skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting rant. Having lived through the first Unix wars I can say with some certainty that the Gnome/KDE/... UI debates often echoed the NeWS/X/Motif/CDE debates. The streams/sockets debate or the Kthread/Events debates, same old same old.

As I've gotten more experienced I have come to appreciate how much some folks care and how little others in the same space do. Makes for an interesting path.

Looking at Linux distros I can easily see folks committing stuff who think Windows 'did it right', the same with folks who felt OSX 'did it right', and yes folks who felt that SunOS/IRIX/Ultrix/What have you 'did it right.' All that really tells you is that there are several right ways. Perhaps most telling is to watch arguments where the parties are arguing from two different places and talking right past each other.

The result however, in a FOSS world, is you get to see all of these visions of what is 'right.' But its not so much a war as it is a sort of dysfunctional anarchy.

In the article, the author notes, but doesn't call out, the difference between a Linux distro and Android, or Tizen, or WebOS, is that the former often has a group of equal committers and the latter has a person/organization that is driving to a particular vision/goal. So while one can rant about how Android sucks as a desktop OS, or Ubuntu sucks as a Phone OS it doesn't really inform the conversation much.

I believe that we will see the emergence of a 'read-only' FOSS project, in the sense that it gains traction, is 'open' in the sense that you can get the code and all, but the leader doesn't allow any outside changes. Android and Chrome both have some of this feel.
Looking for job application advice
I'm an undergraduate student who's taking a gap year next year. I've decided to try applying for a programming job (I've self-studied upper level courses and programmed a decent amount).

I've decided that if I get a job, I'm not going back to college. I don't feel like I'm getting much out of college, and that feeling along with tuition is making me a bit depressed. I'm wondering how to bring up my situation on resumes or interviews. Should I write on my resume that I'm on a gap year, or bring it up during interviews? What's the right way to deal with this? Thanks for any advice.
Domains that resolve to an IP... I'm not 100% sure how they are configured behind the scenes, but the ELBs have a bunch of physical IPs wired into them, so they can SSL terminate for many domains, something that EC2 instances cannot (currently) do.

So Heroku leverages the ELBs to circumvent the 1 IP address per EC2 instance issue.

EDIT: more info here http://serverfault.com/questions/285680/what-is-the-technolo...
Yeah. This is an uninteresting lie relative to the more grandiose ones told by other executives. He added "and Computer Science" but accurately stated the level of his degree and institution. Any evidence that he has added "and Computer Science" in the past? Perhaps this is just sloppiness on the part of whomever prepared the SEC filings? And, the CEO, busy with trying to right the ship, just signed off with only a brief review? Given that I've never heard of the college and that he actually obtained a bachelor's degree, it doesn't seem like a very interesting lie.
How to write an email introduction
Mark has gathered a lot of great people, and they're focused. I wouldn't underestimate them.
Let's reserve prison for people that absolutely cannot integrate with normal society

Are you really making the case that no white-collar criminals should go to prison? I guess I can see where you're coming from, but I personally think that we need more financial fraudsters behind bars. You know, the whole "rule of law" and "deterrence" business.
Check profile. Would not worry about that happening.
I don't understand how this is relevant.

Though I also don't understand why every last HN post about Google's social effort is a circlejerk of how Google sucks, is evil, etc.
1. Live below your means. Save money. Only spend money on occasional experiences (holidays with a SO, etc). Be extreme in minimizing your cost of living. Money in the bank + low cost of living = freedom.

2. If you want to do your own startup don't work for other companies for long if at all. You're liable to get yourself stuck as an employee indefinitely. Do not wait.

3. Learn the full stack of whatever platforms interest you, so you can build complete products yourself. Do not become reliant on a DBA, marketer, designer, sysadmin, iOS dev, etc. Be competent at everything necessary and expert in as many topics as possible.

4. Find a significant other that won't force you to compromise your ambitions, unless you sincerely want to. Related: avoid pregnancy unless you sincerely want to go down that route.

