skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
it might be a bastardization of meta, but there must be a way to stuff this metadata into the existing structures, possibly even HTTP headers (I remember RSS auto-discovery going through a similar development process.). my initial thought was:

<meta property="app:type" content="image/jpg,img/gif" >
<meta property="app:handler" content="open" >

and use canonical as the href. you can have multiple handler types, which are standard types, and then handers are actions

the concern that I have is that with the types this is just file extensions being moved to the web and all the problems that caused in desktop computing. ie. associating applications with file types. but you are saying that there is no default handler, that you get something more akin to an 'open with' which lists the applications that can handle that type

can you email me (email in profile) to discuss further, or is there a mailing list? I am interested in this area and have seen a number of 'web app/widget discovery' initiatives over the years but none really took off

(edit: code didn't show up)
Different set of topics than I expected. More engineering focused. Not a negative, by any means, nut the ToC is worth a look tom determine whether this will address one's particular needs.
That's exactly what Facebook, Apple and every other company does. Facebook "check-ins?" and deals, iTunes Ping?

Personally I'm glad Google has finally stopped acting like every feature they have is a unique product. It's pretty obnoxious to go back and forth between their various services.
Blog post sounds more like a prologue than the meat of the story.

As someone who owns both devices (iPhone 3GS and a Nexus One running Gingerbread 2.3) and uses them both regularly, I can confidently say that iOS still beats Android handedly despite all its limitations and busted pre-iOS 5 notification system. Like the author of the blog, all that openness has shown me is that that openness is necessary to fix all the problems and plug up all the holes in the Android system. So many half baked and unfinished ideas. Typing on Android still doesn't work. Google needs to seriously fix the software keyboard. Even Andy Rubin knows how bad it is--he said so himself. Seven releases and three years later, Android still feels like beta software. From all the reviews of Android 3, that assessment remains true. Although I have to admit, Gingerbread is the most stable version of Android I have ever used.
Happy 4th of July America
Using a generator I think this does what you want. What does the equivalent haskell code look like?

def read_chunked(f, delim=',', size=1024):
buf = []
while True:
data = f.read(size)
if not data:
if buf:
yield ''.join(buf)
break
if delim in data:
spl = data.split(',')
buf.append(spl[0])
yield ''.join(buf)
for s in spl[1:-1]:
yield s
rest = spl[-1]
buf = [rest] if rest else []
else:
buf.append(data)

for word in read_chunked(open("really_big_file", "rb")):
#socket.send(word[::-1])
print word[::-1]

I'm pretty sure I got the gist of what you were after. What do you think?
I don't think the data can solve it due to requiring to collect data on everything. The website is successful due to high price to goods ratio (lobster, big fish). It would be hard to track something like sardines for example.

I believe the better way is to introduce regulation that makes the distinction between hunting fish and farming fish. Hunted fish would be taxed to the extent that farmed fish would be cheaper (taxes go to making farmed fish cheaper, eg research or subsidies).

A similar regulation scheme is being implemented for taxing carbon emissions of electricity producers in favour for renewables. I've also proposed something akin to this for selling native animals in Australia in the bid to fight extinction [0].

[0] http://joakal.com/2011/06/28/animal-capitalist-conservation-...
That's what I was wondering. I would imagine that it could be pretty tough, especially if you are OCRing a fantasy or SciFi book.
Turned down by companies, Ballas built the Weed Eater into a $40M/yr business
I own both an Android (USA) and iPhone (Canada) and I couldn't agree more with this article. It amazes me that Android is so popular despite being significantly inferior to iOS in terms of quality and polish. The iPhone 4 hardware is also so much better than any Android device I've seen.

To me, Android looks and feels like Linux desktop (ugly and clunky, everything is disconnected) and is as stable as Windows (read: unstable).
I know this sounds dumb, but hear me out.

