skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Also seeing WebGL taking hold, I must say that I'd certainly consider JS as a serious contender for the likes of .Net etc"

At most I would say JavaScript can be a "serious contender" to a very small subset of .NET. There is no way you can just substitute everything .NET offers with a mix of html5 and JavaScript. That's why I don't think anyone doing .NET development should be in the least bit concerned. That is unless they have some irrational phobia of having to learn something new for their presentation layer.
It seems to me that it should be possible to use memcpy between multiple C variables to avoid straight type-punning, and then have the compiler reöptimize it into aliased memory or registers (assuming the source isn't volatile memory or something like that, in which case things get trickier anyway). This is roughly what I do in my C programs these days.

In some cases, declaring alignment may be hard to do portably; it's probably possible to use union tricks to force there to exist a dummy statement that implies certain alignment without breaking the aliasing rules, but I don't know for sure since I haven't run into such cases in practice yet.

As a nonrepresentative example, the simple function:

uint64_t foo(char x[8]) {
uint64_t y; memcpy(&y, &x[0], 8); return y;
}

gets compiled into a single « movq (%rdi), %rax » by gcc -S -O2 on my AMD64 machine with GCC 4.6.1.
Ditto here with PDF => Google Docs
Maybe the feeling is that your personal statement of discontent with x86 is not really relevant to the story that new instructions have been added to x86. This is probably why you were downvoted. If you want to leave a comment with a similar essence, perhaps you should try commenting on one or two new instructions that are [interesting|upsetting|repetitive] to you ahead of your statement that you don't care about ARM anymore.

Would HN be a good place if everyone who didn't care about something posted on the story and said, "Ha, I don't care about this, ha ha"?
Very nice! Possible revenue stream by letting folks track their bookmarks, etc.
Another idea: Joining a startup seems similar to being thrown in the deep end. You go in thinking you'll be over your head, but you learn real quick. [1] A large company, on the other hand, seems like it would be easier to settle into. You would get more assistance and there would be more people to show you what you're supposed to be doing.

[1] All joking aside, this is how I learned to swim. Someone literally threw me into the deep end of a pool. I wasn't happy about it, but I knew how to swim!
Maybe you should go to other cities outside Silicon Valley.
One word: outliers.
As I understand it, defending a patent suit is not cheap even if you're completely in the right.
tl;dr: I am old. lol.
They aren't going to kill Silverlight and Silverlight will largely remain unchanged. Remember, while this is a new feature in Windows 8, it's a small feature (live tiles on start menu thing).
I think they were useful in egypt and tunisia to get people organized for the revolution that is still sweeping the middle east.
Huh! Interesting.. pretty much what I was thinking about. Unfortunately, I could not sign up . but I would love to take a look at their product
Just because you don't find it useful doesn't mean that other people don't have utility in facebook.
Everyone needs to make sure each candidate answers two questions during the upcoming election cycle:

1. Do you believe higher speed internet service will lead to a better jobs
economy?

2. What policies will you pursue to so that more Americans have internet access
comparable to our global counterparts? E.g. Germany where speeds are 10x's as
fast at 2/3 the price?
U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti For Hanes & Levis
Sony Data Breach Coming to the End?
Good Hackers Do Exists
This is a great story. Not only were the engineers brave enough to defy Jobs, but also Jobs being able to admit his own mistake and not fire the entire team upon finding out. Signs of true leadership all round.
Yes, I'm not affiliated with them at all; I just found the deal on LEB and opened a server and I just thought the price was fantastic for 1GB of RAM. In fact, it's the cheapest 1GB of RAM I've ever seen. I think they can manage it because they use Hyper-V dynamic RAM allocation. I've never seen that in practice, it's really interesting to see. A kernel driver actually sucks up the extra RAM you're not using if it's needed somewhere else.
I can't disagree that sending out an e-mail would've been nice, though it'd also not be good to stir up all the affiliates when it wasn't yet known if the bill would be made law. That aside, anyone who made a significant portion of their income as an affiliate should've been aware of the impending bill for months and have been watching whether it would pass at the same time Amazon was watching it. It's not an Amazon bill, it affects every affiliate in the state for all companies... Overstock is another big company that severed its affiliate relationships with everyone in the state when the bill passed.
clickable

http://www.vikasvadlapatla.com/musicwalla

http://www.slideshare.net/vgvikas/musicwalla-business-pitch-...
Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/806/
The limitation on the map end is only a limitation for hadoop.

