skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everything is broken, and it sucks and it's kind of our fault. Sort of.

It's a kind of, sort of our fault situation because as time has gone on we've stopped caring too much about companies sitting down and just going "Lets get this stuff sorted out and fixed, and improved and more awesome", but started caring about "How many features does it have? Can it do X in Y and Z situations?" which is great, it pushes the state of the art forward. I think companies are spending too much time trying to get stuff out the door, instead of spending the time improving what they've got.

But we end up in a weird situation where we actively want companies to stop adding new features, but a lot of us are like magpies drawn to the new and shiny. It sucks, it's their fault for not getting stuff done properly the first time, and it's our fault for expecting a new shiny thing every few months. And "move fast and break things" needs to stop being a thing.
Let's also add that it's very cheap for what it is.

Office 2010 Home and Business 2010 (Outlook, Word, Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint) is £159GBP inc tax. It has a usable life of ~5 years. That's £2.65GBP/month (about the same as two loaves of reasonable quality bread a month)
Since DDG uses results from other search engines, and one of their main selling points is the "unbiased, unfiltered search results", I fail to see what Facebook would be buying in that case.
What would be a good place to start learning about what you're describing here?
I can understand that his migration routes are away from most other whales but one thing that keeps coming up, especially in the linked articles:

> And here's the cry of the lonely 52-Hertz whale, which no other whale can return -- as if whale songs weren't mournful enough.

Does anyone know whether this is true? Other whales could not hear/understand him even IF they were close-by because of the higher frequency? And he could not hear other whales either?? Both of these seem very unlikely to me, especially the second one, but I am no expert. I am just assuming if his signature is that of a baleen whale just at a higher frequency, wouldn't others still recognize that IF they were close?

If anything, following the human interpretation of this as the "poor lonely-heart whale", he just has to get out of his comfort zone and explore the waters more... this too "could be viewed as inspiration to anyone with a lonely heart"!
Changes in optimization performance of gcc over time
But his point is that we're spending too much time creating new features, and adding to the pile of broken layers, rather than focusing on getting each layer as close to perfect as possible.
I think it depends on how much they're willing to concede to the Chinese government. If they build it essentially as an island in the rest of the network they might get away with it, it just depends whether Facebook think they'll get a lot of traction for it to be worth doing.
After all these years and Word still can't kern worth a darn. Would love to throw away LaTeX for something easier to use, but Word is not it. Excel is special if you need it, PowerPoint is almost as good as Keynote now. Visio seems like it hasn't been updated in 10 years; OmniGraffle is so much better.
Small time train networks love the crappy system they have now. It means theres a good chance people can get on trains without valid tickets and then get price gorged
See the following comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4530557

The reason why some of them is so fast is because the constant expression is evaluated to a constant, so instead of doing a conversion in the test, the already converted number is returned.

Use this test instead: http://jsperf.com/parse-number-from-string
Ask HN: Anyone interested in html to latex style pdf conversion
I am developer for online guilloche vector editor (http://www.torapp.info) and now we have some free time to invest in. I'd like to develope a latex-style layout engine for regular html5 files, so that all html5 files can have a beautiful printout.
I'd like to get some advices from you guys since I do not want to develope an application which no one wants.
Thanks.
Language Design Is Not Just Solving Puzzles
Life will be wasted if you don't read it Must read if you're Indian.
It's been an interesting switch, I've found that in terms of what "I do" on a laptop or device, that hasn't been impacted very much nor inherited a lot of new papercuts. I have however discovered a bunch of additional functionality that has been really productive.

A lot of this is spoken as a total newbie to both platforms and someone who didn't look into them seriously before changing (coming from a long term Windows 8 / Windows Phone / iPhone background).

Androids intents make it feel much closer to a real operating system in the way it allows applications to interact with each other (compare chrome browser integration on android vs iOS). Linux (Mint in this case) feels incredibly low friction when getting started thanks to apt-get, and a lot of the screw ups that I lived with in Windows seem to fail more spectacularly on Linux, with the caveat they can be fixed to the point of being quite polished by digging into configuration or updating libraries.

Under Windows and iOS it feels like you start at 80% working and finish at 80% working. With linux and derivatives it feels more like starting at 65% and being able to tune your way up to 90%. Prefer the latter at the moment.
Loneliness probably has a new meaning! - 52hz and 2 decades on - a whale trying to communicate has been so lonely in the vastness of sea. It is truly invigorating and unimaginable .. Their 10million years of evolution far greater than the Man himself must be a remarkable insight towards our own evolution. Reading this story i kind of feel moved and touched at a much deeper psychological level than ever ...
"Office" i.e. the compilation of products started in 1989 with Office for Windows (I still have the floppy disks here).

