skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In 1984 I was working for a small company that made Z80-based desktop computers running CP/M. All of the software was written in Z80 assembly language. MS-DOS was gaining traction, so we built a machine that contained both a Z80 and an 8088. It could run CP/M or MS-DOS.

However converting a bunch of Z80 assembler to x86 assembler for all our system utilities etc was a daunting task. There were tools available that would translate the code, but the quality was poor and the resulting output was not really readable [maintainable]. I expressed my annoyance in a planning meeting, saying "We should have written some of this in a high level language." One of the other guys on the team had done a small amount of C programming at university and was aware of its portability advantages. He suggested I look into it.

Although I had used several high level languages in the past (Basic, Fortran, Pascal), I was completely unfamiliar with C. So I bought a early edition of K&R. I started reading it from the start; got about 4 chapters in and thought, "This looks easy enough." So I sat down and wrote a rudimentary VT100 terminal emulator (something I knew a great deal about at the time). I tried to compile it: a dozen errors on the first line, a dozen errors on the second line, etc. I thought, "Hmmm, maybe not so easy after all."

The one guy I knew who had done any C programming at all, had done so little as to be useless as a source of knowledge, and we didn't really have a great deal of C source code available to us at the time. So I sat down with K&R and started doing the examples 1 at a time. Hello World going forward.

I picked it up pretty quickly, and within months our source was about 80% C and 20% assembler. Although I wasn't a self-taught programmer, I was pretty much a self-taught C programmer. The scary thing was, I was then considered "the go-to guy" for C programming advice for the rest of the team. I probably ruined them for life.
Even Google itself went down under a DDoS attack caused by a Mydoom worm variant
Design-by-Contract is protected by various business restrictions so it has nobody but itself to blame for its unpopularity

What's this about? Some patent or something?

I'd guess this is a reference to Bertrand Meyer's company. Since I learned DbC from Liskov & Guttag's excellent book, which came out before Meyer's, I never had much reason to look into Meyer or Eiffel even though they became practically identified with DbC.
Not sure what abstract ontologies have to do with expressing instructions for my computer to execute. I use inheritance as a tool to share behavior across objects. It works nicely for that.
This is advice specific to his particular situation. His comments about a particular style of corporate bureaucracy indicate a mismatch between his temperament and that culture. But he doesn't want to work for himself. This means a long term move to a different culture is in order. To make that permanent if desired, foreign marriage is a good way to obtain the permanent right to work overseas. It is much more difficult for US citizens with tech skills to emigrate to other countries than is the reverse, but marriage bypasses all of that. The advice on personalities is because otherwise he will either go for a random choice that will be a bad match or foolishly pick someone of similar temperament, which in his INTJ case will doom both of them.
Railgun ammunition is designed to lose as little kinetic energy as possible. After all, there's no point hitting someone with a non-explosive projectile unless it's moving fast.
Why not aim for the horizon? That way your track can be on the ground, and even better your impulse is spent approaching orbital speed rather than struggling against gravity drag. Even traditional space rockets turn east as quickly as possible, and a (semi) ballistic launch can do it from the start.

That said for human payloads you'd need a really long track, tens or hundreds of kilometers. I wouldn't want to live near the launch end. (edit: to get a useful amount of speed; still assuming rockets to get us the rest of the way)
On of the biggest parallels might be: Most software is not written to be understood by anyone except the author.
That statement does not only relate to manufacturing. You're putting words in the poster's mouth.
Is there a need to learn it all though?
I'm a designer at my place and here I do all the html/css work and a bit of jQuery fluff on top of that whenever it's quite basic. I do think that's how most places work.

Of course for a developer it's necessary to have some knowledge of html primarily, but no real need for deep knowledge. Not in my, somewhat limited, experience anyway.
Well lets see:

Assuming:

Launch Speed: 17,180 mph (Speed of Space Station) [1]

Launch Acceleration: 25g (Based on my understanding of what humans can survive) EDIT [2]

Just using that as a rough estimate and Wolfram Alpha we get 242,250 meters, or about 150 miles.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=17,239.2+mph+/25+gs

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=31.434+seconds+at+17,23...

