skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How would PEP 380 improve Monocle style programming?

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0380/

I don't have enough experience to really understand.
I don't want to commit for that long to a single type of instance.
(Looks at downmods) I'm surprised that HN seems to be against any accessibility technology.

ASCIIs art's useful, but it's not quite so popular as it once was, and doesn't justify forcing presentation. Reading Guido's post on a phone was completely painful.
Facebook Terms and Conditions on Crawling
Vitamin D via sun, meats, or supplementation is likely beneficial even if you don't "feel" any difference. But also, most pro-vitamin-D sources suggest 2000IU or more per day -- sometimes much more, though traditionally there was thought to be toxicity risks at very high doses.
Well said and agreed. One size never fits all. I try to present as many choices as possible in an article, and hopefully readers discern what works best for them. Sometimes you don't know until you try either.
Fair enough, but your average t-shirt is also somewhere around SPF 10, leaving you almost completely exposed even when you feel fully clothed.

It's like UV has some sort of x-ray goggle-like ability...
It is a natural choice. 3,600 lb is more than the weight of any human in the world, and elephants can't jump.
I'm a little bit slow with the low level stuff. Could someone explain what's so horrific about this code?
Yeah, it's very short notice. Sorry about that. The plan to bring phones for developers landed at the last minute. But, given the opportunity to do it or not, we opted to do it.
Yes, those people probably don't support it, but there isn't the loud controversy that you see over gay marriage. Most people are on one side or the other, but pretty close to the "meh" line, with probably more fervor on the pro-marijuana side.
Enso launched a Maemo powered 3G phone
I meant that we used to have our own datacenter.

Yes, the dedicated servers might be less. But when one of them breaks, I have to wait for the provider to fix it. On EC2, I can replace it in 5 minutes.
Join a local club and do some volunteer work. I suggest Habitat for Humanity, (they build houses by hand for the poor)
Are you familiar with any theory as to how your natural D-making capability atrophied? (Is there evidence that it is lost over time in the absence of sun exposure?)
And what to do if you are Google and your business model is predicated on people with poor impulse control?

Ad land's been a long time darkside after http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

I guess we all have our shadow.
This might be a stupid question, but what are you meant to do if not cast malloc's return?

My C is a bit rusty, but how else are you meant to allocate data of different types on the heap?
Anyone up for a game of Age of Kings?
Illustrating The Team
Magicprefs will do this for you. It's free and works well most of the time. It actually has a bunch of settings you can change and tweak. One of those settings is a middle click and it allows you to change the hit zone so you can make the middle click really large or small depending on what you want.

Someone mentioned above jitouch which handles the mm trackpad and the magic pad. I haven't tried it but it looks interesting. Not free though.

Edit: I just tried out jitouch and it works with magicprefs as much as I use it for. I only use magicprefs for the middle click function and the tracking speed. I really like the tap to switch tabs. It's a well made application and only 6 bucks. I think I am going to permanently use it now.
sort of related, on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/93yaq/anyone_else...
Yeah, Canadian flight prices are more expensive than US domestic flight (even when going to the US), not by a huge amount but enough to dissuade frequent use.
as always, you get what you pay for.
I meant that we used to have our own datacenter.

Yes, the dedicated servers might be less. But when one of them breaks, I have to wait for the provider to fix it. On EC2, I can replace it in 5 minutes.

> I started out on VPSs and saved a lot moving to dedicated servers once it made sense to. For the dedi servers I use I don't have to pay for RAM monthly, and I get bandwidth at a good price.

EC2 doesn't charge for RAM either and the bandwidth is at a great price.

> The kind of money you're paying on servers is just obscene.

It's really not that much more than other hosting providers, and they offer features that the other ones don't. The two biggest being the speed with which I can add new machines and the speed I can add more disk.
The magic mouse has that type of scrolling as a setting you can enable.
What is the difference between a boy and a man?

