skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Going Dark - Spying on other people's computers
That's arguable - you certainly need all nodes to agree in lots of applications. And if you add a maximum time for computation, where do you set the line? Especially in mobile networks, computations can take a wildly varying length of time.
What he says is pretty much very true. Consulting Companies here are on a hiring spree in colleges.
Education here is pretty bad too, the reason being it is in a chapter-wise marks format. Let me tell you how a CS student prepares for exam, Variables is 20 marks, Pointers are 50 marks and Arrays are 40 marks, Lets just study Pointers and Arrays(you get the point right). This is pretty much the case everywhere in India. Optimize the marks at the cost of Understanding.

An entry level engineer here makes close to $1.5-$3/ hour in a reputed consultancy firm. I would not want to talk about those low paying firms at all. Nobody can expect good code for $3/ hour. I am sure Clients are paying more money per person but Consultancy is a broker here who eats up much of the money of their employees. This is pretty much the case here.
Now, should I forward this article to my gf or not?
I've worked with many technologies (including COBOL), but my favorite is still Pick/BASIC. I thought I was the only Pick person here at hacker news.

astrec, where are you and what are you working on? Answer here or contact me off-line. Also, please put your email address on your public profile.
No mention of the deadly mortgage & spouse disease.
Sure, "more work" if you measure in man hours; but when you actually go to use the code and find that it won't compile because the Indian coders who wrote it didn't even have computers, and wrote the entire application down on paper and paid to have it typed, you realize you wasted your time and money.

Outsourcing is no different from hiring regular programmers; if you wouldn't hire the people you're outsourcing to, why in the world would you trust them to do a good job?

True story, by the way.
As a software consultant, I always want companies to outsource their programming tasks...to me! ;-)

But seriously, I agree with your take, inovica, I was frustrated with the quality of work (and integrity of the workers) when trying to cut costs and hire Indian programmers. So I looked elsewhere and have been very pleased with the results I've gotten by working very closely with Russian programmers.

A blanket statement such as "outsourcing sucks" isn't helpful to anybody seriously considering it. It's also link bait, imo.
I think this may highlight the risk of a "Bang" release. Sure, you get a ton of attention all at the same time, but if your product isn't good enough, that's going to be hard to fix (The impression in peoples minds).

I wonder why they didn't just show it to a few hundred people first... maybe they did, I don't know, it just seems like a bit of a bad way to release a product to me.

build product in a vacuum -> release it to the world!!! -> Oh... umm... they don't like it
Factors that improve online experiences
Disqus and FriendFeed Rock Again [Good Customer Service]
The definition of evil
Calloc or Malloc? Any thoughts?
To the best of my understanding, it is largely equivalent to say:

int * i;

i = (int * ) malloc(10 * sizeof(int));

as it is to say:

int * i;

i = (int*) calloc(10,sizeof(int));

The one allocates a memory block of size 10 times sizeof(int), the other allocates ten memory blocks each of size sizeof(int) and has them all initialized to 0. So effectively the only difference in this case is calloc initializes the blocks to 0 whereas malloc does not. And calloc is more computationally expensive. But in the end a similar result obtains.

Normally I use malloc, but out of curiousity I read up about calloc and this seems to be the answer, that they are basically the same except calloc initializes n number of blocks to size size_t instead of 1 block of some given size size_t, calloc initializes the values to 0 where malloc does not, and calloc takes more time for the cpu to do than malloc does. So with some minor differences the above two statements should do the same thing - i.e. I can use the int arrays allocated thusly the same. I think. :-)

Anybody have any thoughts? Which is better to use normally?

(by the way http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/Dave/C/node11.html is where I was reading up on these functions)
Ok, so this might be the wrong place to bitch about it, but if I prefer Adobe acrobat, I actually have to sign up to not use their service?

Wtf
Fair Labor Standards Act: Six Things Tech Workers Need to Know
Fame matters more than beauty in consumer behaviour
I always use calloc when allocating many blocks at once, as you said. Yes, you get a free bzero() with it, but that's not why I use it.

