skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I hope this article helps you understand, use, and explain mutexes and semaphores as distinct tools.

Uh... it didn't. In fact, the very example they give of using a bathroom very much allows for both semaphores and mutexes.

initial state: mutex: released; semaphore: 1 (signalled);
use bathroom: mutex.lock; semaphore.decrement;
leave bathroom: mutex.release; semaphore.increment;

In this way, a semaphore can be viewed as "consuming" the "key", and creating a new one when finished, while a mutex is descriptively grabbing and returning.

They go on to state that a 2-counting semaphore cannot accurately control 2 bathrooms - true, it takes two binary semaphores or two mutexes, or other data. But at this point we're still at the two being identical; all that's been shown is that the claim that a single n-semaphore cannot be used in this manner. And neither can a single mutex. So the claim is they're not identical, but the example shows them behaving identically (the pseudo-code doesn't align with the example, and is meaningless anyway, as you can (and frequently do) .wait on a semaphore until it is signalled, just like a mutex release).

A significantly better example would be to show a single n-semaphore in a producer/consumer setup vs mutexes, where as many as n units can wait for consumption. With an n-semaphore, you just increment when you .push, and decrement when you .pop; you'll never pop from an empty stack, and will wait until a .push + .increment before continuing, and will never over-fill your stack. Simple, safe, and efficient in both code and computing power. Optimal, even - all producers produce until all are unable, and all consumers consume until all are unable.

With mutexes, this is not as easily possible; you'll have to test multiple mutexes, probably associated with an array location, to find one to safely push into / pull from. This means multiple checks to push / pull, and complex (if possible, haven't attempted to actually do it) mutex setups to allow consumers to both act immediately on new data and to not get in each other's way, in a similar manner to an n-semaphore.

edit: a quick example of the mutex's problem in this example:

assume n producers and n consumers, with mutex setup which prevents a producer from overloading an entry, or a consumer from over-emptying (takes 2 mutexes). If producer 1 makes two quickly, the second unit will languish until consumer 1 finishes the first unit and can claim it - no other consumer can work on that slot without many more mutexes controlling access to others' slots, if it's even possible to construct something which does this without spin-waits (continually checking all mutexes), which are very wasteful. I'd imagine it is, but I don't care to work out how to do it, as semaphores make it easy.
---
The big lesson of Digg may be simply this: if someone offers you a ridiculous amount of money for a company that wasn’t that hard to build, don’t think twice. Take the money and run.
---

The problem with that "lesson" is that you never know what is "ridiculous amount of money for a company".

Google might sell itself for couple hundred million too, but it would obviously be a wrong decision.
Don't know what kinds of blogs you are looking for, but my friends over at www.superprofundo.com write some pretty interesting stuff.
"WebSharper"

http://www.intellifactory.com/products/wsp/Home.aspx

----
example:

"This sample builds upon the formlet sample illustrating how formlets may be converted into flowlets for expressing sequences of web forms."

http://www.intellifactory.com/products/wsp/samples/Flowlet.a...
Might The Mac App Store Lead To A New Class Of Micro-Apps?
I couldn't agree more. I find myself somewhat dumbfounded when I think about where I am these days and where I could be. My career path has been a series of serendipitous events that I could not have possibly planned out. I've mostly just responded to opportunities given to me, accepting the fear of rejection if things don't work out. Anyway, great advice.
"This tells us that the person's reputation can be adversely affected. Threat of bad press could maybe get him in line."

Under no circumstances should you make threats like this without talking to a lawyer.
Chances are you are going to get sued for having mcdonalds in your domain name.

switch that to sowhatcouldiget.com, add in taco bell, dominos etc...and it might make you a few hundred bucks a month
Something I have been thinking about is a quote from an old TV show something like:

"Though a tree that falls in a forest and is not heard makes no sound, still, it falls."

I would suggest you stop worrying about press and worry about reaching individuals users. Word of mouth and all that. For inspiration, you might read the story here behind this guy's business:

http://shop.johnnycupcakes.com/story/

(I saw this on HN somewhere previously. Thanks to whomever posted it before me.)

