skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Polls != me, ever. I chose the second answer because it is the closest, but....

I haven't really used C in years, but I can start programming in C anytime and get operative, robust (I'm a freak about error handling and knowing where lie the exceptions) code quickly and cleanly.

These days I dabble in Javascript, higher order perl, and am trying to grok Haskell, but I think in C. To my simultaneous benefit and detriment.

The vast bulk of code I was paid to write was /bin/sh - thousands of lines of clean, robust, cross-platform installation and configuration routines, with pipes to awk and sed as required. But I thought in C.

Other than deliberately obfuscated code and kernel programming, I've never met a C program I couldn't grok.

But I don't use C, haven't in years, and don't know it thoroughly. I am not a C guru, nor even close to being a wizard. But I would call C the lingua franca of the computer world, the cleanest, most elegant tool out there.

C wasn't the first language I learned, but it was the first that blew my mind. After years of hacking on various BASICs, then FORTRAN, and Pascal, I encountered C (I have a BSc in Physics; I didn't hit C until after I decided to experiment with CS for a while).

After years of forcing my thinking into the little boxes these other languages insisted on living within, BAM, here was a language that allowed me to escape any box, build better boxes, nest boxes, hide boxes, thermonuclearly destroy anything within 6 gigs of my box, etc., etc., etc.

The sad side note: Scoping was never really an issue with the other languages, they had pretty hard and fast rules. Scoping wasn't all that much different with C, but all of a sudden it became really, really important to understand it, to be able to unwind pointers mentally and really appreciate what was going on.

So for me, C scope was computer scope, all scope was C scope. One of the biggest mental hurdles for me in learning higher order perl was abandoning C scope and automatic dereferencing without global variables.

It took me a while to get my head around how the difference in scope management made class and object variables and memoization so much easier in perl - and in many other languages - than in C.

So I think in C. And sometimes that's good, but other times it is a handicap.
Absolutely agree. If you don't know where to find your target market, then you probably haven't communicated with them.

If you haven't communicated with them, then how do you know that the problem is actually a problem? Even if it is a problem, how do you know your solution addresses it? How do you know you understand the problem well enough to have actually solved it without creating other, bigger problems?

If you don't know where your customers congregate, or have a way to get in touch with them, how are you going to sell it? I can tell you that it's the VERY rare startup that you can just put online and get customers. Even if it gets covered by tech blogs (which are generally the startup coverers) how do you know if it's reaching your target market?
I'd rather have one that fails obviously in the very beginning, than one that fails silently and subtly.
I hope everyone else is safe too.
5 Tips to Become a Photoshop Expert 
Nobody really knows everything that Photoshop can do, every option that Photoshop can provide, This makes it a mystery , because there’s always something new to learn and try with this huge graphics editing program . But you can learn it from the uncountable tutorials around.
The oldest of the Chicago IKEA stores (Schaumburg) was allowed to be arranged without the blinder walls until just a few months ago. Having never been to a different IKEA, I was confused upon walking in last week. I did feel as if I was in a rat maze and I was commenting somewhat loudly on this fact to my wife. A saleswoman overheard me and explained that this IKEA, after years of being a rogue outlier, was forced to arrange the store as dictated by the arbiters of shopping wisdom in Sweden. She apologized and expressed regret at the fact. Before this happened, a shopper could see all of the other floors at once and get a good view, from almost anywhere, of the large atrium that pierces the middle of the store. Now we get to look at painted hardboard panels advertising different IKEA wares. Plus I have no idea where I am because I can't easily view the open area. Not an improvement.
This sucks. Earthquakes used to be interesting but now when that alert goes off on phones + tv and the shockwave hits it's internal panic time.
I wish I could downvote this as -1, duplicate.
Relentless Facebook Self-Promoters are Narcissists
Christopher Poole: Build A Product Before You Build A Platform
Manage Your Kids' IOS App Purchases
If the story was about a dog that dug some wires I would agree, but people are capable of a lot of things, even at old age. God knows how long she'd been digging.

