skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess it boils down to whether we think it's "lip service" to start work on a new concurrent project before the initial project is complete. As a freelancer, I work on many projects at once -- am I being unethical by dividing my day to several tasks in parallel instead of performing them completely serially on a first-come, first-served basis? I don't see that there's any neglect inherent in using some resources to explore avenues not directly related to the game. Is it also unethical if notch buys a luxurious replacement for something that he had previously owned which was adequate but not luxurious? Is this also a waste of the "advance" given by players?

While notch intimates that there will one day be a "final" version of minecraft, the only way that effects any minecraft owners is that they received a discount from the theoretical "final" phase because they purchased during testing. There is no contract or implication that final is going to be released no matter what, no refund available to users who don't receive a 1.0 as soon as they'd like.

I think it's silly to consider that an ethical violation. People who buy minecraft buy to play as it is, NOT to play at some hypothetical future state. It is not an advance where we receive a half-finish product with the promise of a finished product by x date.
The use of the word "scam" is really inaccurate based on the rest of the post. He agrees that the demo is real, and calls it a scam since others are working on similar things and they are trying to get funding. Neither others working on the same thing nor trying to get funding make something a scam. It would be a scam if they weren't really rendering what they say they are in real time, but Notch doesn't claim that.
Premium freelance job sites?
Anyone know if "premium" freelance job sites exist? I mean if you are clearly above the norm and have the skills / portfolio to show? Just seeing if this is a business opportunity...
Debris From Space Shuttle Columbia Disaster Found in Texas
On a tangent, I wonder if GitHub has any plans to serve binary downloads for projects in the future? Given how sleek the site is, this could make it the one-stop shop for many projects.
10 World Famous Companies that Started in Garages
Ask HN: Should anyone wait for YC, or...?
There is certainly something(facts actually) in the air about YC, but should anyone consider applying somewhere else where applications are open?

There is no real urge to apply really... but as we just entering the starup arena, some guidence would be great.

TC Disrupt coming up, AngelPad has one free spot, TechStars just opened up... this could make you inpatient somehow... :)

ps: I know, i know. Put together the minimum, get users, get feedback, make changes, get more users, make more changes or move on. We are doing it! :)
If they had a subscription-based business model, they likely wouldn't have been charging for the app to be begin with. Amazon pitched it to them, and pitched it to others, as benefiting sales. Their claim needs to be evaluated on that basis, otherwise, you're just moving the goal posts.
After many years, the sad truth is that wysywig editors are only as useful as the output generated when users copy and paste from word documents, which is what I have found the vast majority of input from actual end users to be.

Not supporting wysywig is a tactical advantage in my book.
Notch made specific promises that have been broken. And as far as what I am "entitled to", Mojang are in violation of their own Terms of Service by not providing me with a download of the version as-is when I paid for it. So what am I entitled to for my $15? Look, I understand some people are happy to throw away $15 and have Mojang do whatever they want. I think they have an ethical problem when they make promises but don't deliver upon them (such as SMP being ready before Beta), and furthermore generally treat their users with contempt.
Wireless data from every light bulb
Remember folks, its 20% after Amazon twists your arm to price all android products not in Amazon store at Amazon's prices..
haha you crack me up HN. So I get downvoted but the self confessed moderating troll doesn't. That's awesome and for that I give you this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boh92DrYEWs
The only way this would be valuable for every day use would be for programs that produce "close" output. Think of things like large scale simulations where sub-simulations might go infinite, but if they do and this causes the output of the sub-simulation to change, it isn't likely to cause major changes in the macro-simulation.

Very little code is written that way, but when code is written that way, it allows much more interesting things to happen in software and hardware both.
Why We Threw out All Our Code (And Why You Should Too)
Presumably the user would not activate Jolt in that case. And technically, unless the loop uses polling, it's not an infinite loop because the program isn't even running.
True that, Chrome is maturing nicely while performance remains steady. I also noticed that by disabling the prediction service option, search suggestions aren't shown in the address bar anymore. IMO, they don't really belong in the address bar; They belong in the search box on google.com. Disabling them saves me from having to press the down key 3 times, just to select a recent page in history.
That subjective feeling of unsafety is excellent. I can only wish that other people felt that same tinge of doubt when invoking these operations, as one mistake can corrupt memory.

I also find it ridiculous how tolerant the OSS community is about these things. Major projects written in C (Pidgin) often find themselves fixing these sorts of mistakes over and over again. Why is this acceptable? To me it suggests a rushed design, and it potentially puts my information at risk. Remember, all of the speed gains to be had from C are lost the moment you core dump.

It isn't that C is inherently insecure, but we should require good reasons for it to be used, particularly with apps that interact with the network. Right now it seems like it has a bit too much geek cred as the language of alpha developers.
From the FAQ: Amazon pays developers 70% of the sale price of the app or 20% of the list price, whichever is greater.