I am very much doing the grass-roots thing for one of my projects. I get a lot of flack and relatively little positive response. I actively discourage people from heaping public praise upon me because it causes nothing but trouble. I am frequently discouraged. But the humble, reaching out to the people approach I am taking is gradually working whereas attention-mongering never did anything but backfire and alienate people. Whatever you are doing is unlikely to be as touchy a topic as what I am doing, so you probably don't need to bend over backwards to avoid "good press" when it does come. You may just need to look for other means to validate that you are getting somewhere. Press is not everything.

Good luck with this.
Along with get a lawyer's opinion before doing anything i would stress that you can talk to multiple lawyers or firms to get different prices and opinions. Also I have found that people are usually happier if they find their lawyers through a connection rather than just searching Google or the yellow pages.
I just disagree with the current mantra that you have to be so out there and in the public to be a worthwhile programmer. Many great programmers really aren't interested in tweeting every time they figure out what a hashtable is or whatever.I think it would be suspect if one was not aware of mailing lists and didn't at least lurk through them as a resources but as far as being an active participant, I think it's a bit over-hyped.
Glad you find it useful :)
"I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, man." - Jay-Z
I have never met a professional that rides the bus to work.
The page strikes me as very racist, exactly what is a 'gypsy cab'?
Get a good lawyer from a major firm; you'll need a depth of skills not available in a small firm. Collect all relevant paperwork. Document everything. Write memos to "the file", keep notes. Don't delay.
Node 0.2.3 I hardly knew ya. So far, my few days programming with node have been great. I've delved into Express (a micro Ruby Sintra like framework), and socket.io for real-time goodness. Everything is clean and works like a charm. I have a lot more ahead of me, so bring it on!
Has working with Git on a team changed much in nine months?
Am I the only one who finds it naive to name a startup UberCAB and then act as if it had nothing to do with taxi dispatching services? It's as if the PayPal founders decided to call it "UberBank."
Maybe all that stuff could be put in the UI, perhaps with a javascript popout that has checkboxes, etc and then when the user enters the data, the code is injected into the search bar. Just an idea.
Cuban Craigslist fighting against goverment censorship
He is a big pimpin I guess...
In spite of the sarcasm, it's actually a good argument.

Warfare before the advent of nuclear weapons was a devastatingly bloody affair, with death tolls in the hundreds of thousands. And warfare these days in which only one side or neither has nuclear weapons is much the same.

But when two nuclear powers fight? There are skirmishes. Proxy wars. Posturing and arms races and diplomacy and . . . very little bloodshed. For all its terror and danger and struggle, the Cold War did not wipe out an entire generation of young men the way previous World Wars had. As violent and bloody a past as India and Pakistan have had, once they both went nuclear, they settled down. They still fight, but it's limited. Neither side wants it to escalate out of control.

That is the nature of strategic weapons. Nobody wants to pick a fight with a country that has ICBMs or B-52s. Heck, countries that have them don't want to pick fights with each other. What could they hope to win that would offset the staggering losses they could incur?

As they say, an armed society is a polite society. It scales right up to nations.

Raptor is such a weapon. Not because of the casualties it could inflict -- it can carry only a paltry eight missiles, or a couple medium bombs -- but because of what it does to an air force.

The Air Force periodically goes out for large force exercises -- where they get a huge number of jets together in the air, and act out something as close to a real war as they can. The last few years Raptor's been going to those, and its numbers are astonishing. They match up Red with tons of 4 or 4.5 gen fighters against Blue with a few 4 gen fighters and a few Raptors. And Blue wins. With a kill ratio like 180-0 or 241-2. [1]

Nobody wants to pick a fight with that.

There are two ways to get a country to resolve its conflicts with you peacefully. One is to trust in their good nature and dislike for bloodshed. The other is to make fighting not an option. The second route is more reliable in my opinion, and strategic weapons accomplish it.

