skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is not a matter of imperative or functional. It's the difference between mutable and immutable style programming. You can have an immutable imperative program or a mutable functional program.

Lots of algorithms maintain mutable states. When these algorithms are translated into immutable state style, their complexity (BigO) shoots up. The SO question is asking what's the increased complexity when moving to PURE functional programming style.
Google has been selling ebooks for about a year less than Apple (April 2010 vs Dec 2010). If Google had hit their announced release date for their ebook store it would have been with in weeks of each other. Sure Google just rebranded their store a few months ago but it has been around for much longer.
The author thinks that SELinux is a distribution - it's not, it's a technology that can be enabled by any distribution. That pretty much blows the credibility of the whole thing as far as I'm concerned.
If the black bars bother you then cover them with tape. You are not loosing anything because they are there - you are gaining height.

Just because the pixel exists doesn't mean you are required to use it.

Opinions like yours are apparently common, so what manufacturers do is remove those areas. You get less pixels, and like it better. Totally preposterous.

Taller screens are better - even when watching widescreen. The extra space is useful for playback controls, closed captions, etc.
You don't use multiplication in your life?
Very true! Hence the part where I'm thinking out loud regarding how the gc ordering of data after a copy/compact (in the one generation gc) impacts locality. And I suppose this also applies to more modern gc setups like multiple generations or parallel collection. Is there some notion of data locality that we can formalize and analyze for at least simplified versions of modern memory hierarchy? How well do standard gc algorithms perform when analyzed thusly? How efficient can each style of gc algorithm be if it's designed to optimize locality?

It clearly has some relation to optimal caching optimization problems, but with more explicit interdependencies. It's also seemingly both an online and offline problem in terms of how to analyze it, but I need to think on it more
Yes, the email system could be better. But for something that was designed decades ago it works surprisingly well.

Should somebody try to do some smart parsing of failure notifications to make them more readable? Sure, I don't see why not. But don't pitch the baby out with the bathwater here. The underlying system is not that bad.
I really don't understand your point. Calculating a 15% tip is monstrously simple to do in your head. When I visited the US, I was able to do it from the first meal onward, for meals solo or alone. Dropping the last digit and adding half again is so brain-numbingly simple, though I must admit I did dine at one stage with some native college students who pulled out a calculator to figure out their part of the tip.

It's not clear in what you're writing if you mean "when presented with a bill, how much to tip" or "given the final payment, how much of it was tip", or something else.
Since there is some confusion on Twitter[0], perhaps you'd like to clarify wether you did, in fact, disclose information on a 14-year old girl to the government, without the presence of a subpoena asking you to do so?

[0]: http://twitter.theinfo.org/190203402284834816
Hacker News vs Slashdot - Post Mortem Analytic Comparison
I agree -- credible competition is vital to push industry forward.
Come, come

Up and coming low-level programmers still exist. I just turned 20 this past January and I've been doing x86 at least once a week for 5 years now, in fact, my meal ticket -- IDA Pro, sits as I type this whirring away at calculating the relocations of some PIC in our favorite browser.

While it may be true that that the majority of people with assembly knowledge are slaving on heap sprays more than swizzling pointers or tackling alignment issues these days (or any other "real" low level work). All and all, auditing isn't half bad and I suppose the markets agree.

I guess to that end, There's going to be no shortage of low level junkies as long as kids still think hackers are cool. Kids are going to be attracted to the cyberpunk glam of hackers (or, naturally, Angelina Jolie's smoking body in 1995). Of course, as it goes, If you want to be any good at that sort of thing, you have to write memory corruption bugs, and if you're writing memory corruption bugs then low level is a necessity.

So while it may be true that producing anything save VX crypters in assembly is a dead end, the deep knowledge is immensely rewarding and while it's true you might not be able to erect castles, you can perform some deep machine magicks that will make a few people's heads turn.

You unlock many things that many programmers simply dream of -- The ability to reverse applications, to tweak some 'interesting', decidedly-nonoptimal optimizations (LEA is always faster!) and find cleverly exploitable bugs in applications that you don't have to source to.

