skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In general, I agree with you. I just feel the need to expand on a few points.

> in C you both control the memory layout of data types very finely

True to an extent.

> code maps very directly to an equivalent assembly construct

True but less and less relevant.

Here's where C disconnects you from the processor in the ways that matter most:

1. malloc()/free() are too high-level: You can't control where the allocation subsystem gets your next chunk from, you can't see whether your malloc arena is getting full, you can't see whether you're about to double-free something, and you have no way to recover from a failure to allocate (if that's even possible on your OS).

2. C has no concept of cache; admittedly, assembly usually tries to hide it from you to an extent as well, but assembly language at least has hooks into the cache hardware in the form of memory barriers. C doesn't even have that much.

3. C completely hides the processor status word from you. A minor concern, usually, except in precisely the kind of tight loops people most advocate C for.

4. C has no concept of out-of-order execution or opcode pairing or pipelining in general. Just hope your compiler does.

So, added up, that means C is farther and farther from the hardware all the time. It was reasonably close on the PDP-7 where it was born, was fortuitously even closer to the PDP-11 where it was later implemented, and remained fairly good for a while after, but once you get to dual-core superscalar designs with cache hierarchies and SIMD hardware, you have to rely on the compiler to turn your C into good assembly. Which is, really, a lot like what you do when you write Haskell.
Um, I don't think "not understood" is correct. More like not wanting to be hammered over the head with his simplistic, fable-like, morals.
I didn't say that. Listen, if you want me to describe to you how biased these rankings are in favor of Western institutions, I'd be glad to do so. For example, a common metric is number of publications, for which the accepted journals are almost entirely Western (or US-based). And then you have scores that are based partially on (perceived) reputation, for which American schools will always come first. For the QS World University Rankings, this accounts for 40% of their final score.
I haven't been keeping track of it, but is there still a "looking for/selling freelance work" thread that accompanies the "who's hiring" thread at the start of each month?

If so, that's probably the most appropriate place for it. (If not, you could start such a thread at the same time.)

There have been several front-page threads of people offering free office hours and/or some kind of free service, but even that got some argument over whether it might be too self-promoting of the posters.

Generally, there are lots of companies and individuals that want to sell services to HN users, but we really aren't interested in seeing them as posts unless it's something really ground-breaking in its own right.

[Edit: side note -- if you have lots of good advice to give to startups, you might offer it in discussions here -- this can give you a sort of portfolio to share with prospective clients. And in at least one case I know of, a frequent HN commenter was basically begged by many clients to start doing consulting like you're talking about, because he so clearly had advice worth sharing. YMMV.]
It's always interesting to see all the Colemak users recommend Colemak over Dvorak, without ever trying the latter.
What are you working on? What is your road-block?
I agree strongly with you. It is outrageous that to have our voice heard in an allegedly democratic society, the government would mandate we agree to an onerous contract put forth by a private company.
Java Collections Cheatsheet
This is just cost-benefit analysis.
why?
do php to native c
do very simple language to native c
OK, I take back what I said. SVG can be used to create a single asset that looks good at ALL resolutions; it's just going to take some work and possibly add too much bloat to be worth it in some cases.

So let's say you have a 16px icon design, with an element 7px wide, and you want a 24px version of that icon. The problem is when you scale an odd-numbered-height or width element by a factor of 1.5 in this example, you get an element with a height or width defined as a non-integer (10.5px wide in this case), which is when anti-aliasing kicks in and replaces that extra .5 pixel of element and .5 pixel of background with one pixel of element at half opacity. this makes it look fuzzy.

What you need to do is have a media query like this in the SVG file:

<style>
@media screen and (max-width: 24){#element {width: 10px}}
</style>

Or maybe:

@media screen and (max-width: 16){<shape id="element" width="7px"</shape>}
@media screen and (max-width: 24){<shape id="element" width="10px"</shape>}

I haven't played with it to be sure yet, but something like that might allow you to set the width, height or radius to an integer for the sizes you care about.

Complex paths would still likely need to be redrawn for various target sizes to get rid of the more egregious anti-aliasing issues. In that case, we're adding bloat to everyone's SVG files to serve the needs of different clients. Maybe we're still better off with different SVG files served to different clients when we pass a certain threshold of duplicated content within the SVG, and duplicated paths would seem to me to be in danger of crossing that threshold.
This was the continuation of a minor news story. If it looked odd to you, perhaps you could have looked it up before posting lamely.
Interesting comment, "start your day as a producer". I've seen this around before, but I'm not sure what it means.

How would it work? Would you wake up, and have _one_ hour to produce something? Would it be related to your project? Writing a blog post about your project? Or is that beating around the bush, and actually not producing anything worthwhile?

Does the thing that you produce, have to mean anything? Or does it only have to mean something to you?

