skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Funding" makes it sound like Google is doing this out of charity, or like Mozilla is a pre-profit startup that needs outside investment. Neither is true.

Google isn't "funding" Mozilla; it's a customer of Mozilla. Their search traffic payments aren't charity or venture capital; they are revenue. Search engines are always willing to pay for large amounts of traffic. Even Opera reports significant revenue from their desktop browser [1][2], which has an order of magnitude fewer users than Firefox. This is not the first time the Google/Mozilla deal has been renewed in the past decade, and I doubt it will be the last. And there are other search engines who will also continue to pay for valuable traffic.

(Note that individual donations are still important for the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, since tax rules limit how Firefox revenue can be used for the Foundation's other activities. Donations help support Mozilla's other projects to build the open web like the current projects in education, journalism, video publishing, and online privacy.)

1: http://www.opera.com/company/investors/faq/

2: http://www.quora.com/How-does-Opera-Software-ASA-make-money
Sounds like Apple has been taken over by the business people and IP lawyers.

They're already out of new ideas.
The title is still misleading. It doesn't become clear that the author is advocating CoffeeScript until the end of the article.
Startup idea: $2 a month DNS servers based in Vancouver, Toronto, The Bahamas, and Tijuana.
The angle may be more palatable but that doesn't change what's happening. Professional programmers are increasing efficiency and reducing menial tasks on a much larger scale than what's described in this article. It may not put people out of a job in every case but it is removing the need for a job that was previously needed.
As I said: 99%. I like default tools to be optimized for the common case, corner cases are just corner cases – how often are you extracting a single file from a massive source tree?
Yes, but gcc gives you no way to explain to the compiler that %Q takes a struct foobar* as argument, so either you don't use extensions, and have the seatbelts provided by -Wformat, or you use extensions and have no seatbelts at all.
I was so confused when I thought you wrote "doing this all the way to the top", and linking to Semler who inherited a Harvard MBA and a CEO job from his father.
I agree but I have seen cases where companies have tried to suppress a parody. I think we are going to see Rovio is made of.
hey, not bad. this is very similar to an idea that I had that was basically "a stock market for music artists"

I'd love to see this go in the Hype Machine direction, honestly. Both with the way the media player is on the page and with the ability to "Like" songs. I would have created an account on SoundOff if there was some indication that it would have let me save songs I like. The whole battles concept is a pretty good one

Good start though, keep it up
I posted a "Stuff i use" comment some time ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1881098
Ah-- thanks for posting that. It is interesting to read the past comment threads.

All the same I'm glad the article was reposted as I am relatively new to the site.
This is why I don't buy Sony products. I just bought a new TV two days ago, rejecting a Sony TV. I have no regrets; I found a better TV after a little more looking. Sony has lost thousands of dollars from me alone due to crap like this.
gosh i hope you don't get sued
URDU SEX STORIES: Hotel Ke Room May
So... next you'll add Twilio support so people can do it by SMS, right?
"Maybe what I'm advocating is that people should think about their role in the way that a consultant might."

This is such excellent advice that I wish it was present in the post. I've been advocating this kind of thought (with much more awkward phrasing) to my friends and family for a while now.
Even if Google were to cease to exist tomorrow, this would not mean the end of this revenue stream. I think most people when talking about the Mozilla <-> Google relationship fail to recognize that this is a mutually beneficial arrangements.

Bing and other search providers would be willing to spend lots of money to have the default search status. Just because Google has always purchased this spot in the past does not mean that google is the only way Mozilla can monetize search.
> But you shouldn't be able to sue them when you get hurt, since you knew from the beginning the whole thing will be dangerous.

