skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This question is similar to asking "Are there any useful applications of Ruby for the JVM?"

Of course there are. Smalltalk ported to the browser and able to interact with javascript libraries (in this case it is using ExtJS) gives greater flexibility to developers and the language. Any language being ported to a platform (Yes. Javascript is also a platform.) is a boon for both the language and the platform.
Learn C on the Mac
I open a new textbook and jump in with gusto. But I like more background and context than others. If you're like me in that way, I wanted to share a great book I found for learning C (on the Mac): Learn C on the Mac by Dave Mark. It's is a great start before K&R... which everyone says is the C Bible.

From the early chapters (before flow control!), Dave introduces the concept of the compiler's memory reservation for variables. 4 bits for int's on my compiler! The closeness to the machine running my code makes me love coding even more. It's just not something I've seen in the beginner lit for higher-level languages.

No personal connection to Dave here. Just wanted to share a really well-done starting point to C for we newbs.

Any thoughts on next reads on C, if not K&R?
How much is a decent price to ask for this job?
Hey all, I've been commissioned by a company in San Francisco to do some html5 / javascript web design work to make a 3d model viewer for their product.

I need to integrate it in with their current web store which is some prepackaged php thing and have it vary the price and configuration of both the model and the texturing / color of the model based on package options.

What's a good hourly rate to ask for for this job?

Thanks!
> ...it's worth looking at your HTML/CSS and simplifying it to minimize the bandwidth needed.

Very sound advice. Doing this has produced amazing results for us more than once in the past. As an added advantage, it'll speed things up a bit too! :-)
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Very clean. Some quick suggestions:

Make it clear that a higher score is better for page download speed. I think this is true, but there's no real indication of this on the page

Some kind of explanatory histogram showing relative performance vs. other web sites would be useful. It might even be useful to group load time by page type and size (landing page vs. web app internal page, for example)

For the tune-up items at the bottom of the page, you've reversed the scale -- high numbers are now less significant than low ones. Also, it seems that a 100-point scale here might be overkill.
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Not surprised Akami is so low. Very surprised Google is so high. Thanks for posting (we're shopping around now).
Which part of Finance? Banks? Trade platforms? Funds?
You could:

Ask them if they have a budget figure per hour in mind.
or
Tell them a number and say "is $X per hour in the range of what you had in mind to pay for this?"
I was looking into this the other week for an entirely unrelated project. There do seem to be well-established standards for UV exposure over time, though nailing it down in a layman-digestible (i.e. me) way was tough. IR-emitting security cameras, for example, will provide a diagram showing how long you can safely face the camera in various zones (it was usually measured in hours, so don't panic if you pass a camera on the way out of the office).
24fps must die. When they'll start making movies that gamer can watch without this feeling that he is sitting in front of too old machine?

I've seen high resolution, high fps movie in cinema and it was so amazing that I remember it after many years despite the fact that it was about usual day of some old couple.
Australia pretty prety please.
You can't go wrong with SPIN Selling, especially for products.
I don't know if you're trolling, but Xboxes are one of the top selling consoles. See http://www.kokeytechnology.com/gadgets/xbox-360/xbox-360-vs-... for a random example.
Much Thanks Rider.
Or that they are so relevant in 2011 :-)
Breaking:There's No Unlock for iPhone 4 Baseband 2.10.04 and 3.10.01 [Confirmed]
It was the 90's. That's what stock did.

When I bought my Yahoo stock, it went up 62% in the first five days.
@cscotta as the author of the blog post, I can only agree with the concerns you raised and thank you for your kind words.

Concurrency is something both Ruby and Python have to take seriously pretty quickly if both communities want to mature and play a more important role in the coming years. As you pointed out, there are different ways to get some sort of concurrency and they all present challenges and tradeoffs while none will cure all ills. But at the end of the day what matters is a community of people embracing these approaches and pushing the language further.