Which one do you think you are, and which one would you like to be?
I pre-ordered from Gamestop and picked up two copies pretty quickly after midnight.
Please do. I briefly debated choosing 'meth' or 'coke' in my analogy, and went with heroin because the it's one of the few drugs that is frequently fully demonized, and because I worried the others were American slang. I think heroin better creates the impression I want, although meth might be more technically accurate.

Note that the analogy is not that each individual user will suffer as due to drug addiction, but that the community as a whole will be ravaged by the cumulative effects of the drug. Compare the comment quality on Digg, Reddit, and HN as viewed through the light of http://www.montanameth.org/View_Ads/index.php.
GCC whines and moans, but treats it like a pointer to char.
5 Startups Graduate From New York's Answer To Y Combinator
lol...I think it was fixed. We're going to have a startup weekend polishing session.
> I wonder why google, yahoo and facebook don't run their site on ec2... if it's cheaper.

Well, for one, they are A LOT bigger than us. But you'd be surprised who DOES run on EC2. The biggest one I'm allowed to tell you about is Netflix. Their entire streaming service is run off EC2. I guess they're idiots too, huh?
Vitamin D for the win. A close friend of mine was suffering from intense, debilitating balance problems for months and months, visited tons of doctors, and finally one of them said, "Your Vitamin D levels are really low. An italian can't really get enough sun living in San Francisco." He started taking Vitamin D and the problems largely went away.
There's been some work on writing multitouch drivers for Linux: http://lii-enac.fr/en/projects/shareit/linux.html

It's a bit of effort because it requires new functionality throughout the software stack, from the low-level kernel drivers to higher-level X hooks, and ideally in the future, hooks in UI toolkits to do more application-level things with gestures.
It feels strange to consider myself a hardcore gamer, with gaming PC, Xbox 360, PS3, etcetera, and to have never played the original Starcraft. Not a big RTS fan, I suppose, but I love most other genres. And yet here I am with a Wings of Liberty box sitting at my desk.

Read through the manual, especially the nine (!) pages they devote to the plot in teeny tiny text. For a newcomer it's extremely confusing. The Zerg make sense, but the constant shifting of Terran allegiances and Protoss character names make my head swim. IGN's five minute video summary helped, though I had to watch it three times.

I take it Kerrigan is the anti-hero everyone loves, vaguely like FFVII's Sephiroth. And there appears to be some slight debate as to whether there's any humanity left in her, though her temporary alliances appear to be more for strategic convenience than any real compassion.

What I'd like to know from my fellow HN gamers is the emotion of it. What were the shocking moments? The tearful bits? Were there any? What would I feel about Jim Raynor if I played through Starcraft and Brood War? Am I supposed to think Kerrigan as the Queen of Blades is sexy, or am I supposed to be repulsed by the... things growing out of her back?
Don't believe numbers from Nielson, NPD group, Marc, Ad Mob, etc. The only real numbers are GAAP that come out of the accounting department. This is true for Old Spice, iPhone vs Android, game consoles, etc.
ASP.NET MVC 3: New ViewModel is dynamic ViewData
> But they don't. So they use none of the upside, and have all of the downside. Yay!

That's not true at all. We shut down machines when we are over capacity (rarely) and we often have to bring up a bunch of new machines where there is a traffic spike.
This is much harder. You should start with things that are every day, for your first month or two, so you are already doing well and motivated to continue. And even then I would pick the days of the week beforehand, so you're not tempted to put it off through the week.
I enjoyed the Old Spice ads so much that I considered going out and buying some just as a way of saying thanks. Call it a charitable donation to support the arts.