5. Live with roommates while you're < 30. You'll save money and it forces you to maintain a minimum level of socializing. Find good ones. Put a lock your bedroom door anyway.
Instant Distributed Web Crawling with Tornado and Gearman
IBM to buy Tealeaf Technology
"we had a bug in our bug system that toggled the private flag of a bug report to public on a comment to the bug report causing this issue to go public before we had time to test solutions to the level we would like" Thats having a really bad day!
Yes, this. Every person I know who has a reasonably common gmail address gets mail intended for others. For some of them it's often enough that they've created canned responses to deal with them. It's somewhat astounding how many people out there apparently do not know their own email addresses.
No sensitive information?

http://www.ptecwebdev.com/configuration.php?-s
Hehe. Advanced SQL is unfortunately not my thing. I only dabble in it; and the solution seemed easy enough given my ... limited knowledge of views and UNION
> Unless that "legacy" code suddenly mutates to use C99 features that aren't in C++, it'll still compile in the future.

Forcing legacy code to stay woefully out of date to support a single vendor's stubbornness, perpetually growing its maintenance burden as the rest of the world moves on. Hooray for the Microsoft way!
Unless you use SNI (which is only supported in some browsers) you have to have one IP per SSL host as the certificate is sent before decoding the request. ELB doesn't use that and must have 1 IP per hostname.
At this point we have about as much evidence for water on Mars as we have for water on Earth

Be careful with language like that. Sloppy journalists might turn that into a "we need to balance both sides of the story" and we'll wind up with people denying the existence of water on Earth.
From Gay To Pay: How Fab.com Became The Hottest Online Retailer
> Perhaps I should have said "Supporting versions of C past the point where one could plausibly just pipe the C code through a C++ compiler."

Like supporting for-loop variable declarations, which MSVC's C++ compilation mode (/TP) supports, but MSVC's C compilation mode (/TC) does not?

Oh - and what about declaring a variable anywhere other than the start of a scope? Allowed in C++, not in C. Cute.
"$30 million for Revision3, $1 billion for Instagram. Is there really that much of a gap in value between these two companies?"

Yeah, only one was perceived as a threat to Facebook.
Mars had water far more recently than it had any substantially different orbit. The sun has been getting brighter over the past four billion years, too, but afaik that isn't enough to stick together a full Martian climate history. There's other stuff going on which we don't fully understand yet.

Opportunity is far more impressive than Voyager. Voyager has basically been sitting in a nice clean vacuum doing nothing for the past thirty-five years, it's no wonder it's still working. Opportunity has been hard-scrabbling around in sandy, dusty environments, heating up in the day and cooling down at night, with dozens of joints and moving parts waving around all day.
Facebook and Instagram - 37 cents to 19 billion dollars
iPhone vs Android WiFi usage
It's often given lip service in the literature, and then everyone goes back to asking easy questions.
It looks fun and all, but I really wonder about the implementation and practicality of it in C. But once again, it does look really cool.
Editing text on my Android is much easier than on my iPad. I don't know why Apple goes out of its way to make it so hard. And the Apple on-screen keyboard with its CAPITALS-ONLY display is inferior to others as well.
Hey, I'm cool with solipsism.
Why no one cares about Yahoo CEO’s fake degree
I agree with you mostly. I'm not saying that we should trust him regardless of his lie, only that we shouldn't blindly trust others just because we haven't caught them lying yet.
Pretty much everything looks like a memory address. There is currently a memory address "hole" on x86_64 which doesn't, but any number between -140737488355328 and 140737488355327 can represent a virtual memory address. Prefetching any occurrance of any of those would be insane.

The prefetcher detects patterns. If you start accessing memory at N byte intervals, it will start prefetching N, 2N, 3N etc. ahead. So if you allocate your linked list elements from contiguous (virtual) memory, it will be able to prefetch elements. But once you start jumbling the list up, that will fall apart.
I'll say this again: No programming language is fundamentally bad.

Bad programmers have a tendency to move from language to language, blaming their tools for their lack of skill.

