skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're into building custom OS' but not interested in doing the lowest level bits (bootloader, fiddling page table bits, worrying about the processor details, etc), using a pre-existing microkernel and building whatever you want on top of it can be interesting.

I used my diploma thesis as an excuse to build a toy OS on top of a L4 (L4Ka::Pistachio) microkernel. It provides the basics, incl. IPC and VM building blocks, and a straightforward C/C++ API, and you can do the rest (there's also a number of things built on top of it that you could mix'n'match - i just implemented most of my userspace stuff because that was what I was interested in).

Some links (haven't been in touch for a few years, I don't know how up to date they are):

L4Ka project: http://os.ibds.kit.edu/1953.php
OKL3 (successor to Pistachio, as far as I can tell): http://wiki.ok-labs.com/
Iguana, a set of components to be (re)used on top of L4:
http://www.ertos.nicta.com.au/software/kenge/iguana-project/...
Misc L4 resources: http://www.l4hq.org/projects/os/

If anyone's interested, I could try to find my old code and put it on GitHub (it's a combination of MIT and GPL licenced things).
Java is part of the C family of languages, you can draw a pretty straight line between C++ and most of Java's features (or non-features, or lacks of features).
Yup. It must be an american thing. I've never seen it in any typewritten document in Italy.
It is, yes.

HTML ignores whitespace, unless it's inside a <pre> tag, or when IE randomly decides not to for in-line elements when rendering some CSS rules. ;)
Completely agree. I'll be teaching my kids Java first, if they want to learn programming.
> Much like Cobol and Perl, there will always be a need for Java programmers to--at the very least--maintain existing code.

Sure, if your goal is to get a job maintaining mainframe systems in banks for the next 30 years Cobol or Java are very good ideas.

On the other hand, there are already huge heaps of mediocre java programmers available for cheap, so it's not like the demand is that high.
'that anyone savvy enough to read Slate ...'

should be able to write a simple filter for his e-mail.

str_replace('. ','. ',$str); in PHP or
str.replace('. ','. ') in Python.

I know it's a rudimentary solution but it'll work if one can get so worked up over such trivialities.
The guy is wound up and not thinking clearly.

For nearly all my typing, I use a monospaced font because it makes getting vertical alignment, especially in tables, MUCH easier.

Essentially all my high quality word whacking goes through Knuth's TeX where his care with spacing is high beyond belief. There I include some TeX tricks to put a 'little' extra space after the end of a sentence, but to TeX a 'space' does not have a fixed width and gets adjusted along with all the rest of Knuth's complicated spacing algorithms.

For what a blog such as HN does with my text with two spaces after each sentence is just up to HN, and I haven't gone to the trouble to determine what.

Here's where the guy is wrong:

First, he is way too strong on running down monospaced fonts. Especially for programmers on HN, programming source code nearly always has to look much better in a monospaced font.

Second, and worse, the guy doesn't understand that in high quality typesetting the width of a space is not fixed. So, he is ranting about rubber.

Mostly all he is doing is ranting. Since he is writing for 'Slate', we have to suspect that he is all wound up, "full of sound and fury signifying nothing". Out brief candle. Nonsense. Detritus on the scrap heap of history nonsense. That's why I am always reluctant to read 'Slate': It's written for old maid high school English literature teachers who gush about Shaky Spire.
Yes, HTML collapses whitespace. It's to allow you to format and structure your source html with linebreaks and indentation without it effecting the output.

