skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't find 'main' and friends to be very meaningful), but sometimes it's ok to start there, if you don't have anything in particular to find. And structure is usually an artifact of behavior, so I almost always start with trying to understand the behavior.

I like to first familiarize myself with the overall program flow. With an IDE I can usually do this with 'called from' or similar views; if I can run the code, throwing stack traces paints a nice picture of potentially-interesting control paths, taking note of interesting details along the way.

Other than that, there's usually something I'm looking for when I dive into a piece of code. So I find that function or something that looks like the right area and start poking around the places it goes and the places it comes from, see what parameters are moving around, what side effects are taking place, etc.

I usually try to build a mental model of what I would build if I were trying to solve the same problem. It's usually not spot-on, but just doing a little thinking ahead of time helps me navigate the program more easily, predict what is going to happen, and be aware of recognizable handholds.

I try to keep an eye out open for abstractions and patterns so I can keep a sightly more terse mental model and hopefully fit more of the program in my head. If it's a really big chunk of code I'll keep pencil and paper handy and map out the program's design as a I go.

Oh yeah -- keep docs handy. Every now and then they actually help.
A 14" laptop running Windows XP. Is it irrational that I have even more respect for him after learning that?

No multicore, multihead powerhouse, no HN open on another screen, no very tweaked Linux install...
No more alcohol/nudity at Bay to Breakers
Git is the C of Version Control Tools
I was cheap and only was able to offer $105 for a logo I had done on there, I still had results I thought were great.
I don't expect anything (and should not actually). If I lose my data due to a bad backup/updates policy it is my fault.

The question is not about MS. I've picked Windows because it has a huge user base.

My initial statement is equivalent to: if you take any software product that has many users then its legal docs effectively leave no rights to the end users. So it is not a big deal when Facebook changes its docs accordingly.

I understand that software companies are forced to adopt such policies to survive.

Therefore I rely on MS' good will that it tests updates before it releases them to the general public (even if it breaks all Windows boxes one day, people will be using it anyway).
add me! 148 568 102
Not all socialism entails government ownership there is also direct collective ownership. To answer OA's question there are many successful countries with socialist aspects to their economies (esp compared to US's extreme capitalism) Europe, esp Scandinavia, China, India. The countries that mix ideologies seem to have it the best.

This whole article sounds like a shell game just to avoid associating the bail-out with the word "socialist" which has a ridiculously despised reputation amongst Old White Rich Guys in USA.

And re "Why we're Not Socialists". Um, don't know what we you're talking about. I am a socialist.
With the price of custom graphical work these days, either from 99designs.com or from your favorite graphical talent in the 3rd world (if you find one you like and works well with you, hang onto them -- solid gold), you can justify quality original graphics for projects that would never have merited it before.

My little brother is trying to break into comics without drawing ability -- so he's outsourcing it, for prices that are a) cheap enough for an American college student to afford and b) impressive for an Indian college student to command.

Here's a page:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3112/3151984260_6416872194_b....

Take a guess at how much that page cost.

You guessed too high. No, really, you did.
While it's cool to see them trying out some unconventional ways of monetization, I have a feeling this won't last for very long.
Downvote all you want but I would seriously like to know.

http://www.matasano.com/log/958/enough-with-the-rainbow-tabl...
The MBP isn't strong enough to power 2 30" monitors at full resolution. Get a MacPro is you want more than one 30" display.

We bought 2 30" monitors for Tipjoy with our YC money. We drink that productivity boosting koolade with a firehose.
Online thieves scam state of Utah out of $2.5 million
Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive...
Would Geico hire him?
First arrests in Heartland Data breach
Why is this important:

Trojans/spyware was installed inside the datacenter where this information was being processed. Heartland processes about 100,000,000 credit card transactions per month. They're being quite tight-lipped about how long the trojanware had been active inside their "secure zone."

