skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One bug I had to fix recently was in the commentary system of a PS2 soccer game (with an ancient codebase, parts of which hadn't been touched in 10 years).

The commentator would always refer to a particular player on a particular team by the name of a different player on that team. No-one had any idea why.

This issue had been knocking around for years and somehow ended up on my plate. After about 3 or 4 days of digging around and finding nothing, I finally got to the bottom of it. It just so happened that subtracting the ID's of the two players in question gave exactly 65536. It didn't take me much longer to figure out that the game's database used 32 bit integers for player ID's, and the commentary system was using 16 bit integers, so from the commentary's point of view, the two players had the same ID.

Luckily for me, I was able to fix it by swapping in a slightly-less-ancient commentary system which used 32 bit IDs instead.
> I'm wondering exactly what that means in a quantifiable way.

What does would a quantifiable way be?
Loopt Now Available For BlackBerry Users
Ask YC: Things to do in Cambridge, MA
I just moved to Cambridge and classes don't start for a while. So, any suggestions on interesting groups to join, places to go, or people to meet?

Just catching up on my reading (a pre-req for a project I'm working on) doesn't seem like taking full advantage of my limited down-time in one of the greatest cities in the world.
This is why splogs exist to do exactly that. However, there's a big difference in building an actual site and a splog site, and this is reflected in traffic and search engine ranking.

Getting that traffic is the trick.
I've heard Amazon can be used with a .NET app, as long as you are not running SQL Server on the back-end.

You need to be more specific since Amazon offers many web services. There may be .NET client applications which use Amazon S3 for storage but as far as I know there is no good solution for running a .NET application on Amazon EC2.

If you do find any examples, please post them here.
Lua is designed for exactly the type of work you describe here. I wrote a Lua interface for The Nebula Device (Open-sourced 3d game engine from Radon Labs.) It took about a weekend, starting from scratch. Interfacing to C or C++ code is dead simple. And the language itself draws a lot of inspiration from Scheme without abandoning a more familiar syntax. You get first-class functions, closures, lexical scoping, coroutines, and a clever "metamethod" system for defining object behavior. It's an extremely quick and efficient implementation written in strict ANSI C, and it works well in constrained environments like games. It's quite popular in both console and PC games for higher level functions on top of a low level engine. Give Lua a look-see!
The blog entry crosses into paranoia. Coincidences happen. A company with a related name bought a shorter domain name that he also wanted. It's not mysterious. Instead of seeing the obvious, the blogger seems to imply that somehow godaddy magicked into existence a company with a related name as a front to buy his 9.99 domain name.
"Branding" is a focus on perception, on advertising and promotion. "Identity" is a focus on developing your core values. The touchstone is whether or not what a company projects is decided by marketing strategy in isolation or by business development as a whole. Ideally, these are one in the same, but they rarely actually are coincidental.
When asked what would be the main factor for someone to succeed, Bill Gates answer was how young they start their first company, Warren Buffet who really is smart and was sitting next to him agreed.

Go for it, if you start now I guarantee you will have your life fixed by 35 yo.
The assertion that he intentionally sabotaged them seems just a touch far-fetched. They made an (it sounds like) informal contract with a procrastinating college sophomore, in the middle of a busy school term. Occam’s razor would suggest the delays were caused by disinterest, procrastination, and the busy-ness of his schedule, not malice or greed.

These guys were supposedly working on their site (of a relatively simple and obvious idea) for a year, with nothing to show for it, and their conclusion is: “'That's supposed to be us.' We're not there, because one greedy kid cut us out."” As if the 10 hours of work Zuckerberg didn’t do on their site was the only thing separating failure from unbelievable riches.
I integrated Lua once for a project of my own. But on this project the choice wasn't mine - we ported over existing technology to a new console to meet a five-month ship deadline.