I only ask, because I'm exactly like this guy, and I only want to better myself.
This is actually an ingenious idea. HTTP content negotiation seems like it would come close to doing this well.
I myself would say so if I can write effective code in it (beyond hello world) and understand the syntax. Many of the languages are too deep to know all the libraries, but you have enough skills with it and with a language guide or google to get it to do what you want.
SRI research has covered a remarkably wide range of fields, from avian flu drugs to the Kevlar-replacement Zylon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRI_International#Diversificati...

I'd be interested to learn how much real natural language and dialog system technology made it into the Siri spinoff (rather than just inspiration).
"In other words going to hum drum community college and state school put us in precisely the same employment positions as people who paid 4 to 5 times as much."
It always boggles my mind that more people don't know this. Every presentation I give, I always try to put in a slide about consistent key hashing, because it is one of the easiest things to get right and yet something I see most everyone get wrong (including myself the first time around).
The story of One Kings Lane
It doesn't really matter what you start producing, it's that it (hopefully) sets the tone for the rest of the day. If you can do something that relates to your project, that's even better.
High-intensity week-long courses on topics that you choose sounds ideal. It reminds me of ArsDigita University, where the course of study was sequential and intensive, with most courses lasting one month.
Creatures down there have been separated from life up here for ever, we need to get the DNA sequenced for some of them, we may find some shocking discoveries of our ancestors 500 million years ago. Are there plans to bring back animal samples?
There is something slightly more specific, which is that we have some technology-related gris-gris[1]. The basic problem is that everyone feels more or less qualified to guide a company's technological progress. One very chilling story which exemplifies this comes from about 7-8 minutes into a Clojure talk:

But really what this is is, "I'm afraid. Because I don't want to choose
something that might put my job at risk, and so I will easily pick
something that is less effective but more industry-accepted, rather than
something riskier where I might risk really good success but also
failure." ... I was literally in a meeting at one point with a CTO and
he said, "We believe that the only way this project will ever be a
success is if we pick Delphi, but we're picking PowerBuilder." Knowing
that it's going to fail, but that's the safer choice politically because
if they pick Delphi, they might win, but they might lose and if they
lose and they picked something weird then they get fired.

So if you're a tech company and you go public, right, the salient fact is that your company is no longer self-valuing, but its value is being set by an (extremely meta) popularity contest: I think that this news will make others value you less, so I immediately sell a little cheaper than I think it's valued, thus driving the price down, and so forth. Normally you would say "who cares what someone says my value is?" but unfortunately the people who are playing this game ultimately own the company, so it matters by fiat. They can and perhaps will fire people who don't make that stock price go up.

The gris-gris enter in just about here. Some are owned by the market as a whole, and your owners will be anticipating them and responding to them. But the more dangerous gris-gris will belong to your owners themselves, I suspect -- "You used Lisp? What the hell is that? You're fired."

So that's where I would focus the discussion. Random people on the stock market probably have just enough technical knowledge to think that they know much more than they know. That puts them in a dangerous position when they own your company. If Zuckerberg is careful to keep more than 50% of his company while going public and in doing so releases an open document saying essentially "Facebook is about hackers," I would understand him as trying to violate some taboo on the open market (where "hacker" is a bad word) as well as trying to make sure that people can never muscle out the hacker approach that, in his view, probably makes Facebook exactly what it is. He doesn't want the Ownership to start pressuring the Developers with technological misunderstandings.

[1] A gris-gris (gree-gree) is a voodoo talisman. The key feature here is that it is unquestionably believed to work.

[2] Excerpted from https://blip.tv/clojure/neal-ford-neal-s-master-plan-for-clo...
“Failed” late payment laws to be replaced by passive-aggressive finger-pointing
In my experience, Computer Science was very much not about writing code, or worse, "Learning Rails".
Well first of all I do not equate education necessarily with college, education is a process and college is a place where that may or may not happen. My main point is that assuming large levels of debt should be approached as a business/investment decision, as should anything with such a large down side. And even if you are college material having $200,000 in debt and a degree in something that gets you a $35,000/year job is just not a reasonable thing to do. And with a debt/salary load like above college will be the best 4 years of your life, loan payments will see that it is so in the best case.
This is syntactic sugar at best; other languages such as Python are cleaner and are more performant. Facebook's efforts to compile PHP to C++, HipHop, demonstrate this need, and in my opinion, this project is a step in the wrong direction.

PHP was great for its time, but sometimes you have to let grandpa go.
Drupal apps – an overview
Do students at MIT actually write an OS or do they just do bedtime source code reading?
There are many factors beyond screen size that could be involved in selection of image DPI: bandwidth availability and cost, screen density and current zoom level, amount of free memory available, hardware limitations (like iPad's max 1024px bitmaps).

