skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Writing libraries is a big hassle in Windows because you have to explicitly define all exportable symbols.

Just like in Aix, unless it is now changed (my experience goes back to 2001).

> C++ exceptions cannot pass DLL boundaries.

C++ restrictions have to do with lack of C++ ABI. You have in same issue in ELF systems, when mixing compilers.

> Heap memory allocated by one DLL cannot always be freed by another.

This is a good thing. Object handles belong to the module that created them, and it is a good way to ensure a clean way to use accessor functions to deal with data.
Ah, I hadn't thought about that. I was about to write off this bulb as utterly ridiculous, but this might actually be useful for people with sleep problems.
> There's no other site where I can talk and keep up with my grandparents, my college roommate, and my girlfriend simultaneously.

'Necrophiliac bestiality, of course! How else am I to screw my food while I eat it?'

If these people mean something to you, then you should be able to find the time to have adequate direct person to person communication with them instead of broadcasting to them and your closest 600 best buds. If they don't— then why care?

I certainly believe that you find Facebook useful, but don't overstate it. People have had friendships long before there was a friend button.
O proprio Governo dos EUA nos Da essa BRexa eu sou Brasileiro e ja comsegui diverssas vezes invadir o site da aplle e Microsoft ee agora ireii tentar o do FBI em um COmputador Externo :D me Desejem Sorte
ITC Conversation's podcasts have had an enormous influence on my career. Started listening to them in grad school (CS Major).

In the early days IT Conversations was pretty focused on big Technology topics (software design, security...) with signature podcast from Steve McConnell (Code Complete) & of course the original Gillmor Gang.

Then, sadly, the network began covering too many things. It was no longer about anything in particular. In any case they did set the trend and a whole lot of folks did learn from them.

You built something that mattered!

Thanks Doug Kay
The simplest possible examples of HTML, CSS and JavaScript
Agile is Wrong for UX
He's hitting the nail on the head. As for the reasons... there are multiple culprits at work here.

- complexity of modern systems
- reliance on third party libraries that suffer from all the same problems
- underfunding
- understaffing
- QA next to non-existant or "sourced out" to support staff
- unrealistic deadlines
- incompetence (that was always a problem, but combined with the lack of QA becomes more apparent to the end user)

Basically the issue is we all want more, for less money, in a short amount of time. And I think we've hit the ceiling for that as far as the human factor is concerned.
About that 1800 players number. Based on posts by one of the developers, their server doesn't do any sort of calculation:

> Our server is basically 'dumb', it doesn't do anything in the sorts of processing bullet trajectory, player line of sight or any hit detection at all.

http://www.jc-mp.com/forums/index.php/topic,638.msg4783.html...

Unlike other games which run a full simulation on the server-side, their server (I presume) mostly routes messages between players. This means that the server trusts the client, which is rather poor design for a competitive multiplayer game. Once this is released, players will probably prefer a cheat-free game to a large-scale one.

This is, nevertheless, a fantastic mod. But these people have not yet solved the c10k-equivalent problem for massively multiplayer games.
I think the TSA officially pretends that things like the the 2011 Moscow bombings don't happen.... at least they don't happen to the U.S... therefore it's not a real concern.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domodedovo_International_Airpor...
The major search engines are using map/reduce to build the indexes that searches are run against.
That's an issue I've had with my HTC Android phone and also with stuff like Java updates that want to install "Ask toolbar" and updates to Safari that want to install iTunes etc.

Of course I don't really want to disable updates altogether incase there is an 0 day out there and I need to patch. Problem is that a lot of things don't give me the option of saying "fetch security updates only , ask me before installing anything else and allow me to revert if I don't like it".
I can't stop cracking up watching these videos. It's like a 3D visualization of Reddit or 4chan.

"...in the last test players were killed 223,704 times, averaging out at 1.29 untimely ends per second."
For non-french, Cinemur seems to be a "modern" alternative to the old and messy allocine.fr, the french goto site for finding movies and booking seats. I don't see a way to do that, booking tickets. Is it planned?

