skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't agree that it is more dangerous than pure C. First, you can do all your operations on strings in 100% C++, which will be aggressively optimized to essentially what you'd be doing with C anyway. Second, keeping the underlying representation as NUL-terminated allows you to use other APIs that consume char * C-style strings by calling c_str(). There is a compile-time const check that forces you to write a cast when calling APIs that do not consume a const char *. If the APIs that you are calling do not modify the string, but merely read it (which is the case for almost all uses), then you can have a C++ app that is completely safe from string buffer overflows.

This is called abstracting out an easy-to-make-tragic-mistakes-in problem into a small layer (C++ std::string) and using that layer everywhere.
First image of the next tallest building in the world
This title is misleading; instead of `C` it should use `CPython`.
If you want to learn it from the bottom up, read Code.

http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softwa...

It's a page turner and you'll know more about computers than many developers. You still won't be a programming guru from this, but its a great holistic approach that you can then supplement.
Human Victims Of Human » Saviours of the World……Human Rights Activists.
From the article:

> In the case of PyPy, we specialize the assembler if we detect the left hand string of the modulo operator to be constant.

So it's very much a targeted optimization at the modulo operator (which is Python's equivalent of sprintf).
Applaud

You've successfully made me laugh-out-loud. I was thinking the same thing, but probably could not have made it sound as humorous.
Outsourcing Your User Research Is Like Outsourcing Your Vacation
The argument seems to be that competition is good and will force facebook to be better. But using the competing service will give Google too much power, so don't do that.

Cognitive dissonance if I ever saw it. How can one mind hold both those arguments at the same time without redefining "competition"?
Ask HN: Interested Web-related projects?
My friend is interning for a big company and at the moment, all he's essentially doing is copy/pasting codes and very basic HTML.

What are some topics/mini-projects he should look into to maximize his learning experience & impact?
Things I've suggested so far:
-UX interface design
-analytics
-database optimization
-A/B testing
There are always a few experiments related to the omnibox in about:flags that you can try out to see where things may be headed.
Wow. It is "stupid" to be skeptical of handing over your home and access to your most valuable assets to relative strangers? It is "stupid" to isolate yourself in a non-public, unwatched space controlled by strangers? And one would only think otherwise because of TV? And the legal landscape here "has no basis in reality" in spite of the various laws and contracts that say otherwise?

Wow.
Only useful for people who format their dates in crazy, mixed up mm-dd-yy. Even then, a bit too geeky for my sensibilities.
In other news, if you click INSTALL on an application that tells you it's touching ALL of your phone calls, it might do stuff you don't want with those phone calls.

/headdesk
Being someone who is also actively looking for a tech person, from my experience you need to do a lot more than throw a post up on Hacker News, including being more transparent about yourself.

It wasn't until I launched a product (which i had developed by outsourcing it), marketed it up to 5,000 users, got paying customers till tech people payed any attention to me. I have also have deep industry knowledge and connections that help.

You don't need a tech person to get things moving. Outsource an MVP or prototype. Spend a little to get someone interested and excited.

Just my 2 cents.
Article's more than a year old, and a semi-duplicate of a HN post from around that era.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1647763
From David Pogues' review[1,2] from earlier this year:

Yes, America may swamp Zediva’s big rack of DVD players, and yes, the M.P.A.A. may squash it as it has squashed hundreds of movie-downloading college students. Until then, fellow movie buffs, let us celebrate a brave step forward into the new age of compromise-free streaming movies.

Too bad it was the M.P.A.A. that doomed it and not being overrun by America. :-(

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/technology/personaltech/17...

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2334332

"Judge Walter's decision is a great victory for the more than 2 million American men and women whose livelihoods depend on a thriving film and television industry," the MPAA said in a statement.

"Gag me with a spoon" as they used to say…
I have yet to see a post that tells me what sites to use and what sites not to use that actually had a good reason. This one is no different.
This is true, but local::lib has come along and made things much easier:

http://search.cpan.org/~apeiron/local-lib-1.008004/lib/local...

This very handily includes instructions on how to bootstrap its own installation.
3 tips for beginning web designers
I agree with everything mindcrime says here. It's not being mean; if you want a technical partner, you need to tell us a lot more about you :)

On top of the above, I'd also need to know how you know your idea will work, such as how many users you have banging down the door to use it right right now, for instance. It's all part of selling your idea :)
Page 25. It reflected perfectly my experiences with Cablevision: I can stream movies anytime but prime-time.

And it's the only provider I can get other than DSL. Ugh.
What the example shows is that specializing string operations for known inputs can be faster than not doing so. Surprise!

But going from this to "PyPy is faster than C" seems quite a stretch, no?
This seems like the software equivalent of smacking a car starter with a hammer to get it to turn.
what is MVP? Thanks for the answer

also, how can I have my post in this 'ask' section? Both of my threads below are not anywhere near the visibility I am expecting. Is there something I need to do?

