skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would go further. What I have always wanted is simple: a compiler. I believe that the only way to get one on a Mac is from Apple itself, though I would be happy to take a compiler from a third-party. I don't want to be a Mac dev or an iPhone dev. I don't want their IDE. I want a compiler.

So far as I know, the only way to get gcc (or any other compiler) initially onto a Mac is by accepting the entire Xcode package. I'm posting this here because you mentioned the 3GB download, which always makes me cringe. I'm curious to see if anyone knows a better way. (I've had this conversation online in a number of places in the last few years, but never received an alternative.)
Ask HN: Impressions on elance
I heard a couple of things about elance as a good website where you can find freelance jobs. I would like to get the opinion of the HN community regarding this before actually making an investment in this website.

Have you worked with it? Does it pay on time? How are the clients? How are the projects? Are there other websites you have worked on that are better than elance? etc. Any information would be great.

Cheers!
You don't get big without VC

Perhaps I'm just jaded or out of touch, but I'm pretty sure something like Flipboard wouldn't get Google-big even if they were given 100 million dollars rather than 10.

Huge investments might be necessary to become gigantic, but they certainly aren't sufficient, nor are they necessary to create an actually viable business.
People certainly tend to group themselves by culture, but I don't think any particular culture lends itself toward failure to integrate any more than individual personalities do.

Similarly, where I went for undergrad, Koreans tended to have their own groups. Clearly they don't do that everywhere, and not all of them did - there were just enough of them that didn't want to integrate that it was easier for others to choose not to.
A segment of any group does it if they're a large enough minority - it wouldn't be fair to criticize one particular culture for it.
const only means that the function is not allowed to change memory through that reference. It says nothing about aliases to the same memory.

But the "what if another thread changes the string" issue is a red herring. The question to keep in mind when optimizing in a multi-threaded context is "does the output of the compiler generated code correspond to at least one possible interleaving of threads". Since this thread doesn't do any synchronization, it's possible that all the function executes without being interrupted by another thread, so this is a sound optimization.
How Google searches foreshadow housing prices and sales
Oh. Yeah. The names are poorly chosen, but we're stuck with them. :(
Also the Fed can print money. Which is how the story inevitably ends.

It seems to me that the problem is created by economists winging it. I'd rather see a financial system designed and run by engineers.
I guess what sets HN apart is the premium it places on quality rather than growth/traffic. And that it caters to a specific niche rather than a bunch of disparate, mainstream topics. So the question is if it could still do well given those differences.
Has anybody found a better link, describing more technical details?
I'd like to add that it's also never too late to start taking better care of yourself and reaping the benefits thereof. I know a man who decided to become a vegetarian and start riding his bike more frequently at the age of 40. He's 80 now, and just biked across the country last year.
But the point was that Intel was paying them, presumably in order to not do something that would harm Intel. So it makes sense to keep accepting that payment until the costs exceed the benefits.

Are you contending that Dell would not have recouped any of that rebate money by working with AMD? If so, why would Intel pay so much? In theory, just paying Dell $1 would be enough.
can you name these european tech start ups?

i can think of very few.
The good news for you is that the uncashed second check will eventually show up as a discrepancy on their books and they will have to deal with it. It make take some time but it will happen.
Here's how you should deal with emails after a long vacation. Ctrl-A and Delete.

If it's important enough, it will be re-sent.

Edit: I see lot of downvotes. But I wasn't joking. What's more important in life? Doing busy work with your inbox? If an email sitting in your inbox for more than a week and have no impact on your life even you haven't dealt with it, it probably really has no impact on your life.
HN - Reallly slow for me
Am I the only one? HN is so slow. Refreshing the page takes about 10 secs..
Then the dollar amount is completely wrong. It's not a multi-billion dollar fraud unless that's the amount by which they beat their estimates.
What Azul is doing gets you about 3/4s that far with true SMP. They've got their Vega custom hardware, a new x86-64 software only version named Zing (http://www.azulsystems.com/products/zing) and they're pushing an open source version of the foundation (or more) of Zing through the Managed Runtime Initiative (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1491653 and http://www.managedruntime.org/).

And they're listening to people and continuing to work on the latter, e.g. 3 days ago they updated the Linux source code releases. A complete SRPM, particularly for Fedora Core 12, and a kernel patch suitable for auditing and applying to the newer 2.6.34 containing the memory management half with remaining scheduling part to follow: http://lists.managedruntime.org/pipermail/dev/2010-July/0000....
First I thought, wow, in less than a day its price has already gone up from $30 to $35 (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1540120).

But then I realized the difference in number as reported by the two news outlets is probably just because of forex translation rates.
I see that it was published in 1999. Is it still relevant today?
It's easy to see that this is much ado about nothing: if it actually happens as described, it will do significant harm to major politician-owning interests. Therefore it won't happen.
Where should I begin?

