skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would have mercilessly flamed you for saying this a few years ago, but then I met someone who made millions from writing his own BIOS for embedded systems, since early 80s. I love him, he is a good friend, his work runs industrial equipment that power the world. But ..

Talking to him about the most primitive constructs in computing: say, variables, or calling conventions, or the simplest data structures has been a teeth-pulling experience. One of the tricks he invented involved saving the registers for interruptible code to fixed locations in memory: he reasoned that saving X registers at Y clock-cycles would meet his soft-realtime requirements. He also kept an index, that stored the last instruction that was executing when the code was interrupted, so he can restore the "handler" later.

He "invented" this ~25 years ago.

Let that sink in.

My friend invented context-saving, all by his own, really, and there is no way in bloody hell to tell him that it EXISTED since before he was born.

I am mightly impressed by his work, all of it self-taught and wildly profitable. But it's just sad that I, a two-bit paper-hacker with nothing to his credit can look at his Magnum Opus and have a name for every invention, not to mention research references, and suggest alternatives.

Embedded hackers are competent, but FUCK, sometimes they need to see past board specs and stupid timings. College Freshmen can out produce them, and those kids are running 100% simulated stuff in Java and Flash. Something has to be said for rigor, depth, and breadth of knowledge, but most importantly abstraction. Who cares if you can operate industrial electronic equipment, if some kid with PLT Scheme can create a cycle-accurate simulator of your equipment in 2-weeks, and out-codes you after that?
He can't expect it to actually happen, so presumably his aim is to give the impression that he's confident of winning the case (and, I hope, to create a little entertainment - I sure found it bloody hilarious.)
If you are changing your oil every three months then you are almost certainly wasting money. You should trust the integrity of the oil change shop about as much as you would trust an 'SEO expert.' There might be good ones, but most are looking to maximize profit at your expense.
I looked into SendGrid, and I was a bit concerned that they use IP addresses from EC2 to send out email with. Otherwise they seem pretty good.

I wonder if the issues of needing to send out mail from multiple IP addresses and per-ISP rate throttling are as important as they say. I guess I'll find out if I'm lucky enough to ever hit those limits.
I don't really understand why this is a surprise or that we needed "Firesheep" to make this popular. This is just no-brainer. The ironic thing to me is that Facebook is so popular with colleges, exactly the places where kids sit there with wireshark running, happily gathering data. Firesheep is neat but I am confused as to why it takes this Firefox extension to point this out. I mean, everyone has heard of SSL right? What did we think that was for?
This reminds me of the mixup a few months ago where a site other than Facebook was the top Google result for "facebook login" http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/11/facebook-login.

I find it rather depressing that while we've built up all these layers of abstraction there are still people who don't understand what the address bar is.
I agree with the take away, don't get superior.

However, the relevancy of being an expert in emerging technology isn't really captured by your metaphor.

Also it's definitely not that you're smarter, rather you are just familiar with the technology. And of course, tech draws a lot of smart people (as it's interesting and has probably the highest potential for financial reward for the most people).
Woah, too kind guys. Anyways, here's the post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1831960
http://maziesoftware.com/

Please help! I'm always hard on my own designs but I dont think my current one is good at all. My product is a meeting management web app.
My programming language professor once told us the history of when he was assigned in a committee to produce a brochure about the college. At one point a publication specialist came to the committee meeting to talk about possible brochure arrangements. The specialist was using too many jargon words from the publication world so my professor wasn't really able to understand what the specialist was saying. At one point the professor had an epiphany: "My god, this is how we sound to people that work in other areas when we talk about our own area!"
Where do you get this Java from to install on OSX? I just checked the Oracle Java site, and they only have it for Solaris, Linux, and Windows.
Trabajar en Google -Documental
So are you claiming there is a better way to grow a vector? Or are you mistakenly criticizing vector for a task it isn't suited for.
I mean, why not use @startupmail.com for your personal addresses and have your app use @startup.com?

