skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I finally got our app done and we're in the App Store ready for a public launch in a few weeks with version 1.1. It took us quite a while because we were not technical founders.

I think we got lucky because an open source option became available with just enough documentation for me to tweak it with the skills I learned by reading books at the library and from links on Hacker News (we're publishing a travel magazine in the Apple App Store and we used Baker and Laker, two great open source frameworks. Check them out at http://bakerframework.com/ and http://www.lakercompendium.com/)

I think without these we would have been stuck and would have never gotten off the ground. From a personal point of view, as an ideas guy who never really thinks about execution, it was very difficult. I enjoy spending my time thinking up ideas that will change the world and getting frustrated when I realize I don't have the skills to implement them.

Working on our magazine was a change for me. It wasn't a grand idea, its not going to change the world. People might love the stories, but its not the "next big thing." And I have to say, I'm ok with that. If fact, more than ok, its very satisfying to actually get something done, to have it in my hands and be able to say its mine, rather than just one of my ideas floating in space.

It still took a lot of work, especially on the motivational side, but I handled that by intentionally breaking it down to the smallest task I could. That was also new for me, and I think, a key factor. Every day I got something done, even if it was small, and then one day 8 months later, it was done.

If I had had a technical co-founder and more money would it have been easier? Yeah. But I didn't.

By far the resources I used the most were Hacker News (for motivation and the stuff I learned from articles), my local library (for books on coding and soon, marketing) and the documentation of the code we worked on (and a bit of help from the guys who built it, once again, check them out they're awesome).
I've done Ruby for years and I've written one large commercial project in clojure. Clojure was great, and I would love to use it more, but I haven't been able to convince people to use a lisp.

It's very strange actually, I tried really hard to do a small project in clojure at my current job and got resistance from everyone. These same people were happy to try coffee script, scala, golang, etc, etc. There seems to be a true bias against lisps.
Granted that the graphs are coming from Intel, but assuming they're accurate I'd say it's a sign Intel can reduce power consumption and retain decent speed.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5365/intels-medfield-atom-z246...
The article is written by someone in marketing for a company that provides real-money gambling services to video game companies. That their conclusion is "This is why real-money play is such a great fit for social games." is hardly a surprise.
MOAR Android!
I carry a knife almost everywhere. I regularly carry a 3" lockback (Spyderco Caly 3) but don't usually let anyone know I have it. I was at a work conference a few years ago and that morning I decided not to carry it, partly because I would be around all the company executives and didn't want one of the more skittish ones noticing it. What happens? My CTO needs to open a box and asks me if I have a knife. Arrgh.
Not being able to code will be, in 10 years, like not being able to parallel park. People will look at you like, "Really?"
Apple Manufacturer Foxconn Makes Employees Sign 'No Suicide' Pact
Lots of reasons. Small efficient companies can be much more easily killed by variance / randomness than huge bloated monsters. Successful small companies tend to become large companies, laying the seeds of doom. Successful small companies may just be bought out by the large companies - you can't buy a large company until you are a large company, but the same is not true of small companies. And so on.
Swarm of Drawing Robots: catalogtree 4.0
> On the other hand, it has given me a lot of joy and pride. The joy to take beautiful pictures. The pride of building the reputation of being a decent photographer. The pleasure to give away my work and see people smile. The satisfaction coming from the fact that my work is useful, seeing it's reused by others.

This is a nice sentiment. It reminded me of a quote from Richard Feynman on his thoughts about the Nobel Prize:

"I've already got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out. The kick in the discovery. The observation that other people use it. Those are the real things. The honors are unreal to me." ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMaBmik4VYg )
You can catch the video manifesto here. Admire the chutzpah, too bad about the cause: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Y...
natsukashii

I normally would not feel the need to correct a typo, but in an instance like this it is different as most people on hn do not automatically know what was intended.
What's the punishment for breaking the pact? Evidently Foxconn has friends in high places, but that high?
Jimbo Wales muses about Wikipedia joining reddit's blackout
Wouldn't that just change the form factor of gambling? just... with cuter animals to prey on younger targets?
Yes, but to then go on and say Google shouldn't worry about whether their site is even legible because, hey, it's the user's fault for choosing a phone that isn't based on intents? That's just silly.

But no, iPhone doesn't have that functionality.
Create your own freedom.txt to oppose SOPA
Tumblr always looks terrible with 68pt headings on my Android browser.
False dichotomy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
That's a hell of a good idea. As somebody pointed out, it might not stop you from corrupting neighboring items in an array or structure, but it would let you find the size of an array allocated by itself, AND, it would stop you from corrupting the heap itself!
For the server side, Clojure, by most metrics, would beat node.js by virtue of running on the JVM and its stellar concurrency capabilities. This includes ecosystem, performance and scalability.