(I still haven't actually bought any, though, as I still can't get over my mental image of Old Spice as "really cheap cologne.)
The situation with emergency exit seats varies from airline to airline. Many won't let you reserve one in advance, or only allow preferred or full-fare customers to reserve. JetBlue (once again) charges $40 if you want to reserve one.
TechCrunch Doing Sponsored Guest Posts?
Oh, I would love to have pigs, but the wife is not thrilled about the idea so for now I have to content myself with chickens :-(

Do you read Walter Jeffries blog on Sugar Mountain Farm? http://flashweb.com He has a lot to say about how he raises his pigs on pasture using free surplus whey & milk from local dairies, etc. I've learned a lot from him about raising chickens & pigs.
It's the whole business class package. Fast track through security, a quiet lounge where you can work, enough carry-on that you never need to check a bag, etc etc. Plus you get to only be around frequent flyers, so no hassle with people who don't know that they should take their keys out of their pockets BEFORE reaching security...

Several airlines now are doing flat beds in Business and private cabins in First.
This is an interesting/useful reply http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/07...
$60 for this particular release - I believe this release only includes the 'Terran' missions - subsequent releases, each $60, will include the 'Zerg' and 'Protoss' specific missions.

Thats what got me...I would have purchased it but the pricing out for each set of missions and removal of LAN play has made me postpone purchase...Shoot, I'll try to wait till it comes out in a 'combo' release in a few years...I'll try!
The idea is solid in theory, but in practice I would not use it. Without tactile feedback it just feels weird and imprecise, and I can't help but look at the keyboardto make sure I press the right keys even on the ultralight keyboards that still have seperate buttons.
Hmm. The guy is tremendous, the commercials are funny. And they're memorable.

And I still dont like aldehyde based scents, and prefer my herbalist to make my own scents. They cost a bit more than normal, but last years. Guess that's the kind of people I associate with being a witch and all.
I honestly don't think it's placebo. MacBooks are the only laptop I've ever owned where I've never felt inclined to use a mouse instead of the trackpad. They really are that good.
Earth has locked rotation with the sun rather than stopped altogether, but this is related and a fun read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hothouse_(novel)
C allows implict casting of void* to any other kind of pointer. Hence, you never need to cast the return from a malloc if you're storing it in a pointer.

C++, however, does not allow this. So, if for some reason you're calling malloc rather than new in C++, you need to cast.
How Aptela Achieves Replication and Scaling with CouchDB
I'll second that. I actually find using a desktop computer with a separated mouse and keyboard to be uncomfortable as compared to the MBP with the big, multitouch trackpad.
The story was never the strong point of StarCraft. It's a fairly generic cowboys in space run into Aliens and Vulcans type plot.

What made StarCraft stand out was the incredible depth of its competitive multiplayer that allowed for emergent strategies to be discovered. The map editor was also brilliant and let people create incredible new variants.
C's function call mechanism requires internal maintenance of a call stack, which the programmer ordinarily never has to touch. The broken code author claims that he needs to manipulate said stack to write his Scheme interpreter. He does it wrong in a way that might pass the trivial "hello" test case under Linux, and blames Cygwin when it doesn't even pass that.
Interestingly:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cu9vv/lastfm_ha...
Well, if you're getting into that, you're far enough down into the rabbit hole of optimization that you probably have a reason for being there and some business specific logic that would drive some of your specific tunings..

I'd generally recommend a selector identifying sockets that are ok for write and then delegating to a caching thread pool to handle actual transferTos. If that select loop becomes your bottleneck, you can of course horizontally scale that and have a set of selectors, striping the register()s across them to get less lock contention and having them all feed into the caching threadpool.
I would like to be able to delegate my vote on particular subjects to particular people. That way I don't have to worry if an economist I respect has a restrictive idea of gay rights or something like that, I can just pick a trustworthy delegate for each topic. A computer can ask me to break conflicts where it appears that a particular law should go to two different delegates.
You can buy hight quality batteries that last long more than alcalines. I use varta +2100mAh.
It seems like HN's anti procrastination feature isn't well known. I now am only entitled 2 twenty minute sessions a day. The first one starts when I first get to work, the second one at about lunch time. It works great, highly recommended for those who are lacking a bit in the will power.

It also makes getting sucked into debates impossible.
You don't have to move your hand... if you've put the trackpad under your toes!
Good catch!

