skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't mind to pay for a twitter pro account myself (although I'm on a tight budget momentarily). How would this option hurt the current free business plan? I think there is even a possibility that it would enhance the perceived value not only with current users but also for would-be users. Could it be that there is some kind of inferiority complex behind the lack of decisiveness by twitter management? It's not 2007 anymore, a lot of people "got it" till now. The problem isn't the monetization of the service which could drive people away, it is the potential incremental death of the culture which would. Twitter management just need to carefully observe successful services like github or flickr (pre & shortly post yahoo) which were magnets to mavens and spread from there. Examples for big mistakes in that regard recently were Sony (killing Linux support for PS3), Nintendo (generally too many "casual games" over the last couple of years, and now the 3DS region lock - first on a Nintendo handheld). I know those companies are highly profitable but I see their base crumbling already which always are the "power users". I know talk is cheap and things are not that easy but don't be stupid, think 2011 already.
I'm also working in Leeds.
Butter isn't very expensive - expensive is a highly relative term, and I spend less on butter on a rate of consumption over time basis than I do on bread, or milk, or cheese, or any other single staple alone.

What it is is delicious, and I won't do without it.
I intentionally parodied Linus in my comment about "ignoring reality" to demonstrate how one should not act, but I think some people missed that that was a parody. If you're talking about something else, please let me know, because I have not been "arguably malicious," and I'd be surprised if you can find an instance where I'd been rude (except perhaps in defense against someone else's rudeness.. if you're talking about stuff in my past history).
It's not a zero-sum game with native vs web apps. The web will not kill native apps, but for many applications the web offers a better platform than native development. For example, look at the rise of GMail's web client over MS Outlook - for many users a web client is easier, with mail accessible from any device with a browser.

New HTML5 features will extend these advantages to more types of apps beyond webmail. The same question came up over at Quora, with thoughful responses: http://www.quora.com/Is-HTML5-the-mobile-app-killer
So instead of "save" which seemed rather simple to me, you have to learn two new features such as "lock" and "revert", which do not seem so simple to me.

Oh and also, now you have no idea what data is saved in your documents. Your documents can carry in them hidden past versions without you being aware of it. Which can prove very embarrassing in many business situations. Which means that anyone that handles sensitive data will have to create or buy complex new software that scrubs all documents of old data. (this is already an issue with Microsoft Word and its proclivity to save all kinds of dangerous metadata).

So when before you merely had to save stuff, now you have to worry about reverting, scrubbing, etc. Thank you GUI elves.
As someone who has used Matlab, and someone who has used Eclipse, you can take my "get your fat ass out of RAM already" command when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
"The growth has been primarily in the financial industry."

Completely false and absurd. Supply follows demand. GDP has grown throughout every industry that hasn't seen a decrease in its demand (e.g. railroads, newspapers, etc.). That includes technology, consumer goods, and technology. The economy doesn't exist in a vacuum. The finance industry provides capital to all industries.
Steve Kirsch's take on the Integral Fast Reactor
Google, Facebook and Zynga on a hiring binge in California
4chan Using Fake OkCupid Profiles to Lure Pathetic Singles to Times Square
Most people buy mutual funds, which take a nice fee for doing work a dart-throwing monkey could do (no exaggeration). It would make more sense for people to buy a random sample of the S&P 500, but try telling them that.
Chrome puts the dot in the URL, so clicking from the email posting goes to https://github.com/MacRuby/MacRuby. instead of https://github.com/MacRuby/MacRuby
I agree with you to some degree. There is a lot that happens well out of public (and sometimes regulatory) purview. I just think views that "finance is bad" or "startups are the best" are myopic, don't advance the discussion and ultimately fail to realize the inter-related'ness of all these different forces.