Using ClojureScript in the browser gives you a language to use that's consistent with what you're using on the server, and easy interop (you can just send data back and forth directly, without having to do any extra serialization). It's also (in my opinion) a much better language than JavaScript.

Learning curve is the one likely stickler - depends how inclined you are to learn a Lisp. Personally, I love it.
"Tofu Hotel"... despite the marketing propaganda.

I really hope these projects are publicized enough so that when I am in China, I can avoid these buildings and the buildings next to them, in case they collapse and cause a domino effect or sympathy collapse.
I think this is just a common Google problem; when you hire A+ level talent they don't want to spend their time adjusting css for every platform.

Maybe they should start using CSS brain teasers in their interviews, then.
the less people using it the better

How is that? I would say the marginal cost of extra users is minimal, especially given their (lack of) customer service.
What about bing? Compared to Google Maps in terms of pricing? I think their maps are of great quality as well, much superior to OSM. In US at least.
Nice introduction to Hadoop
Same exact experience here. Should I add the Hacker News circle to my friends circle? Acquaintances circle? Family circle?

At this point I can hear some Googler with a 160 IQ chiming in that, algorithmically, it doesn't matter whether Hacker News is a person or a group of people; the effect on personal search is the same. This misses the point. People think in metaphors, and if the metaphor is broken they assume the product is too.

With so many brilliant people at Google, and Facebook nipping at their heels, I am shocked at how bad G+ remains months after it launched.
half of all teams are below average

If you only look at your organization then yes 1/2 of the teams in your org are below average for your org, not necessarily below average for all software developers. I'm not talking about trying to hire only the best of the best like Google. I'm talking about avoiding the worst of the worst.

On occasion a come to jesus talk might be appropriate with some types of employees, but once one starts threatening people with the loss of employment, bad things often follow - particularly in the US where such threats often mean loss of access to healthcare for the employee's family.

So are you arguing to just fire them outright? I thought that's what you were against? And since when is a frank review of performance a threat? This must be where 'everyone gets a trophy' day has led us. Unless people are told their true performance and how it stacks up to what's expected they will not be able to improve. It may be that they are simply unaware how bad they are performing, or they simply need to be motivated.

BTW, when the job is pushing the boulder forward, smart people recognize the sisyphean nature of the task and respond accordingly.

Huh? Are you saying all work is useless? That's certainly not what I meant by the term. Pushing the boulder forward is what I consider advancing the business in a given direction, one that I certainly hope doesn't have to be backtracked.

In business there are people on the boulder deciding where it should go then there are people on the ground making it happen (I'm including all the support people here). Finally there are people standing on the boulder doing neither, and instead provide dead weight to be carried.

In small companies the people who decide the direction and make it happen are often the same. This is what makes small companies so nimble. Those deciding where to go also know directly of the challenges of getting there. Small companies also rarely have much dead weight just standing around.

In big companies there is often a huge divide between those who decide direction and those who make it happen. Big companies also tend to have lots of people just standing around on the boulder. Now, standing around isn't so bad until these people start getting in the way of the job of advancing the business. When they start actively trying to make things harder for those pushing because they feel some odd sense of job security by doing it that way.
I would happily trade C ASCIIZ strings for Pascal/Perl/Java out of band length indicated strings, even at the cost of those edge cases. Especially if there were a way to internalize immutable string data, and share the bytes of common fragments. (this of course doesn't work well if you plan on modifying the string data)
Every bootstrapping entrepreneur in America can't be responsible for Hollywood.
I don't think it's fair to conclude that wordpress is awful and bloated based on it performing worse than your setup. Static files and a cdn and no dynamic script are the ultimate optimization. Wordpress compares unfavourably because anything involving dynamic features would compare unfavourably.
Before 9/11 it was legal (per the FAA) to fly with a knife with up to a 4" blade. Some airlines limited blade length to 3". I regularly flew with a 3" folding knife. I could often walk through the metal detectors without even taking the knife out of my pocket if I just put my hand over it and walked slowly. Other times I'd drop it in the basket with my keys and wallet and half the time nobody would even look at it.

I used to regularly fly through Portland, Maine (where some of the 9/11 hijackers boarded) and the security screening staff there were some of the few that always looked at my knife. I felt really horrible to see them on the security videos as the hijackers passed through. It wasn't their failure because boxcutters were allowed at the time.
That's really interesting to hear a real-world example. Can you say more about the reasons they gave you?
It largely depends on the context the "you should give this away" is said in.

If say a well known media organization says, "You should let me use this photo for free, because I will give you credit and that might help you get business later" that is negotiating. The creator of the photo may or may not like the terms, but it is an offer of something of value for something of value. At worst, if the photographer is already well known, it is a bad offer that is wasting his time, but it is never insulting.

