skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Use knowledge engines, such as www.wolframalpha.com or www.trueknwoledge.com"

Wolframalpha can be classified as "knowledge engine" but is this true for www.trueknwoledge.com? I couldn't figure out what it is.
Nettatheninja: All I did was create a website
I tend to agree, and have been thinking this for some time. I thought for a while it was my own 'sour grapes' thinking, and maybe it's just everyone's 'sour grapes' thinking too. But... from a content standpoint, it's easier to write about a few big players, because everyone has an opinion on them, and it brings in eyeballs/adrevenue to a publisher. That's a bit reason it's done, I think (cynical, I know). To a lesser extent, some of the things these players do do affect many of us, but I don't think they really affect us as much as we're led to believe they'll affect us (usually), and whether they do or not, reading about the latest Apple vs MS patent fight isn't going to impact my life in any meaningful way.
So what, if the spec says "jump off a cliff", you'd do it?

Linus explains in-depth why the distinction between memcpy and memmove is arcane and useless nowadays, shows how glibc's over-engineering crap actually hurts performance instead of helping, and that being a tight-ass (ie. doing /more/ than the spec) just makes the situation worse for everyone.

Are you all seriously thinking that Linus doesn't know about performance? He's not Miguel, dammit...
It's a good analysis.

One which points to a bleak future in which all work is done by employees of a few monopolistic corporations that defend themselves against competition by giving "good enough" clones of their competitors products away for free.

It seems like an effective strategy for defeating competiton and stifling disruptive innovation.

I sincerely hope it fails.
IMHO, A blue screen of death page would be even more remarkable.
You and your boss have never heard of PhoneGap? Not a cure all by any stretch but you can sell a web-app if you really want to go that route.
The reality is that RIM is behind in product development by about 1-2 years arguably...They have yet to release a phone that could even be compared to the first iPhone...

I'm sure Apple has stuff in the pipeline that is much more advanced that is currently on the market.
And yet, people will still put money into it. Despite so many people, including very-often-right-even-when-the-economy-is-tanking Warren Buffet saying they are too expensive, people will put in money and claim ignorance and bamboozle-ment when it doesn't work out.
particularly as an non-natural public speaker.

My favorite comment after the speech: "Honestly, when you got up on stage, I thought 'Oh cripes, an engineer with no social skills.' Little did I know it was all part of the act!"

Hah, the joke is on you, sucker :)

(Joking aside: this is the best speech I've given in my life by a factor of "lots" judging by audience reaction, but I did competitive public speaking for most of a decade. It isn't totally anomalous that I'd be decent at it.)
Thanks. Has this been true every year?
You're totally right. I was a freelancer in the adult biz for ~2 years and the level of technological incompetence in the industry is hard to believe. For example, no one is using version control systems, most people hardly know the difference between a CMS and a framework, most still update their websites with FTP, virtual hosting is still a scary beast, cPanel is the norm, they still refer to web apps as "scripts", etc.

Innovation in the porn industry is a complete myth in 2011.

PS: If anyone doubts my claim, I suggest you take a peek here and see the level of discussion (the world's largest adult industry board): http://gfy.com/forumdisplay.php?f=26
On the other hand, the subset of Scheme in SICP is pretty small, so one doesn't need to invest much in Scheme to read SICP and do the exercises. And I think a lot of the concepts covered in SICP are clearly visible in the design of Clojure (lazy streams, purely function programming and concurrency concerns) and so I think SICP alone is great at priming someone for Clojure. Then I think it would be better to approach Clojure on its own terms, with something like the Joy of Clojure, which seems to be a very nice book from what I've read of it.
I meant from a user's perspective. You shouldn't care if the song is stored in /foo/bar or in a remote database somewhere in the cloud. You access it through some obvious interface e.g. iTunes.
Having 'file' as a central concept of accessing data doesn't have much connection to the actual way it is used. My vim config file doesn't have much in common with a song I've just downloaded. It is stored the same way, but that's about it.
Looks nice, but as the first comment says: seems to recreate what RaphaelJS does.

