skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A machine that sonically interprets light
Other than K&R (which everyone knows about), what is the current CW on best C books?
That's the same trick as "you're not paying more for using a credit card, the SELLER is paying for it", except of course the seller will have higher prices because of this.
Tech City: the Tories' corporate, top-down vision for UK tech
This looks awesome. And reminds me of the storyline of Homeworld (the building of the mothership). Anyone else?
Also not news since the iPhone 4 has been out FOREVER when compared to the Galaxy S
It looks so much like a terminal that I had a "that's impossible!" reaction when I typed "whois" and got a picture.
I'm curious what the rationale is for drawing from a queue instead of directly in the move event.

Shameless plug: I threw together an open-source version for browsers (or mice, more specifically) this morning - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1873371

https://github.com/mrduncan/marker
From someone in the oil and oil additive business I can say that this article is actually pretty accurate compared to most of the crap out there.

However, ZDDP is an anti-wear additive not an extreme pressure additive. In the article it says, "camshafts exert pressures in excess of 200,000lb per square inch" which means you need an extreme pressure agent.

While ZDDP is effective, it does cause catalytic converter problems in vehicles made after 2006 (since they switched the metal in them), so don't run out and put this in your new cars.

Mark, www.sfrcorp.com
So many hoops to jump for. The last company I worked for demanded full references for the last five years (it was a bank so apparently this was a legal requirement), but later I found out that their company policy is to 'never give personal references.' (ie. the reference would just go to the HR department who would confirm your presence, your actual managers wouldn't get to say anything) I thought at first this must be something to do with liability, but then I wondered if it was merely another barrier to discourage employees from leaving their lowly jobs, to make it harder for rival banks to employ them, and to eliminate the man-hours cost of providing references. Either way, one minute they're requiring all these references, but when its their turn to provide, they opt out.
Gonzo Engineering
Another round of lessons learned from our new team-based way of working
But almost all browsers have a PDF viewer plugin, and in general they're almost always terrible in some way or another. The problem is that PDF's are almost always very long documents, and a lot have embedded images, which results on the plugin crashing, the browser crashing, huge memory leaks, or at the very least decreased performance.

To be fair though, maybe I'm not the target market for this feature, but I find it way easier to just download the file and have it open in Preview, than to have to work with Chrome's implementation.
There was a really nice google spreadsheet on HN once that showed all the startups in more than just YC. If I remember correctly, it's purpose was to show which startups in each incubator were dead/still active/got acquired. You could go off of that list and actually do it for more than just YC. I've been looking for the OP but I can't seem to find it.
Yes, but it draws the decorations for other clients. The GP said that Wayland clients draw their own decorations.
I also wonder how many of TC featured startups are profitable, not only YC startups.

What about the big ones Does delicious.com make money? Or is it a loss-leader for Yahoo. Upcoming.org, do they make a dime on this app?

Flickr has pro accounts at $25 a year. But is it enough to be profitable?

And don't get me started on whether Twitter is profitable…
Sorry my coffee hasn't kicked in yet, but I am a little confused here. How do you intend to make money on your app or is this a free service?

If your app is a paid service service, then you have two choices. First you can build in the processing fees to your monthly fee (or however you plan to charge). You can base your fee on the expected number of registrations and go from there. The other choice would be to charge an administrative fee on top of each registration to the exhibitor or participant. The problem with this method is that if I am an exhibitor why am I going to pay $X through your service versus going directly to the show and paying $Y?

Short answer is that you somehow need to build the cost of the payment processing into your pricing. Whether that is through an added administrative fee or built into your monthly pricing.
Looking at the code I wander why didnt they allow this for the iPhone (it would be adding more media queries and nothing else). It would be pretty cool (mainly this is envy because me not having an ipad but an iphone).

Anyway, great app, they should enclose it on an iphone app with a webkit browser stripped down and offer it for free on the store (they have the other premium app with more features).

