skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
really "a can of worms to judge by anything but success"? What about the Samwer brothers or some of gates dubious tactics? The Samwers just rip ideas to get rich, and I think we can agree there is a bit of a difference in an entrepreneur like Jobs who was innovative and pushed his field to new levels and one like gates who built a monopoly by rather unethical means...
I would recommend almost anything with an interactive shell over a traditional C environment.

Python and irb are nice starting points because you can start out by claiming they are just a calculator, where you have to press return instead of =.

From there, you can go to variables (prevent you from having to type, e.g. the gravitational constant or a VAT percentage over and over), then to looping (print multiplication tables), to arrays (store them for later use, or as input for a loop to print year lengths for the planets, computed from their distance to the sun), and then to functions.

And all of that without having to teach people the difference between source, object code, and executable.
I am working on Social Recruiting Solution
http://yayaid.phpfogapp.com
> Japanese people traditionally ate (and many still do eat) rice at every single mean, lunch, breakfast and dinner?

Agree with the majority of your comment but I think the above could be attributed to their smaller portions.
Eric Schmidt. < Computer Science, UC Berkeley.
This is indeed IMHO a central question in this topic, since parallelizing an algorithm is not an easy task.

So I guess you still end up writing your algorithm in OpenCL / Cuda and maybe use the serialization provided by this lib.

Update: (Just read the hpcc_rootbeer.pdf slides.) You write your _parralellized_ implementation of an Algorithm in Java - and it will be executed on the GPU.
For people who think there is nothing wrong with the Android Play market, just think about what's the last "just released" app/game you downloaded in recent months?

I can't think of anything.

The idea that if your product is good, it will float to the surface is very true, well for some apps/games. The truth is that the developer need feedback to improve his product. Before it gets there, not after. The "Develop for a year and wait to be rich" really just works for big brands, who already know the market well.
I believe in App.net and I think many people too. It will make it there. :)
I think you're supposed to hangout in the foyer, that was some tip I read a while back. You just might look weird without a name tag if you can even get in. Parking lot would look desperate.
Those are black sand dunes[1]. The rover will have to go through those dunes to reach Mt-Sharp.
[1] Hi-Res image of the area (dunes on the right): http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/images/2012/details/cut/mt-sha...
Yeah, I would like to see that section(like python's site has!)..
What “Worse is Better vs The Right Thing” is really about
It's not an attempted Facebook clone used for uploading files?

It has a desktop client? (Which is the whole point.)
The document talks about C89, even though the last Copyright year is 2003. Isn't it about time that we start movin on? Where are the restricted pointers, the flexible array member and so on?

And, by the way, I think the comment at the bottom of page 27 is not correct:

The qualifier const can be added to the left of a variable or parameter type to declare that the code using the variable will not change the variable. As a practical matter, use of const is very sporadic in the C programming community. It does have one very handy use, which is to clarify the role of a parameter in a function prototype...

Actually, the use of const is encouraged as it helps the compiler to catch more errors as well as to enable some optimizations.
qBittorrent [1] can download pieces in sequential order.

[1] http://www.qbittorrent.org/
Hey, I believe Hiss does not require Growl installed to redirect notifications. But this requires Growl to be installed, right? So one solution is free and the other isn't.
I just discovered the git note command. To add to the article github could have used that for their commit comments, or do they?
How strong have you ever known anyone to get by following the advice of doctors?
Since fitness people usually start from a very, very bad level of exercise and dieting, you'd have to do some seriously stupid stuff for the net effect of your regimen not to be a big improvement regardless. Compared to programming or anything else, it's not that important to use the perfect way to improve most of the time. Especially when all the research happens at the cost of actually doing what you set out to.

So what if you can't burn fat from targeted areas on your body, when your overall weight decreases and will eventually shed that tummy fat you've been bothered by.