If you hate war, you should love Raptor. Just sitting on the tarmac, it saves lives. American lives, yeah, but Chinese or North Korean or Russian lives too. It prevents war and forces people to pursue peace.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-22_Raptor#Service_history
Good article. My wife and I just got back from China and I noticed in the food markets that almost all seafood is sold live. Our guide said that is what consumers there demand.
Reach the Stars with Your Astronomy Coursework
Astronomy coursework is related to the field of planets, stars and moon etc. As it is not a wide scope area, students may find the selection of topics for the astronomy coursework challenging. A good topic will enable students to write a good astronomy coursework.
adblock ftw! Very interesting read.
Shameless self-promotion: http://swipegood.com/blippy :)

Turn your blippy account into a fund raising machine. Every time you make a purchase and review it on Blippy we round it up to the nearest dollar and allow you to give it to your favoriate charity.

We just launched the blippy integration and would love any feedback!
I love it. Pair it with a few C# projects to get all the LINQ-TO-SQL goodness and ASP.NET MVC + nhaml and you've got yourself a beautiful way to develop for the .NET platform.
You're right about his semantic mix-up, but surely you knew exactly what he meant.
I'm guessing Gabriel Weinberg, among others, sensed there was a looming market opportunity here as well. :)
The lib I really like is the F# powerpack.
One reason : attracting the right people
Also, if you are an HNer and see a "Rate my X" post in the new section, be sure to give feedback. I usually upvote everyone of those I see even if I dislike the idea behind the website\service linked. After all, they are asking for criticism! Otherwise they slide off quick and I don't see anyone else commenting on them. Most people are here for commentary, but support all creators.
Ask HN: Women who've applied to YC?
We know the number of women accepted to YC is pretty low, so I assume the number of women simply applying is pretty low as well. Being that Startup School was 99% guys, I wanted to see how many women are on here and who've applied (if only to say hello and rock on. :P). Or even, women who read HN regularly and haven't applied, and why.

Personally, I've applied this round with http://weddingtype.com.

EDIT: Also, any guys who've applied with a woman on their team, speak up. :)
When I last checked, my main account (@TweetSmarter) had more retweets (lifetime) than the main New York Times account (@NYTimes).

The real reason why? My wife and I offer Twitter advice through that account to anyone who asks...and a lot of people are really confused out there.
Very important point Bricklin makes, and one I agree with strongly:

"But one thing is and was necessary: experience shipping a product. You should know, he says, 'what it is to actually complete something and get it out the door. That's a real important thing to learn.' Nothing beats the experience of shipping software, to take something from start to finish. You get feedback from users, and find out what you did right and wrong. It's even better, he says, to do this with other people"

Ideas and knowledge are great. Accomplishment is something else altogether. Ship, ship, ship!
IPads Gain Prominence in Hollywood
In a choice between joining Microsoft or Queensryche, I would have joined the metal band too.
For many kinds of programming, you are right.

But if you hit a bug in the kernel, you are probably going to communicate with others (probably on a mailing list) in the process of fixing that bug. Same goes for hitting bugs in any other open-source part of UNIX.

I mean, sure, if you are writing an application, this only applies on the shared library bits. But I was specifically talking about advanced *NIX people... people who would be expected to deal with bugs in open-source products.
They could make a deal with taxi companies, to pass the < 1hr fares to them instead.

Problem solved.
How did he get accepted into all of those graduate programs? I'd love to try
my hand at a new field but i have no idea how to get into a phd program.
Low-cost Web Site Finds Niche
What The Most Watched TV Shows Say About America
I read that through but still don't get why "environmentalists hate it"? Wouldn't farmed fish be preferable, environmentally, than continuing to trawl the ocean?
1) pip creates the virtualenv if it doesn't exist, and uses --no-site-packages by default (as far as I know, anyway).

2) Why not? Varnish is awesome. Is nginx as flexible as Varnish when it comes to caching?
Just make sure you don't pointlessly store continuations when you don't need to, like on Hacker News.
grep-four-two is how I pronounce it too.

