skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Library isn't RAM. If library books were to be RAM, you'd clone yourself many times and stand in front of each book. And, all of you would share mind. Then performing binary search in the library is sort of okay.

Or, it could be organized in a circle where you are at the center. You don't move. But you pull/push each book with a magnet. But, RAM is more like the former. So many parallel flip flops. No wonder it's expensive.
I like the post overall, but the tech analysis is really weak. It makes it look like you spent a few minutes reading specs on wikipedia and decided that was enough to compare and contrast the hardware. It's not, and that comparison doesn't really add anything to the post.

To properly compare the processors you need to note that they are using different instruction sets and that the 360's processors are in-order with hyperthreading. Are the ouya's cpu cores in-order or out of order? do they have hyperthreading? What's the memory latency like? How big are the caches?

To properly compare the GPUs you need to understand the major differences in architecture. The 360 didn't have '512MB of memory and 10MB of video memory'; it had 512MB of memory that was shared between CPU and GPU (which means extremely cheap direct access to memory used by the GPU - something with no analog in modern PC architectures) and then 10MB of extremely, extremely high-speed framebuffer EDRAM on the GPU. These two unusual design decisions meant that overdraw was nearly free on the 360 (because the framebuffer memory was so fast) and that you could use the GPU to help out with CPU computations or have the CPU help out with rendering because both could freely access each other's memory. The Ouya could have double the clock speed and memory of the 360 and still fail to run 360 games if it has no equivalent for those features, because if you have a GPU/CPU memory split, you can end up needing two copies (system memory and GPU memory) of data, and it becomes much more difficult to have the GPU and CPU assist each other.

Someone who's done development for the 360 with the native dev kit could probably provide more detail here, I've only used the XNA dev tools (so GPU access, but no native CPU access) - IIRC there are some other perks the 360 has like a custom vector instruction set that might also give it an advantage over similarly-clocked competitors.
He had disciplined his body to hardship, his appetite to need, his thought to fact, his tongue to silence. He was “the first to enter the battle,” said the hostile Livy, “and the last to leave the field.”

Will Durant on Hannibal Barca, in Heroes of History
Most likely this was a hallway conversation at JVM Language Summit (which it seems that OP attended). I don't see any particular reason to doubt his claim.
The legacy that SCO inflicted on Linux
I trust Stanford PwdHash (https://www.pwdhash.com) a lot more than this, and it basically does the same thing with some nice features and browser plugins.
When I started my career, I also used to find trivial interview coding questions irritating.

As I developed and started applying for more senior positions, I started to find them downright patronising.

As I developed further and started to sit on the other side of the table, I realised that they aren't there to catch out the people who forgot a closing brace, they are there to catch out the people who don't know what a closing brace is even for.

The first time you do the interviewing from the other side, it is truly amazing how many people with extremely impressive-looking CVs fall into that latter category. Having a CS PhD and experience assessing undergraduates on more complicated programs is no guarantee of any sort of programming competence by professional standards. Neither is having been a Senior Software Engineer leading a team of developers at a past employer, for that matter.
I agree in general, but easy fizzbuzz-type questions are not the main problem with interviewing process by far. There are just too many people who almost cannot write code, including CS PhDs.
> Taking Wintel as an example, that could be done by abstracting away the hardware. Require programs to be shipped as some high level bytecode, that your OS can then compile, JIT, or whatever, depending on the best current solution. That makes your programs dependent on the OS, not on the hardware. Port the compiling stack of your OS, and you're done.

A much better idea is already practiced as the most successful method of software distribution ever: JavaScript, or as I call it, source-only distribution.
For small programs, something like CodeRunner is nice too: http://krillapps.com/coderunner/
D has `rdmd`
So much for lack of interest in Windows 8. I'm starting to think Windows 8 is going to be a successful operating system once people get use to the Metro interface.
Once you've paid for Internet and power, being 'social online' is indeed free.
> Asking someone experienced to write the "print a string in reverse" algorithm will naturally insult them.

Why? It's a trivial question that any programmer should be able to answer easily. An interview is a test. An interviewee should be happy if the test starts so simply. It's a chance to warm up and get in the groove.

When you took tests in school were you insulted if the first question on the page was too simple? No, you just answered it and were happy that you earned your first points so easily.
I wish I had read this and thought about it a week ago, before I decided to teach myself golang, which ate up my free time. Is learning an experimental unpopular language going to help me win? Fat chance.
Ask HN: How to get a job as an iOS Developer?
I have over 15 years experience as a web developer and after teaching myself some iOS development I find it a refreshing challenge. However, I have no work experience with iOS development. How does one get started?

Is developing an app and getting it published to the App Store sufficient?