But the limit on the reducer is fundamental. Some reduce functions are not associative, and some don't even have type [T x U] -> T x U. In those cases, there is nothing to be done but redo the reduce.
Oh come on, it's advertising.
I've never had problems with any of those on Linux. YMMV, of course, and I may just have been lucky.

While you might have problems if you build a custom machine or use extremely recent hardware (which doesn't have good drivers), the general implication of browser-as-OS is that people wouldn't be installing this new system on old computers, but instead would buy new computers with it already baked in. Manufacturers, if they wanted to succeed, would be forced to make sure that all the drivers and the system in general worked well.
Interesting history!

Although I question whether a special symbol is even needed. The key in question already has the word "Command" written on it. Adding the symbol seems redundant and confusing, especially since it is not a universally known symbol. And the drop down menus could easily use an abbreviation, for example, "Cmd+Q" instead of ⌘Q.

Especially when used in combinations, I certainly find it a lot easier to read something like "Cmd+Alt+C" instead of all the little symbols jammed together.
I just keep a TrueCrypt volume in Dropbox. I can read it on Mac, Windows, or Linux and it's secure. I use this for taxes and stuff, and don't encrypt non-sensitive stuff so that I get more granular versioning.
We needed a single place to post our videos from Hackers & Founders, especially as we launched the Co-op, our take on incubation. (You'll be hearing more about that shortly). So, we decided to eat our own dog food, and use one of the startups we were working with in our incubator: http://VidCaster.com.

Within a couple of hours of receiving the DVD from Naval's Hack your Funding process video, it was up and streaming on their service. They also grabbed all the other video content we had on vimeo and transferred it over without any problems. The following week, they streamed 1TB of video on our videos alone. Not bad for a company that had only raised seed funding before that.

They are simply outstanding, and I'm not just saying that because they are in our incubator. Their service really does rock. Clean interface, amazingly responsive founders that have been running their own video businesses for years, and built VidCaster to scratch their own itch.

BTW you can look at all the pitch videos for our startups on http://hackersandfounders.tv for our upcoming "Not-a-Demo-Day" this Thursday night. It's powered by VidCaster. And, one of the VidCaster founders shot all the videos for us as well.
Hee. We used to find Twiggy drives in various places (typically in the back of labs when we moved, or when some older cow-orker quit and left boxes of crap behind). We'd send the drives via inter-office mail to one of the original hardware guys responsible for the Twiggy.

We were still finding the damned things and shipping them off to him in 1993. The H/W guy had a pretty good sense of humor about it.

What future albatrosses are /you/ working on? :-)
They are doing useful things, they're helping create scalable technology that can serve 600 million people. Cassandra, HipHop, Thrift, etc are all products from those minds. In addition the kinds of problems they are solving, such as creating a platform for third party integration can be applied to many different other areas. So yeah they're working on a social network, but all the while all this good stuff is happening that we all can benefit from...without a facebook account (I don't have one).
We hear you have money, we'd like it.
The reason Linux seems to be un friendly is because windows takes care you as a baby,most of the time you are not in control and there is nothing much to worry. So if kids where exposed to Linux first this problem would not arise IMHO
Fascinating - the few commands and protocol details he mentions are very reminiscent of IRC. Does anyone have a similar early history of IRC, and the (presumable) downfall of Bitnet Relay?
I was reminded of the following article when I read this blog posting:

http://greaterseas.com/2011/05/the-future-of-innovation/

There's a great quote by Jeff Hammerbacher (an ex-Facebooker) that is great:

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”
I think we can all agree Linux != Windows, but shit it's 2011. Somethings should just work.
Before all this Win8 broughaha, I don't think anyone was considering .Net to be "running out of steam". The Iron* projects were disappointing to see get dropped, but they never really were first-class citizens to begin with.

