skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When every bit of speed and space management actually counts, C (or it's derivatives like C++ or objective C) are still king. Half of those above projects were written when JVM, .Net and python/ruby/etc were mature widely used solutions.

Think about what a gc pause would do to an OS - it could kill performance for every single process on the system, cause issues with input buffers overflowing, and other related issues. A microsecond here and there in call latency may not matter most of the time, but in thousands of syscalls or in low level network processing have large cumulative effects.

Don't get me wrong, I love my high level languages and modern GC runtimes, but there are days and places when microseconds and bytes still matter, and for those, I still grab C. Just like the nailgun hasn't fully replaced the hammer, or the vacuum hasn't fully replaced the broom, there is a good reason C still exists and finds acceptance.

Maybe Go or Rust will start to creep even more into the C space than JVM etc already have, but I really don't see it fully going away, it is just too useful and a well understood proper tool for some jobs.
Your Job May Be Killing You
Tools to Launch Your Startup on a Shoestring (Part 3 of 3)
I like to think of the red alert number as my "score". The higher it gets the more I know I'm ignoring useless distractions.
Good and valid point. Thanks!

Now we just need to find some voice talent! :)
It would be lovely to read an IP lawyer's opinion on this story's implications.

Does this mean that a programmer working at a firm can walk away with code without breaking any laws?
For an overwhelming majority of nontechnical users, no, it is not a good error message. It is filled with confusing technical things that he/she shouldn't have to care about, like HTTP status codes and IP addresses. Even if these people chose to read the whole thing, they still would have no idea what is going on. So it's a terrible error message.
And the counter-counter argument is that if it were really the prices set by the market that we were returning to, collusion would not have been required.
Unfortunately ever since X-Frame-Options became popular, this tool has been rather ineffective.
This post by Russ Cox about random hash functions is timely: http://research.swtch.com/randhash
I think that part of the idea is that reading a message, replying to a message & all other things that you do with mail can be considered as "tasks".
Court overturns conviction for theft of Goldman source code
"I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses: ..."

Seems reasonable to me.
Man, he's going to be chick-magnet now :)

Guys, c'mon donate a few dollars to the kid, right here:

http://cainesarcade.com/ They are raising 100k for Caine's scholarship fund and at the moment about 97k has already been donated :D
I think the two points that seemed different than your previous interviews:

1. The story about your wife's WP hosting was a bit long. It seemed like you were trying to sell the purpose of Mr. Cohen's service but the story was a bit long-winded.

2. I liked that you summarized the video at the start of the interview - but you should do the summary before your interviewee is on-screen. As soon as his face hits the screen I want to hear him talk...

Other than that, I enjoyed it!
I like that he got off, but does that means for the hackers that took googles code. What happens to all patents on software.
Tech Companies That Didn't Get Destroyed When They Were Bought
Oddwerx Fun with ROS from Willow Garage | Oddwerx
Does anyone know if this behavior will be enabled by default in 3.3?
>Recipient address rejected: undeliverable address: unknown user //

Hmm, it's okay.

It's a person masquerading as a computer masquerading as a person. This doesn't really help IMO. Why can't it be

"Hi, this is the Yahoo! email support team. You sent a message to someone but when we tried to pass it on the email address didn't work so we can't send the email for you. Here's some things to try ... technical details and the text of the email you sent are below [or attached]."

The response could also include info like that the domain is live.
The underlying problem is that SMTP only has a few error codes, and so there is no way the MUA can understand (in a standard way) why the MTA rejected the message. HTTP ended up having richer errors, and so clients can provide nice messages if they feel like it. (IE does this for 404s and 500s, though it's not a nice message and it seems to upset most web developers.)
No. You will probably be breaking some laws, but not laws against theft.
I don't think you do. Are you really saying that introduction to python should be about REPL and basic syntax, and not accomplish an actual goal?

> because all of the tutorials out there teach you to build a giant pile of insecure spaghetti hacks.