And, the demo site fails utterly on IE7: the documentation website says nothing about browser compatibility.
Going on a tangent here, it's a real tragedy that 90% of Patio11's business comes from women. We'd have a much better educational system if the percentage was closer to 50% than 100%.
Similar to EaselJS, http://easeljs.com/
With all the acknowledgement of Apple's role on the history of this, I have to wonder whether they are aware that Apple has been laying the groundwork for doing the same thing since Snow Leopard, and that Lion can already automatically quit and even pre-start applications without the user's involvement.

That said, I suspect Apple will keep the "quit" menu item even if it's not necessary for at least one version so that people have a chance to learn that it isn't necessary without being freaked out by it's sudden disappearance.

Also, although app developers have been encouraged to adopt to the new conventions, there will be plenty of legacy apps that don't for some time to come.
This proposal is very similar to "sweet expressions":

http://www.dwheeler.com/readable/sweet-expressions.html

edited to add:

"it makes the language far more flexible than any other language and provides a foundation for fully hygienic macros: you can modify the program entirely while it’s running and guarantee that there will be no crazy conflict behaviour. "

That's not true though, Common Lisp's macros can have nasty variable capture issues, can't they? This isn't using the word "hygienic" in the sense of Scheme's, so what does this mean exactly?
Yes, we totally are. But meta posts about that just add to the noise.

What are you building? Let's talk about that.
How to Chart your Mercurial Commits with the Activity Extension in Windows
I don't understand why sites are still subject to bugs like these. After 15 years of poor-escaping bugs and the security problems inherit in them, why is it so hard to understand the two critical rules:

1. Sanitize everything you can on the way in.

2. Anything that can't be sanitized on the way in must be marked as unsafe and sanitized on the way out.

Nothing* should ever, ever, ever go directly from one end-user's machine to another (even the same user). Ever.

* Binaries might be an exception, but even then possibly not (e.g. virus checking).
Data Journalism Developer Studio – Why Should Perl Programmers Have All The Fun?
There are function pointers in C and they are used to pass logic into C/C++ functions. They are not anonymous, and are more awkward to use than the new syntax, but they covered many use cases.
That's not really accurate. Warren just only invests in companies with strong (provable) profit models at cheap prices. It doesn't matter what it is, it matters whether he (or you, or I, or anyone) can look at the numbers without guessing and see profit.

Before the housing bubble burst, those mortgage-backed securities were being shopped to Buffet. Buffet said he wouldn't buy them because they were bundled millions of loans and he had no way of knowing what the health of those loans actually was. Not rocket science. Not new age, high tech or too young for him. Just no different than anyone should even be with their money.

Would you buy a car for $25K if you did not know what year the car was, what model, what it looked like or what condition? But that is essentially what they were asking Buffet to do. And he didn't...but several people did.
For what it's worth, I agree. Every time I hear about problems that arise from programming in C, with its undefined behaviour etc., I think to myself, there must be a better way to do it. But I don't know of any way that wouldn't involve scrapping 90%+ of software we use every day.
Patrick, I'm really glad to see you use the reference from the Atlantic article in your presentation. It was one of the most memorable "testimonials without even being a testimonial" I've ever read about the use software for a higher purpose:

Next, Mr. Taylor announces it’s time for Multiplication Bingo. As Mr. Taylor reads off a problem (“20 divided by 5”), the kids scour their boards, chips in hand, looking for 4’s. One girl is literally shaking with excitement. Another has her hands clasped in a prayer position. I find myself wanting to play. You know you’re in a good classroom if you have to stop yourself from raising your hand.