If someone who studies economics says to a new photographer, "You should stop selling photos and sell the service of creating new photos on order due to the marginal prices involved and current market situation. Give your old ones away to build up reputation." This is not an insult, but advice (whether or not it is good advice is a different question).

He is entitled to set the asking price for his work, but that is all.
Perl has fixed this (http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=945526 also contains a link to a PDF detailing the issue) in 2003 when it was discussed the first time.

Ruby 1.9 was already randomizing the hashes whereas this current rediscovery of the problem caused them to fix it by randomizing in 1.8 too. Same goes for Python.

The best link to the algorithm I found on a quick search is here http://www.hardened-php.net/hphp/zend_hash_del_key_or_index_... - where the problem was discussed again in 2006.

By randomizing I mean randomizing that value for h for the lifetime you need your hashes to be consistent (until the script ends in PHP)

While you are still vulnerable to attackers who know what that random initial value is, finding that by just randomly trying to create the collisions is impractical and easily detectable.
I think that is a very narrow definition of the value of a search engine.

I would say that a search engine's value is in helping me find what I'm looking for.

Often - as you point out - what I'm looking for is new information.

But there are plenty of other times, when I know exactly what I'm looking for, but I either forgot where it is, or it is simply faster to search for it than to go digging through folders, apps, etc to get to it.

In the case of Matt's story, maybe he remembered that someone posted a picture of him playing werewolf, but he couldn't remember who posted it or where they posted it to. In this case searching for it was very useful and gave him exactly the information he was searching for.

Or maybe I know that I have a picture from some event last year with a friend, but I can't remember - or I'm too lazy :-) - to dig through my folders to find it. Being able to search for it is awesome.

It's analogous to the way search works on my phone, or on Windows 7 or mac spotlight.

If I want to find a contact on my phone, I can dig through the contacts app, or I can just type the name into the search box.
If I want to find a program or a document on my computer, it's often faster to just search for it rather than navigate through menus and/or folders.

This new search feature is simply bringing that same kind of functionality to the data you have in the cloud.
I didn't mean to say that they shouldn't worry about it. I more meant that it's probably lower priority, and for an understandable reason. I'm sure they want to fix the web page and I'm sure they will - but the iPhone Safari market share is probably very, very small when looking at the Google+ user stats.

Also, I thought it relevant to mention here that you can indeed read the post very clearly on the iPhone - but a seeming lack of this feature (Intents) in iOS makes this awkward.
A fun project.

In real life, use snappy http://code.google.com/p/snappy/
now, that's total inanity.
this is a good description of the individual concerns, but it's missing a really important consideration that most API designers seem to ignore: what's the ideal way (or ways) for someone to use your API? once you have some answers to that, you can start designing an onramp to your API that subtly guides developers towards the kinds of idioms that you want them to learn. it's not just a matter of following the right form in the right example, but overall organization--what concepts are introduced as being related, the kinds of examples you have at all, etc.
Another great resource:

http://jacobian.org/writing/great-documentation/
You can add yourself to the Hacker News Circle at http://hngp.axxim.net/.

The "Hacker News Circle" Google+ re-shares an updated circle every 5 minutes. Clicking "Add Circle" allows you to copy that circle into one of your own.

I just made a straight copy called "Hacker News" in my circles where I dump the shared circle.

All this is implementing a feature that Google+ desperately needs: a public circle that users can subscribe to rather than copy into their private circles, like Twitter's lists.

(Note: I am not the creator of the Hacker News Circle, just a user)
I'm a Vim user, and I can't wrap my head around Eclipse. I've used emacs and although I don't like it, I found it to be a good deal more accessible.
What if you want to offer transit directions from your location to a rental?

Actually, Google doesn't let you do that either. They have separate licensing agreements with every transit authority, so there is no API access.

You're right on the geocoder, though. The closest I ever found was Yahoo's, but they're still not up to much.
To tag existing CDs, we've already seen that problem solved with iTunes Match.

To get people to do it, it would be a part of uploading media files. If SOPA were to pass, I imagine hosting sites would require only "signed" media. It wouldn't be perfect, but any distributed file would be signed at creation. Self signing would be simple enough if it were built into media programs. The key to all this is that nobody controls it, and the standard is open source. Once again looking at BitCoin as a role model.