Because then people might wonder if I really did represent startup.com when I emailed them about a biz dev deal.

I agree with you regarding the trust/user experience issue with sending notifications from startupmail.com.
My grandma calls me up and says "I want to move my computer into the other room, will you come over and plug everything in for me?".

I tell her "the plugs will only fit one way round into the correct sockets, you literally can't go wrong".

She calls me back, saying that her mouse isn't working.

I go over and take a look. She'd forced the USB connector on her mouse into an Ethernet socket with such force that she cracked the network card.

The lesson? Elderly women are strong.
Certainly higher than 99.999 for just a random sampling.
hold your finger on the "normal" version of the character until a popup appears for the accented versions.
Current CMU student here. All students are required to 15-123 (Introduction to C & Unix), 15-213 (Introduction to Systems) and another low level systems course of your choice (which to my knowledge almost all require C and/or x86 assembly).
Exactly. I think the fundamental disconnect is between people who see an unfamiliar user interface and immediately try to figure it out, and people who see an unfamiliar UI and think "Oh no what the hell is this, I don't remember it! Panic, panic, panic!". Obviously it's not as sharp a dichotomy as that, but it definitely exists.

A lot of people learn to use computers by memorizing a sequence of steps which, if followed exactly, will produce the right result. To send an email, first double-click on the "internet", then click "bookmarks", then "send an email", then press "compose", then type the email address of the recipient into the field, and so on. This is a very brittle kind of knowledge, and if the computer goes off-script, people who've been trained to interact with computers this way tend to just fail, hard.

I'm not sure what the answer to this is, because for most of these people, learning how to figure things out on a computer would be a lot of work for not much immediate gain.

Maybe the problem will go away on its own. How many younger people read the manual for their cell phones, or a video game? And yet they figure it out anyway, by exploring.
How much time has IE wasted?
The only difficulty would be with the earlier Intel graphics chips (GMA9xx and GMA3xx0, the latter used more recently on some Atom machines). Some of these models support OpenGL 2.0 but their Windows drivers don't. Nobody's going to care about pre-DX9 hardware, and everybody else will have OpenGL 2.0 acceleration if they have Direct3D acceleration.
oh wow, thanks!

Now I see where are all these missing letters from my Arabic keyboard are.

Seriously, how the hell would anyone discover this feature on his own?
One of the nearby casinos offers me $100 match play fairly often, which is a little certificate that I put $100 of my own money on top of.

Let's say I bet black, if it lands red, I lose $100, if it lands black, I win $200, if it lands on zero, I lose $50, and have the opportunity to try again.

18/38 times I lose $100.
18/38 times I win $200.
2/38 times I lose $50, and get to try again.

Without doing the math, I believe that puts the value of the cert around $47.
Don't think this one has been posted... I found it quite humorous:

Why are American {men|women|children} so... : http://www.technomancy.org/google-suggest-venn/#start=Why+ar...
To be fair, oil changes are basically the best deal you can buy from a 'mechanic'.

Besides, he may be commuting 25 miles to and from work in a 98 civic, in which case that would be a fine schedule.
David Cancel also had some great points during his talk at Startup Bootcamp at MIT this fall.

You can watch the video here: http://www.youtube.com/startupbootcamp#p/c/A978F0F30D190EF9/...
the Old Testament God, to be exact.
Also unfortunately I think Flash and Silverlight media streaming don't respect proxies, leaving me unable to stream Hulu and Netflix when I'm in the UK.
Do you have the Ultimate Wallboard?
Looks like some trolls decided to go on a downvote spree.
Where are the "MongoDB is Web Scale" jokes? crickets. If you are not using MongoDB, you are missing out badly and are probably developing at a much slower rate than someone who is.
I know what you mean. After much blog surfing I've written some stupidly simple rails 3 plugins that might help by showing you what is minimally required. A few will also show you the setup that works to test with both rails2 and rails3 (pparams, auto_hash)

http://github.com/kswope/
Is there a Sevilla Startup/Tech scene?
I've just moved to Sevilla, Spain from London. I've a freelance iPhone Developer, and wanted to know if there is a Tech/Startup scene in the city and where i can find it.

