skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Score: 26. Anxious wreck. Hate talking to people, they love talking to me. Crave attention from people, but shy away when they show it. Statistics nerd, but not too overboard. Also, sense more things than the average person... very aware about the environment around me and how it effects me or could possibly effect me. Autistic? Nah. Anxious, shy, interesting, and able to communicate, yah.
The author is not a moron but he is also not correct. Whether or not he thinks this is the best practice, ANSI C is not what is written in most of the important C systems applications. GCC intrinsics, Intel intrinsics and extensions, Nvidia extensions, inline assembler -- these are all things which you will find in most (if not all) of the very performant and useful C systems programs. Non-ANSI C is almost the de facto implementation in systems development and is mostly what people think of when they say "C is high level assembly." Moreover, people have to realize that this will never change unless intrinsics fall out of favor. For example, how would you begin to define a VMENTER intrinsic in the ANSI C standard? The author spends a lot of time railing against undefined behavior, but there is a very big difference between undefined behavior and implementation defined behavior. Simply because someone whips out GCC and says "see? GCC does it correctly" doesn't mean they're wrong unless they're only talking about undefined behavior.

So I guess my perspective is that there are two different types of people using C: people who are writing systems applications and people using ANSI C. Personally, I would guess that the first group is much, much larger.
Indeed. Although what happens when the organizer is on time and the person they want to meet with is late? Leaving early only frees up the other person's time and does not solve the problem.
Thank you for the feedback.

I agree and I've already started to implement some of it.
Cuba’s Public-Sector Layoffs Signal Major Shift
Rethinking the Mobile Web
* like the recording I found of Bach's First Cello Suite was performed on a piano! .*

I heard one of Godowsky's piano transcriptions and it sounded kind of corny, but it's a matter of taste. He's not definitely not considered an amateur. According to wikipedia Schumann also wrote one transcription. Or was it the original cello score played on the piano?

By the way, the cello suites sound great on the double bass too.
Solid analysis. I suspected as much thanks to their series on bootstrapped companies.

I say cut the crap, though. If bootstrapping is the better way, awesome – 37signals will enjoy the bathtubs full of money they get at the end of the rainbow, etc.

Life is too short to spend your time with a chip on your shoulder. Or, at least to write like you have one.
Okay, lesson time: how does one end up getting their startup covered in articles like this? Mine is in this space, and they even quoted someone that knows us.

Is this kind of thing a random draw, or is there a way to boost your chances with something like this? Help me level up, HN: I'm just a technical cofounder, so taking care of this side of things isn't my day to day focus right now, nor my expertise.
Before. Asking for payment details later makes the customer reconsider whether the service is "worth it". It also gives you an opportunity to run fraud checks before you charge the card.
"How to flood the world with pointless drivel created for magpies."
Intel's walled-garden plan to put computer-security companies out of business
I can't agree more with this post. Oftentimes people want to make dinner plans with me and I ask for a time so that I can plan for things after. When these times become 30 - 40 minutes late it messes up my schedule for the rest of the night.

Similarly showing up on time and waiting some indefinite time for people to show up is a pain. I'm ashamed to admit it but I've started being a bit late to things because I find that almost always other people aren't on time either.
Perhaps in terms of GDP per capita or some fundamental rights like political opposition and freedom of speech. Otherwise, "backwards" is relative and baseless.
I know a few of the guys at Heroku and I'd be gobsmacked if they weren't doing stuff 100x smarter than I mentioned. With that said.. I hope I'm not wrong and making them feel bad in the process ;-)
Obligatory quote: "Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful"

- George Box
Ironic to me at least, the style/format of the linked page look psychotic. Sterile black and white with lots of underlining and very little space between the lines. (Shudder) I was too afraid to read it unfortunately. The style scared the crap out of me.

But, I read it anyway. The article isn't much use to me. But, maybe Google could provide an indicator by each link indicating a "psychosis" score for the page based on frequency of phrases in the text like "microwave", "conspiracy", and "paranormal". Then they could change out the indicator each day with something new, like an "Apprentice" score for the number of times "fired", "Trump", or "Ivanka" were mentioned in a page.
What's interesting now is that Cuba is slowly starting to allow foreign investment. However US citizens are not allowed to investment there.
It's a tricky line to walk. If there was a post saying how Heroku waived 1000 bucks, there could be a string of scammish people trying to pull the same move. And when Heroku turns them down, they will refer to this post and claim "discrimination".

I think the issue here may be more of tone. It seems from the post that Heroku just gave a cold "no". The user should really post the original exchanges. As a user, I feel a lot better psychologically when I know the other company tried its best--even if they could not help me.

