skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I noticed that the expression "Systems Programming" now seems to mean a much higher level that it used to. In my mind, writing a web server is still an "application" and is not equivalent to, for example, writing an operating system. The Go language is also claiming to be a "Systems Programming Language" but I won't use it for what I call "Systems Programming"...
>> if "young" accounts have very limited votes available will new users be less likely to stick around long enough to become more active voters?

I suppose that depends on whether or not they are on the site to read submitted news articles and comments or to play the voting and karma game. I rarely vote (or comment for that matter), but I get value from the content. For that reason, I have continued to consistently visit the site for a couple of years.
There was no logically fallacy, he was just making a relevant point.
seems like those cycles could have been better spent protein folding or looking for aliens or something
> If I were more mean spirited I might say that you don't understand how to parse a sentence or that words can take on different meanings in different contexts. I'm certain that's not actually true but that is effectively the conclusion you came to in the same situation. Pretty silly right?

Ahh so let's just play word games then? Let's just call callbacks "allocators of effect" and functions "parameterized callbacks" and see how clear our writing is. Even if we ignore this gaffe, it implies Ryah thinks the world is struggling under the burden of blocking libraries. "Oh no," our hypothetical wage slave might cry, "this library unexpected uses a thread. Now my job is impossible." It's strange to even claim that a feature in 2011. Maybe Node's needs a Paul-Tyma-figure to come snap them out of their implicit assumption that asynchronous libraries are always faster; they are not.

But what he said wasn't true. You can write loops in Javascript, so libraries could enter into infinite loops which would stop the machine from progressing.

> Whether or not winning benchmarks is useful is debatable, but given that constraint it's obvious you don't want GC. He wants a scripting language without GC not JavaScript specifically.

He was not asking or direct allocators and deallocators, if you read the quote, he was talking about removing memory management entirely. I'm not sure how Node's functions could lexically close over anything unless you start introducing a lot of new notions that current node programmers don't care abut.

> Give the guy some credit, he is a C programmer by trade.

I want to. I really want to. But then he writes blog posts like this (http://antirobotrobot.tumblr.com/post/5109182039/overlapped-...) and severely undermines my confidence in him. When he was just playing around with a side project I thought it was a cool hack. Now that he's got a corporate backer it's a little surprising he isn't bothering to up his game.
Or perhaps must be affected by antigravity the way matter is by gravity. Assuming antigravity exists. Whether that's correct at all I don't know, but that's the logic being used.
Obviously not always. It's like in football. Often better get someone with potential and turn him into star.

+ every company needs B-players as well. Nothing wrong not being top notch hacker but rather a reliable loyal worker.
Could anyone recommend a hosted email service that does not allow spying on users?

Alternatively I wonder what Bruce Schneier recommends? Do you have to host your own email server?
Let me elaborate on my previous comment, then:

In the absence of security countermeasures on the casino end, counting cards is not very difficult. You need to be able to do some mental arithmetic in a distraction-filled environment, and you need the self-discipline to follow the technique even when your guts are telling you otherwise, but lots of people have those character traits.

So if a casino does not take active measures to distinguish the blackjack players who are counting cards (who need to be kicked out) from the blackjack players who are just lucky (who need to be courted until their luck runs out), then lots of people, not just the generic “you”, will show up and gradually bleed the house dry.
For companies:

Hire the absolute best you can find. Your goal should be to find people who are better than you at what you do. You need to hit every source of talent and try your damn best to get the best. Failing that, settle for someone who is only as good as you are. This is monumentally important with your first 4-5 hires as it sets the bar and sets the culture.

For job seekers:

They are interviewing you, but YOU are also interviewing THEM. If you are not passionate about what they are doing, it's probably not a good fit. If they are unwilling to listen to you give a better solution than the one they thought of, there's probably something wrong with their culture. If they are offended that you found a bug in their code or test, that's a huge red flag already.

Now, in big companies you can get away with coasting along, working as a simple code monkey. If that's what you want (not saying it's a bad thing), then you need neither passion nor aptitude to get a decent wage working an easy job.

If, however, you crave something bigger and more rewarding, you need to seek out companies that are passionate about the same things you are. In a market as hot as this one, there are a LOT of passionate companies looking for talented people (especially startups!).
Knowledge Is Power… Maybe
A lot of people go with removing the cd drive and adding the ssd there. That's what I did and aside from a sata saturation firmware bug it went great. So fast.
I have no idea how you can measure such things, but several serial killers have terrorized large areas for fairly long periods of time. 9/11 may have been dramatic, but it was over fairly quickly so the terror was short lived, and it also took several people which hurts on the / attackers side.