Also, Lua is imperfect for games: Squirrel is considerably more attractive because it is designed to work in real-time situations(no GC interference). I also had issues with Lua's error-handling.
Block Quotes and Pull Quotes: Examples and Good Practices
1. Do NOT miss WebInno Boston. Next meeting is July 15th, 2008, so you came at a good time. Literally hundreds of web/mobile entrepreneurs, angels, VCs (it's lead by VC David Beisel of Venrock) and other enthusiasts. http://www.webinnovatorsgroup.com/

2. Also, hang out at OpenCoffee Boston every Wednesday at 8:30 AM for coffee with tech entrepreneurs. http://boston.going.com/event-122245;OpenCoffee_Club

3. Consider Boston Entrepreneur Meetup at Exemplar. Good place to learn about general entrepreneurship from both tech and non-tech entrepreneurs. http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/674/

4. Xconomy is the single best source of information that I have found for Cambridge news and events wrt tech and etc. Keep an eye out at http://xconomy.com/

5. Keep an eye out at myEventGuru - http://boston.myeventguru.com/index.php - for networking events and meetups.

6. Going.com (awesome startup in Boston, a person from the team sometimes comes to networking events) and Upcoming.org are always great resources.

7. MarksGuide.com is a guide for Boston networking events. http://www.marksguide.com/

8. General hacking areas include the cafes - DanGrover from here likes Diesel Cafe. Good hacking environment. They also have WiBuddy which allows you to connect with other people inside the cafe.

9. Keep an eye out on Hacker News for events such as DevHouse Boston, and the one I'm organizing, Facebook Developer Garage Boston 2.

Welcome to Cambridge, it's nice to see you here, and I hope you have a good time.

Sources: side dish presenter at WebInno Boston November. Used to be regular at Boston Entrepreneur Network (JayNeely also.) Information from crusade searching for Boston/Cambridge networking events :)
im based in philly with my staryup

theres a bit of startup atmosphere here
(On Sunday) Father’s Day - 10 Top Tips for Being a Great Dad
http://arxiv.org/help/submit

http://arxiv.org/list/cs.DS/recent
I'm ashamed to admit that I've still got a hefty little piece of VBScript at a grocery store that does some price & cost number crunching for them; it features a very funky two-stage inner loop which will occasionally produce random numbers if you feed in very large data sets. Two different pretty sharp people have spent a lot of time trying to track it, and nobody can find it. One of them looked at it and about cried when he realized how it was supposed to work.

Not too long ago, I had to figure out a timing issue in some JavaScript for a photo gallery. It's about as multi-tasking as JavaScript can get, and the code has its own task manager. Each new task was supplied with a UID, which was just the number of milliseconds since 01/01/1970. Occasionally, however, a task wouldn't fire. It would get queued, and then disappear from the queue, but never run. Every time I set breakpoints in the script, used alerts, or otherwise examined the code as it ran, everything worked fine.

It took me most of an afternoon to realize that occasionally two different tasks were being created within the same millisecond, and getting the same UID. Subsequently, one of the tasks would stomp on the other one. I kicked myself for knowing better than that and wrote a more reasonable UID hash.

Years ago, one of the first languages I got to play with was Pascal, on a pre-7.5 Mac OS. I was using THINK Pascal at the time, and having fun, but occasionally my program would bomb out in really interesting ways. It took me a long while to trace the bug to a problem in the compiler, where a struct that was supposed to be 4 bytes long was getting loaded on to the stack in 6 bytes. Usually this wouldn't be an issue, except that one of my functions was popping the struct off the stack as a longint, instead of as the actual struct. Whoops.

But, probably the most fun "bug" I ever figured out wasn't really a software issue at all. I worked in the data processing department of a Bay Area school district. Despite being one of the better school districts in the area, and having enough spare change for student A/V programs and the like, a lot of their systems ran on an ancient Unisys mainframe, COBOL74, and reel tapes. (Hey, it worked. Unisys mainframes have incredible recovery abilities.)

The reel tapes had a little reflective strip near the end of the tape, and the tape drive had this optical sensor that would pick up the reflection as the strip flew by, and dismount the tape.

It was the damnedest thing -- sometimes, usually in late Spring or early Summer, a tape would be in the middle of some operation, and it would dismount, even though it was nowhere near the end of the tape.

I was sitting in the room one day when it happened, and turned around in time to see a perfect little sunbeam sneaking through the blinds and shining right on the drive's optical sensor, fooling it.
I suggest a scorpion bowl at the Hong Kong if you're young but legal, and like people watching.