If you don't want it to collapse you would use a "Non-breaking space"

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-breaking_space#Use_as_non-c...
Terrible idea Just to do it for the sheer fact of thinking more features will being in more money.
I don't understand the typewriter argument; monospaced fonts put even more space between characters.
The basic grammar and syntax are pretty much the same, as are most of the fundamental data types and their behaviors, and many other things. There are obviously a lot of differences, but if you know one language it usually isn't hard to read well-written code in the other language.
My kids, like their dad, won't have the patience to create a singleton main object, with a print method, just to run "print 'hello world'".
What's preventing you from working on the algorithm yourself? What will you be contributing to the effort if someone takes over that work from your friend?
SQL Database design for tag-based search. LIKE is not that bad.
Turn Lighters Into A 'Lil Motorcycle
Show HN: My silly twist on the Facebook Like button
Google crisis response summary page for Queensland floods
«[...] an encoder is not a state machine. Meaning that there need not, and probably should not be, a single base encoder.»
This is not the meaning of "State machine". What I think the author means is "Two encoders for the same video codec can and should be two different state machine", or simply "The developers of video codec encoders have many different algorithmic choices, both in video quality and encoding performance".
As someone who rather dislikes Java, I'd still tell others to learn it (but certainly not as their first or even second language - it teaches too many bad habits).

The main reason would simply be that a lot of interesting problems require tools/libs written in Java (Hadoop and family, Lucene, etc) if you want to get off the ground quickly and efficiently. Eventually, you're going to need to tweak your tools - so learn Java.

Furthermore, a lot of far better languages run on the JVM and have Java interop (Clojure, Scala, etc). Strictly speaking you don't have to know Java to use Clojure. But in practice, it's going to make your life miserable if you don't know the Java libs reasonably well.
Although a Java translation of a C program still looks C-ish, I agree; idiomatic Java is very different from idiomatic C. (This is not surprising; Java is intended to be "C++ done right", and idiomatic C++ is rather different from idiomatic C.)
It's too early to speak of any "eating into the share". If anything it increases the market which is good for Khan, good for MIT, good for Berkeley.
Same - I had nine rounds with Facebook in 2008, for a position in their London offices to be an SRE.

The questions asked by the Palo Alto team in rounds 1-5 were some of the toughest real-world questions I've had for an infrastructure programming role.

The London team (in on on-site for rounds 6-9) were more concerned about whether I had a degree, that I used Linux at home rather than a Mac, and whether I could code PHP (which hadn't been mentioned before).
> as are most of the fundamental data types and their behaviors

Don't ever tell that any C-novice coming from Java. Or you will have fun with interesting array constructs or functions returning pointers to variables created on the stack, etc.
The right people in India to outsource to have all already moved to Silicon Valley.
Chrome is 100% compliant without extraneous h264 support. The HTML5 spec contains no requirement for h264. If you want to blame anyone then blame the W3C working group for not specifying a codec.

As of now h264 is on the same level as ActiveX and VBScript so you might as well ask for Chrome to support those, too.

Granted, in this respect WebM is not perfect either. But at least WebM is meets the criteria to be a part of the W3C spec without modification whereas currently h264 does not.

tl;dr Don't complain if Chrome uses WebM for <video>. My browser will only support Dirac and we're both right.
Moving to WebM may not save money for Apple. They gain money everytime someone pays MPEG LA for H.264 as they are one of the licensors. If H.264 loses widespread adoption Apple loses its share of the fees too.
Programmers use monospaced fonts. (Undoubtedly for good reasons.) Nobody else does.

(I’m actually no programmer and I like to use Letter Gothic – a monospaced font – for my personal written correspondence on paper. I don’t want my letters to look like they were sent from some corporation and the monospaced font makes the letters more personal without being childish. I would guess that I’m in a small minority, though.)
My kids will get the full C drill. Basically the same way I learned programming.

Training wheels are only necessary if you could hurt yourself by practicing. Where there is no such a danger there is no reason not to start with the "hard" stuff. It's like learning guitar or piano - you don't have a practicing instrument with only two strings/5 keys that always sounds good and forgives errors.
Learning Java itself is simple. As a language it doesn't offer particularly anything that isn't already found in other languages, given you know other languages.

The biggest effort would be to learn the libraries and you basically can't do that unless you're regularly writing code that interfaces them. But that you can do from Clojure or Scala or whatever language that runs on JVM.
public static void main(String[] a) { System.out.println("Hello world");}

Yeah you're right. That's an insane amount of typing which would take any kid hours.