Also, I don't think it's fair to tag a concept "ridden with problems and possibilities for abuse". It's a concept, not an implementation. And it was a mighty vague one at that.
Could somebody explain to me how google charges for maps? I'm using it for http://lanmarks.com/ -- and it's not like I'm throwing an API key at them with the javascript include...
Working on it, Joey!
Go to https://plus.google.com/106419647632534512037/posts and, in one of the "Hacker News has shared a circle with you" posts, click the blue "View shared circle" button. Name the circle and voila, you now have a circle in your Google+ account with all the HN people who signed up on http://hngp.axxim.net/

Edit: I forgot to warn you that several hundred people will add you to their circles, and you will get notifications when that happens. You should probably go to https://www.google.com/settings/plus and preemptively disable those notifications before you are drowning in them.

That's all you need to do to get the results mentioned in the article, but you might get a lot of unwanted noise in your Google+ stream from this circle. If that's a problem for you, go to your Google+ "home" page https://plus.google.com/stream and find your new HN circle in the left-hand column. When you click it, you get a stream made from that circle, and you can change the "volume" of the circle using the slider that appears in the upper-right. Now when you browse your normal stream you won't get noise from the HN circle.
PHP 5.x hashtable vulnerability
Yes, but which would you rather be in when an earthquake hits?
In Italy, there is no jail for tax dodgers (perhaps that is the problem).
> I am never looking for photos of myself. I mean please

What if your friend 'Fred' e-mailed you and asked "Can you send me that picture of us from the rafting trip last year?"

Which would you rather do - dig through your photo albums until you find it, or type in a search for it and have it show up in the results?
100,000 lines of PHP or Java maybe. Probably not 100,000 lines of Haskell.
anandtech provided a more level-headed analysis. Intel's new design performs well and beats ARM designs - that have already been in market for a year already. This years ARM designs based on A15 are quite likely to be as good or better. A1,5 the next generation arm, is wider (more parallel decode and execution units than Atom) and is out-of-order further increasing instructions-per-cycle (at the expense of some complexity and die size). This is like the architectural difference between 486 and pentium.

At least on paper, the A15 should be notably faster than Atom if at similar clock speeds (MHz).
I'm the maintainer of the Google+ Hacker News Circle (Well, the script/cron job that makes a circle from hngp.axxim.net). I increased the frequency to every five minutes to keep up with the new growth.

It's great that you're finding a use for it, but it's still irritating that the implementation of shared circles doesn't work well since you can only share a snapshot that users have to manually re-add in order to update.
I've been called a bitch to my face during architectural debates. I've had responses to my technical comments come back as "whatever, sudo make me a sandwich". Been asked while doing interviews, "Oh wait you're not HR?" I've gone to many presentations contain sexist images, etc. Throughout my career I've been constantly had to deal with implications that I don't belong - and that my opinions can be dismissed..

Yet, somehow I manage to keep the perspective that technology isn't populated by sexist assholes - sure the ones that are there stand out and make up a lot of the things that come to mind when I'm stressed. But really it's a small percentage [even though that small percentage can really get to you].

Try to keep the same perspective about women, the vast majority of us aren't "bitches".
1. You're singling out the first "hello world" program in the book which is making an effort to show C using the fewest concepts necessary; flip elsewhere in the book and notice the other main() functions return int values. (The default "int" is C89; the "warning" is for C99; the second edition of K&R is ANSI C89, not C99).

2. First the nit misses the spirit of the example which is simply to demonstrate that "double" has higher precision than the fixnum "long" type; second, calling it a bug misses the fact that text explicitly does not say you can use it to count arbitrary strings; as the text says, it depends.

3. You're calling "buggy by omission" an implementation of strcpy not substantially different from BSD's libc. K&R's is, in fact, how you would write strcpy(). That strcpy() doesn't handle hostile strings is irrelevant; you're not intended use strcpy() on hostile strings.

4. Hard to fathom how one criticizes a book on C for braceless "if"s. We could go toe to toe on high-quality C programs and whether they ever use them; nginx, for example, avoids them; dovecot doesn't. Both are exceptionally high quality C codebases.

Not that you have anything to prove to me, but I reject all your examples, and think you were too cavalier about judging K&R.

But I appreciate the response (and thus the opportunity to piously respond to it). :)
Even if the stack was 0 filled at startup, it won't be after you call something else, and that other code returns. The stack will simply be loaded with the final values of auto vars from the called routines, as well as return addresses and other such stack frame tracking.
Lacking a psychology degree or something similar, I don't think that it is easy to fully understand what you are being shown on your screen.
Being more on the business side than the development side, I completely identify with what you're saying. The statement that value is derived from the cost of the alternative is central to market thinkers, of which I identify myself as.

However! This statement struck me as out of place:

> The moralism in these threads is an irrelevant sideshow.

There is not 100% agreement on the moralism of copying digital goods. There is, agree or disagree, a lack of 100% acceptance of copyright as it stands today. This introduces an alternative that costs $0, which messes up the whole market equation. This moral conflict has to be resolved before you can arrive at a market price for digital goods.