skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm very emphatically not picking nits here. See http://www.softwarehistory.org/history/ec.html for an overview of the history. From there you can dive into the early history of the software industry, with names, companies, and more. (They have less detail than I'd like.) For example if you read http://www.softwarehistory.org/history/csc.html you'll find that Computer Sciences Corporation started with $100 and a contract from Honeywell to write a programming language called FACT. They were NEVER in the mainframe hardware sales business. As for consulting, guilty as charged. There was no idea of a market in software, so if your company wanted to get paid for writing software then consulting was your only chance. But that still happens in the software industry.

However despite there not being a recognized market, software that was produced for one client could and did get sold to others. And as the 60s progressed there came to be enough of these pieces of software out there that the first regular catalog of software products for sale got going early in 1967. By the end of the 60s there were hundreds of software packages for sale, and IBM declared that it would get into that business starting January 1, 1970 by unbundling some of its software from its hardware.

By that point there is no question that there was such a thing as a software industry. Small? Yes. But definitely present at a surprisingly early point.
This guy worked on Froyo's JIT.
Very few things are what they are when it comes to how we work, because until very recently (compared to the total history of humans), the environment in which we lived was intensely competitive and brutal, and anything that didn't aid survival/propagation that required energy was strongly selected against over generations.

There are many things for which the evolutionary cause is not obvious to us, but it doesn't make sense that there would just be lots of random truly superfluous aspects to us.
I also felt very similar to this at my previous job, it was a software engineering position at a very big corporate company. I went from frustrated to burnt out, working endless hours on work I didn't care about and generally wasn't proud of; I was pretty miserable, down and out. I was losing my mind, considering moving across the country, looking for jobs abroad (not that these are necessarily bad ideas)..

Switching to a start up completely changed my life. I completely agree with alttab, I feel more ownership over the projects I work on, definitely more pride and excitement. I think you need a change of pace, a start up would be a great idea. Try to take a week off to clear your head in between jobs though, you'll want to go in with an open and clear mind without thinking about or being depressed about your previous job.

Also, don't get too focused on the salary. As some recent HN posts have also outlined lately, there is much more to life than your salary and I think you'll really begin to get your excitement and life back.
I was in Japan when I got my first drivers license. It took two weeks of expensive instruction, four separate official tests (two written, two behind the wheel), and I was told I was lucky I wasn't automatically failed on at least one of them which apparently is a common practice.

I find it an interesting comparison, not as a value judgment necessarily. I guess I prefer difficult testing for both drivers and pilots considering that a awful lot of people kill & die all the time as both.
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On Triage and Verifying Crowdsourced Reports
Isn't this the shady company that is doing something similar to Jason Calacanis' Mahlo? Mainly that they have machine generated pages designed to return minimal data that returns high results in search engine rankings?

Once search engines optimize their algorithms to ignore these sites, won't the money stop flowing?
Now if only there was an open cell network.

Just imagine if next to the commercial services the government actually reserved an amateur cell network for open use. I guess wifi is the closest we will ever get.
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Does anyone know how to identify the niche content properties owned by Demand Media?
That was partly in response to their inability in the late 1990s / early 2000s to monetize their main (at the time) content, which was staff-written longish-form comedy, so they ended up turning to their forum users (initially a small side thing) to provide an income stream. Admittedly, the banner-ad market of the time was also a quite different place, so it's possible that if AdSense had existed, they would've done fine. For example, Google wouldn't stiff you on payments they promised, or go bankrupt owing you tens of thousands.

Via Wikipedia, two articles from the time on SA's monetization woes pre-forum-fees:

http://lowendmac.com/musings/express.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20020202083639/http://www.theduke...
I think you may be taking this story too literally.

The moral of the story is to pursue happiness over extreme financial success at the expense of happiness.

The story also acts against the deferred life plan. Many people endure things they hate in order to make a lot of money. In most cases, this is probably a bad thing... especially when there are better alternatives.
Exactly, though any amount of licensing fees or control by Oracle cuts to the heart of Android's appeal to handset manufacturers.
Thank you. They didn't link to the email that I can see; is there a more reliable source for this than CNN?
I think its satire.
SA is pretty brilliant in how they charge $5 for changing your avatar image, something which 99% of other popular forums let you do for free. For $10, you can change another user's title. If you get in a flame war with a guy with ten bucks to spare, he can buy you an embarrassing title/image. You have to either live with that or cough up the $5 to change it back.
is anyone selling e-ink or even just transflective displays for laptops/computers/etc/ that I could use in my day to day work? most current e-ink stuff would be too slow for most things... but eh, for a second or third monitor I could use when reading things that don't change, it could work.

a transflective screen could also do the job... I had one of the little green OLPC jobbes for a while, and I really liked the transflective mode, though the device as a whole, imo, was fairly useless other than as a bulky e-reader. Still I'd pay money for transflective panels for my desktop, and I'd pay quite a bit of money for a transflective screen on my laptop.
This is actually a really great explanation and, perhaps more importantly, a really great example of how science and other academic pursuits really work. Personally, I study computational biochemistry and a lot of work appears on the arXiv long before the official publications. So, I try to keep up with the arXiv, but as this is all non-peer-reviewed I have a similar checklist that I use before spending more time going into the details of the paper.

