skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The new version involves less money and more engagement. The VCs will invest $80k in each startup instead of $150k, and we'll organize sessions of office hours in which partners from the VC firms advise the startups in each batch. As before, the investments will be done as convertible notes with no valuation cap and no discount.
yup, the order is biased. definitely worth a couple of minutes to fix that
Perhaps "terrible" is a bit strong, but precompiled headers are basically a hack. They can hardly compete with a proper redesign.

I'm not sure what you'd do about the conditional behaviour, though - seems like something of an omission. I've found it handy, and it is used a lot by the Windows headers. (I don't recall seeing it much outside Windows, though - perhaps a case of "Unix doesn't use it, OS X doesn't use it, RISC-OS doesn't use it, AmigaOS doesn't use it, Windows DOES use it - OK, four to one, it's not important"? ;)
Julian Assange's book an exercise in dystopian musings
Doug Gregor, the author of this proposal, is the chair of the modules study group of the C++ standards committee (source: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2012/n338...). And this proposal looks very similar to the C++ modules proposal by Daveed Vandevoorde http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2012/n334...

So it looks like Apple is working towards making this a standard, not a non-standard extension.
No. It should not. What will hurt them is how you raise them (By heirs I'm talking about children). Give them the best education money can buy and beyond the essentials (food, roof, clothes) make them work for whatever else they want.

Want a car? Get a summer job. Want a new video game console? Do some extra chores. Want extra money for your date? A job in the weekends would not be bad.

Do you get my point?

By the time they inherit money they will learn not to depend on it.

It all depends on how you raise them. If you do a crappy job to begin with then even with no money they will probably be screw. Tell me I'm wrong.
Facebook Stories -  How did they get that effect on the preview image?
It's v8's fault, and v8 does not suck.
> "Bank of America supervisor" implies a manager at a call centre.

Hahahaha, yep. And that's as far as you'll get.

I've worked at a call center that serviced a lot of big companies. Rest assured you will never, ever speak to an actual manager at a call center (call center managers aren't trained to interact with customers, they mostly do scheduling and deal with attendance policy). You'll get a "Level 2 rep" who's just another rep who has some authority to grant exceptions to policy in certain cases.

Also, if you call the corporate HQ and demand to speak to the president of the company, they'll route your call right back to that level 2 rep in the call center. Most companies go out of their way to ensure that the leadership is protected from the inevitable lunatic customers.
Doesn't work like that.

Anyone outside the US and Canada is doing business with Facebook Ireland Limited. They are bound by Irish law.
This will definitely reduce the number of startups with H1B holder founders, even if you transfer the visas, the runway will be comparatively short.
Apple’s Astonishing Profit in Context
I don't want to get into this whole discussion about if the employees do or do not deserve the company, but I thought I'd take up a different angle.

>...leaving it to your heirs makes more sense from an evolutionary point of view.

I think you can make a strong argument that giving the company to your heirs whole-hog is a poor idea (unless those heirs are involved in the company personally). They will almost certainly be called upon to make decisions about the company, and without expertise they'll probably do a middling job of it. It seems quite sensible that, especially in your heirs are unfamiliar with the business, that the employees should have their self-interest piqued in some way when you pass it on. After all, if you devote 20% of the company to employee equity, and the company performs 30% better as a result, your heirs will be better off because of it.

It seems like the people who work at the company are most qualified to run it, and that giving them some incentive to run it well is in everyone's interest. So I wouldn't say it's clearly a bad choice, "from an evolutionary point of view," for either the heirs or the company.

Also, this is completely parenthetical, but this sort of thing does not look good (even if you're right):
>My logic is undeniable, how can you oppose anything I say?
>configuration was complicated

Okay, you got me. Huh?
I think people are being overly pessimistic. It's not that ambitious of a project (particularly a hobby project at that). Why? Well, he doesn't have to support thousands of different drivers and hardware configurations -- he only needs code that supports his own. That eliminates a good chunk of the OS code.

Second, a lot of grunt-code can be found in open source projects, so most of the tedious/time-consuming programming can be eliminated if he chooses to follow this option.

Drop preemptive multitasking, cache-optimization, modes, virtual memory, and networking and there's not too much left.

And finally, it doesn't take that long to understand the GDT. Mine became corrupted once so I took a day to learn how it worked -- fixed that crap in a hex editor.

