skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's somehow interesting to me how often this comes up on HN. It's also a problem I tend to have. But if you had asked me 10 years ago based on what I'd casually heard outside of tech, it was much more common for me to encounter and worry about the exact opposite failure case in creative projects: not the person who has 30 half-finished novels, but the person who's spent 30 years writing their Masterpiece Novel that is probably not going to be a masterpiece, but nobody can convince them that they really should be trying out other things instead of sticking with this one project to the bitter end. Basically, not enough experimentation and bouncing around between projects, and too much unwavering fixation on one Big Project that they've tied their ego to.

Curious what the distribution of those two opposite problems is like! Among creative types, it seems that the "stuck with it too long" problem is more prevalent in certain areas, like writing or filmmaking, but not as prevalent among hackers. I suppose one compensation for it being so common for hackers to fall into the "100 unfinished projects" trap is that it's less common to find hackers who fall into the trap of, "I stuck with the first idea I ever got for 20 years because I thought it was my One Big Idea".
"Something must be done!" "Hey, guess what, smart guy - there's an oversight committee now!"

This reminds me vaguely of Detroit's highly visible and utterly useless monorail.

PS: Bonus points to any who'd like to compare and contrast this with the ("It's radiation!", "Yeah, but it's the same amount you get on the flight anyway!") tuple.
But if you don't call your work Beautiful how will people know you have Taste? When you're Intelligent and Creative you just have to show it.
I don't know what you mean by pseduoacademic, we all include citations around here!
The report that could have cleared the man convicted in the Lockerbie bombing
See also: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2012/03/the-end-...
http://www.db-book.com/

It's a website that's meant to accompany a textbook I used in college, but you don't really need the textbook. This site has slides that cover the material well enough to get started. Note that it's relationally-specific almost to a fault, so you won't get a whole lot of insight into NoSQL if you decide you want to go that route later.
You must finish something at the beginning and end of the day. Make sure you divide tasks in a way that your first and last tasks does not last for long.
Living in Seattle a lot of my friend don't have cars. You don't need one to get around. The bus system will get you to and from work. They can walk or ride a bike to the grocery store. In short, it's not preferable but it's easily doable.

The issue I have with this stance is that not having a car is fully dependent on friends having one! I feel like I'm subsidizing my friends because they chose not to have a car, even though money has nothing to do with the decision. (they make $100k+ working at Microsoft)

Want to play board games? It'll take them 2 hours to bus, so only if I can give a ride. Want to see a movie? Sure, but the bus doesn't run late so only if I can give a ride. Want to go hiking? Want to go snowboarding? Go to a show? Get tickets for a sporting event? Can only do any of those things if I'm willing to pick up and drop off my friend.

I do it of course because if I don't then I'll never see these friends. Maybe it makes me an asshole but honestly I find it just a bit selfish if you brag about having no car but constantly require rides from friends.
The physics of deep-sea pressure
On a related note: One of the least popular things about patents is the ability to patent something relatively obvious and then sit on that "invention" for years waiting for someone else to "copy" it. Patent trolls have taken this to an art form.

As a way to fight patent trolls who produce nothing, it's been suggested that a requirement be added to attempt to actually CREATE and MARKET the technology. That you can't just sit on a patent and wait for someone else to stumble on it by accident; in fact, if someone else DOES stumble on it by accident, it should be considered de facto evidence that the patent isn't novel.

How is this related to the article? If you DID have the requirement that a patent owner actually produce a product, then you could add on the additional restriction that the patent would only apply in the market that the patented product is being sold to. If they can but won't sell an iPad version of their product, and they are notified that someone wants to use their patent that way, then (after a reasonable grace period) the patent would lose its ability to prevent competition in that realm.

Remember the Flip video camera? Super cheap video that anyone could use? They were allegedly working on a new version that would allow you to use the camera as an ultra-cheap video conference device. They were bought by Cisco for $590M, and then just before releasing this new product, Cisco shut them down. The Wikipedia article [1] suggests that maybe the purchase was to acquire patents, but since the company was still profitable and they made no move to divest their ownership of Flip, it seems more likely they shut it down rather than allowing the consumer device to compete with their expensive enterprise video conferencing devices.

It's when patents are used to PREVENT a product from existing that they should be null-and-void. That doesn't help "...promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." [2] IMO, it's only when a patent is used to grant you a temporary monopoly on a product to help you recoup your R&D expenses through sales of the product that it should be valid.

And in the case of an iPad app being able to do the work of a large $9000 piece of hardware -- if they won't produce an app, they should lose patent protection that can be used against someone who CAN produce an app. Protecting their market for $9000 hardware devices shouldn't be done at the expense of "Progress of Science..."; it would be like blacksmiths using a patent portfolio to prevent cars from being manufactured, holding back progress rather than promoting it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_Video

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause
The Humble Bundle for Android 2
Cryptocomb needs help identifying windows application desktop icon
What ever happend to greplin? weren't they also kind of going to solve this? They were in the news a ton until they weren't.

