skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Really, the worst code only ever happens in systems of extreme maturity.

I'm doing some light internal Windows system stuff right now, and all the business w.r.t. COM combined with a rampant NIH disease and competing coding guidelines results in a pretty gnarly mess.

Ignoring for a moment the endless wars between those who are for one particular style or library and those against, and the slight differences in the amazing number of different string types (they number in the dozens at least), I think the worst of it comes from COM. Rather than use language or library support, they reinvent everything. Now, granted, in this case it lets them do some pretty nifty things (like instantiating objects on remote machines and invoking methods there as if they were native), but the way you end up doing everything with these opaque macros (that are, if you can find where they're defined, usually written unsafely, by the way) just seems too magical, and the idea of passing around GUIDs for fuck all is just crazy. Too many times have I had a problem that, even in the debugger, was completely incomprehensible and unimaginable in traditional or UNIX C/C++, and after asking around and waiting for responses, amounted to "oh, just take that magic incantation out of your header because it's fucking with your vtable and you don't need it" or "oh just rebuild everything because your old GUIDs aren't valid" or something.

Most of my time is spent wandering around blindfolded in a room while angry hungarians pelt me with college-aged black boxes, to the point that I'd say no more than 4% of my time debugging has been spent actually fixing real problems with my own code that I might have made outside of this environment.

Ahhh, that felt good. End angry rant.
Jesus, no wonder they can't make any money and are constantly serving up self-ads.
Related: http://github.com/amccollum/pyheat
Definitely a big congratulations to these folks. They've done great work and it's definitely a great day for the promise of the Semantic Web.
Before becoming a Dropbox user I was aware there were other cloud-storage services available, but it was the good word-of-mouth that prompted me to try Dropbox. They're a great example of how to win in a crowded market through sheer awesomeness.

Good timing probably also played a role, though. I went with Dropbox because sync'ing files between my desktop, laptop, and iPhone had become a huge hassle. They wouldn't be worth it to me as a USB key replacement, but as a way to manage today's proliferation of devices Dropbox is golden.
Fitbit automatically tracks your fitness and sleep
Dropped more (-24 dB vs -17 dB), and yet picks up signal in significantly more areas and is significantly more sensitive (-121 dB vs -113 db).

I like the innovative external antenna (Anandtech calls the design tradeoff "ballsy") and I like holding more calls in more places. I'm willing to hold it "right" in exchange.
Zephyr solar plane flies 7 days non-stop
Harvard Professor Matt Welsh: Working for Google
First off, write high quality code. High quality code requires less maintenance. Keep everything separated out properly so that clients can do some updates themselves (e.g. update the text here or change that color to this color) and make sure to stipulate in the contract that you are not responsible for such changes. Write comprehensive test cases. Possibly, limit the contract based on these tests.
Yeah, I did that. In the 2001 recession, after having mad money thrown at me in the 90's, reality hit and I realized I'm really bad at time and scope management. I spent a couple of years realizing this; in 2003 I decided to focus on one of my clients, do all the programming I could on a particular project to make it interesting to myself, and ended up qualifying for EIC.

In 2004 I got into technical translation, and by 2008 I'd built up the clientele to make considerably more money at it than I ever did with contract programming - plus no scope questions, no need to codify specifications and requirements, no temptation to "drill down and do it right", no debugging, no nothing - just give me a document, I count the words, I translate it, I bill you, you pay me. Done.

I still code - there aren't many translators who can code their way out of a paper bag, of course, so scripting skills come in handy. And I'm slowly developing my own language/programming platform the way I want to. But when I think of getting back into programming for pay, and realize that I suck at programming management and thus would fail again? I stick with translation.