Thanks.

btw, I am also looking for one, and cme, i would need your advise.

my post on tech co founder

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2829375

my question in regards on how to start it

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2838115
Getting starting with iOS development (The Code Sheriff)
Why would it use that title? CPython is a part of some of the numbers, but the comparison is C vs. PyPy.
I don't get it. Is he trying to be ironic?
Since we're comparing apples to oranges anyway, how fast could it be if you really wanted to format "%d %d" into the stack 10 million times without a function call... Just for fun:

int main() {
static const char* digits = "0123456789";
int i;
for (i = 0; i < 10000000; i++) {
char x[44], *p = x, tmp[20];

/* sign */
int j;
if (i < 0) { *p++ = '-'; j = -i; } else { j = i; }

/* number */
int pos = 0, spos;
do {
tmp[pos++] = digits[j % 10];
j /= 10;
} while (j != 0 && pos <= 20);
spos = pos;
do { *p++ = tmp[--pos]; } while (pos > 0);

/* space, sign, number again */
*p++ = ' ';
if (i < 0) *p++ = '-';
do { *p++ = tmp[--spos]; } while (spos > 0);
*p++ = '\0';
}
}

$ gcc -O4 -o s s.c
$ time ./s
real 0m0.140s
user 0m0.138s
sys 0m0.001s
what is MVP?

Minimum Viable Product:

http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/08/minimum-viable-...
Nice to see that interns seem to choose the topic they'd like to work on and feel like making really useful work!
Pretty skeptical of the code obfuscator part. Even written from scratch this will not prevent people to deobfuscate it in the end.
I highly doubt that the performance difference is a result of not inlining/unrolling sprintf(). The difference is most likely due to the fact that sprintf() is parsing the format string over and over, whereas PyPy is only parsing it once.

The printf() family of functions is one of the rare parts of the C standard library that is essentially implementing an interpreter. The format string is a program and the library call runs that program with data that is supplied in the other arguments. So in essence this is comparing an interpreter (sprintf) with a JIT compiler (PyPy generating code for a specific format string at runtime).

I agree it's not a very fair comparison: if this C code was performance critical you would call a specialized function for converting an integer to a string, and this would almost certainly beat PyPy.
YES! A maniac for the TRUTH!
Apparently the top floors on the Burj Khalifa, you can get motion sick from the wind slightly swaying the building ... you'll probably get pretty sick on the top floors of the Kingdom Tower
What exactly do you mean by a better UI? The fact that it's Cocoa? Admittedly, I haven't tried your editor (and most likely won't), but can you briefly tell how the UI is any better than that of Emacs or Vim, other than being "shiny"?
char x[44];
sprintf(x, "%d %d", i, i);

This is fine, except you can't even return x from this function, a more fair comparison might be:

char * x = malloc(44 * sizeof(char));
sprintf(x, "%d %d", i, i);*

There is a standard (C99) way to do this: asprintf(3).

char *x;
asprintf(&x, "%d %d", i, i);
return x;
Roxbury Opens $17.5M Environmentally Friendly Police Station
This almost seems like a parody hunt for a tech cofounder. Maybe it's actually a YC funded company looking for people to have a sense of humor.

Probably not.
feel free to shoot me an email, always willing to help out.
In that case you'd probably be eligible directly through the EB5 category, which has a prohibitive $1M price tag.

An alternative would be to get yourself a cofounder who was a citizen, while working on your startup from wherever you were, then get a lawyer to file to get you into the country on an H1-B ... my feeling is that the new rules make this a lot easier to do now.
Secrets of a Successful Business Pitch
The embedded systems I work on use shared libraries, C++, shell scripts, and even Adobe Flash.

Dynamic linking has been around since the 1960s, and is the model that has been used by almost all currently active developers for their entire careers. Arguments based around specialized microcontrollers, hard real-time systems, life-or-death control systems, etc. are off in the woods. Few developers use such systems in the real world, and their code is statistically irrelevant to comparisons between e.g. Python and C.
The Nine Lives of Chloe King Season 1 Episode 8 
The Nine Lives of Chloe King Season 1 Episode 8
If by x you mean performing a string operation and copying the result to memory .. I still fail to see how allocating and deallocating memory on each iteration is a fair comparison, it's not something I'd expect a competent C developer to do ergo how is that a relevant comparison?

I know the aim is to show off the string operation in and of itself so why not leave it there, why the need to bring garbage collection into the mix?

Edit: it's the way the garbage collection has been thrown into the mix I'm having difficulty understanding the need for.
openBTS doesn't seem to succeed commercially. In the only case in it was deployed fr long term use , at the island of niue in 2010 , it was later replace by a commercial base-station vendor called lemko.
Push Pop also won an ADA... I think you're on to something.
I was looking at your profile, but can't find email... maybe I did it wrong?