- It's incredibly brittle. Good luck if you need to make significant changes to your hierarchy, or change that NSOutlineView of yours to an NSTableView. You'll have to rebuild and re-hook up all of the connections on an object. With no warnings or errors if anything is wrong. In HTML, you can just copy and paste, change some tags, and make some adjustments. Now HTML isn't ideal for application layout - but another markup language could be (MXML isn't bad).

- Doesn't play well with source control. Only one user can work on a .nib at once. Just yesterday another programmer and I both made changes to UI. Of course, it was completely unmergeable by machine or by hand - what do you expect when you have GUI generating a 7000-line file for relatively simple UI. So one of us had to re-do several hours of work. This isn't a problem with, say, HTML.

- Most significantly, it only solves a small part of the problem. It completely falls down when you're dealing with dynamic / variable UI - you'll have to resort to code anyway. And a lot of the layout you need to do is actually inside cells - say, trying to build a source list like iTunes, or a table view with icons inside of it. IB can't help here at all. Then, you end up laying out the actual UI in code. And what code it is:

NSDivideRect(cellFrame, &imageFrame, &textFrame, ICON_INSET_HORIZ + ICON_TEXT_SPACING + imageSize.width, NSMinXEdge);
imageFrame.origin.x += ICON_INSET_HORIZ;
imageFrame.size = imageSize;

textFrame.size.width -= ([self sizeOfBadge].width + ROW_RIGHT_MARGIN);

Are you serious? This is 2010. You should not need to be manually calculating the positions of UI elements. There should be a layout language. HTML, MXML, whatever.

IB encourages you to use a very low level of abstraction. There's a lot of repetition, and the closed nature of the tool means it's very difficult to build up higher levels of abstraction. But then again, I guess Objective-C loves loves making programmers repeat themselves.

There's a reason most professionals don't use dreamweaver to make websites, either. And they are much the same.
VBulletin divulges MySQL login
Real estate.
The FDIC is not magic pixie dust. If one of the "too large to fail" banks had failed, the FDIC didn't have cash enough to save the little guy.

Can you imagine the potential consequences of that rippling through our system?
Google’s New Video Ad Highlights How Content Farms Rule At The Search Game
I particularly enjoyed the quotation at the end of the article, from the guy who thinks that programmers "only cause trouble." I'm sure he'd be much happier with a room full of clerks doing the accounts, and transactions taking a few days.
You should have complained to pg. I had a similar thing happen on a digg blog post, and he reinstated it.
25 years ago today, Commodore announced the Amiga, the greatest cult PC ever.
It is the first work to use the word "robot". I think that was in Asimov's preface to some edition of "I Robot".

But no, I haven't read it.
Ask HN: Economical SF Bay Area Development Firms/Houses
I'm working on a web app project and given it's size and my schedule, I've decided to have the app developed.

Given the money we're going after, I'm looking for a development firm in the SF Bay Area (where I just moved). Anyone have any recommendations?
I know of one dearly-departed bank that used a mainframe system so ancient that there was only one company left that supported it. Since the early 90's, that company had had just one customer.
Good private education for our son - I'm not naturally a fan of private education but it is so much better than state education it's really quite sad.
The field certainly helped. I worked in databases, data structures and algorithms, and the exposure to those ideas has been a huge benefit since I'm still working in those areas. I'm constantly surprised at how things that are just intuitively obvious to me are alien to many others. Grad school is when much of that intuition was absorbed, I think.

I think that "work ethic" (mine, at least) is just hardwired. Same for approach to problems. I wouldn't say that grad school influenced these so much as help me realize what they were. I actually goofed off quite a bit in grad school. My work ethic (as in long hours, and job above all else) wasn't tested until I joined my first startup.

Opening doors: not so much. My thesis adviser was not in the mainstream of our field, and most of my friends were in other fields. My professional contacts started developing when I joined my first startup. I was extremely lucky at this startup in three ways: 1) working with world-class engineers, 2) in a well-conceived and well-funded startup, and 3) they were willing to take me, an academic who actually liked writing software, and give me a chance.

Having a PhD was a potential problem early on. I tried teaching/research after grad school, and discovered that it wasn't for me. (This may have been the transition from a Canadian school with easy access to small amounts of funding, to a grant-writing powerhouse in the US, where professors seemed to spend all of their time pursuing grants.) I was lucky in my transition to the software industry -- I have friends who wanted to make that transition and were not able to. And in fact, at my first startup, there was vague suspicion of me just for having the degree. But now, years later, I think that it was time well spent, better probably than what I'd get out of the usual first jobs after college.

