skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder if anyone has tried returning an electronic device to a retailer (could be a console, but also a printer or scanner) claiming it was unfit for its purpose, on the grounds that it would not work without drivers but the customer was unwilling to accept the EULA required to install the drivers.
Microsoft Investigates "Highly Critical" Windows 7 Bug
First of all: You're wrong, the compatibility is the other way around: The old code will have to include <stdnoreturn.h> if they used the "noreturn" compiler-specific keyword, while waiting for the glacial ISO WG progress.

Second: There are two kinds of compatibility: Forwards compatbility and backwards compatibilty.

There is a finite number of existing programs whereas the number of future programs to be written is unbounded and very likely to be much higher over time.

Therefore forwards compatibility is always, by definition, more important than backwards compatibility, and you should never penalize future programs and programmers for the misdeeds and sloppines of the past programs and programmers.

Besides: I have yet to see a compiler that didn't have flags to make it compile to a slew of older dialects of C, so if C1X happens to break your old code, you set such an option, or you fix your source code.

There, fixed it for you.

The "Backwards compatibility, no matter the cost" mentaility is costing us dearly in the quality of the tools we have work with in the future, while providing us no relevant new benefits.

Crap like <stdnoreturn.h> is just pointless ornamentation, cluttering our source code.
Require all operating systems to include a program that searches for this plugin and removes it.

Then write another program to detect if the user uninstalls the first program.
NASA's Kepler finds Earth-size worlds orbiting another star
The constitutional convention of 1787 seems to have done a pretty decent job.
Sorting is useful when order is more relevant than the exact results. Many sites just throw away this use case, because it's inconvenient.
I was really hoping to see a fix for OS X's mouse acceleration. It's annoying when using the OS, and completely broken when I fire up StarCraft or something else that requires fast and precise mouse movements.

(I'm using a Microsoft mouse on a Mac Mini)
Notch's New Game - Minicraft (And An Android Port)
Indeed. As a general rule, if you think the ISO committee has done something pointlessly moronic, there's a pretty good chance that there's more going on than you know about.
at the risk of negative karma; voilà.
Your comments on thread stack size don't contradict the parent's point. Thread stack size is an implementation detail, and it's also an important performance tuning knob. That implies that it should be a knob that belongs to the system, not the C standard.
With respect to stack size, I still believe it is an implementation attribute independent of the abstract machine for which C is specified. There is no reason why some undefined external vendor-specific control (e.g. some glibc function) can't be provided by implementations, where required (however as in the example I gave, implementations are possible where such a control would be meaningless - its inclusion would be myopic).

Following your argument, complex systems could not be designed without similar controls on memory allocator behaviour ("how can I allocate anything when I don't know if malloc() will introduce syscall latency for a size-32 allocation!?") or environment table size ("how can I possibly execute a subprocess if I can't be certain setenv() will always succeed!?").

The answer to both of course is that you don't design for the standard, you design (and measure) for a particular closed system. I can't see why stack size is any different from the two (of many) examples above.

Re: absolute timeouts, the impossibility of emulating intervals reliably with wall-clock is a very good point.
Try ditching your templating language so your frontend guys can work independently.
Defendant asks US Marshals to drag Righthaven principals to court
There's already a little community forming around the game, which is neat. They've got a wiki: http://minicraft.wikia.com/wiki/Minicraft_Wiki
don't get me wrong, it's great and all but... 1 year later, full-time gig, and what about money?
Understanding burnout and reflecting on my experience with it
You are rationalizing: C was not "novel", it was pretty much BCPL-light. There also were portable operating systems before UNIX, some of them were written in PL/1 and FORTRAN.
I think if SOPA passes, Mozilla will remove extensions such as this. I hope this extension is a deterrent to SOPA passing at all.
There are many things horrible about it. Its arguments are evaluated many times which is different than what you would expect. The fact that you have to pass field is just plain clumsy.

