skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was surprised too. I expected a mention of it, and a link to the poetic and intuitive proof-story of why its a problem would be good for the story too.

In case other HNers haven't read Scooping the Loop Snooper, I (re)submitted it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2838488
Which is why I said "the traditional C model of shared libraries." Shared libraries are not a part of the C language itself, but most real systems make heavy use of shared libraries. Even statically linked C programs have this problem, because optimizing across object files is hard - most compilers don't even try.

Not being a part of the C language itself is irrelevant. The traditional linker has been a part of the C ecosystem for decades.
Shared libraries is an operating system feature and has nothing to do with C. C just happens to be the most popular systems programming language. "Traditional C model" is just a bunch of object files, and it's up to you and your linker to package it any way you want it: a shared library, a static library or an executable.

I'm not a GCC expert, but Microsoft C compilers could inline cross-module code since the beginning of time. His example may actually produce different results under msvc with /GL flag and with static linking enabled.

"...Inline a function in a module even when the function is defined in another module..."
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0zza0de8%28v=vs.80%2...
Data of Sun website users stolen
Noob question time: what's the halting problem?
Nah, I had that impression from the very first scene the game loads, which is the creepy guy talking to you.

(I don't mean convincing in a "mistake-for-real" way, but in a "lets-me-suspend-disbelief" way.)
The halting problem doesn't apply.
Ask HN: Computer science neophyte needs a book recommendations
Alright, so I'm the non-technical half of a small Chicago startup, and I want to learn to code. I have fought my way through Programming PHP and JavaScript: In A Nutshell, and HTML: The Definitive Guide, (not in that order), and I'm beginning to think that I'm not the type of person to just learn things piecemeal. I'm looking for a book which explains (in words, as opposed to diagrams) the architecture and operations of a computer from the hardware on up. I want to know what causes a parse error, and where this lies in the hierarchy between the CPU and what gets rendered in the GUI.

Seriously, this is the most curious I've been about something since I wanted to be a marine biologist when I was six.

Can anyone recommend a comprehensive, rigorous explanation of computing and computer programming? I'd be much obliged.
For me, I think of mine stories like space stories. They both tend to have elements of designing and applying technology to overcome the challenges of nature in extreme conditions. The common ideas of adventure, exploration, and achieving new understanding to see things (and profit) no one else has ever seen before also help.
http://www.delicious.com/tag/seo
It only takes memory snapshots to find next end-of-loop instruction in binary code to jump to it, with source equivalent of it being:

while True:
if loop_var > 9000:
break
loop_var += 1

My main complaint that might as well detect a repeat in snapshot but I really doubt that it detects extraneous changes in loop variables that might be caused by stray infinite loop logic.

From programming perspective it's better to crash hard and let the error be known rather than fail silently and introduce more sublte errors.

From user perspective, what is the point of saving file in a program that is falling over when you could potentially save a corrupt file and instead of retaining some of the work the user will end up with a blob of useless data. I guess you could do Save As... and then manually compare changed data with last save. Still I'd be extremelly suspicious of it.
Dolphin 7.0.7 Released Better Mobile Apps, Access Control and More
I guess the real problem is that the example serves no real world purpose and can very easily be biased. See my response to scott_s below.
Sun website 1000's users data stolen
There's nothing really stopping gcc from doing as well here, since it ought to be able to spot that the format string never changes & roll out a custom sprintf() that doesn't need to parse it every time. However, right now gcc doesn't do that, so it loses to a language implementation that does.

The really sad thing is that using an ostringstream in C++ is even worse, despite the fact that C++ has all the types available to it & doesn't need to parse any format strings at all: Not enough template metaprogramming clearly!
Facebook won't build their competing phone OS on top of android - Google controls android and Google is facebook's biggest competitor.
As the post you replied to says, you need to point out abuse of the laws in question for politicians to fix the issue. IV is abusing the law. Sure they are within the law but they don't respect the spirit of the law.

And Apple is getting tons of flack for the HTC patent case. They are not escaping freely while Intellectual Ventures is getting pounded on. And as far as poor consumers who buy from Apple, that's their own damn fault for doing so.

It's completely different when then a company like IV prying on small company who build things with patents that wouldn't stand in court. The little guy cannot sue IV to prove that since they don't have the cash. Public shaming in this case is the best way to go and it's the best way to bring it to the attention of the politicians who can fix the issue.
> I suppose what most greatly offends and alarms me about Airbnb is how sharply it diverges from very well established cultural and legal norms.