You can optimize in ways that other programmers, no matter how skilled in any other language, simply cannot. A recent and related anecdote is my database ( zv.github.com/artifact ) which, once upon a time, was extremely slow during the mkey exchange when it diffs the hashes against it's own, it was copying every hash and comparing it to every other hash it had received thus far (For when quadratic time is too fast). Normally this would have been a few hours long job to rewrite some pithy external library, write tests and somehow implement speedy string manipulation in Erlang. Nope, HiPE allows you to treat an object file as a module as long as it has the correct export interface. My humble database is now an order of magnitude faster on convergence (This may speak more towards the performance of string processing in Erlang than any personal prowess, but still).

So, in conclusion Mr. Andy Firth, it's probably true that the vast majority of people who you are interviewing aren't very good, because hey, that's the central limit theorem at work!

However, I assure you, somewhere out there, there's a boy and his linker, learning low level the hard way. If I were you, I'd hit up security and reversing/crackme forums, you're practically guaranteed to find a wizard or two.

That's the Circle of life :)
My Hacker School experience so far
88% of Tablet and Smartphone Owners Use Their Device While Watching TV
'Corcoran also shares her number one power tool "which no one should have to live without"--and it's not an app.'

Umm... what is her power-tool? I'm not watching a video when it could have been mentioned in the text. This is why I read--videos cost time.
I put my alarm clock across the room so that I have to get up out of bed to shut it off. Negative reinforcement works!
Its old, it doesn't look nice. But it is surprisingly reliable.
doesn't work: "faild to connect to remote"
I find this comment to be rather out of line. IE has really gotten its act together in terms of implementation of new features. I take it you haven't really given IE10 a serious try.
I hope they don't, because if they end up with no product in the mobile arena they'll soon become an NPE with tons of very relevant patents and nothing to lose.

With the erosion of the relevance of desktop platforms, Microsoft's Windows will become a shadow of its past. Without Windows, Office will soon follow it, pushing their server offerings in the same direction. This is really a bet-the-company situation.
Also, I guess at least mentioning the ideas from http://qubes-os.org/Home.html wouldn't hurt...
What a terrible article. It's aimed at teaching people how to use an Arduino, and the point of the article is to give a beginners look into it, yet the disclaimer says it's only about the software side. I'm sorry, but an article about the Arduino should be equally about hardware and software.

The real reason I'm saying this is that his diagrams with the LEDs will not work. The potential across the LED leads is 0. In fact, on the example with 3 chasing LEDs, it may blow the ports (I don't know know if the pin is an open collector or a current source).
yeah, the whole unbalanced-to-the-left thing is really offputting, to the point that i'm avoiding reading my stream. i planning to play around with css userstyles and see if i can centre the stream properly.
Does Microsoft want a piece of RIM?
I'm probably a tiny minority but I don't like that CSS is becoming so bloated with features that overlap fully-fledged programming languages. Yes, it's becoming more powerful but I wonder if some of this is due to an inherent "right, what can we add next?" attitude which takes it further away from its presentational role.

I also mourn the loss of a simplicity that meant that curious teenagers (like myself way back when) could look at a site's code and easily learn from it.
Lowdown is now free and open source
Microsoft in the media: Unfair and unbalanced
And that's why the Mac came more than 30 years before the first viable tablet. No competition means incumbent-driven change.
So awesome. Have shown everyone in my family.

When I was 11, I made Pinball machines. You would use Popsicle Sticks as the flippers, and I proper Clipboards up on books. Then I designed my pinball machines, with Plastacine, paper, and lego. I charged a nickel to my friends to play them.

Here's where, in retrospect, I think I was particularly smart. I also had a 'Comic Book Rental' program. It was more like a pass, and for one dollar they could take out 3 comics at a time, any time - and when they came over they could play the pinball for free.

I had to do it in my bedroom however, and only to friends. This kid had a storefront location! And access to all the cardboard boxes he could ever dream of!