PS: I watched it live on TV missed the first attack, but saw the other two get reported and personally I was never really that strongly impacted. More WTF? than run for the hills.
I currently use gmail. The only features I "need" are tags and searching.
No, it is not.

With facebook they could know about you EVEN when you are not into facefook.

You know , they make people tag their photos with the names on it, with face detection. So the tree letter agencies (NSA..) have registering of events they previously did not have access to: Your friends weeding photos tells them you were there. They do not have to ask anymore. They know everything about anyone with redundancy(multiple people making photos). You are your friends spy.

Once you tag your photos you do their work, instead of having to analyze 5 million pixels x 4 bytes = 20MBytes of data per photo, you reduce it to a 20Bytes name they can plot on a link graph with 1 million more with minimum effort.
Gosh, I hate this semi-transparent gray box at the bottom of webpages like that one. I'm using a netbook so screen estate is quite limited, and these boxes are really obnoxious. Is there a way to turn them off?
To be fair the posted solution at the parent of this thread is wrong. The gush supplied code also doesn't compile and run correctly without modification.
Where should the hit target boundaries for UI elements go?
The only problem here is that he has supposedly been thrown in the ocean to prevent anyone from trying to recover his body. However, I must admit that I would also like some form of proof as well.
ALESSI'S 20% OFF SALE FOR MAY
They could just use a compressed-air ballast tank. That would certainly be simpler than a miniature collider, and the explosion risk isn't that bad compared to the rest of the device.
You could take the log of any score > 1 to reduce the incentive to game the system.. that way someone who relentlessly karma whores won't have that much more influence than a mildly uprated commenter, but both will have more influence than a noob.
I'm doubtful that a 27,000 word patent can be accurately described in a three paragraph blurb.
Some more detail in that article would be nice.
It's not necessarily 'spying.' Many large service providers have such as system for logging in as a user to aid in troubleshooting. Yahoo's is known as AMT for example and lets customer service (or anyone with high enough access clearance) 'be' that user, to see first hand the issues the customer might be dealing with.

For everyone who thinks they're an email pro, or never come across problems, there's thousands of users calling any support number they can to try to understand why their junk mail folder won't empty.
What do you call "Systems Programming"?

(I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but you haven't provided a definition of what you consider systems programming.)
Some even pay zero tax whilst making billions in profit.

Yes, typically because they lost billions in prior years. Sometimes also due to various tax subsidies (e.g., green energy tax credits in the case of GE).

Are the tax policies of most nations unfair to corporations?

I didn't say it was unfair to corporations. I don't believe that a claim like "unfair to corporations" even makes logical sense.

I said it was unfair to their owners. Consider your hypothetical business owner. Out of the $100k in profits, the business pays perhaps $20k. The business owner then pays another $15k. But then people trying to score political points complain that he is getting away with something, and paying only $15k on $80k (19%). I think that's unfair.

Under my proposal, the business pays $0k and the owner pays $35k. This way, he gets to take (moral/political) credit for the taxes he pays just like a salaried employee. (Similarly, I favor eliminating payroll taxes.)
Warmed Up For CodeJam
Al-Qaeda: group of people looking to cause chaos.

Taliban: group of people looking to form a government.

Both have the goals of some kind of extremist Wahhabi-law region.
Practical File System Design: http://www.letterp.com/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf

NT File System Design (Rajeev Nagar) -- you can find this used. I believe his web site had a PDF copy for a while, sans pictures.

My favorite book on transactions is Bernstein's Principles of Transaction Processing (may also be available as a PDF somewhere, from the author).

Read the v6 Unix file system code. That will date me, but it's /simple/ and it works. You can move up from there.

btrfs is neat. I haven't looked at the code.
Hold on, where are you getting the CPT-symmetry violation from? This paper http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.0287v4 has a collection of experimental results hinting at that but the conclusion does not as yet seem to be very strong.
Hi all,
I'll add few details about Distala, and AMP Online Support the underlying API.
We have started this project about 2 years ago, we had made other things around it but stopped their development to focus on the screen-sharing and remote control aspect, and its API.
So as said, every thing works with the AMP Online Support API, it is fully REST, and will soon be released for other developers. We are currently expanding the API to the client-side (JS API), to make a cleaner client interface with Javascript text chat and Flash video/audio chat. Everything will be customizable.

Distala appeared lately (around February), to give a complete example of a typical API's implementation. And is finally a complete service.

For the technologies used:
We mostly used Java (with pieces of C++ for JNI).
We have a cloud-based relay system that enables efficient scalability, all over the world.
Installers are generated with Install4J (a really great tool).
And distala is a PHP/JS/MySQL website.

