skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Woah, there are many things wrong with this. I'll limit it to the biggest two. First, it's important to understand that we (the US) have a very different political party system than many other western democracies. We have a winner take all system, where 51% of the votes gains you 100% of the voting power. This is not the usual state of affairs - in other democracies, 51% of the vote wins you 51% of the voting power. Or, more accurately, party 1 has 10% of the power, party 2 has 23% of the power, party 3 has 5% of the power, and so on.

Theoretically, the two party system is meant to make government more agile and less risk averse. It is supposed to ensure a party is, temporarily, in charge and able to accomplish its political agenda. In multiparty systems, there is frequent political deadlock as parties must negotiate to literally "form a government", or get enough of an alliance between people to mobilize 51% of the voting power. If you read international press, you often hear about the "dissolution of the government" in various civilized countries. This means they've failed in maintaining or forming a coalition, and must go back to political dealings in order to (in most cases) elect a prime minister and get behind a political agenda. These multiparty systems are therefore risk averse, and theoretically worse at achieving widespread governmental action.

I keep using the word "theoretical" because of our obvious governmental gridlock in the United States. But to look at things like the stimulus package and the health care bill, and it's not so clear that we're unable to pass large pieces of legislation.

With no political parties, every single vote would be about political dealmaking and organizing politicians. We would never get anything done. I'm not necessarily saying we have the right system, or even a great system, just that it isn't quite so easy to say "get rid of parties".

Now, to the second point. Jefferson? Puh-lease! I can't stand the frequent popular allusions to Jefferson the saint. This man was a great part of our country and one of the most important thinkers of his time. But he also wrote anti-government propaganda from the office of the vice presidency and had a near-blood fued with George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton.

Jefferson wouldn't roll over in his grave at this political language; he would be saying things far worse. If he sprang back to life today, he would suggest dissolving the federal government, abolishing any standing military, closing down capital institutions to promote an agrarian lifestyle, and letting Virginia negotiate a peace treaty with France. Let's not even talk about just what part of our society would have a real vote and which part would have 3/5 of one. I mean, can we be a little more reasonable with this founding father stuff?
Are there any CEOs reading this who think of themselves as Dungeon Masters?
I would love to know whether Flickr is profitable. It's obviously an awesome service, but I imagine the running costs must be pretty high.
I picked C because I want people to learn C specifically to build the kinds of things C is good for these days. This isn't completionism, it's very purposeful

I'd like to see the little Erlanger too actually.
Thanks, I'd never seen that. Very humorous :)

They should make another one:

Bug #2: Apple has a majority mind-share
I agree with your general thrust, "Advice isn't worth anything unless you reach those conclusions through your own accord." BUT, one way to reach those conclusions is by listening to advice, considering it critically (e.g. why/how would this advice help?), and applying it appropriately to your experiences and future plans. It seemed to me that was the whole point of the final bit of advice in the submission.
Reading through Zed's tutorial reminded me of some Pascal and C tutorials I downloaded in the old BBS days. They were a great introduction to both languages when I was just learning to program.

I just had a look on simtel but I couldn't find them. Maybe you should put some effort into scanning old software archives and seeing if you can unearth them. C is pretty old - you wouldn't be the first one that had this idea.
I understood K&R years ago, but somehow I feel completely inadequate to being a C programmer. I think there is some kind of black art involved in memory management. I checked recently and it seems K&R doesn't even talk much about memory management.

I just wish to learn the current state of the art - what are best practices that have evolved since K&R?
Yes, she certainly can and she will (she's certainly made of sterner stuff than I am), but I consider it my privilege to serve as an outer "bumper" to the real world for my family.
Awesome.. that's just the kind of info I was looking for. From the looks of things, they're actively developing their software and plan on supporting Hulu+ as well. Probably gonna pull the trigger on this badboy then! One more question... does it have a bittorent client built in? I have a cinemaGo, which lacks netflix support unfortunately, but I has a built in bittorrent client which has come in very handy. Not a deal breaker I guess, but still would be sweet
the original message was talking of specific "stacks", which in my understanding includes an abstract language and a concrete implementation (I'd say also some accompanying development tools: if not an ide, at least a repl, debugger, build system).
"haskell" as such would not qualify, while ocaml, scala and ghc would.
It's a funny joke to be sure, but I think it's a far cry from the advice in the post. There's a big difference between relying on something external to make you happy and following your passion.
I'll be referencing a lot of material, not all of them programming related. I'll try to dig up some old text files I liked as a kid per your recommendation.
Nobody's qualified to run a company when they do their first startup either.
openjdk is not certified java? I know harmony did not get a tck but it seems unlikely oracle is not letting their own developers use it.
I think the emergence of the two-party system in winner takes all voting is due as much to the gambit of the voters: if there's a perception that party A is strongest and party B second strongest, then a vote for party C is essentialy 'wasted' - it's a better strategy to vote for whichever of A and B better represents your view
That feeling of inadequacy and incompleteness post-K&R is something I experienced too and is something I'm hoping to address.
If you're not qualified to meet that standard then don't write a C book (or learn more before you do). C programs are either bulletproof or they are a hazard.
I suggest, evolve. ssh, curl/wget, nmap, scp

