skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Excellent critique, but you show your hand here:

> K&R is an excellent reference, and LCTHW covers some new topics like valgrind, which is great.

Wrong, I already demonstrate that they have an example that is basically strcpy() and I show why it's broken. By the time I'm done with the book I'll have taken apart the entire book and shown that it's the source of most security holes through poor examples.

> However, it fails to point out that some of the exercises are just that; exercises. For example, creating a custom type system in C. Never do this.

Totally wrong. You basically just said that all of gobjects (the foundation of Gnome) should not exist, yet it's a successful object oriented abstraction. You may think that's true, but then you'd be in the vast minority. Without a demonstrated reason why one should never do this, your statement is total bullshit.

> Some other failings include; little attention to testing, no mention of cmake (used in major projects like opencv and clang) or lint(!), criticism of K&R systax (arguably validly so, but industry standard is industry standard).

There's extensive attention to testing, with nearly every exercise having use of valgrind and the inclusion of defensive programming macros not found in most other books PLUS a constant demand to break the code they've just written. In the second half of the book I'll be including the testing suite I use in my own projects:

https://github.com/zedshaw/mongrel2/blob/master/tests/minuni...

This claim is borderline slanderous it's so wrong.

Edit: And cmake is a piece of crap that isn't better than modern make.

> Look there's a lot of good in Learn C the Hard Way. I completely recommend it as a way to learn some C... but don't make the mistake of assuming a new book is better than an old book just because it's new.

Meanwhile, you make the mistake of not questioning the code in K&R when a cursory read finds numerous flaws and buffer overflows. If you feel that people should evaluate all things objectively (I agree!) then do it yourself and actually read K&R again.

And by the way, they updated it several times to remove defects since you probably read it. My copy was only a few years old and I had to update it because they fixed bugs in that copy() function I tear apart (but not enough).

> If you're programming C, read K&R. If you're doing it professionally, you probably also want to read Deep Sea Programming by Peter van der Linden.

I agree, solid recommendations, but I'm going to advocate people read K&R for historical reasons and to practice code review, which is what I'm doing in my book.
I for one would love Zappos to ship internationally, and your owners at Amazon already do. I know you can't comment, but please do what you can to push for selling to the other 6.7 billion of us.
No, of course not. I know some hedge fund managers who grew up middle-class and achieved their wealth through grit and hard work. Whether we like what they do is another story; they're not part of the parasitic upper class, and they're generally not evil people. They have more in common with startup new-money.

The people I'm talking about come from a closed, powerful social network. They're not part of a social network because they're rich. They're rich because they're part of a scumbag old-boy network. And they get their wealth the same way corrupt government officials (notice that corrupt politicians are always rich) do: they steal it from society.

By the way, it's not arbitrageurs (which is what many hedge fund traders are) who are destroying society. Actually, most of them make markets more efficient in a way that's rather harmless. It's investment banking/M&A types-- people like Meg Whitman who make fortunes spinning IPOs (that is, robbing companies during the IPO process). That's another rant however.
Brendan Battles is a spammer and Rackspace aren't doing anything about it.
The free trial will always be there, the beta key is a temporary requirement, a gate if you will, and extends the trial period. Plans are not entirely set, the entry plan will be low but it is not a free service, it is aimed at business primarily not a personal blog.
I don't think anybody is arguing we dispose of these people. I think the problem is that money is supposed to be in essence a signifier of creating social value. In a well structured society money should be correlated to producing advances or doing something 'good' but in our current socio-economic climate money in the financial sector is being distributed to those who destroy value.
That is because in front of your eyes, HN is blowing a company up. Just talked to Jessica and their servers have already crashed 3 times! Keep pounding her with traffic HN, good on ya! :)
Looks really nice. Looks inspired by Pinterest I guess..
Have anyone here tried the application/service?
Ha, I like the way you use "we" as if there is a like-minded community of people who agree with you. Cute.
Shameless Plug:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3438290

I did a Facebook photo browser too, just two weeks ago. Zach's is definitely much more polished and professional, but here are some features of mine.