Also, on the Guardian article:

The cable is owned by the Georgian railway network. It is heavily protected, but landslides or heavy rain may have exposed it to scavengers.

If that's just an excuse or not, we will never know.
I think there's a time and a place for public dissemination of emails like this. To take an example, TechCrunch does it all the time - sometimes I think it goes too far (every single internal email AOL sends out), sometimes I think it's appropriate (eg the "snark" email from Moviefone http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/15/snarketing/).

In this case, where there is virtually zero chance of legal proceedings actually resulting, and the protagonist is simply venting / bullying / baiting the recipient, I think publishing an email publicly is a decisive statement that you think they're silly, ridiculous, and should go away (it's also a good read and nice publicity). From a legal perspective, you don't really lose much, if any, ground.

Also, for what it's worth, even if this guy is considering the "corporate veil" (that's a big if), and even if he has a shred of a cause of action (even bigger if) then knowing he's going after individuals is even less appealing that going after a nascent company (much harder to extract money and legal fees from a 22 year old student).
Deals with these labels: http://grooveshark.com/labelslist

TL;DR They got EMI (following a lawsuit), a few prominent indies like Merge, and 99% nobodies. Alongside a still in process suit from Universal Music Group.
The Problem Of “Open”
Chrome has a single icon (wrench, far right) to replace the entire menu system. The first time I used Chrome I was thrown by the lack of a menu bar, but only for the five seconds or so that it took me to find that button.

After getting used to it (another five seconds) I now prefer it to the standard system of using >1cm of space for something I rarely use in a web browser.
Building More Secure Passwords
Ask HN: Accessibility compliance tools
What tools do you use to ensure your web app is accessible by impaired individuals and is in compliance with ADA standards? We currently have limited access to Compliance Sheriff, but we need something more readily available to developers and testers that can evaluate application code for compliance.
Cherokee vs Apache Benchmarks
There's a free, official tool to convert EPUB into Kindle-optimized MOBI format.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000...
But you wouldn't do this in Java (need a random string for an integer).

Instead you might see:

logger.fatal( String.format("Program crashed on index %d: %s", i, message) );

I think C has a similar construct, not quite as verbose, that would save 7 characters out of the line...
FBReader (http://www.fbreader.org/) is an open source ebook viewer for Android with wider format support (though it doesn't do PDF), greater configurability and a somewhat more no-nonsense UI approach. A particular highlight is the brilliant integration with ColorDict and other dictionary apps.
I'd hesitate to say 'just', and there is a rigorous definition of aftershock that this may or may not fit, but it's very close to the big one last month and certainly related to it.

So I'd go with 'yeah, basically' in the absence of a seismologist telling me otherwise.
Data on tutors starts showing some interesting things
There's Scheme environment for iPad

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pixie-scheme-iii/id401023057?...

Doing SICP exercise's on iPad could be actually a fun combo to try and see how well tablets work for programming.
This tool works impressively well. I use it to convert my CV to PDF, as I don't trust my CSS to work everywhere.
FIOS is probably the best bet although it doesn't come to our building. You can still get 20-50Mbps residential if you pay enough. It's quite easy to live cheaply here, as long as you don't live in midtown Manhattan. You can cross the water any direction and knock $1000 off your rent, and if you cram a few people in the same apartment (everyone does), then your rent can be $500-$1000 per person. On incubator funds that leaves some runway. There is a pizza place one block over from me that is open 24hrs and has $.99 slices, so food can definitely be had on the cheap, and we don't have, need, or want a car since 20 instances of everything we need is within 10 blocks from us. Dentist, Doctor, Store, Parks, River/Ocean, Gym, Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Coffee shops.
Have a look at jdub's comment on the item about Ars Technical review of GNOME 3. He summarizes pretty well what will happen (or not happen) in Ubuntu with regards to GNOME 3:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2419435
I do embedded programming. There is only C.
I know quite a few high level languages, but C is the main one. It is probably because I work on system software.