I think this says it all. You really aren't interested in changing anything, just bad mouthing everyone and anyone that will listen. This entire time I've tried to have an honest conversation with you, and at each point, you've done your very best to dismiss what I've said and insult as many people as possible.

I'm sorry, I don't work with your type. Good day.
I use Sleep Cycle when I absolutely need to be up at a certain time. I also like the no-alarm mode just for tracking sleep. When you first run it, they have a calibration mode where it makes a noise when it detects motion, so you can roll around in bed and listen for where you need to place it.

It probably depends on your mattress how well it works. If you've got a foam mattress or one of those ones with commercials of dropping bowling balls next wine glass towers, then yeah, maybe your phone won't pick it up. But it seems to work well enough with my cheap mattress.

In the morning, I can definitely see spikes on the graph for times I know I woke up to pee, so it's definitely detecting something. I don't know about those reviews that say they still get graphs with it left on the dresser; I've not tried that test.
Come off it, you started out by smearing all potential critics with accusations about their integrity, before then going on to claim that Apple taught the Chinese the concept of ethics, all within your first post.

What kind of response would you expect from that? A cake and a paper hat?
The Hunt For An ‘Instagram For Video’ Is On, & Socialcam Is Aiming For The Crown
For those asking why, color replacement is enough to have them implemented. Once your stylesheet grows, you'll have your theme colors scattered all over the place. So having them in one place at the top and making minor changes to the theme is a great time saving feature.
I actually like dart and go more so than javascript. Javascript still has a leg up when it comes to libraries. If Go or Dart get a follow I would be happy to look into it.
Ask HN: Permanent anonymous email as a service?
Many of you may be familiar with Mailinator and clones. They generate temporary anonymous email addresses and prove useful when signing up for services without giving up your personal email. However there are cases when I want to subscribe to a service and receive notifications. I may decide to unsubscribe later. Is there a need for a service that generates permanent anonymous email addresses?

I could generate a long term anonymous email address and have it forward email to my personal email account. Later when I want to stop receiving email from this account instead of looking for unsubscribe button I would delete the anonymous email address. This would solve the problem of unsubscribing from email subscriptions.
Udacity is fantastic. It's the best online CS education I've ever seen.
What is Office without Windows?
Thank you for all the kind words and comments!

We'll be working hard with explaining the product better and add lots of tutorials and more detailed examples to the documentation!

UPDATE: You can submit a token when using the Push API as well. We'll be covering benchmarks in a blog post in the not so distant future.
rajpaul -- the point of the original article is that the crime rate has not really declined; instead, crime has been _shifted_ to the prison system, where incarcerated people live permanently or semi-permanently in horrible conditions.
Wearing my Chronos now, the main drawback in developing for it is everything is seven-segment displays so info has to be pretty basic, still it was a nice watch for $50
How come you do the sqrt of 89?
Something that has worked for me is to have an alarm that I actually like waking up to. Shitty alarms make for the most annoying things in the world when you're trying to sleep. But something nice... we all have our preferences... I like wind chimes, or progressive music - stuff that picks up, rather than starting off with a bang.
This sometimes happened to me when I was in uni. I'd leave my alarm (my phone usually) on my desk on the other side of the room. Some days I'd wake up and see my phone on the pillow beside me.. when this happened there was always an "OH SHIT WHAT TIME IS IT" panic since it meant that I got up, turned off the alarm and went back to sleep.

I also used my computer as an alarm clock for a little while. I wrote a program that would set the windows volume to whatever value (0 to 100) was passed as a commandline argument and then I set up the task scheduler to run it in the morning. This way, I could play music quietly at night and in the morning the volume got cranked up to 100% to wake me. Worked well until one morning there must have been a power outage and my computer was off...

Solving puzzles to turn off an alarm doesn't work for me either - my still asleep self is quite clever at pulling plugs, taking out batteries or simply just smashing a persistent alarm.