I've been an iOS user since shortly after the first iPhone came out. At a previous company, I had to do extensive cross-browser mobile testing on iPhone/iPad, several Android phones, and the Xoom (Android tablet). Every time I picked up one of the Android devices to do something, I had to "think". Its annoying as hell.

And by think, I mean that when I went to turn on the Xoom the power button wasn't in an obvious place (its on the back). When I was in either a phone or tablet, there was a different way to access the wifi settings on each device. Getting back to the home screen was annoying. Why do I have to page back through 3 previously opened apps when I just want to go to the homescreen. (To be fair, there is a separate button to go to the homescreen directly. But why are there 4 buttons at all?)

Clearly, my experiences have been shaped by my years of experience using iOS. To that extent I've even been using iOS 5 beta for the last few weeks on my phone. While it clearly has some rough patches, the new features are well thought out and polished. (Sorry, not going to talk about specific features because I don't know if they are uncovered by the NDA yet.)

So when I say that Android makes me have to stop to think, I mean that any time I have to use one it has these annoying gotchas that require mental effort to examine and bypass. I would be happy to say that it was just me, but a lot of my friends have switched from iOS to Android phones over the last year and I hear a lot of the same complaints from them too. They aren't technical illiterates by any mean, but they don't spend their days immersed in this stuff like I do. One runs a print shop, another is an audio engineer. One even edits video at a porn company.

I think a good way to summarize the difference, and the problems, is in a recent ad proclaiming "your wife will love the Tegra2 chipset". iOS devices inspire people. Android makes them think.
I know a fair amount of C. But I am still looking forward to this book as I hear that LPTHW taught something to even intermediate level people. Besides the exercises are usually good and would like to solve them.
JILTGIRL RATED:HUBSPOT BLOG SCORE 96: THANK YOU
YMMV. I own a Droid X and recently got the opportunity to use an iPhone 4 briefly, and I think I'll stick with Android, for a few reasons:

- The web browser doesn't seem to zoom into and magnify text areas as well on iPhone.

- No swype. It was absolutely painful to type anything.

- The battery life was actually worse, especially while sleeping.

- The common way to go "back" in applications seems to be a button in the upper left, which I find harder to reach than the physical button near the bottom of the Droid.

There may be a way to fix or work around these problems, but I'm quite happy with Android, and really don't relate to any of his complaints. It fits my needs.

EDIT: after reading the other comments, I see I'll probably get downvoted to oblivion for this. :D
I look forward to the content. As a beginning C++ instructor I find there is something lacking between the truth of the language and the conventions for presenting it. Nobody, AFAIK save for the truly hardcore student, has nailed it.
I was probably rambling a bit too much there without making my point clear.

What I meant to convey was that I don't believe there is a credible risk of many 10 year olds abusing drugs. And if any of them do it, I think the main problem in their life is not the availability of the drugs.

As for drinking in bars, when I say "too drunk" I mean dangerously drunk, not just making a fool of yourself and being rude to the staff. The point is that most bars won't let you die on their premises, or even come close to it. In most cultures, recreational alcohol consumption has a social aspect and this is desirable. Drinking in a field in secret in the dark means that if somebody does get into trouble, it's less likely to be noticed before it's too late.

As for people being kicked out of a bar for being too drunk, I think most people would just go home and sleep it off. The sort of person who will go to the effort of acquiring more alcohol and heading off alone to drink in secret probably has other problems.

Again, I'm struggling to say this concisely, so I think the important point is that limiting access to alcohol/other drugs merely attempts to relieve one of the symptoms of a larger problem. It's like trying to cure lung cancer with cough medicine.
These are useful and legal. I don't see what the problem is.
I always had an idea of a 'for programmers' series of books for those who know how to program in one language (say, C++, Java or PHP) and wish to pick up a new language

eg. 'python for programmers' would not need the first half of it dedicated to explaining strings, loops etc. and could get straight into it from a programmers perspective - a bit like K&R. You could then dedicate more content to explaining philosophy, design decisions, internals, history, politics (learn all the in-jokes ;)), etc.

this would also be a good format to learn new paradigms, eg. 'functional programming in scheme, for programmers'
Do people really think C is some mysterious, inscrutable language?