These guys are amazing
IT jobs going in Belfast as Citigroup creates 440 roles
What would be the scope of the book?

I saw Zed mention the same title on his blog once. His idea was to provide something for programmers with experience in other languages and some basic knowledge of C. As I fit in that category, I'd like to see something beyond K&R. Especially some stuff on organizing modern projects written in C, makefiles etc.
Close to it, 768 x 690. Here's how we arrived at that:

iPad landscape is 1024 x 690.
iPad portrait is 768 x 946.

(with Safari's browser toolbar visible)
Moving canvas operations out of event handlers is the key to smooth drawing on the iPad. The queue processor's inner loop is restricted to 10ms at a time every 30ms. This ensures a full two-thirds of the time is spent receiving touch events.
"Do not take advice"

OK, I won't take your advice. But you just said "do not take advice", so does that mean I should take your advice about not taking advice? (stack error, brain explodes)
WWII Dutch intelligence leader's story inspired book, film
The issue in the USA isn't necessarily that politicians organize themselves into different groups/parties, but that there is essentially no choice.

The election system in the USA is mostly organized in district/state sort of way, where the winner of the state elections gets all the votes. This makes it very hard for more then two parties to participate in the election.

Since there is no choice, there is very little incentive to listen to the electorate (always vote for the lesser evil). I live in a country with no district system (and thus multiple parties). While it isn't even close to perfect, at least I can vote for people I mostly agree with.
One can certainly use a lot of time reading Hacker News. Whether it is wasted or not depends on the reader I think.
Ask HN: economics of online faxing services? (Why do they suck)
I had to receive a fax today, so I set out to get a temporary number. I noticed again the economics of it (buying adwords) seem to favor crap services that charge you repeatedly without you noticing, for as long as they can.

Is it impossible to create an online fax service that works well and doesn't charge you ongoing fees, just a one-time fee? I am thinking that the recurring fee services have more money to spend on adwords, and hence push the one-time-fee services out of the market.

I'd love to build a good service with a good user experience and a one-time charge. Thoughts?
Maybe a demo would help to the testing :) for those of us not having git (yet)
A friend of mine has a similar type of software where he is somewhat of a middle man. He charges the company $x base + y% of the transaction. His customer is required to have their own merchant account and his service just processes through their merchant account. The $100 would never run through his account.

Depending on the nature of your business, another idea would be to charge a convenience fee to the exhibitor, but having exhibited at tradeshows for many year I would find that annoying. However, it wouldn't stop me from exhibiting. Annoyances are par for the course for anyone who has ever exhibited at a tradeshow managed by someone like Freeman.

If a customer is shocked that they will only receive $95 of a $100 transaction for the value you add, then it may be time to re-evaluate how you communicate your value or find a new customer.
Except that congress can reverse an amendment by passing a new one.
Mobile Location & Controls Platform Gives Devs Security & User-Level Controls
Break Ke Baad Movie Reviews, Trailers, Wallpapers
Kunal Kohli brings the new pair of Imran Khan and Deepika Padukone in his upcoming Bollywood movie Break ke Baad. The Break Ke Baad movie is produced by Reliance Big Pictures and Kunal Kohli.
Scrum Masters Should Believe in UFOs
Making a latex mask matching the credentials of the original passenger seems high cost/effort. It'll be interesting to see the back story here.
I checked, cost per click for relevant keywords seems to be from 3 to 10$. Not sure what the conversion rate would be, perhaps quite high, say 20%? That's a cost of 15 to 50$ per user there, impossible to recoup with a one-time fee.
It's a style enforced by the magazine. Probably seems better to them than the "royal we". Certainly better than the repetitive use of "I" favored by some. Kind of interesting how English forces us to deal with this issue all the time.
That is why I love Ubuntu: They like to take the bold decisions. Mark Shuttleworth is a small Version of Steve Jobs :)
Being already familiar with Erlang, I wish I had this resource while starting out. This is way easier to read for starting out from scratch on Erlang, and is definitely a light but comprehensive read.
I found myself enjoying this, even though all of these bad grammar titled randomly weird artwork _why-inspired programming books are surely a cliché now.
Just one request: Would you be able to release individual chapters as you are done with them instead of waiting to finish the whole book? Thanks!
I know this sounds completely crazy, but you could always run a Linux VM on your windows machine. I find this more convenient than trying to figure out how to make things work on Windows some days.