My reaction, which hasn't changed, from 11 months ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1267630

The full article:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/01/what-makes...
On GE's Pathological Aversion To Paying Taxes
`param: Type` is from Pascal
It seems to me that "elevating the value of the castle" goods is precisely what Warren Buffett said. He looks for the castles with surrounding moats because they're valuable.

I don't really understand what this article adds to the discussion.
Or if anyone wants a date, she's looking for that too....

http://www.okcupid.com/profile/nettatheninja
Isn't Titanium really just an interpreter taking Javascript to render native UI? While using Titanium allows you to use your experience in Javascript, and avoid Objective C or Java, in the end you still have an app on the phone.
AT&T Users Already Complaining About Inaccurate Meters
> Even if adobe was relying on bad behavior, it was glibc's bad behavior it was depending on.

Wasn't it implementation details it was relying on? Isn't NOT relying on implementation details pretty much the basis of good software engineering?
Characters of Silicon Valley
It's all good. I've lived an odd life, 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. Considering the businesses in which I have often found myself, that has often meant that they felt they were smarter than me. I doubt any of them felt an emotion beyond greed. If that counts, then I'm well and truly wrong.

Then, again, you managed to drag a huge thread out of me based on my emotional reaction to your (frankly offensive) "Bzzt" so maybe you're right for "most" markets.
Ask HN:  Democratization of Investment
So i was thinking that the creation of the many platforms("App Stores") for developers has made it incredibly easy for developers to enter the market, and also relatively cheap to do so.

So why inst there (is there?) investment platforms that would connect ideas/develoeprs to investors that are just everyday people. ie say there was a website that i could go on and view start-ups that needed money...and i could choose how much i wanted to invest and all of the financial and legal aspects of investing in a private company were automated.

It could be a kind of "social network" (i hate using that term now) where companies could create a company profile with maybe a video/slideshow of their product and i could choose how much money to invest.

Does this make any sense? lol
Free Education Initiative
Considering that Google doesn't pay a dividend and has only had around 25% revenue growth in comparison to Apple (71%). I would say they haven't proven anyone wrong yet. People have bought up Google and sent the stock price soaring, so it was a money maker for people who speculated on whether people would keep buying it. But stock market pricing and underlying stock value as it relates to the company are often wildly disconnected. There are companies which dwarf Google in profits, revenue and dividend whose stock price is in the 20s or 30s.
Yeh Titanium probably want the best example as it goes through a translation layer, the others are very much true though.
Shouldn't this

if fruit is 'apricot':

be

if fruit == 'apricot':

?
Color App and the Future of GPS Spoofing for social engineering
The bees are probably faster if you include the time it takes to code a program for the supercomputer to run to actually solve the problem.

I'm saying 'probably faster' because that would depend on the algorithm and the speed of the coder or coders. I still bet a couple of talented well coordinated coders with a simplistic heuristic algorithm would still beat the bees in a realistic simulation (IE having to fly a distance to find said flowers similar to real nesting conditions, not through a hole or something 3' from the artificial flowers).
I own a hotel in Rome and operate a vacation rental site in Europe and although I don't if this actually concerns them or not, you are totally right. In France and Italy, for example, if you take the money, you cannot claim to just be a marketplace like craigslist. He who takes the money holds a different kind of a legal responsibility that maybe is avoidable in the US, but is hard (if not impossible) to justify here. I think big companies don't want to get involved in the tax and legal implications. That said, I don't understand why airbnb and their financial supports are not more concerned about this. Either they have a great legal department backing up their model or they are naive to how different the business environment is in Europe than in the US.
Awesome - needs illustrations for each :)
I think there's an argument to be made that the way an API is implemented is an implicit contract that ought to be upheld.

That sounds wrong to me. If your consumers have to rely on assumptions beyond what's provided in the contract of the API, your API is leaky and/or broken.

[edit] I understand the pragmatism necessary in the case of the glibc issue, but to clarify my point I disagree with the general assertion I'm quoting.
A document you 'close', an application you 'exit' or 'quit'. The document-centric people have been trying to do away with applications since the the beginning of GUIs.