The professional version isn't out right now, but will soon be available.

Thx all
MySpace in their prime were ridiculously popular too.
How could you possibly know whether it's related to hacker news or not when you didn't even read it?
There is no issue to fix.
1 year ago they did 400,000 vids/month, now it's 700,0000,000 vids/month? Is that a typo?
> And when you go to the pay window [...], you will be sharing a lot less with the government and keeping a lot more.

Ever used a road? Or went to a public school? Do you have a local library? Your tax money doesn't go to the government, it goes to the state. And yes, the state has an expensive administration, but by and large the state is all of us.
HN Karma Broken? 
Screenshot taken at 12:23 Eastern time on May 2, 2011.
I'm not the parent, but I usually consider anything requiring fairly intimate knowledge of the hardware and operating system "systems programming", such as writing a database.

Others seem to refer to it as anything that could be considered part of the OS, like writing drivers.
I don't see why you always have to hire better people than you, or people at least as good as you. If you don't mind people taking some time to learn, you can just hire good problem solvers and let them learn as they work...
Anonymous to Target Iranian Government Websites
If you don't feel like even downloading the Scala compiler, you definitively should not apply for a Scala developer position.
Go read Feynman's QED.
Nice post. I like that it explains why you like this layout.

I'm working on my first real Django project now and as a newbie I found the lack of a clear consensus on how to structure the files a bit of a challenge.
Okay, but there are actually TWO factors at play here, not just one.

The linked article intimates that efficiency and technology reduces costs in the "cloud" datacenter, to the point of costs being 1/5th of a "regular" datacenter. I don't doubt that if you have the latest, fanciest tech, you can save some money.

But the flip side is a reduced staffing ratio and hidden systemic risk. Amazon employs fewer sysadmins per server than your "regular" datacenter would. That saves money when things go well, and it means there aren't enough sysadmins to fix things quickly when the excrement hits the air circulation device. That's a hidden systemic risk factor that you should be taking into account - but you aren't. It's really exactly like finance. If the risk-free rate is 3%, and someone tells you that they can get you 6% with no risk, they're lying. There's risk being hidden somewhere that isn't apparent to you.
So in your implementation, you gain voting weight by voting on the posts that have themselves accumulated the highest vote counts?

In order for this to work, you'd have to hide vote totals on all posts and comments, which, as jamesbritt pointed out above, eliminates a feedback mechanism that users may find desirable.
How do you test code that relies on the current time in C#/Java. I've seen a couple solution. Injecting some type of abstract Clock/SystemClock everywhere being common. C#'s lambda's let you do something nicer, like:

class SystemTime
{
public Func<DateTime> Now => () = DateTime.Now;
}

Ultimately though, you're having to work around the fact that Java and C# are class-oriented, rather than object-oriented. Classes are useful - they serve as a template for your object, but in most (all?) dynamic languages, the class itself is a living, breathing, modifiable, runtime object.

What does all this mean? How do you get the current time in a testable manner in Ruby? Use Time.now. You don't implement patterns or change your code. You don't fear the evil static..because really, it isn't a static - we don't even call it a static. It's just another method on another class, which we can rewrite at runtime as need be.

How do you stub it? Well, using a mocking framework:

Time.stub!(:now).and_return(Time.local(2011, 5, 3, 0, 1, 22))

The mechanics of how this is internally done isn't too complicated once you know about Ruby's metaprogramming (which probably takes around the same amount of time as getting familiar with C# or Java's reflection capabilities).

I know, it's a simple example. But it's surprisingly common. And I find it a little ridiculous that to get the time, we need to start creating interfaces and injecting parameters. While C#'s lambda's largely solve this problem, move to something just slightly more complicated, and you're back at square one.

I dunno, not sure if that explained it without being condescending. I'm tired...that stub is actually returning a pretty accurate time for me.
Or, you know, they might have them for stuff like area checking.
Wag the Dog anyone?
That is a good solution. You should patent it! METHOD FOR DYNAMICALLY REGULATING BALLAST MASS ON ANTI-GRAVITY FLOATATION TRANSPORT DEVICE
Under U.S. laws, providers are often required to give information to the government if they have a warrant. If you want (more) security, host it yourself.
Slightly off-topic: ever since I started working my way through Land of Lisp a while ago, I decided I would spend some time trying to seriously learn a lisp dialect. I was thinking that dialect would be Clojure because of its compatibility with Java and its community. But can anyone speak for Racket? I couldn't find a "why racket?" section on their homepage.
You need to show them one unique feature that they like and find useful. It could be a plugin/extension.

