skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Huge fan of FFI (I use it to wrap/test all my shared libraries, mysql ext, etc..), but the problem of cross platform compilation still exists. I write a shared library and an FFI interface, but packaging it for use on Windows/*nix is still a pain (for compilation during install). Is there anything that solves for compilation across implementations and platforms? (FFI makes the interface simple after that)
Ask HN:Openings for a storage and linux device drivers programmer.
What companies are looking for programmers experienced in storage and linux drivers? 5+ years experience!
I agree that we are too slow to point the blame at ourselves. It's healthy to be self-critical.

That said, there are programmers who are legitimately lacking both in basic skills and desire to attain those skills. It's orthogonal to the problem you're talking about, but these people do exist, and they're not as uncommon as one might hope. I can teach the difference between pointers and references; I can't teach you to care.
I downvoted the parent comment, but maybe I shouldn't have. Church is a pretty great place to network; I'm pretty sure my old boss got 90% of our contracts via churchy connections.
Hi Sal,
I have started to use Khan Academy this year and it has helped me to pass all my college math classes. I haven't seen your history videos, but it seems to me that Clemens thinks that your videos are the only resource we use to study the various topics your cover. That's like saying I only watch your math videos, but I'll never open my text book to do practice problems on differential equations.In the same respect if I were to watch your history videos I would be looking for a timeline and overview to give myself structure for what I should study and look at in more depth.

Thank you for all your hard work, we all appreciate it.

Adam
FaceTime looks to go 3G in iOS 5
Even if we change it from "needing a smart cover" to "needing a magnetic cover", the same general principal holds: You won't just need an iPad 2, you'll also need a cover that takes advantage of this capability, which will cut down your audience by a good amount.
[June, 2010]
Stallman: EBooks are "attacking our freedom"
Sounds like you should get one of those 9-5 jobs and let your parents figure their own stuff out. If they ask for help, go for it but it's their choice. They are adults after all.
Just curious, how did he end up spening all that money? Did he go on extended vacations? Did he eventually buy a large house? Was he just working mainly so his family, children, extended family could have a better life?

I guess I understand that saving and living frugaly is in generally something that is desirable, but what is the point of keep saving, if one is not really planning on using it. It then might as well be a number on a bank statement, or a wad of green paper under the mattrass. One can accumulate all that, then die from over-exhaustion from accumulating it, then it might as well never existed as far as that particular person is concerned, if they never really got to enjoy it (Now perhaps some derive a large enjoyment just from the process of accumulation and knowing they have access to large sums of money, it is just what makes them happy, but that sounds a little to strange to me).
You didn't mention where in the UK you are. If you are near Birmingham, you can contact http://oxygenaccelerator.com and see if they can help you find a co-founder for your idea.

At your age you have going to university as an option and meeting people there who you may want to team up with. In the mean time I would suggest looking at the lean start-up movement to help you with the business side of things.

Good luck.
1) Re: 9-5 - Thanks for catching that. My frustration came through on that a bit. I changed the wording.

2) Re: skills - I do everything but program. And by everything I mean everything - funding, prod dev, marketing, sales, operations, strategy, etc.

Great point about not doing something driven by guilt. Thanks for your feedback.
I hope that people will do something more constructive with the resources they extract from others labor, that's all. Drugs and prostitution serve the purpose of transient sensory gratification, and do not build anything.

Of course, money is not real and it does not disappear when it is spent. What is real is the resources and labor extracted at the expense of others to provide and procure these services. Most likely, my examples could be improved and aren't worth discussing in particular.

I'm taking exception to lavish spending and resource allotment which does not even make the person spending the money happy, yet is done at the expense of others who have real needs that are going unmet. I do think an act like spending $200,000 on a bottle of wine at a restaurant just for the heck of it, while the purchaser might have hundreds of employees for whom 200k would be a life changing relief, can be seen as sociopathic.
You are placing a ridiculous expectation on the service provider while excusing the client using any form of security at all!

Sorry, but in 2011 it is not beyond reasonable expectation that a password be kept secret. Getting hacked sucks, certainly. Your company being hacked however is not the liability of your service providers, even if they are banks.
"I don't really want to just start going round telling everyone my idea..."

Ideas are cheap, start building something. It'll help you recruit people and you'll almost certainly need something tangible to get funding.

If events are that lacking in the place you live, chances are that you need to move. If your hometown doesn't already have a lively ecosystem, it's probably going to be very difficult to recruit employees or make sales from there.
Develop internet marketing skills.
The complaint is that he seems to be getting attention from a major donator and source of influence, which might get his "lessons" far more play than any random teacher. Which is a problem for the author since he feels the quality of the lessons is low.