I had to muster up all of my patience just to type all that code out. You're right! Java is so verbose!

Your "argument" if you can call it that, is like people saying lisp is crap because it uses too many brackets.
If everything is sterile, how will our immune systems get any practice?
You were not wrong:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/01/13/hardware-choice-...
Java will certainly not teach you anything else from C but how to put statements in braces and a couple of constructs with similar syntax. And if someone thinks that is C, he doesn't know C.
Yes, I think what you allude to is that Java is just too verbose and unnecessarily complex and I agree. That said, the tools available for Java (i.e. eclipse) are pretty nice.
Hiring Mobile App Developers
I'm still hiring mobile app developers for my Maryland Start-up if your interested please email me klownkeeper@gmail.com
How many updates per second can a standard RDBMS process?
Git is evil in that regard. I had a cookie file in one of my public Github repos only a few days ago.

Ironically I explicitly took care to store all credentials in external files outside the repository for that project. :/
I think you're misunderstanding the post - the author is not encouraging entrepreneurs to quit, but instead highlighting the importance of choosing your niche carefully.

This seems like sensible advice to me - if you want to maximise your chances of success then pick an area to compete where the number of competitors is proportionally smaller or existing competitors have missed the point.

Just because a market may seem boring doesn't mean the technology used to address it will be.
However, if you were to decide you wanted to make a new song that uses the "Pretty Woman" lyrics but set to a new tune, you'd hear from Orbison's heirs/assigns. A defense that you copied the lyrics out of the court record would not get very far.

When a copyrighted work is reproduced in government documents that are available to the public (such as court records), it is considered fair use. A quick search doesn't turn up much specifically on this, but there is some relevant discussion on the similar issue of copyrighted works released by a government agency in response to Freedom of Information Act requests here: http://www.justice.gov/oip/foia_updates/Vol_IV_4/page3.htm.
We would be better off if we turned the patent office into a mere notary service where you can just timestamp descriptions of your innovations, and then go to court yourself fighting for them if you think you have a chance to win.
There is really no blanket rule that will tell you whether it is good to code it all up by yourself or get it outsourced. Depends really on what is your shortest route to market at a reasonable cost. Trying to second-guess it from the outside is a good, but pointless, exercise.

Try the flip side of the question - how many Indian start-ups would have failed or succeeded if they all built and deployed their stacks on their own?
Strava raises $3.5MM to for social biking
I'd skip C and learn assembly personally.
My main problem with Java isn't the language itself. I think it's a pretty ok language as far as statically typed ones go.

My problem with Java is the way it's currently being used. E.g. using annotations to fix things that the language won't let you do elegantly.

There's a lot of horrible overengineering for relatively simple problems (you don't HAVE to use GOF patterns, they're just a suggestion for a solution. If you don't have the problem, don't use the solution!).

While there are a few nice libraries (e.g. http://jsoup.org/ ), even those usually don't have examples. Especially when you don't know the library yet, it's wonderful to get a few minimalist examples how to use it. Just compare:

Java: http://jsoup.org/

Ruby: https://github.com/hpricot/hpricot/wiki/ or http://nokogiri.org/

While both Ruby HTML parsers have a simple example right on the starting page, I have to make at least 6-7 targeted clicks for Jsoup.

The same even goes for the core libraries. Just look at Ruby's String class:

http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/classes/String.html

And then look at Java's String class:
http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/lang/Strin...

In Ruby, almost any method has a small example. The Java doc only has an example for the constructor...
This is the best quote from the comments:

Unfortunately, I see way too much of two kinds of people in startups. There are way too many dishonest owners and bosses who will take advantage of trusting geeks. After all, our skills are all engineering and software, not negotiation and conflict. On the other hand, there are way too many gullible geeks, and geeks who like so many beaten house wives are simply unable to grow a pair and stand up for themselves. Assuming you care about your employees, it's probably up to you to stand up for them.

