skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with his 'noob' example is not only that the comments are overly verbose, but also that his variable names are generic and totally useless. 'counter' and 'pos' or 'ref' are so generic that you always have to look at the whole code before you know what's going on. Rename the 'counter' variable to 'bytesProcessed', and rename the 'pos' variable to 'startOfBuffer', and use a variable named 'currentByte' to walk through the buffer... With descriptive variable names many comments become unnecessary.
I'm not going to argue against the fact that email is complicated and scary, I think this relates to the fact that it's been here forever. RFC821 and RFC822 dating from, what, the late 70s?

It's these same facts:

* The protocols have been around forever.

* The protocols have been so widely adopted (2.9 billion, BILLION, email accounts worldwide).

* It's not going anywhere.

That I think make it worth the pain.
A lightweight version of SwiftShader was licensed for Flash and AIR (http://transgaming.com/news/transgaming-s-swiftshader-3d-tec...).

That said, SwiftShader also features an OpenGL ES 2.0 API, making it highly suitable for WebGL implementations as well. In fact Google is currently in the process of integrating SwiftShader support into Chrome (http://codereview.chromium.org/8480015/).
The snag is that you'll still have to make an investment in helping the reseller, training him, supporting the end-customer through him, etc., but you'll take a hit on your margin. Worse still, he'll own the customer and you'll have had to create scale in an area which won't be strategic for your organization - unless you decide resellers are the way to go.

Developing a sales channel is definitely a valid strategy, but unless you extend it beyond one reseller (i.e. go big or go home) then it probably won't pay off for your org.

We run a wholesale sales channel of more than 10,000 resellers in over 110 countries and I can tell you that it definitely works, especially in markets where someone else has a stronger likelihood of owning the customer relationship. In reality, some sort of a hybrid approach to the channel - direct and indirect, is probably the best approach, presuming you can balance the channel conflicts.
They didn't write it, but based on that they were hiring XMPP devs before, it's likely that they are running ejabberd.
I've generally tried to get the employer to tell me up front exactly what the job entails, before we waste any time actually interviewing. Unfortunately sometimes that doesn't work, because they think they need somebody that knows <X> when they really need an expert in <Y>.

Next time I'm looking for a job, I think I'll scrub most of the mention of languages and technologies from the resume, and see if that helps. :)
http://durak.org/sean/pubs/kfc/
linux kernel fuck count
so much love <3
ThreeCents: Get User Feedback for Your November App
Ask HN: How to block contact form spam?
I've got a low traffic website that has a very typical contact form on the home page. Very rarely, it gets a legit lead. Often, it gets spammed.

Not being a particularly important form, the pragmatic thing to do would be to remove it. But I took it as a challenge to see if I could block the spam.

I've failed miserably.

I've tried several variations of hidden fields and javascript character insertion in an attempt to trick bots and come to the conclusion that either the bots are just better than I am, or they're human, and I have no hope.

So what are the typical contact form spam methods? How do you stop them?

Is there a trick to doing this that I'm just not seeing?

EIDT: by the way, captchas for users are not an acceptable solution. It must be transparent to an actual person filling out the form.
Sid Meier's Civilization V
That's a great idea. Back in the 90's, hoping to cut down on my contact with work during vacation, I told people I would be "rafting in Utah." I had no idea that Utah was such a popular rafting destination--living as I did in Atlanta, it sounded just remote enough to make people think I was out of reach, even though I was in fact at home the whole time. It worked to eliminate attempts to contact me, but for the 20 years since then I have had to maintain the fiction that a) I am a white-water rafting enthusiast (I am not); and b) that I went to Utah in 1991 (I DID go there in 2003 on business, but no rafts were involved). In retrospect, just letting the phone ring or routing my email to the bit-bucket would have been a lot better.
The point isn't to master a specific technology but to get a general understanding of how things work and develop an insatiable curiosity coupled with a creative drive.

Learning how to make an interactive website with JavaScript will teach you how to think in computer terms, teach yourself new technology (reading the documentation is itself a valuable experience) and take a project from imagination to reality. The very best programmers--and somebody starting out so young is probably more likely to become a great programmer--are not the ones that have mastered the technology de jour but rather the ones who have solid fundamental skills, a logical and inquisitive mind and can teach themselves new technologies easily.

Ultimately, all the short-term changes in the software field are ultimately fairly superficial. Going from Flash to JavaScript or C++ to Java is not an earth-shattering change--it's just a natural progression. There are changes, to be sure, but you're ultimately just doing similar things in similar ways. If anything, it just gets easier.

So, in short, the quick pace of the software industry isn't really as quick as it seems and writing programs is at least as healthy for developing intelligence and curiosity as anything else. I really don't think it a worse choice than sports or music for an extracurricular activity.
true, code would help there instead of bikeshedding. also it would serve as guide to anyone following the patch.
Wow, that context really doesn't help your case at all.
Haha, no offense taken! Writing angry things is fun.