Ultimately, we live in a pretty free agent society and if Wall St can pay more (no matter the reason), the rational engineer whose primary motivation is money should take that job. There is nothing wrong with that. The engineer who is motivated by money and other factors (building something valuable, being his/her own boss, etc) also has avenues a la doing a startup.
Good response from Nguyen, but I also think one of their great features that I've read about, also gives credence to their name: the photos you share in common with people you are "connected" with slowly lose their color over time as your connection with them goes stale, basically turning black and white! Great idea and creative tie-back into the "color" name!!
Yes, I agree. I'll caveat my original statement by saying this; I use Windows (work machine), and I'm using the SSD's they gave me, so they may not even be good ones.

That said, I can come nowhere near the performance of a video where some guy wired up a bunch of SSD's, then opened every microsoft office application at once and they just popped up on his screen. Some crude timings below (in seconds; time to open from the "Start" menu, till the hourglass morphs back to an arrow):

Word: 3
Excel: 2
Outlook: 5
OneNote: 1
PowerPoint: 2

Emacs: 2 (had to throw that in)

Now, you may be saying "DUDE! That's awesome!" and yes, it is, compared to platters. But it's not instantaneous, and as soon as your context readjusts, you still notice the startup time.
Unless I've missed something serious, alternate browsers on iOS can't run javascript. In today's game that doesn't qualify as a browser.
What does that even mean? Economic growth has grown consistently. Technology now makes up a large portion of our GDP when it hasn't in the past. Why attack the finance industry when you could also attack the technology industry?

There's more demand. Therefore, there's a larger supply. Simple, basic, very elementary economics.
Birds and Fish are now Dying all Around the World
Wait, what? Maybe the Austrian School goes by theory if that, but every other school of economics goes by facts -- including the Chicago School, Monetarists, Keynesians, New Classical, etc.

Economists' whole basis for their arguments is through empirical data and mathematical facts. Saying economists just relies on dreams is absolutely absurd and shows complete ignorance of the field.
Most margarines sold around here don't have trans fats.
You're killing a mosquito with a howitzer, and you may have better battery life by letting Android do what it's supposed to, and find the offending application.

Download "Spare Parts", go into its battery history section, and select "partial wake usage".

You'll find out what (if any) app is keeping your phone in partial wake lock status.
What do you think of Randall Hyde's HLA?
I'd like to propose a new rule similar to Goodwin's--- any response/reply that begins with a personal attack should be ignored from that point forward--- except I'm not sure how I avoid being self referential...
I found the Dimensions of Advice particularly useful. It can found at the 45:20 mark.
I'm surprised and relieved to see this coming from an Ivy. Huge kudos for moving science forward while leaving the money leeches behind.
And oops...that's Ashkenas. Sorry, Jeremy :)
I believe that:

1) Its unreasonable to expect 50% of paid users for freemium service.

2) Twtr is expected to be a "growth company". This means that his investors expect this 7.7b valuation to grow significantly (we talkin 100s %), not just pay back in 5-6 yrs and/or bring revenue.

Conclusion: Thats why Twtr just HAVE TO innovate and figure out how to make money on ads
> I would much rather read about software & hacking.

Cool - I'd like to read about those things too. Did you upvote the three things on software and hacking that I submitted in the past week or so? Have you submitted any that I could upvote?

> Or is there a JavaScript solution?
> Has someone implemented a HN filter?

If you're into software and hacking, perhaps you could provide one for us.

And to more-or-less answer your question, HN was originally "Startup News" and has always had a bent towards startups. It was widened to "Hacker News," but it still retains that bias. Strict hacking isn't hitting the majority audience, it's still heavily slanted towards the startup scene, and things that interest people who do, or want to do, startups.

That's why Jacques' posts are interesting to people - they are the musings and observations of someone who has started and runs several software and web based businesses. Hence they resonate with the majority audience.

But I'd be happy to see and promote anything you post about software and hacking.

Where's your blog?
It had it the last time I looked but I use picasa now.