Heartland thought that they could release the news during Obama's inauguration and that no one would notice. Heh.

Here's a list of banks that admit being affected:

http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/articles.php?art_id=1200&...

Some industry comments:
http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/articles.php?art_id=1212&...

While PCI-DSS is wild overkill for most of the folks here, it does give an idea of what sort of security measures that a business handling money needs to do. And as you move towards profitability and sale, meeting or exceeding the data security standards will become important.

https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/security_standards/pci_...
A first: String theory predicts an experimental result
I don't really understand why people shouldn't incorporate or even take investments before YC. Can't you just take the stock as advisory shares and buy convertible debt (if they even want cash)? Neither really affect or are affected by the valuation or current amount of investment.
My last job involved a lot of code review. I usually started with static analysis. Cyclomatic complexity is crude, but it seems like a reasonable heuristic for identifying important or interesting portions of the code.
Much of the incoming migrant workers are from places like Britain, or India. These people have excellent educations. It seems nuts that the U.S sets hard limits on such people entering the country.

I struggle to see how a country who outsource a significant part of their manufacturing to the far east could have too many knowledge workers.
I wonder if the Twitter team realized the potential ways people have taken and will take the basic twitter platform when they came up with the idea.
I guess I wasn't clear enough. The "user" tables get updated so that the password used to log in will be "111111" or such, and that means all the salts and hashes will be the same value.
This is really quite cool. I think it has potential, and if they can truly unify user experience application-to-application like OS X does, Linux has a chance at more desktop uptake with the non-hacker population.
I hear this every now and again but it always sounds a little too conspiracy theory for me. Is there any legitimacy to this claim?
Who said they're storing passwords in plain text? They could be paranoid enough to remove hashed passwords. If you know what makes the hash you can reproduce. If it's a database with financial information, I can see crackers devoting time to do this, making their rainbow tables and botnets or whatever to guess the passwords.
Oh OK, sorry for the tangent.
This is awesome.

People who want porn get porn. People who want money (ie Justin.tv) get money.

Unfortunately, there are definitely issues.

Some 8-year-old kid is going to search for the awesome new channel about secant that everyone in 3rd grade is talking about. Since the c is next to the x, he's going to accidentally type "sex" instead of "sec". 5 seconds later, he says "mommy, what is that?", and 10 seconds later Justin.tv has a very, very angry parent on their hands.

Ok, maybe that's a little unrealistic. But people are going to complain about it.
I wonder where a game like Myst, where nothing is easy to figure out, would fall under this spectrum of computer games. I remember spending hours with friends trying to solve the logic puzzles and still believe it was one of the best games I've ever played.
There will probably be some complaints from parents or some being redirected to porn sites, but what do you expect? If parents are so offended they should talk to their child about searching for porn on the internet rather than complaining.

If some kid turns 'safe search' off in google and types in 'porn' - will the parents get mad at google?
You can't do either in isolation. If you just write code, you end up ghettoizing yourself into a style that works for you but has little to do with how others program, and misses out on all the nifty tricks they've discovered. If you just read code, you don't understand why the author employed the tricks they did, as you say.

I usually alternate between the two: find a good piece of code. Then try to modify it to do something different. Then look at the style of the code around the parts you touched, and see if there's a better way to do your modification. Then modify something else in the general vicinity, and repeat.

When I started at Google, I basically just hacked the Google webserver to display "Hello world" in various parts of the result page until I understood what it was doing enough to start contributing to my team.
From another post here, I am absolutely amazed that a search for xxx or sex on Google takes you to flash video based full length hardcore porn. I didn't realize it was that easy these days. What Justin.tv is doing is no different or worse than Google. I would expect Justin.tv is banned by every parental filter anyways.
Not if compete is even in the ballpark.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/perezhilton.com+techcrunch....
...and you didn't have to give up equity for the help, right?
Yes, I have. The adapter basically sucks. It does help if you go into energy saver prefs -> set Graphics to "Higher performance"
"Equity only" sounds like "work for nothing".

