skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When we're talking about the kinds of companies BRK gets involved in, they are all businesses that you can reasonably expect to be around in 50 years. It's not just a "buy low, sell high, time the markets" strategy. To a certain, hyperbolic, extent, might not the difference between timing INTC and IPET just be granularity of time scale?
ahem, in mobile we do not have quit..nothing broke not even the mobile users :)
I love you guys.

(You really should do "Who's on first?" sometime. :-)
Advertising?
I like Groupon too, but the Burlington Northern is going to be a significant player in freight shipping 50 years from now with a high degree of certainty. How sure are you about Groupon?
rearranging the furniture in the middle of the night so people trip over the couch when they are walking to the bathroom

Exactly how I felt about the "new" Microsoft Office UI and the straw that broke the camels back on my continued use of that software.
I guess technical this would be just like a public company on the stock market.

But i guess i mean this could work for small start-ups that are having a hard time getting funding from the traditional investment routes and will not become large enough to go public.
Good post!!

At the risk of being simplistic, I have long believed that in the world of business there are two types of people -- those who use and enjoy risk and those who are risk averse. Often those who are risk averse become employees, even academics. Those who enjoy risk become business owners, usually preferring the process of start up. This is why, if you are a risk taker, you don't really enjoy being an employee.

The government employees who try to encourage start ups belong to the second category and cannot for the life of them understand the risk takers. So, they are more likely to view success as a lack of failure.

Most bankers (Who recently forced a rewrite of the bankruptcy code to benefit their business.) have little or no use for risk. They are of the "employee" mentality. (not all, but it is common) As the article points out, this reduces the number of start ups.
I don't think her sex is an issue here. The only people mentioning that she's female are the ones defending her. The astrophysicist had actually assumed she was male.

I think you're right that she's got to where she is through skill/intelligence rather than gaming the system. I also think there's a perceived pressure on people in the start-up community to be unrealistically talented and I feel a lot fall to the pressure when they don't really need to.
Maybe it's confirmation bias, but I had to learn the metaphor of "no quit option", and I welcome the quit button/option on apps that have them. I have seen many, many users; particularly new Android users; that wonder where the quit button is, and what happens when they just "leave" the current application.

So, no, it may not have "broken" anything, but it has caused significantly wide, if not deep, cognitive dissonance.
Can you link to an example or something?
>However, Lisp has a big problem: it’s not intuitive.

Something about nipples comes to mind.
Five Things Facebook Should Fix Immediately
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I haven't used anything other than Firefox and so far have not had any problems. Do you have any specific examples?
That's not what LTO is about. Most optimisations up to this point do not cross function boundaries, or file boundaries if you are lucky. This does better, allowing optimisations to be applied across the whole program.
I have SSD's. In RAID-0 striping mode. You still notice it.
The trouble with this whole argument is that while the user may not care today, things like standards and defined interfaces are all about keeping things working tomorrow. Your user will surely be just as upset at something breaking tomorrow as they are today, and it's increasingly likely that such breakages will (a) occur and (b) cost more to fix, the longer you implicitly support deviations from the standards.
I don't know that I'd necessarily attribute it to the Canonical team, but the best UI designers make decisions that don't sound right out loud, but actually work quite well in the product.

That's often the very point of UI, is in studying behaviors and responding to them in ways that aren't obvious, and that often sound wrong on their face. Apple, in particular, are considered a paragon of UI excellence, yet many of the decisions they make SOUND downright terrible.

Of course, using their products is generally easy and convenient.

For the record, I am not a UI/UX guru, so all I can offer are anecdotes on this, but I think that the important takeaway is that good UI/UX should not be obviously right. If it were, everybody would have already been doing it, and I think that we can all agree that most UI of yore is downright bad.
Charging credit cards with NFC on an Android
http://code.google.com/p/flot/

http://smoothiecharts.org/
> but essentially every dollar I have made has come from someone thinking he is getting more value for his dollar than I am charging him for my software/service/whatever.

Isn't that the basis of all voluntary transactions?
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I'm happy that Canonical is thinking about usability, but has any of this actually been backed up by any kind of experiment? I see one link on Google to a study done on Thunderbird (sadly down, as it's the same blog), and a bunch of blogspam related to it, but very little evidence that the recent radical changes they are making have undergone any usability testing. If you're trying to help users, shouldn't you study their actual behavior?

I admit though that this is not my field, and I could be using poor search terms.
Mid nineties there was a bank in Boulder CO offering guns for signup or some event. I forget the details, I saw it on their sign outside.
In newer versions of glibc, memcpy() does take advantage of SIMD instructions if they are avaialble. It works something like this:

The memcpy() function is marked specially in the ELF file. On the first invocation, the dynamic linker actually calls the function and then takes the return value and treats it as a function pointer. This function pointer is then used for linking, so that subsequent invocations will call that pointer instead.