Sending all these factors to the server would be problematic, so IMHO it's better if page declaratively specifies what sizes are available and lets UA pick one (so my UA doesn't need to tell every server when I'm out of my bandwidth allowance and hope server acts as expected).
How can anyone call this beautiful? o.O
When the road charges your electric car
I love how this story shows that all startup 'rules' can be broken.

1) The founders hadn't met/worked together before.
2) Neither of them have an engineering background, they outsourced all engineering/design to a remote team.

There are many, many paths to startup success.
PHP has native first class anonymous functions now, so there is no reason snow can't do a good job converting them.
One of his yachts.
I personally don't like the shortening of words. Having a long word doesn't really hurt readability.
The Minimally Viable Party
what about the non tsa stories? the number of times i as a european have heard someone describe an event or opportunity in the usa and then heard but they can't be arsed with the tsa nonsense. is there a measurable reduction of travel to/from the usa since the tsa?
I don't know if I'm the only one, but I hate with passion this trend to remove syntax from a language and call it an improvement. It may be easier to code, but the code you produce is often more cryptic and harder to maintain. The aspect of the maintainability of a language is often disregarded even tough it's a very important aspect. That project is a very good example of this. Sacrificing readability for a few keystroke is never a good trade-off.
Chess is very good to train pre-cognitive thinking. And this is meant in a logical way, not an esoteric. When you write a program, the complexity makes it too hard to find a connection between input, throughput and output for your brain. When playing chess executing a move and it's intention can lose it's logical connection too. In fact the more this is apart the better you play. So the better you can think "apart" the better you can understand complex programs.
TCP Slow Start
Sometimes you're stuck with large PHP codebases.
You're not always dealing with the client that is specified in the UA string. Clients can use proxies, including transparent proxies.

For example major mobile operators pipe HTTP connections through a proxy that recompresses images. In that case you see e.g. Safari's or Opera's UA string, but you're actually dealing with proxy's HTTP behavior.
php as a target platform huhu, btw there was already php-reboot.

php reason to be is hosting + ecosystem, not linguistic qualities, too late for that.
I have to wonder; what makes a lot of these people qualified to do this sort of thing? I'm not saying it isn't a noble goal, but do they have any experience in behavioral pharmacology or classroom education? And yet they're dictating what should and shouldn't be scored? I cringed a little when I read they would be ranking various criteria, such as 'teamwork'.

And after all the articles on introverts on here, lately.
Dave, are old farts permitted to check you new invention? Where the hell is it?
Did the Senate kill crowd-funding after all?
I find I have two modes. Producer or consumer.

Producer mode is tougher to get into, breaking the ice with an easy task in the morning is quite useful.
Neither from a "liguistic perspective" (as in linguistics), nor particularly wonderfully-writen. Worst, it's not even much of a takedown.

"Let us assume that you are breaking the sixth rule itself. Then a fortiori (pardon my Latin) you can't be failing to break any of the rules sooner than saying something outright barbarous. Which means, contra assumption, that you aren't breaking the rule after all. Doh!"

Pleeease, isn't it bloody obvious that the 6th meta-rule does not count?
It says "It also has robotic arms, allowing him to collect samples of rocks and soils".

So a definitely maybe :)
very true, though how would this project help? A major rewrite would have to be done with PHP-Snow just as much as another language.
>I can see how you could add features which would be handy (such as first-class anonymous functions; though good luck making that look like "idiomatic PHP code")

PHP added anonymous functions in 5.3.

http://php.net/manual/en/functions.anonymous.php
For posterity's sake let's make this clear: the SEC rule regarding 500 owners is as follows:

> Companies with more than $10 million in assets whose securities are held by more than 500 owners must file annual and other periodic reports. These reports are available to the public through the SEC's EDGAR database.

Source: Securities Act of 1934, paraphrased in http://www.sec.gov/about/laws.shtml

It requires firms to file special reports. The reason why people presume that it means that the firm must go public is simple: there are only a few additional requirements to go public, and the economic advantages in many cases outweigh the paltry effort.

For posterity's sake, this is worth repeating: THERE IS NOTHING FORCING A FIRM TO GO PUBLIC. NOTHING.
From the reddit thread where I first came across this:
"Start every day as a producer, not a consumer" - http://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/pbjk1/what_are_the_...
Microsoft bans purchases of Apple products with company funds
I was dealing and implementing this last week. From what I understood, calculating log(a+b) from log(a) and log(b) has reasons other than underflow-overflow problem.

1- it is usually a necessity because For example in Speech Recognition and many NLP applications people always deal with log probabilities and log likelihoods.Yes they do it for running away from the underflow problem but all formulation and data is based on log.

