mix beautifully. I just started playing with it a few days ago and am seriously impressed. I'm planning on using it to write a WSGI gateway to put in front of my bottle.py apps.
This timing attack is really old news, but subtle enough to persist in many a project, e.g. Rails patched it in v2.3.4 Sept 09 (briefly re-introduced it this month on edge).

Will be interesting to see which of the big players were shown to be vulnerable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(people) I guess programmers are counted under "creative professionals". (There may be a meta-lesson here that there are specific notability guidelines for porn stars but not for programmers.)
How about a tabbar at the bottom? Presumably with tabs for settings and transaction histories and so on? You could have your own tab bar design to go with the design of your app.

I'm continuing to test your app out (its Friday; great excuse to go out drinking with buddies! ;) ). I'll get you more review later I suppose.
I find it endlessly frustrating that people's best plan for making my life easier is to add more software and more things for me to look at every day.
What is this about a $90 million airplane mentioned in the story?
No. Adding noise to a signal increases the amount of filtering and the number of measurements you need to take. It doesn't eliminate the signals. The vulnerability is the signal; the fix --- a constant-time HMAC comparison function --- is to eliminate the signal.
It's funny to me that when you see a lone person walking down the street or in the mall having an animated conversation with what looks like nobody, you no longer assume they are crazy.
> There are around 25 countries with better infant mortality than the US,

With comparable populations?

For example, Scandanavians do well everywhere. (However, the US ones do better than the ones who didn't leave.) A population dominated by Scandanavians will do better than one that is more "typical".

I'm pretty sure that the US healthcare system is not responsible for crank and crack mothers, but it gets "credit" for their birth problems.
I agree. Is Bill Gates really a notable programmer? A notable business man and a notable altruist, yes. But a programmer?
I think if you were to order topics by importance for inclusion in an encyclopedia, Degrassi: The Next Generation is much higher than Steve Yegge, though there's certainly an argument for including both. Certainly it's had more cultural impact on a much larger scale than Yegge. Encyclopedia coverage isn't a judgment of quality; it's not like the criteria for covering a novel or a film is the reviews they get from literary critics or film critics.
As far as I can tell, he isn't notable outside of blogging (I had no idea who he was either). I can understand why his wikipedia page got deleted.

On the other hand, I have no problem with wikipedia including pages on famous bloggers who happen to be programmers. I think wikipedia's biggest strength is having something on just about everything. If I googled "Steve Yegge", it would be nice to have a wikipedia page there with a short blurb on why people know him (blogging about programming presumably).
Where do you think the mantra of 'smaller class sizes = better education' came from in the first place? Though I don't doubt the advice was was honestly intended, teachers do have an economic interest in reducing class sizes (as it increases demand for their educational skills and accordingly, wages). It's got to be easier to teach 10 kids than 20, and we generally feel we're more productive when we're not overly stressed, the economic implications of the 'small is beautiful' policy were incidental or even unconscious [1].

So, the Gates foundation spent a lot of money discovering that this has little real effect on educational outcomes. I don't regard that as a waste - it may have been an expensive lesson, but I presume the money was spent on subsidizing smaller class sizes in schools. The understanding we've gained will save many billions of taxpayer dollars from being spent on a widespread but mistaken belief about teacher:student ratios, which is a significant public good.

[1] I say 'were', because now that we have evidence of the policy's ineffectiveness, many teachers' union members have designated the Gates Foundation and Obama's education secretary as evil corporatists out to wreck public education.
To say Jobs got next to nothing for his troubles is a stretch. And add to that many people would gladly pay to run Apple. I'd love to have that bunch of brains working for me. It must be like flying a 747 that handles like a jet fighter, every bit as cool as being captain of the Enterprise (the NCC-1701 one)

Too bad I can't afford it. ;-)
Wikipedia will happily include every obscure city, animal and flower species on Earth (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizothorax_yunnanensis_yunnan...), but will try to delete articles on bloggers and singers that are very well known within their niche.

The standards for articles on bloggers and singers have to be high, because there's a huge number of bloggers and singers out there trying to promote themselves by writing on wikipedia about how awesome they are. Since nobody has the time or the inclination to police the article on Joe Blogg's Blog when it claims that "this is the awesomest blog on Earth", wikipedia tries to limit the number of articles on subjects where the article's editors are likely to have a strongly vested interest in the subject of the article.