Why not? Just because you sue them doesn't mean you're going to win. Maybe stupidly extreme sports purposely made the event more dangerous to ensure your injuries (and subsequent ratings). Signing away your right to sue puts you in an almost infinitely dangerous position.
Link to the current C1X draft which is mentioned in the article:

http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1570.pdf
IFPI and RIAA Patronize Google With Anti-Piracy “Report Card”
Agreed, seems like you're not missing much. Sony gear I bought in the 80s and early 90s still works. Sony gear I bought in the last decade has already failed, usually in under 5 years. I quit buying it, as it doesn't seem like it's made by the same company.
What salary should a desingineer expect in one of the big cities?
Top Tech Stories of 2011 for Developers and IT Pros
Ah right, those are going to make things fun. :-) I think in your position I'd write a compiler, but keep the AST associated with the byte code and back off to an interpreter if the AST is modified, maybe recompile after enough calls without further change. The call-by-need arguments don't sound too bad, but could take some thought on the memoisation strategy, I think I'd do it at the caller and pass those structures through, but I'd want to think about it.

I'd hardly count myself as an expert, but I think the best win we've had is in thinking carefully about callsite caching strategies and having a eureka moment about just how insanely powerful MethodHandles.exactInvoker can be.
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Goodwill? Do you think Google's shareholders get warm fuzzies when they see the news of this deal? This arrangement sends Google large amounts of traffic, from which they derive significant financial value. Stop calling this charity, it's a mutually beneficial arrangement.

Edit: I mentioned this before below, but I'll repeat it up here. I work for Mozilla, but was not involved in the inner workings of this deal. I'm stoked to know where my salary is coming from though :)
I guess I've never had to snap people out of it, I just started organizing them myself. It sure doesn't seem to take much to throw people into a panic, though.
Just add some JS and call it a day. http://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/sorttable/
‘Wolverine’ Pirate To Serve Year In Prison – Deadline.com
I'd love to get a compare/contrast between Cornerstone which the article mentions and Versions:

http://versionsapp.com/

I sadly still have to use SVN for some things and have been using Versions for quite some time now. What does Cornerstone do that Versions can't do?
شاهد بالفيديو رولا خرسا وتطورات المسيرة النسائية بميدان التحرير
Funny! You might want to improve the visuals of the page, though. As most people agree, design "has an unfair influence on people's first perception of something".
Are you sure that people are good at finding patterns in tables? If I give you:

x = {1..5} and y = {3.0982, 3.3928, 3.8838, 4.5712, 5.45500}

can you tell if that's linear, quadratic, or something else? Probably not. But if I show you a graph:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=.0982*x**2%2B3

it becomes pretty obvious. A table is not the right way to display this data.
This comment was filled with fail.

Pthreads has been the standard for 20 years, either you do better than it does, or you are wasting everybodys time, including your own.

"Too dangerous" is a direct quote from a WG14 member.

Stacksize is not an implementation detail, it often is crucial resource management issue for each individual application, in particular in high performance computing and network service applications. The C1X thread API provides no way you can set it.

With respect to timed sleeps: You can simulate wall-clock sleeps with duration-sleeps, but not the other way around. Just that simple fact should make it clear why the API, if it can only offer one kind of timeout, should offer duration-sleeps.

NTPD will step your clock up to +/- 3599 seconds. I happen to know: I helped write it.
Ah, I gather firefox assumed that it could write to a given file repeatedly and it would just stay in the cache. Thanks for the explanation.
Do you really think Google could vanish? Google search has become such a necessity in internet culture today, and culture is very hard to change.

Hell... "google" is a verb in the dictionary: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/google
I was under the impression that Mozilla also got a sizable chunk of revenue from Amazon. Every time I search Amazon, I do it via the browser search box, and there's a referral code appended. Even if Mozilla doesn't have a special agreement with Amazon (this would not surprise me), they would no doubt qualify for Amazon's highest volume-based advertising rate, which is 8.5% on all sales (excluding electronics and gift cards, which have a rate of 4% regardless of your referral-volume tier).