Everybody has to live off of something.

Offer a salary that'll cover rent + noodle money and you'll see a lot of positive responses if you throw in some equity. Or maybe even if you don't.

A lot of developers are willing to live on the absolute minimum for a while if you pay them enough to cover rent and food.

Equity is a strong motivator, but it's not even half as strong as the need for food or the fear of losing the roof over your head.

If you want a talented developer to hop on board you have to make sure you can cover his/her basics.
I really don't see any issue with this quite honestly.

If a parent has an issue then either talk to your kid about NOT searching for porn or simply block the site.
They don't need to be banned.

It's a redirect. So as long as the actual porn site is blocked, Justin.tv doesn't need to be. Normal Justin.tv is fine, and if someone does get redirected to porn, the filter should grab it there when it tries to load hot-porn.com or whatever.
We are all pink and fluffy here so you have nothing to worry about, just relax and forget about it...
Entrepreneurship: The New Retirement?
Apple's Mac OS X update breaks Perl
Facebook’s Users Ask Who Owns Information
I don't understand this obsession about only storing hashes, as if that's the primary critical issue with site security. There are plenty of reasons to store the plaintext, and in a well secured database I really don't think it is much of an issue. Or as I heard someone say once, "If you can break into my database, and show me how, I will quite literally give you a million dollars".

Off the top of my head, here's a couple of very good reasons to store plaintext:

- password recoverability: if the user knows they can recover the password, they're more likely to use a more complex one

- flexibility with authentication: to use something like HTTP Digest Auth, you need the plaintext to be able to hash it with a one-time nonce

And like many will no doubt point out, hashing it isn't all THAT secure anyway. If it's not a very strong hash, or there's enough information to reset it somehow, they can get what they want anyway. Not to mention that if your database has been cracked they probably have everything they want anyway - why even bother logging in?

I just don't get it. Sure, defence in depth is the best strategy and everyone should practise it whereever possible. But whether the password is stored hashed or not is not the lynchpin security issue many make it out to be, IMO.
If there were ever a time when we needed Lawrence Lessig to step up to the plate

Are your legs broken or something? The man does a lot, and as he sometimes points out, very few people are also stepping up to that plate with him.
Say you post a picture of me, and I like it and use it for my profile picture. Then you leave Facebook. Now I have no profile picture.

Just the first example that popped into my head.
It just screams of desperation. It may make sense, but do you think they'll be able to keep their community this way?
Yeah, I wasn't aware if I typed in xxx at Google they now wait 5 seconds and send me to a porn site automatically.
When was the last time a parent actually talked to their child instead of complaining about it being someonelse's problem?
Flash versus Open

Perhaps one thing we can all agree on is that the future of the web, mobile or otherwise, will be more or less open. That would be HTML, MP3, H.264, HE-AAC, and so on. These are not proprietary Adobe products, they are open standards…unlike Flash.

In confusing codecs with UI, Wilson keeps asking, “why is it tha[t] most streaming audio and video on the web comes through flash players and not html5 based players?” The answer is rather pedestrian: HTML5 is just ramping up, but Flash IDE has been around for many years. Selling Flash IDE and back-end server tools has been a commercial focus for Adobe, while Apple, for example, hasn’t paid much attention to QuickTime technologies and promotion in ages. It’s thus reflected in adoption patterns.

Hopefully, this summary will clear Wilson’s blind spot:

Apple is betting on open technologies (as it makes money on hardware) while Adobe (which only sells software) is betting on wrapping up content in a proprietary shackle called Flash.

From:

Does "A VC" have a blind spot for Apple?
http://counternotions.com/2009/02/16/open/
They had tons of makefiles, so moving to something make-like was desirable.

I personally think that GNU make has a ton of bells and whistles, so it may be very difficult to emulate it with any accuracy; then again, they also know which features of GNU make are important to their project.