This stuff is exciting.
I guess this is an opportunity for any PaaSes that aren't built on EC2.
All great advice
Yahoo admits “Inadvertent Error” on CEO's credentials
Zynga selling words in the DrawSomething dictionary
Yes, but imagine the bus traffic if you tried that: every commited instruction would require a TLB read to see if it "looked like" an address. The poor TLB is overcommited as it is (Intel CPUs can do three memory operations in a clock). All prefetch implementation I'm aware of simply do sequential access (positive or negative) prediction, sometimes with stride detection, and that's it.
Show HN: domainsicle for iOS - domain name search engine
Amon - Server monitoring, logging, and error tracking all in one package
Woooow. Makes you think twice about panspermia theory, being descendants of Martians.. (latter is Neil Tyson comment)
Exactly. Only one introductory computer science course was offered. Which is strong evidence that it's a complete fabrication rather than an honest mistake.
Generally, it doesn't allow you to walk the list given the pointer to an entry. You always need to know the addresses of two adjacent list entries. And yes, this limits its usefulness in practice. I tend to only need doubly linked lists where I want to be able to remove or insert an arbitrary element without walking the list, and you can't do that with an xor list.
As a developer, I like it because it's more extensible and well structured than WordPress, and focuses more on plugins (they don't have to be a bad thing!) rather than baking all of the functionality into a theme.

As a user, I like it because it's smokin' easy to use!
Linkedin has revenue though, they're not just burning cash. Wikipedia tells me they grossed $243M last year, so a purchase like this doesn't sound unreasonable.
It was clear that Yahoo.com was the definitive result for the query "yahoo" so it would score a 10. Other Yahoo pages would be ok (perhaps a 5 or 6). Irrelevant pages stuffed with Yahoo-related keywords would be spam.

As someone who worked on search quality at Google for some time, this bit jumped out at me as a terrible mistake. The correct way to judge results for the query [yahoo] is:

(a) Where is yahoo.com? At the top?

(b) There is no (b).

It seems like a slight difference, but it leads to the wrong priorities. For the query [yahoo], it does not matter if spam or non-spam is in spot #5. The only thing that matters is where you put yahoo.com.
A big pay day for Venrock. They were the only institutional investor on the deal. Roughly 15x return on their $2.7mm in.
So we know about this issue because the bug for the disclosure vulnerability was vulnerable to disclosure because of a bug.
It definitely is, but AWS has made it clear they will be rolling out multiple IPs per EC2 instance this year.

The downsides of not being on EC2 these days are many. You wouldn't be able to offer the fleet of bonus services that Heroku can offer.
Ah, right -- kind of an oh, duh moment for me. Thanks!
Yes, but I don't buy 'great' camping gear: I buy what I need. Apart from clothes, I rarely buy anything new. I have standing craigslist feeds for things that I want. The only new music gear in my studio are items that would be unobtainable used.
Both eBay and Microsoft opened data science offices in New York City today
Believe it or not, we actually had a C exam question where we were asked to sketch out an implementation of this.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/exams/pastpapers/y2010p3q6.... With classic mildly amusing exam humour introduction!
If liars are fired, isn't that a pretty strong incentive?
This is the false dichotomy that they keep banging their heads against.
Err, I guess I meant something else. For instance, what happens if one of the workers goes down after popping? The message is lost, right?

I think I invented your architecture in my head that isn't near reality. I imagined you were using the workers to take incoming published messages and pushing them into the queues that subscribed connections are popping off of. Effectively building your own fanout. So in this context, I was wondering why not just use pubsub which will handle fanout and get rid of the entire worker model.

Thanks for the reply!
>Over seven years into its (originally) 90-day mission, the Mars rover Opportunity arrived at the rim of Endeavour Crater.

This is absolutely amazing engineering. I would love to see NASA double down on robotic exploration (and mining) of the solar system for the next decade or two.

Really advance the state of art of robotics, make discoveries that would be extremely difficult and costly for people to do, and get many more missions per/dollar than a manned program could.
Privacy concerns aside, I'd be just as worried about accidental unintended side-effects. What if CloudFlare suddenly starts mis-identifying something legitimate as some kind of attack and starts filtering it out?
I know, maybe it's not very useful.