This is one of the reasons I like Hacker News as a community a lot. I think it sometimes makes starting a company sound way too easy (and buzzwordy), but there are a lot of people here who would never have started their companies, if they hadn't found a community here to cheer them on.
You can give yourself up to the Google ecosystem and live happily inside GMail, GCal, GDocs etc. You can do the same thing with Apple or Microsoft, but you can't easily mix and match between them.

You can pledge yourself to a single programming language. You can live and breathe Java all day and become a master of it and its tools and world views.

But the question is, should you? Should you give up the richness and flexibility of all that is out there and hedge your bets in ONE technology stack and ONE IDE?

Vim and Emacs and ST2 are language agnostic. The Unix command line is language agnostic. In fact, it is text editor agnostic, too. You can mix and match the tools and languages you like.

IDEs with all their richness are fairly confined to a very narrow set of languages and methodologies and ways of thinking about problems.

Both choices offer different benefits and different downsides. Make your choice wisely.
An example in banking: John Thain, former CEO of Merrill Lynch (BSEE + MBA).
I agree that this is the case for casual programming. If you are teaching someone who has hardware experience (electrical engineer, etc), it is sometimes easier to build from the bottom up and C is as low as it goes without being assembly (a good and a bad thing).
4. sleeping while inside a monitor.

... Can someone clarify what this is?
To be honest, the only reason I am still using GitHub is because it's by far the easiest way for me to show my work to potential employers.
Thanks for the link, heads up. I'm an Indie Game developer as well and I'm sure building a quality game (read as 'not-a-rip-off') will get me more hits than this guy assumes I wouldn't. Probably the app discovery is screwed up as he says, but its not as serious as he claims nor is it the end of the world, you know. Good games can market themselves (word of mouth)...and if they don't, I can still advertise on various other channels (like adwords, admob..etc) to help people 'discover' my app. The same goes for Appstore as well...Marketplace discovery is just one way, there are lots of other ways to market your apps/games...
What has NASA done to make your life awesome?
Never changed my opinion about a site this quickly.
ClojureDB - a networked document database engine
C programmer for 15 years here...

I'm sure some of the new stuff is nice, but the article is titled "Essential C".. and the basics of C are all old, because surprise: C is an old language.

And the quote from page 27 is absolutely correct. Of course, you're also correct.. it is encouraged.. but other than function prototypes, it's rarely used. Even in function prototypes, it's left out most of the time.
Microsoft Contest Offers Windows Phones To Developers And Students
Everytime someone writes a post about vim we see these editor wars emerge again and there seems no real solution, as it is mostly "use what works best for you".
There are amazing software engineers using vim, and others using Eclipse with Java on Windows like notch or Visual Studio like John Carmack.
Use whats you feel comfortable with.

Personally i like the simplicity of vim for editing taks, i could see me writing javascript or any other scripting language with it. But for complex software i definately would miss the abilities of modern IDEs, be it only for refactoring.
Conversations sometimes go off the rails. Kudos to you both for pulling the plug rather than turning up the juice.
I have read Christians "refuting" evolution too.

I give a guy who doesn't thermodynamics (one does not refute that in a popsci book) the same credit.

If he had really discovered something important, he would not be worshipped. He would present evidence to other researchers, who would confirm his experiments, etc.
http://agmetalminer.com/2009/02/26/power-costs-the-productio...:

"Although the newest smelters can be closer to 12,500 kWh per ton let’s say most smelters are consuming electricity at 14,500-15,000 kWh/ton of ingot produced."

So, that is 12 to 15 kWH per kilogram.

Compare that with http://www.rsi-silicon.com/media/SolarGradeSilicon_050611.pd...:

"In making MG-Si, approximately 12 kilowatt-hours of electrical energy are consumed per kilogram of silicon produced."

That already is in the same ballpark, for MG = metallurgical grade silicon. Getting from there at the purity needed for chip production is energy intensive. From the same text: "Energy consumption for the Siemens process is ~200 kilowatt hours/kilogram of silicon produced"

Even correcting for a potential bias of the author (who has his own patented process that he claims to be more efficient and, I guess, that he wants to sell), I conclude that, per kg, production of silicon-grade silicon is way more energy expensive than production of aluminum.