Alternatively, if you're having trouble with the lein.bat, you could try lein.ps1. (https://gist.github.com/395038) I believe that lein.sh is meant to work pretty well on cygwin now, though.
The general point "don't put too much faith in estimations" is good, but anyone who just assumes everything has a linear growth rate should probably not be in business.
Sorry, I wasn't clear: running X alongside Wayland would hurt performance (at least in RAM-critical environments).
Kind of like how I cannot watch netflix on my linux machine, despite mono and moonlight?
I studied Hsing Yi kung fu in St. Louis which has some similarities to Wing Tsun. I highly recommend either one for the same reasons you've mentioned. There is a Wing Tsun school here in chicago that I'm considering going to since I can't find a Hsing Yi school here.
Cool. Hmm you might want to check your site using Safari, there's a line right through the log-in form, and about & register are not aligned horizontally. I looked at your site on firefox also and it looks fine from there.
For success you're right. Profitability is a bit more black and white even if they haven't reached their full potential yet.
Lots of segmentation fault diagnosis
Even better, I'll explain when and why to use function pointers (finite state automata are a common use case)
Not sure why you're getting piled on; the name is misspelled in the headline.
I feel the same. If you're lucky programs come with a readme.txt that explains the steps required to install it. Why the heck didn't they code that in shell script instead of english? It practically doubles the value of the software.
Sorry, I should have mentioned that this will be a paid service, billed monthly. I wanted to come up with a tiered, flat fee, except that won't work with the above scenario. If I price my app at, say, $100 per month, the minute one paying client's in-app processing fees cost more than that, I'm losing money.

I suppose I could bill my customers the incurred fees at the end of each billing cycle, but that would probably put off some customers, as they would be left scratching their heads as to why they have to pay $100 per month, then get ANOTHER bill for fees.
I demand someone write a great sci-fi movie or novel from the premises set in this awesome article.

"With a set of four machines: black hole generator, black hole drive, power plant, and a self perpetuating black hole powered black hole generator, the potential is enormous. As Crane and Westmoreland say:

A civilization equipped with our four machine tool set would be almost unimaginably energy rich. It could settle the galaxy at will."

Awe-inspiring.
Try mod_pagespeed without installing anything
Generation why?
Looks like an AWESOME service. Now it's all marketing, you have to find groups of people that are interested in this. (College professors?)
Here are a list of different incubator companies and acquisition price... doesn't answer your question, but may help.
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkkhSN3vaY4jdF90b1l...
I know a lot of new people run into perpetual segfault, but I don't think that's really a HUGE hang-up once you get past the basics.

I'll consider some "break it and fix it" exercises for diagnosing these kinds of problems though.
This is great news for the Free Desktop.

Ubuntu is really setting itself apart as its own OS rather than just another Linux distro.

It might take about two years for this whole thing to sort of stabilize (Wayland + Unity), but when it does, Ubuntu will be kick-ass like it's never been before.

