skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What is particularly interesting to me is the part where he describes why the "I should be able to expect two’s complement semantics when 32-bit signed integers overflow" line of reasoning is incorrect.

When I first learned about two's complement, I honestly didn't believe that that is how negative numbers were done. So I wrote a C program to test a bunch of integer operations and printf("%x") the result.

It was neat - here I learned something in assembly, I was curious, I observed the same behavior in my C program, and formed the connection between C, the underlying assembly, and how the architecture worked.

And then this article came along and said that even if your C program behaves a certain way, that is no guarantee that that is how the program will work in the general case. The C specification doesn't mandate that two's complement be used.

Which is a weird feeling; in programming, we can construct a program to test any assumption we want ("I wonder what would happen if..."). But even that is of limited value in telling us how the language works or how the program behaves in the general case, even if the language itself is intended to be cross-platform.

The "just write a program and see what happens" is not as reliable of a way to find a language's boundaries as I'd once thought!
We at DuckDuckGo assure the same anti-tracking policy on our XMPP server. There is nothing greater about DDG then other sites following the same policy :-). But its DDG :-)
In Western Australia the "Shear Magic" sheep shearing robot was developed during the early eighties - a working robot that dealt in real time with shearing a live sheep. Elsewhere, the state of the art was spray painting a regular shaped car on an assembly line.

Various other bits of "cool tech" range from stump jumpers to laser optic wool classing.
i agree with most of what it says.
but the issue is how to successfully and accurately bill per project.
The Government want to change that, they don't think that every taxpayer should be paying part of every train user's ticket. The rail companies will get less dependable, probably less overall money. I hope they still go ahead with the long term things, they said it would take 40 years (note: read the article a year ago) to break even on the cost of making it all electric.
One of my luckier breaks was going to a highschool specializing in voc-ed. "Vocational Education" was the euphemism used to describe skills that you didn't learn in white collar jobs or in college/university.

While there I got to take classes in drafting, machining, and electronics (real electronics -- we etched our own boards!). I regret that I didn't spend any time in the auto shop. The students that excelled there did routine maintenance on all of the teachers' cars!

Years later I was an intern at Orbital Sciences, building a satellite (http://oceancolor.gsfc.nasa.gov/SeaWiFS/SEASTAR/SPACECRAFT.h...).

One day I was chatting with my mentor/boss about building a testing harness. A physical one with dangly bits and wires. I don't remember the details of the conversation, but I remember a compliment he gave me -- to this day, one of my most cherished:

"I know you'll do fine: you've burnt yourself on soldering irons."

At least among those rocket scientists, the ability to actually build stuff is held in high regard.
24in60
At one of my internships they had written a simple server in Java to bridge XMPP and IRC. Sounds like it's been re-invented a few times.
While technically correct, it doesn't remove the need to apologize if you end up having told an untruth.

In other words, you are still responsible for correcting anything you say if it's wrong.

It's worse to knowingly tell an untruth, but it's still bad to have done it at all.
We will see :-) So far we dont have a place where we put the name lol :-) All step by step! :-)
Vice Guide was very interesting. He was visiting large tourist sites, and was the only person there. Visited a gift shop, where he was the only person the attendant probably saw that day.
My lease agreements say that, too... but I'm too impatient to wait for the landlord. Things need fixin'!
Interested in service which creates automated tests in few minutes?
Actually, sending the least experienced technician to your house first is an intentional tactic. My father is a retired HVAC person of more than 40 years. He used to work for small family owned shops but the big companies (like gas companies) began buying up the shops in various areas. Then providing HVAC service plans via your gas bills.

They would load up on young guys and keep one or two old guys. They'd always send the young guys first because they were paid about 1/5th of the amount of the old guys per hour. If they fixed things correctly, then they made more profit. If they didn't fix things, you still paid the hourly rate anyway. After the revolving technicians of various skills attempted to fix (and charge you anyway), they would eventually send in the senior guy to actually perform the repair.

