skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you are far too forgiving. Jobs' language initially indicated Apple wanted all music in the store. Later he reversed his position entirely and seemingly spitefully. Apple does great things, but Jobs does have a reputation for expecting loyalty from companies they do business with. I suspect we'll see more moves from Apple like blocking Adobe's Flash to iPhone app tool (at least until presumably the FTC pressured them). That and a bunch of other great products.
If @facebook.com email addresses have a stronger link to real, non-spammy, non-mass-produced identities than other domains, they could become preferred at many other sites -- a broader version of Facebook Connect.
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I would say the same, but I think its absence has reduced me to tears enough in the past, so I'll pass. :)
I second this. I just graduated and as I was looking for a job and I interviewed for a bunch of companies.

One of them asked that I solve some programming challenges. Sure, I like puzzles and I like being challenged. However, at the time I was already being challenged by my thesis work, problem sets, interviews... it's hard to agree to make a huge time commitment just to get the right to a first round interview.

Since other hot startups/ cool companies (Google, FB) don't require this type of activity, it makes sense to me to think that a lot of people simply won't have the time to apply because they're busy solving more interesting puzzles.
I don't have a facebook account but idk about this. Will users get another username for their email address or use their vanity usernames? The under 18 crowd will use it because like another poster brought up, my brother also doesn't have a email address. He tried using mine.
This report reminds me of the WSJ's article on "White Flight" from a few heavily Asian high schools in the Silicon Valley:
http://wsjclassroom.com/teen/teencenter/05nov_whiteflight.ht...

And somewhat of NYT's report on my alma matter (Berkeley):
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/education/edlife/07asian.h...

Personally, as a white person who attended a heavily Asian high school and college, I never understood this fear of a school being "too Asian". It might just be the hacker in me, but I felt that the added competition such demographics supposedly brings only betters everyone.
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As an independent computer technician, I used to just use PayPal for my website and Square for in-person transactions. Yes, PayPal requires a little bit more work, but then you don't have to pay a middle-man to operate between you and a, well, other middle-man.
... where 16 and under would mean 13-16. Facebook accounts aren't technically available to minors (under 13 years old).
Yes. I think it makes for a horrible society. Two wrongs don't make a right.

If you hit back, it makes you just as bad, if not worse as the original perpetrator.
Ask HN: Best city in India?
I've been working for myself for the last several months and have decided to use my freedom to live abroad. I'd like to start off with India (I'm an American-born Indian). The major places to be seem to be Delhi, Bangalore, and Chennai. Any others you'd recommend? Do you guys have advice on pros/cons of the various cities and how to best get started there?

Number one priority is internet of course. Also, since I won't be part of a company, I'd like a place where it is easy to meet other people - clubs and events and such. I'm thinking of staying there for the first few months of 2011, so I would like a reasonable flat that has plenty within walking distance.

Thanks a lot!
I coded my first JQuery app (www.quaverly.com) using JQuery Mobile last weekend. It was ridiculous how little time it took to make something look semi-presentable--it would have taken me maybe a week to code the equivalent in GWT, and it wouldn't have looked as nice, either!
Kids these days. I guess the OP didn't really understand everything or didn't bother to explain, especially my favorite bit about "computed goto" and the fact that if you code your compiler to emit assembly instructions with labels it's quite "natural" to implement it.

Duff's device is an example of the "loop unwinding." Say you have n divisible by 8, then you can loop n / 8 times and have eight assignments in the loop stated explicitly. Now instead executing n assignments and n looping instructions (there can be more instructions needed for one loop and the cost of jump can also be visible) you can have less, n / 8 looping instructions and still n assignments.

When such thing should be done? 1) If you measured your loop and it was too slow with a one assignment and one loop pass for every n. 2) you know that your compiler can't do the loop unwinding automatically -- modern compilers can do such things even if you write a normal loop if the compiler estimates that this can really help and when you give to it a specific direction to produce such code (e.g. aggressively optimize for speed).

Only now comes the reason for using Duff's device: how to code the case where n is not divisible by 8? Well you can have a loop for the remaining number R of elements, but then you have R assignments and R looping instructions. More clever thing is to have the sequence of the assignments in the code stream, one after another and to jump directly inside to execute exactly R assignments.

Turns out, C was made in seventies, but Fortran was made in fifties and already had the construct which allowed exactly that, the direct jump. So authors of C created something smarter -- a switch statement was implemented so that it compiles to the series of if ... goto or even to the "computed goto" sequence, not needing to do more comparisons if the values for jump conditions are one after another.