But yeah, 10100111001
Thanks for the heads up. I typically view it in firefox, chrome, and IE. I am in the data acquisition stage right now. I am going to do another redesign right before the alpha release.
President is the only office where the votes are cast by who wins the entire state. It's called the Electoral College, and it's constitutionally required. However, it's not constitutionally mandated that the winner of the state gets all that state's votes. A few (Maine and Nebraska) cast their votes based on who wins the congressional districts.

Otherwise, there are in fact more than 2 parties, they just dont' get as much support, and the two major parties generally like to keep it that way. Occasionally though you will see minor party candidates or independent candidates win major offices.
I accidentally upvoted instead of downvoted. It it of course nonsense that you are adding to the salary. If the employer is willing to pay £600, then you are taking X% of £600 and giving the employee (100-X)% of £600. The £500 figure that you are "adding" to is just an imaginary number that has no real significance.

Do recruiters really take as much as 20%? This seems ridiculously high to me. How much of their time are they investing compared to the employee?
> It's a calculated move on Apple's part.

that seems unlikely in light of:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1872915
What I'm saying is that if Flashblock can't stop a script in a "blocked" flash object from installing a trojan, then clearly Flashblock isn't effective at preventing flash objects from getting CPU time.
Not a specific example that I'm willing to describe in public, no. It's more common among junior and student programmers, for languages like C++ where there are lots of compiler and linker settings that are frequently different from one installation to the next, and where heavyweight IDEs are involved (Visual Studio, Eclipse).
Money As Debt - quite old but still worth watching
Is there a US version of the site?
This. I moved to Silicon Valley from Huntsville, AL (< 1hr drive from KKK birthplace, snake handlers, and 'To Kill a Mockingbird'). I've heard more racist and sexist comments from educated people in SV than I did living in AL. Sure, you have your fair share of stereotypical rednecks in AL, but the vast majority of the population is mostly past that. SV just has a bay segregating them instead of city blocks.

My coworkers expressed disgust that they might have trouble in AL going around the office proudly proclaiming they were atheists. I told them that CA had a similar paradigm too: Fox News.

...That being said: Atlanta is a cautionary tale of how laze-faire central planning doesn't work.
This is pretty much the fastest way I've found to clone a disk over a network. To clone from one host's /dev/sda to another host's /dev/sda in Linux, try this.

On the target host, run the following:

nc -l 31337 | bzip2 -d | dd bs=16M of=/dev/sda

On the host you're copying from, do this:

dd bs=16M if=/dev/sda | bzip2 -c |nc dest.host.com 31337

Bear in mind that this isn't secure (everything goes over the wire in clear and there's no auth) and that for best results you should only do this from a live cd (if you're dd'ing from or to the live drive you've mounted there's a high risk that you'll change the filesystem mid-copy, depending on source FS used, this could corrupt the destination).
"They measure how things work in operation. They can monitor at subsecond levels so they catch problems.". Genius!
I would love to see learn Google App Engine the Hard Way. I'm trying to develop on it and it seems too big. I'd little bite sized chunks like this to digest at my own pace!
Asian man boards Vancouver-bound flight disguised as elderly Caucasian
It's simple to say, "Don't learn to code, just find someone else to do it," but in practice this is no easy task. In fact, it's one of the most common problems in startups today. At every event I go to, there's a deluge of MBAs with ideas looking for co-founders (as well as many promising startups that are aggressively hiring), but not enough skilled programmers to go around. Even if you do find a programmer willing to work with you, it will be difficult to determine if he's the right guy for the job unless you have some programming knowledge of your own. So once again, easier said than done.

It's also worth noting that the most valuable employees at an early-stage company are generally jacks of all trades. You want people who can code, design products, write, talk to people, and strategize, and do all of it well. There are plenty of guys who possess the skills to get a respectable startup off the ground all by themselves (ex. Aaron Patzer working on Mint alone in his apartment for months). So at some point you have to ask yourself, "Yes learning to code is a big task and it will take years before I'm top-notch... but why not make that investment and start now?"

People would be surprised how fast they can learn to make something useful, and how often first projects end up being significant.
I suspect the "freedom of speech card" is of little value in this case. The First Amendment is mostly about prohibiting direct government censorship - but the government isn't trying to censor anything in this case; it's a private matter.

Trademark parody is another matter. Google it.
Illustrate the differences between IDB and UB early on.
Exactly.