C could benefit tremendously from a parameterized type mechanism.
It doesn't have to vanish to get taken over by executives that don't see the value in providing such a huge chunk of money to a company that offers a competing product. In fact, I reckon that most business schools teach this kind of support for your competitor is extremely bad. We know that brilliant and awesome companies end up in the hands of MBAs and it's all downhill from there. Mozilla should certainly plan for this eventuality.
OP here,

Neither Metroid (which I love to death and have played through several times) nor Castlevanina have precision combat as just one feature missing. In other words Metroid and Castlevania have #7 (action combat) but not #8 (precision combat + unique enemies)

Metroid should probably be marked for #3 (unique items) though I did mark it for #6 (unique weapons)

Castlevania seems to be missnig #6 (unique weapons). At least that's my recollection. Sure, the weapons are different but you can use any weapon against any creature if I remember correctly so each weapon does not really have a unique use. Maybe I'm remembering wrong.
The idea sounds great! I don't have an iDevice to test it, but hell with testing, I believe my fellow HNers, and I want to wish you good luck from Turkmenistan!
AntiMap record your own data (open source)
Hmmm, makes sense. Pokemon names are roughly representative of some of their characteristics and are designed so that even children can remember all of them.

Now if only we could name historical events and pieces of legislation like we name pokemon and give them cool animal logos...
If you don't value backwards compatibility, then perhaps you should not use a 40-year-old language with a standards committee that does value it.
I am a `desingineer` I guess. I'm working on a startup that is taking on big web analytics. A lot of the reusable code is being released as free and open source so that I can focus on the UI. I built the initial front and backend application (now leading a team), the UI, the product plan, and the marketing plan.

https://github.com/analytics-machine

Contact me: tblobaum@gmail.com
Tutorspree (YC W11) raises $1m led by Sequoia
Here's the clearance:
http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfpmn/pmn....

As far as I understand, there is a distinction between "cleared" (for sale, as this has been) and "approved" (as in a new type of device). The bar for clearance is much lower, as a company must only demonstrate "Substantial Equivalence" to existing, approved devices, and compliance with a quality control scheme. It's kind of interesting to read the SE backreferences for some viewers - they go back to computerized viewers in the 80s or even 70s. (Certain vendors seem willfully careless with the term "approved" and far too ambitious with the SE chain they cite...)
How to choose a programming language when learning how to code
GitHub issues is awesome... except when it isn't.
I don't agree with your assertion that backwards compatibility isn't important, but I would like to point out that the very fact that C compilers allow you to use identifiers that are in the form _Word means that they are breaking backwards compatibility by introducing new keywords.

Many of the libraries on a typical Linux system (anything glib/gtk based, libxml2, etc.) use _Word extensively.
hi Zuzz -- we were able to raise.
Therefore forwards compatibility is always, by definition, more important than backwards compatibility, and you should never penalize future programs and programmers for the misdeeds and sloppines of the past programs and programmers.

Ha. You're adorable.

While I do support the general "hey, let's fix old code and not be slaves to backwards compatibility", the fact of the matter is that legacy code / libraries / whatever in C aren't merely misdeeds/sloppiness--you might as well complain about having to use the same molecules of metal in your tools that our ancestors did building Rome instead of making your own from subatomic particles.

There is a finite number of existing programs whereas the number of future programs to be written is unbounded and very likely to be much higher over time.

But in the future, it's all Javascript/Ruby/CSS/HTML5! Why worry about writing more C code? ;)
It's sort of an exaggeration to call them "trailers"; they're really trailers for the actual trailer, released on Thursday. Still, I got a little geeked out.
Freemium