"To many programmers, this makes C scary and evil."

Is this actually true for people? I find C code generally very easy and straightforward to understand; there's not any magic behind the scenes, like there is in any language that's more "high level" than C.
richardofyork
Absolutely right; really damn solid of them. Thanks Dropbox team for listening to us internet-backseat-lawyers ;)
So what is the purpose of this? How is this better than business cards?
Firework-cam: Pictures taken on board skyrockets as they are lit off.
Having read a fair bit of LPTHW (though I had no actual interest in the language), I am really excited about this.

One of the best things about LPTHW was the context it was written in, and if LCTHW is written in the same way, it should be a really awesome read!
"But why are there 4 buttons at all?"

Those buttons are awesome on the Galaxy Tab, they feel foreign to every application, and they're in just the right place and hyper-sensitive so you quit every other minute in games unless you're careful!
1password explain the new Dropbox terms
That's the idea, although I'm going to assume you know how to use at least one programming language, and probably redirect total newbies to LPTHW if they don't. That should make it easier to ramp up in C and then do cool useful stuff with it.
Why is %d used to interpolate an integer into a format string? I don't recall seeing this done for any reason before.

I hope Zed actually covers how dangerous format strings can be if not handled properly. Format strings are still (hilariously) one of the major exploitation vectors in C-based applications today.

Edit: According to Wikipedia, %i and %d are synonymous. Sorry for the confusion.
Yep, I've been using it for a couple months and encountered all these issues.

WTF is the point of it all?
Indeed, I currently get turned off by most books I pick up, simply because they start out on a too basic general level.

If you however dig a little deeper you can usually find stuff that isn't too tutorialish. Like http://www.c-faq.com/top.html which has been an extremely solid resource for me.
Well, this is basically manually implementing Iteratee inline your solution. The idea is that Iteratees allow writing this as:

main = run_ $
enumFile someFile
$$ splitWhen isComma
$$ map reverse
$$ iterHandle stdout
where
isComma = (== ',') . chr . fromIntegral

Basically Iteratees are a generalization of the technique you've implemented, but:

* Generalized for any error type and support various modes of error handling/propagation (they can go up to the producer, or down towards the deeper consumer as error inputs).

* Are generalized to many types of "buffers"

* Have a high-performance counterparts of standard "list functions"

* Are a standard base for many libraries to extend (http, xml, etc), and are faster, more powerful and more useful than standard strict IO libraries (Haskell's base libs, and Python's stdlib).

So both Python and Haskell have standard "strict IO" libraries. Iteratees are really a new idea -- that Python does not do well yet. So I don't think Haskell's progression of the state of the art in IO handling is really evidence that "IO is unsolved in Haskell".
Wait, why does Google have to do what Facebook has done to have a successful social platform?

Facebook's goal is to supposedly map out all real world social connections, and i would first say that such a goal is a pipe dream, and second that if you judge facebook by that criteria, that almost all services will fail to meet it.
Not sure why my original title was changed. I didn't change it... I think someone's been monitoring me, taking notes, judging me...

Really though, I love Hemingway and the end of his career when he realized could not retire, could never retire, that struck a nerve with me. What will I do in my 50s and 60? Will I still be able to practice my craft? At what level?

Home this clears up some confusion.
Microsoft Office 365 Trial released for public.
Some peer-reviewed papers on Yoga
Got any feedback on the things students get wrong? My experience is they fail to grasp memory management, pointers, functions as pointers, linkers or just how a program actually runs.

If you've got others I'd love to hear them.
Even great engineers are looking for jobs
Update: I changed it to a switch statement. The euler1 program went from 0.081s to 0.091s with gcc on a core i3.

The cascading if statements are indeed faster than a switch.

EOU - original comment follows…

Without the benefit of profiling, I can suggest it may not be as bad as it looks.