That's not to say that this paper should have been disregarded out of hand. There's a difference between a crackpot and a honest good attempt that deserves further scrutiny. Still, with the number of papers that get published these days, having a list like this is a valuable tool.
In the past IBM, AT&T Labs, and now Google all had the huge advantages in being at the cutting edge of research which allowed them to attract talent.

If you want to see a company dying because it can't hire good developers because of it's reputation look at Nokia.
Sun went out of business making decisions that made Java popular, but not lucrative. Oracle has a reputation as a place where people would climb over their own mothers to get a sale; they won't make the same mistake. Moreover, Android is a threat to Oracle's Java revenue, not an asset. Mobile JVM licenses were one of the few things Sun made money on with Java. Android is destroying that business. I'm pretty sure that Oracle would prefer a slice of a smaller pie to no share in a larger pie.
You're far more likely to kill yourself due to inexperience, than due to engine failure or any other technical malfunction. You might also consider getting a glider license to fly motor gliders, as they give you more time and options to land if you're worried about that.

From http://www.schiratti.com/humour.html:

Control: You're unreadable, say again.
Motor-glider: I've turned off the engine, is that better?
Control: (looong pause)

:)
One downside to short TTLs on hosts that receive mail is that if you have some sort of DNS issue for more than 5 minutes, mail may start getting rejected, because many mail servers treat hostname-not-found or no-MX-records-for-domain as a permanent rather than transient error, so bounce the mail and don't retry. With a higher TTL, there will be a greater period where the server has the wrong IP after a change, but that will typically result in a transient error, of the "isn't responding" rather than "doesn't exist" variety.
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moby. plus there's this huge thread on reddit...
When MSN was created in the mid-nineties, AOL, flush with cash, prepared for a fight to the death with Microsoft.

The rallying cry at AOL around that time was that "online services will be Microsoft's Vietnam." I believe it holds up as one of the best business metaphors of all time.
...if you born poor and in a wrong place (environment).
The last time I said a business man is not always an entrepreneur I got downvoted to the abyss.
How Return of the Jedi should have ended.
A hot piece of iron? Luxury. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt. </python>
It's interesting to watch google... they are actually handling themselves /much better/ than I would expect them to... but I think there are solid business reasons for this. Google makes money because it uses data most of us consider private to serve up ads for us.

If enough people stop trusting google, they will no longer be able to do this. Consumer trust is integral to their business. and there will always be tension, as to make money, they need to use at least some of that data to serve us ads, and some of us will take offense to that. I mean, really, there's no way they can run gmail profitably without doing things that I feel violates my privacy.

Now, in the short term, they could earn boatloads of money by violating this trust in a more direct manner... but in the long term, it would kill them. I think that ever since they went public there has been a constant war there, short term profits, vs long-term viability.

My own personal expectation was that this trust of google would not have lasted much past their IPO... it has lasted much longer than that.

Personally, I find it odd that now that this trust is eroding, people seem to be complaining more about net neutrality than about google pushing the limits of what they can do with our private data. Of course, I'm a hosting provider, and thus oppose regulation of my market.
In software, it's really easy to not know if you're violating IP.
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It is absolutely impossible to fly somewhere cheaper than commercial whether you own or rent — it's pretty basic economies of scale. Private pilots do not do it to save money; they do it for the love of flight itself.
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No, because you're begging the question.
So a little boy (Oracle) pulls the hair of a little girl (Google) and makes her cry in the hope that they grow old together?

What happened with the more mature way of picking up the phone and saying hi? Or is Oracle's world not receptive to such radical ideas?
It's a moot point. The nickname is different, and can be proven to be.
An 'exit node' would normally get you raided for child porn, subverting islam, leaking state secrets or whatever else, yes. Apparently an 'exit enclave' is different.
Howlers:

"Java and Android are both generally governed by a license called “GNU” which means, more or less, that you can use the tools freely to make software but that the things you develop with them are not necessarily themselves free. It’s the latter that concerns this case."

"Android’s Java is, despite being derived from the same language predecessor as Objective-C, easier to use."
I was a bad dev without a degree in the bowels of a medium-sized company (1000 people or so?). It was pretty cushy. I was really terrible. For three years. I think I'm much less bad now.
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The reviews I read pointed to reflection as the main problem of Dalvik. Are there examples of successful non-Java apps for Android yet?

