skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yay! Another convert! We're gradually taking over the world.

It is seriously soooo much easier to write C code when you don't have to explicitly check allocation returns. I shaved FOUR THOUSAND LINES out of not- particularly- huge- to- begin- with- server in a previous job simply by getting rid of ridiculous chains of "functions that returned errors that ultimately boiled down to malloc failures", and "call sites to those functions that checked their errors and propagated them". I'll never explicitly check malloc() again.

(There are allocators you do need to check; they just tend not to be called "malloc").
Business templates is a good idea, damn you. (One I've been thinking about for a while now.)
I highly recommend "Molecular Biology for Computer Scientists" by Lawrence Hunter: www.biostat.wisc.edu/~craven/hunter.pdf
"when there is now a six-order-of-magnitude gap between the cost of watching a Khan Academy video ($0) and the cost of dozing through the same content in a Harvard lecture hall ($250,000)"

I think what you are saying is a "Khan Academy" concept as opposed to the actual Kahn Academy...

As of the latest info on the Khan academy site (2/23/11) Kahn had done all the videos:

http://www.khanacademy.org/about/faq#videos

You're not suggesting that Sal Kahn is in any way shape or form a replacement for learning from multiple qualified professors, instructors etc in their respective fields (even in they are only phd candidates for example) are you?

Someone with no real world experience in many of the things he is teaching is "as good" as someone who has actually done something?

Sal says

"What topics do you plan to cover?

"My goal is to cover everything."
Think how much more satisfying it is to save people's lives and spend your days surrounded by people who treat you with respect, fear and dread than to spend 12 hour days doing really boring paperwork.
One note to make is that these tutorials are specifically designed for programming contests not for the real world. A lot of the stuff applies to both, but things like constant factor optimization and heuristics are generally not part of programming classes and a huge part of the real world.
The "post-PC era" is greatly exaggerated. It may eventually happen but only for those kinds of consumers who would have never bothered with LEGO anyways.
For hackers, the PC (or Mac) isn't going anywhere.

In other words, if everyone uses the iPad, who creates iPads and all the apps?
Every time I take a good look at the task manager UI, I get lost when I try to build a menatl model of what a 'task' is.

The old task manager showed 'Applications' and 'Processes', where an application sort-of is 'something with a UI'. Control panels, however, have UI but aren't applications (but they are tasks: you can run them from 'new task…' just as well as you can run 'dir' from it). Firefox manages to create multiple applications for one process (even the Error Console gets its own application)

Now this design: I think it is a huge improvement, but I think it would help if they weeded out some terminology, and used it consistently. We currently have:

- Background process (one of them named 'Fast User Switching Utility Service'. Is 'Utility Service' a term for services that aren't services, or do these appear in multiple places?

- Service

- Windows process (one of which is called 'Desktop Window Manager'; 'Task Manager', however, has become an application)

- Runtime Process

- Subsystem App (not an application)

- Driver Host

- Facility

Disclaimer: most of the comparisons I made are w.r.t. Windows XP. It is the only Windows version I have at hand to check against.
From my experience free trumps paid unless the paid app is promoted by apple/lots of blogs. You may get more return users with a paid app (since they shelled out the cash they will probably want to get their money's worth) but if you're trying to build a user base and especially if your app relies on one, which yours seems to, free is the way to go.
SV has a culture of getting to investors through trusted sources. Email a few of their portfolio companies that are relevant (but not competitive) with your business, ask to buy them lunch and chat for a bit, then ask for an intro at the end of the meeting if it goes well.

From the investor's perspective this a) filters out people with no conviction, b) filters out spray and pray-style emails, c) helps them manage hundreds of emails they receive every day.
EtBr is cheap as hell, but the hazmat disposal needed to get rid of EtBr gels is very expensive.
I'm also a fan and I expect (and hope) they are vying to be a part of it. I watch a significant proportion of my Theisweekin content straight from YouTube. Above all else, this announcement (even a the rumor stage) is a huge validation of the internet as a distribution channel for professionally produced original content. I believe Jason Calacanis bought off on that a while ago with the investment in ThisWeekIn.
>What's the proper scenario to use "long" instead of "int"? I've never bothered to use it.

It was necessary with 16-bit processors, because ints were 16-bit shorts, and longs were 32-bits.

With modern processors and OS', there isn't really a reason to use it. In fact, it's potentially dangerous if you're writing *nix code that's supposed to run on 64 or 32-bit systems. In that case, you don't want to use longs, because they're 32-bits on a 32-bit compile, but 64 on 64-bits on a 64-bit compiler. For Windows, int and long are interchangable 32-bit values, which is another reason to avoid using longs as much as possible when writing portable code.
But you wouldn't tell him?
nice work. would be a great add-on to have a permalink to the score + results. for example, client asks me to make his HTML newsletter, i cringe, create it, test it and have a link to send him the score when he insists we use SA negative words, and so on.
I had the same question when they made the investment. The SV Angel team and Felix from Start Fund have not hesitated once to help when asked, and we've had more than our share of proactive, unprompted introductions to key people from them.
GelRed is another safe one. It is designed so that it will not cross cell membranes. I don't think it intercalates either.
By your argument, we should not have public schools then either? Since some taxpayer who is poorer than you is still paying for that? Also you can choose not to use this option; just go-to a private college?