One good thing that I figured out is to learn concepts from high level languages and use them in C. I guess lot of people are doing the same.
Yes it is a known technique also in 3D games. Related, but more complicated (research) topic is infinite/arbitrarily-sized non-looping texture generation from arbitrary sample images.

http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~vordonezroma/texturesynth.pdf

(There are some mind blowing generated images in the linked PDF.)
I'm still learning it. If anyone else is interested, I'm taking a class for it on my learning website, Curious Reef: http://curiousreef.com/class/programming-in-c/
40 Vintage and Retro Web Design Inspirations
GWT has a fair number of sessions at google i/o as well - so not a dedicated conference, but a dedicated track at a conference.
I don't think it was an explicit requirement, it just would be very wasteful to do a linear search on a sorted list.
Parts of Iwate lost power? http://twitter.com/#!/daiwaka/status/56008913857949696
Neither the dock or launch bar were invented by Apple (both have history in NextOS/Openstep)
Battle brewing at Microsoft over retail store expansion
Mozilla Accelerates Firefox 5 Release Schedule
Scratch your own itch. Startups that solve your own problem are great ideas: you know the need exists and in turn you become passionate about a solution.
This is a great tool, I've been using it for a long time. Only downside is that on Ubuntu Server certain graphics libraries aren't in the PPA so you have to download a static binary instead of using apt-get. But it's a minor quibble for a great program.
Will radioactive water be spread?
Apple to Fix Your Blurry iPhone Pictures With Multiple Flash Pulses
Tampa Criminal Lawyer
MIT Artists Create 21st-Century Mathematical Origami
Tampa Divorce Attorney
They could always pass the cost onto the consumer!
"Which one will I buy"?
How many times do you go though a review or read recommendations of someone before it gives you the final push to buy something? ...
We are making a product + marking app based on consumers + twitter feed .. but not like others star rating product review..
people can see how many users are happy , sad , angry .. People's emotions with any product that can help you :)
Hey, I think everyone gets emailed.
This is a good point to bring up. I agree in theory that managers are useful in gate-keeping roles. The trouble is that very few managers actually possess the power to be gate-keepers. Investors, clients threatening to leave and other fast-paced blame-culture mentality all but strips away their usefulness. In my experience, this at times makes managers feel worthless, expire, or worse - erratic.

My take is, manager positions are ripe for buck passing (to and from), collateral pressure for performance and abuse. Maybe some people can deal with that type of nonsense but the number of those who can't certainly outweigh them.

I can see how a manager might feel by this message. My thoughts are: If you're providing a great service to your underlings and your clients than you're in no position of regret. Contrarily, if you feel sick to your stomach when you go to work everyday and you're proud of that to a point of defense or fear, maybe it's time to reevaluate.
Evolutionary pressure. Tourists now know about the fake USB drive problem, and test-drive hardware in the store. This sort of fakery is much harder to detect, and unless there are easy tools to detect wrongly-sized USB drives, these are going to be the dominant type of forgeries.

Knowing nothing about how USB drive hardware/firmware works, I'm guessing we'll see mainstream Windows software for detecting real drive sizes soon (if not already), and then it'll be a back-and-forth between the two sides.

Ultimately (I hope), the costs of the forgeries and the time needed to verify drive size is going to even out, and you can be assured that even though you're buying a knock-off, it'll very likely have a certain amount of space on it and a certain minimum life span.
Shocked, shocked! to see an O'Reilly data article that does not pimp their Strata conference or their damn "data science" books. This is a great refresher on command-line tools, and I would love to see more stuff like this.
It might not be lawful, but I see it as somehow less wrong than stealing cables in use, or starting the trend.

Related video, though I don't endorse this guy's actions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkLI2ywzRsA

"I steal copper, not [from] family men. And send me my 20% [of this recordings profits] later."

It's a weird world we live on.
Android – The new open source cathedral?
Broken lines?

