skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"[Yes, I know, the user accounts allows also to theoretically share a single desktop computer among more than one physical users (also known as: people), but, come on, these days it's that a single person has many computers, and not the other way around.]"

This is a great example of tech people falsely generalizing their experience and habits to those of non-tech people. There are many, many families with one computer that the entire family shares.
Assange and his band of techno freedom fighters are doing something not so different from launching a major startup against a flood of large entrenched competitors. It's very similar in that they need to cross a chasm and seize their audience against many odds. There are many software technology, product development, marketing and PR aspects we can learn from here.

And the cause, well, we may not all agree with the cause but it's a heck a lot more courageous to fight for your ideas than for a pile of cash and equity!
no surprise website is down, anyone got a link to the torrent?
I wonder how long it will be before all the data centers move to places like the Bahamas...
Both are liable here. Director is basically liable for everything wrong, and accountant is liable for mis-representing books (director also takes the blame, but accountant shouldn't do that in the first place) as well as accounting errors.
Well, being the sole designer/developer working alone and restless for three+ months I can say it wasn't lazy. The other two things are up to you to decide.
I was wondering what this had to do with the other picnik.
Stonebraker says real systems can obviously achieve "CA" when one node is partitioned off. But he slyly switched out the theorem's definition of "available" for a more colloquial definition. The CAP theorem definition requires every live node, including the lone segregated guy, to respond to clients. Real "CA" systems don't do that--they're "available" because the non-partitioned nodes are still responding.
This thread about Mailchimp using PHP might be interesting to read: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1818954
Mechanical keyboards are nice, but I think I would go crazy if I worked in an office full of them. I have the small form Deck keyboard ( http://www.deckkeyboards.com/product_info.php?products_id=30) and love how it doesn't have the number pad which pushes your mouse further away.
I have, and I did like it a lot, it was my IDE of choice before NB hit 6.5. For me now, I like NB better, two features in NB are must have ones for me now. (1) being able to take a class and generate the REST service and DB schema from it or taking a DB schema and generation the class and REST service. (2) being able to debug and trace a variable from the JavaScript executing in the browser through the REST service, into the business logic down into the DB / identity server / MQ server / etc. and back. I cannot live without either of those now.
> no doubt you will want to have some dive log manager application to store the history of your dives on a computer

I'm sure there are some very nice web apps for that out there. I don't install programs I don't intend to run at least weekly anymore, with very few obvious exceptions.
Apologies for the lack of clarity -- my original wording was possibly more ambiguous than the one I posted and I thought I had fixed that, but I guess I failed.
Agreed, I think Ruby > Python, both in syntax and semantics. It's a shame I'm going to have to learn such a close language to take advantage of Python's momentum.
True, but those people are generally screwed from a security perspective anyways.
I saw a human powered ornithopter in the news recently. Obviously that doesn't answer the question, "Can flapping wings power flight?" but it does answer the question, "Can a human's muscles power flapping winged flight?"

The creativity here is getting the job done in Html5, it answers an implementation question, not an HCI question.
But hopefully we won't need them to reboot the earths core.
sinatara
I've read that, all valid points. However, I should mention that accounting on a startup level (bills, invoices, salaries, tax) is really not a drag here. In fact I would argue it's faster to just collect your inputs and outputs (invoices and bills) and get them to your accountant once per month or quarterly, of half year, or yearly (depends how you told tax office how you will do it). Accountant does the rest for you. On the other hand, you could do it all by yourself and have an accountant check your papers and sign them (some people do it like that). Also, no capital gains tax here. :) But this country could do take some pro-active measures for startups. I don't even want to go there, because I would have to write a book on their mistakes.
Did I miss the part of the article where they took his $3,000 check away?
The standard gripes about PHP:

- PHP's syntax is very random. There are over 5000 builtins and no consistency among them.

- PHP lacks (or lacked until relatively recently) many programming niceties such as objects, types, closures, lambdas, and namespaces. To do anything interesting, PHP developers rely on globals or dubious innovations such as using a string as a function name.

- PHP relies on a web-serving model where the program invocation is done in milliseconds. Even if you can (with difficulty) use PHP libraries in command line programs, it's very inefficient for anything like a long-running daemon process.

- Although it is almost always built into a web server, PHP doesn't make it easy for you to do anything useful with web requests -- such as custom authentication in a separate phase from content generation.

- Since it's a web templating language at heart, PHP practically begs you to do the wrong thing and mix presentation and data. To solve this, many shops use a templating language on top of PHP, which does feel kind of silly.

- Due to its ubiquity, PHP is the choice of script kiddies who can't program. The comments on the PHP.net documentation site are mind-numbingly naive sometimes. So even experienced programmers feel dirty using PHP.

That said:

- Among comparable languages, and for typical web serving tasks, PHP is fast. Really fast.