So no, he's probably not going to invent the next highly polished OS that handles every edge case and has been rigorously tested against bugs, but then again I don't think it's unreasonable to see a simple little functional OS.
This is one of those times that the phrase "RTFM" actually makes sense. If the author had read what each one was rather than guessing, he'd have enjoyed it all a lot more. Nobody likes typing out "/system/configurations/networking". That's why they wound up with things like "/sys/conf/net".
But hey, if he succeeds, maybe he'll come around.
Sometimes you need to know about encodings, even if you're just a consumer. Putting just one non 7-bit character in your SMS message will silently change its encoding from 7-bit (160 chars) to 8-bit (140 chars) or even 16 bit (70 chars) which might make the phone split it into many chunks. The resulting chunks are billed as separate messages.
Anatomy of a Native Feeling HTML5 iOS App
Hover over some low contrast text and you'll see what they're trying to do, although it is not obvious and probably not mobile-friendly.
That is a bunch of unhelpful babbling.

The answer to "why?" is just as easily given: "why not?" No more need be justified.

>Because both scientists and mystics seek to acquire knowledge, although the path undertaken is of a significantly different nature.

One has a testable process that can be shared with other people, the other doesn't. You can call your search for truth whatever you like, but the process makes all the difference. Alchemists sought truth, etc, etc.

>"What will man find on mars? nothing but himself."

So what? How should that at all influence whether it happens or not? It is like saying "Wherever you go, that is where you are". True, but unhelpful. You can use it to justify or not justify undertaking whatever action, depending on how you choose to interpret it at the time. "Finding myself" (on whatever level you choose to define 'Find' and 'myself') on Mars sounds awesome, not disappointing.
>> Precompiled headers are a terrible solution
> Why is this?

Think about it: the header potentially depends on any "define" value defined before the header is processed. If we'd have modules that define interfaces that don't depend on macros, we can process all the definitions that make the module only once for all the obj files that depend on it.

You typically don't need conditionals on if another module is used or not. You need conditionals to compile the whole application or the dynamic library some specific way, but that is also only once per the compilation of the whole application.

At the moment there is really code that can include more times he same header to define different types, but these are extreme use cases, however most of the libraries would gain if they would be defined as "modules" definitions of which can be compiled only once per application build.
Thank you everyone for contributing these comments.

Quote>
If the Smalltalk community wants to remain small, insular and essentially irrelevant .... However, if they want to win people back, it would be a good idea to take stock of what the rest of the world is up to and consider adopting it rather than insulting it.
<Quote

Well said. I DON'T want Smalltalk to be irrelevant and breaking out of the image and working with 'your' tool chain and being free is how Redline is taking stock of the rest of the world. You won't find us insulting other languages.

Please give Smalltalk a try, it is a fun language to develop in and the barriers to getting started are being smashed by Redline.

- James.
Why on earth would the people who wrote V8 use UCS-2? What about alternative JS runtimes?
Will work for: less confusing landing pages
TLDR: v8 "sucks" (and doesn't support Unicode code points outside of the lowest ~64k characters).

Edit: v8 in general is pretty cool, but not supporting Unicode outside UCS-2 is pretty bad.
wow that's pretty cool. Looks like everything from that list was in November. Also looks like the majority of the sites were selling prescription drugs.
I've used Oberon, which has a module system quite similar to this, quite heavily, and the way to diminish link time is to not link, instead use dynamic loading: leaf modules are loadable and unloadable, nonleaf modules can be made leaf by unloading all their descendants. Gives you the possibility for immediacy/flow, that a good REPL does. For many cases, you get edit/compile/run cycles measured in (often single-digit) seconds.
Still mission creep, though.
The equity is insignificant, specially for the top startups. What those 20k buys the VC is first-hand knowledge of what is going on with the company and (hopefully) a better chance to invest additional money when/if the company takes off.
It is worth reading PG's email from 5 months back about his vision of what the fund raising environment might look like.

http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-fallout-y-combinator...
Ask HN: What do you think about my startup: getelevatr.com (WordPress plugin)
Overview: Elevatr helps you easily create signup forms and webinar landing pages so that you can increase leads through email marketing and webinars.

Direct URL: http://www.getelevatr.com/

I would love to hear your thoughts about the idea and feedback on the website and demo video.
I'm not. Just because I do not agree with the masses doesn't mean I'm wrong. You sound more like a troll by your comment.

You would probably call Galileo a troll simply by saying that the earth was not the center of the universe.

