skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's important to note though is the general flow of money from non-rowers to rowers.

In all seriousness though USRowing announced this morning that they made the pair for Beijing, so not a bad week for them. I look forward to watching their race on TV later this summer.

http://www.row2k.com/olympics/features.cfm?ID=1191
I surf as much as I can.
Some telcos seem quite intent on charging more for bandwidth than the cost of a film in a bargain bin. If telcos continue to strangle bandwidth then physical media will remain viable for a longer period.
Who Will Fill Bill Gates’ Shoes?
Except the part about (possibly artificially) not having enough supply for an absurd amount of time. You can only sell software to people with the hardware, it makes sense to get the hardware out there.
They demoed this at SIGGRAPH last year.
That's a great case-in-point. He spent nearly his whole adult life running Apple, and he knows that company's business inside and out. He hired a Pepsi guy to take over as CEO, and things went poorly.
For some reason, I like how the forum UI isn't the boring-phpBB navy-and-blue boxes but just a linked list (pun intended)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=219809
I suppose I didn't explicitly say that "young pg" would be into hero worship, but I didn't mean to imply the opposite -- I just thought it was a silly thing to be talking about. I was trying to reframe the argument and I guess I didn't succeed.
More classical management classes (yes I took one, no I'm not a manager) tell you people are interested some set of Money, Power and Prestige.

1) Money. It lets you buy stuff. It may let you buy power and prestige, but this is a secondary thing. Money heavy jobs: Bankers, stock brokers, oil tycoons.

2) Power. Power is the ability to get other people to do what you want. Power heavy jobs: Managers, Heads of State, Mob bosses, evil villains.

3) Prestige. This is how much respect you have from others and the quality of your reputation. Prestige heavy jobs: Professors, lead scientists, philanthropists.

Nobody works for just one of those, and you can sacrifice one for the others. When you work in a company and reviews come around you're given; a raise that tickles your money itch, a promotion that tickles your power itch, and awards that tickle your prestige itch. Or at least that's the theory, and I tend to think it's a decent approximation.
Larry Page or Steve Jobs.
Upcoming programs and events for entrepreneurs in the tech/biomedical industries
There's one question that's puzzled me for a long time: Why aren't there many (any) precise compacting GCs out there, at least in F/OSS software? Do these generally turn out to be a bad idea or something? The only one I've found so far is Mono's experimental GC.
That's not what the most recent development is about.

They had a settlement a while ago the terms of which had been undisclosed. But the ConnectU guys apparently decided that they wanted more, so they tried to reopen the case (which is in general not a done thing after you've settled.) But the judge said they could not, i.e., that they had to take what had been agreed on previously. I'm not sure whether this is final, maybe they can appeal, or take it to yet another state or something.
In the meantime we can use jsonp to bypass cross domain restrictions
I've not either, but most non-apple machines I've bought has a XP/Vista sticker on it.
Visually reorder table columns
Apes' rights
Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm

The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem

The Society of the Spectacle by Debord

Nihilist Communism by Monsieur Dupont

The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

And other classics: 1984, brave new world, planet of the apes, huckleberry fin, slaughter house five (anything by vonnegut actually!). Anything I have managed to get by Stafford Beer has been incredible as well not only as a work of relating to systems analysis but on a philisophical and political level at the same time. Too bad most of his books are in the hundreds of dollars. If you get the chance download Designing Freedom. I will see if I can find a link again.
Well, hold on... If we're talking about the late 1980s (which the author is), then I'm not sure we could call Windows a de facto standard. I agree with the other poster that Gates simply studied history to determine which sorts of contracts would provide Microsoft with the maximum leverage over time. Other OS vendors could have done the same thing; they simply lacked Gates' intelligence and foresight.
This is how RailsConf can become a huge money-maker: just spin it as training for Java/.NET developers and their managers.
Rule 57 should be Rule #1 (assuming that 1 is the most important).
15 is too much. I think "The Three Signs of a Miserable Job" are easier to remember. One of my mentors recommended this book to me recently. I've observed precursors of these from time to time personally. Beware. Remember conscious incompetence.

* Anonymity - "the feeling that employees get when they realize that their manager has little interest in them a human being and that they know little about their lives, their aspirations and their interests."

* Irrelevance - "which takes root when employees cannot see how their job makes a difference in the lives of others. Every employee needs to know that the work they do impacts someone’s life--a customer, a co-worker, even a supervisor--in one way or another."

* Immeasurement - "the inability of employees to assess for themselves their contribution or success. Employees who have no means of measuring how well they are doing on a given day or in a given week, must rely on the subjective opinions of others, usually their managers’, to gauge their progress or contribution."

http://www.amazon.com/Three-Signs-Miserable-Job-Employees/dp...
Yes, phishers probably aren't going to get TLDs due to cost (at least in the short term). But most companies that legitimately get TLDs will likely exercise as much oversight over subdomains as current .com registrars do -- that is, practically none at all.