I think that in the majority of cases, with the progressive system of taxation, and need-based aid in institutions, we avoid the scenario where my education is severely subsidized by those taxpayers that are poorer than I; also we pay a percentage of our incomes, so by definition the poorer people pay less and get the same services.

As for exploring options while in high school: I'm all for that, but I think that in most cases that's not possible; given that the level of education provided is quite basic in most cases.
MK1-3 were 2D characters, all done with video capture. MK4 was a 3D camera-based game and was done with motion capture.

There were other 2D fighting games around that time that used video capture (remember Atari Pit Fighter?) but MK avoided the sprite scaling and kept it flat.
Sounds good. Thanks for the input!
Undercover Cops and Politicians Escape BitTorrent Lawsuits
Philosophically, it's due to a famous system programmer's dictum: "Always check the return value of system calls".

The corollary of this is that one should clearly document when explicitly ignoring the return value. A simple way of this in C becomes a cast to void of the return. Since printf does I/O, it qualifies.

Specifically, this code is from a patch to the FreeBSD source which is ruled by style(9); you will find this form throughout BSD source.
Since the moment they announced their formation, AH has consistently said they are completely stage-agnostic, and Marc had a previous history of investing personally in very small initial angel deals.
So now, will you tell us what you build?
>Actually gravitational time dilation on Earth's surface is on the order of 1e-9. But still negligible.

it is compare to zero gravitation far from Earth. The effect i'm talking about is integral of gravitational dilation change along the path of neutrinos. This path is a chord under Earth surface - the 350 km down to 10km depth and the next 350km bringing back to surface. The dilation change is about 1e-16 per meter of depth.
What he described is not really the post-pc era, but the Apple era.
oh, I like this.

edit: would you want to see the same results, or have it re-run every time the link is loaded? because you could technically just copy paste the report into pastebin…
Let me preface this by stating that much I'm about to post, I've learned from my 18 month old boy.

Aside from the sentimentality of a parent watching his kid develop physical and mental abilities, it's a very interesting phenomenon watching the way the development occurs.

Kids basically learn one of two ways: imitation and exploration. Imitation being quite simple, so I'll move right on the exploration. Now, there's recently been a lot of discussion whether kids in America are being hampered by overprotective parents. I believe that notion is quite correct.

My son has legos, but he also has access to my touchpad and android phone. To him, they're not so different. Legos teach him that he can piece them together to make new things or break them apart for the components (creativity). The electronics teach him that there is a logical action and reaction (logic).

It's absolutely amazing the first time I saw his eyes light up because he figured out how to wake the device from sleep or how to unlock it. It's a physical indication that a neural connection has been made in his head. To me, that indicates these types of tools will indeed facilitate a much earlier exposure to logic we have not seen in previous generations.

So to come full circle, I don't think the death of legos (I don't really foresee it happening) will hamper our kids because there will be other mediums. As long as we don't hamper exploration, kids will develop both creativity and logic.
That is a great example of a genius/cheeky hack to fit a big world into tiny memory.

Thanks for that, made me smile & shake my head at the same time :)
"Fools", he mutters under his breath, "Neutrinos flying faster than light... I pity your indolence." With wiry fingers he taps his pipe on his knuckles, flinging burnt tobacco beyond the edges of the cloud. "Ah well," he sighs, connecting his iPhone to his Macbook Air, "time to install iOS 5. I bet those servers are not running as red hot any longer".
Why would you need to unroll a loop in C#? Isn't that what JITs are for?
All the talk about optimizing but not a single performance measurement or even estimate.
Honestly, I'm a little bit underwhelmed overall.. I must say though, my favorite part by a long shot is the way the box opens to start, and then closes when you lose. It's the most compelling design element of the project... provides a really fun surprise, and I can't think of a more tactile way to say 'Game Over'.
> What characteristics would satisfy people like this that something is "AI"?

It seems Mr. Turing answered that question a while ago.
Yes. The fact that all these useful sensors (touch, display, camera, location, attitude, wifi/3g) are integrated in one small, portable, and not-that-expensive device opens interesting new possibilities.

Think of the hobbyists who send their phone into space on a balloon.
No. He creates a scrolling game with collision mechanics, using art from the popular and recognizable Mario franchise. An acute, but distinct, difference.