Another reason: every obscure animal and flower species on Earth has been around for millions of years, and most of them will (I hope) be around in another million years. Towns usually have lives measured in centuries. The average blog will be forgotten (even by its author) in a few years.
Spot on. Don't club me for saying this, but once I got my MBA, I was able to see tech products from more than just a nerd's eye view (I did my undegrad in CS)
> By dominating a field, they establish ample precedent that others like them can do so as well.

And you think that "like" is gender?
The difference is that it's easy to look primary source material for obscure cities, animals and flowers. But not for some random guy who blogs.

While I don't agree with some of the policies on the English Wikipedia, you also have to consider that having articles about anything incurs a long-term maintenance cost on the project. This especially true when the articles are about living persons or controversial subjects.

People are always complaining about Wikipedia because some obscure subject they personally care about didn't make the cut. Meanwhile there are literally millions of very useful encyclopedia articles on topics that unquestionably belong in an encyclopedia.

It's that sort of content that Wikipedia mainly caters to.
I'm curious how you got that. Are you sure "a" is on /dev/sda1? What OS and FS are you using?

$ du -sh /tmp/a

4.0K a

$ tune2fs -l /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 | grep "Block
size"

Block size: 4096
This lab looks really cool....but the timing of this page being seeded makes me believe its little more than a PR stunt! :) kudos apple fr givin us the iphone 3g/3gs/4...but the antennae problem was just too embarrassing for u guys!
For the right games, discussing parts of the game is also really hard and require quite a number of elaboration to get done properly.

Just check out the number of theorycraft there is about starcraft BW and 2, about the Civilization games and so on. I just cannot see how this would fit into such a simple question/answer-system, given that quite often there is no single answer. (Consider e.g. Broodwar: What is a strong opening build as zerg? Well.. there are around 3-5 possibilities into 2 possibilities into 2-3 other possibilities, and there is a certain dependency on the enemy and the map. Good luck fitting all of that in a single answer).
How much for Verizon to restore a blown droid x efuse? 
It seems the droid x would be the perfect phone, but this efuse fiasco is more than annoying. Are there any phone "hackers" here that can explain how Verizon can fix a tripped efuse?
vtables in C++ aren't free, but C++ has a couple of advantages here:

• If you're calling a nonvirtual method, you don't have to pay the vtable cost at all, just the cost of passing this. And most methods in C++ are nonvirtual.

• A call through a vtable is typically a couple of indexed fetches and an indirect jump. Objective-C's mechanism involves a hash-table lookup, which is a bit slower.
Wait... what? The fact that they thoroughly tested it and still had as big a problem as they did is supposed to make us think they're more competent?
Interesting. Even if you actually scope it down to the name, some of these principles still hold true. For example, take flickr - its simple, and unexpected as syntax. Kind of when I think of it now, it might be part of the reason why I remembered it in the first place. Althought now with everybody in Web 2.0 using some sort of an interesting syntax.. it is not as unexpected, and thus not as memorable anymore.
Yea, because apple actually did it. :) Where was google with their photos of their insanely cool lab? If you wana take a jab at them make sure to kick them while they are down or they might think of a good comeback.
I don't know what it's called, but many Wikipedia editors clearly have it. Here's a great example - apparently there are schools of thought amongst these guys, the most popular being "Deletionist". That's right: people who believe Wikipedia is too big and needs to be pared down. Makes zero sense.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Orangemike
This is an extremely dangerous attitude towards a vulnerability class. Rails did not fix the timing comparison of an OpenID HMAC verification; they fixed a timing bug in the HMAC comparison function of the Rails message verifier, which is used by session cookies and cannot be used for OpenID.

This misconception is dangerous because old vulnerability classes are extremely pernicious and have a terrible habit of reappearing even in code where they've been eliminated in the past. They're like weeds, or cockroaches, and require a concerted and decisive effort to eliminate.

It is simply not "old news" that most OpenID implementations made this mistake, just like it wouldn't be old news if IIS had an exploitable stack overflow in its HTTP header parsing.
> Taboo topics are harmful, in my opinion.