Did Heroku try? I can't tell clearly from the post.
Maybe you could save money by getting 'em to play the symphonies four times faster than usual, then slow 'em down digitally!
If you want a Python-based web framework that's super minimalistic and gives you maximum freedom I recommend (re) trying web.py. Just use it for that topmost routing, for example, and the dev web server. You don't necessarily have to use any other aspect of it. I love Django but whenever I have something that I think may cause me non-conformity grief with Django (or any other "big" framework), or, if I just don't have a really solid vision for how the web app will ultimately look feature-wise, I always start with web.py. Then sculpt and pivot to taste, only as needed. It's much easier switching frameworks than languages, in my experience. And being strong in Python buys you leverage in several other areas that Ruby and the Ruby ecosystem is just not as strong in (native lib integration, graphical games, scientific computing, CGI rendering, etc.).

IIRC GAE's Python SDK is web.py-inspired. (And Django.)
If you're lucky enough to attend UIUC, I highly recommend taking ECE 413 to get a thorough introduction to these concepts. It's unfortunate that none of the class materials are online since it goes well above and beyond what is taught in most undergraduate CS courses on statistics. Taking it was hard, but it made me a much better engineer.

Edit: I suppose this applies to anybody in college. Take the hard statistics course that goes over this stuff. It's really valuable, and pretty hard to pick up on your own.
It is beyond true; every time I sat and tried to polish and prepare, I get owned. That's why, on my new project, I just decided to release and I intend to release often.
Sorry.

Basically, FeedBurner was a startup that was acquired by Google that lets you input an RSS feed, and they produce another feed. You keep the original one secret, hand out theirs, and you get analytics and other features.

Compare

http://watch.steveklabnik.com/posts.rss

to

http://feeds.feedburner.com/watch_steve_episodes

to get an idea. They called this 'burning' a feed. I guess this is what they're alluding to; give me your media file, and I'll turn that into a torrent.
I'm pretty sure that's not true, but I don't know exactly how Heroku works.

The way I understand it is if no one is making requests to your app they will shut down the dynos, and when you start getting requests they'll spin them back up, up to the number of dynos you're paying for. That's why if your app has been idle for a long time it takes a few seconds for the first request to complete.

This lowers their costs, and presumably the prices for their customers.

I could be wrong though, and perhaps they only turn off dynos for non-paying customers.
Pity Sun didn't think of that one !
> You mean the one under the Batista regime?

"one can look at history and wonder if the Cuban people would've been better off living in an American territory similar to Puerto Rico instead of [under Castro's rule]."

You might not agree it would be better for certain, but you definitely can at least imagine an American Cuba that's healthier than the current Cuba. It's not a particularly high bar.
> Who better than the people who built the company can judge the quality of these offers?

This assumes that the acquirers have the company's best interests at heart, which I don't believe is always true. No one ever got promoted for putting the brakes on a bad acquisition deal ( * ). On the other hand, making a big splash by buying up other companies can often lead to big bonuses for those involved which do not take into account the long term (lack of) value that these deals often bring.

( * ) Citation needed, blah, blah, blah.
Sigh...pedantry at its finest. From TFA:

> Most real C implementations will go some distance beyond the standard(s), of course, but I have to draw the line somewhere.

You missed the guy's point, which was essentially that C code is munged and transformed by a good optimizing compiler, whereas assembly is left untouched by a good assembler.
I forgot about that one. It is much simpler to implement on the client-side, as well. And Bram and Arvid apparently contributed to its development.

The main benefit that I can see to the bittornado spec over getright is that it wants to be able to "Intelligently tell peers how long they should wait before retrying." Which seem like a pretty reasonable things to want to have the server be able to tell the client. Rather then simply block the user.
Nice article; short, sweet and enough to pique my curiosity about modern assembly.

Some aphorisms like "C has the efficiency and speed of assembler, with the portability and readability of assembler" come to mind, but those are from ancient history in programming years, and usually said by people proficient in both.

There are other assertions (like jwz in the 'Java Sucks' rant), that refer to C as "a PDP-11 assembler that thinks its a language", but again an exaggerated statement made by someone who knows.

I have not met anyone who primarily codes in an interpreted language who think that C is just syntactic sugar for assembly. Maybe because most of them don't program in C.

I can certainly see some amateur programming pundits (or maybe just forum dickheads) regurgitating the lines without understanding them, but there is a world of difference between the examples touched on, and the actual syntactic sugar of recent java releases (generics, unboxing).
does Heroku have an api? if so, think of it as investment towards writing a traffic spike script/cron job =)
This essay by Yudkowsky is also helpful.

http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes
All of that is completely understandable, but -- unless they've changed recently -- Gmail's filtering is really pretty far behind from what it could be, and Gmail's interface is -- for me, and the clients I support -- a frequent source of complaints.

That's not to say it's bad, but rather that -- given Google's size and the ridiculous amount of smarts on its payroll -- it could be a lot better. It just doesn't seem to be what Google is focusing on these days.

