skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interview at the Clojure Conj 2011 with the creator of Noir/Korma/Pinot
The interview officially starts at 3:40.
<quote>
One wonders where we would be if Pascal or one of it's offspring like Oberon had actually caught on and challenged C. It would be nice to have a alternative system programming language. C sometimes feels like a local maximum instead of a global one.
</quote>

I think we would be using safer systems where buffer overruns and pointer exploits would be almost non existent.

The hegemony of C has cost the industry millions of euros/dollars in software correctness.
SrbijaOglasi
http://www.srbijaoglasi.rs/
I had been thinking of:

http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~savage/papers/CCR99.pdf

(And Nate's right, I drastically oversimplified my summary of it). This is "cheating TCP" by Stefan Savage from '99. A great, great paper.
Pair with a Guardfile and guard-shell to sync whenever a local file changes –

https://github.com/guard/guard-shell
My thoughts are this problem is complex regardless. It's pretty good that you could solve this all in one afternoon.

Are there any blogs, programming books, that you recommend that would help, someone improve their programming skills?

Thanks
The method offered at the post urges you to install the desktop Kindle software, and de-DRMs files from its storage. That hasn't always worked in the last year, as Amazon tried to obfuscate the key storage in the desktop versions, and there's been a kind of race between Amazon and the authors of the de-DRMing tools.

I don't know what the status is now, but I want to emphasize that if you own a physical Kindle you don't need to install the Kindle Windows/Mac reader at all. Just follow the instructions on the blogpost linked to in the Wired article and customize the plugin with the Kindle's serial number. To de-DRM, you then connect the Kindle to your desktop and just Add the books off Kindle as a disk drive into the Calibre library.
The parent is wrong. $2-$3k is still quite reasonable as a rent number in SF.
Without even reading the article: Perjury is a felony in many contexts. I would expect district attorneys, attorneys general, and the like to prosecute felonies. If false declarations that have such serious impacts are not subject to perjury, they should be made so.
I think his thesis is that Rails should help developers avoid those pitfalls. That's half the point of a framework (as opposed to a library): to show you how to structure your code better.

That's actually a big part of the value of Rails: it picks one of the many ways to structure a web application (MVC with templates and an ORM), provides code to support that way, and (relevantly) sets conventions for code structure, directory layout (app/models/, lib/, etc).

It could have left some of those as plugins - like how Sinatra provides only routing and templating, and if you want MVC or ORM, you have to add them. But by making them part of the framework, Rails declared "here is one good way to structure a web app".

By pushing MVC, Rails helped developers avoid the pitfalls of one-page-PHP apps (mysite.com/index.php?page=news) - big entangled codebases with database access, HTML generation and business logic all intermixed. ActiveRecord helped developers avoid SQL injection attacks, repetitive query generation, and sprawling ORM config files. They made those problems trivial to avoid, and thus advanced the state of web development.

The OP acknowledges those contributions of Rails and ActiveRecord, but argues it's time for them to advance again, as there are new problems they need to tackle.
This is a shakedown by Members of Congress, plain and simple. Internet companies have made billions of dollars in an unregulated market but have not paid off Congressmen/Senators through campaign contributions, lobbyists, creation of significant PACs, 527 committees -- things which all appeal to a politician's self-interest. Hollywood has outspent internet companies, paid hundreds of millions of dollars through direct and indirect campaign financing and actually gives a demonic benefit to the greedy politicians by essentially paying them off.

If internet companies want to do anything, I think they should get off their butts and outspend the heck out the idiotic music/movie industry so politicians can see there is a monetary return from internet companies. To be naive and think that SOPA will go away because of its inherent stupidity is wrong. You have to fight.

You have to take action and battle for protection of the internet. You need to pay Congress the "protection money" in this sickening game of soft-extortion. Understand that Congress has power, and can exercise it either way, as long as you appeal to the politicians' self-interest.

It's sad but true.

Save the internet, stop SOPA now!
I'm fairly new to HN community, so just getting a feel for what is appropriate. IOW, this isn't questioning the judgement of the OP, just trying to educate myself:

Why is this relevant to HN? This seems to be a political piece with very little relevance to the technical community (other than how it impacts us all at a global scale -- but so does anything political, to an extent).
The Tyranny of Evaluation
> My comment here was based entirely on what actually happened

I'm not disagreeing with your historical account, just what you derived from it.