Please feel free to check my math and yell at me.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station

[2] cperciva [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1993399] used 3g. Based on that you would have to multiply the launch distance by (25/3) and get 2,018,750 meters, about 1,250 miles. Again please correct me if I got something wrong.
Gene Smoke
true... we're not happy with the current state of the jamendo.com website. 2010 was mostly focused on getting close to breakeven thanks to jamendo.pro (which we did). We also did a management buyout from our former VCs, laid of a lot of staff, so all in all, we're just happy to still be there, growing, and hiring again :)

Now we have several ongoing usability projects, we released a HTML5 player a few weeks ago (replacing the old Flash crap) and are now working on layout and stability improvements on the main pages. It will definitely make Jamendo a complete joy to use again, if we can just spare some time from breaking Google easter eggs ;-)

cheers!
Integrating various python modules/ruby gems that all monkey patch over each other?

ducks

On a more serious note, the closest equivalent I can think of is porting games to work on windows, linux and mac platforms. You would have to have a good understanding of the entire renderer, any main event loops and physics, as well as experience in writing very low level code on all those platforms.
Personally, I find it refreshing to read a blog post that isn't - either directly or indirectly - about how amazing the author is.

Programming blogging has a strong culture of focusing on the newest, shiniest, and cleverest; the only negative blog posts tend to be "why X is wrong". No one blogs about their difficulties, weaknesses, doubts, or the huge amount of effort it takes to get really good at something. I think that's unfortunate, because it paints an inaccurate image of programming.
Is this an argument for prototype-based programming? I don't understand all this stuff well enough to provide a real opinion, but it seems to me that is a solution to the issues he brings up.
Thanks Diego, The main idea is to led people express their opinion. "If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter."
Never happen. Yanks will go broke before 2025 - never happen in AMERICA, CHINA is another story....
I think this is a reference to Plato's Theory of Forms, in which every object we see partakes of some idealized (static, eternal, and real) form (ie, is an instantiation of a class). Except... in Plato's theory, everything is a somewhat corrupted or imperfect image of its form. The theory has a lot of problems (the third man problem, for example).

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Forms
French: Programmation Orientée Objet
Hmm that's odd. Out of interest what was the artist list? Does it happen regardless of what you search for?
I hate when I get trolled by drunk me.
There appears to be potential. A quick google search turned up 'Launch to Space With an Electromagnetic Railgun' in IEEE Transactions on Magnetics. [1]

"The extension of this technology [rail guns] to the muzzle velocities ( 7500 m/s) and energies ( 10 GJ) needed for the direct launch of payloads into orbit is very challenging, but may not be impossible."

[1] http://research.lifeboat.com/ieee.em.pdf
For the record, I never said I didn't want to work for myself, just that I wasn't ready to start my own company. And I don't think corporate culture is unique to the US, despite my phrasing as "corporate America."
Some symbols are hard to see, but I hope it is right.

LaTeX'ed version: http://yfrog.com/gyegnp
We target 1) SMBs (15-100 users per account), or similar size departments in large companies, 2) mid-market companies (200-1000 users). About half of our revenue comes from each side. The SMB side is self-service, but to get these larger deals human touch is required. So, one of the things we'd expect said bizdev hire to do is to convert some of these SMB beachheads in larger companies into enterprise customers.
I interviewed with this guy a while back. Good thing I didn't take the position ;)
That's their main use

With a missile coming toward you at Mach 2-3 you don't want to be shooting subsonic cannon shells at it.

