skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for both the links and the advice - this is making more sense.

It would be fantastic if someone - maybe you, since you've got a high-level 10,000' view down to the on-the-ground detailed experience - could consolidate this into an article and provide a guide on how to build software as a platform from the get-go. Any chance of that? :)
I don't understand Apple's logic here. You can't reconcile the idea of "cleaning because you can redownload" with "available offline". As soon as you clean up, you are going to break offline uses.

I would guess the idea is to help enable these 500 MB per issue magazine downloads. You download a new issue, you nuke some old issue, no one cares. As long as that wasn't an issue you cared about.
Yeah, that's absolutely true, so I overstated my case somewhat on that point (although in my defence I did say "probably"). So, in place of the mis-stated claim in my original comment, let me try that part again.

Writing robust high-load network servers is actually a little tougher than it seems, and the skillset has very little overlap with the "designing a nice language" skillset, or the "making an efficient compiler" skillset. And not only is robustness is important, but to be useful it probably needs a lot of auxiliary features like HTTPS and authentication and logging and FSM-knows-what-all (this point, on which features matter, is the only place that web-programming experience might actually be relevant). And so tacking a half-assed HTTP server onto your new-language project is, well, half-assed. And IMO, there are enough shitty toy web-servers out there already.
"Alchemy" predates meaningful definition of the word "chemical"! If you had presented them the modern solution, they would not have been so inclined to split hairs. They were looking for any way, regardless of whether it was "chemical" or "nuclear" or magic for all they cared.
Oh, that's easy. Sites like Compete don't know shit about shit. For further details:

http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our-...
Well, they are definately not stumbling
That would have been an interesting two-week-notice to give.
The main issue is that iOS is deciding that you don't need something offline without asking you. I don't want my cached email to turn out to have been deleted because I downloaded something else entirely.

Many people would prefer the old method, where it would say you were out of space, and you would have to go free up some space.
Herman Miller Aeron. I'm way to lazy to stand all day
Because there's no point in burning your cloud storage, Apple bandwidth and prolong backup times when those articles can be easly re-downloaded from Instapapers servers on iPad.

Same result, without long backup times, Apple server bandwidth usage and your iCloud storage usage.
Zynga to go ZNGA
I love that none of the js code is minimized! Great use of Mr. Doob's Three.js library

For reference:

http://lights.elliegoulding.com/js/Config.js

http://lights.elliegoulding.com/js/Lights.js
Very, very cool - fyi your site is giving me the ol' 403 - (http://liftoffsoftware.com/) (if this just because you're getting it up and running let me know and I'll delete this!)
They were both the Ada Lovelace of their fields.
I am pretty sure MSR's work makes it to consumer products (Trueskill for XBox + Bing definitely get MSR input and there's the PL division which has some top PL researchers)

But doing Computer Science for the sake of Computer Science is a good thing. It would be a shit world if all fundamental CS research was driven by problems of scale.
Stuxnet, SCADA, Nation State Terrorism and FUD
Tweetie-style retweets in Twitter.app
What else is supposed to be impressive about this?
Ask HN: Have you played Chain World?
Does anybody have any information about what's happening with the Chain World game? Has anybody played it or no somebody that has played it? Haven't heard anything about it since the eBay fiasco. Ref: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/mf_chainworld/all/1
WaitForMultipleObjects and WIN32 events for *nix and RW Locks for Windows
Quanta Computer and Microsoft Pen Android Deal
At the bottom of the README, the author states that links to the website are broken because the site is not yet online.
Strangely, the last line of the README file says "NOTE: http://liftoffsoftware.com/ hasn't been built yet so links pointing there will be dead for a while."

I guess an "Under Construction" animated GIF would be better than a 403
It would be nice to be able to see an optional list of just what hardware is in each laptop that you tested.

First benefit: The user could check that hardware against what he purchased or is purchasing and have a moderate amount of confidence that it's the "same thing" and not a SKU with something significantly different.