But yeah, we need this. Even Facebook's search has been nerfed compared to where it was years ago. It is a colossal pain, all the data is there but no one wants to organize it
On the plus side I haven't once been attacked by tigers or elephants while flying. Bravo.

Also I'm sure everyone in the country can give a long list of the things they were rather the money was spent on, or not spent at all. The TSA has been as effective as setting fire to large quantities of money.
Curiously, there is strong reverse correlation between political correctness and number of women in high-tech.

I've seen a correlation between "non-Western country" and number of women in tech, but I don't even know how you would measure political correctness to measure a correlation.

It seems to me that the US (regarded as one of the less politically correct western countries) has quite a low level of women in tech, while (based on my limited research) countries that most would regard as more politically correct (eg Scandinavian countries) have similarly low levels.

That contrasts notably to places like India and Eastern Europe, where women in tech levels seem much higher.
"I love how many women are in engineering in Romania. 3 out of the 13 on that list" - if that's what you based your assumption on, you are quick to jump to conclusion... I'm not saying there aren't many female software engineers in Romania - perhaps there are, it's just that 13 people is too small a sample to say much about that. I have to admit that I'm actually quite curious if anyone could provide some meaningful statistics on the subject (female labor force participation in IT in different countries) - something more than anecdotal evidence
I found the story very interesting, but I discovered it because of the quote at the beginning of the article:

I don’t want to die in a language I can’t understand.

— Jorge Luis Borges (as quoted in Alberto Manguel, “With Borges”)

This was the quote that guided Richard Gabriel[1]'s talk on Clojure West, entitled "Engineering(,) A Path to Science: I don’t want to die in a language I can’t understand"

[1] http://clojurewest.org/sessions#gabriel
Ability to learn is affected by the timing of sleep
I stand on the other side of this continuum. I'm 25 years old and I own a car. I _love_ my car; and, I often enjoy driving. I will often drive just to drive, even if this means being in relatively heavy traffic. Actually, I find that point where heavy traffic isn't a deadlock to be an especially fun time to drive because it hones my driving skills. I like feeling my car and being a part of my car as it goes down the road. When I'm alone, I like the privacy being in a car gives me as I can sing at the top of my lungs and no one has to hear me when I'm driving at free-way speeds.

I'm even looking to the future where I can buy a new car that I'll be able to use on race tracks and in rally races for my own personal enjoyment.

So,
I like cars.
Greplin is a personal search system, isn't it? Its corpuses are private.
Could really do with having private hidden rooms, so I can play with a few friends without having the whole world barge in.
What if Google and Facebook block access to their APIs? This seems like a possibility if Ark gains traction.
> What I learned when I came of age was that I am a Starter.

The more accurate way to put this is "I am not a Finisher". The argument here is that starting and finishing are two equally valuable skills that are somehow equivalent.

A "Starter" is a fairweather friend. It's easy to start things. Most people like starting things. Note this is different from networking and so forth, which is really a separate skill altogether.

Employers, business partners and investors will look at what you've finished and don't care what you've started. When something is 80% done or when times are tough or it's time to soldier on and run the last mile of the marathon, nobody wants the guy around who says "well, I started, that's my skill but I'm done now, I suggest you find a Finisher".

Not being a Finisher isn't a different skill--it's a character flaw.
> @PaulGAllen: Pressure at bottom is 16,285 Pounds per square inch at that depth. Design pressure was 16,500 ...Yikes/Amazing!
Amazing that it is working. The engineering must be interesting.

I'd love to see a dissection of the submersible once they bring it back up. It'd be interesting to see if there were any seal or structural failures.
The original ticket may have been filed for the beta, but if you read the reports, you will see that multiple people (myself included) are having the issue in 17.0.963.83, which is as far as I know supposed to be stable and was released on 3/22.
Honestly I think this is an issue with your friends and possibly with where y'all live, not with living without a car. Do you live on opposite ends of town? The only trip I can imagine taking two hours one way is Ballard to West Seattle or something similarly silly. Going to movies? Going to a show? Even the Showbox in the middle of industrial wasteland is a 10 minute walk to the light rail.

Hiking, snowboarding, sure, that requires going out of town. (Zipcar or rent.) Staying in town doesn't need a car. (And try parking in Capitol Hill and let me know about preferable.)
I started reading this and wondered, "why is dons back to using via-C instead of LLVM". Then I realized that this article is 4 years old.
Hold down shift.
High school expels student for saying 'fuck' on Twitter
Try the top two rows of keys...
The annoying part about it is that it's easier than ever to do a search to see if there will be a collision.
I am able to reproduce in 17.0.963.83, which is not beta afaik.
Your idea has already achieved validation from you, short of that your work validates itself by existing in a functional state.