I might have bitten the bullet and chosen something like SCons to reach a Python base, and I have spent time rewriting (one or two) makefiles as SConstructs without a problem. But I have also seen huge projects with makefile madness, and I can certainly understand anyone's decision to want to keep makefiles untouched. Emulating make, while leaving room for improvements, isn't such a bad decision.
I think you're projecting. Most of those people just want Facebook to work, and don't care about this latest privacy "outrage".
Read up on the government of 1908, it was extremely corrupt.

Indeed it was. But perhaps you have heard the name K Street before? The retail, envelopes-full-of-cash corruption is now mostly gone. Corruption today is organized, supersized, and legalized. It's called interest group politics. Worse, because government is so much bigger, both in revenues and the extents of its regulations, interest group politics has a far more pernicious impact on our lives than the corruption of 1909 ever did.

The world would probably be more wealthy without that drain, but I don't know if it would be better.

Even given that we want to spend more on healthcare, the government healthcare programs waste somewhere on the order of 80% of the dollars spent. My point was that the taxes we now pay are not being put to good use.

I expect the government of 1908 was more corrupt than the government of today, people did not have the money to let government take that much off of them

Just look at the rates. Combined federal tax rates for a median earner in 1909: 0%. Combined federal tax rates for a median earner 2009: ~20%.

The government was very corrupt then, but at least people new it was corrupt and thus had little inclination to vote in leaders that would raise taxes. Our modern government, via its K-16 education system, has basically taught everyone that the government is our mother and that giving it money is righteous and good.

So yes taxes are up, but it's not like the money is set on fire we are getting a lot of services from that money.

Federal taxes do not pay for streetlights and cell phones ( and neither does much of state and local taxes). I generally view the interstate highway program as a disaster that destroyed urban neighborhoods and created an unsustainable reliance on automobiles.

When it comes to social organizations things like MMO guilds and facebook let people be far more social than the average pre car social club.

You have got to be be kidding. Human beings did not evolve to socialize via text.

Over the last 100 years the middle class and the wealthy have left city's and have only recently been returning. Murder statistics among the poor and they have always been high so correlating it with city living is missing the point.

Murder statistics among the poor and they have always been high so correlating it with city living is missing the point.

This simply false. At the turn of the century, 85% of the population of Milwaukee were immigrants or the children of immigrants. Yet the homicide rate was 3.7. The other big northern cities were similar. The people in these cities were mostly poor immigrants. Yet they worked hard and moved forward in life. In the 60's, breakdowns in law enforcement, "urban renewal", and the growth of the welfare state allowed the growth of a large criminal underclass in the cities. Riots and muggings pushed the hard working middle class out into the suburbs Poverty does not cause crime. Culture and lack of rule of law cause crime.
It's the natural thing to do but at what cost?
Samsung Transparent OLED Display Video
I do not believe that they will necessarily be replaced with anything, really. They may just go the way of the buggy whip.
Quake Wars Gets Ray Traced
I like this Consolas-inspired one, Inconsolata (also available for Mac, etc.):

http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html
once you share something with people, they need to be able to display it for ever to whom you've shared it with)

I am skeptical. Where I work, we're constantly dealing with these sorts of cases where current privacy settings don't quite match past sharing actions. If we can deal with these problems, so can Facebook.

I'm sure the lawyers wanted to have maximum rights solely to protect FB from insane lawsuits. It's not a nefarious plan to sell your drunken clubbing photos. But they failed to achieve balance here.
"We built an API. 2000 pieces of software are capable of sending updates. Summize was the most important one" - Evan Williams

http://loiclemeur.com/english/2009/02/evan-williams-of-twitt...
Canada and Australia have pretty open immigration policies and their standard of living is higher than in the US.
> If you're really seeking a lead developer - I'd change that to at least 5 years of developing web apps, with around 3 in ruby.