Beau design en tout cas.
LinkedIn Launches Board Connect for Nonprofits
You've Got Parallel Code in my Chocolate
If your goal is just to make a mass murder, there are places more crowded than an airport and with less police walking around.

Getting control of a plane can make significantly more damage.
I think this could be rephrased as "Apple and Microsoft products are broken", and that's a problem because he's a Microsoft employee so he probably has no option but to dogfood. For less constrained users there are other products around though which are not as broken.
I understand that you're targeting musicians, but to whom will you sell and distribute their music? The site doesn't currently mention or appeal to listeners. You probably don't (yet) have a lot of music to promote, but a quick visit to Beatport shows what type of attention is paid to audience and content.

Some initial feedback on the site's layout:

- The layout breaks at medium and narrow widths, particularly the home and FAQ pages

- Looks enough like Rdio that I feel compelled to mention it here

Good luck!
I have a mid-90s washer and dryer, which is the exact same design as the 80s versions. In 15+ years, I've had a few problems with them, but every time it was a relatively straightforward for me to figure out and to fix because they are so simple. If you have a voltmeter and an ammeter, you are set.

The inability for me to fix them is what keeps me from upgrading. As the OP noticed, everything is broken, so I expect I will have to get anything repaired. I'd prefer to save some money and do it myself.
That's really interesting. I'm on Windows 7. Just tested in Debian Linux and it's fine there too. Must be a Mac issue?

(Edit: I confirm that I can see faint green spots all over the background in your Photoshop screenshot.)
ACE editor gets BSD license, new website
How to Enhance Your Team Collaboration Skills
Trivia - some core parts of espresso are/were part of specmarks, which are used to evaluate computer designs and implementations.
"How do we fix it?"

Pay for more stuff.

13 of the 20 issues are on freeware or free services. Gmail way exceeds my expectations, because I know I'm the product, not the customer.
Well, I'm guessing the next fad will be to install these things with colored patterns after chopping out chunks of your teeth...
> That there are huge numbers of Spanish speakers in a number of states is not due to immigration. Most of these states spoke Spanish before they had an influx of English-speaking illegal immigrants. The English speakers (helped) split these states off from Mexico and made them join the USA. (Okay, the reason they spoke Spanish is due to the prior illegal immigration of Spanish conquistadors).

The Spanish influence was largely via the Catholic Church. There's a whole chain of cities about a day's walk apart in CA, each with a mission.

That said, the Spanish weren't the only "invaders" for very long. Folks from other US states started showing up within a couple of decades. Spain made an official land-grab, extending from Mexico, but eventually lost a "war".

Also, even during the "Spanish" days, Spanish was only the language of those cities. The natives didn't switch, and there were a lot more of them (at that time).
It is not optimization of a corner case over optimization of the common case; it is enabling of the corner case over optimization of the common case. Making the corner case slightly less efficient, that the common case can be slightly more efficient is obvious. Making the corner case impossible is not the same thing, and requires a much stronger argument.
I agree it is a significant exception. For what other reason would one want to know the time other than to know that you have a commitment to be somewhere or to do something? That's the whole point of a shared, synchronized system we call "time". I think I'll write about "Living without a Car - (Except for When I Want to Go Somewhere)".

EDIT: Upon further reflection now I think I get it. It's not that Steve is living without time, but more accurately he's living without clocks. There's a subtle but important difference.
Ecchu-Yatsuo, the melancholic festival.
Snow on Mars: NASA Spacecraft Spots 'Dry Ice' Snowflakes
Thank you! I also put the existing website a bit more prominently in the description, to make sure people know we already have something. :)
http://www7.buyoffice.microsoft.com/emea1/basket.aspx?cache=... says it's £190 (presumably inc VAT).

Reading the info about installs strongly suggests that unless you bought a PC with a preload then you have to buy the "2 install" version at £240 (but it's pretty opaque).