I guess it's part of the file menu now...
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2639319...
I am very curious to see what the long-term effect of the Fukushima incident will be on public opinion about nuclear power. So far, as we have discussed here, it does seem that some of those previously opposed in general to nuclear power have been impressed by how little radiation has been released despite the size of the quake and tsunami, and have changed their minds or are at least considering doing so. Other people I know are frightened that there has been any radiation release at all. As I say, it will be interesting to see how this all lands.

But as long as the issue is on many people's minds, perhaps this is a good time to raise again the question of breeder reactors and particularly the IFR. It does seem to greatly ameliorate the waste storage problem while apparently being very safe. I just came upon this page by Steve Kirsch and thought it worth bringing to HN's attention.
Bad idea for twitter. They can't get rich off a couple bucks a month for a tiny segment of their user base, I doubt they can even break even.

Worse, having a pro account would cause ad prices to plummet. Who's going to pay premium prices for ads when the people willing to spend money have opted out of seeing them?
That's basically what I thought. I misread the OP to mean that s-expressions alone guaranteed hygienic macros.
A similar thing happened in my own family a while back. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=226987
I agree with you. It was one of the hardest things for me to wrap me mind around. I'm constantly looking for the quit button on apps and I always have the urge to use a task killer to kill off tasks. I have seen a visible degrading of the user experience when I leave tasks running in the back ground. I also suspect app developers are not managing tasks correctly leading to inconsistent behavior.
This ideal is completely irrelevant here - the change Linus and many people are asking for here (aliasing memcpy to memmove) explicitly does <i>not</i> violate the spec; all the spec says is that memcpy is not <i>guaranteed</i> to work when the memory segments overlap.

The conflict here is between going above and beyond the call of the standards and in so doing encouraging expectations of that extra functionality in all software, or implementing only the bare minimum specified by the standards and in so doing breaking software as actually written. Given that this change involved literally checking for the relation between the source and destination address, and copying upward in one case and downward in the other (in so doing, implementing a function which is <i>also</i> required in the standard) adding this functionality to the de facto standard does not significantly increase the barrier to entry for new developers.

I think the ideal solution would be a note in the standard hinting that memcpy can be implemented with memmove, or even better, a deprecation of memcpy in favor of memmove with memcpy being in the interim aliased to memmove, but standards changes are always a pain.
Please explain how the government is "stealing money" for the banks. That is completely absurd. Monetary policy keeps the system in check to stabilize the economy.
Since my son is allergic (not intolerant, really allergic) to milk and dairy products, I have come to appreciate how strong the dairy industry is. There are milk proteins in tons and tons of manufactured products. I remember a discussion with someone at a baby cereal company who lectured me on how good milk is nutritious and good for your health even tough she already knew I was calling because dairy products are deadly in that particular case.

I am surprised we don't yet have a war on the soy cheese used on some frozen pizzas.
Zuckerberg In Zion: Speaks To Senator Hatch, Students At BYU
I work at Gamma Entertainment here in Montreal. You're essentially looking at the bottom of the barrel there if you are using GFY as your source. The people that are innovating in the adult industry aren't hanging out on GFY. The programmers are going to and sponsoring local tech conferences, hanging out here on HN, and actually doing really cool stuff. GFY is where you start, when you wannabe part of the adult industry. It's Digg.

If you're dealing with people FTP'ing up their website, using virtual hosts, and cpanel, you aren't dealing with the industry. You're dealing with Joe Blow Local just like in the rest of the main stream world.
LawPivot Seeks To Kill (Well, Slash) Startup Lawyer Fees
- In the case of iPhoto, I remember the program automatically copying the files from a camera to some folder deep within the hard drive and then giving not a clue later as to which folder that was and certainly not allowing any exploration between folders...

- Don't you find "a right click" with a one-button mouse a bit tricky? I did try it but somehow it wasn't happening... maybe that's where things went South.