But isn't it fascinating? Some information moved from the link node into the state of the program processing it. This halves the link redundancy of a doubly linked list. Suddenly a doubly linked list has the footprint of a singly linked list. How did that happen? :-)

It taught me. Tricks like this make me a better programmer. Even if I won't use the principle involved in this exact way.
Ask HN: Building a startup as a part time non technical person?
What advice would you give to a non technical (non coder) who is currently working full time looking to build a startup?

Should you look for a coder to start the process? Or do as much independently, considering out sourcing early development?

Can you work evenings and weekends to build the plan?

How would you approach potential team members?

Has anyone had experience with making this transition?
If I had a nickel for every time I said "I could have run that company into the ground for half the price they were paying that bozo" I would have... a bunch of nickels and not be much wealthier than I am. Alas.
A Faster Fourier Transform
Research Psychology is, uhm Research Psychology. As opposed to Clinical Psychology. I studied people (behaving online, FWIW), I didn't treat them. Wrote academic papers rather than listening to people.
Let's get physical (units)
I don't get the hype. Nearly every interaction with the LinkedIn iPad app feels very clunky, not to mention completely non-native. The momentum and "bounciness" of scrolling is as blatantly non-native as can be. They've done a bunch of great work to get things as close as possible, but it's still a clunky non-native experience.
Python High Precision Timer Extension - cTimer
You're right. I made that comment early this morning and forgot where I was. I've been on here for a coupla years and I should have known better.

My apologies folks.
Best white noise ever - Star Trek TNG Ambient Engine Noise (Idling for 24 hrs)
Download link in caption:

http://nrg0.us/nccAmbient.mp3
And yet, only worth sidereal research, since the world revolves around shiny things and waiters.
This is great. Apple's Bug Reporter UI is not so great: http://f.cl.ly/items/2G0o0n391o1V3b003C1v/Screen%20Shot%2020...
Keep in mind the upside of LNKD stock. Still probably not enough to retire for most but the upside is substantial.
I would also point out that it's usually better for all parties (yourself included) if the intro is double opt-in.
Without knowing much about you or your expertise, my first impression is you're about to undertake a project that may be too much to handle.

Before you consider launching any startup, you need to find at least a few people who believe enough in your idea to help you. If you don't have that network at this point, start with a small project and see who will help.

From there, start another, slightly larger project. Keep progressing. Eventually and ideally, you'll develop the resources to launch a startup.
Rand Paul has a quick fix for TSA: Pull the plug
Seems like a useful sort of guy to have around. Certainly he's going to have more effectiveness than the SEC in keeping Yahoo's financial disclosures accurate.
As best I understand it, while instruction prefetch is a complex affair, data prefetch is limited to detecting incrementing sequential address access, unless directed through a PREFETCH op. I can't a find a good reference, but I believe at best the CPU can only optimize by detecting stride.

In no circumstance will the CPU magically understand the semantics of some data structure.
I'm also not clear as to what Canonical's main target audience is, but I think it's great that finally someone has the balls to stand up and take lead.

PG once said that design is the limiting edge of open source, which seems true empirically. It looks like Mark Shuttleworth recognises this and has led more progress in Linux land recently than anyone else. He's had to pay the price of upsetting some purists, but I'd rather have that than keep acting nice and have Linux play catch up to other operating systems forever.

In fact, I think Canonical has still ended up too conservative by choosing the services business.

Only a proper product business can give Linux a fighting chance in the consumer market. I'm trying to create one.
OT: You wouldn't happen to have a blog about that? (Nothing is listed in your profile.)
The iOS SDK itself is only for Macs. It seems like a reasonable requirement for something that depends on the SDK to run on the same platform.
That's probably more advanced concept than beginner concept, but totally agree!
Maybe we are talking past each other. This is the page I was thinking of:

http://itasoftware.com/careers/work-at-ita/hiring-puzzles.ht...