I feel its neither cliched nor easily comprehensible yet sort of catchy once you're used to it. Its not something anyone would relate to at first; but its an opportunity, a differentiator, an empty cup that could be filled with anything. Once people start relating to it, they'd never confuse it with something else :)
An IPO for Facebook would mean losing all of their top engineers who are hanging around until they can cash out. Everyone will leave for the next hot startup and to work on their own projects. Zuck is smart for dragging the process out.
Thank you, I'm glad you found it useful!
What are you using for a phone right now? I have our local sheriff's station in my phone book, so I use that instead of 911.
He's using Google Charts (http://code.google.com/apis/chart/). The center piece is actually several charts with transparent backgrounds layered over each other, and the right and bottom are two more separate charts.

Very cool.
Good performance plus reliability
Kids Track at RubyConf X
The reason why functional programming is popular with web programming is that it explicits shared and changing state and allows the programmer to express the purely functional parts as pure functions. Pure functions have the advantage of being very simple to run in parallel - as they have no side-effects.

At least that's my reason.
There are no guarantees of success. It's usually possible to guarantee failure, e.g. by not returning the call.
Sure, hindsight is 20/20 after all. But sometimes it's good to take the money and run when you can (Friendster, Digg, MySpace). Taking the money is especially tempting when dealing with value through audience and not technology. Your audience can leave you as quickly as it came to you. If you're real slick you can even sell at a crazy valuation and then buy it back for cheap like Skype or Stumble Upon.

Facebook is an example of it "working out", but I don't think Zuck would be feeling too terrible if he sold out and had hundreds of millions of real dollars to do whatever he wanted with instead of billions of on paper dollars to try and maintain. I'd be too busy sailing my boat to even know what Facebook was doing, but that's me.
When I get tired and start to screw up - this is about 3 am.

Then I try to accomplish something however small, so I can go to bed a winner.
Sean Platt @ http://writerdad.com is an AMAZING writer, however the blogs focus may not be your cup of tea.
Significantly? Probably not. Ten months is a long time in technology and best practice/process will have changed. The age is yet another factor to consider while reading the article.
I'm sure I could find a way to alienate Digg's users in a weekend and that's apparently what they've been up to for the past few years.
Regarding Microsoft as an investor and it's conflict with Apple, keep in mind that Microsoft has already taken a direct investment in Apple buying ~3% of the company about 10-12 years ago for $150 million. The day they bought it it closed at $4.97 compared to $307 today.
MTV Circa 1993
Generally speaking you can only do yourself harm by responding to this kind of threat. Just ignore it.

The first thing a lawyer will probably tell you is say nothing.
I'd suggest http://www.aldaily.com/ which aggregates very good editorials and reviews from some of the best newspapers magazines and blogs online.
How the Winklevoss twins were made in The Social Network
Wow. Indeed, it is a bit confusing. A much better way would be adding a small label at the top. But I'm afraid the whole UI will become cluttered with several "small labels" creating a WTF UX :(
Would you prefer "Roma Cabs"? In all seriousness, I do agree although I don't think the average American even realizes that Gypsies/Roma are an actual, modern-day ethnic group.
Microsoft: Windows 8 is two years away
You will not be able to reconstruct the regex by a timing attack unless you make some assumptions on the input like maximum length and even then reconstructing the regex will be tough. If you don't make a maximum length assumption then the best you can do is create a string that will pass it because you will never be able to tell the difference between /a+/ and /a{1,10^99999999999999}/. Practically this might not make a difference but theoretically it does.
If he's in at at will employment state he doesn't need a reason to get rid of him.

The OP said he was terminating the guy with cause which is interesting. If the investment is contractually tied to the position it could of course be much more complicated.
LA/CreativeMornings Video: Zach Frechette
AFAIK, everyone is free to quit and sell their shares on sharespost.com.
Hmm, true, you may have a point.
I'm female. I started an application at some point, mostly for the process involved in thinking things through, and contemplated whether or not I thought applying would be realistic. I ultimately decided, no, that's not really the right path for me. But I hang out here a fair amount.