I'm especially interested stories about how you got your first iOS development job particularly if you come from a similar background.
NASA Archive Collects Great Time-Lapse Videos of our Planet
Nobody is disputing the first law of thermodynamics. I do question your interpretation though. Firstly because the human body is not a closed system, and secondly, because there are different ways to interpret the laws as they relate to nutrition.

Consider that x is the calories required to run your body at a given weight, and y is a surplus amount of calories.

Traditional view:

If you eat x + y calories your body will store y as fat.

Non-traditional view:

If your body needs x calories to function, but it's trying to store y calories as fat you need to eat x + y calories.

The non-traditional view is becoming more favorable amongst obesity researchers. If you have an obligate weight gain caused by a biochemical defect, then you better eat the calories to satisfy the needs of the body.
the comment in the JS states:

The following JS is only added to start the time at your local time.
Popular Linux distros
Thank you! Oh I love nature photography, esp the smaller creatures! It will be cool to have a species named after me! :)
If we can put a rover the size of a VW beetle on Mars, we can definitely put a couple of these on it too.
Dalton Caldwell's App.net Meets Funding Goal To Launch Paid Twitter Alternative
As someone in the medical field, this article does a very good up job of restoring the balance and correcting some preconceptions regarding substance dependence and addiction - ie. that not all substances are going to lead to lifelong dependence and addiction, and in fact it only occurs to a small percentage.
This is established medical fact and is taught in all medical schools now.
However I worry that it might make people consider heroin as something that will be okay to have a crack at... There are very real psychosocial dangers of heroin should you end up being dependent and addicted - and the depths of despair that users end up in should not be ignored. No-one can predict ahead of time if you will be okay on it, or if you will follow the stereotypical pattern with which we are familiar with from popular culture.

The article also fails to mention that once addicted, and then having returned their lives to some base level where they are able to seek help (assuming they have not died of an overdose), 90% of patients that start on the methadone program are still on it 10 years later- in Australia the methadone program grows at about 4-6% per year, representing new people coming on and no-one really leaving.
Not cool, and not a good lifestyle!
One quality I find with above-average programmers is they type so much faster than the average programmers.

100-140 WPM on average.

What's the importance? They code quicker, hit walls quicker, debug quicker, fix quicker, ship quicker. They also have to be able to think quicker once the steps ahead of them are clear.

Getting through this cycle quicker I think makes a programmer much more effective at building lots more software, and through it, finding the lessons from the experiences a lot quicker.
OpenStack, GitHub, OmniOS: 3 projects, 1 lesson
I think Scheme is the way to go because it's very easy to build a real compiler for it and introduce assembly that way (see http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/11-ghuloum.pdf if you don't believe me).
IMO the creeper card thing is pretty bogus. If you are in a threatening situation, handing someone a red card is not going to deescalate anything. Nor is it nonconfrontational. It's basically shifting blame back onto the women, "well if he was such a creep why didn't you call him on it" etc.

Heres a thought: harassment at conferences is a big deal because it is a crime that can have you lead away in handcuffs...
Do you work 9 to 5, or do you take your work home with you?
This, again, is completely independent of what degree you have. How you structure your priorities and your work to get it done within sane hours, and while maintaining some sort of “work/life balance” (I hate that term, but that is a whole other story) is entirely up to you.

This is indeed independent of degree but highly dependent of company you are working for. There are developers working 10-12 hours a day who cannot structure their work because they are just expected to stay in the office for said time period.
This is a big question that i face daily. here at our recruitment company, we are actual programmers that do recruitment. first, let me tell you, it does make a big difference in who we choose. When a coder starts talking about how they are using elastic search, AWS or even good old C#, we can talk to them about how the ins and outs and work out how much they actually know.

The challenge that we are facing is with the employers. Many of them that use a HR department rely on a "tick the boxes" approach that cuts out many many good coders. Others rely on "rockstar <insert brandname>" company to choose who gets in. maybe 70%+ of good coders dont make it through because of the above 2 hurdles.

Most of our clients spend 6+months trying to get people, until finally they work out that its the internal process that stops them employing, not the perceived ( and IMHO non existent ) skills shortage.
http://www.bayfronttechnologies.com/mc_tutorial.html
I do, because he seems to have a bee in his bonnet about the evils of interpreters.