2- Also, when dealing with log probabilities, it is possible to generate a look-up table to make this calculation much faster (Around 30 folds) with a good approximation instead of calculating the log(1+exp(log(b)-log(a))) part.

This is helpful for example when trying to find how likely a piece of speech signal is generated from an utterance of a letter (not formally speaking) using Gaussian Mixture Models. LogSum is extensively used there. It is also used in Forward-Backward algorithm used in Hidden Markov Model generation and decoding.

Edited for some grammar and missing information.
Low density * long-tail audience = low margins.
Yeah - that will do, but the TURN operator is a third party. I commented about the situation assuming Joeboy meant P2P connection without Skype or anyone else Skype-like (the URL is the only thing needed). If you're ok with someone else providing TURN and making money on it in some way to pay for the bandwidth, then yeah - that's enough.
The memcopy example isn't an optimization issue, it's a correctness issue. If the described behavior of memcopy is what was intended then of course the compiler can't use that particular optimization, and it couldn't in any other language, either. However, if the author was intending to write a function with behavior like memmove, then the issue is that the code is incorrect.
Just like eating bad food and watching TV, being productive is a habit. Get in the habit and you'll find yourself up early on weekends working on your projects.

The way to feed the habit is with success. To experience successes, I have found:

- first minimize your goals. The less to do, the faster to succeed. The fastest way to finish a feature is by removing it from the plan.

- work on one project, maximum two. Any more and you will always jump from a project when it gets hard or to the "not fun part".
If you were adding to the codebase, you could write the code using Snow. You could also rewrite select portions that you regularly need to work on, as opposed to having to port the entire codebase to another language.
As opposed to your uncritical lack of appreciation?
Role Playing Game written in XNA, translated to HTML5
Describing just one part of it could be sufficient to sue, but not sufficient to develop a client.

Software patents are intentionally vague, so I doubt anybody could write a working client based on a patent alone (even if whole protocol was claimed to be described).
In one sense, I feel "The Open Source Movement" have co-opted a plain english two word phrase.

Their introduction there can be rewritten as "Open source doesn't just mean the source is open. We claim there are also implications about the means of distribution."

It's as though someone was telling people "free beer" doesn't just mean beer that's free, it also needs to be in glass not cans - free beer in cans needs to be called something else…

I think there's a lot of "open source" software out there that is not "open source(tm)". I'm not sure "the open source movement" are doing themselves any favors by aggressively defending their particular definition of a descriptive phrase that is widely known and easy to assume you understand.

(But I also understand the need for specific technical meanings in the software field, and that phrases like "open source" end up being part of the field's jargon, and have far more specific technical meanings than the "plain english" deconstruction of the words indicate. I just think the "open source" case has backed itself into a corner where people assume a plain english interpretation of the phrase, then have the "open source movement" people need to jump on them and say "no, you're wrong". As displayed upthread.)
Answering a Summons
Poor Office Mac team.
It's not like while Steve was alive, he stop less-than-stellar products from going out the door. Personally, I find the new Apple TV design to be much easier then before. Now, instead of playing "Guess the menu", I see where I want to go quickly and easily. Even the colors make it easy to see where it is at a glance. When I first saw it, and has been mentioned elsewhere, I was immediately struck by the question: Well, when are they going to release the AppleTV app for my iPad? Because that screen could be easily replicated to the iPad, and work perfectly.
The first things you do in the morning seem to 'set the tone' for the rest of the day. E. g., have you ever noticed how the first song you listen to often sticks with you for hours?
So instead of firing up HN or Reddit right after you woke up, start your day with something that requires your output - this doesn't have to be an essay, but could be as quick as:

- writing that uncomfortable email that's been lingering on your todo list
- begin to write your next blog post
- not a coder myself, but I would assume that this all applies to writing code / fixing/finding bugs, too.

On a related note, the last thing you do before you sleep can also have a very positive effect on your next day's productivity. I find that going to through / defining the top 3 goals for the day after helps me structure my work and be more motivated to pick up directly on those todos right after I get up.
I wish G+ had more descriptive links, like

http://plus.google.com/Daniel_Meade/Always_a_starter_never_a...
Link Building: The Game Isn't Changing, But Maybe You Should
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. In mine it look a little bit odd as well, but I could imagine that it's better than PHP if you are used to it.
My 2c.

Unless you make this post disappear somehow it will hurt in the future. Or help if you learn from this - now.

Recognize that the way you finish matters more than its beginning. Spend time considering that.

Find someone much like you, but ready to change. It cancels the guilt, offers empathy.

Submit to regular, voluntary accountability. Be brutally honest.

Got new ideas? Write them down in the moment of inspiration. Writing it down cancels urge.

Once success is established with its reward, pattern is broken.

Always choose what is right at every step.
Plagiarism to the Max v3