Developers have their pick of non-technical co-founders. It's a lot harder to approach someone with just "an idea." What are you offering in return? How do you contribute to a startup in those initial months? Sure, I've read plenty of posts on what non-technical co-founders can do in a startup - lots! But, it pales in comparison to the bread and butter of a startup: building a product.

If you're looking to build the next Google or Wolfram Mathematica, find an expert or 2.

The guys at SeatGeek built their initial product - a crude prototype but decent enough to promote at TechCrunch. Now, they're funded and growing. They were not programmers, but they needed something and they didn't have the resources to find someone to build it. Coding is a bottleneck for a lot of non-technical folks. Do what you got to do to get through it, scotch tape and all.
This reminds me of the bit from freakonomics about real estate agents. Basically when they're getting 3% of the sale price of your house, holding out for 1 month to get you $20K (and them $600) isn't worth it to them.

http://www.wisebread.com/why-you-cant-trust-a-real-estate-ag...
Slate.com's Mick Jagger 'response' to Keith Richards' memoir is a joke

http://www.examiner.com/rolling-stones-in-national/slate-com...
It's only a scam if you fail.

So it's not a scam if you make money off it?
Unfortunately, kinect isn't sensitive enough to detect grasping. You'll notice that kinect navigation, hitting a button relies of hovering your arm in place as a bar fills (there are variations), but there's no 'poke' or 'detect fist' there.

You can dream though.
The Scariest Jobs Chart Ever
Adafruit offers $2000 bounty for open source Microsoft Kinect drivers
Same story, many times:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1873017

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1872990

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1872306

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1872289
Replacement for Google AJAX Search API?
On Nov. 1 Google pulled the plug on their AJAX Search API which allowed for nearly unlimited queries to the engine. It has been replaced by the Custom Search API which is equally good, but has a severe limitation of 100 queries per day! They have a link where you can 'request more...', but I haven't been able to get any response from Google from that link or any other channel.

I imagine this affects a lot of people and am curious if anyone has had any luck increasing their limit or if there're other solutions to the problem. We need to rank client websites for thousands of keywords and need to solve this problem soon.
Voter Groupthink (2003 Yale study) [pdf]
At 5% per month, after the first year the EBITDA multiple would go from 12 to 8. After 2nd year, 5 and so on. So the company would pay off the purchase during the 4th year. A good deal for any purchase.
A few days ago I was wondering if the link between two remote hosts was 100Mbps or 1Gbps, and didn't have root access to run ethtool (sidenote: is there an easier way for an unprivileged user to determine this?), so out came netcat and dd:

host1$ dd if=/dev/zero | nc host2 5432

host2$ nc -l 5432 > /dev/null

Let it run for a moment and then ctrl-C'd host1; the stats dd printed on exit gave a pretty clear answer to my question.
If you want to write a similar book for Ruby then have some class and use your own words and write your own book.

I think Zed Shaw does not want his book plagiarized -- simple as that and has nothing to do with what language is being swapped in.
Anyone else now looking forward to D&D 4.5E: Office Space?
The Future of Documentation (Cucumber)
I'd guess that in Amazon and other online retailers, the part that completes the order of the item from the warehouse has to be transactional so two customers won't buy the last item.

Normally, whenever physical objects or money is involved, transactions should be considered.
I don't think you have presented convincing evidence that the root cause of that is not "there are bugs in mono".
I use netcat to simulate a network connectivity failures.

For instance, if server:port 1000 is the normal host and port my application would connect to, I set up a forward from port 2000:

nc -L server:1000 2000

then run my application to connect to localhost:2000

my_application --server=localhost --port=2000

Now my application is connected to localhost:2000, which is forwarded to server:1000 through netcat. To simulate a network connectivity failure I just kill netcat.
Colluding is easier than Competing.
Well, function pointers are only one aspect of this. Suprisingly many experienced C programmers I've met don't know that you can safely cast pointer to struct to pointer to it's first field, which is pretty important trick to achieve reasonable OO (with real inheritance) in C.
Great idea. Why not tack on an OCR package too for people who are scanning in printed documents or screenshots that they want converting to text. You can automate that. If the quality of OCR isn't good enough then you might be able to reduce your turk costs by saying "correct this page" instead of "transcribe this page".

Good luck!
That is an issue in many voting systems, not just winner takes all. There's a fix for that too, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote

EDIT: STV would also take power from political parties in multi-party systems, since people can vote for different candidates in different parties, and list the preferred party as the last choice.
Link to krainboltgreene's take on this, "Learn you a Ruby for Awseome power", that Zed references: https://github.com/krainboltgreene/learn-you-an-ruby-for-awe...

Zed's totally right, in this case:

> The languages and the feel are both totally different, and your rendition of the book would have been confusing and crap.