Bread is a very poor comparison as the margin per unit decreases at a far lower rate than that for non-material goods. I'm sure MS would argue they're only licensing use to you too - perhaps "it's not much more than a TV license" would be better?
Bah, this post reads like a 5-year old bitching because he didn't get his ice-cream [1]. May it be that these problems aren't fixed because they arise from a subtle interaction of hung routers, failing hardware, other installed software that runs concurrently in the background [2], etc. How do you debug something that you can't reproduce in a "standard" setup? For how many CPU-eons should you run your networked application on a simulated network to be reasonably sure (NB! NOT prove!) that it'll handle network outages? HOW are you supposed to write software that behaves "correctly" when its preconditions aren't true? (e.g., that the OS's routing table is sane?) Etc, etc.

[1] Yes, Gmail is slow for me too; haven't used its web interface for years, and I've moved my correspondence to private domain. Some of his complaints are valid complaints about sloppiness. He also seems rather unhappy with Apple's SW, so I'm wondering why is he still giving shitloads of money to Apple.

[2] For example, a backup on my Win7 machine failed, with a mysterious message in event log urging me to look for other errors in the event log. I scrolled down and saw that AV (MSE) had quarantined a certain file. I deleted the file, and lo and behold, the backup succeeded!
I think that the "Buy a copy for a school/library" suggestion is brilliant.

Because I can't buy the book DRM-free in the UK (so far as I can see), but I can make sure that some money goes to Charlie, Cory and the editors, etc. who put hard work into creating it.
Since you are already engaged in freelancing, then you have the minimum equipment required.

So why are you looking to an investor, when what you need is more clients?

Hiring a professional with a proven track record closing sales in your industry is going to be relatively expensive (as in more than your investor may want to invest). Hiring someone without a proven track record closing deals means that they are less experienced than you.

Good luck.
Top BrightonSEO Takeaways
I think operating systems are harder to formally verify than programming languages.
Sync is a fundamentally broken.

Yep. It's weird that everything is built around just one button that says "Sync", when there are two different directions involved.

Either you want to save the state of whatever device you're currently using, or you want to revert it to the state stored in the cloud.

Export <--> Import, pretty much.
I'd be lying if I told you that I thought Bandcamp was a bad service. In fact, they've been a big influence on what we've decided to build. Them and Soundcloud.

How will we ever compete? We obviously won't be able to match them feature for feature at this point -- we're just two guys working on this in our spare time.

But I think our positioning is a little different. Plus, both of us have years of experience music blogging so we'll lean on our networks of artists we're in contact with to hopefully drive some initial sing-ups and get some momentum.

We have dreams of being the go-to service for this kind of stuff, but we know it's going to be awhile before we get there.
Tips and Tricks for running WordPress on Windows Azure
Top Actionable Tips from BrightonSEO
Apple iPhone 5 Off To Fast Start
>Bingo! This is one perfect example of the problem he's referring to about people not being passionate enough to fix the problems: "Those bugs are not that important." That's a lame excuse. Who cares that we are better than 15 years ago, the point is that we have lots of (seemingly) low-hanging fruit that stays there for plenty of releases and that nobody cares enough to fix, because "bah, it's not that important."

Well, this is my other pet peeve, people not understanding the notion of "opportunity cost".

>the point is that we have lots of (seemingly) low-hanging fruit that stays there for plenty of releases

The key word here is "seemingly".

Do you really think that the guys as Apple/Google that pull all-nighters and work themselves to death to finish iOS/Android don't have "enough passion to fix problems"?

Or do you believe that if they took their sweet time they would have fixed every "low hanging fruit"? Even a low hanging fruit can add a couple of days to a month to a project, or delay other, more important features and/or fixes.

"Go attack all the low hanging fruits" is a meaningless proposition. Some projects you use are open source. Why don't YOU go attack them? Who is gonna make those "low hanging fruit" interesting for a volunteer to work? Who is gonna make them profitable for a for profit company, so that it doesn't die in the market while fixing them?

Mozilla tried to build a better browser. They addressed all the low and high hanging fruits.