- It's probably already installed on your platform of choice.

- Within the web-serving paradigm, it has almost everything you would ever want.

- Its model of programming is really brain-dead, but it also can keep you out of trouble since you're forced to do everything in a REST-compatible manner.

- It's also the choice of websites like Yahoo, Flickr, Facebook, and Wikipedia, so you know it is battle-tested.
You're correct. Turns out I've been caught by one of those unknown unknowns where I didn't do any further research because I didn't know I didn't know something. It's too late for me to edit my original post, but thanks for pointing it out
Ask HN: Which compiler book to pick?
Hi,

For years I have been interested in programming languages and their implementation. I have made many attempts over time to create my own (experimental) programming languages, mostly interpreters.

The problem is, my knowledge of this area of computer science is fragmented, to say the least. I picked up things here and there, but I never learned how to properly implement a compiler, interpreter, virtual machine, or even a parser.

So, I have decided to pick a book and work my way through it. I just don't know which book. They all seem equally intimidating. A few candidates that I am considering are:

- The Dragon Book (new version, 2006); seems awfully big though, making me wonder whether I should pick a book that is a bit less comprehensive first, then come back to this one later;

- The Dragon Book (old version, 1986)

- Engineering a Compiler, by Keith Cooper and Linda Torczon

- Parsing Techniques - A Practical Guide, by Dick Grune; focuses on parsing though rather than the whole package

So my question is, which of these books, or any others, do people recommend? (My main interests would be interpreters and languages that compile to bytecode, either custom or targeting existing VMs. "Traditional" compilers that produce a standalone executable, not so much.)

Thanks in advance!
publicity for this boy is far more valuable than any money he could make out of this. he doesn't even know what to spend $3,000 on and it doesn't surprise me at all.

I remember when I was a teenager making more than my parents (dot-com boom) and money I was making was just piling up. I had virtually no goals that would require money back then... of course now as I get older, it's exactly the opposite, plenty of goals, no money :)
I don't think the lend feature is going to work "offline", i.e. without participation of Amazon. So Amazon would have a full control over who has lend, what books and to which people. So they can easily deauthorize them.

But that wouldn't work if there were no time limit at all - you could lend a book and disable all wireless connectivity. So why not make Kindle users who have lent book reauthorize every 14 days with Amazon's servers to extend the lease.. Sure, some people would abuse this system but it's not like you can't download more and more ebooks from various not-so-legal places anyway.

But then the whole thing is useless - seriously, I can lend some books, for two weeks and only once? No, thanks.
Not enough information: what are access patterns like? How often do we add new files? Can we tolerate a disk read most of the time? Are we going to see zipf distributed popularity or even popularity?

BCC has happily chugged through a few million GIFs and PDFs using nested directories, on a single VPS. (Low concurrency requirements and all files being accessed less than ten times in a lifetime makes it easy.)

Anyhow, so the simplest thing that works, rearchitecture when you become Facebook. (You probably won't need to. But spend your resources to achieve success, nit to guard against the problems of successful people.)
Python is used by Google, Youtube, NASA, and Reddit. It scales, it's faster,uses less RAM, and is much saner than PHP.
I wish Amazon would adopt the Netflix model for books. I'd certainly sign up for that.
Tarsnap data is stored in S3; my problem is handling the metadata which allows the Tarsnap service to find user data on request. The two large tables have (key, value) lengths respectively of (41, 12) and (8, 16).

I need immediate durability; fast restart; high throughput bulk writes; reasonable throughput random reads; range requests; and (for financial reasons) I'd like to have a high disk:RAM ratio.
No, I'm saying python suffers from the 'jack of all trades master of none' problem. It's not as well suited as Ruby for RAD, nor does it scale near as well as Java. It's a bizarre niche to fill.
This is interesting. Would this work if I was on the site for say an hour? Or is there some limit to the amount of time you can send data like this? I have never tried anything like this. What is the overhead like?
>PHP is fast. Really fast

Compared to WHAT? Ruby and Perl? Cause I hope you're not saying it's C fast, or even java or C# fast...
How to use major studio names in iMovie 11
"I am not sure it applies here."

Wikileaks wants to show the world the atrocities of the US military but at the same time, releasing this information may harm those involved. From your statement, you are trying to defend these actions through the hacker manifesto. As if it somehow okay because the information needs to be out there.
Looks like a fairly default Ubuntu install in the picture. I remember playing with Linux at that age.. fun times. He probably had a better time of it than me struggling with Redhat 6.3 from my local bookstore though...
Test Airport
You know tablets are here to stay when people start offering tablet-specific publishing as a service.

I have no problems with this product -- it seems like an interesting solution to a real problem -- but this is just a ridiculous statement. Whenever a new trend pops up, people try to capitalize on it. It doesn't matter if the current trend is a fad or if it will last, it's about the opportunity right now.