Word was actually first (in 1983). Excel came in on the Mac (!) first in 1985 and then Windows in 1987. The had a spreadsheet (MultiPlan) which arrived before that on DOS but it was rubbish and didn't make a dent in 1-2-3.

Microsoft had a very complicated history in the 1980s and 1990s.
This reminds me Cython who provides optional types to speed up the critical path. The speed gains are pretty impressive.
Having a such tool in Ruby would be wonderful !
http://proceduralgraphics.blogspot.com.au/2010/06/flock-in-c...

In straight js and canvas, with bird silhouettes and Perlin sky
I remember people complaining loudly about the transition to Mach-O from PEF, but I don't remember seeing solid data that the situation was a problem. Is there data here that supports this?

Some of this just makes sense (resolving function addresses through the GOT, which has an impact on correctness), but for the performance issues it would be nice to know how much is at stake here.
Musk: "oh crap!" ><

http://xkcd.com/799/
> Seriously: this guy seems to believe that the correct way to implement something is with a massive set of examples and test cases, where you massage your implementation until all of the examples work right and all the tests pass.

You have no idea how common that utterly bonkers way of thinking is. I have a colleague according to whom every protocol is trivial to implement. Why? "Trace what an existing implementation does, and replace the values. It works"
There was a time when a computer and the software that ran on it cost millions. That was a time when a bug would cost millions and sink a company or two.
The case for sacrificing flexibility for performance microptimizations gets weaker by the day, and it's certainly not worth the transitions cost - another incompatible ABI change would kill linux dead.

I suspect that the compiler generates the indirections itself to handle linkers that can't; making the linker easily replaceable involves a bit of overhead now but gains us in the long run (e.g. it allows new linkers like gold to be developed more quickly).

If you want to microoptimize how the linker loads function addresses on x64 then be my guest. Just don't expect the devs to treat it as high priority

As the article says, visibility modifiers exist and can be used by those who care about them. I think that will have to be enough, in the interests of usability.
Dude, get another job. Seriously. I've been in this kind of environment before and there is nothing good about it. That kind of garbage creates stress that is going to shorten your life.
Out of the options I think search is the most likely, followed by entry into China and then payments way down the stack.

Search is obviously a big, big money spinner and Facebook now has enough people on who keep it open during the day that they could get a large amount of traffic from people who aren't as interested in the different ways search results can be generated and aren't that fussed. With their database of places, events, venues and so on they'd probably have very interesting results for a specific set of information, and I imagine being able to get into that result set would be worth a decent amount of some groups. It's straightforward business but with some serious amount of backend work going, I imagine if we start seeing Facebook staff up rapidly it might signal they're going for it.

I said payments down the stack, I'll quickly justify. Facebook's biggest problem right now is getting people to trust them as a mechanism, they've had a few scandals that have trickled into the mainstream media from privacy options, companies forcing handover of login details and so on, which erodes the trust-base of users slightly which isn't a great start for a payment service.
I've been thinking for some years now, I wish everyone would stop implementing features and perfect the ones that are already there.

Optimise. Improve.

This is why I was so upset at Sparrow throwing in the towel - they concentrated on one thing, email, and did it better than I'd seen it done before. By specialising they were able to spend the time to get it right.
And what about your body? and the world around you? and your relationships? and the instruments you use?
Do your faulty examples in any way contradict anything else you know? do you have a counter example?

Reality is dirty, everything tries to break down all the time, hindered by the traces of its past, and the ambivalence of its future use. We make stuff dreaming of a prefect neat existence. This keeps us going, like moths around a light bulb. And we should keep on doing this nevertheless.
I would start with Erin Catto's Box2D.

http://box2d.org/

There are C#, Flash, Java versions if you aren't into C++. Lots of documentation on the web, but the getting started guide is good enough.
Ninja bug report.

I installed it but couldn't log in with my Google account. I clicked "Sign up with your Google account", completed the Google accounts popup, and then the Google accounts popup was happy and it went away, but then nothing happened in the Mention window..
SubtlePatterns.com has been hijacked.
I've spent most of my career for 15 years as a programmer. Some days I just want to throw out my computers and phones and never touch them again. Days when I get overwhelmed by the feeling described in the article.

Every computer environment is layer upon layer of kludges. There is shit all the way down.
I agree that doing some more advanced post-processing on this would be great, seems the quality could be a lot better. Perhaps look to the restoration of 'A trip to the Moon' for inspiration of what might be possible.

What are you the creator of, by the way? The video clip? Good luck with obtaining the frame scans.