Thanks
Presumably, having a pending investigation hanging over his head is bad for business.
Good point, make that into a 55k page recommendation and attach it to a morality bill, then congress will look at it.
This just completely freezes my firefox. Can't even get firefox to start at all.. Any ideas?
I just did the bomb lab. I had a blast (pun intended). We're using that textbook, and I've learned tons this semester. The buffer overflow lab was also a ton of fun. This class takes the cake for the most difficult and fun homework assignments I've ever had.
The importance of branding - you don't get fired for buying IBM
Nordstrom's 75-word employee handbook
It depends on what he would use it for.
http://www.mymomjust.com and http://www.mydadjust.com. Using hadoop/pig, I searched through my 620-million strong twitter archive for all tweets containing "My Mom/Dad Just....." The results are hilarious. It's just a single-page site and could be some low-hanging design fruit.
Fun challenge. It took me about 10-15 minutes using curl.

I think it's the right level of difficulty: Difficult enough that you're able to weed out a lot of really low quality applicants, but not so difficult that you run the risk of excluding high quality applicants.
Honestly they should not have made this announcement public, it should be a private message to anyone submitting an application, otherwise random people pick up the challenge and post the answers online.
I once tried, unsuccessfully, to dissuade someone from putting a floppy disk in a CD-ROM drive and shoving it closed with enough force to permanently break the plastic. This person then blamed me.

The lesson? I need to learn to write some people off as jackasses not worth dealing with. (My grandmother, on the other hand, is pretty cool. If she needs cables plugged in, I'll happily help.)
Agreed. But I can't think of any data structure that would offer you contiguous, order-preserving storage and O(1) insertions/deletions of arbitrary elements.
Waaay too easy...honestly, I'm not tooting my own horn.

But I guess it would keep the lazy applicant from applying.

EDIT: on second thought, maybe it is the right level. They aren't likely looking for $100k+ hacker geniuses, just guys who can think outside the box and know how to do basic digging and prevent your typical hack.

I retract my statement. Clever application process.
MongoDB is web scale. No downvotes this time, please!

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/6995033/
The same situation applies to designers, only it's more insane.
http://www.agentshowroom.com

It is a Facebook app that lets Realtors shows their listings. I have tried to make it presentable, but I usually end up doing tasks that are more fun and let the design suffer. Thanks!
I think it's a bit short-sighted to assume everyone can use MongoDB if you're dealing with ACID type apps, or anything that deals with money. It's silly to say that they're developing at a much slower rate than someone that is. Use the right tool, or a combination of right tools, for the job.
I agree, the 'first half' is a pretty big window and Adobe missed their AIR on Android release by months. That said 2011 is eleven years before 2022 ;)
This is the one I always have to learn the hard way: "Focus all your energy on solving a critical problem. Forget your idea."

It's so true, yet such a bitch to put into practice. Cognitive biases conspire against you--especially the sunk cost fallacy, because forgetting your idea often involves throwing away finished work.

My hope is that by getting burned by this enough times, I'll sharpen my spider sense about when I'm not focusing on solving a real problem.
> A feature that is obvious to us is most likely obvious because we put it there.

Or it's not even obvious to us because it was written years ago. :)
A lot of HN discussions relating to business ethics revolve around narrow questions of law, politics, and economic imperatives, as applied to some company in the news.

A future article on how successful investors with different perspectives arrive at a consensus on these issues would be most interesting, as would hindsight into what 'evil' ideas have common, if anything.
http://remembersaurus.com - My recently launched webapp, and also my first attempt at making something look decent on the web.
It should be noted that even cookies marked 'Secure' will be sent over HTTP for versions of Rails prior to 2.3.10 and 3.0.2.

https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994/tickets/5629-s...