I happen to think "tablets" are here to stay, but let's not get carried away based solely on that.
From what I've read, Assange is into ego-gratification, not idealism.
Possibly my favorite programming book is Shared Source CLI essentials.

It walks you through the internals of a functioning Virtual Machine for the .NET platform. You get JIT (compiling), GC, class loading, etc. It's presented very straightforward and there is lots of code to look at.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/059600351X/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp...
"I don't believe you can show me a single comment anywhere that implies "it's OK because some of them probably even deserve it," because that sentiment makes no sense. It's extremely rude to put words like that in other people's mouths."

It's also rude to down vote me to silence opposing views on this article. But, I digress....
You know things have gotten bad when that actually sounds like a feasible possibility.
Think of a simple problem to solve... and then solve it in a few different languages. This way, you figure out what you like, because everyone is different.

You might even be more focused in your learning and select specific frameworks for each language - great exposure for you.
The CAP theorem definition requires every live node, including the lone segregated guy, to respond to clients.

It also models nuked (hardware failure, power outage, whatever) nodes as being in an isolated single-node partition. Which becomes rather interesting in combination with that definition of availability.
Best Term Paper Would Concentrate on the Topic Problem
There are many elements which make your term paper one of the best term papers in the class. One of these which may be considered the most important is the topic problem. However, there are other elements of the term paper which need your concentration as well.
I guess I'll have to ask Sid to add some cartoons next time to liven it up a little.
Perhaps because most of the people around here have degrees in CS, which is something relatively easy to self-teach.

Except that it isn't. The problem is that computer programming is easy to self-teach (indeed, that's pretty much the only way it can be taught) and many people confuse computer programming with computer science.
I have an old mechanical keyboard of sorts that I use... I am currently typing on a fairly old Packard Bell keyboard that has individual plastic switches. It is not the best there is, but it works well... so that is what my normal keyboard situation is.

but what interested me most was the thoughts on how using touchscreen devices really affects input patterns. I have an iPod Touch that I often use to surf the web... usually Hacker News in Opera Mini in fact. I can type fairly fast on the device as well... I have timed myself at 80wpm vs 120wpm on my normal keyboard. From time to time I have even used it to type serious things, such as a few page long history paper. It is never pleasent though. It feels like an absolute chore of utter concentration to type fast on the touchscreen keyboard. It's convinient enough to type a few short sentences here and there, but whenever I go type anything lengthy I cringe at the fact that I have to type there. I cannot imagine having something like the iPhone as my primary phone because of how much texting that I do (I chose my non-smartphone simply for having the best possible keyboard). I really do wonder how that will affect how people think of data.. if we move more and more to devices where text input just isn't as nice as on a keyboard, such as iPads and phones like the Droid X and iPhone, for our computing needs, are we going to be less likely to do serious interaction?
Stop looking for a Business Co-Founder, Learn to Sell Yourself.
Sounds ripe for a marketplace where people can offer to and request lending from other users.
Well, there's the shipping rate that people have to pay.
Over the last 30 years mortgage rates have decreased and with that savings rates (the less it costs to lend money, the less you pay to purchase money). An emphasis was placed on creating wealth in home equity and the stock market vs. saving from your job/paycheck, and living off interest in retirement. Unfortunately it's hard to turn things around (deflation causes depressions) and we have to accept that it's going to take time. Our generation will never see the increase in home prices the way our parents and their parents experienced. The same goes with the stock market. We're overextended and it will take time for things to even out.
Being rich is having the amount of money that allows you to live the life you wish to lead. It's going to be more difficult for our generation to reach that point, but you can never go wrong with saving and preparing for retirement.
Awesome product, but I was shocked at this line:

Baptiste hasn’t actually spoken with anyone at Flipboard about this.

Seriously? You basically rip off of their concept and start charging $50 a pop, without asking for their permission. Isn't this idea infringement or something?

I can see why Evan Doll is pissed (see comment by jamesjyu).
Pretty cool. Anyone know how they're doing this, exactly?
This is a common perspective, but it is worth noting that it is not a foregone conclusion that the publisher will actually do any marketing.

I've been a developer on several games that were published by a major publisher, in the majority of cases, the games did not get the marketing promised and in most of those cases, got essentially no marketing. We ended up doing the marketing ourselves. We may not have been as good as the publisher could have been, but we had far more effect.
I'm not 100% sure. I believe even big corporation might receive some too (there might be a max amount).
Lots of good advice, but watch out for Unicode. IIRC, you can have illegal surrogate pairs in NTFS filenames (which are a kind of naive UTF-16), which renders them unconvertible to UTF-8. Certainly an edge case, but that's where bugs come from...

(BTW, what really shocked me about this was that it means some file paths can't be turned into file: URLs! I had assumed you could always do that.)
The point of money is that it enables to choose what you want to work on.

