skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's great to read a counter argument to the prevailing wisdom, with data to back it up. I've often thought that the argument that "if you can't find at least one person to join you, then your idea (or you) must not be that great" was a little disingenuous. That statement makes sense in certain contexts, such as when someone has just graduated from university and is living rent free in their parent's basement (it is assumed that their potential co-founders are in a similar situation). It makes less sense when a person is working 9-5 and has a mortgage. It turns out that individuals who are willing to burn the midnight oil for months or years after getting off work because they are passionate about an idea are quite rare. The likelihood of finding a similar individual to partner with within their network of friends, and who will contribute at a commensurate level, is diminishingly small. Perpetuating the above idea does this group a disservice. Instead of rooting for them we are, in essence, saying, “there’s something wrong with you or your idea” per se if you’re a single founder.
Yeah, I really dislike those watered down, make-everyone-happy type of review conclusions. Take a stand!
A scary thought. I'd expect there to be more interest in the HN community. Are we really too busy building stupid Facebook apps & crappy 'social' startups to stop caring when something like this happens? http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/work-on-stuff-that-matters-...
I'm glad to know that I'm not the only person who thinks CM fonts are ugly!
I've just saw the pdf, I think that that was his first iteration for this idea.

I always felt that there aren't strong convention in C development because everybody "says I know C" and codes in his own way - therefor you can easily get unmaintainable code.
Googlers are fine with admitting the small errors. I had a bug, this design isn't so great, the evals show this change to be a big loss. Those are the easy ones to admit. The big errors -- this product sucks, this idea is bad, eighty percent of the support personell on this piece of infrastructure are uncooperative jerks -- come less easily.

Anyway, eng doesn't really run Google any more. PM does. Eng can still push back to some extent and feels important when they control huge budgets for new datacenters. But who designs, specifies and ultimately controls the products for which those datacenters are being allocated? Most everything you see, good or bad, that happens on Google these days came from a PM.
Web-based jailbreak relies on unpatched iOS PDF flaw
Terrible Approach -> Give all Posterous import tool users goatse

Bad -> Block a whole rack space

Good -> Negotiate some sort of deal with Posterous

Better -> Let this site access the rss feed

Say I run a blog on the Rackspace Cloud, and want to use my own custom script to rip photos from my personal TwitPic account. Well, I can't because it is banned. In it's entirety.

It seems to have worked in the sense that the Posterous import tool no longer functions. It does not seem to work in the sense that they banned, albeit small, section of their user base.
Not true. Some of the money the Ponzi operator takes in is siphoned off to himself, in the form of "fees" or whatever. That's the reason he's in it for, in part, along with hopefully absconding with ideally the entirety of the last big round just before he folds it and runs and or gets exposed. Ideally, he just keeps it going for a long time and and his fees grow since it's a percentage.

Wall Street refers to this big amorphous blob comprised of many individual entities and transactions and businesses. Some of them do very much resemble Ponzi schemes. All of them? Of course not. Some? Yes.
That's idealism talking, but practically speaking experimenters are invested in the outcomes of all but the least interesting experiments. Nobody wants the search feature they spent a month implementing to come back with negative results on evaluation. This is not only true at Google.

Some of the stuff in this sounds nice but I feel it lacks some honesty. "What is the thing you have been the most wrong about?" And you say that the worst error in judgment you've made is an off-hand remark in a meeting? Let's be serious here.

His call on big mistakes from Google seems good but I doubt Google could have executed on it even if they had known how big Facebook would be beforehand. Big G is not a product company and is best at making products that minimize the time you have to spend using them.
What happens if the native code enters, say, an infinite loop?
Good to hear. Then I'm looking forward to seeing TEDxBoulder this upcoming Saturday. Hopefully we'll have some talks on par with this one or those from the main TED conference.
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An education is what you make of it. Those of us that "survived" the pursuit of the "asinine" found a way to take advantage of the many resources a schooling system offers to compensate for any deficiencies and learned a great deal. Those resources are your fellow classmates, your teachers (imagine that), clubs, sports, and I can go on and on.
I never let schooling get in the way of my education, but I'm pretty sure that's at least partially responsible for me getting rejected from all the colleges I even remotely wanted to attend. So I can't say the system is really in place to support people who do their own thing. It's not a realistic option for most people to start deviating from schooling. I mean you've got to be really above average to be able to quit or marginalize school and still succeed in our institutionalized world. You'd basically have to start from scratch (or at least start much lower than if you subjected yourself to the education system).

The dilemma here is that some students when left alone can thrive without having a safety net education regiment, while some may just play games all day and waste away. And perhaps some may get too specialized and lack other basic skills a standardized education would guarantee. I think if there is going to be change, we have to start looking into whether or not those things are true. Lots of kids are home schooled right? The data should be there.