Your cultural and legal norms are stupid. They have no basis in reality. They are the product of scaremongering TV networks competing for advertising eyeballs with sensationalism. They have produced a society of isolation and paranoia where talking to strangers in the park is a faux pas, and suicide is a major cause of death. They kill people every day. They need to be destroyed.

> Those kinds of random comparisons prove nothing.

On the contrary, comparison to a baseline is the only thing that would prove anything about riskiness. This single incident shows us that (a) apparently Airbnb is run by a bunch of insensitive and dishonest people, and (b) some people steal stuff and smash stuff up for fun. But we already knew (b). To make a judgment of whether Airbnb makes this kind of thing more or less likely, we need to know the baseline.

Urban US society as a whole, not a sanitized amusement park, is the correct baseline to use. Albuquerque is reasonably representative of urban US society.
New Android trojan records phone calls, shares with remote server
Probably because they wanted to simulate calling a function that parsed a string, and such functions will have to allocate and deallocate memory as needed.

It's also worth noting that calling malloc and free in a tight loop where you're always requesting the same amount of memory will be pretty fast. Good implementations of malloc - of which glibc certainly is - will consistently return the exact same chunk of memory to you, and you will be on the fast-path of the allocation algorithm.
For those kinds of tasks, a string doesn't seem all that appropriate to me. The BigString (that is, a Rope[1]) is more appropriate IMHO.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_(computer_science)
It's mathematically impossible to write a program that always correctly determines whether an arbitrary piece of code will halt (rather than get stuck in an infinite loop). Making that determination is referred to as halting problem.
Statically linked programs certainly still have this problem, I'm not contending that at all. I would not however call shared libraries a "traditional model" at all. Particularly in the fields that C seems to be getting relegated to more and more these days.
You are a fucking maniac.
No, I don't think so. I don't think the question presumes that inventing is a good thing and not inventing is a bad thing. In fact, here, you would probably say that the current work does not involve inventing things, but rather putting existing things together. That's supposed to be a valid answer, as well, and a useful one.
The best part is the blog's un-resizable 425px column of text, containing 150+ character shell commands.
By the time I looked at it, it was very very slow, and nearly killed firefox. Love the concept though.
See my reply below. I'm fully aware of the relationship C has to systems programming.
how does this compare to the mac app, hype? looks too similar no?
Depends on their GCC options. If it's the default option, it should be using the shared library. If they changed it to statically link libc, that should produce a(possibly considerable) performance boost.
sizeof(char) is always 1 by definition
Does anyone know the answer to the problem posed in the XKCD comic? http://xkcd.com/356/
If you're running a Unix derived system, most of the programs are using shared libraries. That fits "traditional" in my mind.
non-mobile link:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14370878
Basically the halting problem states that it is impossible to determine whether or not a given program halts under the assumption that it is executed in a turing complete machine.

Due to the fact that a program is a composition of programs which at the lowest level are loops and instructions this also means that it is impossible to determine whether or not a loop halts.
Does this mean that I can establish my own business on a H1B and then have that business sponsor my visa so I can work for it?
I did a little experimenting on the dev channel. I found that after visiting http://espn.go.com/blog/nfceast once typing nfc would suggest it and this HN post and nfc through nfceast would suggest this HN page.
Sorry, but can you clarify how much you expect the fixed connection to cost? It sounds fine to charge a fixed connection fee, but I kind of doubt that the revenue works out the same unless the fixed fee is nearly the cost of the current service. You say that the transfer cost doesn't have to be a fixed dollar/byte, but if it's not, what are you envisioning? If you charge $10 for the first GB and $10 for the next ten GB, you're just on a tiered plan.

You say that light users would pay $20-30, average users would pay $50-60, and heavy users would pay $100-200. I can't see a lot of people willing to pay $200 for home broadband service (I also can't see the FCC allowing it). I have a hard time seeing most of them paying $100 for just Internet access, honestly, and even at that rate it'd be hard to argue that light users at $20-$30 aren't still subsidizing the heavy users. 4x the cost for 12x the bandwidth? Unless we're assuming that the fixed connection fee is $20?

Truthfully, I don't think a lot of people will want the fluctuating bill from month-to-month, either, even low-usage customers. It's nice to know that you owe Comcast $X every month so that you can budget.

Comcast's speed-limited plans are entirely different. Telcos are competing based on bandwidth, not transfer amount. Comcast is offering several plans in that space, none of which are actually competing based on usage.
Personally, I'd like to hear something along the lines of "tools that best fit the team and the problem." Languages come and go but algorithms are forever.
I think if you read the FAQ it seems like you previously could establish an employer-employee relationship (required for H1B) if you were part-owner. This just clarifies that its also possible even if you're the sole owner.