I'll grant though that Gmail has, hands-down, the very best spam filtering in existence. I really don't know how you guys do that.

But ... just to put things in perspective, I think that's the only killer feature that Gmail has left. Otherwise, it's pretty vulnerable; any service provider could launch the same setup I have, on the really cheap VPS services available these days, and readily compete with Google's business mail hosting.
A scammer would be fairly easily distinguishable from someone making an honest mistake, the difference being that you've already made x* the turnover of the 'mistake' on the honest customer, and the scammer would actually be using those instances for something.

Scammers, as a rule don't go for solutions with a high up-front investment in their time, they'd be much better of using a few thousand stolen credit cards instead. Why bother asking for refunds on a real life ID when you can get away with someone else holding the bag...

Heroku should sidestep this question anyway and implement auto-scaling and notifications on certain thresholds asap.
Ask HN: Looking for a cofounder - already have a prototype
Already have a product developed and several beta clients. I want to build it out but need help getting it off the ground. Looking for someone who can code but also help with the company focus/message. I basically need a cofounder.

It was built using Redis, Flask, Gevent.

Please check it out at www.hobsonfiles.com if interested.

My info is in my HN profile.
I was under the same impression. If your app has been idle for a long time it takes a few seconds for the first request to complete, which leads me to believe they shut down dynos for idle apps. But it's possible that's only for the free apps.
Not to mention Domize (http://www.domize.com). I remember using them years ago, I still love it. It's funny, since I can't stand Google Instant, but really enjoy Domize, interesting how that works.
You can't understand the final result in isolation. Out of all men with two children, the probability that they will have two daughters is 1/4, the probability that they will have two sons is 1/4. This leaves heterogeneous offspring occurring 1/2 the time.

If the man is able to make the statement "I have two kids, at least one's a boy", this puts him among the 3/4 of all men with one or two sons. The probability of a man with two sons cannot jump from 1/4 to 3/8 (half of 3/4), as you assert earlier.

It's unintuitive, but it's more obvious when you negate the statement: "I have two children, but I do not have two daughters."
Refusing to Answer the Feds
Agree wholeheartedly.

I've said for a while now that being late is making the statement that you don't value the other party's time.
Three scenarios remain: [B,B], [B,G], [G,B], so the answer is 1/3.

Maybe you were thinking that the order doesn't matter. In that case, what was the probability of getting a boy and a girl, in any order? 1/4 + 1/4 = 1/2. So that's still twice as likely as getting two boys, and that ratio (2:1) will still hold after eliminating [G,G]. You again get 1/3.

Some people find it easier to picture it in terms of frequencies. Imagine 1000 families. What fraction of them have two boys, among those that have at least one boy?
I've gotta second this, command-t is probably my single favorite plugin. I tried using FuzzyFinder way back when, but it was just a little too quirky to be useful. This blows FuzzyFinder (and even fuzzyfinder_textmate) out of the water.

Navigating you project in this way feels a lot quicker than actually browsing the hierarchy with something like NERDTree. Don't worry about where things actually are, just type some junk and the file you want will almost always come to the top.
As someone who's chronically early... If it involves travel of any kind in a US city (9am meetings imply that), sorry, lateness is a given. 10 am, 11am, etc, no problem being draconian, unless it actually involves inter-city travel (i.e. not employees - in the sense that they're people who know where they're going).

If you're asking people to go to a place that you're familiar with and they're not, just assume they're going to be twenty minutes to half an hour late.

I've lost track of the number of times my GPS has guided me around a circle for 15 minutes, or up to a detour sign, or to turn left on a no left turn sign.
Interestingly, this is mostly an American (and a also a Western) problem. In most of the world (South America, Middle East, Africa, East Asia, etc), "on time" ranges anywhere between 30 minutes to 3 hours later.

We grade our personal productivity level much more than other cultures. Other cultures value other things such as community and relationships at a higher level than we do.

A story:

I was invited to an Indian friend's birthday party. It was going to be a huge party with hundreds of invited people (all Indian, except two people), musicians, a hire clown, and a full-fledged buffet. The invitation stated 6pm. I arrived at 6:30pm because, well, I expected them to start late.

Guess what, only two people were there: the birthday friend, because he had to set up the place, and a white guy, who was even more confused than me.

So the white guy and I helped our friend set up. Then we kicked the soccer ball around for a bit. Just waiting.

People started to slowly trickled in at about 8pm. I don't think we started eating at about 9pm. And it was all normal to them.
Knuth seems very tall. I wonder if he plays basketball as a hobby.
Actually, maybe I'm really busy, and doing the best I can. I value your time, but I value mine more. And obviously you're not as in demand as other people are. Sorry you can't appreciate that.
Man, that's boring: I scored 19 :(
I've always seen myself as an introvert and self-centered guy, but I seem to work very well on social stuff, it's like some superpower I refuse to acknowledge.
You unfortunately fall right into the trap that he's warning about: just because you can enumerate the possible outcomes doesn't mean that they are all equally likely (cf: the Monty Hall problem).

