skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it happens a fair amount. Google may have actually wanted the patents at he right price, but may have wanted its competing bidders to overpay if it couldn't win the bid. The aricle said there were about 6,000 patents. I suppose some of them might be ground breaking tech but most are probably worthless or science projects at best. At $4.5 billion, this winning bid sounds like a winner's cure to me. I think Google has some good game theoriests who artificially drove up the price for it's competitors. But who knows, maybe they really wanted to pay up to $4 billion and were genuinely disappointed when they didn't win.
I like this idea, my gut tells me there is something in that arena to be solved with some simple like this (maybe even a universal JSONP callback method definition for an endpoint or something for services that you can call out to for things like this?)

I wonder if the actual usability of this is what stymies it... for example, say SmugMug exposes their image filtering API that they use to sharpen and enhance uploaded images and Flickr exposes their geocoding API to allow you to pass in GPS coords and they write them into the JPG meta for you... what is the motivation for these services to expose these services to 3rd party (potentially competing) web applications to make use of them? I am assuming you have access to these services because you are already customers of those companies, wouldn't they want to keep you in their garden?

If you put this in a pot and boil the water off of it, wouldn't this idea more or less come down to the problem web services are meant to solve and in that way end up with a similar looking ecosystem?

Not critical of the intents idea, just trying to think of where this goes once it exists to get a better idea of how it should be designed/pitched/used/thought of.

Thoughts?
Oho. Followed by a capital letter? Interesting.

I always thought that "all identifiers with a leading underscore were reserved". I just consciously ignored it, and have never had a problem in years. But I was also always using member variable names like "_children", "_childCount", etc, not "_Children".
I don't know a lot about erlang but i doubt it makes parallelism easy all of the time. I'm sure there are many cases when the default actor model works great, but that's not a reasonable model for _every_ problem. Shared memory multithreading (for all of its faults) can be very effective for certain kinds of problems. So it can be worth the difficulty.
It's a serious question, not some kind of ideal strawman.
I have friends who had to take an intro to C++ as their first (and only) programming class.

I heard them talking about passing arguments to functions as "call by reference" many times, and it was obvious they had no idea what they were talking about, just regurgitating what the instructor said.
Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_paper_scissors#Auction_hou...
I don't think he was "broken" so severely that he couldn't function. But there were definitely some cracks in his psyche. Made for a slightly confusing course. As I recall he still finished his post-graduate research, and is presumably and hopefully now a productive member of society. (Though there are many of my fellow alumni from that timeframe that aren't working in anything related to our fields, having the benefit of graduating during the dot-bomb fallout and the Enron/AA mess. Our "career fairs" that year were... entertainingly silent, to say the least.)
I think they can't find the next magic number closer to PI.
I downloaded the setups from the links, and used the "Extract" option in the installers. It appears that only the license was changed: http://pastebin.com/G3H78tSt

Edit: However, the installer binaries' sizes differ by 113280 bytes, while the extracted files' size totals differ only by 925 bytes.

Edit 2: the majority of the size difference is in the .rsrc section, the newer version contains several additional binary resources, some of which appear to be boot loaders. And the text resources are different... is it possible the installed versions are different and the extracted ones are not?
Steve Jobs Inspired by 9-Year-Old's iPad Story
I know this can be tricky. I wrote a Twitter-based keyword filtering tool and subscribed to their garden hose. They say to only use one connection at a time, so I think it may be violating the terms of service to be running more than one stream. Twitter offers larger stream bandwidths, too. Perhaps one stream of all the tweets can be obtained. Even with my one stream connection, I was missing incoming tweets because my local connection was too slow. So, this is a good question. I'm interesting in hearing the answer, too.
Matz starts talking about 2.0 at about 14m30
http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/daniel/daniel5.htm

It's mean to tickle the president.

God says...
eternity hidden Make uncircumcised Shophach dainty Ucal
Nay amends Hammelech spies considerable
Yeah this is pretty cool. I have a similar artificial life experiment that goes by the name "floatworld" (https://github.com/taliesinb/floatworld).

The curse of all these kinds of alife experiments is the how many parameters they have. It's hard to conclude anything when there are 200 dimensions to one's model.
Seems impractical on a large scale, but it would make situations like the e.coli outbreak in Germany much easier to manage.
Actually, No, This Wasn’t Done With A Slide Rule
Internships should be paid and should be about getting training, but for a lot of people it seems to be that working for free is a better alternative to having a gap on their resume, which might render them permanently unemployable. Vicious cycle.

If you have a gap on your resume and time that needs to be filled, I think it's better to try to start your own business rather than be exploited by someone else.
The problem with C isn't C. It's shitty C programmers.

Learn how the language works, follow good patterns, and expect some bumps in the road.