Another thing to keep in mind is what sort of PhD you do. A highly theoretical focus is rarely good preparation for life in the software industry. A highly applied focus is great preparation, (I'm thinking of the long list of developers who have come out of UC Berkeley, and of course, there are the google founders.)
#2 was an error I had, and a co-worker told me screaming that I was a crappy programmer because I did it, now that I know it's optimized I feel like he owns me an apology or maybe not :-)
Solar plane sets world record with 2 weeks in the air
Travelling.

Especially when I was 19 I finished high school (standard time at Czech Republic) and move to UK for few months. I was quite young, barely speak English, have very little money (like 500 pounds) and don't know anybody there.

These few months learn me a lot about independence and such.
Shame, but the real death was when K25 went away eight years ago. Fiddly stuff, that, with no room for error (and slow lenses need not apply) but, damn, those colours! Fall foliage may never look the same. But I guess this guy, a handful of National Geographic types and a Paul Simon tune can't stop the march of progress.
Also impressed that Flickr uses continuous deployment. http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/12/02/flipping-out/
> Since I'm not currently commuting, I spend more time with him than typical parents who attend night school after working full time.

This. Commuting is soul killing, frustrating, expensive, emotionally taxing dead time. A few people enjoy driving quite a bit - for them, it's relaxation. But for the majority of people it's awful.

I loved Los Angeles when I visited there for business 3-4 times, so I moved there. I didn't realize how driving as a novelty turns into terribleness. Just getting groceries took 20 minutes of round trip driving - that's 20 minutes that ain't coming back. And I'm paying gas, insurance, registration, and maintenance for the pleasure of having my time stolen from me.

Never again. Walking cities or living immediately by my work in a mini-city-center for the rest of my life. I don't mind commuting on a train or ferry because I can read books, but commuter driving is a huge waste of time and life.
Or hurt it by forcing people to use a less efficient supplier. Competition is only good if it organic in nature, (ie: comes about because both have efficient methods and high quality products, even though they differ to some degree) not if it forced competition. Then you end up getting a worse product when you could have gotten a better one.
Something amazing on October 10, 2010?
42 -> 10 1010 -> 10/10/10 -> October 10, 2010

The Answer?
I am not sure if it's a virus or not but the site is trying to install something and my symantec just complained and I closed the browser. I think it was the article.
From the Hacker News Guidelines: [1]

"If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)"

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This does not apply to transaction made with a credit card so I don't think Office Depot is going to notice.
It's funny how they think manufactures will reduce the price over time instead of adding features to maintain the price/profit point.

At least how they do it here in the states, I mean my netbook was $170 last year and it's still the same price (or higher), just more things thrown in.

Still, it would be neat to have a computing device with decent abilities that could be found for $10 on pegboards @ dollar stores and Walmart, etc. just like calculators.

ps. the Tata Nano is $2000 in India http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Nano

but would be far more expensive here, so maybe the same goes for computers
Indeed; contra dasil003, it's very clear to me that the perception of counterparty risk had gotten so high that extreme measures like the Paulson stunt and TARP were required to prevent a repeat of the cascading bank failures that in the Great Depression was triggered by this failure: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creditanstalt

And so given all that, I'm not so exercised about either the "bailouts" or the "excessive executive compensation" (Does anyone want 3rd raters to run these institutions?) Sweden pulled off something like what dasil003 recommends, and while I like it in principle I'm utterly unconvinced our political ruling class had any chance of pulling it off.
A plane that lands like a bird
I'm curious if anyone knows why it sounded like there was a jet engine in the background throughout the video? Was it just a bad recording or was there some reason why the room had to have a crazy amount of ventilation?
AAPL has been very good to me as well, I bought in at $73.25 in 2006. I bought more in 2009 right around the 3gs announcement at $140.66. Then in 2010 when the iPad was announced I bought a couple of times (especially when it went below 200 at an average price of $201)

I have found it tends to dip right around or after announcements, there are usually good chances to buy especially if the announcement doesn't blow everyone out of the water.
Buildbot is used for continuous integration, which is a big step along the path to continuous deployment. A lot of companies are doing this today. Fewer are doing continuous deployment. kaChing has some posts about their setup:

http://eng.kaching.com/2010/05/deployment-infrastructure-for...

http://eng.kaching.com/2010/06/applied-lean-startup-ideas-co...