- It's single page app. All Ajax, no page reloads. HIstory supported.

- Slightly more photos(users wall)

- source is on Github: https://github.com/nambrot/Facebook-Photo-Browser

- accompanied by a blog post on architecture: http://nambrot.com/blog/4

The demo runs here: http://fbphotobrowser.herokuapp.com/
Deployed on Heroku, backend Node.js, frontend: Backbone

Feedback is appreciated
The rise of the internet fanboi has brought a large number of young and/or impressionable people who confuse hubris and verbal violence with competence and depth. After years of "ignoring the trolls" I now prefer to thrash them to warn the good people away from their stupidity.

Also, it's a pretty fun way to practice my creative writing. :-)
Indeed. And in addition to that, they don't even dig deeper with the extra time. This expose has all the depth of a pleasant Sunday picnic with Mason.
Show HN: Collection of CSS Creations
Pretty interesting. Fully automated text summarization certainly isn't new (libots, Classifier4j, OSX's summarization service, Copernic Summarizer, etc.) but I haven't yet seen any implementations that use a machine learning approach.

EDIT: A better integrated summarizer obviously won't "revolutionize the web", though.
Managing Multiple Parent Persistence Problem in App Engine
Evil? Maybe not. Hard working? Quite possibly. But almost definitely overpaid.

How much value does the banking industry really create? A whole lot of what this industry does could be replaced by algorithms and put on autopilot.

Maybe I'm ignorant, but it really looks to me that the smart and courageous decisions about allocating capital are being made by entrepreneurs, angel investors, and wealthy individuals who earned their money in value-producing industries (Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk come to mind). The banking industry seems to just squat over a lot of toll bridges, and doesn't seem to even do much in the way of bridge maintenance.
I didn't say you can't learn much about runnign a company, but the title was 'the real deal with Groupon'. You can't learn the 'real deal' here.
can you elaborate please ?
One of the best arguments I've heard for being able to skip a level is from comedian Dara O'Briain.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG3aHvPG6H8
I made an overlay version of the spotlight effect that still allows the site to function, if you like the effect but don't like the total blackout: https://github.com/nitrogenlogic/stop-sopa (there's also a nice dark version available in the dark branch).

Preview of an actual page with the overlay: http://www.nitrogenlogic.com/sopaindex.html
pretty cool, i'll probably do some ajaxy page transitions at some point.. just hacked this together. Friendsheet is all html / JS.. hosted 100% on S3
One of the big failures we have as a society is not teaching our young people that "average" people will do their best to suppress success in others. Almost everyone I know has a story like this to tell... if only that so-and-so didn't tell me my dream was impossible, perhaps I could have been successful at it.
yes, pinterest combined with timeline
The "Identifier" color link is broken.
Download Game - Age Of Empire III | Andra Little Notes
What parasitic elites do to their host civilizations is something a little bit like the tragedy of the commons, except that the latter usually refers to exploitation of inanimate resources.
I had thought about it but

- I wanted to use Sinatra to 301 old tumblr urls

- Call me weird but I loathe seeing *.html in urls and that's the only thing you can do with S3 root object (when I checked a few months ago)

- something I can't remember. maybe it was cf edge server time to update when altering updates.
Dude, stop saying it's broken.

For higher level languages where we have intelligent string objects, yeah, bounds checking is assumed--but this is something originating in assembly-level stuff. If you call it with broken memory, of course it won't work correctly.

You're doing a good job spreading knowledge--don't spread misinformation.

Everyone who is aware of secure C coding knows strcpy() is buggy and the cause of most buffer overflows.

If strcpy() was truly buggy and unpredictable in its implementation, it wouldn't be nearly so useful as an attack vector. Be accurate--strcpy() is unsafe, not buggy. Sheesh.
I was ready to agree until you said Wal*Mart, in particular in the context of 'tearing apart society'.