Most of the time, though, you can use a different higher level language, and be a happier and less stressed programmer
Not all users are created equal. I might be running 1 process per user for a currently logged in user, but move all scanning for non-logged in users into a low-priority queue.
Um, I'd call it a package manager.
> Against this backdrop of multiple causation and timeframe variability, it is difficult to identify a change in either the extent or thickness of Arctic sea ice that could be attributed to the increase in temperature that has been predicted to result from the burning of fossil fuels.

I guess the author missed a key qualification here. It's not enough to prove that global temperature has been rising.
Ashworth Community: Marketing Solutions: SEO Pressor - Wordpress PlugIn
That makes sense, since the installer has compressed its contents.
PDF 995 – Create PDF Files
PDF 995 is great software for PDF files. This software helps you to convert your files into PDF files with good quality like a professional quality.
How about having a webpage with recommended libs for newbies to use? Sort of like NodeJS modules page.
The TCHunt program, whose website this link points to, is quite interesting. It seems to exist to simply point out something I always felt was self-evident, yet I commonly see misunderstood:

"Q. Why write a program such as TCHunt?

A. To demonstrate that while encrypted volumes may be indistinguishable from random data created in one specific fashion that the volumes themselves can be easily distinguished from most other files on your system. Many people insist that their encrypted volumes are undetectable. I hope TCHunt will convince them otherwise, before they learn this fact the hard way. More importantly, you should never claim that an encrypted volume with a mp3 file extension (or whatever) is a corrupt file, etc. While that explanation may seem plausible to an average person, it will not stand up to forensic or legal scrutiny. Data corruption does not resemble AES encrypted data. If disclosing the location of your encrypted volumes may lead to legal issues, then say nothing and contact a competent lawyer."

Of course, as he notes, it can't tell the difference between regular and hidden volumes, but once again: the hidden volumes will still stick out like a sore thumb and clearly be encrypted data. While plausible deniability is technically maintained, believable deniability will always be harder.
Acteon Group
Acteon is a well known engineering service provider with an international reach. It is made up of a total of 17 companies in both subsea and marine equipment and consultation.
That's the funny thing. It isn't praise for your product. It's just what your product has become. Who knows if it will stay that way, but what it is right now is something simply beautiful. You know I would just love to talk more with you about your product. Is there someway I can email you?
This article is silly. The reason Google lost the auction is because they weren't willing to spend more then 4 billion dollars, but others were. The amounts they bid along the way have absolutely nothing to do with the outcome of the auction. Nothing. It has nothing to do with overconfidence or anything like that, it's a simple numbers game. Google apparently didn't think that the patents were worth what they sold for, so they stopped bidding. It's similar to an eBay action -- something that's a good deal at $50 may not be such a good deal at $500.

-1 Flamebait.
> Not everyone self-promotes to the same extent as Mr. Shaw, or has other people promote them.

I don't know much about Zed. I've seen his name and articles here on HN, of course. I read you comment and was curious. I found nothing but a URL in his HN profile and zero submissions attributed to him here. From my very brief scan of his comments on HN posts, it seems like they are on topic. He's not hijacking threads.

So here on HN, at least, it appears that others are doing the promoting.

Zed seems to write original essays and he seems to have strong feelings and opinions on topics that interest the hacker crowd. And dude's got a memorable name.

It reminds me of SEO strategy: Write original, compelling articles and you won't need SEO.
Are you kidding? Most real software does something like allocating some emergency memory at startup time, and then handles a failing malloc call by using that reserve pool to save work, perhaps do a GC, and print a decent error message before quitting.

Losing all of the user's work and printing "Segmentation fault (core dumped)" is never the right answer.
For me, the indirection of pointers was one of the fundamental CS concepts that required real effort to understand.

Before that point, I had never clearly separated the concept of a variable and its value. It took a huge conceptual leap to think about a variable that didn't hold a value, but rather, the location of a value. It took some serious mental gymnastics to deal with pointers n-levels deep.

Mind you, this was actually Perl references, not pointers, so I didn't even have to try to comprehend doing math on them.

After a while, of course, it became second nature.

My favorite aspect of CS is that every so often, I run into a wall of conceptual understanding that requires completely changing how I think in order to move forward. Have you never had moments like this, or were they just different topics?
This is probably more appropriate for the Github support forum than some random HN posting about a project on Github. Your post adds nothing to this discussion.
Watch True Blood Season 4 Episode 2
Watch True Blood Season 4 Episode 2: In True Blood S04E02 under the title "You Smell Like Dinner" tells the story of Sookie who will try to be more quickly able to adapt to new realities of Bon Temps. Scott Winant as directed True Blood Season 4 Episode 2 and Brian Buckner script writer of the story.
Interesting, as much as I don't really like facebook.