The memcpy() function in glibc then simply checks which SIMD extensions are available and returns a pointer to the appropriate real memcpy to use.
?? Excuse me, your comment does not make any sense to me. How is the percentage change in buyer profile will affect educational system?
> does this mean that the GCC GO compiler implements a specific version of Go and will be out of date soon?

Unless the gcc team is prescient, I don't see how any other conclusion can be drawn.
Here are two examples:

1. The business man from the city that buys a small piece of land (40 - 60 acres) and cash rents it out. Now you might say that's greed. He's looking to make more money and is greedy pushing the family farm out and renting to the big corporate farmers. You're wrong though. He bought the small farm to brag about it at cocktail parties. That's why all these business types own small chunks of land in rural areas. That's an emotional reason to own it.

2.Imagine a company that allows you to out source your life. One might say, "If I can make $100 an hour free lancing, then I should out source all tasks that I can for less than $100 an hour" and you would argue this is logical. But the real reason someone would want to outsource the laundry, and all aspects of their life is purely emotional. They can then go brag about to all their friends how perfect of a life they have because they don't have to do any crappy work. That's why people making $35 an hour are paying $50 an hour to have the crap done they could do themselves.

If you damage the emotional part of the brain, you are unable to make decisions. You can reason all day long and compare and contrast, but you can never decide.

I wouldn't be surprised if the emotional value that the guys you run into is how they can brag at cocktail parties or to their business associates how they screwed over some computer science graduate and that they used their Harvard MBA to do it.
Why not change the spec to work right?
In debates over divisive topics, I've found that this two work request very quickly and efficiently isolates and weeds out sloppy thinking faster than any other technique.
I don't necessarily disagree. Most of my complaints are systems of the existing broken paradigm. That my taskbar is cluttered up could easily be fixed with their suggestions, and a part of their remedy might even be to get rid of the taskbar altogether.

The proof is in the putting, and with conceptual changes like this, I'm leery of judging before I see the actual results. For the most part, backgrounded running applications don't take up resources unless they're supposed to (like music playing, or an uptime monitor, etc.) so I don't have any qualms about leaving that to the OS (unless they screw it up,) but all the other visual aspects need to be dealt with at the same time for this to be effective.
I don't know if that guy spent months and months searching for those vectors - but casually lumping XSS attacks in all the big source control sites is a frightning thing to see.

We really need to pull back on the super-cool-awesome new feature bloat of HTML5 and get back to basics: sort this out in a meaningful way.
> Error establishing a database connection

Nice way to quit.

We did it. We HackerNewsed it. Uh. YCombinatored it. Hm. We hacked it. No. We slashd... NO. We Redd.. NO!

o.O
* Isolation between tasks using Linux Containers.

I would just like to point out that lxc offers zero isolation of tasks. UID/GID mapping isn't done thus a root user in a lxc container has all the power as root on the host among many other things. LXC is glorified resource control with a few minor isolation features (syslog in 2.6.38 and posix caps I think and current namespacing in Linux) right now and nowhere realiable as a real isolation environment
Most aspects of the file concept are indispensable to the user. A generic data container is what allows us to have standardized document formats not coupled to applications or platforms and generalized organizing, packaging, sharing, storage, and search. These are user concepts that can't be abstracted away without sacrificing enormous amounts of utility.

The aspects that the user can do without are related to sharing the file system with software that uses it as a backend store.
Recently, I have been examining various 2D html APIs. I find the oCanvas API to be excellent.

In comparison with Raphael, I find that both libraries are good and useful.

In computer graphics, there are two main approaches for 2D: vector and bitmap. Each one has their situations where it is the most convenient.
Raphael is SVG based, vector graphics. oCanvas is html canvas based, bitmap graphics. So each one will have situations where it is the most convenient.

For example, scalable graphics, made of solid lines and shapes, are better suited with the vector approach. While diffuse images and image processing is better suited with the bitmap approach.

oCanvas employs object literals to accede to the various graphic operations. I find that makes the code more readable and thus easier to maintain, than the Raphael API, which makes use of plain function parameters for that.

Some differences that I found: Raphael have support for paths, vector fonts, and premade charts, which oCanvas doesn’t have.