In fact, if anything, over the past few years I'd say the general sentiment has been that .Net has now eclipsed the JVM as the "best" platform available. Obviously not being able to deploy to other OSes (ignoring mono, of course) was a problem, but not a big one for a lot of folks. C# is a language a lot of people really enjoy using, and F# has excited a lot of people and since it's "official" gets accepted in stodgy corporate environments quicker than some of the alternatives (Scala comes to mind).

That said, yes, in the last month or two I have been surprised (but not disappointed) to see that MS seems to be reinvesting in C++. I'm a little confused by this Win8 stuff, though. I think MS focus on Silverlight over the past year or two was misplaced, when they should have been focusing on WPF first, and now I'm not really sure what the status of WPF is with "Jupiter".
Depends on how you segment. For mobile its just a 1-2% tops (WP7 users). On the desktop I've heard something like 50-60%.

Lets put it this way, there are 500M or so Silverlight enabled desktops. There aren't many things you can target that have such a large user base.
WikiLeaks Hits That Are Turning the World on Its Head -- Ignored by the Media
While I don't buy the "facebook is just games and noise" stuff, I do think we should be focusing a bit more in things like clean tech, space missions, etc.

Why does almost everybody want to go work for facebook instead of tesla or any other innovative company not primarily focused in "web" development?

And yeah, the big equity bucks, but I think those could be moving towards other tech fields too...
They also hold another patent, filed in 2007, for an online media player with very vague detailings. I am a fan of patents, but this company is over shotting their bounds.
Is strict parenting better for children?
First Bitcoin "Depression" Hits
Don't miss out,,, Buy new iPhone for $94.48 from http://www.ezy-bid.com
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> we use a PEG grammar for Javascript [...]

Anything open-source, or that you're in the mood to share?
Some food for thought regarding Amazon and sales tax:

Amazon has plans to build and operate a distribution warehouse near Columbia, South Carolina. State and local leaders rolled out the red carpet for Amazon -- a free building site, property tax cuts, employment tax credits, and the repeal of a county law prohibiting Sunday morning sales. But Amazon also wanted a five year exemption on collecting South Carolina sales tax. After all, they would have a physical presence in the state, and there's absolutely no ambiguity about whether or not they'd have to collect sales tax at that point.

When the state legislature voted "no" on the sales tax exemption, Amazon immediately stopped construction on the warehouse and took down all of the job listings for that location. There was a huge uproar, with supporters of the exemption accusing legislators of siding with "special interests." (Where "special interests" apparently means "every other business with a physical presence in South Carolina that doesn't get a sales tax exemption.")

Amazon won this game of chicken, however. Faced with massive voter backlash, the state legislature flinched and voted 90-14 for a new deal that would exempt Amazon from collecting South Carolina sales tax until January 2016. The bill became law earlier this week.

http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/CPT-AMAZON-SCAROLINA_5...

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/201...
I saw an old cleric at a funeral of one of the protesters killed in Egypt on AlJazeera. He spoke of how they had mocked him for his blue jeans(!) and his facebook. He begged forgiveness and said that he saw now how he had been leading the way. Moving stuff.
Assembly code is used frequently in ultra low latency trading and in other contexts for which special instructions are not exposed in C libraries or constructs. For example, there is no libc exposure to the RDTSC x86 instruction
The x86 architecture is a modified Harvard architecture where close to the CPU (L1 cache) memory is divided into 'instructions' and 'data', further from the CPU the memory is joined. L2, L3 and RAM are generally 'unified' or can contain either 'instructions' or 'data'.

