skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Funny, after I moved from programming assembly to mostly C (on microcontrollers) I thought pointers and memory allocation were the neatest things. I guess it all depends on your perspective, write a few thousand lines of assembly on a chip with 256 bytes of ram and pointers seem quite magical.

I also think Jeff doesn't realize just how many people out there still write code for small 8 and 16 bit processors, much of which is in C. Although I would not really recommend using malloc in most of those cases the "dangerous concepts of pointers" are still very alive and well.
If I can't do it on my iPhone (via Tweetie) ... forget it
Agreed. There must be something about the gravitational center of my eyeballs that causes them to roll upwards toward the ceiling whenever someone refers to this generation as 'entitled.'
"You have been given the task of saving the US - and by extension the global - economy"

Arrogant motherfuckers. Please save us all ! PLEASE ! Oh how we admire your economic prowess !

... and this game was BORING. There I feel better now.
I see them fine on Ubuntu/Firefox
They actually have a company that'll bring something similar to events:

http://www.robocoaster.com/content/
I believe the jQuery version attaches the handlers to document which allows it to use event bubbling.

I got this info from a comment posted here by jresig himself. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=406653
Of the top 6 results for "Real World Haskell" on Amazon, 2 are Haskell books...
asdf
Somewhat incomplete article... what is he saying? that you shouldn't pay people well?
... others are "Erlang Programming", "Programming Erlang", "Anathem" (!?), and "JavaScript, The Good Parts".

Curiouser and curiouser, Amazon gets...
"Most disasters can be predicted at some point before they strike, by at least some subset of observers."

The lucky ones?
Good website idea someone should build
See's pays careful attention to freshness of ingredients. This is not only my experience, but also the opinion of a panel of chocolatiers and food critics hired by Consumer Reports to evaluate various brands of chocolates. For me, they are a much better value than Godiva. I prefer to give See's boxes as gifts. Giving my friends and family pleasure is valuable to me.

Furniture stores - There is a value add to being able to go somewhere and try out furniture. If you think 4X markup is way too much, then you have a business opportunity on your hands. Get information to the consumer and connect them to furniture makers. The consumer pays less, the manufacturer gets more, and you get rich off of your cut.

Coca-Cola - I don't buy it. Others do. To them, it has some sort of value.

It's a stretch to equate "Make something people want" and "Exploit people's greed." That Venn diagram is two overlapping circles, not just one.
Yes, please, let's write up the science properly.

Take one interesting observation (methane on Mars), add in at least two hypotheses as to causation (life, volcanoes) neither of which have been observed before (as the article confirms) but with one probably more likely than the other. All clear?

Now write it up as follows: Take the probably less likely explanation and SCREAM AT THE TOP OF YOUR LUNGS that it's fact (headline). Then carry on writing the most convoluted "it's life, but maybe not, unless it's life, then it's cool, but we don't know, but we're excited if it turns out to be life because we believe it's life".

Submit to social news media sites. Wait for up-votes. Kick back and watch your server heat up with traffic.

As they say, thanks but no thanks.
You probably just need to track down the right font that has them.
"RT" as it's pretty easy to type

That's pretty much it. Anything that I can't type on a Mac using alt and possibly shift is pretty out there.

Not only that but who the heck has access to that unicode symbol on a cell phone?
I get the impression from a lot of the coverage lately that they've been working on an actual plan to make money. I'm speculating, but this could involve developers working on features or even an alternate platform conducive to that effort that wouldn't show up in the currently public-facing free system.

I saw something similar with Heroku. In fact, in the RubyConf talk, Adam Wiggins pretty much stated that they were asked by their investors to switch gears to the making money part of things. Thus, the Heroku service stayed more or less the same (and good, I might add) for a period of time up until this recent announcement that other stuff had been happening behind the scenes.
I've solved this problem once and for all with a permanent personal boycott of coding horror. His content is a waste of my time.
Not sure why I got downvoted, but we don't actually have any summary pages. We pretty much send all our traffic back to the bloggers, if you aren't getting traffic from us that's very surprising because as Adrian mentioned we've heard great things from most of our network.

The newspaper deals we're doing also send ALL the traffic back to the blogger, check one out here:
http://www.nbcnewyork.com/neighborhoods/?neighborhood_id=179...

Two links going back to the blogger for every one link to outside.in!

You started trolling so I had to repsond, but our goal (along with EB and everyone else in our space) is to get the content more distribution, as I said above, there is a huge gap that the major news publishers have in local news and the faster that gets filled up the better it is for both producers and consumers.
Good point.