- Plus, being a geek, I always can do what I need to do. I'm not really looking for solutions here. My main argument is that despite a reputation for usability, OS X seems to me to lack practical usability and to instead mostly coast on good and reputation.
Photo sharing sites doesn't cripple the entire economy when they fail.
You're not accounting to the effect a premium service has on marginal ad revenue per user. It goes down as the people with disposable income (the most desirable demographic) opt out of ads.
Ask HN: What would you do to hack your iPod?
Howdy HN!

What's the funniest/craziest/coolest hack for an iPod (any version) you've performed or heard of?
I'm decently sure "functional programming has been called programming without assignments" comes from Ravi Sethi's programming languages book.
Some career advice for all of you on Hacker News.

This advice may be two years too late, but may help someone just getting in now. The decision to leave a high-paying Wall Street firm is foolhardy and one that you will more than likely live to regret later. It would be much more prudent for you to stick around at a firm for 5-6 years, put away $500K-700K in cash, get some experience, make connections and then make your move. Otherwise, you'll probably end up stuck at a startup that is not really going anywhere anytime soon (maybe it will, but maybe it won't), and it will be too late to go back to Tier-1 firms to make some cash.

So the lesson for you young guys out there: Don't pull the trigger too soon IF YOU ARE ALREADY IN A MONEY EARNING JOB.

Wait it out for several years, build a small safety net, and stash away some capital for your entreupreneural endeavors a couple of years later.
Site dedicated to provide you Funny,Amazing and Interesting videos
Really nice site trying to provide only good video content
This would be true if the losses from the last crash hadn't been socialized.

If the financial industry had actually had to bear the consequences of the risks they take in the same way that entrepreneurs do, the decisions would be rational. As it is, the finance sector is protected by the government whereas startups are not.
Another question about Color on Quora, with a surprising answer:

*How will Color Labs (startup) handle inappropriate photos?*
Simply swipe a photo from someone, and a popup will show you
to choose Nudity, Violence or Hateful.
That person will then be banned from Color, thus the only way
to get back on the system is buying a new iPhone or Android. [...]
We also will ban a person from Color for abusing
the reporting system.

That sounds pretty harsh. It makes me wonder if they ban users automatically when a report comes in or if they screen the images before taking action. Also, what qualifies as 'nudity', 'violence', or 'hateful' according to Color Labs?

I installed the iPhone app a couple of days a go. I didn't see any warning that nudity wasn't allowed. Sure, I had to agree to their terms of use, but it had the length of a Tolkien novel, so I doubt anyone will bother reading it. I think there's a real risk that tons of users will be banned without ever having realized that their risqué photos weren't allowed.

And then there's the last line of Color Labs' answer: on HN, I frequently flag articles that I deem inappropriate. If I do so on Color, I risk being banned, not knowing whether my tolerance for offensive imagery is lower than that of Color Labs.

http://www.quora.com/How-will-Color-Labs-startup-handle-inap...
What Makes a Great Startup Engineer?
> they are opting in to a subtly different arithmetic that most people are surprised by

I think that's a "citation needed" moment there. It's true that any native integer type will strange if you go outside of its defined range. The only way to avoid that is to use a language that automatically converts to bignums behind the scene (Common Lisp, etc)

What I don't agree with is that this is something that "most people are surprised by" If anything, the word "unsigned" is a pretty good hint about what behavior you'll get.

And even when you play fast-and-loose with the rules, it usually turns out ok:

unsigned a, b, c, d;
a = b + (c - d);

even if d > c, this will do the expected thing on any 2's compliment architecture. Now, this will break if a and b were instead "unsigned long long". I think that case is fairly rare -- it's not a mistake I've seen commonly in real life (especially compared to the dangerous "botched range-check of a signed value" error)

But you are correct that it's not "merely an advert for an invariant" -- it's advertising that the compiler actually reads. It gives you better warnings (I've had plenty of bugs prevented by "comparison of signed and unsigned" warnings) It also allows the compiler to optimize better in some cases: compare the output of "foo % 16" with foo as signed and unsigned.