On the other hand, http://www.rsi-silicon.com/media/SolarGradeSilicon_050611.pd... seems to indicate that chip-quality silicon is overkill for solar cells. A dedicated factory for solar cell silicon would be more energy efficient than what exists now.
author missed one area where game publishers will never enter..

Android Live Wallpapers as games especially if you price them at $1.00
When you're using somebody else's computer.
Apple asked Samsung to pay as much as $30 per Android phone
If you're clued in on security, you can certainly use the fields to enter unrelated answers. A random 20 characters would be better than Winston Churchill.

But it probably goes without saying that if following the instructions (and putting in an actual answer...) makes you insecure, the model is broken.
Trying to write JavaScript that takes advantage of a single engine such as V8, hidden classes, type immutability, performance of 31 vs 32 bits, lack of 64 bit integer operations, cost of closures, etc. in the end, you spend so much time trying to work within this indirection that C begins to look far less wasteful and more direct, in terms of both human and machine time, especially if you have the general design of what you're trying to do figured out.
Meh. It's about trade-offs. Some languages are designed to be lightweight and require minimal assistance from the IDE. Some languages are optimised for very large codebases and expect a lot of "ceremony and plumbing" around them. And then there are, of course, millions of shades between the two extremes. Java and C# are in the second group. These are all very useful tools when used for the right purposes.

(Also I have written a fair amount of Java in vim and I didn't find it any more frustrating than writing Ruby in vim. And I don't even like Java.)
Internet Download Manager automatically rips the .mp3 file from RainyMood with ease.
My stale side project (haven't worked on it for a bit), a fun way to chat anonymously with other random Facebook users -- http://www.letschattr.com. If you want to try it, you'll need a friend to use it at the same time as well (or use two windows).
Some are in for the fame, others for the money.

I find North Americans incredibly opportunistic in registering patents. A friend that does network support outsourcing was complaining that their (American) boss was setting targets on number of patents registered by their support gig.
I almost always pick something like "What's your favorite color?" and answer with random noise (say "a3tcuh487wchaowiudh23doch3298ahraui"). The rationale is that if I forget my password, I'll likely forget the secret question as well. I only want the secret question to be as hard, or harder, to guess than my password.

I wonder though, if the human at the other end will accept "just a bunch of letters and numbers" as a correct answer.
I am the photographer. Shaun asked if it's okay to name it after his daughter. At that time, I thought it can't be named after the person who discovered the new species so I agreed.

Anyway, that's in the past now. Click here to check out more images of this beautiful lacewing: http://orionmystery.blogspot.com/2012/08/semachrysa-jade-new...
Not really. I am not getting much publicity out of this. No $$ for sure since the images were all under CC-BY creative common licensing. No much fame either due to the way the attribution was done. My real name was used rather than my more common nick: Kurt orionmystery.

Oh well.
Even in Western Europe there was a period in the 1950s and 60s when city planners constructed high-rise satellite towns with lots of trees between the apartment blocks, pretty much all of which are mainly populated by poor people to this day.
OneTravel.com - Product Review
@jeffool, definitely some great ideas there thanks for the suggestions, a few of which I have knocking around in my head already ;)

I certainly have plans to take it far beyond it's current state and that of anything else out there.

Thanks again!
The images are a red herring. Yes, it's an inspiring engineering achievement to land a thing on another planet that can snap pretty tourist photos. But that is not the point. Science is the point. The sophisticated geochemistry instruments are the point.
That link just goes to someone's (yours?) G+ page. I think you wanted to link to this specifically: https://plus.google.com/117789022459699674254/posts/YsnRsCCB...
Good to hear that. Vitess seems quite large.
I think, maybe, they use it for other large internal stuff too.