The relative frequency of the opcodes could make this faster than the switch. See MOV, PUSH, POP in the front? Theses likely have tiny, inline implementations and are also probably a large percentage of the opcodes implemented. They may all fit in the same cache line and give the pipelines on deep pipeline, branch predicting machines lots of good stuff to work on.

Likewise, the infrequently occurring opcode comparisons in the back part of the statement, by definition, are almost always false, which should tell the branch predictors which way to go to again keep the pipelines full.

A switch on the other hand is pretty much a guaranteed pipeline flush.

But… if you asked me to code this control structure without being able to profile and to get it fast the first time… I'd use a switch. (well, maybe with a couple if statements out front if I knew I had a heavily lopsided distribution.)

Then if I'd go reread that article that came by HN a couple weeks ago and turn the control structure inside out and see how much better it was.
Many of the friends I made in my CS classes were terrible with pointers. I never really understood why they didn't grasp pointers, but it was a major stumbling block for them in C/C++
Real reason of India's lack of startups/innovation with some references.
Zed, your level of productivity is truly inspiring. The best of luck to you.
It's not for the type, but for the output. The 'd' means "decimal" output. For example, you can do %x to "hexadecimal" output, and %o for octal. Of course, there's some complex interplay with what type you hand that function.

As for how "dangerous" it is, yeah it's not going to rape your family, it'll just crash. So I'll be showing people how to prevent it.
using gdb?
d for decimal?
After being frustrated for a long time by such issues, I think people are reluctant to immediately forgive and forget. After all, these issues are part of a larger pattern:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook

The Instant Personalization issue was the straw that finally broke the back for me. Without my permission, my Facebook info was suddenly being used to personalize non-Facebook websites[1], and in order to fully opt-out of that you had to visit each application and block it[2].

[1] http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Facebook-Privacy-Concerns-...

[2] http://librarianbyday.net/2010/04/22/protect-your-privacy-op...

I don't know what Facebook did (if anything) to address these issues, and frankly, I don't care. I was tired of having to keep track of the parade of new privacy concerns about Facebook. It seemed every few weeks they added a new feature that required me to once again adjust my settings to opt-out of it. Once they even reset some of the security settings I had previously made, making them more permissive.

So, it is not surprising to me at all how these things "keep coming up".
Certifications and Schooling Questions
Devs and coders, some advice if you please:

So I've decided to go back to school and pick up some certs at http://www.ucsc-extension.edu. I figure it will help me as far as getting work, plus take my skills to the next level. I want to only do one certification because they're setup such that if I were going to do two of them I might as well just get my Ph.D. My bachelor's is in philosophy with an emphasis on formal/mathematical logic, which combined with my own experience has served me well as a coder, but I really want to take it up to the next level and either be able to get a position in a good company where I can make cool stuff or start my own company and make cool stuff. My primary experience is in web development in the LAMP stack with the standard web languages: HTML/XHML, CSS, PHP, and javascript, and I would rate my HTML/XHTML and CSS as very good, while I would only rate my PHP and JS as fair. I would like to get everything up to excellent but I also can't be in school forever nor can I pile up the classes too hard because I need to work at the same time (I'm ambitious but realistic).

So my two top choices for certs are the general programming cert: http://www.ucsc-extension.edu/programs/computer-programming/courses

and the cert that focuses on internet stuff: http://www.ucsc-extension.edu/programs/internet-programming/courses

So what would like to ask is:

1. Which cert should I get? I'm open to doing maybe two or three electives (in fact I intend to, because regardless of which I get, I want skills beyond either of them), but which one in specific?

2. I know some C, and I intend on doing both the C classes regardless, but should I do C++, C# .Net, or VB (I already know some VB)?

3. I am pretty good at PHP, but one can always get better and my first impulse was to plan on doing their comprehensive PHP class. The thing is, I have been hearing good things about both Ruby and Python, and they have classes on both. I have heard especially that Ruby is really good for fast development and that in general it is a lot of fun. So should I get better at PHP or take in some Ruby?