I would interpret the sale price of the app to be zero, so they get 20% of list.
Two things potentially different between the two implementations:

1. The C code is stack allocating a pointer in every loop iteration.

2. Cleaning up the memory without(potentially) triggering Python's GC.

Is the Python GC getting triggered in this scenario? If not, then this is what's actually happening, with the cleanup happening automatically when the process exits:

char x[10000000];
int i;

for (i = 0; i < 10000000; i++) {
x[i] = malloc(44 * sizeof(char));
sprintf(x, "%d %d", i, i);
}

If GC is thrown into the mix, the C code is really:

char x[1000];
int i;
int j=0;
for (i = 0; i < 10000000; i++) {
x[j] = malloc(44 * sizeof(char));
sprintf(x, "%d %d", i, i);
j++;
if(j == 1000) {
for(j = 0; j < 1000; ++j)
free(x[j]);
}
}
Ask HN: Is there a desktop audio player that lets me delete files at source?
I know I used to do this from the playlist UI a long time ago. It was really helpful to delete songs I hate off the hard drive, not just from the playlist.
It looks like Mojang don't actually provide you with a download for the game as it is when you pay for it. So they are in violation of their own Terms of Service. Of course, the ToS is just a clumsy attempt to absolve them of liability, and does not reflect the impression they have actively cultivated on the Internet. If you are going to apply a legalistic standard to Notch you should also apply that standard to Euclideon, in which case Notch is not justified in calling it a "scam".
24-hour design marathon to help a non-profit (3 days left to submit)
New company name Kloobok LLC
Ariadne LLC name has been officially changed to Kloobok LLC.

Kloobok LLC is based in Sunnyvale, CA. Its main product is Maze - a software tool for testing and debugging multi-threaded programs on Linux.

Maze is currently in Beta and therefore is available for testing and evaluation free of charge.

http://kloobok.com
In a practical sense I don't really care if benchmarks are imploring the same algorithms or if ever little detail is the same. I do care what the speed of the idiomatic approach to solving some problem is. That means if the C++ STL's standard sort is the bubble sort and Python's is the quicksort, to 9 out of 10 programmers that will end up using the standard library, Python is faster when it comes to sorting even though C++ would be much faster using the same algorithm.
Why wireless networks are slow
Why not, when the mine is done, install a bunch of turbines in the shaft and pour a bunch of water down to 4km, send the steam back up to the top and voila! Endless power.
You probably can:

$ gdb /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari $PID

iTunes, annoyingly, uses Apple's stupid little "please don't ptrace me" flag, which is a minor inconvenience, but fairly readily circumventable.
Oh absolutely. The original author was claiming that using a 'signature' character, NUL, to indicate the end of a string was is the most dangerous one byte 'feature' and speculates on whether or not the folks at Bell Labs thought that through.

In context, C was just a glorified version of assembler (but with better looping constructs) and that one could overrun strings, or randomly go into the weeds if the NUL was missing was 'understood' because that was no more dangerous than simply writing the assembler yourself. I mean 'JSR @R7,0x4bee' isn't really that much different :-)

I think the author was looking at the past through today's understanding of what the C compiler does, as opposed to the purpose it was originally set out for (which was to be more readable than assembly)
[2004]

You may want to append that to the title. Some people here already know it's not a new essay, but it's a courtesy to those that either forgot or don't know because new pg essays attract a lot of interest on this forum.
I appreciate your feedback.
Here you go: http://www.minecraft.net/download.jsp

Download away!

Man, entitled gamers are the worst.
My favorite WiFi network was one called "firestorm (password: nobosses)". That was in fact the password!
I have no idea what Oryx & Crake is.

You think chickens aren't engineered? American farm chickens are entirely different creatures than you'll find in parts of the world where the chickens are allowed to breed freely. Even on American farms the egg-laying chickens are very different from the for-meat chickens. The for-meat chickens, in particular, are bred to be very efficient at turning food into meat.

My tongue-in-cheek proposal was that we need to breed cows to use less energy in their day-to-day lives, so they can use that energy to produce more meat. Lots of their energy goes towards creating, fueling, and maintaining their legs so they can walk around, so that seems like the first thing that can go. We'd have to selectively breed the shorter cows, and keep going while their legs get shorter and shorter over the generations until they become too short for the cow to walk when it grows up. These essentially-legless cows can then be kept in cages.