John Harvard's is good for microbrews, relaxed atmosphere.

Memorial Drive is closed on sundays and is nice to walk, roller-blade, jog, watch pretty girls, etc.

Harvard Square: Graton St. (dinner), The Greenhouse (brunch)

Also, in Harvard Sqare: Hot chocolate/Candy/Dessert/dates at L.A. Burdicks

If you're new to town, the duck tour and freedom trail are good.

The MFA is good if you're solo, or otherwise, and I highly recommend the museum of science.
I strongly recommend not ending your URLs with cfm.
Some places I like, mostly in the Central Square and Harvard area.

Best view: Find a way to get in the John Hancock building, go to one of the corners of the floor and lean against the glass. You'll get a 210°+ panorama.

Food:

Indian - any of the dozen places on Mass Ave is good.

- Indian Food and Spices (80 River Street) is an excellent one-man operation

- Desi Dharba (on Mass Ave and Main) and Indian Pavilion (Central Square) both have very good buffets in the $8 range.

Mexican:

- Felipe's is great for take out. Mount Auburn Street, next to the 7-11.

- Border Cafe is an extra delicious sit down places yet prices are really low.

Japanese:

- Wagamama - great fusion food

Don't know any good sushi places, though.

After 12pm:

- Falafel Palace on Western Ave and Mass Ave (sometimes open till 3)

- IHOP on Brattle Street, Harvard

Bars:

- Om Bar near Harvard

- Grafton Street is one of the typical Harvard hangouts

- John Harvard Pub make their own beer

- So does the Cambridge Brewing Company on Kendall Square

- The Estate next to the Boston Common. Not a very good club but all the house/dance DJs go there. Tiesto's coming next week.

- Middle East and 2 others next to it on Central Square always have live music.

- The Enormous Room (above Central Kitchen on Central Square) is a nice club/bar with great music, one of the few places that stays open after 2pm.

Parks & Walking:

Not much in the park area unfortunately. Best bet is to go to the far west parts or to go to the Charles River park by following Main St or Mass Ave until you cross the river.

Cambridgeport (what's north of Mass Ave, east of Harvard) is quite nice for a quick walk to clear your head. People on the street say hi. The area around the YC house is also cool.

Check out the markings on the pavement of the Harvard Bridge (it actually leads to MIT). Details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot

NB: When you go to Kendall be careful as there are two places about 10 minutes away which are both called Kendall Square. One is the real Kendall with the namesake Red Line stop and the Marriott, the other one is an office park north of it.
"in one of the greatest cities in the world." -- Calm down. It will get boring within the year.
Not near the league of many other cities. When I think greatest cities of the world, I think of NYC, London, Paris, Tokyo, Singapore, Shangai, Bejing, Seul, Chicago, San Francisco, Berlin.... you get the point.

Boston is about two-three noches down.

1369 coffee is always full with semi-hipsters over educated types, and you can hear intersting conversations

Check out Davis sq. in Somerville, and especially Diesel Cafe. You see hackers there working with their laptops once and a while. The problem is that people are unfriendly, and if you just randomly start talking to somebody with their laptop open, they might snub you.
Unfortunately it is not California. In here if you randomly start talking to somebody, they will talk kindly back to you, in the "who knows, something might come out" away. Over there they will talk back to you in the way "Why the frick you talking to me. Do I know you?". Big difference.

Finale-s in Harvard sq. has some really good desserts!

Harvard Cooop is my favorite bookstore ever. It has a certain "air", very inspiring place (like: you should be smarter, and try harder, kind of inspiration).

But here is my favorite activity while I lived there:
Learn how to Sail in the charles river. In the boston's side of Charles river, at the beginning of the esplanade, there is the community Boat House. You pay something like 120$ per year, and you learn how to sail (all lessons are free), and you can go there and get a boat (you will start with small sail boats), or canoe out anytime you want.
It is actually really fun, if you have the patience to learn. Since it is not even a real lake, and winds are not that strong, it is very easy to learn. And if you get good at it, it would be a great activity for a second date. Worth every penny.
This is fun. I haven't thought about this for a while.