I'd suggest you say it's good practice to have the latest software installed. And in the case of Internet Explorer - if they are using Windows XP - then they ought to try an alternative - as the latest is not available for their platform.

A lot of people just don't put the time aside to learn how to use or understand their tools. I have a relative that has been using the web for only a year. And they get hung up on the most simple of things. Remember your first experiences? Computers are not that intuitive for a beginner. A little training is invaluable.

Once people are let loose on the web - it's hard to reel them back in.
Offtopic, but you could get a third-party warranty from SquareTrade.
Advanced Grid Component using HTML5 Canvas
Getting cached images from your site's visitors
Show HN: My startup: code4cheap.com, a code marketplace
The same people don't seem to bash Lua's tables.
If you use a hosted service, then unless it is specifically set up to prevent it (as with tarsnap for backups, which requires key management on the end-user's part), the people hosting it will have access to your data.

If that's a major issue, then your only recourse is to host it yourself.

Running a mail server isn't terribly hard, but it does mean that when the server dies you're on the hook for fixing it. If you're not a sysadmin, then the pragmatic choice is probably to accept that Google doesn't care about the details of your email and will only be spying on you in aggregate to determine what adverts to display.
Views from the leaders - comprehensive CEO Roll up  NYT
I used to live over there, I know much more than most Americans that there have been drone strikes inside Pakistan for years. And U.S. missile strikes on non-military targets have to end, agreed.

But if the news is true that the U.S. has known about this compound, that it was housing a major terrorist figure, and that the Pakistani Army (not ISI or rather, not just ISI) knew about it, then that's a major game-changer in U.S.-Pakistani governmental relations.

Your average American and your average Pakistani don't know anything about each other. (for very general values of anything, clearly.)
Hrm. This is one of my first blog posts, and I feel like I made it too technical.
I've been debating peepopen but without a trial/demo of some sort I haven't really been willing to dive in. Would you say it's worth it for a vim user?

(edit: never mind, I went ahead and got it)
Bin Laden's Low Tech Hideout May Have Been His Undoing
I'm not even getting that from the link. To me, the link only shows that I can download The Haskell Platform for my Mac.

The only thing there related to XCode is that one needs to have it installed as a prerequisite for running the haskell platform's installer.

This is no surprise because the installer wants to have the "unix development support" package available (it contains gcc, header files, misc command line tools in locations where run-of-the-mill Makefiles can find them...) and it's just incidental that one needs to run the XCode installer in order to get these basic unix amenities on the system.
Posting a random screenshot without giving any indication about what you perceive to be the problem is probably not going to get much of a response.
question: wouldnt your ISP capture all traffic and "log it" on the run, so if you have your own mailserver, government can still ask ISP to get them your traffic packets? -- AFAIK mail runs in plain text over the net, right?
Nostradamus's Mabus Prophecy fulfilled by the Death of Osama Bin Laden & Obama
Startup Accelerators & Incubators Ranked; TechStars and YC Top The Rankings
Google takes top spot in reputation rankings apple intel amazon close behind
I have 3 different SSDs since early 2009 (64 & 128GB Supertalent Ultradrive ME + Intel X25-M 80GB) and the latter two are in heavy use everyday. They all work fine until today, but this article worries me a bit ;)
How does an article with 71 points that's been up for 2 hours beat an article with 300+ that has been up for 1 hour?
Sorry - this reads as though it was written from an authority figure within HN. Am I missing something? I don't think you are part of the HN admin team but I could be wrong.

Examples:

"Furthermore, should you feel the need to flag a piece of content, please refrain from remarking on your subsequent flagging in the thread itself."

"Should you still not feel the article worthy of HN, please do flag it. However, please do not mention that you have flagged it, nor argue for your actions."

I guess I just don't understand why you, instead of pg, are the one telling us this if it is the official line of the HN rules.

If you're just "some dude making a comment", then I certainly don't agree with most of what you wrote. As far as I'm concerned, people can do what they want when they flag and they can flag what they want, unless the HN guidelines say otherwise.
Looking at news.arc, the ranking algorithm includes a factor called lightweight-factor if (among other things) the linked site is in a table called "lightweights." I suspect that table includes nytimes.com. This is because, according to the HN guidelines, "if they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

As an aside, your post triggers the same behavior, as it's just a link to an image.
Startups Are Hard
I wouldn't. I don't object to others trying their luck ;-)
So .. you don't read much sci-fi, do you?
Yes: sdf.lonestar.org. Been running since 1987.
Why Android Location Data Is So Important to Google
Best as I can tell I don't think we disagree. You are saying that antimatter should react the same way with respect to gravity as matter does right? Then I agree. I do not think antimatter will be found to fall up or be repelled.