I'm also a bit wary of leaping from one-guy-musing-in-a-hallway to FACEBOOK PORTING PHP TO JAVA.
The problem is that companies won't employ anyone who isn't perfect. They don't believe anyone is capable of learning, and if they do think someone is capable of learning, they don't want to be "paying them to learn". If you haven't worked at a company that looks exactly like this one, working on exactly the same technologies and processes then you are rejected.
i think this quote really sums it up, "I try very hard not to use when I'm miserable, because that's what gets me into trouble."

it all depends on your personality. if you can get high and be responsible you can probably cope with using in moderation. unfortunately, i imagine a majority of people are not like that. i know several friends that have very addictive personalities and getting into junk would have ruined their lives.

a lot of it depends on how its taken as well. mainlining vs snorting vs smoking are all significantly different experiences, the amount taken as well. one can function when its only a small amount taken, increase the dose and you'll be lying around not being able or wanting to move.

i've tried everything under the moon though and i consider heroin pretty dangerous. i would not advise anyone to try it unless they have a very strong head. it is also one of the most amazing experiences i have ever had. the singer of sublime thought he could jump in and get out when he wanted, he overdosed, quite a sad story.
It will be called "tweeting on app.net".
Actually, the article doesn't mention anything about coding on a whiteboard.
I put it up at projectnoah a moment ago:

http://www.projectnoah.org/spottings/12572689
Why worry? Natural selection will iron out any weird genetic kinks within a few generations.
Lets be honest here: Facebook makes roughly $0.80 per user per month. App.net most likely will never achieve the dizzying heights of hundreds of million users who are leeching off Twitter and Facebook, but it doesn't need too. As Facebook has proven by their failure of an IPO, their lack of business model has destined them for failure. At least App.net have a business plan right from the beginning, something Twitter and Facebook never had and still to a certain extent still do not have.

The issue with a free service is if the free service is good enough like in the case of Twitter and Facebook even if you offer a premium paid service people aren't going to pay because free is better, free almost always wins. The great thing about App.net is that they're openly telling everyone they will be charging right from the beginning, so App.net won't have to compete with their own free offering which puts them in a great place.

My understanding is that App.net is incorrectly being touted as a Twitter clone, it's more-so a massive real-time API that is going to give developers amazing infrastructure and functionality to implement into their own ideas. Lets be honest if Facebook or Twitter completely opened up their API for $50 per year without any restrictions and a guarantee you won't be screwed over, a lot of people would buy but the problem is Twitter and Facebook are dependent on advertising revenue they wouldn't offer a fully-open API they couldn't make more than $50 a year off of with ads.

I was sceptical at the beginning App.net would be different, but now I am pretty excited at the possibilities of the service. The growth of the funding for this thing is crazy, I doubt App.net will struggle to succeed here. Everyone loves to hate on something instead of coming up with a great idea themselves.

Sounds to me like Dan doesn't know what he's on about here. What is he basing all of this assumptions off of? People gladly pay $99 a year for Apple's developer program, I see App.net being the same in that they offer a service that will help people build great apps they can self-monetise much like the Apple developer program only without restriction.
Why is a device without AAA games necessarily a device that isn't primarily about games?

I'm genuinely curious about this. From my perspective, the Ouya seems to perfectly match my gaming habits (I have not played a "AAA" title in many years), so I have to wonder what about the economics of the situation make the Ouya fundamentally untenable.
What Ouya is, is a free emulator for older games. And an OnLive box. And an XBMC box. And by default of running Android, a Netflix box.

There are 3600 people willing to pay to reserve their usernames. Almost 60k people have bought the hope of having one. At worst, it will get a retail push and be a BlackBerry PlayBook level failure. Or it may not, and it could be a Raspberry Pi like success (in terms of buzz). Or anything in between.

What I don't get, is the immense hate it gets. I don't see anyone calling it "the future of gaming", except maybe the press people behind the product? And that's kind of their job. The derision it gets from people who seem to think they're on a Crusade to teach the unenlightened that they're being bamboozled is weird. It's a game console, primarily aimed at a tech-savvy audience that doesn't mind hacking their toys, and even soldering them. And yet I haven't heard that audience reach even the levels of annoyance of an iOS/Android argument. Much less one that needs to be told (repeatedly) that their toy WILL NOT change gaming! ... Who pigeonholed the OUYA as a flagship in the revolution anyway? Marketing? So air your screeds at marketing people. Not those who enjoy tinkering with computers.
I feel like being "that guy", and saying that this is going to fail. It's not going to gain traction, and will not be profitable or popular in the future.

The reason I want to be "that guy", is that me, Murphy, and his law... have a little thing going. I develop, but definitely don't use social applications (I find them distracting and mundane). I think the concept of a completely open and distributed system like dj2stein9 mentioned is what really needs to be implemented in order to leap frog this idea, and others out there, that might be trying to come up with alternatives to the current players. However, I can definitely see this gaining traction. I love the concept of an Ad free network as well as a nice API.