That's a very good point, and a very hard bug to see when you "get lazy" and use a, b, c as step names.
Nice article. I'll be very interested to see if the new legislation actually leads to improvements in this area. It's always made me furious that the credit bureaus collect and compile all this information about me that I already know, but then want me to pay to see it in the format they present (unless I live in a state that allows a yearly view for free).
That's the problem you see.

No one takes a job in mathematics, down here the trend is to do engineering get a MBA and work in Goldman Sachs. I wish this wasn't so, but it's quite true. There are precious few souls who try to buck the norm, but they are far and few in between.

Most mathematicians end up in coaching institutions which exist for one thing; to "crack" the IIT-JEE for the aforementioned rat race. I really wish I could sell them short, but outside the IISc and TIFR along with a few other research organizations there is hardly any innovation taking place. Most universities are intellectually dead and students study only to get "placements" in some company so that they can prepare for their MBA later on.

I know that this sounds like an excessive generalization, but I live near one of those prestigious IITs and I've worked with a PhD student as well as solicited the advice of a few professors. You know what shocked me? One of them, who is one of the original brilliant researchers and an ex-dean, told me point blank to get the hell out of this country and that my future isn't over here.

I really want to change things, but since I am in this system I simply can't do it. However, at least I can speak the truth. Please try to understand that I am not judging anyone in this context. It isn't anybody's fault. It's just a reflection of how the majority of this society thinks.
It is much more subtle, but just as ugly. These days, bright, thoughtful, enlightened people assume that the absence of women in certain fields results from women being unable to compete on merit. The assumption that, if someone creates a scholarship for women, it is because otherwise, women can’t hack it.

I tend to think it is that women often don't have the type of personality that allows them to enjoy a highly technical field. I can't be the only one whose noticed that a lot of computer scientists have some mildly autistic qualities. I do okay in most social situations but I have gone weeks without talking to anyone (besides the cashier at the grocery store, etc.) and I have been the awkward guy in a number of situations. And I am much better socialized than a lot of my colleges at work and in college. The field appears to attract this type of personality, I don't know why. And women appear to have these problems less frequently and less seriously than men do. And this also jives with her "code cowboy" stereotype.
Night life at Cal Academy of Sciences is worth checking out http://www.calacademy.org/
I'd be embarrassed too if someone caught me visiting Perez Hilton. I'm thinking Google should keep an eye on those people.
Thanks for the sharing the link - great read.

I used to have inadequate levels of Vitamin D at 13 ng/ML and jumped on 50,000 IU supplements for 8 weeks and now am on 5000 IU every 2nd day.

My Vitamin D levels are back into the healthy zone at 54 ng/ML and it has certainly made a massive difference in my well being and resistance to flu.

I obviously had to blog about it since it's such a cheap and simple fix to your health. Hence why pharmaceutical companies won’t talk about it..
http://blog.ernestsemerda.com/2010/02/09/we-are-starving-our...
For one thing, he's using assembly of one type of machine and expects it to work on different type of machine. He confuses Linux as a machine abstraction and demands that Cygwin running on Windows to be the same.

For the low level mess, he sets the stack frame pointer to a uninitialized heap-allocated buffer which contains God-know-what garbage. When main() returns, it pops its return address from the stack frame pointer, which contains garbage and crashes. The printf() might sometime work depending on how the compiler emits code to set up the stack frame.

It just shows how dangerous some ignorant programmers can be.
Belkin could release this exact same thing and it would break after two weeks.
This is exactly true. Not to mention "DevOps" is not a job position, it's a culture and philosophy. In the past few months as DevOps has taken off, people listing for "DevOps" job titles usually mean highly proficient sysadmins. In this case, Twilio just wants a developer with a cloud management background. There's nothing DevOpsy about it.

I'm sad that people are not taking the time to learn exactly what DevOps means and thusly commandeering the name for whatever they think they need.
I realized that people who stand around the window watching the construction workers are not actually doing anything useful. Although they feel like they are having a blast.