This thesis proposes that separating memory to 'instructions', 'stack', and 'heap' results in a performance increase for functional languages.

Additionally this is targeted at software that makes a large number of function calls such that the time expense of function calls with current architectures is higher than the actually computational time expense of the code.

Personal opinion: Maybe this is faster at the inner most levels of memory if the code makes lots of function calls. At the outer most levels of memory many things rely on the ability of 'memory' to be treated as either 'data' or 'instructions'. JIT compilation for instance. This would imply that to run general code there needs to be a separation process similar to what occurs between the L2 and L1 caches in current processors. I'm not sure this ultimately would result in a performance increase for general purpose processors.
The ads are a means to an end.

More correct: "The best minds of my generation are making huge amounts of money by solving really hard engineering problems and creating whole new industries. That's awesome".

It's hard to overstate the economic impact of FB, Google + Apple. These people are building the future of the internet. Ads just pay the bills.
You're missing the crucial point of submarine patents: if approved, they are enforced as of the date they were filed. So pending patents can in fact be used as a cudgel, to get licensees to pay for a guarantee that if the patent is approved, they won't be socked with outlandish royalty demands. It's like insurance. To a first approximation, the value of a pending patent is proportional to the probability that it will eventually be approved.

I'm reminded of Tony Soprano to an unhappy customer: "Satisfaction guaranteed, or double your garbage back!"

ps: recent rule changes mean that some patents (those that will be filed outside of the US) will be published 18 months after filing, even if they are not yet approved. Possibly not relevant here, as the troll would presumably want you to see the pending patent to prove the legitimacy of his threat.
It's pathetic. All those clearly very intelligent people at Facebook, and they are working on what is basically a dating site, where you can poke people.

Come on retards (yes you can be intelligent but still be a complete fucking idiot), why don't you go solve real problems in the world?
Perhaps it should refer to all the brilliant people in %90 of web startups in general. The majority of Silicon Valley's (NYC perhaps even more so) recent output is fluff, stuff that impacts people's lives about the same as drugstore celebrity mags.

(But it's not a new trend, TV or advertising or law or finance are/were similar in that respect.)
Care to comment on why this was down-voted? Did I misunderstand Daniel's question or not appropriately address it?

I would assume that some have taken this as advocating on behalf of states that impose sales tax on companies due to the residency of their affiliates. I carefully worded my comment so that this was not the case. On the other hand, if you feel I'm wrong about the position that these states have taken, please correct me...

UPDATED: My position on tax policy is not germane to Daniel's question and based on the rest of this post, would just be redundant to include. When a thread strongly reflects one side of an issue, it's much less dull to try and articulate the counter-point of view... wish more people would try this.
Localtunnel: Quickly expose your local web server to the Internet
Watch Green Lantern Movie Online
Watch Green Lantern Movie Online
How are you I hope you in good health this meeting will discuss the film adventure story that is very interesting to watch this film is a fiction and can be watched by all ages this movie
Linkbait: "Mark Rasch, former head of the US Justice Department's cyber crimes division, said he would not be surprised if Anonymous turned out to be linked to the Sony data breach..."
Sorry for my Naivete, but I think that the world priorities must be peace, health and poverty.
Ubuntu Headless x11vnc VESA 800x600 Resolution Issue Fix
Since I started writing software professionally over ten years ago x86 was the only instruction set that mattered outside of a few niche domains. Now it's all but irrelevant in the fastest growing market. For those of us that have lived in the shadow of Wintel our entire professional lives the last few years have seen some dizzying changes.

So the big picture for me is that developments in x86 are now minor news.
Why Clients Love and Hate Us (and Other Consultants), With An Example E-mail
I'm the Ubuntu Desktop manager, also known as the guy generally responsible for making sure Ubuntu works and works well. I wish I could address each and every issue listed here individually, but I can't. Suffice it to say, if you are having any issues, file a bug on Launchpad for Ubuntu, Unity or any other package and we'll make sure the right person is looking at the issue.