EDIT: OK I see you are the creator of the curiosity clip. Amazing work! Hope you can pull this off, I would pitch in on Kickstarter.
I'd love to see the Django equivalent to Railscasts.
You can see the domain in it's current state here:
http://www.subtlepatterns.com

There's a facebook post from the official subtlepatterns.com facebook page acknowledging the hijacking here:
https://www.facebook.com/subtlepatterns/posts/44043519600741...
For a long time, I thought that the ELF shared library model was the obviously correct thing, but over the past few years, I've come to realize that Windows got shared libraries right after all.

On Windows, all inter-module dependencies are (module, symbol) pairs (written "module!symbol"), not just bare symbol names as on ELF systems. That is, modA!fun1 calling modB!fun2 can exist in the same process as a modC!fun1 calling modD!fun2. The Windows model doesn't permit global interposition, but that's a good thing: the lack of interposition support permits the optimizations Macieira mentions, but "hooking" is still possible through a variety of mechanisms, which usually involve either overwriting import and export tables or the replacement of function preambles with jumps to trampolines.

Regardless of the performance considerations, I think the Windows DLL approach is the more robust and conceptually lighter one. That the Windows approach is also faster is simply a beneficial side effect.
My solution is to find a University library, and find a desk in the remotest stacks (Celestial Mechanics seems to work well). Not customisable, but quiet.
More free exercises
I've been thinking for some years now, I wish everyone would stop implementing features and perfect the ones that are already there.

Look at the iPhone 5 discussions taking place. The most common topic you'll see is: it doesn't have enough new features. That kind of thinking is one of the reasons that refinement doesn't take place as often as you and I would like.
...is it just me, or Django docs are WAY more to the point than all the rails screencasts and tutorials? I wonder if this extends to the whole Django vs Rails way of doing things in general, not just to documentation...
"I don't want to bug the devs, they have better things to do than writing docs for noobs."

11 years of procrastination nice no wonder half your dev team left to go work on wayland with an attitude like that.

Hay did you know wayland has docs for noobs http://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/
Add a cafe in a central location but out of earshot of the rooms, and some open space with a few seats, and you'll be minted.

I'd need a daylight source somewhere!
I quit working at my desk.

It's uncomfortable (despite considerable investment), takes a lot of space, has terrible lighting, is too hot or too cold and is eerily quiet. It's quite depressing really.

I tend to sit in the garden when it's not raining - good lighting, relaxing ambient noise and great air (which is really important). Plus you can get up and walk around regularly and focus on stuff that isn't right in front of you.

The only downside is bird crap and my neighbours think I'm insane.
Except that GPLv2 doesn't work like that. Once the license is violated you permanently lose the rights granted by the license. So even if Twin Peaks fixes their stuff and comes back into compliance, they do not get their rights back automatically -- the copyright holders have to explicitly give them back these rights.

This is one of the important differences between GPLv2 and GPLv3.
Mirah? Anyone?
Only if your server code process each request in a separate thread. But that's also true, when using web-sockets or when using the GIF approach. When implementing real-time applications, you always have to write non-blocking asynchronous server code, for example using node.js or Twisted.
HTTP Server in bash
It causes "import" to behave in ways you wouldn't expect.
In the UK, allotments can have sheds. Allotments are public fields that you can rent a plot on for not too much money to grow food. They are often near railways, just below the embankments. They date from when terraced houses did not have any yard space. Some are very popular with waiting lists, some less so.

I go past a shed on an allotment each day that is built from old doors. The long walls are five doors, and the short walls are three doors. They are nailed to fairly substantial planks top and bottom, and there is a tarpaper style roof. One of the doors is actually mounted on hinges so is the actual door. The owner has used half glazed doors so the interior must have fantastic light. I'd imagine there must be some kind of floor rather than just earth.
Does this mean that there is a room for a brand in which "everything just works"?

Or would that so feature-poor/expensive/slow-moving/low-status that no-one would use it?
Illusions of an Obama Economy, Romney Can’t Do Better, Congress Can
Making money on Windows Store
investor are mostly interested if the idea is working, so i would suggest you start implementing the idea as your in flow your will get more idea about resources you will be needing to implement and running it. which will help you put together a better proposal to the investor and your will get a better prospective whether or not the idea will work.
He's doing too much with too many different things. The following phrase is valid here: "A man with two watches never knows what time it is".

I rarely get problems of that magnitude. The only unreliable thing I have is my ADSL connection and that's not a problem as I can use my phone as a backup.
Yes, as Portuguese I also have an issue with his bias for Brazilian Portuguese, as there are many more countries speaking the language.