(I made a wish list at some point and one of the items on it was something like "Get feedback from Paul Graham" (another was "get feedback from Millard Fuller", er, who happens to be dead it turns out). Decided I didn't need any special favors, I could just keep reading pg's articles and also hang here. So far, so good. Still don't have any answers for the impetus behind the Millard Fuller wish. Que sera, sera.)
Hmm. One thing's for sure, it's gotta be click friendly. I'm thinking drag and drop, clicks, minimal typing..
thats something i have never seen on HN. You must be really starting a new trend for others to follow. Bravo!
the investment was preferred stock that converted in the early 2000s and they sold the shares in 2003. see: http://justinhartman.com/2007/11/23/microsofts-equity-in-app...
Step 0: Be Ed Witten.

More generally, if you can get into one Ph.D. program you can probably get into most of them. Profs, like any employer, want the two key things: be smart, and get enough done to justify their investment in you. Except that students are really cheap, especially in the first year or two, and especially in math or theoretical physics where their cost is mostly in office space, ever-cheaper computer time, adviser hours and coffee.
I downvoted your(the above)comment. Why?

#1 - You contradict yourself implicitly with this defense. If a quote needs more context to have impact, then it is a shitty quote, which is what the OP said plainly.

#2 - 'Juvenille' and 'simple' are synonymous in this context. Period. Jay-z lyrics are more often then not, ridiculously vapid of substance or depth. Musical kool-aid.

#3 - Jay-z is a man who made his money ruining the lives of thousands by selling drugs, and millions more by being a horrific influence. He is a man who has admittedly attempted murder on more than one occasion. He is a man who has used and debased women proudly. He is a man of many transgressions. And I could look past all of them if he did not glorify them so.

Yet he does - so shamelessly in fact that its revolting to witness. His wealth and the adoration of the mindless sheep who buy his "music" are the justification he uses to continue to do so.

He says he'll always rap about variations on the same themes: drug hustling, business boasts, luxury hopscotching from Gucci to Louis Vuitton to the new Dior suit he says is a perfect fit.

I'm sorry his money and "accomplishments" and his poor excuse for music do not make this a praiseworthy man.
care to share that? my comic fetcher is a little outdated
This type of questions, don't bring anything up, those who want to become game programmers, will become game programmers by they own initiative. Beginning with the language they would find at first step better for them, through the experience of time, those spirits would hand out and discover, what languages and technologies match better with the project they are currently working.
Today I could say C/C++ are my best conclutions, thanks to pointers, memory access adresses, offsets.
But who knows tomorrow?

Sorry for my english.
I love love love that they added a Jay-Z song to the page in a classy, non-automatic way. It enhances the article so much. Well done on WSJ's part there.
Nice to see others with the same attitude. It's a thing of beauty to see a room cleared of clutter and reduced to the bare minimum of furniture/stuff.

We follow a very similar process in our house. If it hasn't been used in 6 months or so it goes out the door. Either to charity or ebay.
I'd work with you.

Happiest people I've met. Nepalese. One of the poorest nations on the planet.

Money and happiness do not correlate.

I remember a Nepalese didi (sister) laughing her head of at the "stupid American" who had left her lodge without paying that morning. What an idiot for forgetting to pay. Her neighbours were falling around laughing. I caught the guy by lunch time, and he felt so bad he walked all the way back. I would love to have seen their reaction.

"Life is about experience". You can buy some of it, but not most of it. And the best things in life really are free.
Who?
Do you know this or is it simply conjecture. Do you know for sure that Joe Hewitt is there just for the IPO?
Also, if the contracts were created correctly there should be an earnout to prevent just such a thing if it was a serious risk.
Many companies have been through an IPO with out losing their top talent, perhaps you should look at GOOG and see how detrimental the IPO was to that stock.