You're essentially arguing networks would never exist unless the U.S government made it happen -- and that's why government must act as an "entrepreneur". I hear you, I'm saying this is naive and without evidence, and most likely exists to support your opinions of central planning. It's been tried, I recommend you investigate the history behind that (hint: it doesn't end well).
Building a Vanilla Android AOSP ICS Rom on Windows 7 64-bit
both google and paypal are very aggressive about cutting off piracy sites. there's no need to put it into law, simply inform them and they will voluntarily take it down.

in any case, laws don't work that way. you can't just get the sections you like. you get the whole thing.
You can think whatever you want. Fact is fact.
Europe's Transition From Social Democracy to Oligarchy
Not the calendar, the day of the week. There is no provision in the religious rules for Jews or Muslims for a "one time change".

I'm not super familiar with the Muslim rules, but I know the Jewish rules have their own date line that does not correspond to the international one.

I don't know what the Christian rules are about the international date line and that's what I was asking.
I suppose my point is that China, like Russia and the United States, see a comprehensive space program as important to its interests. As the article linked to in the parent notes, these technologies are necessarily dual use, but I see no reason for that to lock us into a Sino-US space race.

China's leaders have ambitious long-term goals for their space program that will be almost impossible to meet on its own (the cost of a Mars mission would be staggering), so cooperation with the US is in their interests as well as ours. China gains access to dual-use technology, we get to massage China's nationalism into something less virulent, and if nothing else, we both get to delay a strategic confrontation.

Hey, I'm just some guy on the internet. But it seems wise to avoid repeating the mistakes of the 20th century and do a better job of accepting the reality of China's rise to great power status and accommodating them into the international system.
In the majority of recent, real-world instances, local laws have tended to be more liberal than federal laws.

This is an excellent point. It's also far more expensive for lobbying groups to try to influence politicians state by state. Powerful Federal officials represent a one stop shop for buying influence, so decreasing Federal power will reduce corruption.
Ask HN: Is willingness to cold call an essential co-founder trait?
How important is it that at least one of the co-founders in a tech startup is a willing and effective cold caller (to potential customers, investors, media, etc.)?

I've noticed a high correlation in my projects between success and having a co-founder who was willing to cold call. But that's a fairly small data set... have others noticed the same thing, or is it passe in a Web 2 world, or is it a skill you can just hire?

Is the importance dependent upon whether the startup is B2B, B2C, etc.?
The change in timezone data exposed a bug in pytz: https://bugs.launchpad.net/pytz/+bug/885163
As a non-designer doing all my own design, I appreciate these "copy paste this nice looking CSS" posts.
"6. Lack of choice. Box-office tracking shows that the bright spot in 2011 was the performance of indie, foreign or documentary films. [...] Instead, all the shopping center compounds seem to be showing the same few overhyped disappointments. Those films open with big ad campaigns, play a couple of weeks, and disappear."

For me, it's always been the quality of the content. SO many movies are such garbage, and, at least to me, that was more true in 2011 than in recent years. Look at all the reboots that came out this year and think how many of them were worth seeing at a premium in theaters...

Ebert came close to hitting it with that point, especially at the end, but missed it a little. I don't think people prefer indie, foreign and documentaries because of what they are, nor because of the theaters they are shown in. Those movies have better turnout because they are better than most of the big Hollywood titles.
Every state gerrymanders. Mississippi is hardly alone on this.

>In the state of Ohio, a conversation between Republican officials was recorded that demonstrated that redistricting was being done to aid their political candidates. Furthermore, the discussions assessed race of voters as a factor in redistricting, because African-Americans had backed Democratic candidates. Republicans apparently removed approximately 13,000 African American voters from the district of Jim Raussen, a Republican candidate for the House of Representatives, in an attempt to tip the scales in what was once a competitive district for Democratic candidates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering#United_States

That's coming at you from blue-collar freezing-cold northern Ohio.

Furthermore, "right after" the Civil Rights act was passed? It was passed a full 47 years ago.
The Jewish religion has it's own date line that does not correspond to the international one.

My question was what does Christianity do, and I guess no one here knows.
Would be curious how you guys would compare this library to gitdocs, our DIY dropbox attempt: https://github.com/bazaarlabs/gitdocs

Ours includes a full web front-end, versioning, 'cloud' (git) storage, and relatively easy install. Oh, unix cross-platform too (with some windows kinks being worked out).
If it's relevant to hackers and their interests, then it belongs here. See the guidelines:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I believe that the single most damaging thing was strings:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000319.html
Tools of the Trade Part I
I'm sorry you're being downvoted. Thanks for this. As a person with books dating back to the 1800s, wise words to ponder.
Your argument here takes my claim that there are cases where government infrastructure bootstrapping (interstate highways, Internet) is useful and concludes that I would be in favor of a command-and-control economy.

This is a classic reductio ad absurdum fallacy, and only works if your concept of how the economy works is very ideological.
Ask HN: Can you tell a company's (future) success by how isolated the boss is?
Ok, I have this funky theory. The more isolated the boss is from the from the rest of the employees, the more dysfunctional the organization is. Basically, this idea of the CEO hiding themselves in a giant office results in the company's downfall because, well - they don't know what's happening?

