skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for providing the name, I've been trying to remember that story for a while now but my google-fu was weak and I couldn't recall any name involved (person, program or game).

I think you're refering to Dr. Douglas Lenat's Eurisko program. He applied it to the game Trillion Credit Squadron and won two years in a row with fleets the other participants scoffed at. The first year he/Eurisko won by creating a largely stationary fleet that could take enough damage to survive long enough to destroy its opponent. It exploited a damage rule in the competition. The damaged party got to select which component/subsystem was damaged. Eurisko constructed a fleet with many small, useless components which could be individually destroyed without impacting the effectiveness of the crafts themselves.

Edit: Reading more about it apparently the primary advantage was the shear number of craft. Essentially a fleet of kamikaze craft that could overwhelm the enemy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Lenat

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurisko
Yahoo hiring Thompson may aid Andreessen Horowitz bid
Interesting. The Pinterest fans in my life spend all their Pinterest time on the front page it seems.
Wikipedia, which knows everything and is never ever wrong, says the following of the matter, which seems to differ:

"Writing in the spring of 1945 a long essay titled "Antisemitism in Britain", for the Contemporary Jewish Record, Orwell stated that anti-Semitism was on the increase in Britain, and that it was "irrational and will not yield to arguments". He argued that it would be useful to discover why anti-Semites could "swallow such absurdities on one particular subject while remaining sane on others". He wrote: "For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald. ... Many English people have heard almost nothing about the extermination of German and Polish Jews during the present war. Their own anti-Semitism has caused this vast crime to bounce off their consciousness." In Nineteen Eighty-Four, written shortly after the war, Orwell portrayed the Party as enlisting anti-Semitic passions against their enemy, Goldstein."

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell
I'm on several Internet forums where people copy and paste entire articles with no attribution. Slideshows are unrolled, images are hyperlinked, etc.

They're breaking the Internet!

No, wait, they have been the Internet since the very beginning.
What would be their business model?
Avoid problems when running multiple Cake 2.0 apps on the same server
Cato Institute: SOPA Wouldn't Save A Single Net Job
Ifttt is awesome! I was wondering if there is a similar app for mobile devices that I can create rules like "if I am at home (judging by WiFi) then ..." or "if the battery falls below 20% then turn off BT"?
> Do you have a link that shows WoWs revenues?

As far as I know, there's no such thing, only estimates based on e.g. the subscribers base. These estimates are generally in the $1bn to $1.5bn range (edit: per year), and usually on the lower end of that range, since ~2008.

Which definitely does not put any given WoW year at the top of grossing movies (but still in a healthy position, 10 movies so far have gone beyond a billion gross). Still I think a fairer comparison would be to movie franchises, if we put WoW's total revenue around 5~6bn it would rank #2 behind the Harry Potter franchise ($7.7bn) and before James Bond ($5.1bn).

However, I think it's fair to say WoW is an anomaly in terms of revenue. Even more so than billion-grossing movies.
Speleotherapy
I think there's not so much a talent shortage so much as there's a shortage of engineers who are gifted at contrived puzzle questions and willing to accept average pay for exceptional ability.
Uber - not a great experience at peak times (eg: New Year's Eve)
we are hiring system level people at 10gen to work on mongodb so if you are interested ping me christkv at 10gen
Oh, c'mon! All people with with and RAII and files, please reread the article. At least the last example.
It's very frustrating to work with Windows. The lack of a POSIX compliant shell in the standard distribution is what's holding it back the most.

Mac OS 9 and prior was also super frustrating to work with for similar reasons.
The "aux" union contains either the reference count or the string capacity. The idea must be that shared strings are immutable so the capacity is not meaningful. Conversely, if the string is not shared, the reference count is not meaningful.

The outer "as" union either contains the 24 byte char array or the 24 byte (len + ptr + aux) heap string information.
Yes precisely :) It's a major pain in everyone's ass. I don't have enough experience to know if this is only the case in Asian or 3rd World countries, but I wouldn't be surprised if the "in-person" requirement is dropped in Western European or developed nations.

This is why there are a significant number of customers who try to go-it-alone and ignore the website (more expensive) option only to be frustrated and realize that 20 bucks is a pittance compared to not being able to travel.
Both Chef and Puppet have made big strides with Windows support recently and people are using them in anger. Might be worth reading the following:

http://www.opscode.com/blog/2011/05/24/chef-hearts-windows/
http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/1/wiki/Puppet_Window...
Stabilizing Skype on Linux Using GDB
Facebook Pretty rotten Easter egg
I suspect it's more likely that the wood warps in response to some combination of temperature, humidity and the mechanical forces applied to it during playing. It wouldn't take very much warping to cause a change in the sound.
Thanks! Cool idea about recompiling with a new value for RSTRING_EMBED_LEN_MAX - never thought of that!