Not to mention

> the key here is that I didn't give you permission in the first place.

Now, this is slightly confusing, since Zed is offering to let other people use his branding to make "Learn X the Hard Way" books, so it's understandable that someone could get confused. But that doesn't make it right.
As a military consumer of defense industry products, please, for the love of humanity, do not support IE6. Even NMCI, AHLTA, and SPAWAR now support at least IE7. A fair chunk of the Army and Air Force are now Vista and Win7.

As the father of 8 and 5 year-olds, please don't support 800x600. Even in New Orleans after the storm, with my wife working in the public schools, I didn't see any 800x600 displays.
Yes; and I rather wish every college graduate would be required to take one semester of the philosophy of ethics so they can avoid the circular fallacy of psychological egoism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_egoism

Whether from unquestioning faith in mere assumptions of classical economics, or some clinging to ideology, a disappointing number of people-who-think-themselves-smart still believe selfishness explains everything.
Generate secure and strong passwords instantly - PasswordGeneratorOnline
Generate a static map from dynamic Google Maps API
Apple Shitcans the Xserve
On the other hand, not all C code have to be secure. If I'm building a game for the Wii, don't bother me with stack overflows. The same goes for all the simulations out there (C is used about as much as Fortran in research). That's a lot of code.
That's a pretty dishonest analogy. Your first startup will succeed or fail based on its merits. If you write a book for beginners that is inaccurate, those inaccuracies will be spread in spite of their lack of merit.
Just because you're working in C doesn't mean you need to handle every detail yourself. In fact, please don't handle every detail yourself. Show your readers how to use some of the great libraries C has to offer. Not just system-level abstraction layers, either.

You need to go get libraries for a lot of the stuff you'd normally use the standard library for in a more modern language. These libraries exist, and many of them are excellent, but because they're not built-in, people are less likely to use them. This is especially dangerous in C, because it requires so much work to do anything even vaguely complex.

edit: That came off as saying "Teach some libraries". What I really mean is "Teach people to go find libraries."
This commenter hypothesizes that such a writing style is closer to passive-voice, and thus less likely to be offending or refuted, because it is easier to make less absolutist claims. Ideal for news sources, unless the reader desires useful information.
There's a wide yawning gulf of difference between $17000 a month and $80000 a month. One is the average for a senior SW rockstar in the Valley and can afford you a nice 3BR/2BA "meh" house in SF that may very well be on the border of Sketchytown; the other (if consistent and/or repeatable) is Burj al-Arab 3000 square foot suite on holiday, owning condo a short walk to the Marina and the Palace of Fine Arts, FU money.

And, what makes you think they aren't doing something they care about? They are attacking niches within the app store with extreme prejudice. And, that in itself is allowing them to do whatever they feel like doing. The ultimate goal of building a business is to gain the resources to help you manage your _time_ the way you see fit, whether that is through philanthropic causes, building lasting businesses in other areas, self-actualization, focusing on the family, or examining the finer things in life. The #1 goal on DHH's and Zuck's and Ballmer's mind-- the double super secret final endzone fat lady singing goal-- is money. Let's _never_ forget that.

And, how is making derivative apps and giving it away to make ad revenue "shite"? It's simply another avenue to success. I guess patio11 should just hang his head in shame for working on "yet another work scheduler app". This line of thinking is just lazy and supremely pompous.

Moreover, how does conducting a very public and financially candid interview merit being called "a social retard?" That's just such a vicious and insulting attack that I can't even begin to see why anyone would upvote it. Pathetic. And, the envy in you is so deep and bile-ridden as to be wading in it.
...but how does one represent eleven in this system?
With $51 billion, they could buy Major League Baseball...or a majority stake in Disney at current market cap.
Bloglines will live on, sold to MerchantCircle
i can't believe you had the gall to not only be upset with zed for wanting you to take down the repository, but to post it here as if we would side with you. what is wrong with you?
Ask HN: Feedback/advice on an EC2 based startup
I am hoping to get some input for the minds here at HN. My startup can be found at: http://LabSlice.com. It's a solution that allows you to use EC2 for the distribution of thick or thin client applications to customers (ie. send your customer a hyperlink, and it will automatically launch a fully accessible VM for them on a timed-lease). The idea can be extended to anything where sharing of VMs is desirable: training environments, test and lab systems etc.

One problem I face is that I currently require a user's AWS Access Keys (web service keys) to be able to manage their environment. This tends to confuse people at sign-up. I'm wondering if it's a smart or risky idea to give short term trials using my own EC2 AWS environment, or if I should focus solely on those who already know a lot about EC2.

Thanks. SE.
I'm torn between loving the brutal simplicity and wanting them to add more products. I'm guessing if it's successful there's no way they don't add more products/categories.
Mixpanel (YC S09) launches "Analytics for your customers."