skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Has anyone read the part about the new jsval types?
http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2010/08/02/mozillas-new-ja...

According to the author, the old way was to store all JS vars in 32bit C variables, so a small int was able to be stored inline, but floats, objects and strings were stores as pointers.

The author says that the last four bits stored the type info for the variable. But, since memory addresses are 8 hex characters long, a bitmask was used to convert the last four bits into another hex character, thus establishing the full pointer address.

How does this work? I mean, you only have the four bits, if the info is not right there in front of my face in those four bits, how can a mask tease out the hex character?
My GF is an incredible classical violinist. We met at music school, so I can relate to a lot of what she does quite well. But that doesn't mean I'm not consistently blown away by her skills and passion.

She does a good job listening and trying to understand the computer things I'm working on and fascinated by.
Link to alpha version: http://blog.getfirebug.com/2010/08/10/firebug-1-6a19/
"I don't think you can hope that 4.1 will fix anything. Slowness on old devices is part of Apple's planned obsolescence. How else would they get you to buy a new iPhone?"

This was my feeling, too, especially with the lack of an official way to downgrade. But there are people who are reporting no slowdown, so I'm attributing this one more to incompetence than malice.

The lack of bluetooth keyboard support in the 3G on the other hand... I guess not that different than MMS or A2DP missing from the original iPhone. These things were excluded purely for marketing reasons.
if you say your spouse is a doctor, without knowing they're a pediatrician, something is problematic. you don't have to tell uninterested passersby the exact speciality of this hypothetical spouse, unless they inquire. similarly, you don't have to tell these passersby the language your spouse programs in; but the article is suggesting you ought to know it. (and thus be able to answer if asked.)
When I met Adam, we had very few similar interests. I was a political science and philosophy major. Very social, nature-loving, etc. He was programming, hacking phone lines and owning at video games from a young age. When Adam introduced himself, my computer at the time was a Packard Bell 486 and I remember asking Adam if he could put Windows 98 on it so I could try to play a couple video games with him. He laughed at me, and simply said, "Nope, that's not going to work." :) I was never in the D&D or computer nerd crowd growing up. My small town Maine school was focused strictly on athletics. The most I had used a computer was to send aim messages to my HS boyfriend while he was at college. My own geekery really only started because I took the time to listen to Adam and pay attention to what he was doing. I was able to see how much fun he was having with his hobbies, and I wanted to be a part of that. My interests grew over time, but I'm quite sure that I wouldn't know a thing about programming, or the Ruby ecosystem today if I didn't make an effort to be engaged in his personal interests, even though they were so foreign to me at the time.
Ask HN: Experience with immigration lawyers
Greetings.
Since there are many non-Americans living and working in the US on this site, I was wondering if some of you would be willing to share your experience with immigration lawyers.
I was considering getting one approximately a year ago to help me make a plan how to obtain a green card and eventually a citizenship, but then, after doing some research on the Internet about the US immigration laws,
it did not seems to me as if a lawyer could really bring anything new to the table as the laws are fairly straightforward. Nevertheless, today I had a discussion with someone who, despite not having personal experience with immigration lawyers, claimed that a lawyer's expertise can help a lot in the whole process. This made me reconsider my opinion so I would be interested hearing about your experience.

I'm not sure if this is relevant but I'm a rising college junior originally from the Czech Republic attending a college in Massachusetts who wishes to stay in the US after graduation. I have seen the similar old threads about immigration issues on HN but this thread is more about experience with immigration lawyers rather than the process itself.

Recommendations for immigration lawyers in Massachusetts are also very welcome.

Thanks to all in advance.
What does IE9 have to do with anything?

In fact, more's the pity. Microsoft is quite capable of producing great and standards-compliant software, and they often deliberately choose not to do this.

Stop thinking about corporations in terms of 'evil' and 'good'. Start thinking about whether their interests are aligned with yours.

Google was 'good' for many years because their growth required an open, standards-compliant internet. That period is ending.
Wow, that's a whole lot of pretty major changes just for this beta. It's great that the Add-Ons manager is in a tab now rather than a window. Hopefully the Downloads window gets the same treatment.