But Universities are big - surely, you can find people who are of the same world view. Again, at Rutgers, we had ~40k undergrads. Given that many people, it wasn't all that hard to get together a suite of 6 math majors, hang up a huge whiteboard (technically, shower wall from Home Depot), and geek it up :)

As far as classes, it gets a lot better after you finish the common pre-requisites (if your school doesn't offer "honors" sections of those). When you have the choices of picking one of a dozen classes each taught by a couple of different professors (I'm thinking across-semesters), smart people often start gravitating toward the same teachers - ask around.
Non-carbon life forms are pretty unlikely. Carbon is the only element that naturally forms long polymers like DNA. Silicon in the next element down in the same column in the periodic table, but it forms relatively simple compounds at high temperatures. Think rocks. Non-water based life is a better bet.

If you are thinking artificial life, well yes, just wait a while and we'll cook up some ourselves, roomba's big brother.
Ha. This is exactly the app idea my team worked on at iPhoneDevCamp2 in SF. It was never completed. I wrote the server side, but the other coder got wasted that night, and his hangover forced him to miss most of the day...
Scientists baffled by mysterious columns of coloured light
> FP's greatest drawback, which is the copying of large data structures

I guess you made that one up on the spot. Go read about "Purely Functional Data Structures" http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/theses/okasaki.pdf or have a look at Haskells Data.Map implementation for another example.
He had to work in the constraints of the language..
um, I'm talking about this particular post of his that you specifically quoted. I'm not talking about his general position on learning 'C' (which I also disagree with)
Combinators for the win!
Just because "recycle" and "retweet" both start with "re" does not mean that the recycle symbol can be co-opted for retweeting.

But, meh, it's catching on and it's part of the evolution of language. Soon we'll all be speaking Twitterese.

kthxbai.
Dodgeball Shuttered By Google, Its Co-Creator Promises To Clone It
I believe that he's saying you shouldn't pay people well enough that they'll stay even if they really dislike the work. Instead, find someone who's excited about the work,and then find out how much they want.

There's a lot I don't know about business, but here's an idea I haven't heard of: pay people very little, but with immediate raises. I think the common wisdom is to avoid raises until you have revenue, but if you're going to spend, say, 60K/yr on someone and have funding for one year, you could structure the 60K in such a way as to provide 5 or 10 percent increases in paycheck for the entire year. Since people are happier about getting a raise than having any given amount, this might maximize payroll satisfaction.
>I have devoted probably less than an hour of my time out of over a year of development on this codebase to memory management. I have never understood why people think it is so hard to call free() a couple times whenhttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=435267 your program shuts down.

I'm completely and utterly unable to comprehend how a code-base of the size you mentioned could have its memory managed by a couple of free() calls when your program shuts down. (And if you're program is shutting down, why would you even need to call free() at all? )

Are you using some kind of garbage collector tacked on top of C?

Edit: Can you elaborate on the nature of these programs? Because if you're building any sort of non-trivial data structures in your code at all, then you almost certainly need allocations and deallocations
Yes, true. Still, our society encourages innovation, where anyone is free to start a school entertaining whatever niche you fancy. This solves the vast majority the pain of being in an informed minority - you can find educational institutions from pre-schools to universities where the administration focuses on excellence. For Math, Rutgers and Princeton are great Universities. For CS, I imagine Texas A&M would be good.

Any large university will give you enough of a selection of professors for you to be able to focus on the good ones.
If you are going to troll at least read the subtitle of the book:

"The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes"
I think the real interesting part of Gen Y is the amount of writing which is being devoted to us. Is Gen Y really that difficult to understand or so unbelievable? Does it deserve all this writing and attempts to dissect it?

What's really interesting to me is how much criticism we're getting for wanting jobs that aren't a repeat of the workforce before us. Imagine if the Internet media was around when the generations shifted to cities and away from rural settings! Farmers crying out about the lost workforce from their children who went to work in the industrial revolution factories. Or maybe the outcry even further back when shepherds' kids decide to settle down and build a farm! Gasp Shock horror. Cats sleeping with dogs in the streets. Anarchy abounds. It is... simply put... the end of the world.

Gag. I'm just so tired of the Gen Y angle and BS that gets written about it.
Intelligent species tend to kill each other off. Note that we aren't the only hominids. Note what we are doing to the most intelligent of our cousins. Note what we did to the Neanderthals.
I once worked for a web analytics company. One of the very popular presentations was an overlay of the customer's page which showed counts and percentages for every link and button off the page. It was a simple visual that showed what was converting and what was not. You should try to collect this data even if you are not using an expensive service. It facilitates little optimization experiments.
We have to call free when the program shuts down because the program is available through a library interface, and so it can be called as a linked library in addition to being used as a standalone program. If it wasn't for that, we wouldn't even need free.

The program is structured so that based on the parameters it is given, we know exactly what needs to be allocated: how many video frames need to be malloced and so forth. This is all done in the initialization functions and after the program has started, it never needs to grab any memory ever again. This is not a case of "we're allocating the max we need and distributing it later"--it's a case of since we know how the program works, we know what exactly what it will need to do and how many frames it will do it to simultaneously.