When I'm trying to allocate memory for many blocks of something, I'd use calloc just because it makes my intentions clearer in the code when someone else is reading it. If I'm allocating memory just for one area or block, I'd use malloc+bzero or possibly calloc with a clear block count of one. The efficiency in the end is pretty equivalent but it makes your code easier to digest to other people.
with a handle like "biohacker," your phone is probably already making funny noises...!
It is weird and magical to me that the lisp guy got modded up but the JavaScript guy got modded down.
as i can recall the founders of YouTube said it was impossible to share videos with email because of the large size...
except .3gp how are you going to avoid the file size limitation of most mail services?
As they say, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

It is never wise to trust and go by any blanket generalization. I am afraid the author raised very valid points, but at the end made this blanket statement:

So what is the solution?
Don’t outsource. Seriously.

And then (probably as an afterthought) added this:

If your work is very monotonous and does not demand high quality, outsource.
If you want a very good software product and if it the flagship product of your company, never ever outsource.
You are doomed otherwise.

My views on this topic:

1. Outsource wisely. If consider yourself a hacker, and are in early stages of developing your product/startup idea, then outsourcing is definitely not for you.

2. If your work is not well specified and not well thought out, cross location development would make it even more harder to come up with something special.

3. Good programmers are not easy to find anywhere. If you are looking to outsource, and want a good team, please be ready to put in the hard yards. Negotiate, and select your team.

4. If even if you have the right team 'skills wise', please give this 'relationship' a little bit of time as well. :-). Developing a good working relationship across geographies is not easy. So, if you are looking for a quick solution in a short time frame (2-3 months), your odds of not getting what you really want, are higher.

Previous related discussion threads:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=217858

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=233145
37signals Live - Episode 2 - Today Noon EST
Speed Matters: US Internet Speeds State by State
I assure you that the buzz has not died down for people considering serious investment in Cuil. And ultimately, that's why people do buzz launches of demo products like Cuil (and Powerset before it) did.

The mandate is to prove:

1) That you can make an infrastructure capable of generating indices and hosting a search site that will get major traffic.

2) That your product is not vaporware.

3) That your product has room to grow in terms of technical capability, to justify why a company is seeing investment.
During my internship (summer 07) I was encouraged to use XP instead of Vista. Both my boss and mentor used it. Though this may be atypical, I don't think anyone cares what you run as long as you get your work done.

Don't know why you would want to use XP though, it seems pretty old and funky these days. And who really wants to check for spyware every day or two. I choose to use vista, but did a good deal of my coding in emacs, and kept ubuntu on my home machine.
https://www6.software.ibm.com/developerworks/education/au-me...

It is a pretty trivial stuff though. First half describes typical "slab allocator". The other half covers the use of free lists, and that's in a context of speeding up their own clumsy bitmap-based free block tracking code. All this is supported by dmalloc (?), which is IIRC a default GNU libc allocator.

The discussion of multithreading issues is very basic too - just simple single-lock wrapper of all API calls. That's just dumb if you pardon my French. No mentioning of granular locking or lock-free options.

Also, on a more general note - writing custom memory manager is an option of last resort when optimizing existing code that cannot be refactored. That's because writing a manager is meant to negate the effects of a bad application design; so if latter can be fixed, there's really no need for a manager.

Consider their own example of allocating 5000000 objects, each with its own new() call. This is what the std::vector is for - it coalesces all new calls into one and then constructs the instances. If, in a real world, these 5 million objects are not allocated all at once, then vector still can be used as an application-level pool of objects. In the end, this is an application-specific allocation quirk and it needs to be dealt with at the application level, not in libc.
My girlfriend would be delighted if there were a male contraceptive pill. She is barely over 100 pounds and is very sensitive to medication across the board. (Just one cup of coffee in the afternoon is enough to give her insomnia.)