Also: The "tabs on top" on OS X could use some touching-up - right now the tab bar is just swapped with the toolbar, and still below the window's title area. Something more like Chrome (or that Safari beta, for that matter) would be nice.
It's really widespread which is why I am on the fence so much. It's ridiculous, and you can only speculate what their reason is.
am i the only one who thinks that the language they work in is not the most interesting or fundamental aspect of their programming career?
And in most Indian languages.
Web Photos That Reveal Secrets, Like Where You Live
Well I'm supporting that cliche too. When I was a kid I took over the spare bedroom with LEGO trains and cities. I spent hours obsessively building, sort of how I write code now. Just hearing her one mention of LEGO made me want to get the blocks out and play.
yeah... 500 days ago. So what? If you're pointing out that there's insightful discussion on that thread then fine, but just saying "Dupe" seems like you're implying this posting is bad somehow. (personally I don't really think it fits with the hackernews vibe but that's a different issue)
Other services I've seen that seem to not fall into that "smaller players" category: Coremetrics, Webtrends, Unica, OneStat, and Clicky. I've worked with all of these (and some smaller players too), and I must say that for the value, you really can't beat Google Analytics. Even Omniture will have some times when the data is not available right away; especially as you start doing some more complex things with it.
So students can place bets to whether they'll get a high GPA or a low GPA (i.e. short-sell their own grades).

I'm going to find all the students that go to schools that grade on a curve and I'm going to take the opposite side of all those short-sell bets, package it into a derivative and sell that! I'll open a bunch of firms and call it "Ivy Street".

With all these prediction markets being opened up, with film companies hedging their movie scripts, I haven't looked but there's probably a market for betting on record sales. Who bets on these things? I can understand people with an edge (insiders etc), but how can there possibly be retail investors for these markets? Are stocks, bonds, mutual funds, options, futures, ETF's not enough to speculate with?
A World Without "ESR"
Would love to see, but proprietary format precludes. Ironic.
Android is, at least, designed with some degree of variation in hardware specs baked in. Dealing with something as weird as a TV would be a stretch, but it would at least be an extension of existing behavior.

iOS, on the other hand, is designed to run on a few specific devices. The iPad required some work from developers for full support — and that was for a device which still closely resembled the existing iPhone and iPod Touch.
I'm guessing that any ActiveSync features exist only by accident, from the original fork of the official Mail client. K-9 is an IMAP client, nothing else.
The Magic Trackpad still sort of assumes the presence of a cursor. I suppose you could have it use absolute positioning for this case, but that would still feel pretty inexact.
Pick Something to Fail At
Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner
That argument doesn't hold water.

a) The people with jobs without benefits are paying minuscule taxes, so it's wrong to say they are paying for the benefits of public sector employees in that sense.

b) Every time they buy something from a company that does provide benefits to some or all of its employees, those people are "paying" for someone else's benefits. But no one seems to complain about that.

This whole thing is an apples & oranges comparison. Right now, there's a class of jobs that gets benefits and a class of jobs that doesn't. Federal government jobs are overwhelmingly in the first category. Comparing them to the overall population of private sector jobs is silly.
I would offer to show them my Pearl Jam collection.
Summing up:

* The Innovator's Dilemma, and

* Mistaking a key driver of innovation and growth (software development) for a cost center.
If applying a steel spike sticking out of the steering wheel resulted in a measurable decrease in deaths from traffic accidents, would you support it?
And French, "tu" (familiar singular) and "vous" (formal singular, or plural).

English used to have "thou", but of course that's long since extinct.
"But they had the most opaque obstacle in the world between them and the truth: money."

rings true for humans too.
It's possible that they will...but also possible that they won't. Given the evidence presented, we can't know. Has anyone done a followup study?
FYI: a 'this' comment is better done by simply upvoting and not commenting at all.
I'll give a couple more examples: I consider myself to have very liberal political views. My father is a strict honest to god Republican and teetering Tea Party sympathizer. In order to be able to better understand his point of view, I have a button on my car radio set to his Republican political station. Every now and then I listen to it, even though I despise it. But I get a little glimpse into what he believes in, and what he's listening to it. Personally, I couldn't care less what the right-wing nut jobs are ranting about, but I do care about being able to communicate with my Dad about his interests.

Another: a good friend is a very talented amateur photographer. I know nothing about photography and it is not a personal interest of my own. But since my friend started learning, I ask him questions about the cameras he is buying, and the specs on each, the techniques he is practicing, etc. Because of this, my friend gets to share a really important part of his life with me, and I get to learn new things about photography and gain a certain appreciation for that art and the work that goes into it.

Take the husband/wife element out of my article. What it boils down to is opening our minds to things outside of our own spectrum. In turn, it makes the other person feel valued that you take the time to understand some basics about what they love.

I'm not suggesting that a programer's spouse should drop his/her career and become a programmer. But knowing enough to be able to hold some conversation with him/her and to be able to relate with them on some level shows that you're willing to step outside yourself, and think about what's important to the other person. I think we do this all the time in our relationships - we try to relate to our SO constantly. But programming seems to be one of those interests that are just avoided altogether in many cases.
The only free version that I found is available with 25MB. To me this isn't really an alternative to the free gmail version.