Some links to remember:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu
https://launchpad.net/unity
and
https://launchpad.net/unity-2d

On each page there is a 'report a bug' link on the upper right.

Or, if you experience a crash, you can report the bug at the command line by typing 'ubuntu-bug' and a series of prompts will walk you through the data collection.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs
Well, better connecting people's mundane lives than figuring out how to 'financial engineer' something I guess.
Hmm -- I dunno, as a longtime programmer but OS agnostic, it's only with Ubuntu 8 and later that I've felt like things are approaching parity. Sure some things suck, but OSX and Windows suck at least as much in myriad ways.

It seems like what's really going on here is 'nix fanboys are upset at the level of vertical integration necessary in a distro like Ubuntu, to achieve a basic level of operational success at the cost of flexibility and horizontal modularity.

So go spend hundreds of hours per year hand-crafting your favorite versions of everything, and updating drivers manually every week or so, while bitching about how you want your money back from Canonical -- I'll just get on with doing some real work.
> - Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, sounds like you don't have Flash installed, or no 3d acceleration (no video card drivers? What videocard are you using?)

I am 100% certain you can't get netflix to work on linux. Also, flash sucks on linux. I am tired of flash on linux. Asking what video card you are using is a cop out.
Ask HN: How do I start with Machine Learning?
My last company dabbled with the usual web data mining, but with some text mining / NLP twist for ads. Then later tried to apply machine learning but it closed down on our locality.

I wish to continue learning and trying to research on it. I am horrible at math, but I'm trying to change that, so I'm trying to re-learn high school algebra as a starting point. I know some machine learning resources on the web speak heavily using linear algebra, so that would be my long term goal.

What I wish to be is an active researcher on the field of machine learning. An independent researcher, which I know is possible since, from what I understood, one doesn't need government approval or very huge funds to start with it.

Going to university is out of the question. I have to do researching myself with my own resources.

Any help would be highly appreciated ;-)
Off topic, but for the first image displayed next to the text:

>> "(Source: Google Images)"

What? Does Google Images offer own original content?
The problems that the article addresses are not the ones that I would have chosen.

I think the main problem that new users to Linux have is the steep learning curve. The author dismisses user friendliness with the implication that the only reason Linux is difficult to learn is because it is different.

The analogy given is vi versus a standard Windows word processor. I am not disputing that vi is a much more powerful program, but I am saying that it is much harder to learn than Microsoft Word. Using Word, without knowing the keyboard shortcuts, you can use the toolbars to do what you want and in doing so you learn the shortcuts, most of which are printed next to the menu items.

Using vi, without knowing any keyboard shortcuts, you can do exactly nothing. Arguably vi is much better off without toolbars because they take up a lot of screen real estate and would be difficult to implement from a terminal window, but that does not mean there is no such thing as user friendliness.
Another problem is the problem of hardware support[1], which the author does not address at all.

Having said that, I will agree with his point that since it doesn't really matter much to (with notable exceptions) most developers what features people not already using Linux would like to see, development is centred around people already using Linux and on more gentle slopes of the learning curve.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2643671
It's pathetic. All those clearly very intelligent people at Facebook, and they are working on what is basically a dating site, where you can poke people.
Come on retards (yes you can be intelligent but still be a complete fucking idiot), why don't you go solve real problems in the world?
I might have to disappoint you all...

An Australian company, BHP (my employer at the time), was working on this method of steel production in the early 1990's. They had big hopes and put a lot of R&D investment in it, but were unable to commercialize it as the sheets of metal produced did not have consistent ductility and were prone to cracking.

So - the idea is not new, and the challenges of going from a concept to commercialization are serious, and were beyond the capabilities of one of the world's largest steel producers. The Bainsteel website indicates that they are still in the R&D phase. Best of luck to them, hope it works, but it is vaporware until it is on sale.