I don't know if this theory is right or wrong but any takers?
One of my favorite phrases about a startup is that they are an "overnight success." Thomas sort of addresses this notion in the article. Most overnight successes have been in business doing iteration after iteration for 2,3, or more years. People outside of the startup world (and even some of those in it) don't fully grok the amount of time, dedication and just good old fashioned hard work that goes into becoming an "overnight success." Startups take work. And speaking with a bias as someone who came out of AngelPad, they definitely light a fire to help you in the right direction.
You may want to check out our our DIY dropbox attempt: https://github.com/bazaarlabs/gitdocs

Automatic uploading, web front-end and versioning.
I have a Kindle, but any technical books I read are physical. It's much easier to thumb through information quickly with a physical book when you aren't quite sure what you're looking for.
IMO, the only way for physical books to exists alongside ebooks is by bundling the ebook with the physical book, similar to movies. It baffles me why publishers haven't already done this, but then again...publishers aren't the brightest people.
Serbian web site for classifieds
I used to use bluehost until their gradually declining level of service was just too much. I switched to dreamhost and have been happy ever since. Highly recommended.
I agree. It's good to have real world examples so people can see what can happen under SOPA, but I feel with or without SOPA, DNS providers and hosts are going to make stupid mistakes. I do feel that this sort of blanket "we're shutting you down without contacting you" approach is very scary and frustrating, and I think we all fear it could be very common place with SOPA. Bluehost should not have done anything to his domains without contacting him.

I also feel that maybe real-world examples of servers and domains being seized by the government, justified or not, might be more appropriate. Especially when the domains and hardware seized were due to potential copyright infringements and not overly-stringent spam rules.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/wyden-domain-seizur...

http://torrentfreak.com/feds-return-seized-domain-111208/

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/domain-seizures-def...

http://www.electronista.com/articles/11/11/25/doj.ice.seize....
Repost: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2464213
We operate in this space and have certainly seen an increase in prices. A product not mentioned in the article that has had explosive growth is solar panels.

We've see the price of Tellurium dioxide move from $13 to $215/KG from 2002 to today. Manufacture's are now requiring that all broken panels be returned for recycling.
Bad code is a time and money sink.

The biggest mistake most companies make is not rushing bad code out the door too quickly, that's hard to prevent entirely, but rather failing to take the time to fix or replace bad code quickly once it's obvious the functionality isn't throwaway.
Why, for the love of Notch, do people keep porting everything that you're supposed to be doing in a real programming language to Bash? Yes, it's Turing complete, but the syntax is ugly and inconsistent, there is just about no support for data structures, and you have to fork a process to do practically anything!
For the interested, Khan Academy has an excellent series analysing renting vs buying at http://www.khanacademy.org/video/renting-vs--buying-a-home?p...
Any centrally controlled system will edge one way or another compared to decentralized units. If you take one example (a specific race issue) and generalize, then you'll conclude (as you seem to have done) that centralized control is superior.

The benefits of a large shift in power toward the states are too numerous to list, but to name a few:

- Look at the issues discussed in national political campaigns. They are unduly biased by the issues relevant to swing states, and candidate promises (and laws) end up exerting federal control over swing state issues simply to help candidates win Federal office.

- Voter empowerment. The washington establishment is so big and unwieldy that it takes lots of money to get one's voice heard. With increased power at the state and local level, individuals could more easily focus their activism efforts in ways that would create the biggest benefit.

- The biggest issue is experimentation. With 50 different "experiments" in democracy (state laws) there is hope of actually realizing that a law is bad. Our current system picks a single winning approach before any has been tried and then loyal partisans stick to it and ignore all evidence. How much better would it be to observe how 50 different entities solve similar problems. Like any optimization problem, this might at times be a less efficient approach, but it'd do far better at global optimization.
I stupidly downvoted you (SOPA! GAH!) but you made a good point, so, sorry.

Generally one of the reasons I don't freak out about laws regulating the Internet is that the Internet as we know it today is rickety anyways.

In the last 10 years we've seen the monumental shift (predicted in the late '90s but widely scoffed at) from ad hoc network protocols and native client/server implementations to a common web platform. Nerds still recoil a little at this, thinking about the native/ad-hoc stuff they still use (like Skype), but if you look at the industry as a whole, particularly in the line-of-business software development that actually dominates the field, it's all web now. TCP ports are mostly irrelevant. If you were going to start a new app today, would it be a native implementation of a custom protocol? Probably not!

One of the things that got us to this state was in fact regulatory: default firewall configurations that don't allow anything but web out, and disallow arbitrary inbound connections.