By removing the Global Interpreter Lock most of the alternative Ruby implementations are making a statement and the community seems to react. If we educate the community, commonly used code will become threadsafe over time and developers will learn what it means to write threadsafe code. If made easy, co-routines and non-blocking IO will be used. If implemented well and properly explained, actors will be used more often when it makes sense to do so.

My goal was to try to simplify the concurrency problem so the community as a whole can discuss the topic. I think that the concurrency challenge can be improved by increasing the awareness, getting people motivated and having an open discussion. There is a reason why Ruby and Python still have a GIL and why removing it to improve concurrency would have its downside. I want to make sure people understand that before blaming Matz for not removing the GIL already. The Ruby implementation fragmentation also hurts progress done in MRI, if you look at it, alternative implementations often have more people working on them than people working on MRI!

Let's hope that this article is indeed a step in the right direction.
Simply put the original title, this is recomended here anyway.

Minecraft clone coming to Xbox Live Indie Games: FortressCraft
NBC actually does broadcast Sunday Night Football on its site for free, at surprisingly decent quality. I do wonder what allows NBC to do that but prevents other broadcasts from being made available, though.
So how long until they are integrated into displays then?
I think they are using IR, not UV.
Why would you want to run Skype in virtualbox? Skype runs on Mac, Windows and Linux.
Do you start a startup incubator?
Yeah. And it was about 100MB, not 2GBs.

Careful though: I managed to hose one of my Windows 7 VMs with the stock WU SP1 update. Do remember to take your snapshots. I didn't :(
And this is why I use Free Software only. Thanks for the reminder.
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Is there any way to download videos from fosslc.org without going through the whole "flash video downloader xtreme plugin+++" rigamarole?

I think that it is somewhat ironic that a website that says that it "Promote[s] open standards and interoperability" ( http://www.fosslc.org/drupal/about ) doesn't use a more open standard/format for the presentation of its videos...
I play it on my n900 as I curse Nokia(Zen bound demo is cool too, I might buy it).
The only point at which an address can be used to prevent fraud, is between the credit card charging process and your bank. If it's paypal charging your credit card, they're the only ones who need your address.
Not the most elegant solution, but the VideoDownloadHelper add-on for Firefox is able to snatch it without a problem.
I'd find this very helpful too.
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Airbnb is great! not just the perseverance mentioned in the article, but also the attention to design.

It is interesting to note that unlike some other startups in the valley, Airbnb was from the beginning was working to build and support their community and not just expect it to come together on it's own.
I had some discussions with Goodmail late last year about potentially using their service. We send a decent amount of mail via custom qmail servers. For us, it was a chicken and egg problem, Goodmail obviously required a maximum complaint rate but on the flip side higher complaint clients would be the ones most interested in the service. Our low complaint clients were already hitting the inbox and Goodmail didn't seem to justify the extra effort and cost to drive better engagement.
Right - so you're a racist, misogynistic idiot who'd rather put up pithy one liners and tell me to fuck off than address the point. Glad we got that cleared up.
I believe the "new mouse" is not gesture-based control like the Kinect, but rather eye tracking such as tobii.com. Gesture-based control is great for certain things like controlling a TV or similar, but simple fatigue will be the problem in using it for more "typical" computing scenarios. Just try and stretch your arms in front of you for two minutes, you'll see what I mean. Eye-tracking on the other hand, can very well be used for standard computer use, and it's an amazing (dare I say magical) way of interacting with a computer. This is given the right software naturally, as a standard eye-tracked mouse cursor is not really that great. In any case, the next 5-10 years will be interesting in terms of UI and peripheral development.
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Mac OS X Updates Make Time Machine Backup Unusable
OP feels like a dunce because he is a dunce. The medium has nothing to do with it - his actions would be equally stupid if he had been replying to a letter or phone call or fax. Engineering solutions to naïveté would be nice, but they're unlikely to work without stepping all over basic rights. The big wide world is a scary place that demands a certain degree of cynicism and savvy. I feel no obligation to protect competent adults from themselves.
Your logic works both ways. If you say it's hard to measure then how do you know that get the same outcomes?