Economists--including progressives, such as Matt Yglesais--often comment on the bipartisan fetishization of small businesses and liberal demonization of large ones. This attitude often seems motivated by isolated incidents--the tendency of any deep pocketed company to attract bad press and lawsuits--not the general effect of large business on people as accounted for by sound economic data. In general, large businesses tend to offer better jobs and more advanced economies tend to have more, larger businesses. Nor should Wal-Mart be constructed as harming the lower class, as their very low prices are especially important for the lower class which they achieve by real efficiencies of scale for which mom-and-pop stores are generally incapable. I don't have time to find citations everything, but for the last claim you can check out http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dialogues/fe...
pg,

How many, or which, of the companies that have had success with Y-combinator were companies that were, in a manner you could discern early on (such as in the application process), clearly addressing schleps versus those you took on simply due to the force of character of the founder(s) (by virtue of their relentless resourcefulness)?
Provider may be sued for booting DDoS victim offline.
I remember seeing some in Paraty... Didn't see any in Rio indeed (only those "refreshment units" that spray water on your face :-))
Hobo - Heroku + Git + Python Blog Engine
Blog engine (very similar to toto) written in Python for Heroku.
I've played hundreds of mobile games and the vast majority don't hold my interest for more than a few minutes. Even the truly great ones only last a week or so. If they're trying to be addictive, they are failing miserably. The model seems to be more like "pay a dollar to satisfy your curiosity about something sort of neat looking".
When we raised our seed funding, I used several cap tables - none of which worked for me because they all made certain assumptions and didn't allow for reverse-calculations, which is what I needed. I found that a simple spreadsheet worked best in the end, but I had to review it a few times to make sure I didn't mess up the numbers.

In our case, the investor said: we value your company at X, we're willing to invest Y, and we need ESOP of Z%. From that, I had to reverse engineer the percentage and number of stocks that all involved would get.

The method that worked for me was to convert everything to number of shares and price per share before and after investing, and then calculate percentages based on shares / total shares for each party. This way, it's easy to calculate how many shares the investor gets based on the valuation (which determines pre-money share value), and final percentages based on total number shares after all is said and done.

A few things make a generic spreadsheet hard to create, and you should keep in mind:
- Is the investor paying based on % or share value?
- Are the ESOP stocks issues before or after the investment? (you get ripped off if it's before)
- Are you issuing new stocks or giving up a percentage of existing ones?

I hope this helps.
has anybody tried to crawl tumblr outside of goog?
Hey that's really nice. Has a demo and the snippet right there. Great work!
The morality is in deciding when it is worth ending a human life. What tool you use is a distant second, at best. In war, once you have decided to kill a person, the moral course is to kill them as quickly and effectively as possible. Preferably with as little pain as possible.

The tools are horrible, because war is horrible. If you're opposed to their use, you need to act at the political level (to stop unnecessary war from happening) or the strategic level (to win the conflict in a way that does not require direct, physical confrontation)
I mean, he's a likeable guy, but something is rotten in Denmark.
Might be gauche, but I'd like to plug an intro to concurrency and distributed systems I wrote a couple of years ago:

http://carlos.bueno.org/2010/04/dismal-guide-to-concurrency....
Well, that just makes me want to see them. How do I do that?
Five tiers of material aspiration: Necessities, Leisure, Comfort, Social Status, and Power. The sane place to "get off" is somewhere in the middle of the Comfort tier.

Leisure is freedom-to (travel, be educated), Comfort is freedom-from (housework, annoyances), and Status is mostly about the ability to maintain maxed-out Comfort (about $2-3M per year, post-tax) without doing anything of value, i.e. being able to get all that just for being "special" (the narcissist's dream). Power is the ability to dick up and down peoples' Status on a whim, because a lot of people who've maxed out the other tiers get bored and need something to do.