Second benefit: If you implemented a search, someone wondering whether an unlisted laptop is OK could make a good guess by searching for the presence of tested laptops with the same sound card, graphics card, etc.
Looking for cofouner in the UK.
I'm looking for a UK based co founder, preferably one swaying towards design as opposed to hacking.

I've already incorporated as a Delaware corporation and have seed funding on board.

I'm exploring all options and anyone who thinks they can fit the bill hit me up on email.
Not even between devices with exactly the same model numbers. I've seen batches of "identical" laptops arrive from the factory with a mix of Broadcom and Atheros wifi, for instance.
This is SURPRISINGLY mesmerizing. Something about the music and the animation and interaction just hooked me.

Plus the fact that it wasn't in Flash was a major plus. But not sure what it was...but had me going for a while.
Microsoft announces ODBC driver for Linux
Seriously? You control the scene. The music is the ambiance that gives the scene life. Unless you can build something better, I'd say be impressed.
If I only have one antique pocket watch and, during a partition, Alan buys the pocket watch while communicating with partition A and Bob buys the pocket watch while communicating with partition B, how do we get back to a consistent state without application code?
Install the GNOME 3 packages using apt (gnome-shell and gnome-panel should get you most of what you need) and run them in fallback mode. The GNOME 3 fallback mode is pretty close to the GNOME 2 experience, although it is missing a couple of features that some people may want (e.g., panel applets). I've been using Oneiric this way for months and I'm pretty happy with it.
Wow. That last part "you failed to take initiative" or "You're not a team player" makes me sad. That's a fubared situation.
Looking For E-Ink Applications Beyond Ebook Readers
A chronicle of what we learned hitting rock bottom (a failed startup)
> anyone who thinks they can fit the bill hit me up on email.

You didn't describe much of a bill.

"Needed warm body who's more of a designer than a hacker."

My mom matches that description.
If the app is on IOS by default, it's probably not worth competing with. But if it's in the app store and you have to click to download/buy it, then it's definetley worth competing with, if you can do better than Apple. All Apple does is raises the awareness and build the 'want' for that application for you.

Oh, and Apple is great for us small guys, the same way Paypal is. It's great, unless/until they decide to stomp on you and crush you, then it's not so great.
> the gestalt of Firefox is of a development process that values press and feature creep over performance and correctness.

:

> I've recently been running into a number of "benchmarks" where some rendering engines achieve better performance by simply doing the wrong thing because the right one would be "too slow". […] This is not exactly an isolated incident; a number of the performance issues I've run into recently in Gecko have had to do with correctly handling edge cases that this particular open-source engine happens to just not handle.[1]

1. Boris Zbarsky. "Performance vs. correctness tradeoffs". Three Monkeys, Three Typewriters, Two Days. 2009 October 18. http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/bz/archives/020267.html
This looks like an impressive, feature-rich version of escape from the web (https://launchpad.net/eftw). Both use tornado on the backend and there seem to be some similarities in the multiplex classes. Escape from the web in turn shares code with ajaxterm.

Both (gateone and eftw) render terminal output on the server side using a python terminal emulator, while shellinabox mentioned in another comment uses a Javascript terminal emulator on the client side.

Edit: The docs say, the terminal class was written from scratch.
That's a tough line to argue: the scraped page is actually stored by Instapaper (otherwise you could not access it from the website), so you re-download it from there, and technically it's not user-generated it's at best user-curated.

But this does indeed defeat the point of having it offline, which is a significant part of IP's purpose.
That's only the data that will be backed up to iCloud though, so it probably doesn't include cache/tmp.
Also, the browser plugins in use (e.g. adobe acrobat) have a huge impact.
...when those articles can be easly re-downloaded from Instapapers servers...