I agree with him; these look like "make me look not stupid in casual conversation" lessons, they don't seem to impart a real understanding of history, of these major events and what impact they have on the present world.
Thanks for the learned helplessness link. I'll look into that more.

As for exercise, I take walks, bike, etc. The thing I'm missing the most are having other like minded people around to share ideas and progress. But maybe I need to look into building a small Skype-based network for this, or something similar.
Let's assume for a second that this wasn't a hacker, but a malicious employee. In your world is the bank still liable for this?
The problem with a poker app that utilizes this is that you would be showing your cards to other players. Poker players peek at their cards face down, not face up like an iPad.
Quite true, but classics focus on distilling principles. If the authors' thinking was valid then, there isn't any reason it shouldn't be valid now, as I've been arguing that at least parts of the past repeat.
Haha, yeah I'm from Birmingham, I'm actually applying to Oxygen this month but they say on the website "While we don’t screen applications just because they have a single founder, it does make things more difficult" (Hence this post). I did look around the Oxygen website but couldn't find anything like that, do I just use the contact form?
Why is the time spent on banks wasted? Reading your comment objectively is extremely hard when it's on HackerNews.

"Stop wasting money on the industry I'm not in, and start focusing on me!"
Ian Bicking does a great job of debunking the many of the alleged advantages of code sharing: http://blog.ianbicking.org/2011/03/30/js-on-server-and-clien...

Validation on the client is primarily a user experience concern,
where you focus on bringing attention to problems with a form, and
helping the user resolve those problems.

Once the form is submitted, if you’ve done thorough client-side
validation you can also avoid friendly server-side validation. Of
course all your client-side validation could be avoided through a
malicious client, but you don’t need to give a friendly error
message in that case, you can simply bail out with a simple 400 Bad
Request error.

At that point there’s not much in common between these two kinds of
validation — the client is all user experience, and the server is all
data integrity.
You might not be that far off. Electronic payments are becoming the standard. Banks love electronic payments.
What did the app do?
I'm not a good cofounder candidate for geographic and other reasons, but I'd be happy to step you through some idea options and potential business models.
I'm an agnostic, but the parent comment is not a bad idea; I've gotten a tech job via church connections before. (I attend church because I'm a professional singer; lots of us have church gigs.)
Great direct advice and very true, but tough to stick to in all cases. Thanks.
How does alert() impact browser event loop?
"A good historian will use the fact that he can't divorce himself from his own viewpoint as a reminder to be extremely cautious. A bad one will use it as an excuse to indulge his particular biases."

I'd say this is also true in the broader sense of how a person chooses to live in an inherently muddled world. You can take obstacles and confusion as a call to action and vigilant reflection, or you can use them as an excuse for giving up and accepting mediocrity.
You could probably just use a bank that utilizes tokens or some other two factor authentication.
There's an interesting book called "Buyology" which was written by Martin Lindstrom, one of the big proponents of neuromarketing. Definitely worth a read or two!
Very creative. I really like this. Well played, sirs.
Streamlined rules for robots
I heard Amazon might be allowing epub books from authors/publishers starting this fall, but I doubt they'll be converting all their existing ebooks to ePub, which is a shame.

And Stallman is right. You have fewer rights with ebooks than you do with real books.
Cloud Economics: Build vs. Buy
>A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

For a pilot of a Boeing 747, yes, it is. For an eight year old learning history, a little knowledge is probably the very best first-step on the path to a lot of knowledge.
Is it possible that you actually can't really do those things if your startup failed? In other words, is it possible you're representing having skills that you don't actually have? (It reads to me as if you have a willingness to practice those skills, though they aren't well developed.) Maybe it's time to honestly evaluate where you're at and invest some time into personal growth and development. You will reduce cognitive dissonance and through surrender to the mastery process some of your depression will be ameliorated.
I object to all four of these points!†

But first, let me help you out with some research. Here is the FIRST SENTENCE of the SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS section on the FIRST PAGE of the FFIEC's _Guidance on Authentication in Online Banking_. Wait for it. Wait... for... it...

The agencies consider single-factor authentication, as the only control mechanism, to be inadequate for high-risk transactions involving access to customer information or the movement of funds to other parties.

Now then:

(1) A fine-print clause waiving the banks responsibility for any protection of funds in an account beyond providing a working login prompt should be found unconscionable.

(2) That the compromise in question here didn't occur in a fashion that you recognize as a "technical compromise" doesn't actually make it not a security failure on the part of the bank. By creating a security system that revolved around a security mechanism that literally every bank of Keybank's size and above recognizes and loudly proclaims is inadequate, the bank fielded an inadequate technical countermeasure to attacks and cannot lean on semantic games to hide that fact.