And it has been further enhanced recently: http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/2d5a12a50bcd83fcc99865d...
as a former lawyer who has handled large and small document reviews, i can say that both doc review platforms i used, concordance and caselogistix are horrendous and there is certainly an opportunity here for someone to do this right.
http://www.rhinoaccounting.com - Web based accounting software
A penny is pretty much negative money, if you care about the debt.

I see no major problem with getting rid of it - other countries have, after all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_rounding
Yes everyone, upvote the strawman argument.
Hmm. If this project ever expands to a larger audience than the one intended here, I will definitely look that up. Until this happens, I'll apply the YAGNI principle. :)
He was also the CEO while they launched Digg 4, which has been a huge disaster and may be what kills the company.
Tech people, and especially the circle that is absorbed in the startup/techcrunch/combinator thing, have to be the most incredibly self absorbed, solipsistic bunch of twits in creation.

Most people are busy earning a living or living their lives doing something that actually matters, and the subtle nuance of details that tech startup types endlessly masturbate over is trivial background noise to most of the normal working populace.

To turn it all around, I have had the experience of explaining a legalism such as a specific application of labor or copyright law to a deep hard core techie. It's absolutely outside their universe and their frame of reference... does not compute... smoke starts coming out the ears... "Illogical! Norman, please coordinate..."
it seems a bit on the easy side (only took me a few mins), but I like the idea. It was a fun challenge.
It is kind of odd that speed is the main motivation to switch from MySQL. Horizontal scaling is the usually given reason. From what I have seen Mongo achieves most of its speed by not using fsync by default. There were some slides floating around a while ago that showed Postgres at about the same speed by turning off fsync.
Interesting! I'll fix that. Thanks!
Ask HN: How to parse emails like TripIt?
Does TripIt write custom parsers for each potential email source (Expedia, Orbits, United.com, etc)? Or are they using some sort of parsing library that I'm not aware of?

I run a small CRM system for notary publics (notarycrm.com) and customers are consistently requesting the capability to forward scheduling emails (from banks/signing companies) into NotaryCRM. The idea would be that we'd parse the emails and add the signing to the customer's account - saving them a few minutes for each signing.

UPDATE: If anyone is particularly interested in helping me parse emails via SendGrid's Parse API, contact me - will trade your RRuby on Rails skillz for money. :)
email me andrew at aawsolutions.com
Why? It should work on a WPA encrypted network as long as I have the network key - from the perspective of my network interface nothing is encrypted.

This indicates that the card has not properly been put in to listening mode, which means the plugin is not operating my card correctly.
Change your color temperature to fix your sleep patterns
This is something I've forgot in the years I've spent working since University. There is a certain joy in hacking on data structures / input management and finding the exact patterns that will handle all of the error cases you've thought of.

Anyone have any suggestions for priming myself to work on a problem without directions and finding a solution as you go along (exploratory programming)? The closest I've come lately is exploring the node.js API and working out a basic web server with auth, cookies, and some MVC structure.
http://tekbob.com/join/default

:)
Agreed. I think the lesson is that the service must provide functionality for sub-groups or tribes and not attempt to be a catchall, as Digg tried to do.
Right, they have a custom STL because they want to have their custom memory management.
People probably mistook this for a comment thread on an interesting and informative blog post, not SQL/NOSQL flamewar central.
Why is it wrong to upvote the argument that says "use the tool that suits the job"? MongoDB fits some use cases really well, and even then we're still learning how to use it (read the post about the problems they had and how they fixed them). It's basically like any other database: it's good for some things, not so good for others, and when you use, learn it like you would learn any other part of your technology stack.
Well, I wouldn't directly equate technical knowledge with intelligence.