The conclusion that BB/BG/GB are all equally likely follows from the assumption that the man would definitely state that he has a male child if and only if one of those conditions were true. But what if instead we add the fact that the man would only say that he has a son if he has no daughters? This isn't contradictory with anything else in the problem, but now the answer is clearly "P(BB) = 1", which makes it hard to state that certainly "P(BB) = 1/3" when there is a consistent interpretation of the problem that gives a different answer.

You should reread the way he set up the problem again: he makes the subtle distinction between things that are given to us by the omniscient problem writer and things that are given to us by characters inside the problem, for whom we have to apply Bayes Law an additional time.
My apologies that this is a bit off topic, but by visiting your site on my phone I discovered a bit of a downside of vimeo: it says "no mobile version" in the vid box. Imagine my surprise when I thought that your site was proudly announcing it had no mobile version! Closer reading cleared that up, but it was unfortunate.
>Russia is simply not a society governed by the rule of law. No well-intentioned Microsoft initiative or poignant NYT report is likely to change that.

Reminds me of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84MsRuC-1l8 ... does anyone else have any other interesting anecdotes, stories or links about "anarchy"/nepotism/realpolitik in international business?
A Kidney Detox - Stone Busting Tea
Android vs. Chrome OS Tablets: What Do You Think?
A party might be a different thing, but when you are meeting one or two people, the expectation is that they will not leave you standing around on your own for any length of time.

This is a sign of bad time management on top of rudeness.

I have known people who were continually late, so I would always tell them 30 minutes before I get there. Effective technique.

Things were worse before mobiles of course, I would wait for 10 minutes, and then head off. This was an accepted rule among my friends.
A more thorough introduction to this topic is "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science" by E. T. Jaynes (http://www-biba.inrialpes.fr/Jaynes/prob.html).
i'll second that for score and sensibilities, though I prefer code and politics to statistics.
No, really. I'm running late. My friends understand that we know are being a pain in the ass, but we just can't get it together. It is rude and selfish, but more than that, it's just because we can't get our act together in time. It's called "kids", man. Get over it.
Courier for Mac - Upload to Facebook, Flickr, Vimeo, Twitter, YouTube and more
Think of it in terms of a set of tuples and not a set.

{(B,G), (G,B) , (B,B) , (G,G)}
Now THAT is rude!
This would make sense for the crowd here, but not for 90% of users whose searches are very fuzzy. So, another vote for "expert mode"...
Here to claim my extra points. Btw, tried searching for Gmail messages in Thai before? It doesn't work.
You are right, each person has their own balance they must find. Otherwise, my comment is no different than dhh's article.

I would argue, though, that I can still see my startups as a hobby/lifestyle even though I would I be more than happy to retire early with fu money. Primarily because I would still want to start build my own products even without the lure of getting rich quickly.
You're right. Maybe I couldn't think of enough instances where I've made a mistake and asked for a refund.
Prioritization is necessary when demands > resources (time).
Any website that you use could store all kinds of data about you without even telling you. Not to mention your ISP, who knows everything! At least Google is making it clear via Google History that they do have the means to do it.
I tend to agree with you on filtering--I want the ability to filter on headers, for example. See http://www.google.com/buzz/109412257237874861202/Tu7U17YACA8... where I made the argument that a startup could use Gmail OAuth to do filtering better than Gmail itself.

But I do think that Gmail Labs is pretty hard to beat. Labs like "Send and Archive," "Undo Send," and "Quick Links" save my bacon on a pretty regular basis.
Perhaps this would offer an equally appealing explanation: if the man said, "I have two children but at least my firstborn is not a girl..." then the intuitively appealing response of 1/2 becomes roughly correct.
HBO needs to make all their shows available online for a fee. Just imagine how many monthly subscribers they would have, if they could provide access to all their shows.
You need to come to the LA area for dim sum in Monterey Park or San Gabriel.
It's human error. Simple as that. Happens to absolutly everyone even the brightest individuals. I've seen in "the livesite" that this kind of spike problems are more common than you think, and the ideal solution is to automate an alarm that tells you both, when a spike is happening, and when X throughput passes over a threshold. This kind of automation is easy and spares lots of trouble.Could be as simple as scheduled task parsing some logs. Some more fancy option is always good though :)
Because it would decimate their bottom line if everyone stopped running extra instances.
Are we looking at the wallpaper ad? It's surrealist, so there's weirdness to go around, but the shadows are weird (coming towards the centre) and the horizon line is different for the rolls of paper than it is for the image as a whole.