I really didn't want to come across as pedantic, which is why I tried to keep it light and say I thought his mimicry was cute. And I love stuff like this! We need more 6th graders like this. I would have mad chilled with him and his app club.

That said, I do believe that the way we use language frames the world for other people. So I try to keep things in perspective. It's not that this isn't wonderful, it's that there're so many wonderful things that I prefer specificity of compliment to a general word ("great") that may suggest this is some sort of pinnacle to others. Greatness in turn becomes the people with such a tremendous sensibility that they can incorporate many, many wonderful things and, in the process, underline some deeper truth.
I don't have an answer, but here's a write up about some approaches that I took earlier in the year but failed with:

http://www.mindscapehq.com/blog/index.php/2011/04/03/a-faile...
Things like this often give me pause for thought. Often this community, and indeed myself, drive myself to attain better results, and generally push towards a wealthy career, so often we can forget what is truly important.

I'm a religious person, so often this translates to worrying about how I'm prepared should I also meet an early grave, but its important that in times like this that we also see the importance of others in our lives, our family, relationships etc.

Easy to forget that the thing we work so hard for can be wiped away in a split second.

My deepest sympathies to all involved.
IMO, the best way to spend $50 is on a Charles license - http://www.charlesproxy.com/

It's saved me countless hours debugging web services, be it JSON, XML, AMF, you name it. There's a free 30 day trial, and it runs on Mac OSX, Windows, and Linux.
In his position I might stick with a higher price. I'll sell fewer units meaning there's not as many clients to support while making the same revenue.
I'd say the real scam is SEO, PPC just has a lot of campaigns that check the suggestion boxes but never look at the return.
such pussies.
The Real Cost of Patent Trolls
The Don Libes book, Obfuscated C and Other Mysteries [0], is a fantastic programming book, among my top ten. I think it's out of print, but Amazon has used copies.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Obfuscated-Other-Mysteries-Don-Libes/d...
1000 Mile Running Man Wants to Create A New Operating System
At the lower price, you produce a lot more consumer surplus. This is valuable if you're the charitable type.
Do you have anecdotes to back up the idea that a CTO title is helpful in VC pitches? I've done a lot of those, and (with a team, of which I was the least important but most technical) gotten an A round. I don't think you're right. The "C" is a liability, not an asset.
Jameson from LaunchRock here. It's not uncommon to see 30% on a page. It all depends on design and copy. I was originally skeptical, but people are willing to give out their contact info if you peak their interest.

Where we see the opportunity now (and what we're building) is how you interact with that person after they show their trust and allow you to contact them. it's very important to win them over in a way that is authentic.
SPIN Selling: Use Sales Techniques to Get a Job and Network Successfully
I agree with your premise. I too am skeptical of a singularity although I am hopeful of at least a Feline level of intelligence within the next decade. But the way these things go, the space of ideas is probably non-euclidean and certainly very high dimensional. It is possible that in the dimensions we are used to looking at things a singularity seems far away but is actually right smack in front of us in another dimension. So I remain agnostic.

Note also that - at least as far as I am aware - we have not managed to extend lifespans. Erastothenes for example lived till 82, at or more than the current expected lifespan of many western and first world countries. We have only increase the probability of arriving near the maximum life span by dealing with famine, war, diseases and optimizing diets and nutrients and lifestyle.
Walmart acquires Aussie tech start-up Grabble
If it ever does die completely, it won't be because of iOS.

Right now, the dock basically serves two UI purposes: "here's a list of apps you want to be able to access quickly, viewable at the edge of your screen", and "here's a list of apps you're currently running, also at the edge of your screen".

On OS X, these are currently combined into the same UI widget.

On iOS, they both exist, but as two separate entities: the docked app icons at the bottom of each springboard page serve the first purpose, and the list of recently-used apps in the double-tap multitask bar the latter. The interface has changed slightly due to the fundamental difference in the multitasking paradigms between the two OSes, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that the iOS UI has something that is clearly related to the OS X dock, both in form and in function.
One of the finer points of that book is that it is a biography of Dirac's life, not just a description of his insights into physics. His personal life was unhappy and makes for rather depressing reading. When Feynman was described as a second Dirac, only this time human, it is difficult to appreciate fully just how fundamentally different the personalities of the two geniuses were.

Between studying electrical engineering and going to Cambridge he also earned a degree in mathematics, if I recall correctly. He was not given a sufficiently large scholarship the first time he was accepted to Cambridge, and so he had to wait.
> If you believe the history of mobile phone is like the history of the desktop, then of course, it's a war.

If you believe the history of the mobile phone is like the history of the desktop, then you're a poor student of history. At the very least, saying that the two are the same is far enough from a given that evidence of that situation should be provided.