I have written an app in JavaScript going the HTML5 route, but it required some Java glue code. The JavaScript engine is V8 (at least on Froyo), so it is fast.
I suppose there are reasons pushing for the study of recent popular culture (easier access to interviewees, for one), but often I get the feeling that things get lost in the recency and media attention: studying Twilight has this weird trendy/journalistic feeling to it, no matter what angle you take on it, and we don't currently have much perspective on how it'll play out. I'd much rather see the "anti-fan" concept (which is interesting) studied with a less recent example where we have a lot more distance on the height of the fandom/antifandom, e.g. by studying the disco-haters of the late 1970s or some other example > 5 years old.
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Part of the goal of Tor is to have a bunch of normal people running Tor nodes on their own personal machines, VPSs, etc., in which case they're almost always shared with other traffic (the person's own traffic).
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This idea is actually very clever. This is the basic concept to make money from free, 1st you solve a problem and generate plenty of traffic, 2nd you indirectly or directly create a secondary problem for your users. This is the part you monitise. According to the variables and the ticks you use to create the secondary pain, will adjust the revenues you make.
Here is a barbaric and senseless default. Do a crontab -e without $EDITOR set and you'll be dropped into ed. I realize that it's the "standard editor" but the joke stopped being funny when I needed to edit a file with it.
It's not only on the app layer:
"""
One is a provision that would let broadband providers offer "additional, differentiated services," that would be not be subject to the same rules as the open internet. These would possibly include "health care monitoring, the smart grid, advanced educational services, or new entertainment and gaming options."
"""
I assume you've had this looked at? I have chronic patellar tendonitis, brought on from a tragic lack of flexibility in my quads.

After about a year of physical therapy, I've definitely gone a long ways towards alleviating the pain.
That word is not in my dictionary.
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In the field of energy management, organizations are charged high by electric utility companies while the government legislation become tighter in the regulation of carbon emissions.
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You don't have to delete certificate, you can mark it as "Never Trust".
I had a brief look and can't really find any detailed empirical work on the matter. The paper by Gray cited in the article does not really have much empirical work behind it - but is more about identifying the concept of the anti-fan as such and acting as a call to action for the research that is needed.

Given that the concept is relatively new, it may be extremely difficult to identify historical records of genuine anti-fans back in the day, since many may not have known that this is the sort of practice they were engaged in.
Very interesting - I see myself using it.

My test case:

def sumTo(n):
def sumTCO(num, sum):
if num == 0: return sum
return sumTCO(num-1, sum + num)
return sumTCO(n, 0)

print(sumTo(10000000))

produces the following Haskell code (tail call optimization works!)

module Main where
import Berp.Base
import qualified Prelude
main = runStmt init
init
= do _s_sumTo <- var "sumTo"
def _s_sumTo 1 none
(\ [_s_n] ->
do _s_sumTCO <- var "sumTCO"
def _s_sumTCO 2 none
(\ [_s_num, _s_sum] ->
do ifThen
(do _t_0 <- read _s_num
_t_0 == 0)
(do _t_1 <- read _s_sum
ret _t_1)
_t_2 <- read _s_sumTCO
_t_3 <- read _s_num
_t_4 <- _t_3 - 1
_t_5 <- read _s_sum
_t_6 <- read _s_num
_t_7 <- _t_5 + _t_6
tailCall _t_2 [_t_4, _t_7])
_t_8 <- read _s_sumTCO
_t_9 <- read _s_n
tailCall _t_8 [_t_9, 0])
_t_10 <- read _s_print
_t_11 <- read _s_sumTo
_t_12 <- _t_11 @@ [10000000]
_t_10 @@ [_t_12]

Which in turn produces a ~830KB binary after stripping (1.5MB before) which is linked only to gmp and the usual linux binaries, i.e. essentially static. Memory usage is also pretty low. (0.2% with 1GB RAM)

Thats's the good side. The bad side: It's slow. Runtime is about 10s whereas the same code in C returns instantly and measures less than 4KB.

The ugly: It's slower than Python 2.6 which "only" takes ~6 seconds for the iterative version using range. If converted to a while loop with manual incrementing (berp doesn't support range yet), Python takes ~8 seconds while berp still takes ~10s.

I understand that it's only version 0.0x, but I'm a pretty disappointed by the speed for numerical operations - I hoped (Python compiled to) Haskell would be within an order of magniture to C. TCO on the other hand is very cool - and there's no stack limit, which is great for some algorithms easier expressed recursively.
Headcounters: my first wordpress plugin
it took me 90 minutes to write this wordpress plugin: now it's your turn to install it! I'll paypal 100$ to the 100th user that installs it!

http://github.com/etozzato/headcounters ;)
In my university (HU Berlin) this is part of the normal computer science curriculum in the 2nd or 3rd semester.