Oh pfffff, I say.

If you're hiring someone to do something they've already done before, you're missing the point.

We took on a Haskell programmer to lead our C# development side, a network hacker to lead our JavaScript work and a (CS) student to lead our Java application server side.

I strongly suggest you re-define what you're looking for in a 'lead developer'. Ability, talent, enthusiasm and team-management are high on my list.
They do if you're feeling lucky.
[Yahoo Research] Preferential Behavior in Online Groups
Good thing I didn't learn secant until high school -- in which my typo would turn into a pleasant surprise
"the site should really include a page confirming that the user is over 18 before redirecting them"

Yes, because 16 year old boys who searched for porn are going to click no when asked if they're over 18.
_why is eccentric in a completely out there way, its pretty hard to argue there's someone like him. RMS is a archetypal hacker from the 70's who remained that way in the 2000's.

There's no doubt that they both do great things, one's just more then slightly more unique and the other is intimately known.
Probe launched on Chinese sweatshops manufacturing computer keyboards
I start by cleaning code a lot.

I've found that often it's better to make the code more legible (indenting, IDE, etc) than just trying to parsing it without.

I would say unless the code is already in great shape normally tidying it up a bit means comprehension happens much more quickly.
User looks up xxx on Justin.tv for xxx on Justin.tv

User looks up xxx on Google for xxx

The intent is different and the auto-redirect, even at 5 seconds, is troubling.
It's not up to Justin.tv to ask for an age: it's up to the site that actually displays said pornographic content. It's their business and their responsibility.

Btw, after trying out the redirect, there is in fact no "pornographic" material on the entry page.

EDIT: this comment was not meant to be a reply to your comment, jackowayed. (oops! sorry.)
The fact that this story is so controversial (read the comments on TechCrunch) really shows that Justin.TV will probably stop doing this soon.

Interesting idea to give the adult searchers what they really want. The problem is that adult content is still too taboo for many folks.
okay =) I understand, that people are not familiar with situation in this Linux world.

When you selecting CentOS you're reusing Fedora's and then RHEL's release circles and time of their gurus.

Fedora is an bleeding edge distro, for rapid integration and testing, while RHEL is Fedora-based commercially supported by RedHat system.

CentOS is a repackaging of the RHEL's sources.

Oracle reusing RHEL for its Unbreakable Linux. Why wouldn't you?
Were those rhetorical questions?

Not sure where you derived them, but my only point was: usually when enough outraged people are outraged someone/some company gives in. Unfortunate, but true. Personally, I think it's a great idea.
Well, I don’t know how a "recession in the real economy" differs from any other recession so I can’t really address that point.

But as for the banks you’re simply wrong. The problem with your argument, and many like it, is that you hide the actual facts by focusing on the macro. That produces a lot of analytical fear mongering with no real basis in fact (to even claim our 7.6% unemployment rate compares to the 25-to-30% rate of the Great depression is ridiculous).

The fact is I still get credit offers in the mail daily. The banks that are going out of business are having their assets bought by bigger banks that are seemingly doing just fine. So I don't see any banks "hoarding cash"

More importantly you still have 92.4% of the population gainfully employed (and probably another 4% on top of that who are housewives, students or otherwise not looking for a job). That means there’s still a huge market of credit worthy people who want to buy stuff on credit.

The great, great, great, great majority of people are not in danger of losing their jobs. That makes them as credit worthy now as they were a year ago. On the other end of things banks still have shareholders and shareholders still expect profits. So in the end you have a supply and demand system that is still up and running just as it always has (it’s just slowing down).

P.S. To give you one example of the fear mongering going on a lot of people are quoting Japan’s "lost decade" but very few of them are pointing out that Japan still had positive GDP growth throughout that decade..
HTC takes a European vacation with the G2. Will we see it stateside?
Casino regulators issue alert over iPhone card-counting app
What every online service can learn from Ma.gnolia's experience