Of course, these tiers are fuzzy. Most of us would find business-class travel to be enough Comfort, but some people require a private jet. Also, people with severe psychological issues (which can manifest as greed, which is slightly more glamorous than crippling panic attacks, I guess) will never be comfortable, which is why they soar into the Status and Power tiers but are (internally speaking) still trying to achieve basic Comfort.
If you go by "skate to where the puck is going to be", the puck, when it comes to communication, always moves towards platform agnostic protocols. (.. and Skype provided a decent fraction of Facetime's functionality well before Facetime).

If the likelihood of a person using platform A is P(A), then the likelihood of two of them communicating is of the order of P(A)^2. So even if you have 20% platform penetration, that only gives you a communication likelihood of 4%, leaving plenty of space for other providers to fill.
you are very welcome. I hope the transition to vim is enjoyable. :)

This might be of help,

http://stevelosh.com/projects/learnvimscriptthehardway/
My thanks to Zappos for that email. It was enough for me to give my wife necessary suggestions to secure her associated accounts without alarming her.

It is probably worthwhile in these situations to provide basic implication info for laymen, i.e. implications of "your cryptographically scrambled password."
I strongly disagree that extensive training is required to create art. Art comes in many forms, and it's a quite myopic to imply that only professionals can create art.

I guess we'll just have to disagree.
Turn on 'showdead' in your profile.
http://i.imgur.com/iKqk9.jpg
I really wish I could have attended this as a Drexel CS student across the street, but I'm in Seattle for a co-op internship. Hopefully there will be another in the summer.
I can make direct comparisons to the everyday reality seen in one American factory. Sure, I'm the sysadmin, but I'm responsible for all the computers on the shop floor, among other things. There's not a soul out there I don't know, and I've seen what things are like when they work until 7 AM the next day to finish things.

Here's how these conditions measure up:

* 12 hr shifts normal, 14-16 hour shifts common? Ouch. They must be at capacity. Sure, the guys have seen 70+ hour weeks of heavy labor and 20 hour days, but they're not that common, and they usually get their full weekend. Sure, it's normal that workers stand, but that's what makes working a shift that long so brutal (as well as heavy lifting & heat/cold). And I'm sure they don't have ergonomic mats to stand on in China.

* Inspections known in advance? That would be normal. You should expect them to spend roughly the week before the inspection trying to look good.

* Management clueless about what's really going on? Normal.

* Unions are illegal in China? Wow. I thought they were, you know, Communists or something. This being a "Right to Work" state, I've never dealt with unions either.

* Kids working under-age? Don't see that here. Your average US shop floor factory worker is an HS-dropout or ex-con (or both). Nobody works there because they want to and the burn-out rate is usually pretty high. In a good economy, it would be ~15% turnover per month, though that goes down almost to zero when jobs are scarce. I'm sure they need the money, but I sure wouldn't want to see kids needing to do that sort of thing. US workers make roughly 10-15x as much, depending on experience, though I don't know how the buying power compares.

* Worker dorms? We've only ever joked about sleeping in the parking lot after really long days. I thought those went out of style here centuries ago.

* Workers burn out really fast here, too. But we have Workman's Comp for those who get injured and MSDS sheets & safety gear for anyone handling dangerous chemicals. The Chinese are getting completely screwed here if they're getting injured and tossed aside.

* "One man got his hand crushed in a metal press at Foxconn. Foxconn did not give him medical attention." That sort of thing does happen here, except that you get medical attention. Oddly enough, I gave someone medical attention for almost the same injury not too long ago. His hand just needed a few stitches. He did return to work on light duty the next day, though.

* Here, they just send you home if you're getting too much OT and they complain about how long things take, even if their estimates were totally unreasonable. I've never seen anyone get blacklisted or anything like that.

In short, we have it a lot better here, but there are quite a few things that need improvement. The Chinese are really getting screwed on the safety side of things. I don't know if factories are ever truly safe, but you can do a lot better than that.
I would be REALLY pissed if someone washed by car without my permission. I'm surprised it had a positive effect on you.