These aren't classic Microsoft "puzzle questions". They are programming challenges that say a lot about your approach to programs and problems. In particular, all of them ask you to make tradeoffs between correctness and performance.

They are cool enough to attract engineers, hard enough to discourage the idly curious, and unique enough that no published solution exists. That's why I said that someone who does this kind of puzzle for the sheer enjoyment of it might be exactly what a high-level software shop is looking for.

Would I want a "puzzle expert" who could solve the problems on ITA's page? Hell yes.
There have been several posts that made it to the front page the past few months where someone in exactly your position learned to code and built their app, at least their prototype themselves. Very inspiring. I don't the bandwidth to dig them up at the moment but try some searches. Here's one to get you started:

https://www.google.com/#q=site:news.ycombinator.com+learned+...
NANJINGLUG
The upside potential of LNKD? Depends who you ask.

http://caps.fool.com/Ticker/LNKD.aspx

856 'Underperform' to 196 'Outperform'? Sounds like somebody is bearish! (disclaimer: as i'm sure is quite obvious the Motley Fool community KNOWS EVERYTHING and is NEVER WRONG. coughcough)
Samsung Galaxy S3 with the Siri-challenging S Voice
This is silly. You're only able to make 200-300k/year for the company because of the infrastructure and audience they've built for you and all the other engineers to use as leverage. It is orders of magnitude harder to make that much on your own, regardless of how good a coder you are.

Also - we need more consumption? Wealth comes from production, everything else is just shuffling money around. People in the US are complaining about decreased wages and underemployment, not that they need more vacation.
either the founders accepted a really shitty investment offer or you don't know how to calculate returns
Consider a company with $100M in revenue, $1M in profit, and a market cap of $1B. PE is 1000. Now say this company has a shot at doubling revenue in the next few years without incurring additional cost. They will then have $200M in revenue, $101M in profit, and the PE will be 10.

Can someone provide a concrete example of a company that has doubled revenue in a few years without incurring additional cost? I realize that it is possible, but I'd love to see where this has actually occurred.
this would have cleared any liquidity hurdles, easily. it is a kick-ass outcome for the founders. the investors probably got 10x over 4 years.
I wonder the same about mobile web apps. Why try so hard to make the visual design and user experience so similar to a native app...when you're not a native app?

I'm sure LinkedIn spent an inordinate amount of time tweaking javascript to approximate native scrolling behavior, but as you note, it's just nowhere near the mark.

I commend LinkedIn for open-sourcing[0] pieces of their app, but when user experience is a paramount concern, there is no substitute for native. Ditto for Facebook's iPhone app. Most users may not be able to articulate why things don't feel quite right, but you can bet they'll notice it.

[0] https://github.com/linkedin/LIExposeController
>I can program in any language.

Maybe it's just me, but if you actually think this is relevant/interesting then I can't help doubting your credibility.
This is probably more about our overcrowded jail system sucking up huge amounts of taxpayer money. The point is likely supposed to be that its one more person in jail, which is bad, but because that person happens to be a CEO, suddenly its about how he shouldn't go to jail because he's a CEO. It's a matter of unfortunate implications.
"Object cycles, when two or more objects refer to each other, are currently not handled by the runtime, but will be in future releases."

So, basically, you're stuck with retain cycles right now. My bet is that they implement a way of marking weak references rather than becoming more intelligent than ARC.
Have trouble deciding on a posting title?
Confessions of an introvert
I assume you'd only own one if you had to work on one. Even then, it would be up to the employer to purchase it.
Like all things in life, split-test until perfection. Science.
the rules actually are different when you're selling something with zero marginal cost.

I don't think there is any business that sells something with zero marginal cost. Even if LinkedIn grows significantly without any marketing and sales activities, they still must deal with:

More users == more servers
More users == more support staff
and on and on.

Use Google and Facebook as classic examples.

And if you aren't getting more users, then you are ramping up marketing efforts to do so.

While LinkedIn is a definite success story, I'm not buying it that they are running a zero marginal cost business. I don't believe that anyone is.