I wouldn't mind working with a technical startup as the coder. But at this stage in my life I'm too risk-averse (kids, orthodontia, college coming up) to risk much on a roll of the startup dice, so I wouldn't be able to devote the focus to it that it would require. But there's no way I'd go back to just slinging code for hourly wages.
Can we assume only operators that return integers are valid? For instance, you can't do sqrt(2) factorial, but you can do sqrt(4) factorial. Kind of tricky when dealing with things like 2 * (3/6) though.
Seeing a giant 10-story, foam-padded test facility doesn't exactly seem like real world use to me, but then again I know nothing about proper cell phone testing procedures.
It could work. Reservations would be better. I'd remove the expectation of a tip as well.

You wouldn't even have to employ anyone, just have a list of house cleaners willing to take jobs on a moments notice. or Partner with a cleaning service.
The textual content and most of the image content is all licensed under licenses that allow you to download a copy and put it on your own server. I have a copy of English, Spanish, and Portuguese Wikipedias (text only!) in a pendrive on my desk. There's a conveniently downloadable textual tarball. Furthermore, you can even follow Recent Changes to keep things updated. And there are legit companies like Answers.com that actually do this.

I suggest that you start an "expanded Wikipedia" project with more inclusionist criteria. I'll be happy to contribute, although I'm pretty happy with the English Wikipedia's notability policy. I'm sure thousands of other people will be too, especially if the result is any good.

Jimmy Wales already did something like this, by the way.
There's just been a lot of discussion and interest in Wakemate here. I just saw this alternative that also claims to track calories and fitness so I thought I'd post it for those who are interested.
I had an on-campus interview where they were processing a lot of people quickly. C++ was non-optional. Of course, I have little C++ experience. I would suggest anyone seeking a job at google know C++.
Or slavishly detailed write-ups of Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes.
Typeof, == and ===
>which could cause a large amount of harm to the network at large.

What kind of harm? I don't see any harm you could do with this phone that you can't do with another / an antenna. And if it's P.R. harm they're afraid of, people who replace their OS / jailbreak are usually proud to claim they did so to anyone in the vicinity, so any bad experience on their part isn't spread to others from what I can see.
Fairly old news by internet standards, check out the official announcement on the SproutCore blog.

http://blog.sproutcore.com/post/756343010/the-next-revolutio...
Here's a screenshot:
http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/7628/screenshot20100716at23...
Indeed, look at how they describe different phone models -- which of these are not like the others?:

In our tests, iPhone 4 dropped from 3 bars to 1 bar
In our tests, the BlackBerry Bold 9700 dropped from 5 bars to 1 bar
In our tests, the HTC Droid Eris dropped from 4 bars to 0 bars
In our tests, the Samsung Omnia II dropped from 4 bars to 1 bar
In our tests, iPhone 3GS dropped from 3 bars to 1 bar

I noticed some time ago that they absolutely refuse to refer to their mobile devices using articles, and avoid personal possessives whenever possible. It's always "with iPhone, you can blah blah blah", never "with the iPhone", and rarely "with your iPhone". They exclusively refer to their product as if it were an abstract idea, never grounded in physical reality.

It was always something quietly infuriating before, but here they've intentionally tried to contrast themselves against their competitors.
Wow, there are some fantastically stubborn, yet civil minds in that thread. I like Nate's reference to writing a blog post "to help people skip the standard progression of awareness to timing attacks."

"Standard progression of awareness" is a wonderful term.
My questions is are those results due to the antenna being external or some other design feature of the antenna? Could they get similar performance with an internal antenna, or at least an antenna that had some insulation between the antenna and the user?
You might think so, but it seems (at least in my experience) to turn out that in education and other governmental organizations, funds tend to get routed toward personnel expenses and away from capital expenditures. This is why so many governmental offices are have ugly painted cinderblock walls and uncomfortable chairs, while the workers are accruing big pensions and taking enforced coffee breaks. (Sorry if that seems a little bitter. I'm reporting what I think I'm observing)

So I think that the power structure in the system will prevent an improvement in efficiency like what you describe.
I just tried it out and it is not what I hoped it would be. It only stores a little bit of gmail - subject plus a little text from the unread mails (maybe IMAP works better). It didn't seem to get any of my facebook posts... so I'm going to uninstall from Firefox. :(
Well, it was a rant (as requested)...