Luckily, unless I'm really tired (eg go to bed at 6am, get up at 8am), I normally wake up before I need to get up. Actually getting up is a lot harder than waking up tough.
I was just thinking something similar. Did we all learn nothing from the recent spate of PHP critiques? Wordpress has several delightful qualities, but "runs easily and smoothly with minimal maintenance required" is not among them unless you are among the least demanding possible users of it.
Does anyone have a link to the commit that fixed this? I'd be interesting in seeing the before and after.
I suggest returning the error in a .doc file so that people can read. At least some.

And yes I get you idea, this is actually a RFC
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6522

And the MUA (Mail Program) should just deal with it properly. But then you have all these Bloatus Notes, M-SExchange and other broken system in the wild...
It would be reasonable to someone reading HN, since we probably are not scared off by technical jargon. Even if the instructions were spelled out completely, the plain-text formatting and numbers (IP addresses) immediately tell the average user that this is over their head and they ignore it. It's not user-friendly for real-world users.
My still asleep self would simply take out the battery, turn down the volume, or throw the phone into another room or out of the window.
For just a 1.0 language Go is really looking good. Compared to Python at 2.x it's very impressive. I'm looking into using it for my project.
I agree with your "what can we add next" qualm, but I'm not feeling that way about variables in CSS. I don't see variables hindering code readability/learnability. As a front-end guy have you ever exclaimed, "Man, I'm glad CSS doesn't have variables!"?

I've done front-end stuff on and off for a few years and I've always thought variables would be the "easiest" thing for implementers to enhance CSS.
I had never heard of Fritzing [1], the program used to draw the diagrams. 18MB for the windows version, I think I'll check it out. it looks to be at least 3 years old. found it on hack a day [2]

[1] http://fritzing.org/download/
[2] http://hackaday.com/2009/08/25/fritzing/
Could you be more specific about the minimum level of programming? My programming is still in a nascent stage but I am considering applying to HS and wonder what the minimum bar really is. How would you describe the initial coding level of the least experienced attendee for your batch?
The problem, generally, is that rendering the tiles is computationally expensive. You have to wade through each feature (thing that could be represented in the tile) and decide if it intersects the tile, then decide if/how it will be rendered, then render and composite it with every other visible feature.

Doing all of that work quickly is possible, it just isn't simple. Also, for most people the data involved changes relatively infrequently. Why have the server render the same tiles repeatedly when you could just cache the result and reduce it to a simple file hosting problem?

Also, your 2048x1536 screen may likely be loading more than 48 tiles. It's common to request tiles around the current viewport and (less common) above/below the current zoom to ensure they're present before they're needed. To see this in action, see how fast/far you have to scroll a google map before you can "catch it" with tiles that aren't loaded.
What I really want to know is how a framework such as Flask uses a decorator for the route. How is the correct function picked for a particular route that is defined against the decorator? (Maybe I'm completely misunderstanding this...)
Yeah, but UIs aren't there for reading; they're for using. If I get an undeliverable because the recipient was bad, then the UI just needs to indicate, "Bad Recipient."

People are doing energy management all the time, and that's not a bad thing. They see something that looks technical at a glance (it's got numbers and slashes and run-on sentences) and that's it. They know they're not technical, and they don't aspire to be technical, so they don't waste energy trying to comprehend the message.
I've definitely read things, and maybe they were just statements from the RIAA/MPAA, that said copyright infringement was exactly the same thing as theft. Or am I making that up?
You missed a crucial part of the post:

Machines can read [these error messages] just fine, though.
Here's an idea: machines shouldn’t slap us in the face.
They should help us along if they fail to do our bidding.

He's not encouraging admins to replace useful debugging output. In fact, it's the opposite: he's encouraging email client designers to actually use the debugging output to let people know what went wrong. His mockup is quite clearly of an email client showing users relevant recovery options based on an underlying error message the client has parsed.

In other words, he's proposing that email clients treat MTA error messages precisely as they already handle raw headers. Full headers contain useful debugging information, but you aren't normally debugging.
The decorator can do anything. In flask the decorator syntax is just shorthand for adding the route to a registry which is looked up every request.