Loved this - thanks for sharing.
I think of Data structures as extension, value sets. Function as intension. They are dual to each other, sort of, modulo `some` energy.
Grad student sneaks fisherman into Nobel's 1950s publication
They never seem to amaze in the form of catching a terrorist...
those of us who live by the motto "Anything worth doing is worth obsessing over" will immediately recognize this kid as one of ours.

i offered in the reddit thread to buy him an actual claw machine. they don't look that expensive. anyone know an arcade machine dealer in LA?
I know that was sarcasm (as was my original post), but that's kind of my point. Haskell is a simpler language than Ruby in a lot of ways. But the extra complexity in Ruby (or Perl, whatever -- pick your workaday language) is driven by clear practical concerns.

Where a functional nut would sit and worry about getting a design right that correctly abstracts the properties of any right triangle, a web developer is happy to hard code the values for 3:4:5 because that's all that's required. And he isn't wrong to do so.
Except this kid's actually generating income.
Actually, it works just fine with a variety of iOS, Linux, Windows and Mac clients:
https://guardianproject.info/wiki/OSTN#Client_Software

It is just SIP over TLS, and RTP media with ZRTP encryption - all open protocols.
They just can't write LKMs like they used to.
Do they say anywhere whether they mean $1MM in total sales or that they are now doing $1MM per month in sales? Those are two totally different concepts and I'm not sure which hurdle WPEngine has crossed.
Above the fold design is critical from a marketing standpoint. But you're right, everything doesn't have to be above the fold.. if anything the above the fold should be designed to encourage readers to scroll below the fold.
Yup. For now, you just make calls to other people using the same server or another OSTN compliant server:
https://guardianproject.info/wiki/OSTN#Client_Software

Your standard phone calls still go through the standard dialer and public phone network.
What's the point? Microsoft makes money off of Android phones anyway - not just that, but I believe they make more off of Android phones than off of Windows phones?

Even if that >50% isn't true (though I believe it is), it helps to put things in perspective - what's Microsoft's larger goal, other than just get a bit of market share in another corner of the larger tech market?

Google and Apple both have visions behind Android and iOS, respectively, even if they're very different visions/goals. I still don't know what Microsoft's driving vision behind WP7 is - that is, if they have one.
The current fork status indicates 52 unemployed Rubyists?!!
I felt like sharing this info here because it matters to me more than pixel density or aspect ratio.

It turns out that GPUs like the popular Intel integrated gfx chips requires each lines of your framebuffer to be 64 bytes aligned. And yet, when using a 1366 wide resolution in 32bit per pixel mode, the visible length in bytes of a framebuffer is 5464, which is not a multiple of 64.

The operating system circumvent the problem by allocating 5504 bytes for each line of the framebuffer instead of 5464. It represent a loss of 30KB of unused memory.

Anyway, you're probably think I'm mad to care about those things instead of pixel density or aspect ratio, and 30KB is definitely meaningless compared to the memory footprint of a complete framebuffer (which is around 4-5MB). But you know these people who can't stand having the volume bar set to an odd number on their television set ? I'm exactly like them, why in hell would you not use an horizontal resolution which is not a multiple of 64 ?
One ID to rule them all...but is that the best idea
They do. And it's slow. Although, to be fair, I don't know if it's for that reason.
Haha, the paper towel and Tide box computer brings back memories. My cousins and I made side-scrolling video game machines this way.

We set up the paper towel rolls in the box, with paper (half-sheets of copy paper taped together end to end) rolled around them, with a big, long scene/level drawn on it. One person would turn the crank, causing the screen to scroll while the player controlled a character which could move up and down, courtesy of being attached to a popsicle stick poking out a slot on the side of the box. The object of the game was to hit goals and jump over objects and pits.

More complex games had two popsicle-stick controlled sprites, and I seem to remember that we experimented with cannibalizing the motor out of a broken remote control car to run the screen, at one point.
Ice Age Online - Browser Game - DotMMO.com
Thanks for being an awesome maintainer!