Edit: All accounts right now are free forever. We're building premium features for the business use case which we'll charge for. Everything right now is free forever.
It especially pisses me off when one group (Apple) does it and I am also financially bound to AT&T so I can't even walk away. Those need to be decoupled: Apple changes their TOS, I refuse, and thus I am released from my AT&T contract. That, I believe, would at least slow down these changes for the coupled contracts.
Project pigeon
Most likely they will also be pressured into releasing a FireFox update that breaks previous versions as well (just so we cannot keep using older versions of the addon without also being stuck with an old/insecure version of the browser.)
thanks so much, Auston!
Do you have any mechanism to unbind events on model/collections you've made in views/subviews, or will the bind methodes will live forever.
Do you have something like a global eventbus or how your views comunicate with each other?
I would pay for one based out of Vancouver.
What's the license on Minicraft? Or in spite of particular license, is Notch pretty much giving the thumbs up on porting anyway?
Apple however is free to suppress anything they want in the app store, so I guess we'll see.
Taking bets on when ISO C will acquire a form of templates, or taking it in even more generic direction - parametrized namespaces. Something like this (an illustrative example, don't knock me down for including val into list):

namespace(T)
{
struct list
{
T val;
list * next;
list * prev;
};

void append(list * l, list * i)
{
...
}
}

Then

list<int> * foo, * bar;
...
append(foo, bar);

No need for namespace nesting, default arguments and other ++isms. Just something to replace multi-line macro blocks.
I always found it easier to type "ctrl/cmd-l amazon.com" and do my search than use the mouse to switch engines (is there a keyboard shortcut??) But, knowing that it can potentially benefit Mozilla, I will start using it more often now. Thanks.
Let's go for "The Delicious Digg Awards".
First: Why should the API for setting stack-size be implementation defined, when a stack mandated to implement the language ?

Second: You seem to labour under the misunderstanding that all threads in a program have, and should have the same stack size ? That's simply not true, you can look in Varnish for a good example: We may have 10 "overhead" threads with big stacks and 100.000 worker threads with small stacks.

Third: You cannot add "some glibc function" to set the stack-size of a thread you have not yet created, and setting it afterwards may be impossible (if you want it larger) or cause memory fragmentation (if you want it smaller).

Fourth: What does malloc(3) have to do with thread stacks ??
A lot of Apple zealots are siding with them, saying that other tablet makers are directly ripping them off. I imagine a lot of the people who hold this position have never used a computer before their iPhone.

"All cellphone makers enforce their patents - all of them. Further, patent enforcement is critical to technological development. Companies will stop investing in R&D if others can simply wait for the product to come out, copy it and avoid all the costs associated with inventing it."
There is already a version of Firefox packaged with Bing. http://www.firefoxwithbing.com/
More like just compiling =)
Ask HN: Are there new scenarios enabled by the for officespace with datacenter?
Ask HN: Are there any new usage scenarios enabled by cloud computing for officespace with a medium sized datacenter?

With cloud computing availability so prevalent, are there any new use cases and/or types of companies that would benefit from being able to have convenient, easy to access Silicon Valley office space adjacent to their servers which are collocated in a medium sized Tier 3 data center that has direct access to high speed fibre and is adjacent to an Equinix data center?

For instance, are there specific applications/industries in Silicon Valley were one might need to:
- Upload large amounts of data such as video to a CDN on a hourly/daily basis?
- Use CAD, Animation or graphics software modeling directly on the collocated servers with additional support from cloud servers
- Transfer large datasets to/from EC2 for high speed cloud computation

Equinix and other data centers typically have office space, but as I understand it's typically very expensive and not intended for long term usage.

An advanced thank you for any thoughts/ideas.

Full disclosure: I am a co-owner of a commercial building in Sunnyvale, CA with about 60,000 square feet of office space and a 12,000 square foot data center that was built by a previous tenant and would like to maximize the potential benefits of the previous tenant's significant investments and its ideal location to a new set of users.
Online Homeschooling Programs Have Many Benefits
A rule of thumb is $4000 or $4500 per kilowatt.

So 100KW of power, with N+1 power feeds, generators, full UPS backup system, etc. would cost about $500K to build. Would give you 10 to 20 racks' worth of power.

However, that is too small to be worth it, so they would probably build something quite a bit larger than that.