And I fully agree, this is really interesting and you get a much deeper understanding of a computer's internals.
and 1$ to the 1st, 10$ to the 10th and 1000$ to the 1000th! LOL
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I was hoping to see an AAlib browser plugin, but having done that in JavaScript is very cool, too.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work on my browser (Firefox 3.5).
Sitting on your ass all day staring at the see is not what everybody wants. Also, the fisherman in the story already has a successful business.
Most companies buying mainframes, buy mainframes to run Linux and Java apps on it. The COBOL+mainframe market is not growing (very much). (source: talking with an IBM research director in Böblingen, Germany responsible for mainframe development)

Mainframes promise turnkey-reliability, where the IBM support guy comes in before you notice anything going wrong. The point is that "mainframe" is a strong brand and IBM has the monopoly on it. There are solutions magnitudes cheaper and just as reliable as a mainframe.
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Sealed Classes
> They'll all expire eventually. ZFS (like) file systems will eventually be very succesful.

Yes, that's all in the "like". In 4 or 5 years, btrfs and others will mature and ZFS will look less exceptional. That, and ZFS has a major culprit which will become more annoying with time : it's not cluster-aware.
In your youth, you don't have to care about risks much, hence your expenses are low. You can never get really broke, because you'll always have an able young body to sell and start over. The older you get the more you have to worry about risks.
Yeah, that's pretty terrible.
i hope he got his orange juice
"Just as women are constantly told and whispered (directly and indirectly) they're not pretty enough, men are constantly told and whispered (directly and indirectly) they're not rich enough."

She seems to think people have these thoughts only because the media whispers it to them. Unfortunately, there is also a degree of truth to them, and the media merely exploits this truth. It does matter how pretty you are (especially as a woman), and it does matter how rich you are.
"No man is rich whose expenditure exceeds his means; and no one is poor whose income exceeds his outgoings." Thomas Chandler Haliburton
The Python yield keyword explained
And from the author's comment:

"I think to argue otherwise ignores whole swaths of interesting business history such as Steve Jobs’ involvement creating Objective-C at NeXT."

That ignores the fact that Objective-C had already been created (by Brad Cox and Tom Love) before NeXT was founded.
Ask HN:Alternative to archiving email on Gmail
I've got my email setup in such a way that all my email gets sent to an everyday email account, as well as a "backup/archive" Gmail account where nothing gets deleted.

Gmail's search has been the one thing that's kept my email archive useful vs. a stack of mail files in a folder.

My question is, what email archive/backup setups to HN'ers have?
That is good for Android community and not so good for Java community.

First of all, we should praise Google for making so good decisions, to re-use wast community of Java developers and Eclipse (without which they cannot program ^_^) and avoid bloated and corporative-centered JVM or Java ME, that it resulted in such ridiculous lawsuit about .jar files. ^_^

They also got a lot of buzz and the reputation of not doing evil and even being a victim of a corporate monster and patent trolls.

btw, it looks a lot like an Apples decision about dropping Flash (yet another outdated artificial tumor) just because it simply does not work. Google'd rewrote VM, while Apple invested in LLVM.

So, it is a good news.
I used to fly slope-soaring gliders back in Auckland, and I can't recommend it enough. A slope soarer is a little indestructible foam-and-tape plane that you hurl off a mountain - the wind against the slope provides lift, and you're off. The basic kit was about NZ$300 including the radio - you had to glue it together, sand it and tape it, which no time at all compared to balsa. Aerial combat was the best. Plus, running up and down hills all day got me quite fit.
Any possibility for a thin, lean 50 year old on a low protein diet building some muscle ?
I do use a parallel bar 2-3 times a week (3 or 4 reps of 15). Is there a regimen that does not use weights and bars that one can do at home to build some strength and muscle.
That's the advantage of having a hosted solution.But from a technical standpoint, wouldn't that work with e.g. Riak too?
Cobol on cogs
I upvoted you because i thought people were in these things a belief sadly shown to be false by
http://www.shallowsky.com/planes/weasel/slopetips.html
Aerial combat should have alerted me!
New social community, the new digg,ezine?the new digg+Twitter+stumbleupon?
Is this a joke? Merely setting a border on any of their elements will cause browsers to show a horizontal scrollbar for no good reason.
I am a front end dev and do exactly the sort of stuff he's mentioned. I just find it very dissatifying work. Everybody from marketing and their dog has an opinion about how the website should behave and look, which leads to endless discussions. Nobody cares if you use Python or Java in the server.

Front end is often seen as just one step up from a web designer.