My premise, in point #2, is that this actually isn't the case with respect to Instapaper's raison d'être. In fact, that's sort of the premise behind much of Marco's post too.
I've been using Git for version control for all of my own personal projects as a sole developer. I've heard that Mercurial and Git are very similar, and your reasoning for choosing Mercurial is very similar to my own choice of Git :-)

I like Git because I can easily track changes, see what I've done since the last time I commit (which is pretty often), and also keep separate branches for different sets of functionality without crossing over. I do mostly web development, so I will often start working on a new feature or a big change, only to be pulled off to fix a bug or add a smaller, more urgent feature, and push those live before finally getting back on track and finishing up. Using Git branches for all of those separate trains of thought helps me to keep things straight, and to be able to move quickly and easily between them.

As far as disciplining yourself to continually check into version control, maybe I'm too paranoid, but I used to always find myself creating copies of files before making big changes to them, just to be safe, or commenting out code instead of deleting it, because I might need to reference it again. Once I started using version control I broke myself of those coding habits, now I delete when something needs to be deleted, I overhaul files when they need overhauling, and commit regularly enough that if I ever need to look back at or restore a previous version of a file I can do so easily (and with date/time stamps!) Also, because I'm building a business around my software, it's nice to know that if/when I bring on other developers I will have a long history of the work I've done.

Good luck!
> when those articles can be easly re-downloaded from Instapapers servers on iPad.

That's kind-of the issue though, is it not? One of Instapaper's strength is that it provides for reading in a nicely formatted and offline way. You don't need a connection to go through your IP stack, unless iOS has decided to clean out everything.
I'm getting great performance on a netbook with 11.04 and sawfish as the window manager. I log in in classic mode, so I get the gnome panels, and then switch over.
This person obviously didn't live through they great Netscrape IE war.
It would be great if SQLlite could provide the option of "NOSYNC" tables that might lose recent updates after a crash. However, in order to ensure that the on-disk file is consistent it at least needs write ordering when it does decide to write to disk - "I don't care when this write gets to disk, as long as when it does, this other write has already gotten there too". There's no API to request that without also requesting data be flushed to permanent storage immediately - be it fsync, sync_file_range or O_DIRECT.
Seem like the Dropbox app will have this quandary but on an even larger scale.
You should update your post with this information unless it's there but I didn't notice it.
This type of hiring approach strikes me as test for submissiveness, rather than programming ability. The hiring company wants someone who will do as they're told.
It really depends on what you are writing. If you're trying to write the next great startup web app then, yeah, use python or ruby or perl--C is probably too finicky for the fast pace of a web startup. But if you're writing systemd (an "init" replacement) you'd be the object of ridicule if you wrote it in any of those languages.
The number of users doesn't mean much, everyone is invited now.
The problem fixed is that the user has an indication as to what happened to all of their saved articles. That's a very big difference. It's not a full solution, as the parent noted, but the UX is far superior.
The optimus thing is annoying -- that specifically prevented me from buying an optimus equipped laptop when they came out. (IIRC nvidia gave no help at all to those attempting to provide linux drivers.)
> Some articles may even vanish (different location, move behind a paywall, deleted, etc...). In this case those articles would become inaccessible when the OS deletes the cache.

As far as I know, all scraped articles are stored in Instapaper's server and downloaded from there, you don't get them directly from the source page.
Kochen? Besser nicht | emuscene.de – Mein Tagebuch
A tiling window manager is a great option for a netbook. I would recommend Xmonad.
This is a use case where it sounds like you want full consistency, so in the realtime layer you would use a database that becomes unavailable during partitions.
I'll believe it when I see it, pretty doubtful at this point.
A lot of things can be utterly incomprehensible to the suits. We have to be patient with them.
Exactly. I hate these misuses of the word 'Users'.
What do you think a lawyer would do to stop Apple from releasing into a market before you manage to?
I have the opposite problem: flash will consistently fail to work on a page in Chromium but work fine in Firefox, even though they're using the same copy of libflashplayer.so.
I do believe that was sarcasm.
A satirical look at infographics
Text messages: The end of an affair
> What you beat is the complexity the CAP theorem normally causes. You regain the ability to easily reason about your systems.