Figure 200 racks, each with 8KW-10KW per rack, that means 2 megawatts of power, thus 2000 * 4500 = $9 million for the building.

Figure $40K per rack to fill it with hardware (at a low estimate), half full of 100 racks is another $4 million.

Plus they have to manage construction, sign various contracts, pay permit fees, buy land, pay for fiber, etc. At a minimum they would need $20 million all in before serving the first byte of traffic.

All this is my estimate, could be entirely wrong.
hi! thanks, I read that but doesn't say anything about monetisation: 1 year on any idea how you might make some money?

UPDATE: read reply above
Scroll to "Does GitHub use cijoe?"

> No. We use Jenkins.
You may want to look into this -- it might be another add-on or toolbar you have installed, since Mozilla does not do that. (Disclaimer: Mozilla employee)
If you read the minutes they borrow generously from PThreads. But I can imagine some major vendors, like Microsoft, may say, "We have a threading library where PThreads conflicts with how we do threading. Rather than just taking PThreads as a whole, lets look at these issues and come up with a solution that will work reasonably for everyone."

Otherwise you end up with C1x coming out and MS just saying, "This is broken for Windows. Our compiler won't implement it." And just let gcc and Intel pick up the load. Which may be fine for some, but seems counterproductive.
Lay flat hose
In ‘Next Big Thing’ Start-Ups, Immigrants Dominate Management Ranks
You can read up the discussion on the original thread for more info: https://groups.google.com/group/golang-nuts/browse_thread/th...
I've met people who I thought worked very hard, people whom others relied on. I've been giving them the words, "If you're irreplaceable, you're unpromotable."
Don't know if the author of the post knows it is on HN, and his blog doesn't do comments...

He talks about might wanting a different diff tool than Changes. Might recommend Kaleidoscope (http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com/). I like it, however the one thing that I do hate about it is the lack of a directory compare feature. It can only compare two files together.
PyPy will power the ultranets of the future - The Simpsons revealed
email deliverability is a huge can of worms. i didn't know that when we first prototyped it. we noticed that our test emails were going to spam on walter's account as we were getting ready to send out the first bunch of emails. so, we opted for sending the emails by hand from a gmail account using bcc while we figured out how to tackle the problem.

it became clear very quickly that this would be hard to solve ourselves quickly, so we tried mailchimp (which is not well-suited at all) and eventually went with sendgrid.

nowadays there are 4 or 5 similar providers that you can use: amazon, sendgrid, mailgun, and a couple of others that i can't remember right now.

we haven't had a good reason to start doing that in-house, yet.
"""While I do support the general "hey, let's fix old code and not be slaves to backwards compatibility", the fact of the matter is that legacy code / libraries / whatever in C aren't merely misdeeds/sloppiness--you might as well complain about having to use the same molecules of metal in your tools that our ancestors did building Rome instead of making your own from subatomic particles.""""

Only you have to use the same molecules of metal by the laws of physics, while compilers you can IMPROVE. Heck, we even produce new metal alloys and materials all the time. So, the analogy is 100% flawed.
BCPL had a single data type (the "word") and no structures.

Ritchie's paper above covers the innovations in C quite well. See sections "The Problems of B", "Embryonic C" and "Neonatal C".
You're way oversimplifying it. Google gets a huge influx of traffic through this deal, and Mozilla would most likely be able to generate income from their 30% of the browser space if Google didn't sign this (possibly even from Bing, which is even worse for them). That kind of market space itself is a valuable asset, and is why Google is willing to go through this.
RailsConf 2012 | Austin, Texas
tl;dr: if you don't value backwards compatibility, bend over backwards.
For the third time, the API for setting stack size should be implementation defined because there are perfectly practical implementations for which any specification would be meaningless.

Another reason is that almost all prevailing contemporary environments use virtual memory, and the prevailing embedded architecture (ARM) is about to go 64 bit (the desktop/server world already has). In a world with virtual memory, paging, and even where we're 10 years away from "complex system" interconnects powerful enough to provide shared memory across 10k+ computers filling a football field, how much longer would setting the stack size have any practical meaning.