So now we're able to have one sequence for a direct jump (say 8 assignments in a switch) and one sequence for unwound loop (loop around 8 assignments). But why not trying combining them? That was Duff's insight, and the Duff's device is a result of it. The benefit: instead having 16 assignments in the generated code, you'll have just 8 which are going to be used both for R assignments and for unwound loop.

Just that last step (reducing the number of the assignments in the resulting code from 16 to 8) is something that you probably won't measure as a direct speed benefit, you'll only have a bit smaller resulting code. So I guess it was more a curiosity than something that must have been done exactly so even as it was written. Still it nicely demonstrates how people who know what is produced by the compiler are able to think, on one side, and how C can be used for "assembly level" optimizations, on another.
No, genius doesn't come from just hard work. You can work hard at the wrong way for a long time and still not get any better.

A genius is someone who sees the world by his own sight. A genius has wisdom because of that.

On the other hand, someone who learns only from school can't be a genius and get wisdom from books, he can only be someone with ability through learning, because he didn't awaken himself and see the principle of the world through himself.
It's a result of a strong campaign by http://uservoice.com. They've been pushing hard for the past 1-2 years and, if you were watching carefully enough, you could see those buttons slowly but surely appearing on more sites. They've simply reached a tipping point now so you notice them. It's somewhat akin to seeing a specific car model more often if you own the same model -- once you notice a pattern, it's difficult to un-notice it.

I like the UI. I dislike the UX, or rather what the button does to a site's overall UX.
Their demo seems to be loading content from the internet when you click a "stuff >" button. That's a terrible metaphor to use, since the expectation when hitting a button like that is instant feedback. Had they left links looking like links, you would expect a delay while loading and therefore not be disappointed.

To make it worse, putting the "loading" dialog up actually makes the operation seem slower. If I was building a site using this library, that's the first thing I'd figure out how to disable.
Fewer tests for the end-condition, and fewer jumps back to the start of the loop -- by a factor N, how many consecutive steps are 'unrolled'. (In these examples, N is 8 -- but it could be larger.)

But what if the number of steps isn't evenly divisible by N? That's where Duff's Device comes in; it lets one 'switch' at the beginning enter the loop at just the right place for the right number of remainder steps to be added to full iterations.

See also the Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duff%27s_device#Performance
Useful presentation, though I don't know how reliant Google still is on MapReduce for search.

There's a slide in there "Numbers Everyone Should Know" that deserves its title -- things like 10,000,000ns for a disk seek.
I took Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. My class had lots of Asians (and other minorities), and to a large degree they beat the pants off most of us white people for grades.

But that was the point of going there, I thought. I had scholarship offers from universities where they were going to make it easy on me. The high immigrant population at Waterloo shifted the bell curve so that all the courses had to be harder. Why would I spend money and four years of my life on something that wasn't as challenging as possible?

So thanks, hard-working immigrants, for raising the bar and therefore the quality of my education :) I hope the best Canadian universities continue to be smart enough to not try to influence it the other way.

By the way, I lived in London Ontario for a while, and the University of Western Ontario seems to be exactly as characterized in the article; mind boggling. But hey, I'm all for diversity. If that's what the majority of white people want to pay for, then sell it to them.
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I've always thought that Facebook could make a real difference by becoming a central hub to control your "persona" or identity so to speak. Facebook could integrate with every other service and app under the sun, and users would not require to input information (any more then their Facebook uri) to register for anything.

Instead they're trying to undercut Google by keeping them out of the 'shared data' agreement and now they're going into... e-mail and messaging? I'd rather they work on improving Facebook Connect and give me a way to control my data (and usable privacy controls while we're at it). I sure as hell don't want my personal email (and even less any business or corporate email) going through Facebook. Hell I have a hard time accepting Gmail, though it's so convenient I compromise.

Lots of people say that Facebook won't go the way of MySpace. But you know what? Lots of people said the same thing about MySpace too. Everyday I see or hear more and more about people I know just not using their accounts anymore and in some cases actually deleting them; even I don't get much value from it either this days.