EDIT: talking about FastMail
Hello,

So you know, we have just started listing sites for sale at http://marketplace.searchforecast.com/

We typically have been dealing with sites that turnover more than $50,000 a month and most of these sales are done offline. We own and operate the CRS Conference (http://www.crsconferences.com) sponsored by Google, AOL, eBay which over 1000 publishers attend as well as many website buyers and sellers. Many of the transaction/negotiations happen at/around the Conference. In fact, our next conference is in Los Angeles in January 2011!

We also large interactive Nasdaq listed companies + other large networks actively buying domains. These large networks buy 20-30 websites a month. We know these firms personally and hence offer our clients premium access to these very reputable buyers.

Unlike many website listing websites, SearchForecast is a business which operates a large technical staff optimizing some of the largest websites in the world (BBC, Harrahs Casino, Deloitte). We also have over 20,000 visitors per month to our AdSense Directory at http://www.searchforecast.com/adsense_directory_index.php from all over the world which is why we are now listing websites for sale online.

We would certainly like to speak with you about your requirements and prefer that we post your site as a free listing on the Marketplace. We will waive the $29 listing fee by using the promo code 2740835 (we have the fee to keep away spammers!)
Follow this link to http://marketplace.searchforecast.com/selling-business.php

We do take a commission upon completion of the transaction, which is 10% but we offer a unique "Sellers Guarantee" - you only pay us when you have been paid by the buyer. This gives our clients peace of mind. For larger clients that have over $1M, we have lower success fees.

We would be happy to match the sellers commission you have in place with other agents.

I would be happy to answer any questions and look forward to hearing from you,

Best Regards,
________________________________
Marc Phillips
CEO, SearchForecast
Telephone: 650.530.0895
Cell: 415.606.0900
Email: marc.phillips@searchforecast.com
Website: http://www.searchforecast.com
Skype: marczphillips
Twitter:@SearchForecast
________________________________
Haskell does seem to have a good runtime, although I've read lots of posts talking about problems with high memory load. How much could you have accomplished if you hadn't had to spend resources on building that runtime though? How much energy are you going to expend going forward maintaining parity with the JVM, with 1/100th of the resources?

And I really do mean runtime. You can share libraries in any language but sharing a runtime with Java means I get things like bulletproof Oracle drivers, Hadoop, Netty, Mina for free and I can use Scala at the top of a very rich food chain. It took me all of about 15 minutes to get Hadoop queries running in Scala. What's the Haskell story there?
Just like a founder position for YC, just different location, and different incubator!
It's unfair to use your public school costs as evidence because they are not comparable to his numbers. Here are the numbers across the board for all college students [1]:
Median: $9K
Mean: $26K

Also, if we were to put opportunity cost into the calculations (because you could work/work more if not going to school), it would quickly approach the $25K figure.

[1]http://www.collegeboard.com/student/pay/add-it-up/4494.html
In one sentence you summed up what took me 10 paragraphs to explain. :)
I don't see this as being true. I went to a state school (UofI). It cost $700 a quarter.

I got bored and dropped out. I had absolutely no trouble finding a job. Not having a degree has not come up at all, even when working for a big corporation that does extensive background checks.

So I am not buying that college must be expensive, or that there is no way to get a job without completing college. Sure, some people are rejected from some jobs for not having a degree, and some people spend a lot of money on college for no real reason. Overspending on college is no different than overspending on anything else.

(Example: I just bought a $900 vacuum cleaner. That doesn't mean that if you don't have $900 you can't clean your house. It just means that I overspent.)
Search is one thing but what I'm uncomfortable with is how much of my personal stuff is stored on Google, stuff like mail, rss feeds (and the current read/unread state), calendars, docs, etc. I was a bit uncomfortable before and the Buzz fiasco and the recent uproar over Net Neutrality hasn't exactly eased my mind.

I would like to run my own servers for the above functionality but don't want the overhead of managing machines and backups. I could be interested in a package of products that runs the software in the cloud and configured to use my own domain name and stores data on my own S3/dropbox. In a perfect world it would be easy to switch providers for the various layers. I'm sure this is technically feasible today but I'm talking about an easy to use setup, ease of use being totally subjective of course.

I wouldn't necessarily object to using Google for one of the above layers or services, I just don't like one company having all of it.
I use the "approved" EU format for my cv. In LaTeX, of course. Wastes a ton of space, but doesn't look anything like a "default" TeX document. But still looks fab.
Rapportive also does this.
But is it worth 3 times as much as founding your own company? ;)
That was asked previously but I never really saw a (valid) answer:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1568890
If you have moral objections to Google, you don't want to be using Baidu.
Documentaries for Tech Geeks
Have you seen raplets? Being the gatekeeper to the email inboxes of thousands of people is a pretty compelling opportunity.
I wouldn't, unless the candidate pointed in that direction. I certainly wouldn't invade on their private space.