"Number of procedures per capita per year" is a horrible measure. It assumes that procedures done is a good proxy for overall health, which it isn't. Public health (clean food and water, trash pickup, promoting exercise and outside activities, cutting down on smoking, etc) is also important.

Here's a scenario. Country A and B are identical except that country A has pushed for potable water and B has not. As a result, 10% of the procedures in country B are from dysentery, cholera, and other water-borne diseases which are relatively cheap to treat (keep hydrated with a solution of salts and sugar). As a result, country B has more doctor visits per capita, and on average these costs are cheaper than in country A. Country B also has lower life-expectancy, more days sick per year, and other measurable outcomes.

By your definition, country B has the better health care system but I think most people would prefer the overall health of country A. Therefore your measurement is not so useful as an indicator of overall health outcomes.
http://blip.tv/file/get/Fosslc-20100513__1604__DMS_1120__Col...
8 bits? You were lucky to have 8-bits. We never had 8-bits. We had to make do with t' abacus, and we never had any beads!
Calm down. I agree with your anecdotes and have observed similar events and people.

Still, if the highly abstract programmer competency follows a normal distribution (and I admit a leap of faith there), you'll agree with me that half of the programmers out there will end up below the average. You'll also agree with me that just above the average doesn't make a good programmer, so, most of the programmers around us will be bad ones.

I don't believe you were downvoted for saying painful truths (which I don't think you did), but more on the form of your statement. I believe most downvoters didn't pass the first sentence. I believe this is a good thing - poor form is bad for discussion. We shouldn't get emotional.
Absolutely - thanks, Matt. This is a very well-written, thorough article, and it provides a clear, thoughtful survey of the landscape for folks who are interested in parallelizing their programs and learning more about the advantages and tradeoffs implicit in different approaches. This piece has a lot of potential to catalyze thought within the community about how best to move forward.

The explosion of interest in the subject intrigues me. The work that's been going on in terms of making mainstream Ruby libraries threadsafe is great to see, along with fibers and evented approaches. MacRuby's exposure of Grand Central is especially unique. But interest and upvotes must also be followed by action. There will be a lot of false starts. We'll probably see a handful of approaches which bloom and fade from popularity. While the "fragmentation" issue is there, I tend to think of it in terms of spirited experimentation. In any case, people really care now, and it's that drive that forces a community forward. That's good to see.

Keep it up!
Powlygamy - A snowboarding movie made with Contour helmet cams.
We took some Contour helmet cams (and a go pro), some creative commons music, a lot of icehouse, and some beautiful weather and made a pretty fun snowboarding video of our weekend in Utah!
Not true. I don't have to buy a smart phone, for example. I can live a wonderfully productive life with a normal cell phone. This means the price we see for a smart phone tracks very close to its value. You cannot do without health care. If you get sick you will pay any and every price to get well. If you die, your money is worthless anyway. A market you cannot opt out of is inelastic and normal free market forces wont be able to find the correct price as they would in a more elastic market.
Heh, it can be worse. In my last job we actually had three parallel time reporting systems. One for billable hours, one for hours worked on project, and one that clocked on entering/exiting the building. Of course, they all three had to match.

I've always wondered how that's useful to anyone. Judge me by the quality of work I do, but not whether I sit in the chair the required number of minutes.
> sometimes a delay in releasing updates really is a feature.

absolutely. i would say more companies that have to scale to a lot of users do this. google and facebook certainly both do this
>The phrase "market elasticity" is meaningless.

Nonsensical. What kind of market theory are you following that doesn't factor in market elasticity? Rush Limbaugh eco 101?
Here's mantra to repeat until you prove otherwise, "My application is not CPU bound it's IO bound". Even most applications that max the CPU are still IO bound because of their IO access patterns. Seriously, think about how your app is IO bound not CPU bound.