While you won't be able to get the paypal TLD, I'd be surprised if paypal.shop is appreciably harder to get than paypalshop.com
Yep. An example of old, "non-cool" and "evil" technology (classic ASP) still at work, loading pages nearly instantly :-)
"Who will carry on his legacy and define the current Web era of computing?"

The users. This is the way of the web now, and the torch will be carried by us all
Scalability problems are not just for the web :)
Good idea; too early.
One more step for freedom: Pardus 2008
A Developer's Second Most Important Asset
My worry about this is that it is yet another place for the implementation quality of your browser to be largely responsible for the security of your data. While I think Microsoft does a fine job of security R&D, the tend to massively fail when it comes time to actually deliver.

At a fundamental level, simplicity of mechanism has to be part of any secure system. Every major MS stack (Windows kernel+core API, IE+ActiveX+JScript, Office+VBA) is just too huge, and has too many little back doors around the security infrastructure built in for performance and backwards-compatibility.

Now, if they truly willing to commit to using a substrate like Singularity for their trusted computing base, we can talk about security.

The better way to handle this, of course, is separate browser runtimes for separate applications, ala Prism/XULRunner. Each desktop app should have a whitelist of hosts it's allowed to access, and sharing can be accomplished via normal local system channels.
Yes, the size could be computed that way. However, I was going by the original paper in my implementation. This meant that I had to first estimate how many items would be in the tree, then take the base-2-log of that (in order to get O(lg n) performance), and then make each node allocate that many pointers. Of course, with most nodes, most of these pointers are uninitialized and unused.

In my comment, I was referring to my (and the reference) implementation. After reading your comment, though, you're right that you could allocate a number of pointers equal to the height of the specific node. The only downside is that you then have two mallocs for each new node (once for the node and once for its array of pointers), unless you do something hackish like putting the array of pointers at the end of the struct and manually adjusting your malloc call to allocate the right amount.

One other note: I don't think my skiplist was doubly-linked. The search algorithm involves moving forward on the highest level until the move would take you past the desired element, then you move down a level and continue. By the time you hit the bottom, you're guaranteed to either hit the element you're looking for, or your position is the node before where the element would be if it was in the list. Thus double-linking is entirely unnecessary.
The fastest computing experience I had was somewhere around 2001-02 or so, I had PIII 1Gz with 256MB of RAM and 3MBit DSL connection.

Everything was screaming: every piece of software I ran, every site I visited. I forgot how "Please wait..." popups looked like.

After that, it's been declining ever since: my software has gotten slower and slower, and web sites started to bring back dial-up memories from mid-90s.

After switching to Linux I got back most of what I lost, but the web still feels much slower, even Gmail is giving me "Still working..." strip at the top on a daily basis and randomly 1-2 squares on google maps remain gray after initial page load: hard to bitch about free stuff though.
I read things everyday about what's better: Windows or something else. The truth is each OS has its own plusses and minuses. Linux/Unix allows a sophisticated user much more power than Windows. Windows has a whole network of developers that create the mainstream games and other entertainment software I enjoy. I use both a Unix and a Windows system, but I use both in a very different manner.

Regardless of one's opinion on what OS is better, you cannot deny that Gates is one of the most brilliant people of our time. His business practices are what brought him wealth. He may or may not have done a few questionable things, but what business hasn't? This is why we have a justice system. Laws are not always written to be black and white. The justice systme is there to help us define all the gray in between.

If I had the ability to create a monopoly because the laws don't explicitly define a certain prohibition, you can bet your ass that I would. I'd deal with antitrust issues as they came up and leverage what I have already done to move into a new area of exploitation. Whether or not you want to believe it, that is how capitalism is practiced.
Excellent HBR piece challenging the Long Tail
Okay, but which is slower, hashing a string and then looking into an array indexed at that position (possibly traversing a very short (2- or 3-item) list), or performing an average of 17 string comparisons (for the case of ~130,000 items)?

In particular, the hashing approach gives similar lookup times for any item. The skiplist approach is dependent on the (random) structure of the built-up skiplist. A given item could be found after 2 pointer traversals, or it could take 30. Also disturbing is that as you get closer to the item you're looking for, the string comparisons take longer and longer (because the common prefixes are getting longer and longer).

With a good hashing algorithm, similar strings will hash to different values. This means that even if 2 or 3 string comparisons have to be made (for strings that land in the same bucket), failing comparisons will be fast since they will likely fail on the first character.
My company is so firmly entrenched in Java the only reason Rails is not completely dismissed is that one of the senior technical gurus sees its potential (and likes it).