That right there is the reason you see this question come up over and over in software companies. The plainly obvious answer, when asked to work 60 hour weeks as a matter of policy, is "Not just no, but hell no. It simply doesn't work. We'll do it (to your detriment) but you're going to have to pay us hourly while it's happening." But because of this unique combination of uninformed (or manipulative) management and meek developers, that answer never gets presented and the policy gets put in place.

If you see this start to happen at your office, stand up for yourself and your co-workers immediately. They won't put the policy in place if they know for a fact that the whole team will walk.
Just like the title of this post, your comment can be misleading.

USPTO sends an action and attorneys respond to that action [1]. Which means a case can go on for years if attorney (for clients) has deep pockets [2].

A patent grant was not designed to be end-all be-all for that patent. For example, it can be found invalid at anytime by uspto (re-exam) or by the courts.

An examiner only has hours to read/understand/search/write a response but in any case this was really bad mistake that should have never happened.

1. Attorneys have usually 3-6 months and USPTO has usually upto 4 months to respond to attorney.
2. Using request for reconsideration and continuation among other things.
I'm currently examining the following patent proposing the use of mail quota. http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=mFrNAAAAEBAJ&dq=s... This patent is filed in 2000 and issued 10 years later ! In 2006 it was apparently extended to international. Does this mean the validity of the patent is 20 years starting from 2010, or is it from 2000 ? This is weird. Note that I'm in europe and don't know US patent particularities.
As someone who programs Java a fair bit, what bad habits do you believe it teaches?
Dropbox and Loopt
We tried it at work.

Firefox tells me my location is in Stockholm (proxy), and chrome shows the correct location, guess it is because of how they determine your location, just wanted to let you know.

Would be good if I could see the location of other users, if they enable it that is. Also maybe even allow users to change their current location so that they can follow other places.
Agreed. It's too trivial for humans to have to worry about, anyway. Let alone to rant about.
What Conferences Should SysAdmins Attend?
Find a good freelancer, offer him/her some interesting work with a deadline of "when you get around to it", and negotiate on price? I don't think this is impossible. (Of course, you'll need to find a freelancer who can do a good job but can't fill 100% of the hours (s)he wants to work. That may not be trivial, but it's possible.)
I actually do plan on using NuGet feeds internally. It will be great to have our CI server publish feeds for things like shared libraries or service contracts or anything you want to share and version with an explicit upgrade mechanism.
Quite simply, what most people are missing here is that Chrome is removing H.264. How does removing a capability of a browser enhance its capabilities?

Its nice that they add WebM, but there is just no practical reason for removing H.264.
> Thing is there can be a dozen great ideas out there but it won't necessarily be the best one that succeeds but rather the one that people actually hear about.

So true. I guarded my own startup idea jealously for years, then one day discovered at least 2 serious contenders. One of them has launched and quit (Contenture). Another one (Kachingle) is still around. Flattr does something similar and has better publicity.

Nevertheless I've realised that it can take years for one startup to suddenly be in the right place at the right time. I'm planning to revisit my startup idea because I think my twists on it are smarter and will give me enough of an edge to be the person for whom time and chance was a friend.
Data Day Austin - January 29, 2011 - Austin, TX
They don't have to go nuclear, they just have to serve youtube content in higher resolutions in WebM than in H.264.
Confession Concerning College Networking
Yes, they are mostly AOL members.

Not being funny, look at your user-agents for people who click on your ads.

As AOL dies, so does the ad clickers.

Don't worry, facebook will pick up the slack.
>> unbelievable corruption

Any proof?
It depends on what you think is cheap. But Java developers that even know a little are doing fairly well right now. Java developers that know a lot can demand top dollar and there are tons more opportunities to earn that amount than with pretty much any technology.
I would say learn Java not because there is a lot of existing Java code (using legacy code as the main argument is a bit presumptuous) but because the JVM is a versatile and powerful foundation for your code: profiling, debugging, hot class-swapping, monitoring are really well done.