Most of the repairs are easy and minor. Nowadays furnaces have circuit boards with LED lights indicating the problem. So it's mostly just replacement of a known part. So most of the time they made a lot of profit by sending the youngest/cheapest guys.
How is it better/worse than BSON?
> without a decent text editor/full ssh capabilities.

I routinely do dev work on my CR-48.

While it may not be your preferred editor, vim provides syntax highlighting, code folding, shell access and multitudes of other options which can be fine tuned to precisely the user's needs.

With the latest dev update I can specify which private key I want to use to connect to a given machine as well. They have turned on limited local filesystem access.

However, this is the dev channel; I have no clue what's going on in beta right now.
I agree that there is a perception problem in this country involving skilled non-degree jobs. On one hand we're complaining that immigrants are taking all of our "jerbs", but on the other hand, we say we're too good for a job that doesn't require a bachelors degree.

We have to break this perception. I don't know what the solution is, but I do know in Germany students can decide whether to take a university route (high school) or take a skilled trade route (vocational high school).

Of course, that system has its own problems, because students are separated by social class by the end of 4th grade, which is incredibly early to tell a young person that they can or can't get a university education.
>"	Doing business in a bankrupt state"....Is not that hard. Pointless article.
Hmm, if they are suing a bunch of small developers couldn't they band together to pay for a lawyer to get the patent invalidated?
Yes, the shares disappear. A company cannot own itself, at least not directly. If a company had 3 million shares outstanding, then buys back 1 million shares, there would then be 2 million shares.
http://hubski.com

Like HN meets twitter.
Why?! :-)
I was talking to a boiler-maker friend the other day when he described an automated device that he places at the joint of two pipes to be joined, gets it aligned, and (it sounded like) presses a "Start" button and the unit moves around the diameter of the pipes, welding them together. No "by hand" required. It's not surprising, in a way, but when I stop to think about it, it's another case where people are being replaced by robots. I'm concerned for the future of human work.
If that's true, then why is there a shortage? Labor can be replaced easily, skilled labor can't. Try waiting to ship over a cheap plumber next time your toilet won't flush.
Wow, so much elitest attitude in here. I've seen everything from "don't water us down" to "back in the old days, degrees used to mean something". My view is more in line with Nature. We need to fix the system, we need to realize that management is important if we want to be leaders, and finally that PhD will gain so much useful skill and insight in their own field and that we should encourage people to take those skills out into the market. Hyper-specializing in a specific biological testing technique is all fine and dandy but maybe a few more broad general skills so that we can do more interdisciplinary work and solve the hard problems in the world is important as well.

Also, I see grad students and postdoc students as highly skilled labourers. A lot of what we do is grunt work that can't be automated or easily done because we're pushing the boundaries and haven't quite smoothed the process out yet.
Blind fish in dark caves shed light on the evolution of sleep
Chromebook : 4th time trying to do "everything on the web"
I'm sitting on a lot of data that could do a lot of damage to ATOC. Time to stop sitting on it?
still surprisingly accurate, despite being a decade or so out-of-date.
But then, you can't tell whether the sarcasm was intended from the very beginning of the message or merely the last sentence/paragraph.
> Maybe some people just have a knack for this stuff?

True, but IMO that knack has to be fostered for it to develop. If you were raised on a farm, I assume you had some guidance. I doubt that a lot of kids whose parents are software developers would go into woodworking.
That's not really the case in the Bay Area... I was renting a decent apt for $1k/mo, but a small fixer-upper house was $500k, which was way out of the range of what I could get a mortgage for.
Acer Iconia Tablet W500 Discount
I would recommend exploring the new Acer Iconia Tab A500 or W500 (Google android 3.0 or Windows 7), or as an alternative the Motorola Xoom or apple iPad
TechNews:
Techmeme,
Techcrunch,
Daring fireball,
Oreilly News,
Official Google Blog