I presume that the same is also true of eBay in some fashion.
How odd that virtually all editors are doing it wrong. I don't believe that result for a second. 1600 replies, self-selecting.
Sony just lost about $600 the other day when I bought a TV, rejecting the otherwise perfectly good Sony option. That's neither the first, nor likely the last, purchasing decision they'll be excluded from.
Smartphone Shipments Beat PCs in ALL of 2011
I think Microsoft is too incompetent to be evil these days. The reason not to use Bing is that the results suck compared to Google.
Is a cure for the common cold on the way?
Indian e-commerce Giant Flipkart bullish on Mobile Commerce
The XREF table for MySQL
The XREF, or cross reference table, is a database table that links records together. These tables are very good for normalization in your database. I almost always use an xref when I need an many to many relationship.
You think Mozilla really has much leverage in a situation like this? Google is the best search engine and everyone knows that. Mozilla would do their users a disservice by switching to Bing or something, and this could even be seen as a positive thing by Google due to the theory that it would drive more users to Chrome.

While I agree you can also look at this from a perspective of mutual benefit, it's certainly not an obvious open-and-shut deal, especially not with Chrome in the mix. It's simply a matter of priorities, and as I noted in the grandparent, it's easy to conceive a situation where this perspective may shift.

Also, I think that executives care about the opinions of shareholders about as much as Congresspeople care about the opinions of constituents, i.e., they don't care at all unless it looks like something will cause a major disruption to their continued employment.
"Often this kind of student never makes it to the end. He flunks himself by dropping out. He ends on a soda fountain or doing yard work, but all the time reading and studying because a good mind is always hungry.

Now one of the things about Lisp, and I've seen it before, is that Lisp is a real magnet for this kind of mind. Once you understand that, and see that it is this kind of mind that has contributed a lot to the culture of Lisp, you begin to see why Lisp is, like many of its proponents, a brilliant failure. It shares the peculiar strengths and weaknesses of the brilliant bipolar mind (BBM).

Why is this? Well, its partly to do with vision. The 'vision thing' as George Bush Snr. once described it, is really one of the strengths of the BBM. He can see far; further than in fact his strength allows him to travel. He conceives of brilliant ambitious projects requiring great resources, and he embarks on them only to run out of steam. It's not that he's lazy; its just that his resources are insufficient."
Kind of makes you wonder why Mars doesn't have a magnetic field then?

Its composition is similar to Earth's, and I assume that it's big enough to have similar pressures and temperatures closer to the core?
Dropping a Magnet Through a Copper Pipe
How do you plan to monetize iDoneThis?
Absolutely wonderful quote from the article:

My tool for writing Varnish is the C-language which in many ways is unique amongst all of the computer programming languages for having no ambitions.

The C language was invented as a portable assembler language, it doesn't do objects and garbage-collection, it does numbers and pointers, just like your CPU.

Compared to the high ambitions, then as now, of new programming languages, that was almost ridiculous unambitious. Other people were trying to make their programming languages provably correct, or safe for multiprogramming and quite an effort went into using natural languages as programming languages.

But C was written to write programs, not to research computer science and that's exactly what made it useful and popular.

This is a great thing to meditate on when trying to understand why the language is still used.
Plan isn't done yet. You can see the preliminary Ruby implementation at http://github.com/dpkendal/Plan, but I'm now working on a "final" version in RPython to be compiled by PyPy. The download and docs links are there to show what the website will look like eventually.

It should have bigints, though.
maybe... smartphone apps would scratch a very similar itch and those will happen first.
It showed up in my search today.
So it appears at lot of people disagree with me, however nobody is proposing a solution. Are these guys basically doomed?
Nice idea about the checks. I need new ones and I just might see about doing similar myself.
What makes you say you don't believe it? Once upon a time "everyone" knew amber text on black screen was the easiest on the eyes.

// A lot has changed since.
SOPA is a very bad thing. We've heard it every day for weeks here and everywhere else techies hang out.