The other thing cows spend a lot of energy on is their digestive system, which is the typical multi-chamber system needed for hard to digest grasses. Most American cows don't eat wild grass anymore (unfortunately), they eat what we choose to feed them. If we feed them easier to digest food, they don't need the complex stomach anymore. This is tougher to breed for, so some genetic engineering may be necessary to kick-start the process. But eventually we can get cows with minimal digestive systems that are only able to digest some kind of highly nutritious and easily digestible paste, which we can pump right into a tube in their neck since they're cage-bound anyway. So that'll reduce the energy they need for most of their digestive system, which can be diverted to producing more meat instead.

Now, at this point, their heads and tails aren't really of much use anymore, and eliminating most of their senses and higher brain functions would probably be a blessing...
"How can we sanely say something is financially vital to our country, and then exclude 99.9% of the population from it?" <-- How can we declare a private bank "too big to fail"? I mean, no we can't, but this isn't the only insane situation here.

"What about a transactional business model? Give people free access to the market, cut out the brokerage middle men, and charge players to place transactions?" <-- who fronts the cost of the exchange? Electricity, rent, salaries, etc. Amortizing the cost through trading fees isn't fair to those who trade, because there would be users of data who don't end up paying at all. I think if you accept that they are private businesses, the pricing model makes sense.

" why wouldn't the market naturally fill the role?" Let's say the market starts falling rapidly. In a pure-market system, no one would be able to sell. The DMM obligation ensures that, at the very least, some people would be able to sell at some reasonable price. Think about insurance companies: you make a small amount of money most of the time, and every once in a while you need to make a large payout.
Pentagon Seeks Social Networking Experts
>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.

And the fact that it only runs twice as long is pretty impressive, actually. Sprintf is doing the parsing 999,999,999 times more than the PyPy interpreter is.
Nope. If I buy the game, and then download it a week or two later I do not necessarily get the correct version. Furthermore, any reasonable person expects that if you are truly only purchasing some specific version then you would be able to download it into the future. You can't have it both ways.
PyPy simply doesn't have such a thing yet, that's all. I don't think there's any technical reason that it couldn't be developed at some point in the future.
Makerbot killer? Ultimaker: There’s a New 3D Printer in Town
Don't Burn Bridges: A Guide to Networking in Silicon Valley
Great post, as usual. And agree with almost everything except this:

> You can rent a decent place in a cool part of town on a typical startup salary.

"Decent" and "typical" are open for interpretation, but I can tell that for most interpreters I know the expression above evaluates to False. :)
I went to MIT, I can say that the only "real" advantage that I got from going there that I couldn't have gotten an a different school is that my Resume says I went to MIT - and that tends to get people to take a closer look at it if/when they might otherwise not.

I've found that for really good/talented people where they go doesn't matter as much as what they do and how deeply they explore the subjects. For me, the huge advantage to having been at MIT, is that all that hacking/discussion with peers was almost impossible to avoid. You almost can't help but work on cool, mind opening projects, and interact with people much smarter than you are.

But really - that opportunity is available no matter where you go to school. You might just have to work a little harder to find them. For the most part the best developers/hackers I've worked with didn't go to one of the "top top" schools - they worked super hard where ever they were and worked and learned outside of their normal curriculum, and in some cases that might even be better for them.

Career wise, I don't thing that having a degree from MIT has gotten me anything that I couldn't have gotten by having someone at a company say "you got to talk to her, she's really good." Just get to be good, do some cool things and you'll get noticed. If you worry that you're not getting exposed to the topics that you would at a place like MIT, you can always take a look at the books (or use OpenCourseWare) that they use to teach yourself a lot of the same things.
Isn't that one of the main uses of the Downloads area?
Or February 8, 2011?
You clearly don’t know what you are talking about. If you want the version of the game when you buy it, it is clearly your own responsibility to download the game. There is no violation of the TOS, to claim otherwise is absurd to the highest degree.
I've been pretty harsh, I know, but it feels to me that you've really missed the point about why the traffic comes to the blog and no further, and you need to re-focus your efforts. The points I've made won't all be right, and they will probably all be hard to take, but they are genuinely intended to help.

I was disappointed that it's taken this long for you to respond. We're all busy, but I've taken time to give you a critique, and I thought you'd be checking back for responses. It's not too late for me to engage further because now I really do have other things to do.

Not sure that you'd want much more from me anyway - I expect you're feeling a bit battered. For that I apologise, but I didn't have time to be more diplomatic.

Good luck.
This might be a tenable position, except according to this interpretation of the Terms of Purchase they have not fulfilled their end of the bargain, since they do not provide me with a link to download the version of the game that was released at the time of purchase. This is really just a clumsy attempt at removing liability, not a reflection of reasonable expectations. Notch actively cultivates the expectation of continued and active support.
The guy you're responding to clearly created a new account here just to troll.
"People who buy minecraft buy to play as it is, NOT to play at some hypothetical future state"

Evidence?
Unless I'm missing something, it already can.