On the other hand, oCanvas have support for animated sprites, scenes and timeline/game loop.
A Python with a Lisp- Parseltongue?
maybe an alternative to sexps appeals to those who don't use lisp because they don't use lisp because of sexps?

the idea is that mexps translate directly (and simply) into sexps, so macros would work in exactly the same way as they do now.
Patio11 sells education software.
This makes some sense. We often rate social networking sites demand-side, by how much potential people see in them rather than how much they're actually worth. The fact that the still growing Groupon is worth over 6 times as much as the well established and influential Twitter is a perfect indication of this. Worth is still somewhat based on assets and popularity, and we shouldn't push the price of companies up by such huge factors simple because they ARE growing and haven't established a reliable estimation of worth yet. Startups are a venture market, where the real money is made before sudden explosions in popularity, but we shouldn't grossly over rate them just because they aren't already well established, and the explosion hasn't happened yet. Especially because if the explosion does happen, and the company is worth at or less than its estimated, demand-side, potential worth, nobody's making money anyway, because the stock price won't have increased much. In other industries its called poor evaluation to treat EVERY up and coming business like its going to explode, why should startups be so different? Because SOME people have made tons of money? If were all "chasing the american dream" in our investments and will settle for no less, than that's acceptable. But if were trying to invest intelligently, its unjustifiable that every up and coming startup is grossly over rated in price. Unless Groupon actually has around 22 billion dollars in assets, then they do not have a justifiable price. Otherwise, we need to listen to the Oracle of Omaha and wise up. Startups are still an industry, and we need to get used to that to avoid bubbles like this. Maybe venture capital is so hard to break into because you ACTUALLY need to look for companies that aren't popular yet, rather than just decide to invest in the companies you use every day. The strong investments are made before the company is well known, not before it has an accurate price.
The standard setup for compute clusters is that there is an admin ops team that is assumed to be trustworthy and then many untrusted users. Is this a problem for these use cases? I think the untrusted admin is less of an issue for most organizations.
I think no one is arguing against the adult industry being innovative at some point in history. It just isn't true in 2011.
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Myself I would go for a compromise. Flash's behaviour (using memcpy when then mean memmove) is definitely faulty, and it's not an obscure C undefined behavior either, I'm sure any C tutorial worth mentioning has "if you want to copy overlapping regions of memory, use memmove" somewhere in the middle. I'd just fill a bug on adobe's bugtracker, tell them "we'll keep the current for X months, but then we'll switch to a new implementation, so if it still breaks it's up to you". With X being a reasonable enough lapse of time.

By the way, if flash was open source it would probably be a one line patch to fix the issue, but it's not, and I wouldn't blame the fedora/glibc devs for that. Breaking things because "you can" is no good policy, but it doesn't mean you have to be backward compatible for ever, that's what being realistic is about.
Said ethicists may have noticed that a whole lot of death row inmates seem to be getting exonerated lately.
Bribe them. Give them a promotional code that gives them $5 of one of your other products, and let them give a $5 discount to one of their friends. You'll be able to purchase information about your target market.
I completely agree. I'm curious how we would abstract the rest of the hardware though. cam/mic/sensors can't be accessed from javascript (yet?).
He means "It would be better if elementary education had more men in it." I'm totally agnostic about that, although I would certainly have appreciated not having all those hilarious jokes about child rape when I told people I wanted to be a teacher.
RPG for Pre-Schoolers
Your kids have a great imagination, so put it to good use and try the Kids Dungeon Adventure. My daughter is 4 and she loves it.
That's why I called it pathologic... ;)

Edit: using the symmetries described in the same Wikipedia article, the size of the database could be reduced significantly to roughly 5*10^9, which is quite manageable.
Also, Buffet is not some old fashioned, technology ignorant day trader. He claims he doesn't know much about technology companies, but he was still the first one to predict the internet bubble and is well involved in the current markets. No one doing as much market research every day as he does "only knows about industries 100 years old."
I don't think it's correct to characterize the C++ hello world as using object-orientation or even templates. There's no template syntax in it, for example.

It does use that one predefined object std::cout and its overloaded operator. But other than that plus namespaces, it's not using features that aren't available in C.

I disagree that it uses most features of the language, at least not in any direct or visible way. There are a lot of features it doesn't use.
I think a lot of this "bees are computers" business started back with this

http://www.math.rochester.edu/about/newsletters/spring98/bee...
Also, Buffet is not some old fashioned, technology ignorant day trader. He claims he doesn't know much about technology companies, but he was still the first one to predict the internet bubble and is well involved in the modern markets. I think he's just speaking relative to his knowledge of other industries. No one doing as much market research every day as he does "only knows about industries 100 years old."
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It's funny, because from my perspective as a casual office user, I actually thought the menus made things a little easier to use, even if I needed to "re-learn" where things were.

My wife however, much more of a "power" office user, has completely sworn off of them. This is a person that knew pretty much where every menu item on word and excel was by memory. Her experience has been destroyed, so much that I needed to re-install 2003 on all the machines that she would use.

Most certainly tripping on couches.
Nope; that's a common misconception.