The rail gun ammunition is much smaller so you can carry much more of it and make a much more mobile gun turret because it doesn't need to store tonnes of shells or have a feed back to a magazine.
Slightly OT: anyone know of attempts to port emacs to android? If I had that and an attachable human-size keyboard, I could ditch my laptop for many purposes.
Yep. In their defense, this was a codebase with a 20 year lineage that ran on Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AS/400, all variants of Windows including mobile, Irix, and some that I'm probably forgetting, and they had never run into this issue before.
I tend to think people enjoy Chatroulette because of anonymousness.
Freedom from unnecessary (that is, things you have no control over) worry is one of the basic tenets of Stoicism. After learning about that, it seems foolish that things like this aren't common knowledge or taught in schools. The reduction in stress from just this one single realization is huge.
What is a Person?: Wikileaks,  Facebook, Privacy, and the State
This is really slick! The low barrier of entry is totally key. I love the design and I think the concept will work well. Sadly, only 2 girls turned up, so I sent the more attractive one a parodic message. Maybe I'll make a friend.
I would expect that most people close multiple tabs with [cmd|ctrl]-w

If you think most people use keyboard shortcuts, we're working with completely different customers ;) Finding someone that uses the keyboard to copy/paste is decently common, but I rarely see use of shortcuts beyond that.

I find I use mouse close most often when I'm "info dumping", as mouse scroll and cmd+click to open a new tab are, for me, mouse operations. Rapid open/close of several pages is normal. Once I have 3-5 on a topic, I go "info diving" and nothing gets closed 'till the end, at which point cmd+w is how I tend to close out of the extra pages I had open. But cmd+w by even power users is, in my experience rare.
Apache redirect to a static page, while he gets the cache plugin set up?
They created the status box in response to Twitter. Now they realize people connect on many extra things including pictures (Instagram) or videos.
I am kinda surprised too.
Is there any good that comes out of putting sensitive and classified documents that are meant to protect our citizens (if kept confidential) on the web? Let's assume that the strategy or communication didn't mention any illegal activity or corruption from within our gov't within these documents?
Stepanov's STL has inspired the design of ranges and algorithms in the D programming language standard library. http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/phobos/std_algorithm.html
I've considered that, but wanted to go with existing convention.
Very awesome and inspiring ... I do the same thing all the time (hack at codesy things that I have no real understanding of ... like the time I spent 2 whole days trying to get Phusion Passenger to run on Windows) and feel ashamed to say it out loud for some reason.
I've come across a few of those "bare minimum you need to know to do X" posts on SO and on one hand I think they can be great pointers to the best reference material in a given field.

On the other hand I worry that these kinds of lists promote an impractical approach to mastering a field that is at odds with being a "Hacker".

Think of it as being like Waterfall Subject Mastery versus Lean Subject Mastery. In Waterfall Subject Mastery you try to anticipate what you need to know up front, learn a bunch of stuff, then try to apply it to a problem. There are two problems with this model: First, you really don't know what you need to know. Second, you won't really understand it as well in the abstract.

With Lean Subject Mastery OTOH, you pick a problem and crank on it until you run into a wall. Then do some learning until you can overcome the wall. At first the walls will be many and frequent. But over time your baseline of competency is increased and you actually become productive in the new technology.

What's great about the lean approach is that when it comes time to learn about a specific topic, you have a much better context for understanding it, and thus the effort to learn it is greatly reduced. And because you have an active project, you can put your learning into practice more quickly and thus retention is increased.

The secret, though, to making LSM really work well is to commit to learning a bit more than just what you need to get over the wall. This is the difference between truly learning and being an eternal cargo culter. Don't just start banging against the OAuth library; try to understand how OAuth works. Just do it in the context of a real-world problem.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against education and learning for learning's sake, I'm just more for efficiency and getting stuff done.
I've got you, but I'm wondering what your approach is? I'm stuck in a mindset where I work from creating a database to CRUD to functional code.
Another interesting facet of the "natural ontologies" argument is that the history of Zoology is a series of "bug fixes" where we got the ontology wrong.

Leaving out changing requirements and DNA mutations for a second, there have been massive changes to the "official" ontology as we discover new species or examine DNA and have to say "oops, turns out, the platypus doesn't derive from birds at all".
Ranked List of Geo Tech Blogs
If you observe their history carefully, you will see they do it all the time.