Yes, the inner unions/structs are used to tell the C compiler exactly where the different data values should go. They are in fact not anonymous: e.g. "heap" and "aux" - the names appear right after the closing brace.
Quite a bit of a simplification, since 1) Lotus v. Borland established that this sort of copying was legitimate and 2) this would be a copyright issue, and not a patent one.
It has to do with the atheism community on Reddit.

Even if, for sake of argument, the atheism community on Reddit is composed mostly of Vatican-sponsored trolls... it would still be a problem for atheists, because it would be giving atheists and atheism a bad name.

Which, it is. It's the dominant atheism community on Reddit. How can continued misogynist behaviour there not be a problem for atheists?
Except in the most egregious cases, how many optimization articles ever save you more time than it takes you to read them? As you say, computers are unimaginably fast.
Just don't look for 'best places to work' surveys. I find that it as if they just take a random sampling of big employers. In fact you'll find Zynga on many of the lists for their 'perks'. After running circles through many hot companies for the past 8 years, I finally found a company that treats employees very well - very healthy company culturally currently. On top of it, it happens to be a big company that people would recognize but probably would have to google to remember what they do. Its not a perfect situation but I finally feel like somewhat of a human being after hopping from death march to death march which inevitably just lead to the eventual death of the project.

So I guess my advice is to open up to companies that you might not think of immediately because industries and companies have varying cultures.
IT Needs Seat at Technology Table
Every time design questions come up, design is made out to be some kind of mythical force people ether have or don't. Well that is not the case, design is a discipline like any other and can be thought to anyone willing, just like maths. The mythical force people see as design is what's called art, and is a highly subjective process based on feelings and emotioms, where as design is a logical progression from raw data to workable interface.
Flagged - this is totally not what HN is about.

Who the heck up-voted this crap?
Interesting problem. Haven't thought of the sampling rate required. The location resolution probably will be poor for precise multitouch function. But even a single 2D location is enormously useful - turning any surface into a touch screen.

kabdib mentioned phrased array, which can be very helpful. It might solve the sampling rate issue since it's analog. I found this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamforming. May be some of the techniques in radar/sonar can be borrowed here.
> no clue what that says.

I think it's supposed to be ありがとう ("arigatou"), which is is Japanese for "thank you" (the informal version). The characters are hiragana.

I have no idea why they left off the う at the end, though, except that it just turns the last o into a long o and many foreign speakers are insensitive to the difference between the two because they sound almost the same.
Ah, SEO, how much I loathe everything you spawn and touch.
Two that I like the most (although not exactly side projects):

http://getlocalne.ws (Global News Aggregator)
and
http://www.RapiDefs.com (Web 2.0 English Dictionary)
That assumes that what's being done is creating value. This often isn't the case because of dysfunctional product management / customer development.
AFAIK, the official stance from Basho is to not use a virtual environment. That said, Joyent does officially support Riak in their environment. The thing to look out for is not slow i/o but variable, unpredictable i/o which is what you get with virtual machines... unless they are your virtual machines in a private cloud.
There may be competitors but the initial "branding" will still hold. Guys/gals in blue shirts and red hats and great customer service will differentiate from any would be competitors. Emphasizing the customer service will make sure competition stays away.
Asian students cheat like mad on US college applications
Values in interpreters written in C are frequently implemented as (manually) discriminated unions - i.e. unions that share a field at the start to indicate the type and contents of the remainder - because that's a handy way of implementing the polymorphism required for a straightforward interpreter. It's pretty much necessary to use structs inside unions in order to have a more than one field per layout; the struct is just grouping, so it doesn't need a type name.

So without looking at any of MRI source, I'd be willing to guess that most, if not all, of its structures representing Ruby values start with a field of type RBasic, and that type contains information necessary to distinguish and interpret the remainder of the value.
I wish they supported Dropbox by accessing only a single directory, I'm a little reluctant to give it access to all my files.
I will tell you, for anyone who actually helps to build the selling product, there is nothing worse than watching a salesperson completely oversell a project, walk away with a fat check, and you are left holding the bag and working overtime.
In another interview, Coulouris said:

> By the way, 'em' stands for 'editor for mortals' - I christened it that after Ken Thompson visited our lab at QMC while I was developing it and said something like: "yeah, I've seen editors like that, but I don't feel a need for them, I don't want to see the state of the file when I'm editing".
Cool idea. While I have no interest in 4sq, this sounds interesting to me.

I think the name is pretty weird though, no idea what it means / refers to.
Which is where .NET hits a pretty good compromise, IMO. For things where deterministic cleanup really is important (file handles, connections, COM objects, etc.) there's IDisposable to provide for deterministic destruction of that stuff.