- Portugal

- Brazil

- Angola

- Mozambique

- Green Cape

- Saint Thomas and Prince

- Guine-Bissau

- East-Timor

Probably a few others might still use some dialect of the language as well.

Actually Portuguese was the same as Galician not Spanish. Spanish is actually Castilian from Castile region. In 1516 Ferdinand II declared it as the official language of Spain, hence Spanish.

But you're right about the language similarities.
Symphony project is terminated, I think they gave some of it to Apache but I can't find the source anymore.
+1 for the django.me tip. I can see myself using it all the time from now on :-) Out of curiosity, how and where did you find out about it? http://django.me redirects to the main page of django docs and google search didn't give any useful info.
<shameless self promotion> I gave a talk about "Designing Interactions that Help Customers in Decision Making" last year at EuroIA: http://www.hyperlabs.net/ergonomia/presentazioni/euroia11/
I remember seeing the article about the history of this pop up and when it started getting into the maths my brain wasn't keen, but this is a really simple and great explanation of even the heavier aspects of the math involved.
Distribution not use is required for the GPL to restrict you. But you are right that modification is irrelevant.
Rubysh
I suggested using Prolog in the comments. His problem description was not quite good enough for me to assess whether or not Prolog will be a good choice, but at least it's a candidate.

A Prolog program is essentially a list of rules that are written as an implication. Something like:

moves_to(Cow, Location) :-
hungry(Cow),
current_location(Cow, OldLoc),
food_in(OldLoc, OldFood), food_in(Location, Food),
Food > OldFood.

In human language: a cow moves to a location if it's hungry and there's more food in that location than in current location.

I should probably write a proper answer.

edit: Added a proper answer to the stackoverflow with an almost complete introductory Prolog example. It's waiting for your upvotes :)
Crux of the discussion? It's become a market norm to have more, new, novelty. If the only selling point of an iPhone iteration was bugfixes, stability and refinement of the workflows it would just be interpreted as a list of things that were wrong with the previous product.

I think from one perspective advertising refinement is perceived as perpetual incompetence with respect to your capability to deliver a quality product. Horrible inversion of logic.
This experience is quite interesting. But it would have been better if we had more context about his life.
I can't imagine to live without time at work.
My boss give deadlines I must meet. Sometimes I can't finish everything so I have to talk with my boss to decide if we renounce some features or we push the deadline. Everyday, people ask me for schedules: "When are you going to finish this?", "How long will it take if we want to do that?", etc.
AT&T: iPhone 5 Set Sales Record, Was "Most Successful iPhone Launch Ever"
It seems in the last hour or so, someone has uploaded a different Galaxy S3 benchmark which beats the iPhone 5.

There's now an S3 benchmark with a score of 1628, which pretty much shows how silly the obsession with benchmarks are...

http://browser.primatelabs.com/android-benchmarks
I don't think you know what circular reasoning is.

Are you seriously suggesting that anything that isn't designed against every conceivable example of human incompetence, is a flawed design?
CUBRID Node.js driver - M2 is completed
Good point. I went through a phase where I offloaded virtually everything that takes electrons bar my laptop and phone (which doubles as my modem), I've been at this baseline for a good year or so now. Between that and limiting myself to one bookmark of any given category or subject matter (eg, HN = news and tech, Juxapoz = art site, rather than multiples of each), I feel like I have a hundred million hours a day in which to do things.

I went from struggling to read a few pages of a book or write some code every evening to currently working on postgrad eduction, other certifications, volunteering, etc. It's not as literally simple a transition (lots of changes in motivation and practices in the mix), but every single device comes with a level of cost in terms of time and cognitive "energy". Stack them all up and it turns into a pretty big percentage of your capacity each day.
maybe he just want to be left alone
This idea is also in use at http://www.sublimetext.com/ The demo is using this technique because streaming video would actually take more bandwidth in this case as only bits of the image are actually changing at one time/incremental changes. It works a treat!
you got some css bug http://i.imgur.com/bVpZt.png (firefox)
Django by Example is one of the best resources: http://lightbird.net/dbe/.

It's getting a little out of date, what with Django 1.4 and django-registration 0.8, but nothing that can't be upgraded without too much hassle.

#django on Freenode is also invaluable.

You can also search inside the Django documentation with "!django", if DDG is your default search engine.

I also recommend checking out dotCloud (YC) instead of Heroku, as it's much easier to set up for beginners. Just download the wsgi.py and make the necessary changes to your settings.py, and Bob's your uncle.
Their 10million years of evolution far greater than the Man himself

Nah. We've all had exactly the same length of evolution.