PS your ps is a great link... Is it complete?
// In Java, all instances of Object are also a monitor.
// See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monitor_%28synchronization%29
Foo myMonitor = new Foo()

// To "enter" a monitor, you use 'synchronized'.
synchronized (myMonitor) {
// Inside the monitor, we could do a Thread.sleep.
Thread.sleep(100);
}

This is a very simplistic problem case. However, it is very possible for this to become a bigger problem. Because I can call arbitrary code when "inside" a monitor, it is very possible to call a method that does a sleep incidentally. (e.g. many implementations of IO operations will require some sort of sleep.)
cs246 videos are available at http://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs246-videos/, but the quality is horrible.
What App.net really can be (if we let it)
How about e-mail?
>tailoring a vanilla installation

>newbies to start with using vim.

Sorry, but what? The very last thing a newbie programmer should be doing is
configuring plugins. A newbie programmer doesn't need plugins. They only
serve to confuse. Which is also why the very worst thing you can do to a newbie
programmer is to give them an IDE.

vim is perfect for newbies. It just works, and the defaults are mostly sane[1].
Yes, there's a slight learning curve, but you can do basic text editing (enough
for writing any Hello World program and then some) after taking 20 minutes to
do vimtutor, and from then on it just gets more powerful.

You can add plugins when you actually need them. A newbie doesn't need plugins.
They just need a good text editor - and vim (and Emacs) is the best you can get.
No fancy editor or IDE of the week will ever change that. Not Eclipse, not
Visual Studio, not ST2, nor whatever else.

Another thing: I refuse to take anyone serious who even brings up the "argument"
of "arcance 80's style GUIs" and/or "modern GUIs". Why? Because in the
overwhelming majority of cases, that means "vim doesn't have drop shadows, it
sucks"[2] (or some variation of that).

Nobody even knows what a "modern" GUI is supposed to be. It's just a fuzzy
way to say "I don't actually have any tangible arguments against $thing so I'm just
going to accuse it of not fullfilling unwritten, non-existing standards that
no one has ever agreed on.". Or in other words, bullshitting.

[1]: Really, the only things I did when I started with vim was to ":set number"
and ":syntax on", then put that in the .vimrc. That's it. Everything else was
added on demand.

[2]: Yes, I actually had someone trying to argue this to me. I closed the
comment page and burst into laughter.
and it applies to every market, particularly labor.
I agree however you forgot to mention the excellent Geany, which looks more comparable, and I think it be better for a developer to spend time improving that rather than porting a heavily MacOS based editor.
For the low level stuff an assembly language is way better than C. C is still a LOT of magic that you won't be able to fully understand without understanding how the machine and the compiler works. In assembly a line corresponds to one instruction. What the assembler is doing is translating each line to an instruction number that the machine can interpret. That is a whole lot less magic than what happens in C. In addition, pointers are much easier to understand from a machine perspective than from a C perspective: they are just numbers indicating a location in memory. C makes that far too complicated with different data types, pointers to local variables (and higher up the call stack), confusing pointer declaration syntax, etc.

You can learn C syntax for assembly language idioms later. Starting out by learning the concepts plus the syntax at the same time leads to inefficient learning because when you're learning concepts like pointers it doesn't help to have to learn confusing stuff and syntax at the same time.

This does not apply to languages that cleanly abstract the machine like Scheme/Python/Haskell/what have you, but C lets the low level stuff shine through so much that you end up having to learn that anyway; you can't really learn it as an abstraction.
> Long Tail Market

Oh, don't get it wrong. The long tail market is there. But what many people get wrong is that you don't make meaningful money as a producer in a long tail market. The guy owning the store with all those obscure niche titles in it will make the money.

Yes, you can produce obscure apps (and music) and find customers. But it won't be many customers. You as the producer will be making only cents. The app store owner on the other hand will be making the big money because he can monetize the whole long tail with his indefinite shelf space.
Please: let me buy high quality 256k mp3's of all this to put on my ipod. If i could buy enough so that i'd never notice repeated tracks, i'd love it.
Ask HN: What headphones are you using?
What headphones do you use when working?
"A great poker player demonstrates commitment by going “All In”."