The only reason I can see that there isn't "Learn Rails in 5 days" training for $2,495 is that there is not a market for it yet - since the managers don't want/need Rails programmers there is no need for over-priced training. And from my experience, you can't being to touch on Rails in 5 days. Even if you could, after the 3rd day, your brain becomes numb.

Remember, Java is safe. Java won in the Enterprise. Who could have predicated whatever percent of SMBs and Fortune 500 companies would have Java running every which where? Rails is a big step out of Java programmers comfort zone.
It's Official: Facebook Not Worth $15 Billion
Blogger.com Rocks With the Introduction Of Lots Of New Features
I've a problem with #14 - Making your career your life. Some of the most successful, radiant people are so because of their devotion to what they do professionally, i.e. because it's their life.
Ruby code is so damn elegant. :)
Interesting... now that I think of it, it's not necessary for a node to know how high it is, because that information is available in the traversal algorithm (the node is guaranteed to be encountered at the level which represents its height). Using a log-2 dice roll (as the algorithm specifies), you will get nodes with an average height of 2, and with only forward pointers, that does work out to 2 pointers per node.

I may have to revisit my implementation and do it "right".
I don't disagree with the author, but I do think that the mechanisms he's asking for, with the exception of the stronger sandbox enforcement, fall under the header of "magic pixie dust" security. Randomizing memory layouts and enforcing W^X may help prevent buffer-overrun attacks, but it won't help in cases like the ARDAgent backdoor, or even in the case of something like the current Ruby vulnerabilities.

(W^X is particularly useless when you're talking about a dynamic language runtime -- the scripting code pretty much has to live in writable memory, unless you're compiling everything to C first and using dlopen() and kin.)

The kauth framework and Scheme-based sandbox language already built in to the XNU kernel from Leopard on allows a lot of work to happen today, if security vendors decided to get off their collective asses and offer a comprehensive OS X security add-on.

Unfortunately, none of the major AV/anti-malware vendors have a reputation worth a damn in the OS X community. They spent so many years selling "do-nothing" AV products to Mac users that no one takes them seriously now.
Google Caja - A source-to-source translator for securing Javascript-based web content
consulting is potentially an option, but i don't think i would get an equity stake as a consultant. they are offering me equity now as a founding partner if i join up.

I am fulltime on my startup now. I am building the product, but i have no income/revenue source now. i am completely self-funded and i should be able to keep self funding for a year. i figured a year would be long enough to see if this idea has legs.
Correct, but with billions of dollars at stake it seems like they should have been able to figure it out. They made almost $5 billion in cash last year. This isn't a little startup trying to do something scrappy. If I was an exec I would be concerned why my company can't figure out how to make enough widgets 1.5 years after launch.
I think what he is trying to inference is that one must not sacrifice his sanity, family and friends at the expense of his work.

Again, all people are different when it comes to how they maintain balance or not maintain balance, for the good.
well he did borrow some code/features so I guess they did have some claim. But yeah its a good day for those guys because they get paid w/o really doing the hard work.
So the Earth is obviously getting warmer, but most people ignore the question of whether humans are entirely to blame or if the larger factor is a natural climate cycle. Certainly when the Bering Land Bridge melted (near the end of the Ice Age), no one was blaming that on carbon emissions. Is all the environmental hoopla really going to make a difference?
I've found the users there tend to be very helpful if you want a small group to take a look at your app/project at an early stage and give feedback. Just keep in mind that the demographic skews technical.
When the competition (Sony and Microsoft), are losing a ton of money, I don't think Nintendo are that worried to be honest. They've clearly won the current game system wars, both with the wii, and the ds.

Producing enough consoles to meet demand isn't an easy problem I'm sure.

Bottom line is Nintendo won, make a ton of money, and people want their products.
for 1, on my product i feel that there is a certain window of opportunity with it. it is a simple product that scratches a nice itch, somebody else is bound to have the same itch.

on their products(they have more than 1) their is also a bit of a time issue. they are basically short on people, the market is demanding more from their product and sooner so they need to bring in more people.

i guess it really comes down to your number 2. i am leaning towards focus on my product since i don't think i can reasonably do both at the level of quality i expect from myself.
Microsoft To Acquire Mobile Solutions Provider, MobiComp
But that's not exactly what this article is about. It's not about whether or not you've chosen the right career; it's about mistakes in general. Particularly, I got a lot from mistake 3: the advice to sell benefits, not features, is very good.
that is a point i had not considered before, but probably more reflective of the situation than any other point.
I've heard Nintendo is having problems moving software titles for the Wii because so many people are content playing Wii Sports.

Can this be validated by actual data or am I just rumor-mongering?
18% of americans think the sun revolves around the earth? FSM save us
I submit that they're meeting demand precisely. They still are winning the sales wars, in all markets, every month. The idea of a "shortage" is a myth.