Besides, nobody knows what people want. Who would have guessed that the world needed another site to post and comment on photos? Would you validate that idea? Yet Pinterest thrives. Just do it, then tell people.
Do ya'll know about the Sugar Project's Collaborative Activities (Sugar is the UI that once was OLPC)? It uses multi-computer DBus Tubes to enable cross system activities: here's their multi-player MIDI environment where kids can jam together via each of their' computers' on screen or real MIDI devices.
I have three friends in this very predicament, though they don't gloat about it.

One of them honestly doesn't need a car. He lives in the middle of Seattle, bikes everywhere (or used to) and lives right next to work. I don't see him as much of a movie going guy; and, the only time he ever needs to really be driven places is when they're way out of the way (like all of us going snow-sporting in the mountains), or it's super-late. I don't really hear him gloat, it's just not something he uses except in the edge cases. He's adapted to that 1-2 hour wait time so far as I can tell.

A second one uses the buses to get to and from work and even when he comes over to hang out. We just plan for him to bus home at X at night, rather than X+2 (where X is the last bus). He misses his car and wants to get another one.

tl;dr, depends on the friends, some of them adapt to the restrictions.
64 bit x86 is very similar to 32 bit. The differences are covered in on slides 191-193 in this deck.

The biggest difference for me is the difference in the calling convention. In 32 bit, all arguments generally are placed on the stack for "standard" calls. In 64 bit, different OSes have different conventions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_calling_conventions#x86-64_... (note that OS X and linux use the "System V" calling conventions)
Don't forget going between towns. Getting to Redmond from Renton is a 2 hour ride because there isn't a direct route.
If it gained traction, wouldn't a Google or Facebook acquisition be even more of a possibility?
Sure, and if you want to have a better user experience, manually add those certificates to the ones you trust, then you won't get the warnings.
Congrats to Patrick and Yiming on the launch. It looks awesome and adresses real problem.
That doesn't sound fair. My plan at least for weekend trips is to figure out a practical way to rent a car. Should still be cheaper than owning one all the time (being realistic about the number of times I really went on such trips).

Also the public transport system in your city seems to suck.
But don't the controls that overwrite handling of the hardware back/back buttons apply equally to the software buttons? And if there's no other way back out of it, the multi-tasking app should be redundant by default.
This is just about the opening example, so not really the main point of the slides, but: Is it actually still faster on modern machines to use this repnz version? One analysis a few years ago found that the naive C implementation, when compiled with gcc optimizations, was actually faster than that inline-asm implementation; the inline-asm implementation has fewer instructions, but doesn't execute faster: http://canonical.org/~kragen/strlen-utf8.html
Notice that he didn't mention Los Angeles or Houston, which are still big cities, but which are also relatively sparse monstrosities that are only navigable by car.

I'll stick up for Houston a little bit. Yes, public transportation sucks and you need a car. But the near-complete lack of zoning means that most of the places you need to go are relatively nearby, so if you live close to work (usually possible because as you note real estate is cheap), you won't be spending that much time in traffic.
I wish there was an API where I could input as much info as I had array("firstName"=>"John","lastName"=>"Doe","zip"=>"12345") for example and it returns info on as many matches that go with the input and includes occupation, birth date, relatives, etc. That would be awesome...
That's a possibility, but the article states that Ark used its Y Combinator connections to get full approval from Facebook to dredge its Graph API.
The companies that were working on this before were pipl, spock, yasni, 123people, isearch, wink, etc.
and which ever one loses the acquisition bid will block the winner
"The UT 3000 is the very first underwater communication system combining analogue and digital communication in one unit. In addition to the telephony and telegraphy mode, the UT 3000 offers unique features such as own noise measurement, horizontal distance measurement and transmission of SOS signals.

"The new digital mode for the first time allows fast and reliable transmission of digital data in water. The possibilities for digital data transfer are nearly unlimited. In the future, own position data, SMS, maneuver reports or target data can be exchanged between submarines in a more secure way.

http://www.naval-technology.com/contractors/sonar/l-3_comm/

http://www.elac-nautik.de/products-naval_acoustics-underwate...

Also: according to the UT 3000 MASQ brochure, it can transmit at up to 1000 bits/sec from 12km to 17km

Edit more: the brochure says the communication protocol overhead is typically 20%. Error correction is included - and features "excellent burst noise rejection". I would think underwater burst noise could be quite long. Would this require an interleaved code? Could someone comment on this?
Hey guys, I've found a few Dropbox powered apps:

Skrivr (closed beta): http://skrivr.com/
Droptype (closed beta): http://droptype.com/
Calepin: http://calepin.co/
scriptogr.am: http://scriptogr.am/
TermKit[1] was a proposal that tried to fix some of those problems by adding two new channels (separating terminal in/out from stdin/stdout data pipes) and using MIME-types (particularly JSON) to the latter.