There are only four things in the entire program that are malloced:

1. Video frame objects (big structs with tons of pointers to data that goes along with a video frame). A new_frame function exists to malloc and return a video frame. This makes it easy to check mallocs. We know exactly how many frames will be needed on startup. These frames make up the vast majority of memory usage of the program.

2. One data struct for each thread. Each thread has its own local struct that it passes around containing data currently being worked on.

3. A scratch buffer, per thread. This is a small malloced buffer used for a few calculations that require variable-size buffers, usually depending on video frame width (i.e. something known at initialization, but not known at compile-time).

4. Bitstream output buffers for each thread. In the extremely rare case that a bitstream exceeds the initial allocated value, this is realloced on demand.

Every single one of these can be free'd trivially at the end of runtime.
The problem for most information jobs is it's very hard to measure performance. Basically, I don't know how long a particular task should take, since every task is so different. It's very easy to notice when a guy on an assembly line is slacking.

But, if Tom takes 3 months to complete a new feature/analysis and turns in reams of code/analysis, there's no easy way for me to tell if he was super-productive and finished 6 months of work in 3, or if he over engineered a solution and stretched a month's work into three.

Even worse, Tom doesn't even know how productive he is. He'll think that whatever solution he ends up with is the best possible.

Code reviews, pair programming, etc. all work to alleviate this information black hole. But they just end up stratifying information workers since, over time, workers will rise to better companies in accordance with their competence. And this will just worsen the information disparity. If most of your coworkers are at the same level of competence as you, no one will be able tell you how good you really are.

Incidentally, based on anecdotal evidence, I believe this stratification will start at the bottom and work its way up. And that it is now about 25% complete. I've actually visited a company whose core business is sorting (mailing industry), where not a single employee had a reasonable understanding of Big-O notation, any standard sort algorithms, or any standard threading techniques. I've visited other companies (healthcare industry) that have over a million lines of VB6 (and they like it!) with no plans to transition for at least a decade. Another does most of its work on IBM Mainframes (VSE), and in spite of constantly running up against the limits of the platform, had never even heard of or investigated z/VM, LPARS, or Hipersockets (they thought I was making stuff up when I started to tell them about how all these features would make their lives easier). They scare away most decent programmers, and people who become decent run away. And, all the engineers at these places think they're great.

Anyways, done ranting. I just finished interviewing around the country (eventually found a great company), and was really surprised by the fact that companies with dozens/hundreds of programmers apparently didn't have one good programmer.
Do you thread comments on your startup?
If you are writing good, and highly reliable C, that is meant to run for long period of time, there will be no mallocs() and frees() inside the main loop because memory fragmentation can eventually crash your program. You will dynamically allocate and re-use memory outside of the main loop. You will use the stack for temporary creations. You can actually calculate the maximal stack usage, and ensure you have enough space, instead of 10 days into running that malloc() decides to return a null pointer because of fragmentation.

And one (very good) reason you call free() before your program terminates is so that you can use tools to figure out if there are any "real" memory leaks in your code. This way you don't have to wade through piles and piles of "oh that's not a 'real' memory leak because it'll get cleaned up when the program terminates".
I hear someone typing in the background. Wasn't there a hack that allowed keystroke logging with only audio a few years back?
It's not redundant information and in Haskell you write exactly the same thing.

doSomething :: HashSet Int -> HashSet Int
Sometimes I find that after a few months working in the same job theres little left to learn which causes the boredom to set in.

The problem is that you either settle into it and plug away, or move on to something new and challenging.

If the pay and benefits are very good this counteracts the will you might have to leave, which I guess is what the company is trying to do. They don't want to lose the people who can do the job (perhaps even if you're coasting) so they pay you a salary/benefits to make you stay.
The ones lucky enough to interpret their data stream correctly.
Asus confirms Eee phone
Keeping users in control
I like to use the template pattern for that sql connection problem.
Is this the future of sky cars?
Because of the difference between deploying infrastructure vs. maintaining infrastructure already deployed.

Companies seem to be willing to deploy infrastructure to collect e.g. 1 dollar payments, but not 10 cent payments.

I'm guessing that they'll be willing to maintain that infrastructure even as the value of the payment decreases due to inflation, since the per transaction costs are low and likely to get lower, and there's little risk in maintaining existing infrastructure.
I think these text-based iPhone games could be a pretty good thing. I have a couple ideas bouncing around right now. I'll be following how much steam this app picks up...though I'm sure if this idea does become popular, the market will get flooded.
It seems like an easy question of efficiency to me. Can passion scale to large corporations? I don't think so, though perhaps large complex systems can be abstracted into a hierarchy of simply modules. THe solution is not performance reviews, it's "small businesses". ('middle management' is just a stereotype from poor implementations of the hierarchy...i hope)

from my own comment on the blog:

Except that the talented people are going to the companies that give them good salaries and benefits and treat them with respect.