Also, tip for arguing - the hyperbole of phrases like "make developers sell your soul to you" makes your argument hard to take seriously.
Google to sponsor Startup Weekend
A fine example of the price elasticity of demand. Not surprising in the slightest, but a helpful real-world illustration.
American Express to plough $100 million into digital start-ups
This is similar to Linus Torvalds's (former?) practice of "dropping patches" in response to overload.

It's actually not a bad queue management process overall. Local processor offline / overloaded? Drop all but the very highest priority (for email: immediate family, $BOSS) messages.

The late Joe Barr describes this obliquely in his discussion of the development of BitKeeper (git's predecessor as the Linux kernel code repository):
http://joebarr.sys-con.com/node/32618/mobile
What case? All I did was to compare something from 1943 to something that's happening now. I did not, at any point, state that I have anything against homosexuals. You are inferring that, simply because of the modified swastika on my website. You didn't take the time to read anything about me, so I put forth an explanation. I am being calm and logical, not emotional and reactionary, like you and a few others here. The picture he posted is out of context, simply because it is disconnected from the text of my website, which contains, in its first link, a set of three links which give more information about who I am. I gave a summary of those, and linked directly to them, here, as well as informing you of that comment.
Mashable's Pete Cashmore on the 8 digital trends of the future
Thanks, Nagyman. You have no idea how useful that shortcut is to me.
This is not part of the american cultural narrative and thus will be harder to accept even to your own psyche.

Its important to understand how the difference between your own thinking and society's thinking can and will affect your own happiness (usually in a negative way). Its not something many people think about but has very real consequences.
We look at this as a place to start building a relationship. Our company today is about landing pages, but it's not staying that way. The things that are coming soon are all about what you do with the list after you have it.
> The green button in almost every case just resizes the window to the optimal size.

For varying values of optimal including "not optimal in any way for any user in any situation"
... eh?
In Season Accessories
The P2P world is just full of unintended consequences:

How litigation only spurred on P2P file sharing: http://www.itnews.com.au/News/279763,how-litigation-only-spu...

Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3227844

In summary, as the penalties for filesharing increased, filesharing was pushed further into the underground, and filesharers adopted protocols like Bittorrent that are more difficult to kill with a court order than Napster was.
It doesn't take a special person, so much as it's simply the case that no matter who you are, your startup is likely to fail.

When I was much younger and starting my first (fundably doomed) startup, one of my cofounders liked to say, "yeah, most businesses fail, but those statistics include companies trying to sell soft drinks to Eskimos and combination Chinese food/pizza restaurants". Then we'd all chuckle, knowing that the statistics most certainly didn't capture dynamic new technology firms like ours.

No. Most companies fail. Look at the list of dead YC companies. Those were screened by a team that has specialized in doing nothing but screening founding teams and then attempting to give them every advantage their considerable and growing infrastructure and connections can give them. And they still fail.

Because that is what startups do. They fail.

The best, most talented, most experienced founders in the world would presumably be among the first to tell you that you can't read anything about your self from the simple fact that your company failed. Learn what you can, but don't ever let it grind on you.

(Some people just shouldn't be in this game, for whatever it's worth, like Matt Damon said about the no-limit players in Rounders; not because they can't, but because it's not healthy for them.)
I'm not sure about details but as far as I remember Windows CE uses a brilliant approach to fix this bug. System tick count is set to value equal three minutes before overflow. And system counter overflows three minutes after OS starting. 3 minutes usually enough to load all applications that could be buggy but this time is less then usual debug session.

edit: found details:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms885645.aspx

For Debug configurations, 180 seconds is subtracted to check for overflow conditions in code that relies on GetTickCount. If this code started within 3 minutes of the device booting, it will experience an overflow condition if it runs for a certain amount of time.
So, of the people paying $1 for the product, you know that half of them would gladly pay $2?

Sounds like it's time for 2 versions of the product : (i) The almost-full-featured version ($1) and (ii) The super-duper gold-plated version ($2). The removed feature doesn't even have to be very useful : You might lose 10% of the $1 value people, but snag 25% of the $2 value people (who just want some justification for paying the full value to them).
Note that Feynman was Jewish. I don't know if that mattered in America in 1945, but it certainly did in Australia.

See http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s632081.htm : "What too are we to make of the cavalier disregard of an applicant whose list of referees included Rudolf Carnap, G.E. Moore, Niels Bohr, and Bertrand Russell?"
NewSQL vs NoSQL for New OLTP
Tlc Payday Loans
Cumulonimbus releases pressureNET 1.2: barometer network for Android tablets
Game-Theory Study: Traffic jams, ISPs and net neutrality
Yemek oyunlari
I'm the dev of pressureNET. We're building a network of barometers (currently about 500 active users) that are inside Android devices, currently the Xoom and soon the Galaxy Nexus. Using this information going into the future, we're hoping to improve short-term weather prediction and forecasting, on the 1-hour to 1-day scale. We intend to correlate our data will local radar data to provide more accurate predictions. You can read more (and see our source code, of course) on our blog at cumulonimbus.ca.