It got a lot of flack, and I don't agree with everything the author proposes, but I think that part could definitively be improved.

The problem, of course, is backward compatibility: even if you can reimplement and/or wrap the core utils, what about the thousands CLI programs in each distro's repository? You'll end up with an hybrid beast that doesn't really do anything well.

[1]: http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/
Everyone has an opinion because everyone has been there.

But at the end of the day it's simply: just do it.

And keep talking. Be loud. Let people know what you're doing.

One done thing begets another thing to do.
How awesome is it that he is tweeting from the deepest point on earth?
Gez you beat me to it! I just wanted to +1 this, in launching our company, one thing that has been killing me has been my health. I've put on weight, started drinking more, eating more and exercising less...

Today i went for a run, i think it'll make me more productive tomorrow. Get disciplined is the plan, but i'm not sure how easy it'll be...im going to write about this next week.
There are a lot of "shoulds" in this comment. I'm no fan of the patent protection racket we have going, but what you lay out would be infinitely worse. All those "shoulds" are decisions that would be made by beurocrats with little real understanding (who really knows whether the $9000 device can really be substituted with an iPad and app?).

Patent reform is tough. The obvious one (no pun intended) is that patents really should be non-obvious. Beyond that, I vacillate between killing them and severely neutering them. I think they could have some value if they protected inventions that were two or more steps ahead of the current technology. Being able to patent the place everybody would put their next foot is inane.
That's the winner's problem.
Yet another way to do this is to use "/bin/echo" instead of the builtins or printf. "/bin/echo" is part of POSIX.
Yep same here, I have been through 2 fairly sizable exits, in which I build the tech from the ground up and have done some pretty complex development in my career. That being said I have difficulty with any interview where trivia type questions are asked, let alone the whiteboard as it puts me totally out of my element, I create on computers, as such it is where I do my work, the whiteboard in front of people that I do not know, is not a place to draw out creativity on demand, it is the opposite of the environment needed for an INTJ.
Another really cool project by Russ Cox, is amazing how prolific he is.

A related project of his that might be of interest to people learning about kernel programming is the documented history of the Plan 9 kernel: http://swtch.com/plan9history/

This post is going to seem a bit fanboyis, but over the years I had some (rather violent) disagreements with Russ and is easy to forget how much stuff he has done, so it was time to remember some of his awesome work.

Now he seems to be spending most of his time hacking on Go ( http://golang.org ) but just from the last few years some of major projects where he has been the main driving force:

* Plan 9 from User Space - Port of the Plan 9 User Space to Unix systems. http://plan9.us

* vx32 - Virtualization similar to NaCL, and ported the Plan 9 kernel to run on it. http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~baford/vm/

* Google Code Search, now sadly shut down, but he open sourced the core of the engine. http://code.google.com/p/codesearch/

* RE2 regexp engine - http://code.google.com/p/re2/

And other smaller projects (I'm sure I forget many more):

* libtask coroutines library for C - http://swtch.com/libtask/

* Foundation storage system - http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/misc/foundation/

Before that he was heavily involved with Plan 9 at Bell Labs, being responsible for much of the graphics system (which later was the model for Xrender), storage(venti/fossil), auth/security(factotum/secstore), and all kinds of other work all over the place.
Unless I'm missing something neither of them are Seattle.

I agree that if you need to go to Renton regularly you do need a car.
Don't koans generally cast off preexisting notions? It seems the philosophy espoused by that story is "don't think too much about the design of your tools".
The US Constitution had some great lines drawn and it required much more than just majority rule whims to change it. Unfortunately, it's been butchered by politicians and the courts and that butchering has effectively become law through practice and precedent. The US Constitution had a good run, but it's fairly ineffective now.

If you're just asking a philosophical question about where to draw the line -- Libertarians have put a great deal of thought into this matter. The non-aggression principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle) may not work in absolute terms, but it would be nice to move toward it to battle the continual feature creep of the federal government.

Societies, governments, and businesses have life cycles. America had a great start with the idea of Liberty being central to everything (except the ironic scourge of slavery). That notion of Liberty attracted people all over the world who helped turn the US into the super power that it was. Over time, though, the success and ends that Liberty created became more powerful than the core message of Liberty itself.

Now here we are. The Takers have infected our society to such a degree that all of our societal "safety nets" are headed for near-inevitable bankruptcy. Unless people wake up pretty soon and realize that we have to act responsibly, we're pretty much doomed to suffer a great amount of financial upheaval in the next 25 years. With the new season of Dancing With the Stars underway, though, I doubt anyone will have time to worry much about Liberty.
Wow, such a great idea, and its presentation video is phenomenal. I don't see how this could not succeed.
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