Look at Elon Musk. If he didn't have all his PayPal money he wouldn't have been able to found Tesla or SpaceX
Not hard. The client could notice if the connection dies (JQuery has AJAX failure callbacks, for example) and then attempt to reconnect; that's the important thing.
Neither is chillingo or the other iPhone publishers. Or at least, in most cases they don't. If you've had a hit with them, then maybe they will front cash.

But the old model where the publisher pays for development is no longer present. The publishers are looking for teams that can develop the title themselves.
Well, you'd expect the US Secretary of Defense to have an idea about it, and he says he doesn't know of any civilian killed for appearing in the previous documents ( http://edition.cnn.com/2010/US/10/16/wikileaks.assessment/ ).
Wikileaks gave the military a virtual veto right over the afghanistan documents; the US chose not to allocate resources to looking over them.

With the 15,000 or so Afghanistan documents that Wikileaks continues to hold back, they again offered to let the US review and make redactions. The US again declined to do so (publicly this time). The US claimed that doing so might legitimize Wikileaks.

That shows where the US' interests really are; it isn't in protecting the civilian informants to any appreciable degree.
I'm not pg, but this is probably the best place to tell one of my favorite stories.

The highway navigational signs in LA are notoriously confusing, especially this one sign in particular which didn't make sufficiently obvious an exit onto I-5. So some local took note of the sign and started to work. He found out exactly what paint colors to use, cut some sheet metal the right way, and made a North I-5 shield. Then he made himself a counterfeit Caltrans (California highway department) uniform, went to the sign, and altered it with the counterfeit shield to point out the exit. (He even made the shield dirty, to make it seem like it had been there for some time rather than being newly installed.)

It was nine months before the highway department even noticed--and when they did, they didn't even change it back. It stayed up for years until the sign was completely replaced--complete with this guy's alteration.

I don't know if that qualifies as hacking a system to one's advantage, or even as a hack, but I think it gets at the underlying personality trait.

Links:

http://www.good.is/post/the-fake-freeway-sign-that-became-a-...

http://www.ankrom.org/freeway_signs.html
It's amazing what the Internet has done for child geeks. Now they can find out about, interact with, and do useful things rather than hack alone in a vacuum.

My biggest child tech achievement was finding the word C--T in a data file for a text adventure when I was 10 (I was trying to cheat at the game). I casually asked my parents what it meant and my parents wrote in and complained and we got a free copy of the then-new Wing Commander by way of apology <g> (Happily, I didn't learn what C--T meant till I was about 14..)
I also think that touch screen keyboards are crippling, but it seems that most non techies don't type fast enough to care anyway. So maybe keyboards will end up being a specialist tool?
http://news.ycombinator.com/lists
Back in college a few years ago, we mostly used Simplex and other tableau-pivot based algorithms for solving large linear programming problems. Link to wikipedia article on the Simplex algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplex_algorithm

For most problems that individuals face each day, linear programs are fairly simple to model and solve. However, there are lots of complex problems that are solved each day.

A few examples of large-scale linear programming problems:
- For Amazon.com: what quantity of each item should be stocked at each warehouse each day to minimize inventory while also optimizing for shipping time and cost to demand nodes (customers).
- For an airline: how to plan and schedule flights to all domestic and international airports to maximize profit
- In shipping logistics: how to allocate trucks and set routes to minimize fuel cost while satisfying delivery time.

For complex systems, you can easily run up a linear program with millions of independent variables (producing millions of rows in the linear system).
"There were only 361 million Internet users in 2000, in the entire world. For perspective, that’s barely two-thirds of the size of Facebook today."

That quote there blows my mind.

Of course, ten years ago I was surfing on a Windows 98 box using an early release of Netscape 6 and an ISP managed by Walmart...
I'm pretty sure he's talking about the option of getting a job, punching a clock, and working with older, more experienced people.
1st, what made macs awesome is how well they target multiple platforms. having access to apple, linux and windows user on one device was awesome.

2nd, chrome and firefox will still auto download flash, so really what this does is it makes safari users act like IE users in that they won't have all of the plugins.

it seems that apple is doing this so they rapidly iterate for Mac OS (next) without vendor support. sounds like apple is getting quite before something big in the next OS.
The Zune store also sells straight-up, no DRM mp3s for about the same price Amazon does.
Specific to you, I think you just added value to yourself even though you failed at trying to code because the act of trying to learn how to code itself made you discover that it's not as easy as it looks for just anybody, and thus make you appreciate your technical team better.

Not understanding what it takes makes it harder for non-technical people to appreciate talent. You could use your failure here as your selling point.

Of course, now non-technical "frat-boys" here are going to wave the "I tried and I failed" flag, but know that it's not hard for technical people to find out if you really tried or not.