It reality, the document metaphor works great for a few things that resemble documents. But documents are as much an artifact of the paper-handling wold as processess login sessions are to the electronic world. Are they really more fundamental than, say, a stapler? Is a stapler worthy of being a fundamental pervasive metaphor for interaction?

Games? Videos? Terminal windows? Phone calls? Desktop sharing? Text and IM? Many of the things we do with computers have little to do with documents.
His recommendations make a lot of sense: accept that failure is a natural part of doing business, remove structural obstacles to reduce the objective risks of a failed venture, turn failure into fodder. But his overall framing seems to be that entrepreneurs should be heavily driven by fear of failure. That works well for some people but not others -- for many (including me), fear leads to stress and increases the likelihood of irrational reactions.
What kind of graphs do you mean? If you're talking about charts, not graphs with nodes and edges, then there are a few:

http://highcharts.com

http://g.raphaeljs.com/

http://www.jqplot.com/

http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/

http://code.google.com/p/flot/

http://dygraphs.com/

http://thejit.org/

http://www.jstat.org/

http://processingjs.org/

http://mbostock.github.com/d3/
Curing the Staggering Entrepreneurship of Korea
In case anyone is wondering why HN is hostile towards Facebook, the reason is this: As engineers (and that includes me), we are just upset that all this advancement in technology has come down to this :)
Here you go:

http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/selling-t...
Seeing the forest instead of the trees is a common trait of successful people.
3 Questions with iPhone Guru Giuseppe Taibi on Mobile Project Management
thanks, i'd not read this. they do seem quite similar, though i think we focus on different things.

i think i prefer haskell operators to infixing with {}. still, i hadn't considered subscripting.
Yes, the author helps clearly distinguish between anxiety and fear, which I felt is very insightful!
IMHO, including some malicious javascript that causes an actual stack overflow would be even more remarkable.
Bees have evolved for 100M years. During this time an enormous amount of bees have lived and finding a shorter path between flowers is obviously a very strong evolutionary pressure.

Generally the bee species is a genetic algorithms supercomputer that have worked for a very long time to find good solutions to the traveling salesman problem. I'd guess your suggestion, that we should not even try to find the results of that 100M years computation, is based on some personal feelings ;-)
That's a great idea - a job for @nicholealbright
It's a pretty important question and I hope that gccgo will keep up constantly with the newest Go releases (which I know is though because Go has weekly releases).

You can follow their golang-announce mailing list or check this page http://golang.org/doc/devel/release.html to see if a backward-incompatible change has been released.
This idea comes up periodically, but it's something that appeals more to those who don't use lisp than those who do. I thought the same thing before I started really using lisp, but once you start feeling comfortable with sexps a superficial pythonic skin sounds annoying. The suggestion of trading lisp's macro features (how would you define macros with "mexps", and how would mexps interact with macros?) for syntactic whitespace that people either love or hate doesn't sound like a long term improvement.

"Mexps" might attract a few new people to lisp, but the existing lisp community would reject them. It would be more effective in the long term to show people the value of lisp's existing syntax.
"Sell benefits, not features" is a marketing-101 principle; a good way to tell if you're selling a real benefit (and selling it effectively) is to isolate and hone the emotional component to it. You can do this even in hard-nosed products; there are emotional components to the "we're not full of shit and our products just do what you need them to do" pitch.