If kids have to learn how to drive then they should do the driving, and school should just provide the vehicle. Can't learn to drive while sitting in a bus (but it's more economical).
IIRC MobileOrg is open source. Let's get to hacking!
Even with the threads possibly stopping at unsafe points, a mostly precise scan (saving the last stack frame) can be done if the stack maps are maintained for all the call-sites.
So just to get this straight. You have to have music playing from Pastebot in the background for it to remain active? (even if it's a silent song) If you stop the music, does iOS freeze the app?

Well luckily the iPhone has a very long audio playback on it's battery I guess!
That imposes an uncalled for runtime overhead. A better way would be to implement it using code-patching, by overwriting the instructions at specific pre-determined locations which will then cause the thread to halt when executed.
Testing, ranking and inspecting have become all too pervasive?

In Finland national testing, school ranking lists and inspection systems do not exist.
Unfortunately behind this facade it still manages to focus quite heavily on rote memorization.

http://www.oph.fi/english/education
I have owned and used pretty much every single GTD app on the market.

OmniFocus has been the winner for me simply due to its maturity. I use it in conjunction with org-mode for Emacs. org-mode is what I use for managing my code and computing environment. OmniFocus is bigger picture: "Call so-and-so @Phone"

I have to also drop my hat in the ring for TaskPaper. It's quite well done.

However, OmniFocus is unfortunate in the sense that you cannot export a flat file. It also is unfortunate how big of a behemoth the iPhone application is. I wish they'd include a standalone quick entry application so I don't have to load the entire database every single time I use the app.
How is Spotify at making coherent playlists? I'm tempted to try it, but I'm beyond satisfied with how well Pandora queues up songs in a sensible order without jarring transitions, and I'm wondering if Spotify is comparable in that respect.
The difference is that startups go out of business when they fail, whereas publishing papers like this is considered success in academia.
Technically nothing stops you from opening the raw device and to start reading packets. Sooner or later you'll need to figure out when your packets can be forwarded to the next layer for processing so work can be done for a particular connection.

And that's what the kernel did for you all along. The abstraction of file descriptors for clients is a useful one, it allows you to decide what to do. The decision here is not 'do I want all this data in one stream' or 'do I want it demultiplexed', the kernel does a fairly good job of the demultiplexing that needs to be done anyway (re-assembling a stream of packets in to functioning connections is non-trivial) and it exports that interface to all user processes to avoid having to recreate that useful abstraction in those user processes.

It's possible there is some gain to be had by 'rolling your own' and by getting rid of the kernel abstraction by collapsing all these layers in to a single user mode program.

But I think you'd soon find that you are simply re-implementing all that code, and that instead of a clean (poll or epoll, either is fairly clean) interface you'd be bogged down in maintaining your own tcp stack.

I once ran in to a situation like the one you describe. I was the programmer in charge of coding up a driver for a high speed serial card (high speed at the time, nowadays we'd laugh at it) doing X.25. I'd nicely laid it out as two separate pieces of software talking to each other using message passing on a weird but wonderful little os called QnX. One process to handle the data link layer, one to handle the X.25 protocol.

After a series of benchmarks with 8 such cards in a single ISA industrial enclosure, together with a (for the time) very expensive micronics 33 MHz motherboard I figured that maybe we can gain some performance by merging the two processes, to save on the IPC. The end result? Identical performance, in spite of the message passing overhead the bit-twiddling, checksumming and actual IO was such a large portion of the work done that the IPC didn't matter at all performance wise.

But it did matter to the code, the second version was decidedly harder to debug and maintain, and eventually that 'branch' was scrapped in favour of the one where the layers were clearly separated.

Poll and Epoll are communications mechanisms, they communicate with the kernel about the state of a bunch of fds. Both implement the same functionality (as long as you don't use the actual events of epoll) from a programmers point of view. Both have slightly different use cases, and for some situations it may be advantageous to use the one or the other. There may be a difference, but on the whole it will probably not be a very large one once you factor in all the other stuff that needs doing.
thank you for the compliment. agreed the site would possibly be improved if certain topics were banned or at least better moderated. it's hard to get rid of all the bathwater without getting rid of little painful parts of the baby though. :)
I like your idea of changing the color of the letters if they are in a different language. I might actually work on that.
I beg to differ. People that develop a grit are the ones telling those that didn't what to do. If they couldn't get the work done, how else do you expect them to lead? You can't define a submissive person as simply as above. A submissive person is also one that didn't have the grit to develop his communication skills, his people skills, his critical thinking skills, and his creativity, etc.
Not to engage in the no true scotsman fallacy, but then by definition, your subjective experience was not the pursuit of the asinine. That doesn't mean other people's subjective experiences do not fall squarely within that realm.
If he'd spent some space on neurology, he'd know that forgetting things doesn't create space for new memories.
If it helps, I've actually ditched the desktop version in favor of the iPad client, except in the limited case of moving tasks from e-mail to OF. Everything else I do on the iPad client now.