The important thing for employers is to hire good people who respect the company and themselves, and thus do good work. The important thing for employees is to work for good companies that respect them, and thus provide decent responsibilities (job ownership) and power (salary, benefits).
Nice pictures - makes the post worthwhile. That is something I would like to see.

The headline and reporting is the usual tosh from the Daily Mail though.
Being born in 1981, which according to wikipedia is the last year of Gen X, the following year, 1982, being the beginning of Gen Y, I consider myself more of a Gen X'er than a Gen Y'er. That said, just from the point of view of software, it is not fair I don't think to call Gen Y "entitled" because there is a lot more to know about technology than there was even 10 years ago. To keep up, people always need to be learning new things. So Gen Y has a burden unlike any previous generation of just the vast array of knowledge of different programming languages, etc. they need to be able to compete - a vast breadth of knowledge, if not depth. So it is really uncalled for to call Gen Y "entitled" as a whole group. Sure there are "spoiled brats" in every generation, but we cannot make these kinds of generalizations, especially in the technology sector. And even the whole notion of this article displays archaic thinking, regarding the job market, at least in technology. The whole "get a job" thing has been more replaced with "get a gig", i.e., people are more into independent contracting/consulting etc. than before, so Gen Y is not necessarily the same as Gen X in terms of trying to find a long-term employment, at least in technology. It is more a generation of independent consultants that is coming up. This article is wrong from top to bottom, wrong in calling Gen Y "entitled" and wrong to think that the ills of the job market are going to finally be all that damaging to them, since they are more independently minded than their predecessors. A response to this could be: What happens when deprecated purveyors of old technology get hit with web 2.0 and 3.0? The answer is they get replaced. By the same Gen Y they so despise.
I rather save space with interrobang: ‽
Am I the only one who liked Google Notebook? With the Firefox addon it was a quick and easy way to make notes without having to have an external source of note taking.

Can anyone suggest a good alternative?
SONY ERICSSON W705 (UNLOCKED)
Sony Ericsson W705 unlocked quadband gsm world phone is a fantastic device that utilizes the Walkman line of features to demonstrate the power of an mp3 player. A 3.2 Megapixel Camera that takes pictures in great quality with an emphasis.
Sorry if that came across as "trollish." It's just that adequate compensation is important, meaningful recognition matters, etc.

Being enthusiastic about your job matters, but the big tech companies that recruit the cream of the crop (Google, Amazon, etc.) pay well above market rates, and don't seem to be suffering a lack of quality.
Hmm, this is pretty tedious; no, I didn't play for long. Good idea, tho.
Yes, I have had to solve this problem a lot. It's probably my own fault because I am an inexperienced Haskell programmer, and maybe it's just because I'm incompetent but I find space performance very difficult to reason about.

It seems like anybody can make these mistakes, and they are mostly invisible until one day your problem size is a little bit larger than normal and your program explodes and crashes.
Oh yeah, cause I just demand to have balloons and a cheap plaque for my first day on a job.... or, you know, maybe not? My gen is probably unreasonable (few people are in any gen methinks) but "they" clearly just don't get it at all.
My generation is X, they called us lazy because back in the late 80s and early 90s the job market was the worst since... WW2? correct me if I'm wrong.

Crap job market = lazy generation.

And because the Y generation grew up during unprecedented economic growth they are the most entitled generation.

If we could bottle folksy wisdom, we'd have a lot of stupid in bottles.
So sick of crap like this. I'm Gen-X and very much remember being called whiny and entitled. We were neither -- no more than any 20-somethings have ever been.
You could just copy and paste it from an other message - oh, wait...
word.

it's great that you're active on this discussion thread. is it challenging finding all the places that discuss jQuery? is it interesting engaging with different communities or are they all pretty much the same?
I much prefer bottled alcohol, it helps us forget the stupid things people sometimes say.
Clarification: when I said "Don't do it," I meant, "Don't keep it a secret."

Sorry, that was kind of awkwardly phrased. Should have reread before posting.
I use Google Analytics on several sites. It's got the same view you're talking about. We like it a lot although there are other things I'd like to change about GA. Can anyone suggest alternative web/ecommerce analytics?
it's hard to tell what 'amazed' and '"patched"' mean. rather, it's hard to know what you're saying and with what overtones. are you sharing a fun joke or being rude? i think you might be downvoted for perceived sarcasm/meanness. it could be a mistake.
I am in your HTTP headers, attacking your application
Repeating something that has been said so many times that it has become popular wisdom is an easy way to fill word count.
Sure, because everyone wants to have to mess with their global font settings in order to use a website properly
Making something people want?
The first thing that came to mind when I read the title were the movies Cube and Hyper Cube.