Mario is an intellectual property. Not a genre.
Actually, in this case the classical velocity addition formula is the correct one to use - the formula you mention applies to a moving reference frame, but the author's objection was that in the satellite frame the CERN folks mis-calculated the time it would take for a neutron moving to the right to meet up with a station moving to the left.

This is why to call this a relativistic objection is giving it far too much credit: the author is, quite literally, claiming that the physicists at CERN don't know how to solve a purely classical rate problem.
powered by mongoDB + node.js under the hood.

I actually wrote my own KeyVal over Postgres in js. It worked fairly well, but got better perf with MongoDB which I found quite sane and easy to use.
That's why IBM is now working on Deep Watson.
Exactly... PCs and mobile devices have existed in parallel for some time. "Post-PC" is a propaganda term.
My family didn't own a computer until after I had read my first programming book (I was in 2nd grade, the computer in my classroom fascinated me, and the public library had a book about BASIC.) Curiosity always finds a way.
Exactly. The end of the PC era doesn't give rise to the 'iPad era,' it gives rise to Ubiquitous computing, and Apple knows this.

The trajectory goes:
mainframe: one computer, many people
personal computer: one computer, one person
ubiquitous computing: many computers to many people

If anything, people are going to be programming the shit out of everything in the future, not pulling back.
> I think ANN is the real thing, and most of the other "AI" solutions that we have give the impression of intelligence, but are simply algorithms that solve problems we have in very well defined ways...ANN is a general intelligence that gets shaped by experience and adapts figure out its own solutions...It isn't some coder banging on the keyboard trying to replicate what a human would do under a specific situation, it is something that truly learns.

It's not ANNs on the one hand and "some coder banging on the keyboard trying to replicate what a human would do" on the other.

Supervised learning is the most common use case for an ANN, and means learning from labelled training data during a training phase and then not changing; it can be done with a number of techniques, including Support Vector Machines, Decision Trees, Bayesian methods, and so on.

Reinforcement Learning on the other hand, is continuous learning from trying things and making mistakes -- experience, in other words. It too can be done a number of ways, like with Evolutionary Algorithms, Markov Decision Processes, Inductive Logic Programming, etc. Hell, PG's spam classifier learns from experience, and it's nothing more than a Naive Bayes classifier ( http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html ).

Without going on for much longer, my point is that there really is no reason to exalt ANNs the way you have.

Disclaimer: I'm a huge believer in Artificial General Intelligence via Competent Program Search ( see http://metacog.org/research.html + http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=2&v... + www.idsia.ch/~juergen/ )
>1. The distance traveled by a photon going through a fiber optic cable will be different from the distance through the ground.

it is still shorter than through the satellite. Also the fiber distance difference can be measured and accounted for - much simpler than to account for satellite position.
I agree that the device offers many opportunities. Nevertheless it's not just about porting some interpreter, you also have to deal with apple policy which is not that friendly to such ideas. See for example how Scratch was rejected last year: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/04/apple-scratch-app/.
There are multiple BASIC and Scheme interpreters in the App Store, as well as apps for writing HTML documents. If you want to write proper apps, an iOS developer certificate costs money, but so did Visual Basic back in the day, and on Android or a jailbroken iPhone it's free.

Post-PC devices are inherently bad for programming because they don't have proper keyboards, but by the same token you'll likely have access to a keyboarded computer to do homework on, at least until someone invents a new input method that's better for both. (Nuance dictation for code, anyone?)
They have a form right on their site for submitting business plans.

http://a16z.com/about/contact-us/
RWC France vs Wales live stream online
Wales vs France
Rugby World Cup
Semi final
Match schedule:
Date: Sat 15 – 2011
Time: 21:00 local, 08:00 GMT
Venu: Auckland
Enjoy everyone here to see an exclusive Match between Wales vs France Enjoy Rugby World Cup 2011.
Not sure if the Lego example is a good one. Lego has been available for over 60 years, and still going strong. According to his website, the OP is 18 years old. If his fears had any basis, then Lego would have disappeared way before he was born.

Another important point is that our experiences shape us in specific ways. Our kids' experiences will shape them differently. Having iPads does not make them any less inventive or curious. It's just that we can not imagine, today, what they will think of in the future.
Agreed. Why not post invite codes to responders here on HN?
>> compensation plans are what drive share buyback programs

Sometimes, but without dividend imputation you really can't tell, both shareholders & employees who are affected by these compensation plans based on stock price, are incentivised to pay out profits via share buybacks as opposed to dividends.

In Australia, where there is dividend imputation, you still sometimes see companies do share buy backs, (that could be driven by compensation), but mostly you see many large established companies paying out 50% or more of their profits as dividends.