I should have said "there is no other language which gives you the latitude for crafting high performance tools". You can indeed create serious high performance systems in a number of languages. The thing about most languages other than C and C++ is that things written in them tend to inherit their qualities - A system written in Java generally use Java's garbage collector. That works great for a number of things but it's still a constraint.

More of C++'s "modularization" features are optional than in the other languages so you have more latitude for creating your tools than anywhere else.

Of course, you do get the badness too...
It's 3 months old. Here's the original discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1290303
It could backfire as marketing, because even with such a fancy lab, they still couldn't produce an iPhone with good reception...
isn't that the case with most jobs. At first it was fun or even just a hobby, but when you have to do it for a living it's not the same anymore.

Hobby > Study > Work > ugh...
Existence proof: me.
The Nexus One has a bootloader that can be unlocked by just sending a debug command; it's very friendly to modding. Sending that command does trip a hardware flag that voids your warranty, but actually getting custom firmware onto the device is dead easy.
The same for me (Mechanical Engineering undergrad). I think part of the problem stems from thinking that marketing == advertising. In fact if you are going to create any part of a business plan, I think it should be your marketing plan. It will force you to really think about your product, what features will bring the most value to your customers, and how to reach those customers.
Yet I can't help but wonder if, by rewarding the behavior with a grand spectacle, they are somehow training the media and the public to pick on them.
The inclusion of gendered pronouns is stupid, especially given that this is a language for talking to robots. Is a robot he, she or it? A virtual assistant modeled on the master? A female game avatar of a male human? What if the software developer's judgment differs from the user?

When you're going for unambiguous, "oh, and of course pronouns need to indicate sex", is not a good start.
Scientists formalize perfect handshake; world peace on track for 2012
Well spotted, do references have to meet the same notability requirements as articles themselves?
My personal favourite questions from that quiz were:

* How many ways are there of painting the sides of a cube using four different colors?

* Which colors would you choose?
The new way the feds take over websites
> but most people can't get past the initial $529 price.

Sadly, this is very true. I bought an unlocked Nexus One, and people ooh and ahh over it, but when they ask me how much I paid for it, they blanch. At that point, they stop listening, even though I go on to explain that it ends up costing me less over time than if I'd bought a cheaper-up-front subsidized phone.

It's really a reflection of our credit card culture. Many people consider $600 over 12 months (Only $50/month!) to be cheaper than $500 all at once (OMG, my bank account!).
Are we failing on ambiguity here? If by "it" you mean "the peter principle", then yes I think it's very true.

But here, by assumption, the programmer is not competent (I doubt this is so, but that was the context) and petercooper's suggestion -- a good one -- was to consider getting promoted into a perhaps more suitable position. That's the inverse of PP.
Urban legend.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen
Inside Every Old Person Is A Young Person- Wondering What The Hell Happened.
They've certainly got the spike-pit nailed.
The power of traction always amazes me. There is nothing like watching your business gain a reputation and existence of its own outside of your idea of what your business is. Once you start getting traction you will always be surprised how easy it can be. But, getting to traction... that's the hard part.
Voltaire didn't say, "I will defend to the death your right to force other people to say it for you."
Yes. In fact strike "on hn".
Details: http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-and-megaupload-escape-dom...
Try PadMapper? (http://www.padmapper.com)

It incorporates Craigslist and other sources.
I'm not saying rails is a problem, but that there's value in the large, stable and well-tested standard library.
Able to read it easily yes. Finding it during work hours - not me personally =) Good find.
I am not sure I understand you. What does WebSockets provide that would make me not need to develop, distribute (!) native iOS apps? WebSockets do not have anything to do with user interfaces, audio, OpenGL, etc.
Oregon Trail still works on them, so who cares? :)
I'm a designer who reads HN, and there are lots of other UX, UI and web people on here too.