Plus, they're being smart and shipping units to Europe instead of here, given that they make more yen on the forex.
Researchers develop a 42GB super DVD
Selling features instead of benefits is one of the all-time classic marketing mistakes. He didn't just make that up. If you don't know how to describe the benefit of a feature in a way that is convincing to a technical audience, you either don't understand the feature well enough, or you shouldn't have the feature.
Would the person who downmodded me for my comment post a response. I would like to know your opinions of what I wrote. I was only trying to stimulate discussion.

If you downmodded me because you don't like Windows, Gates, or my statement on the practices of capitalism, that's fine. I just want to know what you think. There must be some disagreement that you have. I would like to respond to that.
Developer-entrepreneurs...we want to talk to you! 
We’re looking for developer-entrepreneurs in the San Francisco Bay Area who also are interested in Cloud Computing. Possibly you are a developer looking to create and/or sell the next Facebook or build in the Cloud. Send us a bio with your background and current projects. We’d like to qualify you for an interview about your ideas and opinions. You will earn $200-300. We are a consulting company researching developer opinions. E-mail us: conversation95@gmail.com with “Developer” in the subject line. Thanks!
Bleh, powerpoint? May as well put it behind a door marked "Beware of the Leopard". There is a URL for a group at the end, but it won't let me in because I am not a member.

To summarize though:

New http content encoding.
Server defines dictionaries and tells clients which dictionaries to use for a request.
Client loads the dictionary, presumably once for many pages.
gzip is still used after the dictionary compression phase
Claims a 40% savings in bytes over gzip alone. (Perhaps not counting the one time dictionary load.)
Can't get protocol or specs without being accepted to a private group.

Sounds like a good idea, but I'd like to see it compared to other compression algorithms that outperform gzip. I suspect it helps XML in particular. I had always assumed giant XML tags would compress away with gzip, but in practice replacing long tags with short tags is still a big win.
Every time I walk by the Wii shelf at Target it's empty. They sell for more than retail on eBay (and being bid on heavily). Demand isn't being met.
http://www.paulgraham.com/designedforwindows.html
If you don't know how the product will benefit the user, then what is the point of the product to begin with?

For me, if I'm writing a program for myself, it's to solve a particular problem. If I think others might find it useful, I would mention what problem it solved for me.

If the program has a particularly clever (efficient) algorithm, that would not be part of the sales pitch. Instead, I would note the effects of that algorithm, not the algorithm itself. It's the difference between, "This music player efficiently handles large music collections", and, "Only 10 songs are kept in memory at once, and indexing is done so that searches over the entire collection can be performed in constant time." The former tells the user all that is needed, while the latter is simply confusing and/or meaningless for a non-tech person.

This is what I think #3 meant, and I thought it was great advice.
Hmm. You are right. Maybe my unconscious is trying to tell me something if I picked up two out of the list of 15 relating to career-limiting habits (#8 Forgetting who you work for; #11 Not blowing your own horn). But the economy is poor now (#12).
Google Media Server:  turn your PC into a home media server
I think this comes back to Nintendo trying to avoid risk. Similar to how they don't want to sell the hardware at a loss, they want to make damn sure that the production facilities producing the hardware are worth the cost in the long term.

They probably figure that the money lost due to not quite meeting demand is less than the risk to ramping up production to meet demand that may drop sharply over the course of a year or two. And it's not like starting up a production facility is a small task.
Unfortunately I think it won't make any difference. High oil prices do make a difference. But I don't think anyone has a serious plan.

For the greenies conservation is the answers to everything, but ultimately that is a ludyte pipe dream. I don't see any countries with a serious plan to ramp up nuclear power to a level that will replace hydro-carbons. And I think that is the only real alternative.
I love this article. I've wanted to write something like it ever since I held my first "business" role, as a product manager moving from a lead dev role.

I cannot possibly stress enough #11 on this list --- "blow your own horn". Software development is more meritocratic than almost anything else you can do in technology. Devs track each other by commits and by improvements to codebases. Some devs are loud, but even when they are, their seniority and expertise usually manifests itself in strong opinions, not outright bragging.

The business world does not operate this way. If you assume that people will notice and appreciate your accomplishments, you will get your lunch eaten. Worse still, if you call the classic geek play of being loud and authoritative as a way of expressing your accomplishments, without being explicit about why you're qualified to do that, you will alienate and offend people.

Here's a freebie from my list:

Don't write long email messages. Don't ever write documents in the form of email messages. Businesspeople use email differently than you do. They've never been on mailing lists. They never read Usenet. If you have something to say that needs to be remembered, put it in a Word document, "brand" the document ("The $XXX Plan"), and send that instead. A bunch of times, I wrote marketing copy or feature/function definitions in 4 page email messages and discovered weeks later that nobody had ever paid attention to them.
'Browser' rule of thumb
Iconic photo of MSFT founders.. recreated 30 years later