I'm serious, I really do not see the error in my logic. Your ad hominem comment adds nothing to the discussion.
I've done quite a lot of (embedded) OS development in VS. It's a pretty nice experience, because you can generate a console app that you can use as an emulator that allows you to prototype really fast, and use your embedded toolchain when building for the device.

With the obvious caveats that you write as much of your code to be cross-platform as possible, and be careful with endianness.
Booking hotels
If any of you naysayer arsehats (you know who you are) bothered reading to the bottom of his article, you'd have seen that he has a section where you (if you do indeed know about OS development) could help him by answering his questions. I pasted it below for reference:

-----------------------------------------------------------

My research

What I’ve found out so far:

Boot sequence:
BIOS;

Master Boot Record (MBR);

Bootloader – the program that takes it over from MBR and loads your Kernel;

Kernel.
How to write your own MBR and write it to Disk on windows.

I’ve written a small utility in Visual C++ that allows directly to read/write from disk (download here, source included for Visual Studio 2010 Express);

How to write bare bones C kernel entry point.

How to write “naked” functions on Windows in Visual Studio

Missing link - I still don’t know how to properly step from MBR to Bootloader to Kerlen, that is – write your own MBR code that would load bootloader, pass the execution to bootloader that would load and pass execution to bare bones C kernel:

What exactly is Global Descriptor Table (GDT) and Interrupt Descriptor Table (IDT), and how it looks in C and Assembly?
How and when, and again how, if when is later (for example in Long Mode or Protected Mode) to set up all this GDT and IDT stuff. They say you have to set it up before the kernel. Then they say you can set it up with dummy values and set it up later in kernel. Then they say, that to set it up, you have to be in Real Mode, so your kernel (which might be way over 1Mb of real mode space), needs to switch between modes. And then if your kernel is over 1Mb, you can’t access memory locations after 1Mb, and so on… It’s confusing, but I’m going to find it out and post it here later on.

How to handle Interrupts in C?
Will they perform as callbacks that await some return values or do I have to use inline assembly to process them correctly;

Is it possible to write MBR in C?
I do understand that you still have to set ORG to 7c00h, and use some specific assembly instructions, but if they could be wrapped in C using inline assembly and C entry point can be glued with few lines of assembly code, why not?
As someone who's just started on a less ambitious OS project, I couldn't agree more. I'm writing basically exclusively for legacy hardware because I'm not expecting to run it outside of QEMU, but one of the reasons Linux took so many man hours to write is because it runs on everything while maintaining stability. If you recall, Linus started writing specifically for his own machine and everybody hopped on the wagon for their own.
I'm not sure if collecting a lot of money on behalf of projects qualifies as an ISP.
The first sentence was an overexagerration, but I have had near-death experience for my kid, and that makes you reconsider various things in life seriously. I am certainly not a violent person whatsoever, but from that incident I understood that I would disregard almost everything if stakes were that high once more.

But, coming back to the original issue - it all comes down to two different theories of ethics, opinions about what is good and just: in essence, if some choice equals to murdering one to save ten others [a simplification for the sake of argument, assume that no alternatives exist] , would doing so be good or evil?

There are valid arguments to say that doing so would be evil by the nature of the act.

There are valid arguments to say that not doing so would be evil, by the result of the act (10 others dying instead of 1).

And I do value a human life of "a racial slur of choice" more than a hundred sheep - archaic laws did value human lives in a couple dozen of domestic animals, and that whas when a peasant's life was considered cheap; we can and should be better than that.

And I do value my kids life more than your life - that is also quite natural, I doubt that you'd find any parents who think otherwise.

It all adds up. I mean, if you start discussing life and death, then most solutions aren't pretty; and discussing only 'pure' solutions means not saving (= murdering) lives - such as the lives of people that could have been saved by some sheep.
I don't really like that you call tests "just checklists". That's accurate for unit tests, but I don't think it really captures the spirit of integration or functional tests.

Integration tests, to me, provide value by making a space to brainstorm "what if" questions around corner cases of interactions between components. Testing the "happy path" provides confidence that all the individual assumptions aren't inconsistent as a whole.

Functional tests, for me, provide a way to think about "well, this is what we built, and it's internally correct, but is it what will fit the needs of our users?" I would also differentiate between end-to-end scenario testing, and discrete testing of a single unit of functionality. An example of the former would be the signup process, while the latter might be making changes in a preferences configuration screen.