Most good designers won't work on spec, but if you look at print designers interested in jumping to web, you could try providing comparable hours of development for their freelance/personal stuff. I see you're interested in trade/barter, luckily it's your best bet.

Also, it sounds like you need a designer who can do front-end, not just any designer. If one of the dev's can pick that up, you've got a wider array of options. While it's becoming more common for designers to know the mechanics of what they're designing for, the good designers who can do front-end are not going to want to work for free.

Good luck!
It's easy to exceed public outcomes when you can refuse students who are severe behavior problems or bias the selection in some other way.

My wife is a teacher, and a severe behavior problem impacts the entire classes performance, but it takes so much of her attention away from teaching.
See Anandtech's followup article from yesterday. Apple innovated on the antenna, trading possible (and typical) attenuation for more sensitivity.

Anandtech feels they "willfully" went for more sensitivity for most situations, at the price of variability depending on certain rarer signal situations. He calls the design choice "ballsy".

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3821/iphone-4-redux-analyzing-...
I just use google docs to record thoughts and ideas.
As it happens, the Intel 4004, the first microprocessor, was co-designed by Intel and Busicom, a Japanese company. Busicom owned the rights.

Other Japanese inventions include:
- pocket calculators
- CDs
- the Walkman
- Camcorders
- Blue lasers
- Glass integrated circuits
- Flash memory
- The floppy disk
- Flat panel displays
- LCDs
- Plasma screens

I think they're doing okay.
A phone that can't make/maintain proper calls IS a really serious problem.

Lying to your customers about perception (5 bars always, making the first two bigger) IS a serious problem.

When the Uberphone that was supposed to be mega-awesome has a repeatable hardware issue this IS a serious problem(even if the issue itself is minor, which it's not).
There are many hundreds of thousands of words of discussion about the WP notability criteria, and at least half of them are about everything that's wrong about WP notability criteria. It's not a casual mistake in the slightest--it's a mistake, but it's not casual. It's a perniciously systemic mistake rooted in a dysfunctional culture more interested in process than product.
Matt Ridley's The Red Queen also discusses this particular culture, being one of the extremely small number of polyandrous (one wife, multiple husbands) cultures ever known to have existed, in contrast to the extremely large number of polygamous (one husband, multiple wives) cultures. Interestingly, in the small number of cultures where it does exist, the men are always brothers -- presumably this is the only way to get the situation to work without the men killing each other and/or children which they suspect to not be theirs.

I haven't read Sex At Dawn, but human mating really has very little in common with bonobo mating. The human drive to pair-bond is actually incredibly strong (even in polygamous cultures the man almost always has one primary wife), and if I recall correctly, nearly unique among mammals (though common among birds).
That was a hack piece of journalism based on no facts and not even a finished product. As a reader I felt it was very harsh and didn't provide any examples. If he writes the same thing when Windows 7 is released and provides examples then I might listen to him. But releasing an article like that right now just lowers his street cred and makes him sound like he's jumping on the anti-MS bandwagon with everyone else...
Hah, CardMunch didn't cure cancer, but here's true story that people could relate to.

I remember one day this beta user decided to send in a bunch of cards for process. It was nothing out of the ordinary except the stream of cards just kept coming. By the end of the hour, he had sent in 470 contacts. We completed them fairly quickly, but out of curiosity we calculated exactly how much manhours we spent processing his cards.

19.93 HRs.

Arguably that's how much time he saved, because he didn't have to do everything on his own. It was pretty sweet.

So maybe the title of the story would be: "how we saved one user 19.93 hours in one Friday afternoon"?

Is that something you can relate to? :)
Revealing smartcard circuitry by boiling chips in rosin
Bah weep gragnah weep ninni bong!
I'd like to see it explain why.
And it was certainly curious how the "in depth" LA Times article (saying the Toyota problem was real) neglected to mention that all the cases they covered in the article--and listed ages for right in the article--were senior citizens...
Thank you, and no worries. It's been a few days and I'm well over it.

I get the message you were trying to get across and I agree with it.