I only see Hadoop being used even more widely now - that, or spinoffs/improvements, etc., as needed, unless Hadoop really can scale as much as possible.

At least, that's what this article tells me.

http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/06/hortonworks
No, I want a solution that deters domain squatters and is overall better for most people. Maybe, there should just be a cap on how many domains one can own at a time. But domainers would probably complain about that too and make some hypocritical remarks about how this restricts their internet rights, when what they do restricts the internet even worse.

You're just ignorant and want to complain, you don't want a solution, you want to just be better off for yourself.

I think this statement represents domainers such as you perfectly. May I ask, can you name one benefit domainers provide to people?
Why does every post about Google+ have to be linked here?
Interesting. Thank you. They revise Bittorrent for use inside data centers, where block sizes can be much larger and there aren't any malicious nodes. They prefer Bittorrent to alternatives because, through its broadcast overhead is higher, it scales better with number of nodes. One thing I didn't glean from the paper is whether the advantages of BT are unique to their framework or whether they would apply just as well to MapReduce.
Is this a big enough problem for average people? I know people create a "lost phone, need your number" Facebook group or event but is that enough of a pain? I've never seen more than one from the same person. So what exactly are you offering the average person with a messy, incomplete, and unsynced address book and why would they pay?
Web browsers should support built-in checksum verification of downloads (when owners upload md5sum/signatures/etc with the files), instead of having to do it manually.
How Friends can be Crappy
hey, I was just idly chattering about C and the way people in general often approach it. Not intended to be a review of an unwritten book or imply that you plan to approach it in any particular way.

I am a bad ass of course. But I thought it was relevant to the comment that I've written a lot of C.
Okay... I still don't understand how this is better than simply putting the contact details on the card itself, other than the risk of staleness.

(And the marginal case where you want to revoke the ability to view your details after you give out the card, but before the person checks...hmm...)
I remember when you guys were baseshield... ninite could mean like (nigh-night) as in good night.."say good night to your installation problems"
ARM chips to rival PS3, Xbox 360 in 18 months?
The point is, the crash you describe will only occur on 32-bit operating systems, and only after you've allocated more than 1.5GB of memory. For most projects, that is extremely unlikely.

Your solution would work. But the extra code complexity, development time, and maintenance isn't worth it except in very, very specific scenarios, like if you're writing a third-party library such as Lua or FMOD or FreeType or... etc.

Here's an alternative solution that doesn't require NULL checking malloc, and provides all of the same benefits:

1) create a function (I call mine "Sys_Exit()") which allows you to cleanly exit your application from anywhere in your codebase. For example in my game engine, my main() function looks like:

int main()
{
App_Startup();
while ( App_Frame() ) {}
App_Shutdown();
return 0;
}

and Sys_Exit() looks like:

void Sys_Exit( int code )
{
App_Shutdown();
exit( code );
}

2) write a "my_malloc" function which forwards to malloc. Use it for all memory allocation. When it detects that more than 1.2GB of memory has been allocated, then it prints an error message and calls Sys_Exit().

This allows you to save the user's work, etc, and your shutdown sequence has a fairly large amount of remaining memory to work with (so that you don't truly run out of memory after you've fake-run-out-of-memory).

This is a very simple solution if you really care about the extremely unlikely out-of-memory crash.

----

tl;dr: It is almost always a bad idea to NULL check malloc(). It tends to destroy readability, is error prone, and is hard to maintain, for very little practical benefit.
Public Interest Requires Public Input: Verizon/Android Tethering
How does the browser verify that the md5sum is correct? The server would have to send the md5sum to the browser through SSL, which is good enough to protect the download anyway.
K&R chapter 5.5, Character Pointers and Functions, explains pointers and shows how they are used in C. It's probably the clearest explanation of pointers ever written, and it doesn't require any understanding of hardware or assembly language (though that would help).

I remember reading those three pages over and over and experimenting with the code until I got it. I probably spent several days studying the pointer chapter back when I was a teenager. The light bulb eventually went on and C pointers made sense -- until learning C my programming experience was mainly with time-shared BASIC. The stepwise refinement of an indexed array version of strcpy() to a pointer-based version is a masterpiece of programming writing -- I still refer programmers I am mentoring to that chapter.

Finishing the strcpy() example with the one-liner

while (*s++ = *t++) ;

the authors write "Although this may seem cryptic at first sight, the notational convenience is considerable, and the idiom should be mastered, because you will see it frequently in C programs." I've found that programmers either get that line of code or they don't, and those who don't haven't mastered their craft.
In fact, here's a reference: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/e7f8y25b(v=vs.80).as... (It's in a "Microsoft Specific" block but says it's part of the ANSI C standard.) It applies to C, and it also applies to identifiers staring with two underscores.
Quick Tip: How while(1) can make parallel code better?
Hardly. Having worked on intranet applications I know first-hand how critical performance is. One on end of the scale you have very small companies, sharing your apps infrastructure with their timesheeting, invoicing and other app servers. On the other end you have companies like Shell, with a user base of over 110,000 employees. All their servers are hosted in the Hague.
WebSurgery v0.5 - Web app testing tool Released
Legal wiretapping doubled? I wonder how the illegal kind is doing.
Ah yes, a language VM, not an OS VM. My mistake.
Pepper (Dating site) hacked by Anonymous #Antisec
> What would it take to get this running under OS X?