What happened?

It took them 5 years to ship something that worked kinda OK, by which time the company had died, and the market share went to IE. And even those releases 5 years after the new code started had lots of problems. Eventually they betted on the more minimal Firefox instead of ever perfecting the full blown Mozilla browser/suite. And it's still not perfect.

Result? Besides the parent company dying, they haven't got that old high Netscape market share back even now.

>Who cares that we are better than 15 years ago

I, for one, do.
Agreed. My last vacation showed how much they've changed our lives. Every day was completely improvised thanks to google, yelp, and maps.
At least some of their hesitation was because they were selling very expensive systems like Displaywriter and DataMaster [1] to word-intensive corporations and didn't want to cannibalize that revenue. For example, most big law firms still had typing pools in the mid-1980s and those were driven by Wang and IBM word processors, not PCs.

The office suite concept was still a hard sell in the late 1980s and early 1990s; most were seen as a mediocre collection with a star product. Before Windows, people were much less concerned about a common UI and more interested in getting the best-of-breed (or at least the market favorite) in each category. So that led to Lotus 1-2-3 for spreadsheet, Wordperfect for word processing, Harvard Business for presentations, and DBase for databases. None of those came from the same company!

IBM had products in several of these categories but they were not market leaders. By the time IBM got serious about an office suite, there were already three strong options available (Microsoft, Borland/Lotus, and WordPerfect). Then Windows 95/Office 95 hit and it was all over.

[1] http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc/pc_8.html
Likely. I remembered OSX used to have few issues with GIF rendering in Core Graphics, but I'm sure Chrome and Firefox aren't using Core Graphics for GIF rendering. Strange.
Looks fine in FF on my MBP!
Everything about programming is easy when you break it down into parts. I think good programing is about the ability to learn new domains, abstract thinking skills, a good design sense(for architecting code and user interaction/interfaces), and a healthy dose of patience for debugging. I wouldn't generalize too much about specific domains because they each come with their own unique challenges.
Doubtful that this is more damaging than:

import os
os.system('insert local exploit here')

It's true that it is another place that you can get a python script to execute code outside of its environment, but you get a ton of those for free with the stdlib.
Interesting hack, but there's one thing that looks unnecessary complicated to me:

Why do you need metadata to describe where the "patches" are located? Why not simply putting all frames one below another, where all unchanged areas are transparent? In case missing transparency support in old browsers is an issue, just use a special unused color instead. Since PNG does a very good job in compressing away those empty areas, the resulting image won't become noticeably bigger.

Is there any reason for which you excluded this option?
I bought a Kindle so that I could read all those books from project Gutenberg.

That's basically (a) time saved on shipping + (b) money saved since those books are in the public domain + (c) no trees were cut for me to read those books + (d) storage efficiency.
Google pulls another Android reddit client, no response after 3 weeks
It _is_ a shame that it's only available on that page in HTML format. Usually the books that Charlie and Cory have released CC have been available in mobi, epub, etc.
Give OpenStreetMap a try. It is free and open. Just they way these things ought to be. You can set up your own geocoding server with Nominatim: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim#Reverse_Geocodi...

There is a VM to play around as well: http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/AndrewBuck/diary/17698

Also there is Mapquest's API which uses this: http://open.mapquestapi.com/geocoding/
A lot of people are surprised that you don't use a dishwasher. This I find surprising.

I don't use a dishwasher either but for a different reason. I do dishes as a fitness hack. No, you don't expend a lot of energy doing dishes. But doing things by hand as much as feasible leads to a less lethargic lifestyle. Another hack is not using a microwave for anything. For instance, I make oatmeal in a pot the old fashioned way; stirring constantly so that nothing burns to the bottom of the pot. I don't use a dryer. After washing clothes (no I don't do this by hand!) I put clothes on a drying rack. I fold clothes right away after they dry.