I love it when people step outside the box.
Honestly the closer you stay to the spirit of K&R the better the site would be. I've looked at a lot of C books over the years and K&R is the only one I thought was even decent.
A Lions Prey (See Ya Finder)
Book review: Land of Lisp
Some Basic Dissertation Questions
Students will have many questions concerning their dissertation when assigned to write one for the first time. The answers to these questions will enable them to have a better understanding of the importance of their dissertation papers.
Enjoy: http://mrduncan.github.com/marker/
Plan on it, I'll be working on a tight feedback loop since I'm not even remotely qualified enough to be doing this.
Apple Releases New 'Server' Configuration of Mac Pro to Replace Xserve:

http://www.macrumors.com/2010/11/05/apple-releases-new-serve...
Don't forget easy ssh host hopping.

ssh -oProxyCommand="ssh host1 nc host2 22" host2
"The mean of the top 50 growth rates" is a horrible abuse of statistics. No amount of ~pretty graphs will compensate for that.
I'm not trying to replace K&R, but I'll be inspired by it since I grew up with it.
I have a friend through Karate (he's my age, 18/19) who went to boy scout camp a couple years ago and was screwing around with some friends. They were free-climbing a cliff. He fell from around 40 feet up. He broke many of the bones in the left side of his body, but a few months later he was fine. He actually owes his life to knowing how to fall correctly.

If that ain't a reason to pick up a martial art that trains falling... (Or you could have common sense. Either way.)
Chris Wanstrath's How to Bootstrap a Business
By the way, if you are a fan of a language trying to replace Erlang (with my blessing), OTP is your real target. The shared-nothing processes and message passing and all that stuff is really all there with the goal of making the OTP libraries possible. Copy all that other stuff but miss the OTP functionality, and you will have copied the style while missing the substance.
You usually have to get pretty implementation/purpose specific beyond that. More often than not, the next step is APUE, which is dissatisfactory for what I have in mind.
9 Outrageous U.S. Secession Attempts
Here are some of the weirdest causes that have led to secession drives.
whatever you do, make your examples bulletproof. even if it's not how you would normally write the code and it seems overly cautious, do your audience a favor and write the example that way anyway.

if there are any buffer overflows, integer overflows, off-by-one's, signedness issues, failure to check return values of everything, use of typically insecure things like sprintf instead of snprintf, all of these problems will just carry over into your readers' code. please do us all a favor and stress the importance of writing secure code from the ground up and not as an afterthought or something only done just before releasing it.
True (and I wasn't too clear), I was pointing out that some sites actually serve up video in h.264 instead of flash when no flash is detected. The native h.264 is more efficient than flash for videos you actually want to see.
My current employer has a couple of XServes running a WebObjects based webapp. This might create some headaches for us.
Oracle should not sue Google over Java use, IT staff say
Do you read the docs of every new software product that gets released, in order to see if it's useful to you? No, there aren't enough hours in the day.
How voters turned out on Facebook
Link, for those that haven't seen it: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1
It depends on your definition of 'very large scale'. Certainly any large financial/insurance company is going to be churning through great gobs of data that really does have to be universally consistent. This is basically the niche that keeps IBM's mainframe division in business.

I'd suspect that if those don't qualify as 'very large scale' to your definition (which would be entirely justifiable) that such systems don't exist because they're not currently possible. For example I don't think it's possible to implement Facebook with SERIALIZABLE no matter how much money you throw at the problem.

(I'd love to be proven wrong of course)
I'm glad that there are at least some people on HN who still understand the type of company Microsoft really is.
Definitely, bug fixing = not enough testing. So you charge for testing in advance of for bug fixing afterwards - you choose :). I am talking about hourly payment here of course. If price if fixed... then you can't charge for it.
What I really miss is some C book that teaches the modern approach to "object-oriented" C (as done in Gtk, Apache, CPython etc.). Actually many programmers (presumably with only passing knowledge of C programming) even actively proclaim that you cannot program in C in this style.
Gaius, I wonder if one vendor or trading firm was trying to cause trouble for another...
And they don't pretend they have don't a bias. They often express an opinion, but its always clear that it's an opinion. "Balanced" reporting has never existed, but the crazy practice of pretending it does is disappearing in this age of Fox news and the internet. (Is this the only good thing that's come out of Fox news?)
FiveThirtyEight: how the pollsters faired
I don't think the learner would appreciate the subtleties, and I don't agree that they'll learn anything from it.