So instead of saying "The CAP theorem, while still being completely valid, doesn't have to as annoying as you might think," you said "The CAP theorem [has been] annihilated."

Gotta love blogging.
I think it has something to do with the question you're posing in your second email. Are you asking them to commit time or resources without compensation? What is your question?
This is just nonsense. C is perfect for what it is supposed to do: systems programming, the kind of software you write when creating operating systems, debuggers, and device drivers. It will hardly ever stop being useful for these tasks.

People that make this kind of complaint were using C for the wrong type of software. If you want to write a web application in C you just need to reevaluate your tool set.
I loved the movie too. I never played the game, but the game soundtrack by Anamanaguchi was awesome.

Your description of Scott Pilgrim is pretty much my thoughts on Anamanaguchi in general--a combining of the old (chiuptune) sounds with something modern.
I doubt that the tech industry will ever move completely away from C. (I had a friend who was doing graduate work in physics and he was required to do all his work in Fortran, believe it or not, so old languages do stick around).

For "mainstream" (read: enterprise) software, yes, C may fall out of favor, but it's a great language and here to stay.

There are just too many cases where C is the right tool for the right job and it would be silly to use a different language.

I'm thinking particularly of embedded software. While languages like Lua are great for embedded scripting, they still need something to script against.

So, C isn't going anywhere and I expect that 100 years from now it will still be a worthwhile language to program in.

(Also, C is very much the Latin of modern programming. Learning it helps your understanding of so many other things. In case you're curious, Lisp is Greek and I mean that affectionately).
Why there is no point in burning Apple's bandwidth, but there is a point in burning Instapaper servers' bandwidth?

I don't care how Apple (or Marco) solves the problem, but I sure do not want to lose Instapaper articles at random.
Hmm, from reading the thread it does not appear to have been solved, at least not the underlying problems. What was solved was the removal of a couple of synchronous calls. The fact that there are slow queries on some profiles seems to have been caused by the fact that ANALYZE does not run for some people[1], and this does seem like it has been fixed yet. I should check this for my Firefox profile at work to see if old stats are the reason for it hanging.

So what needs to be fixed ,if I follow that thread, is the removal of all synchronous calls and some solution to either not have to run ANALYZE or run it more often.

1. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686025#c89
I got Ubuntu 11.04 on an Air -- it was more convoluted than I would have liked, but a lot of that is how Apple set it up. The Air won't boot from an external disc unless you're using the Apple-branded drive, which seems a little silly.

The steps were pretty much (a) install refit (b) make a custom USB stick (usbnetbootin doesn't work) (c) create a partition from within OSX (d) install from the usb stick to the partition (e) Do a couple of fixes, such as blessing the correct drive to stop the really slow boot times.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MactelSupportTeam/AppleInt...
Socioclean: A Reputation.com for Social Networks
"Cash – As of September 30, 2011, cash, cash equivalents, and short-term marketable securities were $42.6 billion."

During this quarter, Google made $302 million on interest alone. That's an impressive 11% of this quarter's net profit. I wonder what they plan to do with all that money.
> If I have to train myself to lay my phone face down, it's a design flaw. It's a design flaw because it increases the chance of damaging the screen

Screen damage rates for iPhone 4 are far higher than Nexus S. I take it from your message that you believe this is due to a design flaw. Interesting... I suppose I agree.

> requires the user to adapt to something that could have been done correctly in the first place ... that's a flaw.

No, it couldn't have been done correctly in the first place. The iphone 4 sacrifices 66% of its speaker volume relative to the nexus s to get side placement. That's also a flaw. Design is about tradeoffs.
NYC's VC action more than triples in third quarter
Steve Wozniak First in Line for iPhone 4S
Etsy Changes Its Privacy Policy and Pivots Towards Real Names
Presage - the intelligent predictive text entry platform
Diaspora Asking for Money, Again
Personally, I wouldn't mind if it was somewhere I wanted to work. Heck, I spend longer than that on the cover letter. When I'm job hunting I'm pretty selective so I spend a lot of time on just a few job applications (research + cover letter). Requiring code makes makes it more time consuming for less focused job searchers but maybe that is the point?
I don't get it - I've had the same screwdrivers since I was 15. Why would you just throw a lot of knowledge and a perfectly good tool out?