What is your email?

Thanks.
Ask HN: Is hckrnews.com not working correctly?
Try going to www.hckrnews.com then click "Get Next Day" at the bottom. It jumps from Sunday to Thursday! Any ideas? That's a hefty amount of missed information.
Trunk.ly launches a Hacker News connector
Where did you get that from?

The new rules seem to say that you can do this as a sole proprietor.
Adobe Edge uses jQuery
That sounds pretty limited to copy/cut/paste and opening and saving. If you're doing heavy editing, and more so if you're using the editor for programming, you won't find that much use for standard shortcuts.

For Emacs, there's also Aquamacs and CUA mode, which use the "native" shortcuts as you'd expect.
Wait, you expected to receive 20% of your pre free giveaway price during the free app of the day promotion and Amazon just gives you money, seriously? Where exactly does it say that you get paid during a free giveaway promo?

From the FAQ:

What is the payment structure between Amazon and me?
Amazon pays developers 70% of the sale price of the app or 20% of the list price, whichever is greater.
But the question here isn't actually "What is the ONE TRUE STRING format that the language permits, all others to be rigidly banned by the compiler?", the question is "What shall the default string be in the core C APIs and functions?"

If you still need NULL-terminated strings, you could have chosen them, and if you knew enough to so choose, hopefully you know enough to treat them like the dangerous tools they are. Meanwhile, the core C functions and API and UNIX could have been built around the much safer strings, which wouldn't have been all that hard to upgrade to 4 bytes (or more) later. Or we could have done a UTF-8-like size encoding, or turn the default strings into linked lists if they got large, etc. It would be OK, because raw expanses of memory would still be available to you, it just wouldn't be the default.

NULL-terminated strings are the wrong default, even though they should be available to those who really need them.
The word "invention" is ambiguous. I invent what I don't know, therefore, the less I know, the more I invent. Incompetence is the mother of invention.

IMHO, creativity is a better word: creativity builds on previous knowledge.

(I'd like to expand on this but after many rewrites of this comment I can't phrase properly what I want to say so I'll just leave it at that.)
Well more like smacking a Toyotas accellerator to get it to stop ;-)
California judge: trolling with someone else's Facebook is identity theft
Really nice summary on things to know before starting developping a first application!
I was searching for something like this for a few weeks. Too bad it starts by saying buying a MAC is almost mandatory... ^^
Review of that BookBook iPhone case... in short: it sucks
No no no, there's no way a Facebook phone would take off (especially in the already crowded market). Facebook's environment is built around iterating quickly, with okay solutions, and checking for bugs by pushing it out. It's a great hacking spirit and probably fun to work with, but is really ill suited to hardware and consumer products (look at how long it even took Google to get used to having discrete releases)
08.02.2011.
Google Developer Days 2011
Interesting take---not at all what I expected from the title. The notion seems to be to preserve competition rather than running from one side of the boat to the other. I'm not sure that 2 makes for sufficient competition, but it certainly beats one.
I'd say you are "that" guy. This is indisputably an interesting story even if it wasn't YC's crown jewel (or, one of). This is what many bloggers do...they write about their experiences. Unlike some or even many, EJ was not writing to build HN karma. I think what she has written is plausibly reasonable. It would be easy to nit pick with some of the details.
No, I mean a regular maniac, the one that stands on the street corner, mumbles to himself and screams at people that pass by.
Monday seems to be on the first page already (before clicking "Get next day", at least when i load the website.
I can't think of two people managing todos the same way.

You obviously not going to add a todo if you are able to complete it right away. This doesn't mean you should stop making them.

Also if the todos on your list are irrelated, you may just letting it loose. If you have a million items on it, than you are MONK.

Recording todos can save you much more time(headache) than it consumes to make.
This is gonna be downvoted, but I must say, ”mm-dd-yy is totally nuts!” I can accept “Feb 8, 2011”, but definitely not mm-dd-yy. The next one is letter-size paper. Well, another holy war...
Good. The one about "write your own code", and if you need to paste some CSS section into your own CSS file, first print it, and check where that piece of code is going to fit, and you may need to spread it along your own code.
Toronto Movers | Toronto Moving Company | Toronto Moving, Storage Services 
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Yes, but I missed Friday, Saturday, and Sunday -- I would like to catch up :)
Everyone bends a little in their own direction but I didn't see anything worthy of the "liar" designation.
I just pasted my original code with properly indenting in here, so I thought to remove ugliness once I copied it pastebin.

Also I saw some small city in california 'Los something...' with population of 28k which didn't get caught by the first function that only lists 50 most populous cities so I wrote the second one that includes every town in US.
I once got followed by a new local radio station that was launching in my area (I work in radio and they seemed to be following every radio person in the region). I thought, fair enough, and followed them back.