Getting it running on Linux is as simple as throwing the source at GCC (with the -lSDL flag), so in theory it would probably be a similar level of difficulty on OS X, if you already have everything you need to compile programs. I don't have access to a Mac to test this on, though.
Run that sprite sheet through optipng and gimp to remove extra white space and you can get it down to 4021 bytes.
Basically, it identifies the randomness of a file that is AES encrypted. In general no other file will have that kind of random data. I wonder then, can there be an efficient encryption algorithm which will make your file look more like a particular type of data (say .mp3 or .jpg)?
TriNity (Indian Girl Hacker) Strikes again to server with 690 websites
UP Rajarshi Tandon Open University Allahabad Website Hacked
You don't have a better solution, plenty of companies have enormous portfolios of domains. This also wouldn't free up the better names, the best ones would simply be allocated into different management companies, only the marginally profitable ones would be let go. There is no shortage of domains and nobody is restricting anyone's right to a domain. Just because I own a name doesn't mean you've lost a right to domains, you have the exact same rights you always did, the freedom to register a domain that nobody else has purchased. The same position everyone else is in, equally. You have not proposed any objective way to measure and define better. Utility in a real market is hard if not impossible to measure. You think it's your right to have a better domain name? It's not. Welcome to capitalism, where a free market dictates how resources are used. But they are blocking valuable startups you say. If the company is actually viable and successful they can surely purchase it when their utility is greater than the current owner. That's the beauty of capitalism. When someone else's utility is greater than my own, they can purchase my asset and it becomes theirs. Simple.

May I ask why I have to use my capital for YOUR benefit? Since it's mine, I can do whatever I want with it. That's the nature of capitalism and freedom. Just because you don't like or even agree with what I do doesn't mean the system is broken. You ask for the same protections, if not more, for your own assets, but want to take others' protections away. Your arguments, if they can even be considered such, boil down to "you suck, it's unfair someone has the name I rightfully deserve for no apparent reason other than I want it, and we should change the system so I get what I want." Go try that in the nicer area of your city/state/province with a lot of vacation rentals. Tell a homeowner that you need that property more than they do because they have another home and how it's more fair that you get it.
You're the dick Zed. The guy (hp) barely mentioned what you were doing at all and was just offering some general advice on C. You take it like a personal attack on your manhood.

You're always defending yourself against dreamed up conspiracies. You have a serious martyr complex.
Actually learning about the stack was one of my big 'aha!' moments. I sorta' knew it existed, but I didn't really comprehend it.
This is an absolutely fascinating thread-- thanks to Rachel Zahorsky for the original article, and to sunchild and other commenters for thoughts and inspiration. Am very interested in contacting others on this list with an interest in both law and code.

I recently wrote about version control and law on quora: http://b.qr.ae/kRgGyk, and about 'open sourcing' access to the tax code here: http://blog.tabulaw.com/2011/06/open-source-tax-code.html.
Well, you could always encode the data as an mp3. If you did, it would look a lot like an MP3. Might not be efficient though. And it would still be easy to tell that it was encrypted data.
I used Ninite today on a new computer, remembered it off the top of my head without issue. Keep up the great work guys :)
The point everyone keeps missing about facebook is that they were trying something new in the social space. They did commit mistakes and have accepted it. They also allow you now to download all your data. I believe that if facebook merges friend lists and groups, they have will have a strong product against google.
This feels like an engineers vision of the web. The two benefits of this over apis are:

1) The user gets to choose how to perform a particular activity.

2) Services can be found either automatically or by the user searching for services and saving them for later.

Don't the majority of users want this taken care of for them? Imagine going to facebook and having to find a service to perform a friend request. That's just an irritation for a benefit that most people don't want(wow I can send an invite using SMS with this service).

It's also notable that there's no styling on the examples. How is the UI going to be integrated, are all of the web intents supposed to follow a standard CSS format? How about the amount of space that service takes up on the page?

I suspect apis are popular because they're the best fit for sharing functionality on the web. Users want curated, integrated websites, not a set of mix 'n' match components.
Fire and Forget: Asynchronicity is your friend.
With guns, we are citizens.
Without them, we are targets/subjects.

Peruvians should learn from https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Gun_politics_...