Then there's the ton of libraries for everything and good tooling.

Of course, the language itself might be a bit too verbose for some people but I'd rather take Java and the JVM then another language where I'm missing some of this.

I guess most people don't differentiate Java the language from the Java Virtual Machine and that's a shame. I could be doing JRuby on the JVM and be happy then drop into Java for some optimized code. Thus, Java just happens to be the "C" programming language of the JVM.
Heroku and Posterous.
Yes. But only for a short period of time.
Define "win" :)

Make money.
I think he means C-style syntax rather than C family of languages. Java certainly is made to read like C and C++ more than anything else even if it is very different under the hood.
I'd like to know as well. IMO, one of the few things Java is actually good for is to learn object oriented programming.

- It has a pretty simple syntax, as it doesn't have too many strange or unintuitive language constructs.

- Its verboseness forces the learner to understand what is going on and be thankful for the magic that more dynamic languages provide.

- It's statically typed so it forces the learner to think about types.

- It's hard to shoot yourself in the foot with beginner mistakes like with C++/C. Still, it's a good preparation for learning C/C++ later.

- Clear compile-time and run-time error reporting.

And so on...
bill.o'reilly@example.com
Do not roll your own. Use a library. You will miss stuff.
Colorpul - A simple generator that uses online photos to create color palettes
So let me say first that Java was my first language, and I don't believe I've been corrupted in any nasty ways.

I was 10 when I learned Java, and it always threw me off having to copy those first two magic lines which I never understood. What is 'public class'? Why 'static'? What even does the word 'void' mean? 'String[]'?!

Sure, after a few months I figured out the meaning of all of those words -- but it wasn't nice having to do that "open up last file I wrote / copy magic header to new file".

I don't think it's wrong to teach Java as a first language, but I think that there are better first languages which show what real computer science is faster than Java does. Less coercion of a language to do what you want and more free-flowing ideas.
Seems like you can buy it in Germany since 2007 (www.dienanoexperten.eu / www.der-nano-shop.de). Never heard about it before, so I guess it can't be that revolutionary, but maybe I give it a try...
Yes it is. Unlike viraptor I've been using Coro (http://search.cpan.org/dist/Coro/) successfully in production without any hitches and have services (including web apps) that are still running after 2 years without a reboot.

PS. For my Coro webapps I use Continuity (http://search.cpan.org/dist/Continuity/) & Squatting (http://search.cpan.org/dist/Squatting/)
So is this the beginning influx of reddit jokes on HN?
Huh? IE6 is a browser not a standard.

"Works on IE6" is a type of HTML/CSS/JS that works on IE6. People had to make websites to work on IE6. That meant new features of the web (HTML, JS & CSS) could not be used because they didn't work on IE6.
Burn out will start after 2 weeks, error rate will raise accordingly.
Very soon, you will be occupied a lot fixing errors that only occur, because programmers are not well concentrated.

Trivial. The company will lose instead of win. New features require programmers that are inventive. Ever seen someone inventive who is overworked?

And then: require 15 hours work without any more salary? Find new jobs.

After 30 years in programming business I must say: the way to win is to stay creative, think well what features your product needs to stay on top and satisfy customers. Implement and test this as good as you can. The rate buggy software loses customers is high. And a lost customer will not come back for a long time.
Ideas are expensive, but unless you are very confident of their worth, and are able to milk value from them on your own, it's not worth keeping them locked up in a cellar.

Personally, if I think i have a brilliant idea, that's when I actually want to share it, so I can quickly learn how to milk value from it as I analyze they way others receive it.

Knowledge not expressed is void!

Maybe am a bit selfish at times, but who is not?
Hosting isn't really an issue. I've been running a .NET site on Softsys' VPS hosting for a while now, which has features and pricing comparable to something like Linode.

If you outgrow that level of hosting, go Azure or colo your own machines.