A few weeks later, after they'd started up and the dust had settled, I had a look at their Twitter page. "Following: 0." The cheeky gits had followed everyone, got a bunch of followers in return, and then deleted us all! That was enough to lose them a significant amount of goodwill from me and I promptly unfollowed them.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2657135
Google's "Calling From Gmail" Aims to Disrupt International Calling
Clicking on a couple of the animated objects results in this: http://cl.ly/8xvR

I wonder if that's intended behavior.
Facebook Acquires eBook Maker Push Pop Press - See The TED Video To Understand
Dulwich – a native python way to access Git repositories
Transforming Motorcycle
There you go! Proof that Transformers are infiltrating human society!
It reminds me of Zed's excellent distinction between invention and implementation: http://zedshaw.com/essays/c2i2_hypothesis.html
Make no mistake about it. Being too quick to rewrite a system is bad. It causes unnecessary work for others and can throw a schedule behind drastically.

That said, I think it's important not to go to the opposite extreme. Personally, I'm in the camp of being too quick to rewrite things myself. And though I've learned to control my gut instinct in this regard, I've also learned that sometimes it's right.

I can name several instances where everyone would have come out better just by rewriting the damn thing up front rather than trying to fix or maintain the old system.

TL;DR - Sometimes discarding your peers' work is the best way to respect them.
On second thought, you are right. I was thinking of Alexander having to build boats in India.

On the other hand, Google book search has never worked for me. But I do think Google is waaaay better then nothing. Howewver, I am not certain that Wikipedia, as it stands, is actually a net gain.
Definitely, looking at the topic and the pointer styling
Of course. My point is that polygons aren't the limiting factor today, so having unlimited polygons wouldn't "fix" that. The GPU typically determines polygon budget, with the CPU determining physics and AI.

Of course, you can dump physics onto the GPU, but that will cost you polygons. I guess that could, in theory (if you really had unlimited atoms), give you more cycles for physics.
I think the better way to do this would be to throw a "JoltException" which you could catch in your program if you wanted to, like any other exception.

It seems like it'd be a huge mess to try to write code succeeding the loop which tries to handle the case where your loop code didn't complete like you expected it to.
Physicists report progress in understanding high-temperature superconductors
It also may not be applicable if you don't actually have access to all memory states involved. E.g. when communicating with a 3rd party computer over a network.
>Another candidate could be IBM's choice of Bill Gates over Gary Kildall to supply the operating system for its personal computer. The damage from this decision is still accumulating at breakneck speed, with StuxNet and the OOXML perversion of the ISO standardization process being exemplary bookends for how far and wide the damage spreads.

First off, IBM did put CPM/86 on the PC and sell it. Many people bought it. We had it at work. The reason CPM/86 failed relative to PC-DOS was simple - CPM/86 cost nearly $300 and PC-DOS cost $40.

There wasn't anything discernably better about CPM/86 at the time, either its programming API or its user interface, and people did the sensible thing and bought the less expensive operating system. It was a no-brainer.

As to the idea that CPM/86 was somehow a secure operating system, I haven't heard that before. It's patently false.

What killed CPM/86, plain and simple, is it was way, way overpriced. I have no idea who made that decision.
So the question is, is that phenomenon of "perceived technical sophistication" and expectation something that has been studied.

I'd be really interested to know how people generally behave here. Questions like, "use X for a while, then get to try out X^2, then go back to X, how long does it take people to forget the speed improvement of X^2"?
It has been posted multiple times already.
Story with comments : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2834183
>Everyone today wants to get the personal glory out of their own little pet project instead of getting the glory out of contributing important patches to existing projects.

Everyone? No. Most people just want to download the projects they like and build stuff with it. A fraction of those will contribute bug reports. A fraction of those will contribute patches. A fraction of those will contribute feature pull requests or plugins.

I think the perceived problem is that there isn't yet a clear winner in heavy JS frameworks. I think their usage is more niche than their social media coverage would make some people assume.
The comments in the original page are great!.
SSID = "WeCanHearYouHavinSex" LOL!
Does this imply there's an android app that can record your phone calls? I'd love to get that for calling utilities.
This is the wrong conclusion. Yes, there's a lot more information out there now. It's a noisier environment. Yes, that can lead to information overload, which can lead to apathy and short-termism.

But the challenge isn't in knowing which sources to "turn off." It's in knowing which sources to trust and to emphasize over the others. It's in separating the signal from the noise. But on the balance, it's generally a good thing that we've got more information rather than less.
An aside, but since you bring it up: if Minecraft was never out of Beta, I would still consider my money well spent, thank you very much. And, he does continue to work on it. He has a team now and they're all working on various things.
Its just an Endian difference