The source code is pitifully small: https://bitbucket.org/mitsuhiko/flask/src/4d82231621fc/flask...
Create An RSS Feed From Scratch.
Calling a decorator can mutate some shared state.
Dopiest thing I've seen about this is the statement that Apple "considered" fixing prices.

God forbid someone should think about doing something.
Of course. This is obvious to anyone who isn't indoctrinated by copyright industry doublespeak.

Copyright law is a restriction on the copying of information. Theft has no place in copyright law and never has. It is merely a perjorative term used to confuse the issue.

Edit: Apologies for my angry tone. As you can tell, this really bothers me.
For anyone posting promo codes, this works very well for distributing them and avoiding having to check them all to see if any were unclaimed: http://yaycodes.com/
I successfully hacked my sleep schedule around 5 years ago. I used to think I was a night owl basically working till 3 in the morning and waking up at noon, then, I realized I was basically not being productive enough doing that. I used a combination of two things:

1. Sleep exactly 7 hours a night at the exact same time (+/- delta) and wake up at the same time.

2. Use the same awful alarm that wakes me up. The alarm doesn't sound alarming, its just that when I hear it, I have to wake up because it is tied with so many memories of waking up in the morning for exams. In fact after switching to an iPhone which doesn't have the same alarm, I have found it (slightly) difficult to wake up.
Oliver Samwer's 1999 thesis on startups
With all this huge valuation talk going on, I wondered what happened to color. It looks like they're kinda going for this too: http://www.color.com/
Link is broken on my end.
They control distribution. You know, that thing nobody needs? Well, you can't use what you don't need without them.

Of course, each statement is true for different parts of the market. You still need distribution for physical books and you don't need it for e-books IF you can make people aware of your book somehow. Well, that's a big IF sometimes.
Supra skate
Note that he is still likely to go to prison. He was convicted under two federal laws, and the appeals court disagreed on their use, not his guilt. As he has essentially confessed to criminal copyright infringement and some lesser crimes as a part of the appeals process, the prosecution will most likely charge him under some state laws next. (The state laws have much lower maximum sentences.)
I am a bad person. Even with an important meeting I have / will sleep in.

Later, I would invent crazy excuses, or just tell about my monstrous condition.
http://www.convertapi.com/
An upvote, in my opinion wouldn't be nearly enough to let you know how funny I though this comment was... as a fellow entrepreneur just starting out without income it helped remind me that maybe I don't have to do everything perfect the first time around, that I can take some small shortcuts, so long as the end-user enjoys using my application how or what it is made out of doesn't matter.
If such an assertion were true, it would be terrible for their business. Theft of a $20 object is not generally punishable by a fine of $100,000.
I really would love to be accepted... It sounds like so many people are applying though.
There is some serious infrastructure ensuring that that smoke detector is not overwhelmed by the roaring pyroclastic cataclysm that is having lots of Wordpress sites with arbitrarily well-coded PHP running in themes/addons/etc

Simplest example off the top of my head: there's an automated system which will kick you emails saying
"You're sending MySQL ORDER BY RAND(). Not a great idea. We told MySQL to ignore it. There's a setting you can configure to override this if you're confident you know what you're doing. Site outages caused this year by people flipping that switch: 5."
Google+ Thank you Google for breaking all my apps and extensions…
Here's the source of Flask's `route` decorator:

https://github.com/mitsuhiko/flask/blob/master/flask/app.py#...

When you call `route` with a URL pattern, it returns an inner function which is used as the decorator. That decorator just records your route and function in the Flask URL map, and returns your function unchanged.