I can reinforce each lesson/problem you're describing one by one through the exercises, but a new person simply wouldn't know good code if it slapped them in the face.

Confer with Learn Python the Hard Way to get a feel for the aesthetic and technique I'm working towards.

I don't want to write bulletproof code, I want to teach them how and why to write bulletproof code.

I'm not qualified to meet that kind of lofty standard anyway.
For me X has always symbolized old, hard to configure, clunky, and ugly. It wasn't meant to be part of Unix but it mixed in. I am glad to see it go at least from our desktops.
Here is a link to the spreadsheet, https://spreadsheets0.google.com/ccc?key=t_toYuVyy6fci0MAiIa... Also the original analysis post, http://blog.jedchristiansen.com/2009/09/21/copying-y-combina...
I was genuinely curious about the laptop.

But their high-end recommendation was a Macbook.

I suppose it makes sense that they're targeting people who aren't picky and are just looking to buy something they won't regret in that category, but there's a HUGE gulf to me between buying a Dell with Windows 7 and a Macbook running OSX.
I agree. Recruiters suck. They never ask for references for your benefit, it's always to extend their sales reach. They tend to drag you out to their offices for a 'face-to-face', for no relevant reason whatsoever because all of that 'stuff' you had to do there could've been done online anyway.
I think that while the efforts are misguided, Zed should take people's efforts to transplant language X into LPTHW as a high compliment. He wrote a great, concise book and people were inspired.

I've already run across LPTHW forks for Clojure and Ruby on Github -- two languages that don't transpplant well into LPTHW, but hey.
Good job, cool but styleless :)

Can this things be done with html5 svg?
http://www.handwritr.com/

Sounds like a nice idea, you may need more stringent rules on what constitutes a "page" though.
As a XBLIG dev I have to say the "no free games" rule was a great idea, I think it kept out a tidal wave of fart apps. And I can completely understand why they were afraid of XBLA cannabalisation, XBLA devs pay good moeny to release their game on XBLA.

Shame about the politics derailing the XNA drive though.
What about Learn C++ The Hard Way ? Anyone ?
I believe this is what you're referring to?

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkkhSN3vaY4jdF90b1l...
I'll teach function pointers, and might expose them to some style of OO C, but I haven't made any decisions on it.

My approach is going to be relatively unflavored by the Macro Hell of other projects. I'd rather not instill those habits. They can learn that on their own time.

I want the learner prepared to write clean sysprog code. That's it, the rest they can learn having been taught proper C and make their own stylistic decisions.
The Economist has a particular and well-known style guide that all writing for the publication must follow, be it for the online version (like this piece) or otherwise - and as others have pointed out, one of their styles is using the third person and "this/your correspondent" as opposed to the first person. Similarly, they don't put author by-lines on their magazine pieces (and only initials on their online ones), although die-hard Economist fans can often recognize individual authors by their phrasing and subject matter.

If you're interested in more of their particular quirks of style - or want to see how well-specified the writing style is for a major magazine - most of their guide is available online at http://www.economist.com/research/styleguide/.
Interesting, why not start your own firm then? Is it that hard to get the actual vacancies?

If you know what you're talking about in comparison to 90% of the other people, wouldn't it be a lot easier to place one candidate and get £15k from him rather than the £1k you're getting now.

You say that the general aim is to earn your salary in bonusses, so that means that an average recruiter has to place around 60 candidates per year. If they earn around £15k per person for the company, that makes +- £900k of which they take home £60k. Rough calculations of course, but seems like pretty good margins for people that know what they're doing.
So You Want To Start A Web Startup?
The scribd link is there because pg automatically rehosts any pdf uploaded to HN in violation of both copyright law, and the terms and conditions of Scribd.
At the moment that is quite flexible, I'm thinking of creating different pricing schemes to get jobs completed within set time frames.