I don't think its a huge win though.
Other reports of this story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2818847 : aptiquant.com <- This has all the comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2822935 : conceivablytech.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2822162 : mashable.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2823776 : cnn.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2823808 : msn.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2823947 : pcworld.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2823949 : theatlanticwire.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2827618 : theregister.co.uk : killed

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2832782 : telegraph.co.uk : killed

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2832818 : pcmag.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2832948 : telegraph.co.uk : killed

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2833997 : (unknown) : killed

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2837736 : bbc.co.uk : killed

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2838228 : npr.org

... there may be some I've missed. And now there's this one:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2838474 : bbc.co.uk
I think they are clarifying the extreme case not limiting things. If a company has 2+ shareholders or 2+ employees it’s a stronger case to support requesting an H1B.
The halting problem:

Given a program and an input, determine whether that program, given that input, will ever halt, or if it will loop infinitely.

One of the fundamentals of academic computer science is learning that it is mathematically impossible to solve the halting problem - which is why the grandparent comment simply notes "the halting problem" with no further explanation; it's a famous problem. (Don't feel bad, everyone has to learn something the first time!)

The poem linked elsewhere in this comment tree is a simple and pithy description of the mathematical proof.

For (many) more details, Wikipedia has plenty of information.
Auto Transport Plano, Texas
I hate to depart from the group think, but there's another explanation aside from a smart engineer getting carried away with their own brilliance:

They remarked how they spent a couple of days looking over the system which was complicated and creaky, they couldn't figure it out

Now it may be the case that they didn't really try to fix it and are just using that as an excuse, but OTOH, they may actually have been stumped despite best efforts.

If the system really did defeat this smart engineer's days of study, then in my opinion, and the opinion of at least one discussion I've seen on HN, the software should have been rewritten. (IMO) this really needs more clarification before scorn is passed.
IMHO, your third point about "apps with the Internet as transport and APIs as the endpoint" is now where all the interesting client behavior is. Web apps in this regard are just clients implemented in JavaScript.
House members voice support for proposed AT&T, T-Mobile merger
Thanks for that - I was going to ask just that question! (which is the "closest to the center of the earth" mine in the world)
Italian Intelligence agency CNAIPIC steals sensitive data from Indian Embassy
How should I architect my (mostly) text-based game server?
Does your computer have an infinite tape?
Note, that there are no actual changes in law here, just making the process easier to navigate. And a good lawyer would have helped with that previously anyway.

Still, given my experiences with USCIS employees, anything that clarifies things for them is wonderful.
The Baroque Era of the CMS
Pocket Folders Are Trustworthy Folders
Folders are fabulous creation and formation, which help you to increase your business identity in the global bazaar. We offer economical folder printing services.
Why would you assume the need to deallocate in the loop? Reuse of an already allocated memory location is C optimisation 101.
Are there any stories of positive experiences (for Developers) with Amazon's App Store? This is the second bad one I've read on here.
Invention vs re-use. Unless the candidate is willing to take an honest, logical approach to this decision (involving defendable reasoning), I'd be wary.

Is it a solved problem? No? Invent it.

Is the solution available to you within your constraints? No? Make your own implementation (unless there's a way to acceptably compromise in the design).

Is the solution cost-effective to use (performance, ease-of-use, bugginess, support, etc)? No? Make a better implementation.

Otherwise just re-use an existing solution.
At the very least you have to say their choice was educated - there was a debate, they decided to go ahead and do it, it didn't work out, they're shifting their resources as a result.
I've added London, as per your transient request, which is now deleted. I also changed the comments to "select cities", as this code by no means represents a comprehensive analysis over all possible cities.
If you didn't notice, their version was based off of static allocation for the character array, which is the kind of thing a sharp C programmer will put in as an optimization. Note that the Python version is already pretty optimized, according to general Python idioms.

You are arguing that they should have compared against a less efficient C example, which honestly boggles my mind.
Omnisio in HTML5
That advertising is to developers. I'm baffled by why anyone would think that the general public cares what payout Amazon is giving to developers. To the general public, it's a free app.

Do you seriously imagine that members of the public are attracted to the Amazon Android App Alliteration Store because they think Amazon is a more charitable and supportive firm than Google, and shows greater kindness to the ramen-chewing developer? I feel pretty comfortable in asserting that the vast majority of people don't give two hoots about what arrangement exists between publisher and distributor. Do you go to the movie theater and decide to watch a Universal film because their producers are nicer than the ones at Paramount? Do you grade other products/services you buy by the providers' corporate social responsibility score, or the credit terms extended to their suppliers? Of course you don't. With a few exceptions (mostly symbolic) you are wholly ignorant of such things, and rationally so. You assess products and services based on whether they fill your needs at a reasonable price.