Hardware:
AnandTech,
RealWorld Technologies,
StorageMojo,
ServerFault Blog,
Gustavo Duarte,

Security:
A Day in the Life of IS investigator,
Microsoft Security Research Center,
Layer 8,

Fun:
Reddit,
Boston Globe's Big Picture,
Atlantic's In Focus,

Others:
Lifehacker,
The Art of Manliness,
Windows PowerShell blog,
Paul Graham Essays,
Anil Dash,
Catonmat,
Joel Spolsky,
MintLife,
High Scalability,
The old new Thing
He's far too reasonable to make a presidential candidate. You have to be somewhat extreme to attract dollars because too few middle-ground people give too few dollars (and there is no media drama involved).
That's cool. But I've no idea if you're retaining IP logs and chat logs. You really need a service specific privacy policy which details exactly what you store and for how long.
From The Basement To $17 Million In Revenue
I'm American, and I was taught to use the "British style". In fact, I didn't even realize there was an "American style"--I always considered it a punctuation error, though I guess it's common and inconspicuous enough that I didn't even realize publications like the NYT would make this 'error'.
I limit my subs to mostly tech and feeds that post infrequently but well.

I go back and forth between enabling Hacker News and disabling it. It's too busy and distracting sometimes when I need to get things done and I don't want to get lost it some lengthy article somewhere.

Here are my current feeds sans HN

http://abstrusegoose.com

http://xkcd.com/

http://cmurphycode.posterous.com

http://acmel.wordpress.com

http://bsdpunk.blogspot.com/

http://saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com/blog/

http://www.cpeterson.org

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/

http://blogs.iss.net

http://ignorethecode.net

http://blog.lastinfirstout.net/

http://linuxsysadminblog.com

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com

http://planetsysadmin.com/

http://teddziuba.com/

http://toroid.org/ams/etc
How interested would the transit developers group be in 'hacking' the transport system, i.e. ripping apart all the proprietary encodings etc used by ATOC?
I really don't think machine intelligence is quite there yet (or will be for multiple decades). There is a lot of decision making and experience in those jobs. Robots are fine for the factory, but in the field they lack the flexibility of a human.
Books.

Books have a relevance that's hard to match with blog posts, newspapers and magazines.

Books from 200 to 2000 years ago still have a lot of relevance. (Human nature hasn't changed much).

So instead of reading about the latest privacy invasion from Facebook or the latest startup that no one will know about in 2 years, try a book.

I'm trying this myself. Spending less time on hacker news, and more time with good books. So far, much more satisfying. You feel like you accomplished something after finishing a good book. Versus feeling like you wasted a morning/night reading through "timely news".
A few people here mentioned that their online giveaways didn't convert well. You may think, "who wouldn't try out my cool new app for a chance to win an ipad right?" But consider how this may read to your potential new users, "So they want me to enter my information into an unknown service, without any concrete return? and wait, is this one of those... try out any one of these services for a free ipad scams?"

remember that your potential new users have no idea who you are, and people are still generally suspicious of new things on the internet, and rightfully so.
Someone has already automated it. Take a look at http://www.delay-repay.com/

It only works for NXEA, but that's good enough for me!
This is similar to "geeks do not respect suits". Suits are meant to signal credibility. But since geeks value ability much higher than style, the suit, being worn by "less intelligent" salespeople and managers, became a negative signal.

Similarly, perhaps online the use of American punctuation is becoming a negative signal, showing pedantic training as a "professional writer" rather than a true ability to convey ideas.
Alton Brown ends "Good Eats"
We're not short of electricians, we're short of people who can repair televisions.

We're not short of carpenters, we're short of people who repair furniture.

We're not short of plumbers, we're short of people who repair washing machines.

Once specificity is injected into the conversation, the issues surrounding these shortages become more clear. Are you going to pay to repair a computer if the newest wiz-bang HP is only $400 at Best Buy or WalMart. Some might. After all, they may only have $200. Majority will probably just buy a new one. But there is currently a lack of labor to address the market of people who wish they could have the computer their aunt gave them 4 years ago refurbished.