We no longer live in the days of typewriters or daisychain printers with fixed column widths.

We now have these wonderful things called laser printers which can print using fonts.

Fonts are resizeable. Even to the point that 150+ columns could be fit on one unbroken line.

And even lines that long can be quite readable if you print in landscape.
Failure Avoidance Strategies for Every Startup
The google charts link at the top of the thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2419367) https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chs=150x150&cht=qr... is served via HTTPS. Their docs don't officially acknowledge supporting HTTPS but it looks like people have been doing it since 2007 (at least - http://groups.google.com/group/google-chart-api/browse_threa... )
7 Amazing Drowned Churches
These churches were flooded and drowned by men’s own doing, in their cavalier hurry to change nature’s path for dams and reservoirs.
Steve Blank assesses the startup culture in Ann Arbor, MI
Note that the qrcode.js part of this is

// QRCode for JavaScript
//
// Copyright (c) 2009 Kazuhiko Arase
//
// URL: http://www.d-project.com/

Here's the related QR project(s). (Note the implementations in other languages.)

http://www.d-project.com/qrcode/index.html

I forget (if I ever knew) whether this has any connection with the originators of QR code:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denso
I've been taking some time to learn CL lately, and one of the things I've been doing is SPOJ (http://www.spoj.pl) problems. One one paticular problem (FCTRL) I attempted to solve it in CL and came up with code that I was pretty sure would work. After submitting a number of times using the SBCL compiler, I could not solve the problem in the time allocated.

So I went off and just manually translated my code to Python. Exact same algorithm, pretty much word for word translation. Submitted, and made the cut (barely).

This I found dissapointing; how could a byte code interpreted language be faster than a compiled language?

So I picked up 'ANSI Common Lisp' and started optimizing. Found some problems where I was using / instead of when I could just use floor (but then I found a problem where floor always does a cons; why is there no simple floor where I don't get multiple return values). Submitted, finally got accepted (and slightly faster than python). Further optimizations included giving the exact ranges for certain numbers and inlining the floor function.

After an hour or two of optimization work I got it down to about 66% of the python run time. Not even close to what I was expecting in runtime performance, especially considering the 'SBCL is just as fast as C' arguments that are all around.

Not that I'm not going to stop learning CL, but it seems the performance claims just don't add up to the performance reality (for this case). And the development time was doubled just to make the program run acceptably fast.

As Paul Graham said in ANSI Common Lisp: Lisp lets you write slow programs fast, and fast programs slow. But in many cases 'good enough' is just that and I can really see how python excells in this regard and how it's taken over the hearts and minds of a lot of Ex-Lispers.
That is only true if you are if the mindset that there can be nothing wrong with unfettered, free-market capitalism. While it is certainly better than many other economic philosophies, it would be a mistake to pretend it is perfect.
english feed: http://twitter.com/#!/list/TheTokyoPost/japan-earthquake-cov...
SCALA 2.8 VIDEO TUTORIAL
pdftotext can produce garbled output, especially from two-column PDFs.* Depending on what you need, scripting Adobe Reader may be an option as it does a better job.

* I did a sizeable data mining project a while ago which required converting a lot of scientific papers to plain text. pdftotext didn't work well on a lot of them, so I had a script sending click events to Adobe Reader running overnight.
I very much doubt his code is both a joy to read and made up exclusively of one-character variable and function names.

It's one or the other.
Tips and Links to get more traffic alongwith Like and Follwers
I am sure that everybody should Bookmark this article, as it is having very unique tips and links to get traffic and also you can increase Like of your Facebook pages and also Followers on Twitter.
Please repaint that other side of wall too.
Umm... "hackers"? I know the term has fallen into disrepute but this all seems a bit trivial.
Total spam.
C is great. Yeah it isn't perfect, but it's always there, the rules don't change and you always know where you stand.
Are there currently alternatives to the Android Market?
umm... no. They will get back to you if you do not get in. Do not assume that because you have not heard you did not get in.
great tutor :)
I tried porting it to OpenBSD and found building it from source to be surprisingly complicated. IIRC, it wanted me to install their own fork of qt, just to render PDFs. Pass.