I don't run a whole lot of apps and as a result have not got around to using the Amazon store, but non-industry members of my social circle have mentioned that there's 'a free app every day' there. I suspect that if I asked what return they think this nets for the developers of said apps they would just give a me a funny look.
What drives mobile payments, in emerging markets?
QuickDiff - visually showing the differences between text
This does a very simple job: it takes the input from 2 text fields, and visually shows you the differences between them. It's a graphical layer on top of the "diff" command in Linux, built as a website/service.
Software engineer in NYC.  Perm.
Click the link and solve the puzzle to get an interview.

http://www.yodle.com/careers/job-details/software-engineer-new-york-ny/

0 to 4 years of experience
• Excellent coding and design skills. Software that works, is reliable, testable and maintainable should be what you do by default.
• You enjoy writing software and take pride in what you build.
• Having programmed in Java will help you get going faster, but your primary languages aren’t as important as being a great programmer.
• SQL proficiency, particularly with PostgreSQL is a plus
• Strong communications skills, both written and verbal
• BA/BS or above from a top Computer Science program
• You should be able to work daily in our office in New York City
I launched http://tubufy.com, which is a web app that lets you create music video channels from spotify, mog and last.fm playlists. Working on reaching out to potential users right now. Building is easy, marketing is hard!
That's not really it. This, at least in my understanding, is a fully generic optimization, of operations on constant strings.
I'm pretty sure you can do that without an H1B, but you can't work for that business (your own business) without an H1B.
Hands on with Skype for iPad, a killer video chat app
Thanks for the pastebin code. I've added London to my list for now, and I'd be interested to seeing the results with all possible cities if you wanted to merge your code in github.
You're looking at this from the wrong angle. You're looking at the C code and thinking, "How can I optimize this?"

What you need to do in this case is look at it and say, "How can I optimize this and still retain the essence of what I want to test?" Your optimizations remove that essence - if you're calling a function that is a part of an API, it will have to allocate and free its own memory. That the code is in a loop is an artifact of the experiment.
If you're interested in mining, or big machines in general, consider attending the quad-annual MINExpo. The next one's in Las Vegas, Sept 2012 http://www.minexpo.com

This is the sort of totally awesome stuff you see there: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=MINExpo
I think those are for Sproutcore 1.x. The 2.0 docs are still sparse and still here: http://guides.sproutcore20.com/
What is your basis? Why do you believe that 1 is optimum?
Two words: shadow economy

http://www.alexisofthought.com/2011/08/our-brief-relationshi...
The busy beaver function gives very loose upper bound...
A better bound: If the computer can be described with $n$ bit of information, and a program did not terminate with $2^n+1$ operations, then the program has a infinite loop.

$n$ is usually the memory + cpu cache size.
A sufficiently modern Unix derived system, sure ;) I have quite commonly seen shared libraries not done on embedded systems however, regardless of heritage.
Wow..thats awesome! May be building next-gen HTML5 stuff (based on TC reports abt HTML5)
As far as I can tell, they're not doing any voxel-voxel collisions. Mesh-voxel collisions sound much more tractable.
Technical details and scripts of the Wordpress Timthumb hack
On a side topic, how facebook decides to acquire companies? Any idea?
* ugh * does anyone actually like that avatar animation, and the slow scrolling that results from it?

I find the comments here far more useful, and they aren't one-line commands with no explanation of the parts. Thanks for the submission, for the discussion's sake, but I'm not going back to that blog any time soon.
If Notch wants to be picky about ethics, let's talk about spending money hiring for the development of a new game (Scrolls) before finishing a game players have essentially advanced him money to complete (Minecraft). Or about sitting on critical security holes for months. Euclideon may not deliver on its promises (it probably won't), but for all Notch knows they do have a novel technique and labeling it a "scam" is just irresponsible.
Is your life interrupting your job?
The quote is still good, I think your interpretation given the context is flawed.

We might all be guilty of something as defined through law, however that doesn't mean you are not innocent ethically speaking.
And I don't consider embedded systems to be traditional. Otherwise, we wouldn't have to qualify it with "embedded."
There is an 'engineer' category, so if you have a degree that says 'software engineer' (which are about 5-10 classes shy of a CS degree usually) you can use it. They have this artificial distinction between programmer and software engineer where you make or design new code or just modify existing code so lawyers are still required and there is the 'Computer Systems Analyst' that seems to always imply a need for a degree that says Computers in it.