And I believe many of the companies featured in the Startup Lessons Learned conference are doing continuous deployment:

http://www.justin.tv/startuplessonslearned/videos

There's a lot of momentum towards this. The company I'm at is working to get there.
That's awesome. I'm always impressed by the reliability work that comes out of NASA. I don't regret a single penny of my tax dollars which goes to them just for this sort of thing alone.
I think you mean this

(x = Post.first) ? do_foo(x) : do_bar
I would. I've sent you an email.
When it comes to change or innovation, the British are characteristically skeptical and morose. A BBC reporter even wrote about the issue last week: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-10665372 - The negative spirit in the UK is palpable after spending an extended period of time in the US.
That's not how I understood it. It was more like:

As a human, you can mentally rotate an object, recognize a face and do all these extremely expensive computations effortlessly. For doing that, you need to have a model of the local universe loaded up to your brain, which in addition is constantly filtering out hypothetical scenes and movements which do not satisfy the principle of least action (e.g., you don't think Steve Jobs is under your desk right now).
Many of such computations, however, are of the kind that could easily be carried out by quantum computers, provided you would load them up with the correct model of their neighborhood.
Now imagine that the many worlds interpretation of QM holds: All the things in the cosmos "span" multiple universes. There are an infinite number of replicas of yourself in ever so slightly different universes. If your brain is indeed a quantum computer, your brain is cross-linked to all your other brains. There is no need to load up any model anymore. All that you needed is to perceive the reality as it comes!

Of course this "argument" (I would call it a theory) is full of holes, but the topic makes for some interesting talks with philosophers.
It's my understanding there is a specific exemption to any purchases made with a Credit Card.

So now it's non CC company to company transactions > 600$/year which is a far smaller pool. The absolute worst possible case is total revenue / 600$ but the reality is most companies have a fairly small number of suppliers. So something like Ln (revenue / 1000) for the average small business.
I can't pick one so I'll say:

Learning Common Lisp;

Making my own (unreleased) web framework from scratch;

Learning the Rete algorithm (very fast matching of many patterns against many data items). It's the most elaborate algorithm I can implement, it was hard to learn mostly because of how incredibly abstract the descriptions of it are, but it's applicable in many situations to make really cool features possible so it was well worth it.
My experience is the opposite.

The simplest solution is harder and takes longer.

I think easiest or quickest is what is really meant in this formulation, but rarely do either of these result in simplest. I start with the former and strive to iterate towards the latter, because the former starts cheaper but ends up more expensive in the long run.

Simplification is an optimization.
Land. By far.

But I have high hopes for learning Haskell.
They probably need $10m investment to hype them up, fuel the koolaid so that someone else will invest more or buy them.

Agreed though. There is no way on earth you need $10m to build a simple app these days.
Too many laws, too many prisoners
> It has been postulated that American welfare assistantship programs are somewhat to blame.

I don't know how significant such aid was with the folks that I knew. I think that a bigger factor was the culture.

In most cases, they got their basics from family, so the assistance went for "luxuries". It's not enough for real luxuries, but it's enough to buy "stuff".

I don't think that the "stuff" was a big motivation, but its unclear why society should provide it.
SHA1 is still pretty damn fast in Git, I couldn't be able to get an even close speed with my own implementation.
Tab Candy: Mozilla Labs is making Firefox tabs sweet
U.K. Enterpreneurs need to travel to the U.S. to promote their products. I'm not sure how valid the comparison to flipboard is, since founder sold his last business for $800m which is some advantage in it's self.
Do you allocate some fixed time or number of pages as a goal to read every day ?

When I start programming it takes up all available time..
Garbage. The failure of Lehman Brothers caused the Reserve Primary Fund, which had been making a big deal about how they, the inventor of the money market mutual fund or the like, were being conservative in their investments, to "break the buck" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_Primary_Fund).

All that plus the AIG mess etc. caused perceptions of counterparty risk to soar. There was an insane run on money market funds and drastic action had to be taken to prevent the banking system from seizing up. A lot more than 60,000 jobs were at stake; perhaps less than 600 million, but certainly 9 figures worldwide and 8 in the US.
axod, you've built an awesome lifestyle company and you should be proud of that.

but some people want to build billion dollar companies - it's a matter of taste - but if you want to do that, especially if you want to do that in the consumer space - you often need to defer revenues for user growth.

and doing that in Europe is very hard.

I'm really not sure this is even up for debate - who are the startups you're thinking of?

again, different approaches to different companies with different aims.

I don't think $10M for a social news reader app is insane, nor do I think Twitter raising $200M is insane. Some people thought Facebook raising so much was insane - that they'd never make money - and look at them now, almost $1Bn in revenues.

You're not looking at bubbles, you're looking at investors placing very specific bets on industries or trends in the hope that in five years from now they'll have another Facebook.
Haven't you just described Gmail?
Ask HN: Anyone going to Defcon 18 this year?
http://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-18/dc-18-index.html

Anyone going? I'm 50/50 right now.

I'm coming from Santa Monica so PM me if you want to convince me and commute together.
Bank Stress Tests