I have worked with Site Server 3 in the late 90's and I can assure you no sane developer would have created such a monstrosity. That was, probably, the work of a marketer.
The Minimalist Guide to Leaving Your Soul-Crushing Day Job
While that is true, in the old method it had the status box, with the other links (photo, video, link, etc) below it. It was still a 2 click process.

I would think that most people enter a personalized status message most of the time, regardless of whether they are just posting a simple status, a photo, or a link.

Just seem dumb to me, and of no benefit, to make it a 3 click process.
This suggests that the terminal velocity of a rail gun projectile is around Mach 5: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ship/systems/...

I guess I can spend my time worrying about other things!
Well, if you expand your definition of "the problem" to "how do we enable people all over the world to interact with this information on any computing platform over an untrustworthy connection running on low-end hardware", then I think the chaos and technology soup is a little more necessary to things being where they're at now. So no, it's not technically necessary, but politically/economically it is.
Very richly detailed and clearly presented. "From at least this vantage point Anonymous starts to look more like a group of seasoned politics activists, debating the merits and demerits of actions and targets, warning for example, not to attack the media. Even if these documents cannot be taken as the totality of Anonymous, they reveal that some of the participants do engage in strategic and political thinking."
maybe, is it time for creating pornoogle.com?
"Sites will ban you"

Wish it would happen here on HN. Seems like it's a weekly occurrence where someone announces a pet project that involves crawling the whole site. I can't help but to think this is connected to the 30+ second page loads I get here often.
The essays at the beginning of Holub on Patterns completely changed my understanding of OOP.

Implementation inheritance violates encapsulation. So do getters and setters. They let code outside your object rely on your implementation and make your system brittle.
I'm really impressed with Cuban's genuine interest in technology. It seems like he buys lots of new products simply to try them out (Logitech Revue and Samsung Tab). He's always trying to make himself more productive and find an advantage.

Of course he has the advantage of enough money to test out all these new products and technologies.
exactly what I did... tried to switch apache to port 81 to be able to configure the cache plugin. But even this way, all the disk accesses were taking 30 seconds each...

The real error was posting it there in the first place and not directly on the Jamendo blog... Never again! :)
Front-end web work, at its basic level, is not hard in the traditional "let's go shopping!" sense, but what I find maddening is how unintuitive some of it is (CSS, I'm looking at you). Then you have to worry about how broken or incompatible browsers are. I think "pain in the ass" is a more apt term.

When you get deeper into the UX, things like A/B, optimizing load time, scaling the backend, etc, and that is where it becomes less tedious and the domain knowledge required is more respectable.
A similar lesson is passed along in Starcraft playing circles, which is stop teching and go kill your competitor.
Calling the Troops to Battle
Make users read before they vote
Weirdest Animals Discovered in 2010
Hey Julian, when are you gonna e-mail me back? ;)

Anyway, tastebuds is great. Though there are no matches in my country yet, a cute girl from some other country did favorite me. What I miss is search in all matches regardless of country.
Interplanetary Day After Tomorrow
Walgreens email list stolen by spammers (which would explain my inbox...)
The gmail transfer question is interesting. I spent some days trying to upload my mail archives and looking for the best solution.

In the end I configured 5 pop3 account on my server for gmail to fetch concurrently, and filled them with my archives. I did use http://imap-upload.sourceforge.net and http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/ to get the mboxes into the pop3 server and move mails archives from a gmail account to a google hosted account.