Here is a very large (in Australian terms) company that pay out around $1.3 of dividend a year and whose price is $13.90. http://au.finance.yahoo.com/q?s=qbe.ax&ql=1 (I'm not advocating anyone to buy it. It is an insurance company very exposed to the US economy & also recent natural disasters. )
Thiel argues that the value of a BA from Harvard is almost ENTIRELY credentialing and signaling, and has very little to do with learning; and therefore, a BA from any school holds little value because it represents very little about what somebody actually learned in school.
Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Apple's TOS have some significant restrictions on running interpreters. Some have been allowed, though.

For more information, see Section 3.3.2 of the iOS App Store Review Guidelines, and the following posts on lua-list:

http://lua-list.2524044.n2.nabble.com/Ok-Apple-has-released-...

http://lua-list.2524044.n2.nabble.com/Lua-on-iOS-again-was-p...

http://lua-list.2524044.n2.nabble.com/iLuaBox-Now-Available-...

Also, s/begets/regrets/
Apple doesn't control the Internet, and while HTML5 has its own limitations, you could still probably port Logo to it, especially since Logo isn't all that complicated.
Interesting you say this. I totally agree, and I have had a 'back burner' idea for the past year or so now of creating a simple template generator for libraries/such projects. I really need to start working through that list! :-)
I don't know, it's hard to determine what is considered "hard." Sure, you were writing in assembler, but you were also writing directly to simpler hardware, and the games were much, much simpler.
10,000 free tickets, goal to increase tourism by having people spread word of mouth recommendations of how they didn't spontaneously generate an extra limb on touching Japanese soil.

I wonder if this is the best use of funds. If they've figured out word of mouth is going to be an effective strategy, wouldn't 20,000 tickets at half price go further, even considering the extra good will that the second half off would generate?

I know I'd go for the half-off just as quickly as for the free.
there is also attention lockin, once you start watching a show, there are a lot fewer distraction.
"I may be biased, but: I feel like Google's "geek cred" is slipping."

Thank you, Captain Obvious!
I took a class on GPS in grad school. We built a GPS receiver in software (MATLAB, actually), and I remember that we had to account for relativistic effects. I do not remember exactly what the math was, though. I think that it was just a correction provided by each satellite, which was added/subtracted from the time/distance from that satellite to the receiver. If I can find the textbook, I'll try to look up exactly how it works.
Interesting perspective. Definitely not for everyone living that frugally though. 1 Charlie Sheen weekend in Vegas would blow the years budget :P
This is very interesting, but I can't figure out how to use this in Bash, when I try:

xargs -I % curl -X POST "http://sa-api.postmarkapp.com/filter \
-H "Accept: application/json" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-v \
-d '{"email":"%", "options":"long"}' \
<message

It seems contents of my email message file are processed one line at a time, instead of the entire message passed in place of %

I'm using GNU bash, version 4.1.5(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)

EDIT: added indentation to fix display
How to run background jobs on Heroku for free
Siri Answers Questions From Readers
Yep, the more things change, the more they stay the same...

When I was a kid, you could but germanium diodes and ferrite core coils, and make yourself a crystal radio - it was _magic!_

But...

There was no way I could have gotten hold of something like an Arduino - probably not for _any_ sort of money, never mind the sort of budget kids birthday or Xmas presents run to...

The same with a lot of other stuff, I had to wait till my first paper round job to be able to save up enough money to buy the ~$200 (in 1982 dollars) radio control gear before I could build an rc plane. These days that's $24 or so delivered from China...

I remember playing with my fatyer's grandfathers predecessor to Meccano, stone building blocks with pressed steel girders. I suspect children today probably look on historical toys like lego with similar charm/disdain...
SNES games were coded in assembly too.
It's to stop lint(1) complaining that you're not checking the return value from printf().

I see you're an old-timer here but maybe you missed out on lint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lint_(software)

That page says it dates from the late seventies; I was still using it mid-nineties. I don't remember the last time that I linted but today Ubuntu is lint-unaware. These days the compiler will pick up most of the things that lint used to.
You may be 18, but you sound like an ignorant old man.
"Back in my day, we wrote our own BASIC programs! That's how we got good!"

There will be new and unexpected ways to create and tinker with technology. Don't give in to the "old man thinking", change is good.
I think that may be a fairly safe assumption. The very form factor of the Ipad and tables in their current incarnation makes them poorly suited for most types of content creation.

However, among content producers tablets supplement rather than replace other form factors of computers for the time being.

Also, docking stations are likely to improve and become more common. A future tablet which would be more powerful than current generations with a solid docking station that would support a full keyboard, mouse and second monitor is a standard computer with the ability to undock it temporarily when not doing real content creation...
Agreed 100%.

Someone, somewhere will have to program all these wonderful gadgets.

While it is conceivable that all development will occur only inside big mega-corps, I somehow doubt it. People have a voracious appetite for new content.

Smart money is on the tools to create new stuff becoming more widespread, not less.