Folks do still complain that they can't deterministically destroy managed resources such as instances of String. I suspect those folks have missed the plot. That desire is indeed at odds with the memory manager; what is being requested could not (for the most part - the CLR's large object heap does complicate the story a bit) be provided without wholesale downgrading .NET to a less efficient collection algorithm.

It'd be much wiser to instead learn how to implement performance-critical routines that really would benefit from manual memory management in a language that's better suited to that kind of task, such as C. Whining that a garbage collected run-time uses garbage collection is just being silly, not entirely unlike complaining that your horse isn't very good at swimming.
I think he didn't make it clear enough. The system isn't broken, the original source just has a lower pagerank.I fail to see where the issue is. I've seen links rank lower than their relevant HN or Reddit posts on Google before.
We created a context aware to-do/task list application. We make recommendations for each of user's tasks to help them get done quickly. Check us out at: http://diglig.com
Or an opportunity for the bureaucracy to simplify stuff and improve their UX and kill these businesses.
The Berkeley EECS NFS mount is chugging, so I've mirrored the site at:
http://cs.harvard.edu/~pbailis/pbs-mirror/#demo
I don't think it's that clear cut. I can think of lots of examples where I'd rather see the comments / links from trusted individuals or sites ranked above the original source content, regardless of what search I'm using.

Pagerank shouldn't be universal - it doesn't make sense to believe that the same ranking system should work equally well for all users.
Got some apps into the Mac App Store. Such as...

Reddit Notifier (for your OS X menubar):
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/reddit-notifier/id468366517?m...
I had the same thought. I worked briefly for a software company in hollywood that did film compositing/editing software, and it's an amazingly innovative industry. It's also an industry that recognizes and rewards technical talent... sure, we aren't movie stars, but I worked with programmers who had academy awards (the technical kind, of course). And they were super cool people, very willing to sit down and help a newbie out. I also remember Kathy Sierra's post about the "hollywood model" (your job security is your reputation, based on your past projects), an approach that only works when talent is identified, recognized, and credited (how many programmers at silicon valley get to put their names on the product?) I'm not saying all is peachy in hollywood, but it is indisputably an innovative place for technology and technology careers.

This is why it kills me to see a different wing of the movie industry essentially pitting itself against high tech. I'm not going to dispute another key point here - much of the legislation being pushed by the studios could be very harmful to technical innovation. We're at the point where people on hn are starting to talk about boycotting not just those corporations but the people who work for them.

Sad to see this in an industry that does such wonderful, innovative tech work in many ways.
Got married in Puerto Rico a bit ago, and extremely happy we worked with a group that helped handle the marriage license details.
I didn't intentionally plagiarize, I mentioned Jon Mitchell name on the post, before I shared the post which WAS presented better and then later shared by Mike Elgan did it became famous and the question of plagiarism arise before that no one really cared for that content.

In my defence... Rohit Shrivastava. The guy who unintentionally shared something that bombed big time.
AnandTech - Nokia Lumia 800 Review
Our company does not have commissioned reps either, and frankly, I'm not complaining. Our sales figures are fine.
> All these are counter-productive for a company...

In my experience, companies that deathmarch can't see past the current deadline: "We'll deal with the repercussions of this action later, we need results now". Which, yes, is counter productive in the long term, but they don't care: the long term isn't even on their radar.

Be this because middle management promised the impossible to upper management (through foolishness, incompetence, or ego), or because upper management needs to ship PRODUCT X to meet quarterly stock market projections (again: maximize shareholder equity): the focus is on the current deadline.

As long as the company meets that goal, everything is OK (even if - in the process of meeting that goal - they set up smoldering fires that will need attention in the medium term).
Arizona woman still pays AOL $14.95 a month for email
It is also a nice introduction to C for rubyists -- it explains the basic ruby c object model and how different kinds of strings are laid out in memory and the implications that has on performance. Ultimately, the author shares your conclusion.
>I personally would have given her another couple more years.

Wait, you state that Yahoo needs someone with vision and balls, then you say you'd have given CB a couple more years right after saying her vision was no right???

Nobody is addressing the real issue: Yahoo needs to build something innovative that people want to use, not just mee-too services.

I agree with what you say about the board. Look at Google, Apple and too a certain degree even facebook, you have very very technical/visionary leaders -- Yahoo seems to be trying to solve a technical abyss with traditional business strategies.
Death marches in my experience are always reflective of companies that take on excessive 'debt' in the more general sense. This may take the form of accepting too much money from investors or making big future promises to customers or shareholders. When this debt is too extreme it manifests itself into a death march which is just a frantic move to satisfy the debt that was probably unrealistic in the first place. Its similar to somebody who buys a house outside of their means and then has to work 2 jobs to afford it.
Re-reading what I wrote, I guess I made it sound like a negative experience, but actually it was a fun adventure. All the buying experiences on eBay were positive. I never felt like I got ripped off. It was fun learning how to fiddle with fiddles. In theory, it could have even been a sort of money-making hobby, although I only managed to only about break even (Am I supposed to count my tool purchases against profit? Nah.)
I'd have to agree with your point:

"Most of them are doable but I think they are probably missing amazing developers that may not know how to solve those problems, but they are capable of solving real-life problems (fix this bug, port this library, refactor this code...)."