I think Facebook is losing direction and just trying to wow users with amazing features that no one really needs. They need to focusing on making what they have better, not adding features and avoiding integration with other services.
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Heeding Your Own Advice
I have had countless numbers of conversations with girlfriends that had bad boyfriends or husbands, less than pleasant job situations or imperfect decision-making skills when it comes to controlling their shopping, and they always end up with the same phrase, “I should take my own advice.
It seems that Rails is doing something horribly wrong. There should be no reason to use code-generating or evaluate strings in a dynamic language.
Personally I really don't want my email visible to Facebook. What would they do with my information? Google already set the precedent for leveraging email data _somehow_. If so, Facebook will probably push the boundaries while carefully marketing it so that users accept something they would not have just previously. I only have a problem with this because they're profiting from data that users would not have allowed them to sell to advertisers if they had known about the terms when signing up. So it's like a bait and switch and that makes me distrust them.
An extra 30 bytes for a useful feature isn't much of a big deal if you ask me. Especially if it saves me adding a bunch of code to do the same thing.
> I am asking applicants to write some unit tests, to summarise the key point of a Google I/O video presentation that's actually fun to watch. I am asking them to learn enough about a web framework to be able to write a very basic program. I am asking them to review some really dumb code. And since I don't need code-monkeys but people with opinions, I am asking them for their opinion about my protoype: What would you improve?

Shit you are kidding right? Or do people just really value their time that low?
Wrong -- your FB email address will likely have the same prefix as your vanity URL. Guess that that means? Spam bots know your email address already.
Would this look out of place in pre-war Germany if you substitute "Jewish" for "Asian"?

How about looking at things as if the individual matters?

More smart, hardworking people only makes a country stronger and life better for the average person.

Need proof? Experiment with the exact opposite. Move to a place where everyone is dumb as a post. You may be the smartest fish in a mucky little pond, but you'll never get your order right at the drive-thru again. Break a leg and wake up with a cast on your arm.
I doubt it. Most schools block Facebook, whereas most do not block Gmail (many rely on Gmail themselves). Using a Facebook email is just asking for accessibility problems.
Window Shifter - move applications between networked computers
The 10% pay rise was offset by a $17 drop in the stock. Most employees own stock, so they got an extra 10% taxed as income at the cost of lower stock value which is taxed as gains

Something tells me Google didn't think it through
It's a bit off-topic but if I remember correctly they silently introduced a 'Server' version of the Mac Pro. Running the same X-Server software. Basically all that has changed is the form-factor, which isn't a rackmount anymore, but instead a tower model.

'Enterprise-y' Apple deployments will probably still be an option, just not in a rack.
I heard that Zuckerberg locked Paul Buchheit in a closet and told him he couldn't come out until he cloned Gmail.
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YUI2 was the first JavaScript library I started with, then I got into a project where I found jQuery code. At first I thought that jQuery's selector-centric method is weird, but I quickly found out that I was wrong. The thing that I love in jQuery is that it feels like HTML and JavaScript. YUI2 is an OO framework and a good one, but to me jQuery feels more like the web.

I seen little YUI3 but as I seen it's kind of shifted into a more functional style than YUI2.
I'd be glad to do the extra work (well yeah, within some limits, I won't code you a website for free :) ) The benefit to me as a developer is that this reduces the probability I'll work with incompetent people.
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RMS sold GPLed software in the early days. RMS is also someone who made deep personal sacrifices to see a certain vision of freedom prevail, or rather be preserved. That seems to me to be very American.
For most of high school, I had the misfortune of living in the South. (I got the hell back to civilization as soon as I could.) The little town (population 6,000) didn't see too many people move in or out, and there were grudges festering left and right, and there were fights all the time.

This is purely anecdotal and based on what I saw and did, but in an environment like that, it seems to me that escalation is only a problem if you don't escalate quickly enough. If I ended up in a fight (and I probably could have resolved a lot of conflicts without fighting, but I had that perfect combination of arrogance and insecurity that plagues the teenage mind), the problems continued only if I lost easily. Some of the best advice my mother gave me was "You can at least get a sandwich if they got a meal." (Other hits from mom: "The secret ingredient is always more butter." A stout lady, most of her advice was either directly about food or used a food analogy.) If I won, or if I managed to hit hard enough in the process of losing, I'd get no more trouble, except in one pathological case. Being unskilled but kind of big, I was often able to hit hard enough; if I have anything to say about it, my kids are going to log plenty of hours in a boxing gym.