"Downloads/add new download" allows you to upload various files and title them.

See https://github.com/shabble/terminal-things (hit the downloads button on the mid right)
See also: Military's 'sock puppet' software creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-oper...
Yes. Depending on the date format of course it lands on quite a few dates. Fun fact is that WiFi was actually invented in Australia, who are on the date format that would have the day being celebrated in February.

Of course this post was more of a lighthearted 'Congratulation' to an excellent technology.
Agreed. It's refreshing to be able to see knowledgable people arrive at better solutions.

I love the fact that they come up with the best solution that solves the problem based on their skill set at that time; and when either their skill set improves or the technology improves, they actually go back and replace the current solution with a better one (even if the better solution requires a change of programming language)!

It shows the true power behind hiring the right people. It's not as much about the number of years of experience with a technology stack, as it is proof of a person's ability and willingness to learn new skills.
What do you mean by co-founders? There is a common misconception that co-founders implies an equal equity stake. This is not usually the case and is oftentimes sub-optimal / problematic. Also, in cases where different classes of stock exist (F stock), co-founder could imply F stock and would have a very different implication.

An equal equity split between 2 people is an often advised against situation. Personally, it's worked for me, thus far. However, in my case, I'm working with someone I've known for more than 10 years, we have complimentary skill sets, we decided we wanted to work together from day one...and other sound justifications rational people would need to ensure the fact that no ranking decision maker wouldn't be an issue. That being said, this type of arrangement often blows up & it gets ugly.

I'd offer this as a better definition of a co-founder. One who works on a startup before any money is raised and is in it for the long haul (they have a vesting equity stake). This doesn't imply equal equity.

Using the latter definition, a common practice that has worked for several entrepreneurs goes as follows. Someone has an idea and starts working on it. They move it along enough to entice another person, whom can accelerate some aspect of the product significantly (given the stage) and is compelled the product/vision enough to join the team. This person is given some % of equity (typically 15-30%) and is now a co-founder. As the product continues to move along & theoretically increase in value, people brought in to contribute (before salary can be paid) get progressively smaller and smaller stakes. The company can afford to pay salaries, the next filled position is typically considered the 1st hire.

The earlier you are, the more decisions you have to make to figure out your projects place in the world. The larger the group, the more time is allocated to decision making and not to doing. That's really bad.

Also note, being the ultimate decision maker at an early startup sucks: It's hard on you, time consuming, stressful, expensive (startup & opp cost), everyone involved should realize your leading them aboard the Titanic and the goal post keeps moving. As the first founder, your job is to make sure that you bring on the right type of people and you won't know who that is at the get go. But, the startup world is filled with the wrong type of people that want to get in early and be a co-founder. Those type of people will judge everything you do as CEO (especially when you don't do what they think you should do), kill morale and ultimately, make getting a startup off the ground much harder than it already is.

So, how many co-founders is too many?

too many > smallest number needed

Good luck!
As someone born and raised in northern Europe I agree that YYYY-MM-DD is the only format that really makes sense. Then again, I also don't understand why everyone is not on the Metric system..
The best way is to learn is from critique and I really value it. I apologize for taking so long to reply!
How are you helping Somalia?
I wanted to know how people were helping out the people in Somalia.
Aloha Editor as well as Opera did improve since Aug 2010. At that time Aloha Editor v0.9.3 and Opera 10 did not work properly together. I did some debugging and improvements with Maike Tylor from Opera. The current dev version of Aloha Editor has the bad alert replaced with a console.log and Opera 11 offers better support for contentEditable. Due to the huge refactoring and at the same time major improvements and extensions the dev is not yet stable enough to be released. We expect a release within a month.
Another point of view is that money equals power. Societies rightfully worry that uber-accumulation of wealth leads to power imbalances; i don't think it's just a superstition. There are also a number of points i disagree with. I wonder how he would write about it today, after the crisis.
The page fault problem seems unlikely, but SIMD-optimized versions of functions like strcspn() will read in 8-byte chunks, causing Valgrind's memcheck to complain about invalid reads when you do a strcspn() on a string where length % 8 != 0.

As for the original problem, I suspect x86 is relatively unique in its tolerance for unaligned memory accesses. The ARM processor I'm working with will return the wrong data if you try a 16-bit or 32-bit read that is not aligned on a 16-bit or 32-bit boundary. malloc() is supposed to return memory that is aligned to the platform's largest alignment requirement, so it takes a bit of deliberate work to create unaligned accesses. It seems unlikely that a NUL-terminated string will be accessed using unaligned multi-byte reads, since optimized libc functions will take alignment into consideration.
I regularly pay my ISP large amounts of money to treat me with contempt. Somebody I'm not paying can treat me however they like. They have /zero obligation/ to be nice to me after I purchase an "as is" product.