I went with htmldoc (http://www.htmldoc.org/) instead. Perhaps the rendered PDFs aren't as pretty, but for my purposes, it works quite well.
If you don't want to grok SQL you can always try NoSQL which is basically (for most engines) documents made of key-value pairs in collections.
Tsunamis (and waves in general) don't actually move the water they're traveling through over any significant distance. It's the wave's energy that's moving, not the water itself.
The marginal cost per license for hosted apps is also almost 0, for many Saas apps.
That.... is beautiful. Especially the exit 15 months later.
Agreed. All change is bad. Period.

No good can ever come out of change. If things aren't the way I recognize them and like them, then they are obviously inferior because as we all know, functional UI design never changes. The principles that we had when Windows XP came out should still be in use because that's what I'm familiar with.

And I completely agree with you about using the a computer as a tool not a toy. If I can't immediately change the tool in a way that is familiar to me, it is worthless to me. For instance, the first thing I do when I get a hammer is take it apart and see what kind of different colors I can make the handle. That's how I know it's a good and usable tool. And I've found that the most customizable tools are usually the most usable tools. If I can't choose the font face used on my screwdrivers, I don't even bother.

I think we got two different things out of the article. It seems like you got the impression that it was saying that changing things shouldn't happen. I got the point that change for the sake of change is stupid. But if you identify behaviors that people do and don't do, and you change your product accordingly (like Chrome has done) then it's probably a good case for change.
I see an opportunity for a lifestyle business focused on providing start-ups with teaser sites like this that are tied in with social media bots and so-forth to efficiently exploit bleeding-edgers.
Best NodeJS Tutorial
Watch the first video and fast forwward to 7:35 and listen to this guys accent, he makes learning node interesting:

http://nodecasts.org/
While still a very new project, pdfsplit (http://dmwit.com/pdfsplit/) may be worth a try.
Work/Life Balance at Startups
> Spell the name like a normal person. Twitter works because it makes logical sense, spelled as it sounds. Tumblr is hard to explain to a non-tech user — tell your Mom to go to Tumblr.com and see what she types in.

Funny to read this example since Twitter used to be named "Twttr"! I guess they understood the problem soon enough!
> chooses to go with Python or Ruby simply due to inertia of the languages

Not sure if that's inertia of the languages. My Python path started with a) having only heard it's good for scripting/prototyping and b) the need for a quick way to test a SOAP interface.

Nobody in the company used it at that time, so language inertia was heavily against Python. I had the first successful SOAP call within hours of downloading the implementation (yup, the is important).

Googling for Lisp soap client gave some links for an implementation on commercial Lisp (deal breaker at this stage) and one whose quickstart docs start with at least three required dependencies "Make sure X works for you", "get package Y", and so on.

My point is that "batteries included" really makes a difference.
Mobile Apps Invading Your Privacy: A Technical Analysis of Pandora
The saying that a picture says more then a 1000 words is true. In our case our pie chart alone says more then 100 000 words if you look at reviews like of Twillight. Feel what 1500 reviwers on amazon felt in 1 button press and share this with your friends
Am using C a lot, from writing device drivers and hacking network protocols to userspace stuff. Yet I can't say I know it thoroughly: there are enough little quirks in the specs.

It is a great little language for sure, still destined to outlive some of the languages that are hip today.
Indeed. If you already have one tile that's, say 50px wide, you can easily find coprime sizes:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=coprime+to+50
cheating lol
agreed on str...(), but this is not semantic, is broken lib that is hard to update for backward compatibility issues, so in some way it is not a matter of the language.
Interesting - looks like chart.googleapis.com works over HTTPS:
https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chs=150x150&cht=qr...

but chart.apis.google.com (which Google formerly used) does not:
https://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=150x150&cht=qr&#...

Turns out I was looking at some outdated docs. Thanks!