> unless he pulls a knife
I carry a knife nowadays, after being in enough situations that came close enough to turning ugly that I wished I had one. I think, on general principal, that it's good for everyone to carry a weapon. A distant relative of mine who was born in the town we moved to had told me that when he was younger, in the 1940s and '50s, everyone had a gun in their jacket, "and you could tip your hat and be polite, or take turns shooting at each other." There's something to that, I think, in adult society. If there are no easy targets, if anyone you try to mug/terrorize/rape/attack/etc. can potentially end your life, then society is its own deterrent to crime. There are always irrational actors, of course, but if the crazy guy has a weapon, I want a weapon, too.
Things Goolge can't do while building new product
This is taken from Robert Scoble's tweets just now

---
Talked with a Google exec tonight about why Google can't do something like @instagram.

1. Can't keep team small enough.
2. Google can't reduce scope like @instagram did (they cut down feature set).
3. Google, if a product becomes successful, will get tons of resources and people thrown at it. Iteration periodicity goes down with more.
4. Google forces its developers to use its infrastructure, which wasnt developed for small social projects.
5. Google's services need to support every platform and language. Instagram is iPhone only so far.
6. Google's engineers can't use any Facebook integration or dependencies like Instagram does.
7. Google can't iterate in semi public (I, and a lot of others, had Instagram weeks before release, which made it better).
---
"many white students simply believe that competing with Asians—both Asian Canadians and international students—requires a sacrifice of time and freedom they’re not willing to make. They complain that they can’t compete for spots in the best schools and can’t party as much as they’d like"

Time to file for an injunction to suspend Evolution's "survival of the fittest"
Adding an extra layer of abstraction to have somewhat nicer looking source code doesn't seem worth it though.
One question, I noticed that the pdf from from the onyxneon site is 185 pages long, when a previous draft which i downloaded from chromatic's site was 273 pages long.

Where did all those pages go?
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Is the notion of 10-X programmers, super cool programmers over-rated?
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It's not under-valued, it's non-valued. As in, it's impossible to attach a value to someone's creativity, because, as far as anyone has been able to determine, it's not quantifiable. You can't hire with "creative" as a criteria unless you can create some sort of test that will accept creative people and reject non-creative people. Since there is no such test, we don't bother to look for it when hiring, and thus don't build businesses that depend on their employees to be creative, because they haven't been filtered as such.
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I was wondering what was so bad about the badges you pin on (point 6), before I remembered that most conferences I have been to were academic rather than business oriented. Physicists' are apparently confident that their clothes will not be ruined by pin holes.
you are agreeing AND disagreeing at the same time???!
I think he means it the other way: e-mail addresses ending with facebook.com could signal "this is a genuine person, not a spammer".
"Because it flags you as a mill, uninterested in the applicant and likely a firm that treats development as a commodity."

My impression is exactly the opposite. It flags them as a company that cares about technical competence.

"If you want to screen for the absolute basics of rote capability that's what those various certified professional type credentials are for."

Their test screen for more than that. And of course those professional certifications are useless if you go beyond the very basic level, just like "CV-years of experience" are useless for determining competence.
Violin and piano are indeed the most popular solo instruments in classical music. I won't stretch it too much if by saying that some of the best classical pieces are piano and violin concertos. At least 7 years of piano education were almost unavoidable growing up in former Soviet Union as well. There were free music lessons for everyone. Most people never touched the instrument after they were done. However some ended up switching to guitar or being able to play piano/keyboard for friends' entertainment. So overall I am glad I grew up in a country where music education was so universal.
You need an email address to sign up for Facebook and every time he signs up we write it down. So, he does have one.
Google try to integrate social network with gmail (buzz) and failed.
Now facebook is trying to integrate social network with mail and result would be fail IMHO.

Mail and "social networks" are different need.
I can see his point: I see more and more family members who have an email but who don't use it at all.

Instead they are all reachable via FB.
aren't iphones the gateway from work to facebook?
Social networking is lame.
After having eric go through the trouble of reworking an older tool into a couple thousand lines of javascript and css and making sure every teenager got a copy, I think it's only rational that he be indignant that facebook hasn't held a press conference to thank him and changed over a fundamental part of their infrastructure in the last week and a half.
Not sure about the Europe, but most of the construction done in the US is not unionized. The specialty areas certainly are (electricians, pipe-fitting, etc.) But the structure and foundation is straight-up grunt work.

And, as told to me by a friend, half the people on the site are inspectors. You've got the guy digging the hole, you've got the county inspector, you've got an OSHA inspector, and possibly an EPA inspector and union rep. That's a lot of people to doing nothing while the guy digs that hole.

It's probably an exaggeration (we were talking at the bar) but all exaggerations are based on a bit of truth.

And with all the reports of buildings toppling in China during the last few years I'd prefer the job be done right than done fast.