We went through 4 different contraceptive pills, each switch taking over a month. They had obnoxious side effects: made her feel irritable, cut her sex drive down to nothing, made her feel not attracted to me, and made her feel like she "wasn't herself." It was horrible and it did test our relationship. The pill is not really an option for her, and I wish I had an option other than a vasecctomy.

(We currently use condom & foam, which ruins a lot of the spontaneity, and which isn't quite effective enough for her tastes.)
So, all I have to do to get that girl that isn't interested in me to change her mind is convince her to take the Pill?
Should Hitler's Mein Kampf be Un-Banned?
So, instead of having multiple routes, with this method you're locked into one route per action.
You'd think it's JavaScript, but actually, it's Python.
A few people had asked me about setting this up and I've finally gotten around to it. If it gets accepted, I plan on using InsideYC.reddit.com to solicit questions to ask the panelists in the run-up to SXSW. But I'd like to know specifically from the Hacker News community -- what would you like to be covered?
Okay, I spent the last 15 minutes writing the code above in assembler, and then looked at myself and thought - what the hell are you doing?
Prevent a Disaster A Remote Backup Service Showdown
i only use calloc when i have any chance of addressing an area that could ever potentially be empty. i more typically malloc if i'm making space and immediately fill it up completely with whatever goes in it so that any of the previous garbage is gone
day = 15

case day
when 1 then puts "All the rage!"
when 2 then puts "Worst product e-v-e-r"
when 3..(1.0/0) then puts "...uhhh...nil, but Ruby still loves cuil, even if others dont!"
end
Apple's iPhone 3G A Month Later: Excellent, But Not Euphoric
That's the nature of buzz that gets you in front of 1/200th of internet users. (Based on Alexa stats, at least.) Also according to Alexa, they are only down about 4x from their peak at launch. Cuil claims they got 50 million searches on launch day, so if this logic is even remotely close to correct they are still seeing a good amount of use.

Of course, each of these stats sources are somewhat unreliable, and combining them raises its own issues. Caveat emptor. ;-)
Newsflash: Google is a Ponzi Scheme
One tank of gas girl controversy
sigh

What's the deal with your headline? How about if you show a little class and not use profanity next time? The headline in the original article is "No end in sight for Calfornia’s budget woes". Why would you change it to "Go help California out of the shitter"? Is that supposed to be funny?

If you want to behave like a fool please go back to Reddit or Digg. Garbage like this isn't welcome here.
Multilingual SEO Forums 
News about SEO in different languages to have more info about how to exploit affiliates, etc.
It was a DailyWTF a while back, I believe.
That final solution was trash. Decouping can be helpful. For me the biggest is using third-party code. I can have my own URL structure for someone else's app and the views (in Django, aka controllers in Rails) don't change. Having to change every method just to fit into my site structure would be a nightmare. And I don't see a need to tie URLs to my methods, they're not always being called by a URL anyway.

Knowing about available parameters is again not a problem in Django, they are in the method definition. I was pretty sure this was the case with Rails anyway.

And as Chris already mentioned, you can have multiple routes if they are decoupled.
First: Lose the cast. It's not needed in C, clutters the code, and can hide real problems (like implicit declarations of the functions -- this can cause crashes on 64-bit architectures). A void* exists solely so it can be assigned to any type* without casts. It's useless for any other purpose.

Yes, they are effectively the same. I'd suspect that on most systems (glibc, certainly) calloc more or less does:

mem = malloc(nelem * size);
memset(mem, 0, nelem * size);
return mem;
Getting your geek on! Finish it!!
I bet that in a month, Cuil is still a top 1000 site according to the usual measurement services. Maybe the buzz has died and I find many faults with their launch strategy (and results) -- but they still built and shipped a fast Internet-scale search engine. That alone should give them a lot of slack.
I2 Says "I Do"
Another one "bites the dust"...
7 things to remember while building a web application
Cutting beams makes no sense! That would be a stupid and heartless landlord. The apartment is no longer rentable for the next tenant, and repairs are likely to cost a lot.