It's also more clear why the shortage exists. People with the proclivity will gravitate towards the 'safer' route, being an electrician. We only notice a lot of laid off electricians because construction is in a downturn. But, and here I'm only speculating, I think most electricians or utility company linemen for instance, would not count refurbishing old pc equipment for minorities in ghettos as a viable replacement for the work they currently do. At least not financially.

Similarly for carpentry. There is a market outside construction for woodworking. Does it pay as well? Is it large enough to absorb all of the carpenters idled due to the construction downturn? Judging by the unemployment numbers for construction workers, I would bet the answer to at least one of those questions is 'no'.

The reasons for our imbalances are more fundamental. In the US, things are less expensive to buy than they are to build for instance. Presently, encouraging people to go to Vocational Schools sets the conditions for the same sort of disappointment as encouraging them to go to College does. Until the more fundamental equilibrium are established, we will always be short of people willing to do low paid work. And there will be an over supply of people to do the high paid work. Even on the vocational level.

FAR more vocational people in car repair for instance, than computer repair or woodworking. Consequently, it is tough to land a job in car repair and easy to be fired. Lots of people out there learning to do it. Meanwhile, no one wants to repair furniture or PCs because there is no money in it.
It's not abuse when codified in law. Until Congress changes the rules, it only feels like extortion.
I dunno, spinning disk drives are ridiculously cheap these days. 160GB Laptop drives run ~$40 USD. The same price for SSDs will get you about 8GB of storage. It's just not comparable.
They don't recommend a specific netbook to use for the installation (or I just missed it), but as far as battery life goes: the Acer Chromebook is rated at 6 hours, and the Samsung at 8.5 hours. My Eee PC 1005HA was rated at 10.5 hours, and after having it for a bit less than 1.5 years gets - in normal usage, not in theoretical manufacturer-rated usage - between 8 and 9 hours.

I haven't seen the figures for boot time for Chromebooks, so I can't really compare that. Since the Chromebooks don't have physical harddrives but instead a small SSD (as they don't need local storage for anything but the operating system, and that reducing the moving parts makes them less likely to fail), it might be difficult to get the same boot time.
The government pays the train companies to run a transport service; departure times are an essential part of that, in a way that crisps quite plainly (or quite saltedly, ha ha ha* ) are not.

I agree that large-scale API provision is added value, and I have no objection to a private company making a profit from that. What I object to is a private company being handed a monopoly on that private data, with no effective oversight being given to the terms under which they provide access to it.

ATOC, by dint of the exclusive licence granted to them by Network Rail, have complete control of the market for this publically-funded data. They are adding value by serving it as a reliable API, certainly; however the price they are able to command has little relation to that value, because they have no competitors.

* sorry
Anyone else have Florence and the Machine in their heads after reading this headline?
I thought the font had a ligature for the string "Zapfino,". That was confusing.
Not Blogging? You’re in the Minority
> He's also the narrator for Ford truck commercials.

Deadliest Catch as well.
I'm sorry but I don't really understand the utility of that service ? Is there any link to other protocols ? What are the benefits of using this server instead of something like gtalk or some other widespread service ?
Why should I jump to this service and make my friend so the switch as well ?

Thanks :)

edit: I know perfectly what is DDG and I really love this search engine, but still.. don't get me wrong, I'm just asking for answers there, not being rude
24in60.com: The last 24 hours in 60-second, unbiased news bites.
I can assure you that I'm not naturally on the right of the political spectrum, but I have a fair amount of knowledge of how the public sector works (particularly at the higher levels) and it pretty much aligns with my personal experience.
I don't think that having to bump your screen resolution to get a website/video working is anywhere close to reasonable. The point was to replace Flash for web multimedia because it was too resource intensive and unstable. What we see now is a half-supported proof of concept growing out of unrelated technologies.