You get to argue that point with the person who wrote "I think this idea is harmful."
-Wrote Rhino on Rails, a port of Ruby on Rails inside the Google Language fence (JS, C++, Java, Python)
-Used to work at Amazon?
At least now without a case, you'll have a reason to upgrade to the inevitable Rev B, then!
Interesting angle on the business card problem. Looking forward to seeing this after release.

In terms of advice, how about buying adspace or sites like Free-App-A-Day?
One of my friend created a Desktop software for small business.He was giving free trial license and download for 30 days.
Adwords gave him 50 daily propsects.It took him 6 months to get his first customer and 2 years to reach 200 total sales.
But in the process he learnt a lot about that specific industry ,added lot of features to his product and also added an online offering.
Now he is selling 60 a month.
I don't know if he's saying that, but yes, nearly all performance-sensitive code in games and desktop software is written in C++, not C. Objective-C seems to be edging in.
In other words, this is where Jobs generates and amplifies his reality distortion field.
The Questionable (At Best) Value of Gold as an Inflation Hedge
John Cage visits an anechoic chamber: 'Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but as he wrote later, he "heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation." Cage had gone to a place where he expected there to be no sound, and yet sound was nevertheless discernible. He stated "until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music."' - http://goo.gl/mFI5
Will this be the next "intel inside" ploy? Except this time its "Apple's grab for your money inside"? Or "Steve Job's awesomeness inside"?

What was the quote? "The only thing worse than being talked about all the time, is not being talked about all the time". Because bad press can be turned into awesome press.
I can't say I understand why some people would consider RSS feeds to be too complex. There really are only two operations that you have to know how to do:

1) subscribe to a feed you like (so you like this web page? click the rss button in the url bar.)

2) Read their feeds, which basically consists of just scrolling down a page full of articles.

Sure, there are lots of other things you can do with RSS, but when it comes down to it, the system is incredibly simple. Far simpler than visiting a every site to find updated articles...
That's a bit unfair. Woz donates, Jobs has thrown money and time into improving organ donation, and in any case Jobs has only become super-rich in the last few years - Gates passed that point somewhere in the mid-90s, so he has had much more time to think about it. I imagine Jobs wants to groom a credible successor for the next few years, so that the company's price doesn't plummet when he retires.
It's more complex than you're making it. One man's notable figure is another man's regular Joe.

If one allows articles that have little interest

To whom? The "general public"? I'm not sure anything has interest to the general public anymore. The world has become massively fragmented.
I confess this is advice I have gathered from others, rather than something that has worked for me (I haven't tried it for a paid product site like yours). It will always be a lottery emailing busy bloggers, but you could get lucky!

Something I have had success with is emailing smaller blogs that I know often feed stories to the larger ones, and also blogs that have insatiable appetites for new stories. Regarding smaller blogs, something that worked very well for me is to contact first the international spinoffs of highly popular blogs, rather than the standard US one - often they get far fewer emails daily, and stories they write get picked up by the main site.

edit: One way to get bloggers' attention would be to just give them a copy of your app. Don't write as if you're just asking for a write-up. Write to tell them you think they could probably benefit from your product, and you'd like to give them a free copy. And that if they like it, here's your phone number / email for more information.
Yelp's Android app approached 1 million users
http://web.archive.org/web/20000229223044/http://www.gulfstr...

"January 20, 2000 - The Apple Computer Inc. board of directors awarded CEO Steven P. Jobs yesterday with a Gulfstream V ultra-long range business jet."
I once saw a guy go into a juice bar that sells 12 and 16 ounce smoothies and ask for a 14 ounce smoothie.
"On some login systems, the computer will check password characters one at a time, and kick back a "login failed" message as soon as it spots a bad character in the password. This means a computer returns a completely bad login attempt a tiny bit faster than a login where the first character in the password is correct."

This doesn't sound right to me. Aren't passwords usually checked by hashing the entire password and comparing against a hash? I don't see how software would be checking passwords one character at a time.
What's the source of that? I found an article on WebMD (http://men.webmd.com/features/coffee-new-health-food) that claims that moderate coffee consumption can actually reduce your risk of colon cancer.