I'm not trying to argue with you now; just extending my point.
While CPUs have gotten much faster (60%/year), memory hasn't kept up (barely 10%/year). Most programs spend much of their time moving data around in memory, because common programming styles lead to data that is extremely fragmented (poor locality) - memory is the bottleneck, not processor speeds.

http://seven-degrees-of-freedom.blogspot.com/2009/10/latency...
Right, the memcpy() API is leaky because it leaves some things unspecified. You can deduce the implementation by providing various inputs to it that have "undefined behavior". This is a common problem in C, and there are usually functions that avoid it (Linus recommends memmove).
It was for IBM, by abandoning trying to compete with DELL selling zero margin laptops to home users and sticking to selling $Bn systems to $Bn clients for $Bn they have a recipe for making $Bn
The Best Way to Make a Convincing Argument
in python they're equivalent (for strings and numbers and such).
IIRC, in the biography I read about him, he had the opportunity to invest in pre-IPO Intel, but turned it down because it was a market he didn't get, so he definitely does "lose some" from time to time, but on the whole, it seems to have worked out "ok" for him.
So, glibc changes, breaks adobe, and it is adobe's fault?

This reminds me of Joel Spolsky's article, "How Microsoft Won the API War:"

"There are two opposing forces inside Microsoft, which I will refer to, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as The Raymond Chen Camp and The MSDN Magazine Camp.

Raymond Chen is a developer on the Windows team at Microsoft. He's been there since 1992, and his weblog The Old New Thing is chock-full of detailed technical stories about why certain things are the way they are in Windows, even silly things, which turn out to have very good reasons. . .

The other camp is what I'm going to call the MSDN Magazine camp, which I will name after the developer's magazine full of exciting articles about all the different ways you can shoot yourself in the foot by using esoteric combinations of Microsoft products in your own software."

He thinks the MSDN camp won, and that's bad, and he contrasts with, say, Apple in historical times:

"A lot of developers and engineers don't agree with this way of working. If the application did something bad, or relied on some undocumented behavior, they think, it should just break when the OS gets upgraded. The developers of the Macintosh OS at Apple have always been in this camp. It's why so few applications from the early days of the Macintosh still work. For example, a lot of developers used to try to make their Macintosh applications run faster by copying pointers out of the jump table and calling them directly instead of using the interrupt feature of the processor like they were supposed to. Even though somewhere in Inside Macintosh, Apple's official Bible of Macintosh programming, there was a tech note saying "you can't do this," they did it, and it worked, and their programs ran faster... until the next version of the OS came out and they didn't run at all. If the company that made the application went out of business (and most of them did), well, tough luck, bubby.

To contrast, I've got DOS applications that I wrote in 1983 for the very original IBM PC that still run flawlessly, thanks to the Raymond Chen Camp at Microsoft."

The thing is, Apple is still mostly like that. Want the new hotness? Upgrade. I've been using OS X since 2004 and have trouble remembering all the stuff that broke because of OS updates (NetNewsWire and printing were particularly common). I don't know if it's because of the MSDN camp in Apple, but I do find it ironic that you cite things breaking as a reason to move to Apple. There are plenty of them, but I'm not sure that's one.
I wrote that into the slide primarily because you had seemed so affected by it. Thanks for calling it out for me.
Because once one generation of programmers has figured it out, the next one is already hard at work making the same mistakes all over again...
No, you really didn't. Comments like this add nothing to the discussion.

Couldn't you have at least linked to the google cache?
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KY4Mjyl...
"1. Don't submit an app with anything but IE."

This same holds true with IOS dev center and Safari. For all of apples talk about html5 and standards and all that, their own internal pages don't appear to be tested on anything other then safari.
Frameworks like Django and Ruby on Rails 3 do a good job of HTML-escaping everything that goes out. It's better to escape _everything_ by default and let the programmer explicitly say if something should not be escaped.

I guess GitHub is using Rails 2, which doesn't escape output by default.
This is a very poor way to compare operating systems. Each has different optimizations by default. That, and many many other factors make this a terrible project. It's unfortunate that so much work was put into testing so few things when many more things need to be considered. The set of data (machine variations, software tuning, etc) are far too small. It doesn't matter how many times one runs the same test on one machine if it's not the machine he's really testing, but the operating system.

Now if it was only a matter of what operating system without tuning works best on this one machine without tuning, then this might just legitimate.