In any case, I notice quite a few folk keep a work and a personal fb a/c these days -- particularly the youngsters. I have no problem in being shifted to the work version, as appropriate.
I think there's something to be said for focusing on what the market rewards, and clearly the market wasn't rewarding yahoo for having great technology in 1998. Nor did it reward Google for having great enterprise search. You can't fault Jerry and David for not seeing search when the market had clearly supported banners with no basis for search as a viable model yet.
"The worst problem was that they hired bad programmers."

Can you provide any specific examples of how bad programmers hurt Yahoo?
I assume people are going to Google me, and it seems to be a reasonable thing to do. The top result for my name alternates between my personal site and Facebook. It's kind of silly to think people won't look at it.

Especially since I have luke.schlather as the URL, and flinchbaughschlather.com/luke is a little less obvious, even if my name's all over the page.
If node.js were just another framework, it wouldn't be very interesting. But from what I've seen so far, it's more exciting: an abstraction over the OS that factors out the machine-your-own-screws details of C while otherwise leaving the model intact. That is, instead of a top-down design that replaces the OS's low-level ways with something else and then maps between the two, it's a bottom-up design that attempts not to change anything important about the way the lower level works. This I think is what Ryan means when he says he's suspicious of abstraction. The result is something more like "the ability to write C programs in Javascript" than "a better web framework". This strikes me as powerful and capable of evolving in some interesting directions.

Bottom-up design is not common. But it should be. Done well, it's a way to have your cake (abstraction) and eat it too (performance).
How about the 3rd universal factor: growing too big too soon?
I'm not sure I'm understanding you right; a hex character is four bits. To tease a hex character out of a 32 bit int, you'd apply a max of 0000000F, where F is the last four bits.
Nothing Grows Forever - No Growth Economics
There even was a module system but it got scrapped. Complexity and impact on the core language among the reasons.
Bad programmers wrote a bad search engine, and Yahoo lost all their traffic to the good search engine?
I used these guys: http://www.vgkids.com/

They were really nice people, on-time, quality printing and did some extra design work to get our design ready for t-shirts.
> " You can get programmers who would never have come to you as employees by buying their startups. But so far the only companies smart enough to do this are companies smart enough not to need to."

Yahoo did do this through the Inktomi (Yahoo Search, 2003-2010) acquisition. I've worked in that organization and learned a tremendous amount from the people. At that time the hiring bar had been considerably raised from what Graham describes (I have no idea whether that was the rule or the exception at that time, I was there 8 years later), nobody was shy of rejecting weak candidates. Much of the knowledge did diffuse to rest of the organization and it's important to note that along side the "dot-com-wannabe-millionaire-vesting-in-peace" crowd the essay describes, there was plenty of genuine technical talent (anyone who has worked there can attest to presence and influence of hackers).

Unfortunately, for many reasons, that talent has slowly bled out. There was also a great amount of friction between Search and rest of the organization e.g., resistance (by Search engineers) to dog-fooding of what was often inferior technology. Search was, however, able to maintain a different platform, remaining on Linux, with their own platform/software stack, but were some "wtf" moments like porting and forcing the adoption of a custom user space locking library from FreeBSD when Linux already had futex (on the other hand, the fact there was a custom locking library built in a "media company" does say something).

The other key mistake made is that they would position bright, capable new hires in areas that weren't directly correlated to revenue and treated as cost centers. That just seemed highly illogical to me. It's a mistake that's often difficult to fix: once young graduates are used to working on glamorous projects, it's much harder to get them to work on more mundane, but revenue critical projects such as advertiser systems. Google's strategy of a uniformly high hiring bar (vs. some teams hiring people other teams rejected for roles involving the same skill-set) and assigning hires to business priority projects (while allowing individuals to transfer if the project wasn't their cup of tea, with proper incentives in place for some projects) seems to be (at least from an outside point of view, I've never worked at Google) better.
I really don't get these Yahoo is dead stories. It's still the biggest site in the world if all it's properties are put together.
Australian national broadband network speed jumps to 1Gbps
Upcoming Apple TV loses 1080p playback, gains apps... and will be renamed iTV
though that would skew the referrals and other metrics wouldn't it?
I concur. Despite the PHP-bashing that goes on, it's a very powerful platform, but massively abused in too many cases by non-programmers who often think that they can program.

MS-stack-only experience makes any candidate a non-starter for me, unless they are very inexperience, but they must show enthusiasm for getting the hell out of the hole.
Excellent article. Note though that the pilot did not technically eject, his ejection seat was ripped out of the disintegrating plane intact by aerodynamic forces. Though the experience is probably applicable to the case where a pilot were to intentionally eject at Mach 3.
As far as I was concerned (admittedly I was still a kid at the time), all that mattered was the Yahoo homepage was garish and full of ads, and the results were hard to sift through (because they were full of 'sponsored links' and the page was equally garish). Google was the antithesis of all that, and that's why I used, liked, and rooted for Google.