This is a minor point, but given I live with a very serious poker player, I've started to twitch about poker misunderstandings.

Going all-in is not a rare event - at least not in no-limit Holdem, which is the game most people think of as "poker". Nor is it limited to the "great" poker players - in fact, it's one of the more basic and more common strategies, otherwise known as "shoving", to intimidate others out of a pot or for half a dozen reasons.

I know there are probably a lot of people on HN with more poker knowledge than me, so I'll shut up now (and wait for the inevitable discovery, possibly from my SO, that I've got the entire concept backward) - but it just irked me.
What I Learned From Russell Kirsch
"Just look at the code below - do you really think you can understand it? Of course not." Dick.
Good point!

On the other hand growl is completely open source & Hiss isn't. I'm just providing an alternative here. At the end it's all about freedom of choice :)
I prefer programming in CUDA over programming in Java. However, I have a lot of respect for the Java runtime.

If Rootbeer or something similar allows me to program CUDA stuff in Clojure, then I am impressed and excited.
Interesting. Billy gets Nate to do his dirty work.
While I have a hard time imagining Bruce just lifted someone else's blog post without crediting (more likely it was passed on to him in conversation?), this post predates Schneier's by over a year: http://tcoverride.blogspot.com/2011/05/security-questions.ht....
Most clients don't allow this option as it makes the network less efficient. The swarm is efficient due to the fact that users download the pieces randomly and therefore are able to re-seed pieces that a low percentage of other users have.
I've actually never used uTorrent myself, but I found myself quite appalled by the title and then slowly warming up to the ideas as I read the article.

As I understand, the company behind uTorrent currently makes their money from people who install a browser toolbar bundled with the uTorrent installer. This is one of the sleaziest sources of revenue. Putting some ads in the app itself is at least honest.

Even better, rather than having your average "Clean your computer now!" ads, they apparently plan to advertise using "sponsored torrents", from within a BitTorrent client. That's actually pretty clever! If they push this a bit more, they can use uTorrent as a trojan horse for a legitimate BitTorrent platform the way iTunes went from being an app to put music on your iPod to a full-blown music store.

I'll defer my judgement until I see how this turns out, but it can hardly be worse than a browser toolbar.
I love it when people still cite The Long Tail, years after every bit of data it was based on turned out to be false. It's the tech industry's favorite pipe dream, but digital distribution simply does not change the 80/20 rule.
You may be confused at what Share is; it's a desktop application that uses the bittorrent protocol[1] to do P2P transfers between users. It integrates with Facebook for very much the same reasons as SendRail does.

See https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-releases-new-share-appli...

[1] It's actually developed by BitTorrent Inc, the same guys who write µTorrent.
* PC games can charge a lot more. On mobile, users will balk at anything that costs more than .99 cents. If you want to charge $5, you have to have a pretty amazing game (like, Zelda-level), and even then people will complain.

* Lots, lots more competition from crappy spammy games that flood out the good ones.
Seems to be fixed, works for me now
If the founding fathers saw it made sense to decimalize your currency, then why are you people still using stupid feet, inches, pounds and ounces?
@josscrowcroft, I am definitely keen on developing the app to deliver the best rain experience possible for people :)
You're also assuming the metric for success = money, which while that may be your barometer for success, you should be wary about assuming that's other people's metrics as well.
> The comments so far in Y Combinator...

You're confusing Y Combinator with Hacker News; they're related but different.

The video is poor because it's inconsistent; it starts by saying that Reallocate aims to "solve specific humanitarian issues" and then explains that the first project is to build statues of people attending Burning Man and delivering them via what appears to be AR Drones from Parrot.

Really? That's the most pressing humanitarian issue they could come up with?

There's nothing wrong with building 3D sculptures of people at Burning Man; but it's bizarre to call this a humanitarian endeavor -- even if "in the next decade" this technology may be used to order parts for "broken tractors".

Also, the speaker in the video talks too fast and drops her voice at the end of sentences, making her speech hard to hear / difficult to engage with.