I do believe some startups are missing out on some amazingly talented developers by making this your rubric. Some people just don't some solve puzzles well, in the same way some people don't perform stellar on tests, but does that mean they are not capable of writing great code. Not at all. I've met some stellar coders who do not solve timed puzzle or timed tests well.

Will someone please explain to me exactly why solving a puzzle is a indicator of potential workplace success. Do you want to hire puzzle solvers or actual developers? Should I spend my time improving my puzzle solving skills or churning out code that solves real-life problems?
Profiling CSS for fun and profit. Optimization notes.
I think behind almost every successful endeavor (no matter the scale) you'll find someone driven by personal dissatisfaction with their work. For example I think most good software comes from people who go to bed a little concerned about issues with their code or product features. On the more grand scale, when Michael Jackson released Thriller, the first album I believe to outsell the Beatles, all those around him thought his next album should be just a simple collection of covers so he could take a break, but he was determined to out do it, dissatisfied with his current success (which would seem absurd even to most HNers, you just outsold the Beatles, you can give yourself a pat on the back)

Success is the balance of dissatisfaction with your own work combined with a drive to push forward. The drive without the dissatisfaction just leads to a bunch of mediocre half done projects, the dissatisfaction without the drive will just end in depression.

I think truly great people are nearly torn apart by these clashing drives, but that's what leads to true masterpieces.

On a personal note I think it's important to find the level of dissatisfaction that works best for you. It my be great to make Thriller, but paradoxically if you're the person that makes Thriller you won't be able to accept its greatness. At the same time you never want to be in a state of comfort such that your life is spent playing xbox all day. Of course some (Buddhists being one group) would argue that true happiness is elimination of both the drive and the dissatisfaction, they may be right but I'm too driven in my personal work to follow that path ;)
The purpose of any search engine should be to rank good results above less good results.

It doesn't matter what the theoretical page rank algorithm says, if following it results in worse results, then don't follow it.
I looked up "poisoning the well" because I didn't know the precise meaning, thanks for the new phrase! In fact I'm not "poisoning the well" because a) My opinion was the one in question; Poisoning the well requires an audience and poisoner and more importantly b) I didn't introduce this information, the author wrote it himself.

Anyway regarding poisoning the well, check out the second example here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well#Examples
"The text is written so obscurely that you can't figure out exactly what the thesis is (hence "obscurantisme") and then when one criticizes it, the author says, "Vous m'avez mal compris; vous êtes idiot" [roughly, "You misunderstood me; you are an idiot"] (hence "terroriste")."" Ironically, this does precisely describe the behavior of a commenter here, but it's not me. :p
Still my most used piece of software ever. No other text editor comes close in efficiency. Let those who can't learn vi remain tethered by the mouse, they'll never be able to write or edit text as quickly.

Now if only the sc spreadsheet could be retrofitted with Lotus 123 menus. With that, vi, and screen I'd be nearly as efficient as 15 years ago with 123, MKS vi, and Desqview.

Sad that today's software interfaces have so little to do with efficiency (and that includes the 'pc' keyboard layout).
[Emacs]Org-Mode « Musings of a Software Engineering Student
Built an app to help students at my college save money by finding a shared ride to the airport.

http://5crideshare.com/
In this case, it might make the overall thrust of the article - that G+ is reducing the quality of Google search results - worthless, because it calls into question his credibility with regards to his ability to assess that quality.

It's like Yelp reviews of sushi restaurants that start with "I don't usually eat sushi, but..." ... the points involved may still be valid, but the overal credibility of the assessment is seriously impaired.
I remember some years ago talking to the CEO of a company that was doing a great job of selling to us - I mean way over expectations - fantastic.

I asked - how much are you paying that guy - he is great? the answer was - "an OK salary" - but they did find out what motivated him - for this guy it was vacation time.

Everyone wants a salary that reflects their worth in a business - then (for peak performance) everyone might have different motivators. It might be recognition, a great car, a better office - it does not matter - find out what it is and supply it...
Other posts have already mentioned that specific macros of this form exist in several Lisps. I've seen more than one macro-writing guide that talks about the with-something macro pattern for managing resources, and I've seen it applied in libraries that provide macros like with-database and with-query-results.

CL and Clojure could easily support a generic with macro requiring that there be an open and close method for the resource in question.