This might be the beginning of something great, but WebGL still has miles to go before being viable mass consumption technology and it's important to recognize that.
It's hardly unusual for entities that receive government money to also charge for products/services produced using that money. Three examples I can think of just off the top of my head include 1) the health service in places like France where there are subsidised usage fees, 2) farmers in the EU who get large subsidies from the CAP or the equivalent in the USA, 3) application fees in patent offices.

It is definitely super annoying that this data is not free, but the reality is that it does cost a bit of money to gather and aggregate.

Furthermore, though I frequently take the train, I do consider it unfair that general taxation revenues are used to fund the train services -- especially considering that if you look at the stats they are principally used by the wealthy. Charging for data goes some way to shifting the cost burden of rail back onto the rail travellers themselves, as the person ultimately paying for this data is the traveller that uses the train time app/website.
To tie this into another subject of discussion, where do Ballmer's disparaging remarks about Apple's products fit in? Is he bullshitting but believes what he says and just hopelessly incompetent at recognizing their merit? Or is he deliberately lying to try to manipulate people into buying his products?
Also, the older guys are probably doing construction work and making more money.
A friend did this: https://gitorious.org/irctk ("irctk is a general-purpose IRC wrapper written in C with libircclient"). I think it could be pretty straightforward to do the job using it.
Without any details it sounds like vaporware.
Looks like I spend most of my time navigating (or should that be 'grinding'?) in the northern hemisphere.
We definitly will add such a page, so far i can point you to the statement on our forum, you can see it here:

http://duck.co/topic/duckduckgo-s-new-public-xmpp-jabber-ser...

See down under the comments, i explained there what is so far logged, but we will tune this now over the next days.
SSDs don't break if you drop the computer that they're in, throw it on a bed, or otherwise treat it badly. HDs do. Reducing the failure rate of Chromebooks is almost certainly worth it.
I don't disagree with the sentiment here but I object to the idea that "anti-hucksterism can be seen every day on HackerNews"

A startup, by definition, is an act of hope. It's a bunch of people agreeing to be underpaid and overworked for the chance at doing something great. Even though they know the odds of them actually doing something great are next to 0 (the majority of startups fail).

So the type of Bu--sh--ting or Hucksterism he refers to absolutely MUST be present by definition. And I think everyone knows that. In fact I think it's celebrated here more than any place else.

Look at all the "ASK HN: REVIEW MY STARTUP" threads and you'll see a lot of support. I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone tell a budding entrepreneur not to reach for $100-a-share. When criticism is present it's almost always to help the person achieve that goal not reprimand them for having it.
This is the fifth attempt, if you count Oracle's Network Computer from the late 1990s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Computer
I'd be quite interested to see the comparisons they make and the raw data they use.

When I worked in the public sector the minimum wage came in and boosted a lot of the low grades pay levels. At the time this was said to be an embarrassment for the government as the minimum wage did little to similarly skilled workers outside of the public sector.

Indeed where I worked practically any of the staff could work for substantially more in an equivalent role in a private firm.

Teachers seem to get less money often in private sector, but benefits of shorter terms, better discipline, better working conditions and the like help considerably. Nurses in private employment seem to get quite a bit more.

What's equivalent to the police force?

Armed forces are supposedly poorly paid, but they get bed and board too.

>The report said the gap - or pay premium - between what a typical public sector worker earns above their equivalent in the private sector has increased to 16.5% over the past two years for salaried workers.

But it says this has risen by 35% for workers paid by the hour, despite efforts by the government to reduce the public sector wage bill.*

At the same time, real pay has fallen for the bottom 30% of private sector workers.

/ Is this a case of damn lies and statistics. If private sector pay falls then the gap widens, no? Is this article just about falling private sector pay due to recession?
Funny enough, on a Nvidia Quadro NVS 110M laptop I get the same thing in Chrome -- but it works in Firefox 4 (when it doesn't crash the whole browser).