Overall these little hacks have made me less lazy and have given me a feeling of having more energy.
Time to get some perspective
Yah, we're definitely hoping to become a portal for fans discover music. At this early stage though, we can't promise that we'll be able to drive traffic to artists since we're not there yet, so we'd be relying on artists to drive their following to us.

Once our content library starts to build up, we'll hopefully transition to a more listener-driven public site. Thanks for the feedback!
Scientific codes are much harder to verify formally than programming language implementations. Even getting an informal error bound is virtually impossible in most cases. Formally verifying e.g. web applications is also incredibly hard, but in other ways: (1) it's hard or impossible to formally specify in a non-trivial way (2) the implementation depends on a huge amount of code that needs to be verified or at least specified (OS, compiler, network, etc.).

In fact in this list, the most difficult things are the easiest to formally verify: programming language implementations, network stack, OS, filesystems, algorithms, etc.
Student Relationship Management System
Redeye will mess up your code
I really like that Apple is willing to experiment and push the envelope on their corporate site. Very refreshing.
looks beautiful - great work on the design. was it a large dev / design team ? 6 months work ?
Bina48 is first humanoid robot to address a conference
It's really nice, just add a (free and illegal) streaming service of these movies and it will be perfect :)
I would argue that any reasonable technique that allows users of older browsers to access your site or use your app relatively normally is within the bounds of what we would describe as "graceful degradation." Being non-automatic doesn't make it any less valid.
Here it is in 87 chars:

[{0:"fizzbuzz"}.get(x%15,{0:"fizz"}.get(x%3,{0:"buzz"}.get(x%5,x)))for x in range(101)]
That page was last modified in 2006. It must have held up well against attacks or he would be broke by now!
If Google can cancel Acer's license, why should Apple grant one to Google?
Don't limit yourself to Google. Try OpenStreetMap apps. For example OruxMaps or OsmAnd. You can easily load routes and data into those. The underlying data is free and open and you can contribute easily (and have the changes live in minutes). OsmAnd has incredibly easy ways to select POIs to highlight.
Would be nice to have this in Montreal. We do have http://www.cinemamontreal.com/eng but it's not as beautiful :(
"The $2,000 is only available to the first person who provides a working attack"
I think the alternative formats are normally created by readers. They'll probably start to show up soon, or you could create and submit your own.

Edit: although unlike Cory's earlier books, this is under a NoDerivs license. It's possible that changes matters slightly...

Edit2: If you go to Cory's site (http://craphound.com/rotn/download/) it sounds like alternate formats are still an option (and indeed EPUB and MOBI are already there).
Could you elaborate on the c10k-equivalent problem for massively multiplayer games ?
Online editor for reveal.js HTML presentations
Sounds awesome! I'll talk to the rest of the band about signing up with you guys.
Dining Out (with friends) for Android - The History and Future of Your Food
I agree he was laying it on a little thick, but at least the substance of the article was interesting.
I haven't verified this myself, but friends tell me you can no longer get "free" phones from AT&T unless you get a data plan. At $15/month for 2 years and 2 lines, that's 720 bucks. And phones just aren't durable enough to last for 4 years.

It's probably time to start grabbing old phones off of eBay.
So you'd never hire someone like Paul Graham after he has worked for 10 years in Lisp projects, or some guy doing 10 years of embedded C work, etc...

Using "lots of" technologies is a meaningless metric, except if you want a code monkey to work with whatever for some startup where everyone has to wear 10 hats.

If I was building the Curiosity I would get a guy with 20+, not 10, years of experience in just embedded C (or Ada or whatever).

If I was planning a new JS heavy web app, I would get a 10+ years Javascript wizard. If he had the JS chops I could not care less if he also dabbled in Haskell or APL.
Default transanction isolation level in PHP for Firebird
BYOD and the Death of the DMZ
Cold fusion: smoke and mirrors, or raising a head of steam?
I touched on this in another reply: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4532495, with the short answer being unusably high memory usage.

From memory PNG doesn't compress as well as you may intuitively think in this scenario, with the resulting files being around 3X the size.
Where's this stated exactly in the license?