It's the cache thrashing / memory IO / disk IO constraints not the number of threads. People just increase the number of threads to increase the chance that there is data in the cache that the CPU can use.

Trim your data structures so they fit in a CPU cache line, make sure your data structures are properly aligned, make sure all the RAM slots on your server are in use. Put more RAM in your servers, throw out your spindle disk and replace them with SSDs, check your switches, can they actually handle a full 1Gbs burst? Or do they start dropping packets? Are you using all the network ports on your server? Are your switch interconnects 10Gbps? Is close-to-open cache coherence on NFS killing your cache hit rates? Are your indexes fragmented? Is your memory fragmented? Are your splitting your IO so that sequential IO goes to spindles and random IO goes to SSDs? Are your disk partitions aligned to your RAID block size. (Hint: If you're using RAID and your partition starts at sector 1 you're losing 15% of your IO performance) Do you have a cache in front of your app servers that will cache the response so the server thinks it's communicating with the client at a full 1Gbps? I'm not talking about something like varnish, just a simple store and forward cache.

The GIL is just a red herring so that people can point to something they have no control over and can give up hunting for performance.

It's not the GIL it's your IO subsystems. And turn your random IO into sequential IO, here's an example, lets say you have to store a whole bunch of 40K jpegs, instead of writing them as individual files put 1000 of them into an uncompressed ZIP file. Now your IO is sequential instead of random and you've taken a whole bunch of load off the kernel. If you're running on a 7200 RPM disk your throughput just went from 5-10MB/sec to ~100-200MB/sec
Ask HN: How do you get feedback for your product?
Your hourly rate should depend on your skills, not the job for the client, so it really depends on how skilled a developer you are.
The update is 2GB in size? Whoa.

Oh wait, that's a fully patched W7, the update is really 100mb.

32bit x86 http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/A/F/0AFB5316-3062-4...

64bit x64 http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/A/F/0AFB5316-3062-4...

AllInOne http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/A/F/0AFB5316-3062-4...
For this kind of work I wouldn't recommend charging an hourly rate, because when projects like this overrun (and if it's HTML5/JavaScript the chance of it happening is likely) the employer will feel cheated if paying for longer than they expect (and let's be honest, all employers think that websites take half the time to build).

The best thing to do in this instance is to find out their overall budget for this thing, break it down into an hourly wage and set an overall price based on what you feel your time is worth.
Apple Halves Minimum iAd Buy
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Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To it. (2001)
http://www.yottaa.com/ also tracks multiple location, and keeps tracking over time.
They don't provide that on MSDN - the ISO there just contains the SP1 installers for Win2K8 and Win7.
Indeed it is IR, http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/11/tonights-release-xbox....
I'd be interested to hear what you think a reasonable basement price would be. In Minnesota for a (very) healthy family of five, I pay over $600/month for a plan with an $11,000 deductible, meaning I essentially write a check every time one of my kids has a checkup.

Which brings up one of the biggest red herrings in this whole debate - the notion that the U.S. has a "market-based" system. The next time you go to the doctor, ask someone what it's going to cost. Guess what? No one outside the two people working in the basement billing office have the slightest clue, because it's all paid for by the insurance fairies. There's nothing even remotely resembling an efficient market for healthcare in the U.S., but the insurance companies like to spout otherwise, because it's entirely to their advantage.
Hi! I'm posting this link because I strongly believe that we have history repeating itself. We might have 1996/1997 right now so let's go back in time and learn something :)
I mean - those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

This post is a great recap of what people during the bubble thought about software development.

Personally I don't want another bubble - the one in 1999 was enough for me ;)
Says the poster who was previously complaining about ad hominems...

No, I'm just an adult who recognizes that words only have the power that you give them. If you wish to continue to allow your emotions to be a slave to the language of others, that is your prerogative; but don't expect others to follow you.