It's fantastic. Forecast view is probably one of the best things to ever happen to me.
Free Text Editors to Open Large Text files
14 Ways to Make Yourself Better Right Now
I know it is a big issue. I should have made my disgust and sarcasm more apparent in my post.
Working on a site to help name all of you guys's projects, by making it free and fun to crowdsource names: Needanym (http://www.needanym.com)

Beta testers welcome!
Also, how easy a company is to pitch (and therefore find another to join you) is absolutely irrelevant to how good the idea is. If there's a relation, it's most likely inverse -- unless you mean by "good idea", "able to get further funding." (Pets.com was easy to pitch, Google not so much.)

I'm a sole founder. I progress for the same reason I breathe; there's no "not breathing." And because I'm a sole founder, nothing can stop me. No co-founder issues, no arguing. The worst I face is that I can be slowed down. Nothing can stop me.
To write such an eloquent and thought provoking piece as this, her education must have taught her something more than just memorisation and facts.
Also: Sun never had the opportunity to sue anyone else who made a competing Unix-like OS. If they did, then sure, IBM-type tactic would have certainly held off their competitors.
Of course Android can be hacked, so what else is new?
> Right now, users are "trained" (to dignify what's happening) to look at the browser URL bar for a name and a lock icon.

If only that were true.

A payment gateway I stumbled across the other day (http://www.centricom.com/flashdemo/POLi_demo.html) gets the user to download an application which they use to log into their bank from. The intro video instructs the user to check the address bar and the lock icon in the fake browser they've just downloaded. The best part is that the payment gateway goes through all this so they can edit the HTML of the users bank and inject payment details.

One of the Australian airlines is pushing this instead of Paypal, and it's getting real world use.
I went to a very competitive public school. They looked at more than just my grades. I'm sorry that you got rejected, but quite frankly, if you didn't get good grades, it's hard for a school to vouch for you mastering basic skills you'll need at the next level. If however, those grades are a reflection of one of many problems of obstacles you may have faced, then that's where your personal statement comes in. If you decided to do your own thing, then as someone reading applications, I'd rather give your spot to someone else and wish you well in that sense.

Whether you decide to go to college or drop out is a decision I hope everyone can live with either way. At the end of the day, yes, find what you love and do what you love. Schooling is a great, great way to learn how to do many things, meet many great people, etc. It's not the only path, but it's an easier path for most people because you have the threads of people who came before you and would know how to guide you--assuming you're on the lookout.
Can you please elaborate why you want to focus on the professional under-graduate courses? I share the same anguish and thinking on it led me to believe that the process should start much early (High School and Higher-Secondary). This provides an opportunity to help the kids to work their ways independently (against the social pressure) and figure out what they want to do when it comes to picking an under-graduate course. Given that the current generation has seen much more financial independence than the previous ones (and possibly sharing the same anguish), I think this is the right time to drive the schooling system in the right direction.
As her brain does not cease to function when she leaves school grounds, there is no reason to believe she did not gain her perspicacity elsewhere.
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/53/41558958.pdf tells me that non-commercial (government or government-subsidized) R&D represents ~1% of GDP in 2006 for the US. I believe equivalent figures for the 1800s would be closer to 0% R&D inasmuch as there were no Departments of Energy, Health & Human Services, etc., but I'm willing to be proven wrong. Maybe the Gilded Age governments in the US actually spent 2% of GDP on R&D.
Porting Galcon using the Android NDK
That sort of anti corporation FUD belongs on Reddit IMHO.
You're right about needing basic understanding of everything. However schooling goes much further beyond that. You can take college level courses in high school. A college level education is supposed to summarize your professional capabilities. As you can see, the problem is that youth is swallowed up by an educational itinerary that leaves very little time for you to do what you want at a time you can make the most out of it.
I think it's the other way around.

Top pupils quit their post-school projects because they don't have teachers standing over them offering gold stars and punishments. They're so resigned to extrinsic motivation that it takes years to rediscover the creative, inner self: the guy that, without setting any goals, enjoyed lego and learning to speak english.
Posterous should make a client-side proxy for pulling the feed. Just a small Java applet, or Flash or whatever (I'm not 100% sure how cross-site protection is implemented), and have users run that to down- and upload the pictures.