I'm sure I'm not alone in having already signed all the petitions, already written to all my representatives, already spread the word to my personal network so other people can do the same.

At this point, what can I do but watch it happen?
U.S. asks journals to censor bird flu studies
I'm not sure if Sony can show that for their agreements, can they?
Apple buys Israeli flash storage maker Anobit in $500m deal
> I think that it is better to question why developers still create so many simple CRUD applications.

Because clients keep throwing money at us.
Bing probably wouldn't be averse now, but it should be obvious that Microsoft also has a major conflict of interest in regard to paying Mozilla money for the top spot in search. With Microsoft's history, nobody should be surprised if they drop Mozilla after they use its traffic to establish Bing (and other MS properties, like IE, Windows, and Office) more fully, and nobody should be surprised when Bing plays dirty and intentionally degrades the experience for Firefox users in an attempt to compel a switch to IE or another MS platform.

While I don't believe that selling the default search spot is problematic, I do believe it's risky and dangerous to make that the primary source of revenue, especially when the major potential bidders have serious conflicts of interest with supporting Mozilla (that is, they provide competing or incompatible services and products).
Ditto Music Scam
Do you mind elaborating on the supposed political quibbles that would prevent a pthreads-like API from being adopted? Are you are implying that vendors of competing API's would oppose anything pthread-like making its way into the standard?
Partech get to the €100M first close of its new venture fund
This is follow-up on an earlier Hacker News submission:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3279225
speaking as someone mulling various names for products, I'm wondering why pokemon and startups happen to have ostensibly names. what pressures are applied to the designers of pokemon and startup founders that cause this?
A parody is constitutionally protected free speech. Yes, they can sue regardless, but I think your leverage is higher in that scenario. I am not a lawyer. I hope the creator has spoken with one in case.
Try using GMP bindings for R:

http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Arbitrary-precision_integers_%28...
Doesn't seem like the author really thought some of this through:

FTA: "The <nostdreturn.h> file according to the standard shall have exactly this content: "#define noreturn _Noreturn" Are you crying or laughing yet ?"

It's a compatibility constraint. They can't simply add new reserved words to the language because it will break preexisting code (c.f. all the old C headers with idenfiers like "bool" or "class" or "virtual" that don't build in C++). The underscore-followed-by-capital convention happened to have been reserved by ISO C90, so that's what they picked.

But they allow that this is ugly, so there's a new C1X header file you can include in new C1X code that makes the identifiers look like you expect they should. Obviously old code won't include this header and is insulated from the change. (I guess if you wanted to nit here, having a separate header for each new feature seems dumb to me. Why not a single <c1x.h> or the like?)

Compatibility is important, especially for languages like C with staggeringly large bases of mature code. For an example of what happens when you break compatibility in the name of "progress" see Python3, which years on is still not installed by default anywhere, and probably never will be.
I got 8/10!
There are a lot of possibilities beyond just switching a default from one competitor to another. For example, a differently-designed UI could make it easier to get results from multiple search engines. For one illustration, see http://clarkbw.net/tmp/Firefox-Awesome-Search.html

For more thoughts on this topic, see http://www.squarefree.com/2011/08/12/how-mozilla-could-impro...
HP already won last years.
As a full time consultant, I suppose I agree.

But as I think about it, wouldn't it make sense to boil it down a little? "What I advocate is that people think."

From the article: investing a little to upgrade a computer or a piece of equipment saves time for a lot of people. It was obvious, right?

The trick is that he was thinking about ways to improve it. I don't really want to argue the pros and cons of Adam Smith and the "invsibile hand" here. I'm just a believer in people's capability to innovate, to think.

And if you have people who are obviously not doing this, before getting rid of them (which is important, if you end up with no alternative) -- try to think about what they bring to the company. It might surprise you where they've made improvements.
Nothing good ever came from a committee.
Lets Make Robots
Corporate Plausible Deniability Increases Your Startup’s Business by 10x
It is not difficult at all. You sort on the backend where your data is using your RDBMS then you display it.
"stack size is an implementation detail"

Thread stack size is an important performance tuning knob. If your app has 100,000 threads you really do care about running out of memory. If you have 10 threads you don't care. You should of course separate the choice of stack size from your application code. Your library still needs to support this.