I made my first contribution to a GH project a couple of weeks ago. It was only a few lines, and the maintainer had to make a few modifications before he merged it, but I got some really positive feedback from him and you could tell how grateful they were.
Intel's 50+ core MIC architecture: HPC on a Card or Massive Co-Processor?
They'd never do it but I wonder what would happen if they forked Android and put the Metro skin on it.
RedPhone had some nice optimizations like tying into your existing public phone number (perhaps a privacy issue depending upon your view), and using SMS or Google's Push service to ensure your device is not sleeping when you get a call. OSTN/OStel has no custom modifications, but alternatively then is pure open-standards based.

Voice quality wise they are about the same... the goal is for you to be able to run your own server as well. There is already some info available today on how to do this: http://freeborn.devio.us/doku.php?id=freeswitchfreebsd
Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0) review
> The importance of your credit card is that it links the account with you.

What if you pay with a prepaid Visa/Mastercard, since those aren't linked to your name? Or in cash (yes, that still exists!), or via money order (since sending cash in the mail is illegal, and money orders can't be reliably linked to an individual).
I tried this too, but then I started getting up while I was still mostly asleep, walking across the room to turn off the alarm, and then going back to bed again. I even tried putting the alarm in a closet, but I'd still get up and turn it off.

What worked for me was (1) going to bed at a reasonable hour and being sure I got 8 full hours of sleep, (2) giving up coffee, and (3) going running every morning (I lived next to golden gate park, totally worth it). I was able to get up early, got tons more done in the morning, and I also got in shape. Best thing I've ever done.
I did misread what you wrote, but I thought the point was a good one to make, so posted it anyhow. Not disagreeing, just adding.
It would run like shit.
This is not necessarily true. In particular: "2. Black and green tea manufactured from leaf from the same bushes on the same day will have virtually the same caffeine levels (within +/- 0.3%)"

http://chadao.blogspot.com/2008/02/caffeine-and-tea-myth-and...
I agree. I've been using the N9 since its release and I think Meego is very close to being consumer-ready. Great UI, fast, stable, great built-in software. Some built-in software lacks some features, it doesn't quite have the tweakability Maemo had and there are a few bugs and shortcomings here and there. But considering the small market the N9 was deployed in, one can only wonder what it could have been if it had gotten more attention from Nokia.

I was an N900 user before that. I hoped Nokia would be a shining beacon in the mobile space, with an open operating system and a more GNU/Linux software stack than just the kernel. But those hopes were shattered by Elop's turn. I guess Microsoft will continue to drive Nokia's market price further into the ground so they can buy them for a few pennies.
بناطيل فيزون
بناطيل فيزون
بناطيل فيزون
بناطيل فيزون
بناطيل فيزون
بناطيل فيزون
http://www.analoza.com/vb/t671.html
The end of the article does mention this:

> SELinux is not its own distribution. It is a subsystem of plain-vanilla Linux. SELinux is included in all kinds of Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, he said.
How recruiters look at your resume
Silly putty for potholes
I'm also in the current batch of hacker school. It's been a humongously, life-changingly fantastic experience.

Before I did hacker school, I thought I was a good programmer. But being in a room with 20 incredibly smart people really makes you realize what you don't know. Since joining, I've:

-Authored a (now-committed) patch to the python core
-Written a SPDY implementation
-Contributed to many open source projects
-Learned C and Rust

I've also made friends that I hope to keep around for a long time.

In short: If you have any interest, even if you've only done a bit of programming before, apply. They select on passion for self improvement, not skill.
Speaking of being stupidly optimistic.. not sure if that's a phrase with a negative connotation, but I certainly think it's an admirable quality.

This kid is stupidly optimistic. Grown people and some kids would think "I can't build an arcade out of cardboard boxes, there's no way it would ever work", this kid is thinking "of course I can build an arcade out of cardboard boxes. Why wouldn't I be able to?".