Whoah. Feeling like you are having a blast is useful. This isn't a sweatshop.

There are a lot of solitary software engineers out there - either freelancers or people embedded in a "regular" office setting or people surrounded by programmers who really don't like coding (hard to believe, I know!). "Virtual" watercoolers like HN do serve a social function and there's nothing shameful about it.

The only downside is that there is an implicit timer for watercooler chats, whereas it is possible to dip in and out of HN all day. Well, if that is a problem for somebody, they know where to find the procrastination setting.

Obviously with any community, after you have been around it long enough you can get the "ok I've heard everything" feeling. In which case it is quite natural to move on, but that doesn't mean the community is worthless, just that you have extracted all the value you could out of it.
The pie chart should have used matching colors for domains that appeared on both pies.
Considering the amount of websites that use Google Analytics this will result in an almost constant sound. At least the websites I browse often.

But it's an interesting project to make people aware of the amount of data they send to Google. I just dont think that people that do not know this will install a plugin like this.. Or use FireFox at all.
I agree, with the exception that you should never view organic traffic as free. Even if you didn't spend any money on SEO directly(e.g. buying links) SEO can be very time consuming, and you should always consider the opportunity cost of time spent on SEO versus other traffic sources.

I pay my outsourced employees who do SEO for me by the hour, so maybe I feel the financial pinch of a large scale SEO campaign more than others, but any time spent on SEO by anyone in your startup is money.
Ask HN: What tools do you use to communicate with your early adopter community?
What tools do you use to communicate with and receive feedback from your early adopter community? (especially for web services) Google Groups? Facebook Groups? Or does services like Uservoice and GetSatisfaction work well? Would love to hear pros and cons.
I'm not sure what you mean by this.

I write code that directly controls physical equipment. I work specifically for the Software Development department and we are the only people who have control & responsibility for software. While the electronic aspect of the systems are controlled by our EEs, Software has complete responsibility for the code.
The Ultimate Startup Car
Start their own business, obviously. Then they can get shares in that.
gcc relies on the stack to handle function calls.

In this case he's using in-line assembly to modify the stack pointer.

That's bound to end in bad results.....
Well, you'd at least hope so.
The core concern of Transhumanity is the Human condition itself
Cheap cologne with hormone disruptors. Have fun not being able to have kids if you wear it.
The asm statement puts the pointer (the malloc(5000)+5000's result) into the stack pointer. When the arguments are passed into fprintf(), they're pushed on top of that frame (presumably back into the malloc'd block).

In my book, a worthy attempt to grow your stack on the heap, but you've really got to be ready to hit the asm debugger when things go awry.

Edit: as mentioned in other comments, the mistake was (at least) in not restoring the stack pointer before main returned.
While I always enjoy a good rant, I don't see why it had to be so vicious and insulting. Yeah, the guy's clearly pretty confused (if he wanted to do these kind of tricks, I'd try to use setjmp, fiddle with the structure, then longjmp to it), but there's no reason to be mean about it.
I noticed that people rarely use the foursquare "to-do" section, so started working on a similar project a few weeks ago.

There are lots of interesting things you can do with the data once you get it.

You appear to be going more along the lines of a 43things/plancast. I'm not going for the exact same space, but I'm sure there is some overlap.

I'm not sure I get the name 8tysix. Is there a reference I'm missing?

Overall, I like your homepage design. But once I get into the app, there are lots of alignment issues and stuff that I'm not digging.

I suspect you just rushed this out to get some feedback, but I would have liked to see more of a polish on the beta.
I don't know if this was standard security or it was there for the Olympics, I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out either way. It was just surprising since they were relatively heavily armed.

As for the bombing threat: bad guys don't need to be on the train to bomb the train. Also, unlike commuter train or subway it's a "low people-density" train.
I've had similar results with my projects. PPC was the main driver of sales, and press releases proved worthless. The only successful PR I've done is reaching out to bloggers in the space with a personalized email.