"providing absolute timestamps rather than intervals is important because it prevents drift"

I don't know what you mean by "drift". When I put a timeout on a threaded operation (joining, acquiring a mutex, etc.) I am guarding against blocking forever 99% of the time. It is much cleaner to say "this should take no more than 5s" vs. "this should end at XYZ time UTC". Forcing the application to track elapsed time in the face of NTP etc. sucks. Letting the library handle those edge cases is good. It can use a CPU tick counter or similar.

"Fears regarding ntpd causing sudden jumps aren't well-founded (ntpd adjusts time very slowly, in sub-second intervals)"

What if I am sleeping in sub-second intervals? This goes to the general thrust of PHK's article. He is endorsing K&R C and pthreads because they give you minimal tools that can express a very wide range of programs. Building assumptions about how long people want to sleep for into an extremely widely deployed standard is a mistake.
Chromium and Chrome are identical except for one compile flag (which means you can at least check it yourself):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3034755
A patent system that has most of its connection to actual innovation definitely hurts consumers.

Apple's claims against the Android tablets have been shown here to involve something like the claim that Apple invented the tablet, something that's also been debunked here.
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I don't see this as particularly monstrous - it's reasonably succinct, and in this case a macro implementation does the job just as well as a built-in linked list would, and with much more flexibility.

#define VTAILQ_INSERT_BEFORE(listelm, elm, field) do { \
(elm)->field.vtqe_prev = (listelm)->field.vtqe_prev; \
VTAILQ_NEXT((elm), field) = (listelm); \
*(listelm)->field.vtqe_prev = (elm); \
(listelm)->field.vtqe_prev = &VTAILQ_NEXT((elm), field); \
} while (0)

(I don't understand why it uses VTAILQ_NEXT((elm), field) instead of what it expands to, (elm)->field.vtqe_next - that would make it more obvious what's going on by paralleling the use of vtqe_prev - but that's the fault of the macro implementation.)
+1 for iDoneThis and congrats. I've been using it for the past 4 weeks and enjoying it.
Congrats, looks very interesting! It's even something I would recommend that my mom start using since it's so easy to get started.

Who else signed up just to see how they were sending out e-mails? What steps are you taking to make sure o1.email.idonethis.com goes past Hotmail/Yahoo's spam filters that are notoriously deadly?
Is this yours? There is no reason to have 10 on a page. Do it like "Steak House or Gay Bar". http://steakhouseorgaybar.com/
I agree. And I agree it seems like a natural extension, however it's not the idea that's impressive, the action itself is impressive. There are a lot of forces that make this step incredibly difficult for universities, hence why it has taken so long.

Naturally they have to be very cautious of how they market and execute on any alternative credentialing system, both due to the new system being in competition with the traditional, and to ensure the branding will (or can) not tarnish their name.
"""The <nostdreturn.h> file according to the standard shall have exactly this content: #define noreturn _Noreturn"""

Damn, this standard is way past the point of no return!
This is exactly how stdbool worked in C99 too. _Bool is the actual typename and stdbool.h includes a macro to normalize it.
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I find this author's characterization of the history of C inaccurate. At the time, C was innovative. And its existence did enable computer science research, because with C, operating systems were finally portable. C itself was a worthwhile contribution to computer science research. Kernighan and Ritchie built upon prior languages, but they were able to distil what levels and kinds of abstraction were needed to implement portable systems programs. Many of the concepts in C existed in C's predecessors, but not in the same form we know them as. It's easy to under-estimate how novel that contribution is because so many of us think in C now.

For a history of C from the source, Dennis Ritchie, read this: http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/chist.html