Once that's in place they can send an email to twitpic, telling them that they've circumvented the block, and they should feel free to unblock Rackspace.
It totally makes sense. You should also be able to choose to use more than one socket (but not so many as there are clients), in case you still want to take advantage of all the cores available.
Vic Gundotra leads Google in Social war w/ Facebook
> If the server software is using a queue and thread model, it likely then gets that data which the kernel has gone to great effort to demultiplex into N streams and provide it through N separate file descriptors--and multiplexes back onto a single queue for the worker threads to pull from!

This would indeed make no sense were it not for the fact that only a subset of the data received on the network card is actually intended for your server app.

You want a single file descriptor on which you can read data only destined for your port. At that point the data must already be demultiplexed by the kernel or you'd get the data destined for all possible ports.

I'm not sure not demultiplexing data will win you that much because the kernel had to demultiplex it anyway regardless. But if you want to implement this and try it out, by all means go ahead.

Wait a minute, let me get this right... you want to write your own TCP congestion handling code?? Sounds like you're interested in raw sockets, which are already available.
Delaying college by going into the military for 2-4 years seems to work out pretty well. Some of the best students I've met have been on the GI Bill.

An approximation for non-military-inclined people would be spend a year or so traveling, and then learn some relatively straightforward but non-trivial skill (say, photography, or field service engineering for a certain kind of hardware), and then traveling around to do that job (even if you end up net losing money). It's cheaper than college, and generally better preparation for life. It then makes college itself much more valuable.
I see your point, but I would disagree that Google wasn't an easy pitch. Example: "We're the best search engine. If we're better than everyone else and easier to use, more people will use us. We'll use those eyeballs to make money."
“No, Apple didn’t license iBooks from me. They just copied me. Ah well,”

http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/27/think-ibooks-looks-familiar...
It may sound inefficient, but I've never seen it being a bottleneck. It needs to be separated out at some point, and the kernel is the best place to do that.

maybe if you're trying to serve 50,000 video streams from a single machine or something, but then you'll probably hit the limitations of your connection before you see any CPU usage from the networking code.

This whole discussion, as I've said before, seems like a classic case of premature optimization.

Networking code doesn't eat CPU. It's negligible.

Concentrate on all the BS dynamic functional language database crap people seem to insist on using at the higher levels. That's where all the wastage is.
Nice layout. I do want to point out a lot of text on the home page are images. "Join Buddify" "See 5 great reasons ..." "Cool people on ....". They can be replaced with texts and themed with CSS
Ask HN: Rate my "startup": A university student website
It's a website for Australian students to post textbook listings. Other students can look up those listings and organise a meeting with the listing owner for the transaction (No sign up needed if you're not creating a new listing).

I put startup in quotes because I'm not actually a company, just a software engineering student.

Can you give me tips on the landing page, the presentation of the listings, the "obviousness" of things you can do at my website?

I've spent a whole day at uni today giving out pamphlets and sticking up paper ads and gotten a whopping 1 new user. How do I market it effectively? There's only half a dozen users so far and I connected maybe 4 buyers to 4 sellers. It's been open for over a week now. I've also setup a facebook page and invited all 262 of my friends. One of my friends also invited all 600 of her friends, but there are only 30 people at the page so far... I'm also buying $1.40 worth of facebook advertisements a day, which equates to 14,000 impressions and maybe 2 clicks.

This is proving harder than I thought when I was just programming.

I may expand to other countries later when I've built up some customer base in Australia first.

URL:
http://www.textbookcentral.com.au

Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/TextbookCentral/140405375982617?ref=ts
What does PM stand for?
By my observation of the vast majority of people at school I would say... most people would just procrastinate and get nowhere if you just leave them to find something to work towards.

School sucks; but I think it is a bit of a dirty hack to keep kids minds on something for a few years. It needs a major revamp and broadening of the curriculum (so that those who do want to think independently can do their own thing).

But otherwise we risk a next-generation of total dropouts with no education and no life skills (it's bad enough anyway).

Yep; that's what society has come to. The fix is going to take more than just a few years.
If you have friends or relatives or a partner in your life, you are never alone.

Yes! I don't think this is said enough.

I was having this exact chat with my wife last night. I'm working as a freelancer while building a startup and she's supporting me 100%. What were talking about is how a husband-wife team would look to potential investors when clearly one person is doing the most of the visible work, but couldn't do as much without the other. And one thing that came up is equity and how that could play out.

I wish I had a good answer.
hire.
I'd like to see this answered clearly, myself.

Mint has established itself as the top personal finance management app out there. I love Mint, and think it'll be very difficult to move to yet another PF tool out there. So what exactly is it about BlueLeaf that is so compelling that (1) users have to beg to be invited, and (2) it stands head and shoulders above competitors?
+revenue -> +employees -> +funded startups