I've had friends here in Houston whose landlords have lollygagged with fixing the water heater and the air conditioner -- for about half a year. The landlord of the friend with the broken water heater tried not cashing her rent checks for several months in order to evict her ahead of the lease. My friend just explained that she had been sending checks, and she also had the cash on hand and just handed the amount due over to her landlord in front of the judge.
Evolution, change we can believe in!
I'd like to hear long-term stories of life before, during, and after YC, for the companies/founders. Not just snapshots of today. Ideally with low-level details that provide the true insights, obstacles and challenges faced and (how they were overcome or bypassed), and the life journey.

When reading books (especially those of founders/companies/history/philosophy), it is the long-term journey that I find most interesting.
I think there's a difference between an engineer working for someone, and the person making the product decision. If you're a developer for a software company building accounting software, and you don't have much use for accounting software personally, you're probably fine. But if you're defining the product, you're much better off if you've been a user of accounting software in the past.
I'm not someone who overemphasises the value of credentials but I wouldn't dismiss this result so eagerly if it won a serious award and is considered an important result by more knowledgeable people than me.
Tell you what, I don't know about caching but I have long held spaces to be evil, such as "C:\Program Files". WTF? It would have made sense to say "C:\Program_Files" but using a space is just, well, wrong. I work in Austin where rumor holds that horse thieves are still hung to this day. Something about "common law"/"citizen's arrest". Anyway. If that is true and I don't know if it is, I might expand the horse thief law to those who include spaces in directory names. (In jest at any rate!)
Google Releases an Open Source Cryptography Toolkit
What's Wrong with Western Music? Part III. "Passacaglia in Cm"
YouTube vs Webkinz: How they grew over time, state-by-state, to become successful websites (maps included!)
Parallax: a novel browsing interface designed for freebase
It's a nice feature for browsing Wikipedia aimlessly. I'd be more interested in an article about this: "We’ve got a super-fast in-house graph storage system that makes it possible to do interesting stuff with graphs quickly, notably figure out which pages are related.." Sounds cool, how does it work?
Sorry, but i disagree with your blanket statements as well.

Let me tell you how a CS student prepares for exam,
Variables is 20 marks, Pointers are 50 marks and Arrays are 40 marks, Lets just study Pointers and Arrays(you get the point right).
This is pretty much the case everywhere in India.

Not sure how many CS students you know, and how many of them actually studied the way you mention. But to extend that to "pretty much" everyone is going a bit too far.

And as far not giving your best (or getting the best) when you are working for $5 an hour (its great we have currency exchange rates!), is also not true as well. I know plenty of people who give/gave their best, just because they liked it. I love programming and believe i churned out good stuff, when i was earning that much. And there are plenty of others like me.

So does that "pretty much" means, everyone does great work, no it doesn't.
Overall, I wouldn't agree that "science is having a hard time", either. I don't think trends in PhD production are consistent with your argument (PhD production is basically at an all-time high). The Internet and the computer revolution are also compelling examples of how important science and technology are: in addition to being a useful tool for science itself, they have motivated a lot of people to go into scientific/technical careers.
Maybe he got modded down for posting code that won't run.
The reason the malloc tax is so high is because of "free".
This is retartded. You might aswell define your "routes" with mod_rewrite. (or equiv)
"most developers aren't hedge-fund traders, auto mechanics, laywers, hotel managers, etc. yet somehow people manage to build specialized software for those fields. "

But imagine how much better the software will be when the developers know as much as hedge-fund traders, auto mechanics, etc. If you look at a book like Martin Fowler's Analysis Patterns, you realize that a deep understanding of the domain is crucial to building a good model to support it.
An interesting article describing attraction and smell in humans:

http://psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-19960...