And yes, I addressed your question. Read the parent comment of your post again.
How to sync installed packages between computers
I knew Apple was on to something again when, not long after Jobs retook Apple, their inventory on hand started to approach that of Dell. That was Cook's doing.
The problem is that we mostly make stuff up as we go. With geocities, it was basically wget + rsync. With Yahoo Video it is wget + youtube-dl.

Not many of us are programmers and at first there was nobody around who was able to fix the UTF-8 problem. We decided to start anyways, knowing that it would be easy to locate all videos that failed and download them later. It's better to get 95% than nothing at all.
Does anyone here think crowd-sourcing due-dilligence on startups would be a good idea?
Would you consider working in India? The M:F ratio in software development is 4:1.
Off-topic, but rent control has terrible problems. It lead to some grave NY neighbourhoods problems from the 60s to the 80s; back in the 20s in Paris...
Yeah, true.

Fortunately the MSDN subscriber downloads inventory is publicly browsable: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/downloads/defa...

From there we can see the download details for all "Windows 7 with Service Pack 1" ISO files (all Windows 7 editions, all processor architectures and all languages).

From there we can for example see the following information for the English Professional x64 version:

File Name: en_windows_7_professional_with_sp1_x64_dvd_621750.iso
Date Published (UTC): 2/16/2011 8:49:08 AM	Last Updated (UTC): 2/16/2011 8:49:08 AM
SHA1: 5ED2584110E03F498DB4458BA9FAFD5A7EF602ED	ISO/CRC: 74F3CB73

With this information, I can be confident in downloading an ISO from a peer-to-peer torrent. When the hash matches, I can be assured that the file is legit and not backdoored.
The Decline Effect Is Stupid
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Rate my startup - Subzin: A movie quote search engine based on subtitles
Subzin.com is a movie quote search engine based on movie subtitles. Find any quote in millions of movie lines. All quotes are time-based contextualized, and linked with the imdb movie database
Facebook Marketing Strategy
Social Media is gaining popularity very fast and is influential in many ways. Social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Blogs are rapidly replacing the role of trad ...
No, actually it's rent control that gives way to that. Landlords don't rent at a loss, and prefer keeping their apartments empty, resulting in shitty communities, then squatters, etc.
That isn't true -- you can run a variety of heuristics to catch N% of fraud (and X% of legitimate payments) prior to submitting them to the bank, getting them accepted, and then having your merchant account ganked for high chargeback rates.

For example, an annoying system which will decrease chargebacks is "If your IP address goes to a country other than your billing address, shoot first and ask questions later." It bites me all the time, but there are sensible business reasons for it.
IOS App Accessibility
Come now, I can't be the only one that finds the Hacker News quality "good to great"?

If Hacker News is about hackers in a startup sense, it's good that the front page has everything from: Movies being in decline - Ruby concurrency explained - A torrent meta search engine - Windows 7 SP1 launch - iPad2 being unveiled.

There are far more elements to hacking than programming, just as there are far more elements to startups than programming. And I dig that Hacker News is so varied.

I think there is a vocal minority of people that get irritated by bicycle shed debates (+1 from me to allow collapsing comment threads on my machine) or people wanting to only read about programming or hacking - the latter of which is laughable because I am pretty sure you'd be sick of Hacker News if it was 100% a specific topic (I have some scars in the field of sorting content users will enjoy...)

Guess what: there are millions of non technical silent people on the internet, and a huge amount of those people visit Hacker News every day - and love this destination. The amount of random non computer scientists I meet in Cambridge that love Hacker News is staggering.
I find it very useful without the torrent part as well.
Dude, Sweet!
http://www.subzin.com/s/dude,%20sweet!
http://cyberspaceapp.com
My favourite that I have seen in a codebase is

# This is hideous
# I want to poke my eyes out with a fork!