Yet the whole process was slow and not that good:
- Some email changed encoding (chinese characters) while they looked good with mutt
- some were dupes and gmail did not dedupe them
- many had a problem with the date (missing from the mail, but the last MX date could be used) and so gmail assigned them to the date when they were retrieved from the pop3 server
- some mails were also merged because of _From separation in mbox not supported by imap-upload or getmail (can't remember ATM)
- sent mail could not be filed into "sent"
- chat archives could not be moved between gmail accounts
- pop3 retrieval accepted a max of 200k emails IIRC, so I had to do it by batches
- pop3 refused some mail (it thought they had viruses or exes attachments) and let them in the pop3, so I had to move them manually while another 200k batch was running
- gmail pop3 retrieval also means additional delays between iterations

Finally, when you correct any bug, having to go through the whole process again is painful (thrash all the import and start again, reload the pop3 queue, resume 200k batches)

Then there's the spam problem. You will have false negatives. And if the process is taking days/months depending on the size of your archive, you'd better remember to check the spam folder and move then to inbox, or add a special rule to never sent any email from your archive to spam. But if you do that, you'll fill your gmail account with some spam which you may not want if you didn't take care to delete your spam and have some mboxes containing up to 80% of spam as I had.

For now I don't think there's a good solution and I gave up until I have more time to spend on the problem and a workaround on the limitations (pop3 is a killer)

But it remains an interesting problem, because I believe there's a market for a good gmail migration offer. (I'd have paid $50 or more to have the mboxes properly integrated in gmail, and I guess I'm not alone!)
Keep in mind, while reading this, that the Cr-48 is a beta product of sorts. So the mentioned hardware faults will most likely be fixed when this thing actually ships.

Somewhat unrelated:

Right now my ideal laptop would be: Take a 13″ Macbook Pro, replace the HD with an SSD, replace the DVD drive with more battery, add 3G.

I couldn't agree more, that really would be a perfect laptop.
Ask HN: Facebook export feature work for you?
Submitted a request through my account settings page to download my information from Facebook. It's been over 30 minutes now and still nothing.

I have a little over 100 friends and very few tagged photos so I ask: Why the delay?
In Windows 7, you can hover over the taskbar icon for a browser and it will show a preview of all your tabs. Clicking on the tiny close button on a tab's preview will close the tab, but if you miss it, you will switch to that tab (and window) instead.
I voted for this before reading.
White Stripes, Death Cab for Cutie, Van Halen.

It doesn't seem to care, just tried again with other random bands. My work computer is kind of iffy, I'll try again when I get home and let you know...
Despite what the article says, Anonymous didn't attack Amazon. And if they had tried they would have not succeeded. Amazon was up all the time.
It looks like you forgot to call the function in 'simple_catch'. Interestingly, if you do, manual_with_catch will actually be faster in the failing case. (A try:fn() finally: return True beats everything else in the failing case)
Basic summary:

Respectable battery life, a poor terminal, and an infuriating trackpad. And John Resig is spoiled from owning a Mac.

Battery life is good to hear, terminal strikes me as "fail" (seriously. Developer mode. It should be as developer-friendly as possible, no? That means a good terminal application.), trackpad could be fixed through software, and who isn't (who has one)? [edit: correction: there's a non-developer-mode terminal, which is this one. Developer mode has SSH key abilities & others]

Not too surprising, given that this is an early-release test. But in that way it's similar to many other Google products; first version is crap but interesting enough to use, and in time (if not dropped) it tends to take over everything because it gets better and better. It seems to me this might take off whenever they put out offline versions of GMail and Docs. Until then, it's of limited (though interesting) use and most definitely not for everyone.
Wow. Lack of SSH niceties like keys must be painful.
I remember in high school philosophy class describing prototype-based systems as Aristotelean and class-based as Plutonic. I'm amused you've hit upon the same general idea. (For what it's worth, I like Self, apparently named after an Aristotelean philosopher with rational self-interest.)
Useful comment posted from Chrome team member Jen:

I’m a Chrome team member and saw this going around Twitter.

Just wanted to say, you can right-click on the Cr-48 by tapping with two fingers (or holding Alt and single clicking).

You can also flip the developer mode switch under the device and get full access to a shell: http://www.chromium.org/poking-around-your-chrome-os-device

hope this resolves some of the comments!