I might still try the service - I currently pay ~$30 with tip at the local car wash place where they wash your car by hand.
How can you tell, how do you know?
How to Help Victims and Survivor of Accustomed Disaster:
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Evil? Maybe not. Hard working? Quite possibly. But almost definitely overpaid.

Absolutely, and most of them will admit as much.

The banking industry seems to just squat over a lot of toll bridges, and doesn't seem to even do much in the way of bridge maintenance.

I have a lot more respect for traders, quants, and quant developers (who do an honest job, if a socially useless one) than for investment bankers ("eye-wankers") and private equity douches.
Network: The Secret Life of Your Personal Data, Animated
Yeah, sure!

Code's up here:
www.762studios.com

It's been up about a week or so.
(EDIT: we had it up on the first, technically.)

We're pushing out a significant update to that code in the next few days, as well as polishing the site with the bugtracker and things.

One of the big problems we ran into was function-level specialization for certain container classes--storing smart pointers in certain cases would screw up the reference counting. The code update will be fixing that.

If you want to get in touch, shoot me an email at cre1@762studios.com

Happy hacking!
:)
Harvard Statistics 110: Introduction to Probability, on iTunes
Both. We're all simultaneously idiots and geniuses.
Hey, sorry if you took it the wrong way. I'm just pointing out some flaws I see in the text, and I fully acknowledge it's a work in progress and these may be solved over time.

However, I will repeat.

K&R is an excellent text. If you disagree, I dispute your credibility.

I also stand by my comment. Smart people have created strong type systems like gobjects and ctypes in C.

As a programmer, you should unequivocally _never_ do this yourself. C is about reuse, and not reinventing the wheel. Sure, if you want to use a strong type system instead of C++, do so. Do not write one yourself.
I bet Demand Media would salivate at using something like this. Pages with automated summaries of every page in the internet.
Not that I know of, I researched it a bit a while back. None of the payroll companies I came across have a decent API to access this information.

I've met some folks taking a look at building a better API driven payroll software, but it will be some time before that happens.
Dude it is very simple, click the fees button at the bottom of every single one of their pages. Then click the accepting payments button and view all discounts and fees. Took me longer to type this message than to find it.
Given a lump sum of cash and annual withdrawal of a certain percentage of that cash (3% per year is safe, 4% is pushing it, 5% is a sure way to lose your money), you would need the following amounts of money to pay yourself $50,000 per year:

$1.67 Million @ 3% (1 / .03 * 50,000)

$1.25 Million @ 4% (1 / .04 * 50,000)

$1.00 Million @ 5% (1 / .05 * 50,000)

Put another way, if you have X Million, how much could you safely withdraw each year at 3% per year?

$1M: $30k / year

$2M: $60k / year

$3M: $90k / year

$10M: $300k / year

Keep in mind you will pay tax on these figures (15% Long Term Capital Gains tax if you're lucky, or more if it's regular income). And this does not account for inflation, so assume the value of money gets cut in half every 25-30 years.
Ask HN: How do you "design then code"?
Hey HN,

So I want to build my own web app, and after reading Getting Real by 37signals, I'm inspired to build mockups before actually adding the functionality. I have two questions though:

1. They (37signals) say that you can make the design with HTML and CSS. What are the good tools to facilitate this process? I guess I could write stuff from scratch, and I've found some tools that help you make mockups, but what are the best ones?

2. How exactly do you add the functionality with the design? For example, let's say I want to make a web app using Ruby on Rails, and I make the design for it. I can then create a rails project and build the functionality, but how can I tie the actual functionality with the front-end? I'm sure this is a long answer as well, so if you could recommend a place where I can read about it, that would be wonderful.

Thanks in advance for all your help.
As a small business owner the interview left several questions unanswered for me. The most important I had was which investment would I lose least on: buying GRPN or running a Groupon?
I guess my headline wasn't good. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3468848