Kids think anything is possible. That's awesome, because if they think something is possible and want it badly enough, they'll try it. And even if they fail, they still tried. And they'll try again. And again. As they grow up, most are constantly reassured that they can't do anything, and this is when lose their optimism.
Their "vision" is "me-too." They're getting killed by the app store(s) and they're looking for a way to expand their relevance beyond their desktop revenue streams. Their vision is quite simply to remain relevant. I can't say they don't care about innovation, but innovation seems to be playing second fiddle to catching up. Their entire company history is littered with being late to the party. They're operating on a multi-year velocity rather than shorter cycles. While that worked for Windows (due to Apple's late 1980s incompetence) it won't work now because Apple (and Google) are firing on all cylinders. They're chasing a moving target. Wayne Gretsky said, skate to where the puck is going to be. MS is building products around where the puck used to be.
Allowing some injustices and illegal behavior to go on because there exists larger injustices out there doesn't seem like a good strategy for anyone hoping to see an improvement.
That's most unfortunate! Would you mind telling us what browser (including version) and OS (ditto) you're using?

Thanks!

(we did a full test in "all" browsers before posting, but there are always edge-cases and we appreciate your help a lot)
From my last job working on SIP and encrypted SIP I found a flaw in the PJSIP library where they were generating keys using only ASCII characters and not the full range of the unsigned byte type. I found this in a client application phone using PJSIP, informed the developers of the application; I don't know if it ever got back to the PJSIP developers. This was about 3 months ago and I don't know if this has been resolved in PJSIP, but I would be worried about SRTP key strength in this application.
Status codes:

http://www.iana.org/assignments/smtp-enhanced-status-codes/s...

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3463

I'm guessing most e-mail client providers just haven't found a reason to prettify the responses. If anyone is up to the task, then can you explain PGP/GPG so the entire world can also understand and use that?
I wrote a script to automate GitHub project creation, open sourced 70 apps today
I think it depends somewhat on what the proportions you're talking about are. Ben Tilly's slide seems to be saying that changing already enrolled users from A to B is bad, clearly. I don't think changing the filtering rate on new users would be bad, but I haven't looked at the mechanics in a while.
Explain Ukkonen's suffix tree algorithm in plain english? - Stack Overflow
A lot of people prefer to look at actual error messages vs. a pretty face telling them, "Don't bother to learn what's actually going on here... let me iDumb this down for you."
I really like this idea.

You can apply this to every transactional email, not just to bounce messages.

Off the top of my head:

- Vacation auto-replies

- Receipts

- Error reports (ok, that might be a bit coding specific)
The government complaint is actually pretty easy-to-understand and read, for anyone who wants to understand the real issues here:

http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/ebooks04112... (pages 5-9)
> This looked less like someone earnestly plotting to kill Obama and more like a bored kid phoning in a fake bomb threat to their high school.

It doesn't matter, they take all threats seriously. Two children in a UK school sent death threats. The US secret service tracked them down, and sent English police to see them.
Imagine how much more disruption they would be in this market if a bunch of the largest incumbents weren't illegally colluding with each other to keep prices artificially high.
They apparently didn't fact check or properly research this article because its got some things that are blatantly wrong...

This article is also fairly old, any idea why it was posted?
Ask HN: Best service for finding a virtual personal assistant
I recognize this question has been asked before on HN. But I haven't seen a post in a while, so I thought I'd ask again.
Can you share your views on which platforms are the best for finding virtual or remote personal assistants. I'm looking for a part-time assistant to assist me with regular tasks, not a one-off type service like Fancy Hands. Ive tried Get Friday in the past, and wasn't thrilled. Open to suggestions. Also curious if people have a preference for oDesk or eLance for these types of requests.
Thanks
That's more or less what Nokia was doing. MeeGo was a Linux kernel with a mostly Nokia userland on top (albeit more desktop Linux-like than Android.

I doubt they would succeed. I'm not sure whether the carefully cultivated to be anti-Unix Microsoft development mindset would survive the allergic reaction this would cause.