> It would be better to have a range-checked types, like Pascal

Adding runtime checks to arithmetic is the type of costs that are never going to be in C. This is no different than saying "C should have garbage collection" or "C should have RTTI". They're perfectly valid things to want in a language, but they're anathema to the niche that C holds in the modern world. With C I want "a + b" to compile down to one instruction -- no surprises.

And even if you DID do a range-check, what do you do if it fails?
1. Throw an exception? Sounds logical... oh wait, this is C there's no such thing as an exception
2. Clamp the value? Now you have behavior that is just as bizarre as an integer overflow
3. Crash? Not very friendly..
4. Have a user-definable callback (i.e. like a signal) What is the chance that the programmer will be able to make meaningful recovery though?

There are, however, some additions to the C99 type system that I think would be useful.. for example C++11's strongly typed enum's are a good idea.

> I find that most programs deal with values for their integer types with an absolute value of under 1000

I find that most programs deal with values greater-than-or-equal-to zero.
You do realize companies that provide those valuable goods can grow faster, hire more people, and grow our economy's GDP much quicker, with more capital, correct?
It was once pointed out to me by a public speaking coach that "the audience wants you to succeed." It's so easy to let nerves kick in and become terrified that if you make even the slightest mistake you will be booed off stage. It can feel like an adversarial relationship between you and the audience.

The reality is that in almost all cases people in the audience are there voluntarily because they want to hear what you have to say. They want you to succeed so that they can have an enjoyable experience listening to you.

I have also realized that this is true at times when I am in the audience for a speaker who is really nervous. In some small way it feels like I am part of the speech. I think most people have been in this situation and sort of cringed when a mistake happens, because you don't want to see the person on stage hurting, you want to see them do great.
Buffer webapp
Softwae is capital-intensive as well in that it usually takes a significant amount of labor to build out a product to the point where it can generate revenue. Just because the capital tends to be paid out in salaries instead of purchases doesn't make it capital-cheap.
I think you mean "declaring the variable inside the loop initialization", which is not a bug in C99 and not subtle anywhere else.

The intended bug is that 0.1, in floating-point, is not exactly 0.1. On x86 (and probably anything with IEEE-754 floating-point) the loop counter reaches 0.5 successfully, is a little bit high when it should have reached 1.0, remains high up to when it reaches slightly more than 2.2, and then suddenly becomes low when it should have reached 2.3, and continues to be slightly low and get progressively lower thereafter, all according to whether the sum is being rounded to a value that's slightly too high or slightly too low. The consequence is that the loop runs for an extra iteration with x ≈ 3.5, or 3,5 if you're from, say, Argentina.
Is this submission a deliberate attempt to make Linus look bad? The title is not at all what his comment amounts to; it could be removed from comment post without changing the meaning. I don't doubt you can find a multitude of quotes of Linus in support of various, official or pragmatic, standards. He was just polemizing.
Good idea. They have ejabberd, yaws, and Wings3D under http://www.erlang.org/link . But no CouchDB, RabbitMQ or Riak...
Prioritizing the principles in James Hamilton's LISA paper
Hmm, is that really a problem? https://github.com/macruby/macruby is working as expected. I assume you would just type the camel case name once, when cloning the repository.
> Are you sure iPhoto still has a 'reveal in finder' option? I"m not seeing it...

Right click on a photo in iPhoto, then click on "Show File".

edit: ah crap I forgot a new iPhoto had been released and you're probably talking about '11, not '09. Ignore this comment.
No. Not correct at all. There is no evidence whatever showing that the current size of the financial industry caused faster growth, more hiring or GDP growth other than the financial industry itself.
I disagree. As it stands both AT&T and T-Mobile are starved for spectrum. That renders them (especially T-Mobile) unable to compete effectively with Verizon. How can you compete on price when you can't deliver the level of service your customers expect?
Lessons startups can learn from the infamous Gizmodo redesign