So, Flask is arguably perpetuating a slight abuse of decorators, since it doesn't decorate or wrap your function at all, but merely saves a reference to it somewhere. But it's a fairly clean way to make up for the lack of code blocks or multi-statement anonymous functions in Python.
Actually it has been found to battle Alzheimer's disease. http://epicentre.massey.ac.nz/EJC/Stuff/PastPapers/Papers_20...
You missed perseverance. Kid never gave up.
Can we? We have been for ages! For more than a decade now! It's an argument that's been repeated over and over and over again.
Except for the easily distinguishable front-paged YC ads.
>One mail server may allow attachments up to 10MB, another 20MB [...] not allow attachments with a .exe extension, [...] important for this flexibility to be available.

[...] I'm not sure that it's entirely feasible to "standardise" error or bounceback messages. //

Well couldn't we use something akin to SPF - ie a TXT field in the domain's DNS record with a shorthand for the acceptable receiving protocol in operation, kind of an RPF.

So you'd have something like:

alicious.com TXT v=rpf1 deny-ext:exe,reg,dll max-size:15MB req-field:sender ip4:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/16 req-format:txtonly req-other:spf ...

would tell the MTA (or the forwarding relay) that this address will likely reject emails containing exe, .reg, .dll files; emails over 15MB; emails without a sender field; emails apparently originating from servers outside the given address range; emails not in text format; emails from domains without a SPF; ...

Whoops got carried away there.

What would be the problems with this sort of scheme?

[FWIW there's already a milter called RPF but that's not what I'm proposing here I'm talking instead about a policy to give to a sender to tell the sender what you intend to accept so that they can choose to match your requirements and avoid having the mail rejected. Obviously an MTA/MUA can choose to receive mail that doesn't adhere to the policy if they wish.]
The Great Thing About Mobile Development - My Development Story
Nope :). Because I really want around 18 inches of vertical height, and how will I fit a 3-foot-wide screen on my desk??

(Edit: Others have discussed the viewing angle issues with rotating a screen, but it is an option.)
Why is waking up early even a desirable goal?

The problem with doing it consistently is that it works great until that one Friday night when you stay up till 3 AM, which screws up your schedule for the next week.
I'm currently working on a startup in an only tangentially related field.

One line item of my capital plan is to relocate a small blog network I run (http://ozblogistan.com.au) to WPEngine. There's enough traffic that I'd need the $249/mth plan.

That's how badly I want not to be a WP administrator. And how much better I think full time professionals could do it.
Good point about my story of Olivia's experience. I think I was excited because it happened recently, and I might have been trying to win him over -- which is odd because I don't need to do that.

Glad you said that about the summary. I've been thinking about the comments and assuming the summary is what everyone was talking about.
Yep, see issue#1 on the proposal:

"As defined here, the syntax for variable usage is different from the syntax for variable definition (i.e. var-foo for definition, var(foo) for usage). Some have suggested that the syntaxes should should match, using functional syntax in both cases. Others have suggested using a prefixed symbol instead of functional syntax (e.g. $foo) for both the property and usage."
> archivable, ... decentralized, encryptable

This. I shudder every time someone mentions replacing e-mail attachments with Dropbox/iCloud/etc., which somebody already did in this thread. With e-mail, I am beholden to nobody; and if I pay some company to handle my e-mail, it's only because I voluntarily chose to do so. I could drop that company at any time, fire up my own mail server, and have a 5TB mailbox with 10, 20, 30 years of searchable history if I wanted to. I can also access it with a whole bunch of free and open-source software, from ESR's original fetchmail all the way to the latest alpha of Thunderbird.

Every other messaging system that I've heard about, on the other hand, is either held hostage to one company's proprietary platform or clearly not intended for people who need to look up conversations they had 10 years ago.

So please, folks, by all means fix what's currently wrong with e-mail. But please think twice before suggesting that everyone replace it wholesale with some proprietary cloud-based TODO app.
They're certainly happy to describe it that way in PR moves and the like, but they've only ever really sued people over copyright infringement, or pursued criminal copyright infringement charges.

Actually charging a copyright infringer with criminal theft of property, as opposed to just colloquially calling such infringement theft, is a fairly novel legal tactic.
If nothing else, it is an appealing site design :-)