New in version 1.2 is the ability for users to see graphs of pressure readings over time, our first step at putting the data in context to prepare for future work on predictions.

Also, for the HN crowd, I'll add that Cumulonimbus Software (that's us) is currently writing a business plan and looking for funding. If you'd like to get in touch with us, email us at software@cumulonimbus.ca.
Win95 had a famous timer wrap at 49.7 days. Ouch.

The API call in question is called GetTickCount[1], and it's still really popular - especially for doing quick things like comparing for timeouts, and so forth. It returns milliseconds into a 32-bit int.

There's a replacement named, funnily enough, GetTickCount64, but iirc it's only present on Vista and newer, so it hasn't found its way into a lot of software yet. The Windows Performance counters probably provide better metrics for people actually interested in this data.

_______________________

1. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms72...
It sounds like you're trying to "take back" the word nazi. I think that's a bad idea because it's quite callous. However, if I understand you correctly from those links, to convince you I need to show that your current behavior is counter to your own self interest. I think it is, because:

We are still a long way off from your goal of nanotechnology-based personal evolution. It sounds like you want to develop that, but the highest probability way for that to work is through collaboration with a few other smart scientists. And you'll have a lot better luck with said collaboration if you give up your "take back the word nazi" campaign.

Also, off-topic, but you should check out the book House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds. It's got a lot of your ideas as plot elements: A human replicating herself, and then following all the copies as they diverge because of experiences, and another human who gradually replaced parts of himself with nanobots in order to live forever.
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Mastermind 1
He also suspects we're a decade or less from discovery of life on another body in our solar system.

I'm not skeptical of the singularity but I can see how/why an intelligent person could be. (Though I do feel it's worth considering that semi-sentient software could precipitate singularity-like changes without being able to pass the Turing test. I mean, it's sort of inherently myopic that we base the distinction of when a machine has crossed the threshold of sentience based on whether or not it's as smart as/smarter than a human. That could turn out to be a completely useless metric.)

My understanding of the arguments in support of meaningful extension of human lifespan (trending towards immortality) in the foreseeable future is that we're ±100 years from a development that results in (let's say) a 20 year bump, before those 20 years are up we will have accomplished a 60 year increase, within the following 60 we'll have managed to tack on 180, etc.

I do think mind uploading is probably a much more sustainable approach to Immortality for Everyone!®—then again, that's a lot of electricity.
I think that it is easier to filter the messages before reading them, for example with the Gmail spam filter or something like SpamBayes ( http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/ ).

You can help the filter a little with a static "captcha", like 'Write the word "orange".' or 'Calculate: 2+2=' . Or make a special filter rule to test the "captcha". (The real captcas are more difficult to configure and annoying to the real users.)
The author describes youth culture's social form by calling it "post-emotional," "entrepreneurial," and eventually "generation sell." As underwhelming as this is, I think it's incredibly generous, as I would call its social form simply "nothing."

The tendency to start artisan businesses is not a social narrative, it's just another part of the aesthetic. The author compares modern youth culture with the hippies, beatniks, and punks. But those generations were doing what they were doing for a reason. Read anything from the heroes of those generations, and you'll see a clear "grand narrative" that described the social relationships of the world they were trying to create. The social narrative of punk culture was not "a tendency to start bands that played three chord songs." That was part of the social aesthetic. The narrative was one of anti-authoritarinism, collective autonomy, and a vision for a world without hierarchy.

The truth is that youth culture today has no narrative. Yes, money is cool again, small-business entrepreneurship is a common pursuit, and "maker" culture has taken root, but these are just the things people do. Ask someone why they made the latest LED clock design out of "make magazine," and they'll more than likely say something along the lines of "because it's neat." Look at the average young entrepreneur, and you'll find someone who discovered technology before they discovered themselves -- someone who is "innovating" because that's what they read they're supposed to do, rather than out of some informed sense of the social reality they're trying to create.
So it's a software problem rather than a hardware problem. Fine, maybe it's not a finished solution yet--but Apple hasn't stopped selling Mac Pros yet, either.
What about performance? One of the reasons to use namedtuple is performance, esp. memory-wise (afaiu nametuple stores field names in class definition, which can save a lot of space compared to lists of dicts). I would expect recordtype to be better than dict but not as good as namedtuple. It would be nice if author posted some benchmarks…
Is Tony Hsieh Playing Sim City with Vegas?
So, when this bill is passed, presumably people will point the finger at MPAA/RIAA companies, and start taking them off the net?