You are completely ignoring the experiential aspect of reality. Buddhism (at it's best, at it's worse it's as bad as the others) treats meditation as a science of interior experience. There are actual things you can do to change the way you perceive yourself, and you can learn things from them by a process which is analogous to science. It features hypothesis testing, experimentation, validation by a community of peers. We can learn intriguing things by looking at the places their practice, which produces measurable permanent effects on the brain, interacts with what they describe experientially. Your worldview leaves no room for this. Go do the experiments. It's easy. It's proven to make you feel better. You will directly perceive why it's wrong to think of experience as just an interaction of localized matter in time. I can't convince you of cell biology without showing you a microscope. And I can't convince you of consciousness and how it relates to these other things if you do not directly use the technology in these areas. I don't understand why people don't think it's scientific. There are confirmable results. Just look through the right door.

And when you do, you will find that rather then stepping into a room, you have a reversal of perception, and your construction of yourself becomes something you step out of. It is exactly that thought "What you call awareness is an illusion" that will flip in this way. What we call awareness is what is aware of the reality that is actually the illusion. This awareness has no properties, no features, it is what all properties and features arise and are experienced in (as you, me, and all the other experiential phenomena). You can perceive it, but when you do, the you you perceive is an object of perception. When the you that is not what you think of as you perceives you instead of perceives through you, your perception inverts and broadens. You can see this, yourself, for yourself, if you let yourself see, at which point there will be no you to be doing the seeing, you see? Do you see at least why you should do the experiments to try to see?
Find a great book at Lorem Ipsum Books outside of Inman Square. http://www.loremipsumbooks.com/
Presumably, fiaz is referring to SICP the class (6.001 -> http://sicp.csail.mit.edu/Fall-2007/) rather than the book.

The posted course site is not up to date, because as far as I know 6.001 is no longer being taught at MIT. (http://www.eecs.mit.edu/ug/newcurriculum/index.html)
or you can check out veetle.com --oneof my friend's startup

You can create your station there, and somebody has created a station with live games!

It works on linux and windows, but I am not sure it works on mac yet.

My productivity at work during the day has been very low these days. All the games have been pretty good, and some of the groups are getting very heated.
Yup, SICP was a course before it was a book.
The MIT Museum is pretty sweet. There are a bunch of Arthur Ganson's insane kinetic sculptures and some old robots. It's $7.50 for adults, but I think there is a student discount, free if you're an MIT student. Open 10-5 every day.
I lived in California for 13 years and in Cambridge for 4. My impression is that people are of uniform unfriendliness in the two areas.

I do agree with the recommendation of Davis Square. The Somerville Theater, which is in Davis, is pretty sweet.
s/Graton/Grafton/

Also, the Greenhouse went out of business a few months ago (though it was good while it lasted). Maybe try Daedalus on Mount Auburn Street. It's relatively expensive, but good.
I thought I was being clever but in the end I've ended up confusing people. I think you can take it as you want to.

By using the word "sequel" in the title, I was implying that there is perhaps some hope for future CS students to be inspired by the beauty that was in the SICP class and book. I took a class that was based on the book at the University of Minnesota and it still stands in my memory as one of the best classes in CS that I have ever taken.

My love for the class and book is so deep that sometimes I'll flip through the three copies I have (one first edition, and two distinctly different printings of the second edition) just to remind me of how beautiful hacking can be...
"Since Google acquired YouTube, the company has tried desperately to make something, anything, from its $1.65 billion investment, but so far, it has failed miserably."

I haven't read about or seen the 'desperate' tries and the 'miserable' failures he is talking about. What has Google really tried? Isn't this analysis a little premature?
Technorati Raises $7.5 Million, Crashes
EReader for the iPhone in the works
Creators of E-Mail Monster Now Try to Tame It
Advertisers Give Thumbs-Down to Google-Yahoo Deal
Cost of Obsessively Checking Your Email: $650 Million a Year - Silicon Alley Insider
And now with Lunatic Python, you can even use Python from Lua or Lua from Python, two-ways! So you can do Lua-in-Python-in-Lua-in-Python if you have that desire.