>>> "1"*1000 is "1"*1000
False
>>> 2**31 is 2**31
False

The fact is that the only thing guaranteed by "is" is that if you have "a = b", then "a is b". Whether or not "new" objects are going to be identical to old ones is left undefined, and may change depending on type or value.
An interesting concept on risk-averseness is that it also depends on how much you have to lose. That is, if you have not much to lose, you don't mind taking on more risk.

This might also explain why startups as they grow up, tend to lose their entrepreneurial spirit (Do you Yahoo! anymore?).
Remember the part about the airline industry talk? I can't help but see parallels in quite a lot of tech companies.

In 2008, he said:

The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. Think airlines. Here a durable competitive advantage has proven elusive ever since the days of the Wright Brothers. Indeed, if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.

The airline industry’s demand for capital ever since that first flight has been insatiable. Investors have poured money into a bottomless pit, attracted by growth when they should have been repelled by it. And I, to my shame, participated in this foolishness when I had Berkshire buy U.S. Air preferred stock in 1989. As the ink was drying on our check, the company went into a tailspin, and before long our preferred dividend was no longer being paid. But we then got very lucky. In one of the recurrent, but always misguided, bursts of optimism for airlines, we were actually able to sell our shares in 1998 for a hefty gain. In the decade following our sale, the company went bankrupt. Twice. (http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2007ltr.pdf)
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Hmm... I been finding it hard to find any hosts, which across the board have raving reviews. I have been finding that a search for any hoster + sucks yields plenty of results.
I'll give you that... It certainly depends on the person and past experience and I did generalize a bit based on my experience with technical co-founders I've known and worked with. When I said a "really good" tech co-founder, I kind of implicitly meant someone easily capable of or already possessing some of the skills necessary. I look at myself or some of my successful friends and all of them are tech co-founders who learned the business stuff pretty easily and have been successful. In cases like that, if some mba grad tried to sell them on "oh, i'm a business guy" (which has happened quite often), they'd always get told to fuck off.
Thanks for the tip, I will check them out. Stackscripts look like they can significantly reduce the pain of setting up a box.
You Can Call Yourself An Entrepreneur When...
You do know that Amazon just launched its own, competitive Android Appstore right? amazon.com/appstore
Are you actually implying that men are better teachers than women!? If you're going to make a statement like that you better have some facts to back it up.
Seeing this purely as a spec v pragmatism issue isn't going to get us anywhere. There is just no way around looking at each case individually. There are specs that are pie in the sky, outdated, flawed compromises or reflections of vested interests. But there is also a huge amount of lock-in and lost productivity resulting from lack or disregard of specs (e.g IE6). I see no way to be principled on that one.
Care to fill us in on why multiple CEOs is a good thing for RIM?
I've had buttons in both the provisioning portal and itunes connect simply do nothing unless i was using safari.
Well, maybe, but I was thinking more like rake offs by organized crime, or maybe industrial strength money-laundering.
I will draw 12 seconds of hand drawn animation for $24
Actually it's very similar to StrikeDisplay (posted a while back, but I don't think anyone saw it):
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1816482
http://strikedisplay.blogspot.com

SD tries to handle things like child objects dispatching events up the display chain and implementing an AS3-style pseudolanguage...
Should have clarified: In Linux, f.lux does not appear to work with multiple monitors. Redshift works great in Linux.
The code in the post is based on depth-first search, which basically is a trial and error approach. A well implemented and effective one thanks to constraint propagation, but it is still trial and error. And there are cases, in which backtracking (trial and error) is necessary - at least one of them is documented in the post (the puzzle "hard1" that took 188 seconds).
I'm amazed it took this long but these changes are very VERY welcome:

G++ now issues clearer diagnostics for missing semicolons after class, struct, and union definitions.

G++ now issues clearer diagnostics for missing semicolons after class member declarations.

G++ now issues clearer diagnostics when a colon is used in a place where a double-colon was intended.
Those two pieces of advice really are like telling programmers "just don't make mistakes".

Giving that advise is really, really easy. Every competent web developer knows that. The hard part is actually implementing it.

For example, lots of programs written today still have buffer overflow vulnerabilities. Those are even older. The fix is also very simple: "Check the bounds of your arrays before you use them". That is, again, just telling the developer to not make mistakes.

Designing security into your app can help with preventing XSS attacks, but there is no single perfect way.
No, he's implying that we should have an equal amount of men and women in education.
Incidentally, how many HN users are from the North West? I'm from Bolton
Agreed. We have to produce a lot of paper doc in my domain, and in our bug base, there's a section dedicated to spec bugs. Just cos it's in the spec doesn't make it right.
that is very confusing, but fair enough. it at least seems to work in the sample code.