Dalton and friends. I hope you're extremely successful with this endeavour, and, that you can all comment on this comment in the future with a big "I told you so".
My mistake, I thought Emscripten was an LLVM VM in JS. I'll take a look at it to see what the output actually does.
Ask HN: What are some algorithms for automated grammar correction?
I'm not sure if this is the right way to describe it. What I mean is, say a user types in "apple ate I", the algorithm would give suggestions like "do you mean: 'I ate apple'?" and other possible arrangements that makes sense.
What is your typical customer, if you don't mind me asking? Can smaller startups afford your services?

Also, do you consider culture fit at all? I read somewhere that because recruiters make their money on volume, their interest in small companies is rather limited. Basically, it doesn't make business sense for them to spend hours to get to know a small company's culture inside-out and then send them one-two candidates. You could be funneling dozens of developers to very large clients with very generic culture requirements in that time frame.
Love it, it's oscillating between quiet and loud rain a little too quickly for me, is there a way to leave it level/even?
A lot of the current svbtle blogs are incredibly vapid.

The current, most popular post on the svbtle network is Dave McClure, a super angel with his own Wikipedia page, hoping that he's a "late bloomer", not a "loser."

dcurtis' latest post:

I’ve been hearing rumblings which suggest that Flipboard is about to be blocked from Twitter’s API, following Instagram’s blockage last week. What is Twitter thinking?

Literally, that's the entire post.

I really like the actual frontend of svbtle blogs, and the 'ideas v. published' blogging interface seems smart, but the notion that this is some curated uber-network is absurd.
That explains how to write a top-down (or recursive-descent) parser. Humans generally find it easier to understand and write top-down parsers.

Tools like YACC exist to make it easier for humans to specify bottom-up (or shift-reduce) parsers. They have a number of benefits over top-down parsers including performance.

If you want to understand the magic of YACC, without the whole "it's magic" bit, you need to understand how to write shift-reduce parsers.
A follow up message from the better half:

"I love that sound

It always helps me sleep
thanks you :) "
My pet theory is that those companies lose the ability to retain, much less attract, top talent as more mba's and business types who are just looking at the bottom line takeover.

They can't recreate the early magic because they couldn't have created the conditions for it in the first place.

They just came in later to help monetize after the business models were in place.
I read a great book on this topic: "In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters"

While there are many lessons in there one theme stood out for me. Companies grow by listening to their users and providing what they want. They then fail when managers start to believe the products success is due their brilliance so stop listening and start telling the customers what they want.
Depends on what you want to do. I had to modify some of awesome to get it to do what I wanted, and later found that it was way easier to just modify dwm to get what I wanted than to mess with awesome, because dwm is simpler.

I do really hate not having a system tray in dwm, though. The patch they have on their site did not work well for me.
SEEKING WORK - New York City

I'm a full-stack Ruby / Javascript developer looking for rich-client application-oriented Javascript projects using Backbone, Sencha Touch, jQuery Mobile, ExtJS, etc. Please contact me at barry[at]barrypeerless[dot]com to discuss your project. I look forward to connecting!

Cheers,
Barry
I can tell you from personal experience that very large companies, especially the ones that are no longer perceived as hot as they once were, have a rather low bar of entry. I can see however why a small business would want to be very cautious though. Say you're a 9 person business, the 10th guy you hire is going to determine 10% of the company's success. You want to make sure you don't screw up on that. It's a fine balance, right?

Is your opinion that startups these days are on the excessively cautious end? Would hiring more openly for a trial position and firing fast be a better approach?
A little disappointed to see Javascript being used even if it's only for getting a users local time. Seems like a trivial thing to me when just having a CSS wristwatch is awesome enough without having to make it accurate. Besides that, this is awesome. Funny to see that a lot of the CSS is in-fact browser prefixed CSS and that if all browsers supported the same properties it would be much smaller.

Aside: the CSS animations absolutely decimate my core i7 PC and almost makes Chrome become unresponsive. The CPU usage is through the roof, can't wait until CSS animations are stable and more widely supported.
There's something really inspiring about the way Dalton Caldwell speaks in the video. His demeanor shows an air of confidence, but it also shows how pissed off he is with the existing ad supported free model. Here's wishing the very best for app.net's success.
D'oh! That's not what I meant to imply. Should have made that clearer.
I was thinking the same thing. My default response to sexual assault would involve the police. And probably a lot of angry yelling.
was this post just written with a JavaScript-buzzword generator?
I am always so happy to see a navigational demonstration that doesn't rely on external positioning, e.g. GPS. Having tried both sides (dead reckoning/sensing and external positioning), I have come to feel like so many GPS-based projects are essentially trivial GPS demos.
Unfortunately there's a level of harassment that probably isn't worth prosecuting, but that still is a very real problem.

The creeper card system, while imperfect, does provide a kind of a framework to call people out for minor inappropriate behavior which some might find easier than continuously find a good response on the fly.