My goals are to be reasonably well-grounded for whatever I might have to face and to be prepared for work. While I know that's impossible, it's possible to get closer than I am, and I want to be a true asset to whoever I end up working with/for. That means skills that last rather than flashes in the pan, and I worry that Ruby might be one of those, while PHP is tried and true.

Thanks in advance.
: Hotties Versus Nerds
Wipeout is an yankee reality show that’s positively progressing to send you on a sugar coma or a laughing euphoria that you’ll never ever forget, complete with stunts, failed and successful ones from our aspiring contestants who believe that they need what it takes to be referred to as work and healthy, and therefore the final champion of the race; most particularly.
heaven forbid you're required to think
I thought I was the only person who noticed the News Feed issues!
I'm hoping to make this book ramp up faster than LPTHW, since I'm assuming people have either read that book or know one programming language already. However, I'm also a big proponent of practicing the syntax even if you think you're an expert already. It just makes things way easier later on.
JSON-Fu: a JSON serializer for JS/CoffeeScript (with circular reference support)
Prefix a token with + to force it to match.
it's not like it makes you do calculus to operate it. "Back" goes back a page, "Home" goes home. What do you want to do, go home? hmmm
how about 'if you are proficient at another language, feel free to skip to chapter x'? and put the generalized stuff at that point
Yes, actually people are deathly afraid of C thanks to other language inventor's excellent marketing against it. There's a few things that you need to really nail to be good at C, and they're difficult things, but it's not "dangerous" like people keep claiming.
One of the first programs I tried to write in C++ (my first language) was a chess game. I eventually hacked it together, but it wasn't pretty.

The hardest part for me was learning the patterns necessary to do anything, and specifically to do it remotely well.

For example maybe one of the exercises could be some kind of board game, where you demonstrate how you translate "the ideas" into "the C code"? For example just because you know that a Knight can move two-plus-one spaces doesn't mean you have any idea where that code should be inserted into the program's structure, or how to write it in such a way where you avoid overrunning an array. (The naive solution would crash when the Knight tries to move off the board.)

Translating ideas -> C code was easily my hardest task when I was first starting out.
What I wanted to say is that it is easier for the recipients of the post to reason about.

That said, they should really start suggesting people to follow ala Twitter. With so little friends inside, my stream is kinda empty!
I've got a hunch that there was a little more to it than just "a good name and logo."
Yes, that's exactly right. This kind of bundling isn't illegal until you're using a monopoly in one market to crush competitors in another market.

Microsoft used its desktop OS monopoly to ensure that IE was far and away the most dominant browser on the internet. It's a great example of how these sorts of otherwise-legal tactics, when taken to the extreme, can lead to situations that are bad for consumers -- which is why the anti-trust laws exist.
Absolutely.

It would be quite easy to do UI-wise, you can already select either "Stream" for the whole thing or an individual Circle. Just let us click on multiple Circles at once.

Then add a setting somewhere to multi-select your default stream Circles.

Some of the other things i'd like to see (or should I split this into a separate post?)...

- Make Sparks work more like reader. Sparks has HUGE potential but right now I have no idea how it pulls content and from what sources. It doesn't seem to update much though. Let us do an initial search for content for the keyword, but then also add RSS feeds to each keyword so it can be our one-stop-shop for perusing new content each day (both from the RSS feeds we added, and from the default Spark query engine). Format it a bit more like Reader too, title + expandable box for content.

- Bring in our Buzz posts as "Public" posts on Plus. What's going to happen to Buzz anyway? I really liked it, but surely it's deprecated now with public Plus posts?
He has a normal 5 and a normal 16 as well as the modified versions.
dedicate some later chapters to ramping the reader onto assembler, the stack (and smashing it) and instructions

there are a lot of C devs who don't understand what it is their code is producing, and how an application and memory are managed