It would be like insisting on a frewindtapedrive() library call, because your machine happens to have a tape drive (and aren't files stored on tapes eventually!). Thankfully you weren't on the committee in the 1980s. ;)

Nowhere did I suggest all threads should have the same stack size - if anything by the Go example, I suggested they might have no specific 'size' at all.

malloc(3) has nothing to do with thread stacks, it was just an example of yet something else that has very implementation-defined behaviour, for which any standardized tuning API would probably come up short.
Who needs SOPA? 'Wolverine' Pirate Gets 1 Year in Jail
How interesting. I came from an Architecture background (high school +2 years and University +2 years) and I was decent at it and won a few awards before diving back into computer science (which I did throughout high school) and business (i.e. startups) and became a jack of all trades and then a founder. I can definitely see that my creativity in one area influences the other -- see https://github.com/tblobaum/nodeQuery
You mean the job where the first 10 ammendments were necessary after just two years ? :-)
This is the best comment so far, I think, because it highlights why a designer + engineer, even a theoretical 'designeneer' equally skilled at both, isn't necessarily going to be twice as valuable, and in fact may be only as valuable as a single engineer or a single designer.

I believe strongly in the value that knowing both can give you, and for certain classes of small project it's a huge win.

But you're right: context-switching is a limiter. You only have so much free time and mental energy.

For me, I know that I prefer working with competent UX/visual design guidance. I can get some really pretty results from doing my own designs, but it's a wonderful freedom to know that I'll spend 15 minutes in the morning iterating on a piece of paper with a designer today, and then just go away and do my thing. I'll get a PSD that will make the prototype UI more concrete late-afternoon, and the next morning we can talk about how using the UI makes us want to change it.

But if I was doing it all myself? I doubt that even with twice the time, the overall result would be equal, either on the code or the design side.

That designer keeps all of his visual design acumen and photoshop 'muscle memory' loaded into cache.

I keep my emacs key-chords, the code's secret sauce, my bash and git aliases and the topography of staging environments loaded into my cache.

There are definitely projects that exist where you can 'do it all', but ... node.js' model is great for maximizing throughput, but when you've got drastically different types of work, that's what you have multiple cores for. ;)
finnw, the code is actually pretty trivial and does not make use of very special functionality. Further, if SOPA does pass, many even more innovative programs will come out of the woodwork, at the OS layer. I think forcing a patch like that would be a hard sell.
G1 is definitely an interesting piece of work. It's geared toward very large heaps where you need more predictable pause times, and is intended to replace the concurrent mark/sweep GC.

To enable G1 on Java 7: -XX:+UseG1GC. Prepend -J if passing to the 'jruby' command.
Yeah, that would have been neat, unfortunately they came up with a solution which will work for nobody...
I didn't mean at all to imply Mozilla would be taking it down; just that the government wasn't happy with the mafiaafire add-on and has included text in SOPA specifically targeted at making add-ons like this "illegal". Just another reason SOPA is bad :)
Two Decades of Pipeline Spills
I haven't used Appfigures, because I was turned off by my sales figures being stored online, but [AppViz 2](http://www.ideaswarm.com/AppViz2.html) is a really great app and I can't recommend it enough. Beautiful graphs, intuitive app, good customer support. etc. etc. AAA+++ would use for iTunes Connect stats again.
Initial underscore followed by a capital letter is a reserved "namespace" since 1990, as a previous commenter noted. (And for the record, identifiers that begin with two underscores are reserved for use by the implementation, and identifiers followed by a lowercase letter are guaranteed to be unreserved as long as they are file-scoped symbols, and not globally visible.)
He actually proved the opposite, that sorting functionality in such apps is far from "obvious and useful".

37Signals doesn't provide it in widely used apps, and very few are complaining. So sorting is more like the 20% 1% case.