(3) It seems obvious to me that customers should not be expected to be better at tracking anomalies than banks, who spend tens of millions of dollars every year on systems to profile and analyze transactions. Regardless, it does not follow from a customer delay in noticing fraud that the bank couldn't or shouldn't have been expected to see the fraud earlier!

(4) How does it change anything that, once fraud was detected, further fraud was halted? There'd be no dispute at all if the bank continued to allow online criminals to siphon out of a known compromised account. The entire debate is what the standard should be before all parties acknowledge fraud.

You say there's "simply no way I can find the bank acted negligently unless I have a hate on for the banks". Well, I don't have a hate on for the banks. We do work for banks. There are many banks I like. My comments are not motivated out of irrational bank hatred.

† They aren't, by the way, "facts of the case"; each is your interpretation of the facts we're aware of in the case. They are as "factual" as your bald assertion that disagreement with you must imply irrational hatred of banking.
The algorithms are a PITA without lambdas, and are not easily composable or extensible to express more complex iteration. None of them can work with multiple containers, which makes writing even something as simple as a "zip" function using the algorithms an exercise in futility.
I agree, if a development like this were to happen for electric vehicles, adoption of them would skyrocket. The one thought I have is how much will this cost to produce initially per liter, as well as over time when it reaches a critical mass?
"It's not so new but to the average person its new" - Steve Jobs in the linked video.
I'm at an interesting point in my life right now - I've left my full time job to focus on my own business. As I left, he offered me this opportunity.
So, what have I got to lose? Time. Time to develop my own business the way I want. I have much more faith in myself than my friend and his business.
But as you say, 30% is very good for an established business which is why I'm stuck!
Does Samsung really have 28 billion in cash?
Doesn't google already have a huge office/datacenter in one of the biggest buildings in manhattan?

http://mashable.com/2010/12/03/google-manhattan-1-9-billion/

Granted, it's not the headquarters, but still.
An issue of wired I think 2 months ago claimed that the current payout was 30% to Verizon and 70% to the developer with Google getting no cut from app sales. Obviously their information could have been dated as well.
Let me add some nitpicking to complete the obnoxious HN trifecta. The proper ortographic representation of etc is &c. In fact, that's where the ampersand comes from (think ligature form of Et).
World Domination Summit a Pilgrimage
No, because even using countermeasures that meet or exceed industry best practices, a malicious employee could be expected to gain access to the account. Unlike this case, the internal fraud would be entirely outside the bank's control.
Exactly, a decade. Something like that is not really spooky. A decade is a long time.
Quora: Working a Full-Time Job While Running a Startup
The problem is not how many people are willing to accept gold it is there are not enough people willing to pay with it.

Very large financial transactions on multi-currency, multi-nation, trading markets use Gold and Oil Futures as currency.

There are storage facilities around the globe that will actually move physical gold from one private 'vault' to another and confirm the transactions. The end user has an interface similar to online banking and doesn't have to leave their desk.
Yes I actually agree with you. I should have provided better context: 9-5 meaning that people here are mostly content with what they have. They aren't out and about in the city looking to build new ventures, take risks on big, unproven ideas, etc.
There's a Straaaaaw Maaaaan [1]
waiting in the sky;
He'd like to come and meet us,
but he thinks he'll blow our minds

Seriously, not believing in god doesn't mean you don't acknowledge your own subjectivity and your feelings.

Jesus was probably the first to emphasize how much the humans are social beings, that they need one another, and that there's actually a lot to enjoy and to win by being nice towards each others.

Some biblical teachings are remarkably insightful, but you don't need the full package to make sense out of it.

BTW, assuming that god (whatever it is) is transcendent, by definition, it is impossible to conceive it. As a consequence any attempt at conceptualizing it is doomed to fail. You're only ever relating to your flawed mental representation of it. It can provide wonderful experiences, but you can get similar ones in totally different settings [2].

[1] David Bowie, Starman http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5iOiLX5ppA#t=00m52

[2] http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html
This is a knee-jerk reaction. I doubt they really understand the technology. And from what I understand bitcoin transactions are not that anonymous.

But even if they were, are they going to ban everything that allows anonymity? The same senators mention Tor as well. Are they going to make the use of Tor illegal - the same tool that was used in revolutions against oppressive regimes?
The experience he's talking about is the same experience domain based Microsoft networks have had available for a long time, and it was an awful experience as it relied on network connectivity for your files. It was nothing revolutionary.

What's happened in the last decade+ is the infrastructure to support all these devices, and their network connectivity, has increased so we can finally have a good user experience doing it.

Without the infrastructure to support it, the product would end up instilling a sense of hate in people who use it. And we all know Apple is about creating the most seamless and easy to use experience for the user.
I wonder if it is related to:

"Evidence for Correlations Between Nuclear Decay Rates and Earth-Sun Distance"

http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3283
Ask HN: is this a fair offer?
I received an offer and wanted to get the general public's opinion regarding it.