However, the statement "compared to you, most people seem dumb" isn't necessarily wrong -- 'you' must just be very intelligent.
I think it's more like wearing hammer pants.
If by "look at it" you mean "ignore it and vote based upon the title of the bill, its nominal purpose, which party proposed the bill, and how the party whips say to vote on it"...then yes, Congress will "look at it".
Does a lottery winner earn their money through hard work? Or a rich man's kid? Do they 'deserve' it? Hard work will make you a decent living, but beyond that you need a significant amount of luck. We live in a society of laws that dictate wealth distribution, and those laws are currently skewing wealth distribution in a way that has nothing to do with merit. There is nothing wrong with adjusting those laws to distribute wealth more widely and give more skilled people an opportunity to build on what we as a society have achieved.
I just discovered this and can't believe no-one has posted the URL for this before.

The warm color temperature really helps me control my sleep cycle, which can be pretty bizarre with the amount of time I spend staring at my monitor.
I work in sustainable fashion. We have a designer, but he is busy with other projects. I would love an infographic to help me put the facts on the fashion industry and pollution/waste etc in an easy to read and visually interesting format for lay people.
I am the author of Redisql and I wrote a blog post today explaining the concepts behind Redisql (a RDBMS on top of the NOSQL datastore redis)
http://jaksprats.wordpress.com/2010/09/28/introducing-redisq...
The original idea was to have a single roof to house both relational data and redis data and both types of data would exhibit similar lookup/insert latencies under similar concurrency levels.
And then I added simple commands to convert redis data into relation tables and vice versa, and I made many memory optimisations, etc... the result hopes to be the complete datastore solution for applications that require the fastest data lookups/inserts possible
I suspect that one source of the "Rock Star" meme is an inside joke about rubies being a type of rock.
Hmm, did you modify the session cookie? Because that is _not_ trivial with Safari developer tools.

Edit: Removed potential spoilers.
cool post :)

we just redesigned http://www.easycalapp.com - a frustration-free booking calendar for solo entrepreneurs - but we need a sales page.
For me, this is the key phrase:

"A joy to manage as they typically do 99% of the job for you"

I don't doubt that managers prefer employees that are easier to manage. But is it really in the organization's best interest?

I don't know thte author, but I've learned not to underestimate what a good boss can do for an employee. I'm inclined to believe that maybe if the author gave "rock stars" a bit more attention, he might be surprised at what they can do.
I don't want SSL for Facebook. SSL is slow, and its only slower the worse your latency. Until SSL is fundamentally changed to be fast, I'm going to avoid it at all costs.

Currently on my production application it adds a minimum of 200ms per request.

This is yet another reason to use a tool like 1password.
> Oh and apparently you can buy a Sundae for as little as $.999999999999999949.

Damn, I was sure hackers here would test the edge cases, but I thought it would hold! :) What you describe look like a weird behaviour in Ruby's string parsing to int (if I remember my code correctly), but I'll look into it.
Weekis - http://weekis.com

A Minimal, Unobtrusive and Focused Week Planner.
Regarding whether or not it's too easy...that's something we wondered about. We decided we wanted a relatively straightforward initial screen rather than an complex brainteaser.

So I would by no means liken this to the Greplin Challenge, but we're trying to accomplish something different. We're hoping to eliminate the crappy applicants so we can spend more time on the good ones.
You can't break the computers as such but if you work with enterprise software you sure can run the wrong process at the wrong time, or with the wrong options and make a mess in the database. Sometimes that commits IT people to spending hours or days cleaning up. Lots of people still spend all day on these old school systems.

Because lots of apps are linked up (emails can be filed so Document management, which integrates with CMS....) users don't know where the boundaries are. So it's a small wonder that they get scared of the system. And I think that fear reinforces any uncertainty with computers in general.

EDIT: typo
> Why is it wrong to upvote the argument that says "use the tool that suits the job"?

1) Because it's a strawman argument.

2) Because the reply addresses a very small subset of apps, which 10gen specifically says is not recommended for use with MongoDB.

My point is simply that you gain productivity and Mongo tends to get a lot of hate on HN. My time is limited. For 90% of use cases, I am going Mongo.
This is just multiplying my inhibitions :)

It's a '94 Mercedes 500SL, so...better safe than sorry?
Wary of Google Street View? Move, CEO Schmidt says