Mainly, I perceived you as being rude and disdainful (lmgtfy, "That is your conclusion?"). I can't speak for everybody, but my immediate reaction is to feel stupid, and then get defensive. It's hard to take a step back and realize how minor it is when in the moment.

I know that was not your intention. I really do appreciate you sticking this out.
Sure, if they were in constant use, but they're used pretty sparingly. The bluetooth radio is on whenever the game hasn't been paused for a few minutes, and that dominates the power usage.
Wikipedia has the answer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anal_retentive
I, for one, appreciate the effort that the carriers have spent to pre-install apps for me!
Also, the project seems to be affiliated with CSAIL. Your everyday user has no idea who CSAIL is, but I think it's got some huge geek credibility. I wouldn't "hide" the affiliation behind the link to David Karger at the bottom of the page.
That effectively already exists. The internet isn't instant or consistent, and this is about remote timing attacks.
"The tests for Celiac are extremely good. 95% sensitivity and specificity"

Well my bloodwork came "strongly positive", and the biopsy was negative. So what do we make of that?
I don't really like approaches like this one. It's the technology that should be adapted to humans, not the contrary.
FeedBurner sucks, why haven't you built a better one?
Your comment reminds me of the Mad Men episode where they create a Lucky Strike ad campaign. The ad team offers up the slogan "It's Toasted" and the Lucky team replies that all cigarettes are toasted.

"It's Toasted" became the Lucky Strike slogan despite their protests and was a huge success. This wasn't entirely fiction of course, it was based on a true story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_Strike

See also: David Ogilvy's Shell campaign

http://www.copywriting1.com/2007/10/famous-david-ogilvy-tv-a...

And Claude Hopkins' Schlitz campaign

http://www.copywriting1.com/2007/10/claude-hopkins-schlitz-b...
It says that Isaac Asimov writes like Arthur C. Clarke.
They need sharks.
Well, whatever the critics say about apple,their products are very reliable unlike other.
Alternatively, just make everyone hate you with a burning passion, and you will NEVER be forgotten.

The villains carry on much longer in our minds. How many people who know Hitler's name remember Truman, Churchill, and FDR's involvement in the war?
Mint Condition Adobe CS3 Design Premium Software
Does anyone know how feasible this kind of attack is with real world network latency and server load fluctuations? In the end it comes down to statistics, but i could imagine forging a token this way might take a very high number of failed attempts, which might then trigger other security mechanisms?
That one "Is There Anything Good About Men?" talk from a few years ago mentions some DNA research that shows that modern humans have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors (with the corollary being that the average male with an enduring genetic line reproduced twice as often as the average female). If that's true, it's hard to imagine ancestral humans being anything near strictly monogamous.

http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm
I saw this in my facebook feed posted from a friend. I don't have the heart to tell him there's no way this will end well (CS3+that pricepoint).
Google Analytics doesn't load any stubs for async tracking, it inlines an array of "events to send" and then loads the entire GA script asynchronously. Once it's done, it runs through the list of things to track.
RSS readers suck. I've signed up for a abandoned Google Reader at least three times. Here's why:

1. I have maybe 20 or so sites I like to follow.
2. Adding all these into Google reader takes me 20-25 minutes or so. It's annoying.
3. Once I add them in, Google reader starts filling itself up with all their posts.
4. Suddenly I'm faced with two things:

a. A rapidly growing number of unread posts I'm supposed to deal with.
b. A generic, plain, boring interface in which Gizmodo articles, Slate articles, NYTimes articles....all look exactly the same, as if they'd been published by...Google.

I hate both of these things. I don't need another guilt box nagging me to do stuff all the time. And I don't know why I'd want to reduce all the lovely web sites I enjoy reading into a single, generic, designed-by-Google design. Variety is the spice of life. I'd rather just click on my bookmarks, actually go to the sites when I want to read stuff from them, and let the publishers get some ad views in the process.

I can't stand RSS readers.
That should be 1/874000 :) (assuming sound traversing air at room temperature).