It's interesting that the pill, which intentionally tampers with a woman's reproductive system, also tampers with what a woman finds attractive in a potential mate, sans the intention of mating for reproduction.
Gearheads don't get it
switch ($day)

{

case 1:
echo "All the rage!";
break;

case 2:
echo "Worst product e-v-e-r";
break;

case 3:
echo " ";
break;

default:
die('not cuil ... not cuil');
}
Calloc clears the memory to all bits zero. All bits zero doesn't necessarily mean zero values. Not many people will make this distinction and happily write broken code thinking that calloc always clears the values to zero accordingly.

calloc's zero fill is all-bits-zero, and is therefore guaranteed to yield the value 0 for all integral types, and '\0' for character types -- but does not guarantee useful null pointer values or floating-point zero values.

Some C implementations represent null pointers by special, nonzero bit patterns when it can be arranged so that inadvertently using those values triggers automatic hardware traps.
If I was to work for a company, it would probably be one that had rigour in its employment practice.
Those that hire carefully, fire carefully, and you can actually learn a lot about a company from the interview (as much as they can learn about you).

If that takes a 9 hours or a 9 days, then so be it. At least then I'd know I would be working with people I can respect and learn from and would enjoy being around.
You're kind of doing the same thing -- the fact that you've had good experiences with Russian programmers doesn't mean that Russian programmers are good, and Indian programmers are bad. I've had very bad experiences with Russian coders (not by choice).

I think the parent's point was that some outsourced people are good, and that you just have to take time to find the pearls in the (giant, steaming, rancid) piles of oyster guts. The bigger problem with outsourcing, if you ask me, is the communication delay. It's nearly impossible to build a team when they're thousands of miles (and 12 time zones) away.
You seem to be forgetting about the docs and the examples in there....
Google Minus Google
It's astonishing how many people you meet that have worked with Pick, and perhaps less so the percentage of those who love it. I know a whole stack of people using UniVerse and UniData.

As for me, I worked with AP on SVR4 (NCR)and D3 on UnixWare in the 90s. Actually there were some old ADDS boxes kicking around too. Inventory management and accounting. I quit to join a dot com in Feb 2000. Clever of me, eh?

Right now I'm in Australia for the most part (have a place in NYC too). Not working on anything particularly important, but I am getting the itch.
This is a great science article, thanks DanielBMarkham!

"Several previous studies have suggested that women tend to prefer the smell of men who are different from them in a cluster of genes ... which governs the immune system"

"when the women started taking the Pill their preferences shifted towards the scent of men with more similar genes to their own."

"The research also found differences between women in relationships, who tended to prefer odours of men with different MHC genes, and single women, who tended to prefer the smell of MHC-similar men. This could potentially indicate that if women are tempted to have an affair, they are more likely to choose a man with very different genes, to maximise the diversity of any offspring that they might have."

"Women on the Pill tend to prefer macho types with strong jaw lines and prominent cheekbones. However, women who are not taking that form of contraception seem to be more likely to go for more sensitive types of men without traditionally masculine features."

If these findings are all true, how many things that have happened over the last 30-40 years would it explain? Sicklier children, cultural attitudes towards men, rising divorce rates, etc. Wow.
Up, up, down, down, left, right, half-circle punch!
Communicating Sequential Processes: A Formalism for Concurrent Programs
Indeed. I voted it up because i like YUI and would like to thank Yahoo for the work. I realized my mistake right after i clicked...

This is not a news entry and shouldn't be on HN. Perhaps a good way to go about showing your gratitude is to ask people here on how they use YUI and share that with Yahoo...or something like that.
I'm not making the comparison. I'm making fun of it.
If the results of outsourcing were so bad you all guys wouldn't be so worked up about it. The truth is, the person you answered (currently downmodded to -1) made an excellent point. People who protest against outsourcing are no different from the workers long ago, when the companies first started using machines to perform tasks previously done by physical labor. The workers then went on strikes, were destroying the machines etc.
neither.. try using a language does dynamic memory allocation and garbage collection... it would save you a lot of headache...
calloc by default, then profile your code, and if memset or calloc hits the top of the profile, start pruning them out.

You get a much bigger performance win out of swapping in a pool allocator, or, even better, arenas.
The same is true for golf.