If you know what you are doing, C is perfectly safe.

If you don't know what you are doing, even the safest language is a grenade without the pin in.

I've written a few web apps which are just inetd spawned C which shifts JSON out with printf's and handles POST data as a hash table. Utterly simple and surprisingly scalable.
Which video host would you choose?
Ask HN: What are some blogs with great writing?
I'm a pretty terrible writer. I just spent 3 hours writing and rewriting my first blog post and it still doesn't sound right. I know it's a practice makes perfect kind of thing, but it's still pretty discouraging.

What are some of the blogs that you follow? I'm hoping that I'll be able to pick up one or two techniques from some of the top blogs on HN.

My blog: http://blog.grooovy.me
(if it doesn't load, try again later. Sorry! the DNS was just updated to reflect the new blog URL)
So you would still have to deal with the case of someone reading inconsistent data and taking wrong action as a result. If that action is only internal to the system you could go on and do a cleanup when the system becomes consistent again. If the action is external you can not.
Isn't NSApplicationSupportDirectory for stuff that isn't "Documents" and yet needs to be managed as app state (not in 'Caches')? Why not just use that instead? That's what my app does and it seems to be OK with iOS 5.
We do that. Have you drilled down into the individual listings?

I'm currently working on displaying the 'core' (processor, network, display) components in the main listings to a) help differentiate between SKUs and b) stop you having to view each model to find the one you're interested in.
Ubuntu I N C E P T I O N
Yes. Device substitutions are hard enough, but device revisions add another layer of complexity.
Again, I think I must be missing something. If you hit Play and don't touch the mouse you see the same exact animations as if you flew in a big arc at full speed.

You control nothing more than a camera angle with a glowing avatar.
I've done it with a microwave and some marshmallows (I taught this lab to some first year college students long ago when I spent a term as a college physics instructor).

It's similar to tzs' method below, in that you have to know the frequency of the microwave's radiation, so it's not entirely satisfactory.

But, given that, it's a really nice demonstration of standing waves with a cool result to calculate.

The method is to cut a bunch of marshmallows in to small chunks (or just buy mini-marshmallows), spread them on a tray in a microwave and turn it on. After a while, you'll see that the marshmallows are bubbling up in some spots, and not cooking very much at all in others. Measuring the distance between either the lows or the highs gives you the wavelength of the standing wave.

Given that wavelength and the frequency of the microwave radiation, you can calculate the speed of light.

I'm going to punt on it and leave the calculation up to the reader, mostly because I haven't thought about this in 15 years or so and I'm sure I'd miss a factor of 2 somewhere:).

Also, this will not work unless you can get a microwave where you can turn the turntable (the rotating plate thingy) off. Most microwaves didn't have a turntable in the early 90s, but this isn't true any more.
haha! Valid point.

However, I don't think one email will make me think hey this is the guy. I mean I've spent countless hours in Starbucks and still have no co founder.

This will be just the start...

That make a bit more sense then my appalling initial post!
Basically prior to development I am curious as to the video hosting the majority of users would prefer, videos will be between 30 - 60 mins in length and quality will be reasonable. Any feedback would be much appreciated.
Dennis Ritchie, Father of C and Co-Developer of Unix, Dies
Looks great, but I'm happy with what I have now so I'm not too pushed about spending money on a service. I'm also old enough to worry about trusting a site to hang around for 10 years with my data. (and by old enough, read: stuck in my ways enough) Must look into the migration effort though. And browser addon support. Its definitely a sweet looking service.
I didn't make any comment or complaint about the practical difference...
15 surprising and powerful life lessons I’ve learned while surfing