Background:
- Startup with 0 lines of code, 2 founders
- Raised stealth funding of 1-4 million USD
- Coding will start as soon as 2 devs are recruited
- Founders are taking a regular salary pretty much, maybe a bit less than average (from what I gather)
- The employee stock pool is 10%

Given the above, how fair is it that I was given an offer of 50% of my current pay for ~0.6-0.9% in options?
Speak to the people deploying multifactor and reputational authentication at major banks, and to a one, they will tell you that it is not considered a reasonable expectation that Windows systems be kept intact in order to secure bank accounts.

Banks can't come out and simply say that because of market realities (there are lots of market realities involving software security that terribly impact your day to day life) and concomitant liability.
Why would it need the whole sum in cash? Equity for equity is normal for unleveraged takeovers.
Have you ever tried to compile Xcode samples on a MacMini?

I do it on a 6 year old Macbook and have no problems.
> Why would my email and contacts be locked into iCloud?

Don't ask me, ask Apple - they're the ones who're doing it :) Contacts was one of the things that Apple mentioned would be stored in iCloud at their talk a couple of ago. I'm not sure about email.

One of the reasons your contacts would be stored in iCloud is so that they can work with Apple's (proprietary) new chat/message system; iMessages.
You don't want to write one paragraph like a romance novel, another like a patent application then a third like an advert.
I second the commenter who recommended Types and Programming Languages, but the short answer is, "Sure, if your language has subtyping, and you want to arrange the inheritance hierarchy in that way." It would solve it a little bit better because the type of

x || (y && z)

would default to being the 'most general' type of all its arguments, which could be Bool but might be more specific in certain circumstances. But this of course only works if your language has some kind of subtype relation, which is not necessarily true of every language—it is not, for example, true of Go, or most typed functional languages that I know of—and it still ends up having typing rules like

t1 : A t2 : B A <: C B <: C
------------------------------------
t1 || t2 : C

It also assumes that the Boolean class is implemented as a single class with no subtypes for True and False—i.e. not like Ruby's TrueClass and FalseClass; you'd have an instance variable or something which tells you whether an instance is True or False—because if you implemented it with singleton instances of a True class and a False class, then you'd bifurcate your whole object hierarchy, and it also assumes that there can be no type 'more general' than Booleans, because if there is something 'above' Boolean in the hierarchy, then you'd have to rewrite the rule as

t1 : A t2 : B A <: C B <: C C <: Bool
------------------------------------------------
t1 || t2 : C

and... well, it does get a little complicated.
I agree with you completely - I would give you +1000 if I could.

The part I find the funniest is that the judge actually agreed that the bank's security was lax, yet still dismissed because Patco was in violation of the agreements.

I wonder how many new business customers Ocean Bank has signed up since this suit went public? The good old free market is (hopefully) doing its thing.
That's true.. I just find that owning a mac to be in the cost of doing business. That just maybe outside of the means of the average hobbyist developer.
I understand the reasons for choosing a friend as a co-founder but I think this situation is a bit different. I have spoken with him about my concerns and he assured me things will be fine however his actions don't seem to match his words. It's a delicate situation because I don't want to lose a friend by being too "honest" with him if I decide not to take part as he will surely want to know my reasons.
Microsoft is a Little Doomed Right Now...And a Tablet Won't Help
Really good point, how do I go about achieving this? I'd like to believe that I have the skills, insights, strength, and endurance for all these things, but yet, I have to accept the reality that so far it has gotten me nothing. I'm open to change/learning - if my family weren't an issue I'd go anywhere in the world to learn, reboot, start over, grow, etc.
Just curious, is that taken from an actual language? Because I've wanted a feature like that for ages.
Also: Borland, mid-1990s.
As your mind ceases to exist, the effect of your existence is not lost. Meaning does not cease to exist after I die. I can care about the world, human beings and life beyond my own life without believing in one of the many thousand-year-old religions. In choosing to appreciate and enjoy my life as much as possible right now, I honor all those who come after me. I am part of that future. My appreciation for life inspires me to contribute as meaningfully as possible.
I think one key thing to keep in mind is that it is better to chose a style that is more likely to obviously have no errors, rather than one that has no obvious errors. (Wirth?)

With longer methods, it becomes more strenuous to say that it obviously has no errors.

And in It seems that having many small methods trades one complexity for another. is not a fair representation, as the implied relationship is not linear.
In mathematics there is a well defined right and wrong, but in history there are often competing viewpoints of which none can be dismissed easily. I would say that to pick one as true and discard all the others is folly.
I thought the ideal language he was talking about is Haskell.