Over the next 10-15 years, I'm hoping we'll get similar nudges away from first-class addressing only for machines (which are less and less useful as an abstraction for completing tasks using technology) and towards first-class addressing for subjects, interests, content, &c. This is an insight lots of people have had, from David Cheriton & TIBCO in the '90s through the RON work at MIT through VJ's work at PARC & so on.

I wrote off Lessig for a bunch of years after reading _Code_, but I think he fundamentally has it right in the sense that implementors have as powerful a say in how things are going to be regulated as legislators do. America had the Constitutional Convention after the Articles stopped scaling; the Internet will have little blips of architectural reconsideration when the impedance between the technology and what people want to legitimately do with the technology gets too high.

(I'm trying to make a technical point here, not a political one; I support copyright, and am ambivalent about SOPA.)
Do the back-of-the-envelope calculation on antimatter. I did it once, then mislaid the results. First question: make it or farm it?

If you want to create antimatter then, at the very best, energy in = energy out. The energy required to accelerate a small mass of human seeds + associated robot farmers (say 100kg total) to a reasonable speed and to slow it down around the star at the other end is enormous, and a sizable fraction of the annual energy consumption of the entire human planet. It might not be impossible to realise, but it will require as much of a political effort as a scientific/engineering one.

Of course, antimatter from space colides with our planet every second, so why not just harvest it? Imagine the entire planet covered with a web that captures every particle of antimatter arriving from space. Well, it would take hundreds of millions of years to harvest enough energy though antimatter to send that 100kg mass to a nearby star.

Chemical rockets aren't going to get us there. Antimatter is currently the densest energy source known to man, and it's not enough. Barring the invention of warp drives, we're stuck here. Make the most of it.
I bought the first kindle and took it on a month long trip to Africa and re-read the Baroque Cycle on it. I jave a a few new Kindles since. I love most the platform aspect of Kindle and I rarely buy novels or computer tech books in any other form.

However I grew up traveling to Powells books and living with physical books. I find that a good physical book has something that the digital version lacks. The physical form is a symbol for my memories of a book. I can simply pick it up and thoughts, themes and so forth come back to me. A quick flip through pulls out my memories.

For deep study I still find that writing in ad underlining a book increases my understanding dramatically. For awhile I composed notes at the computer while I read but this was time consuming and akward.

Digital books are disruptive. As Carr once wrote though, the disruption doesn't mean something isn't lost... often much is. We need to find the right ways to bring as much as that along with us from the physical world into the digital as we can. Perhaps I am too old already, but I am sure I will be one of the last with physical books as well as a continual user of the digital.
IIRC the first (unusable) Windows version was written in Pascal.

I remember reading somewhere that Pascal calling convention was more efficient. Return from a function and cleaning the parameters from the stack could be done with a single RET N instruction, while C calls needed both a RET and a separate stack realignment, because C allows variable number of params.

I don't know if it's still the case with recent processors.
My comment here was based entirely on what actually happened, not some theoretical view of how economies work in the abstract.

Then you aren't allowed to speculate abstractly on how economies work. You are relying on one data point with no control group.
Verizon Wireless Will Not Institute Single Payment Fee
Don't confuse a company's boss with a company's manager. If you are a small start-up, yes, sit in a cubicle in an open spanc and bully up the employees. That works. However, if you get to a higher level, the more seclusion you get, the better. It all becomes distracting and you need to meditate more in a total seclusion to stay at the visionary path. Because you can't and shouldn't react to all the "crises" occurring every day in a day to day normal business operations. Leave it to managers and keep them accountable.
High Street Blues
It's a cheap rhetorical trick. "Sanity" is defined as what his favored candidate wants to do, no?

It depends. If Ron Paul were to reverse his views on positions where individual rights and freedom are the foundation, do you think the original poster would still support Ron Paul?

If your answer is no, then he's clearly not defining "Sanity = What favorite candidate wants."

If the answer is no, then the original poster is guilty of ineloquence and inadvisable word choice. By the same token your position is misattribution of the other poster's motivations.
If it's mostly ascii compression is something you should almost automatically think about.

There's also snappy http://code.google.com/p/snappy/
You're missing the point - I'm making a historical point.

I'm generally of the opinion that more states' rights is generally better as long as it doesn't create a game-theory zero-sum clusterfuck of misaligned incentives, like taxes for crossing state borders or something like that. Some things need a federal guarantee but many can/should be devolved to the states.
That's only going to work in US politics if someone can figure out a way to remove the fetus witha gun.
...I also used that as an example below the main example :-) And I have come to the same conclusion as you re: Backbone.
Why does my BlackBerry have a flashing light?
Check out Moniker. They have a no-nonsense policy and are in the business of protecting domain owners.