Try it out, it's darn fun: http://labix.org/lunatic-python
Many thanks. A lot of those seem very cool, and I'll definitely be coming to WebInno and OpenCoffee.
Ask YC : How to find ideas for a web startup
I have a day job in IT firm bulding "Enterprise Class Application" in Java/J2EE. There is a lack of innovation, creativity and challenges in my current job. I want to do something innovative, meaningful and challenging.
So, I am working to start a web startup. But, I am unable to find unique ideas. Whatever I think of, already exists in one form or other.
How do I find an idea?
Interesting, I guess I'm not really entrenched in the startup/tech community of Philadelphia. I probably should try to be though...
Yeah, I wonder what that's like - going from just you and maybe a couple other guys to suddenly having to manage the whole world.
Looks like a great place - and under a mile from my apartment. Thanks, I'll probably check it out this weekend.

Although, I already have a queue of about 10 books to get to ... A visit there will likely just make me feel more guilty for not reading enough ;-)
RescueTime is mentioned! :)
I have an idea for some software I'd like to write (a startup, but not web-based).

It is extremely math heavy, and I'm currently brushing up on Linear Algebra and Differential Geometry (yay Open CourseWare!). If I can manage to get a working proof-of-concept before I graduate I'll likely pursue it full time.

Otherwise, I still have a lot to learn (as I discovered from my last boss) and a few years at a big company (ITA Software looks promising) may do me some good.
Sorry to hijack the thread - but I think that this is pretty appropriate nonetheless. I just recently moved to Cambridge/Boston, MA as well. Would someone enlighten me, as to what might be some great software/web companies in the area that a young CS grad should consider and apply to? I feel a little bit lost here, as there are certainly lots of tech companies in Boston but I only saw a few walking in downtown and Kendall Square.
Fair point about Cambridge - I think I'm just a bit over excited about my new home :-D

I visited the Coop a few days ago - but wasn't particularly impressed. I think I'm more a fan of the dusty, hole-in-a-wall, hidden gem sort of place.

I'll look into that community boat house - I'm not sure if I have the time or patience, but it is definitely worth considering. Do you know where I can read more about it, or what the name is?
http://www.community-boating.org/

If you're looking for a dusty bookshop, try McIntyre and Moore in Porter Square: http://www.mcintyreandmoore.com/

Porter Square Books is not dusty. It's basically the old Concord bookstore, re-opened in Cambridge after some dispute with the owner, after which all the employees quit en masse.

Rodney's bookstore on Mass Ave in Central Square is at least somewhat dusty.

The lower floor of the Harvard Bookstore is all used books, though mostly remainders, not much dust.

If you're into sci-fi/fantasy: http://www.pandemoniumbooks.com/

The Coop is pretty weak in my opinion. It's owned by Barnes and Noble, and the selection is not remarkable.

Also, tomorrow, there's the river festival: http://www.cambridgeartscouncil.org/riverfestival/

Sponsored by Microsoft, no less!
If you have the ability to travel, I recommend heading down to Foxwoods (about 2 hour drive) around 11pm on Friday or Saturday. Most people are enebriated by then, and the Texas Hold'em tables are like an ATM.

EDIT: Sorry, I assumed that you were over 21. Don't bother going if you are only 18,
Debugging VHDL on a FPGA (which ran correctly in a simulator) is, uh, fun. I don't remember the details, but it was a single character fix.

Also, debugging MS Office file format generating code is painful when the only feedback you have is Office giving you "corrupted file" errors.
"OTHER PEOPLE'S WINE may already be a commodity, but NOT OUR WINE, no no no no... Our wine is SPECIAL, yes yes yes yes..."
I asked you because Boston...shocked me.
I'm interested in meeting people in Philly to work on startups in the future. Are there any meetups that you could suggest?
I'm 22, but I don't have a car ;-) Thanks anyways though.
checkout MIT CSAIL

http://www.csail.mit.edu/index.php

just walk in and ask someone to show you around. they got some pretty cool stuff going on
I'm not sure yet ... just moved in. If you're interested I can probably give you a better idea in a few weeks.

So far, it seems pretty nice though. Lots of cool little places near my apartment. Haven't really had a chance to have more than short conversations with people though.
This is a very good use of visualization. Best thing I have seen in some time using it. Almost biological...