I think it would be worthwhile to also discuss "tenet" testing, such as Performance, Accessibility, Localization/Internationalization, Failover/Rollover, Security.
Yeah. Compile times there were ridiculously fast, bordering on interactive. Go follows the same path.

Java has very fast compilation as well, due in no small part to tossing the preprocessor and having fast binary imports.
Weak argument. HN is to look at interesting links that "tickle the mind". My link does that. Being the second most upvoted comment in the thread proves that. I feel sorry it tickled yours the wrong way, benatkin.
For GCC this is highly optimized:

"The preprocessor notices such header files, so that if the header file appears in a subsequent #include directive and FOO is defined, then it is ignored and it doesn't preprocess or even re-open the file a second time. This is referred to as the multiple include optimization."

http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/cppinternals/Guard-Macros.html
What if smARtDUINO was rendered with the lowercase letters in a much smaller font? It looks like they are intentionally trying to use the ARDUINO name to sell their products. They are causing confusion and that is a violation of trademark law.
YC gives a measly $600 for travelling expenses for the interviews, but suddenly $80k isn't enough?

$4k gets you anywhere in the world, and maybe half the western world is reachable with $1k or less. You're not going to spend a substantial portion of $80k on flights unless you go home and back every weekend.
Unicode 2.0 added surrogate pairs in 1996. Unfortunately, the first versions of both Java and JavaScript predated this and got strings horribly wrong, and now any conforming implementation of either is required to suck. The Right Thing would be for almost everyone to work with only combining character sequences, except for a rare few who need to know how to dissect one into its codepoints and reassemble them correctly (just as people don't normally need to extract high or low bits from an ASCII character).
i put together my own little version:

http://vicapow.clickb.in/investor/partner/person/yc
Multi device testing made easy
Mostly, don't push. More and more users just shut off all notifications anyway.
Great point, I've added this option.
Compared to building an OS and support libraies, building your own plane is trivial. Flying it may take balls, though. For the best example I know of: short video at http://www.joostconijn.org/film/vliegtuig/index.php.

The guy built three planes. One didn't take of, one crashed, one brought him across Africa in short hops with landings at rebel-occupied airports where he didn't always manage to announce his arrival.

Short thread at http://www.homebuiltairplanes.com/forums/hangar-flying/12196....

(Apologies for deviating from the subject, but I figure hackers might find this interesting)
F-Droid Free Software Repository: Interview with Ciaran Gultnieks
I love this bootstrap Metro theme http://wrapbootstrap.com/preview/WB0HT4KX4
If the people can't even select representative well, why would they be able to decide issues well?

What would any of these proposals do to increase long term thinking? Making it easy to express opinions on 10 topics a minute seems virtually certain to increase short term shallow thinking.

In other words, in what concrete ways would any of this make anything better?
Redis Cloud is now available on Heroku, AppFog and AppHarbor
Garantia Data, a provider of innovative in-memory NoSQL cloud services, today announced the availability of its Redis Cloud database hosting service on Heroku, AppFog and AppHarbor platforms over AWS
Why First Person Shooters are so popular
We're just starting to get it going at my current company, so I can't really speak to its production qualities. The goal is for real-time statistics/analysis on call records: 100-2000 rec/sec, keeping a day to a week or two of records.

I've done tests previously, and can confirm that they aren't making the performance numbers up :). 3x $500 servers (~18 months ago: single quad-core Core2) were able to handle over 100K tx/sec with k=1 (2 copies of each record). It was pretty easy to get it up and running and the out-of-box performance required no tweaking on my part to achieve excellence (apart from making sure NTP was working well).
the leaping into the unknown and figuring it out is one of the essential qualities of a good hacker.

a massively minimal os is not that hard.
Sounds like you still don't understand the GDT :) [1]

I agre with you, though. As with any hobby project, picking the bits that are interesting or fun makes it easy to keep going.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Descriptor_Table (maybe you're thinking of the GPT?)
According to Carmack, it really wasn't that difficult to program around it, which I'm sure made the decision easier.

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/136614459887202305

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/137189212519792640
Meet the new Pluto
I have actually recently been doing a lot of research on ESOPS. Back in the 90's congress passed a law that makes it possible for a company that is 100% owned by an ESOP to pay ZERO corporate income tax!

If you have a startup that is cashflow positive and generating taxable income you should look into this. I am still leraning a lot about it myself. This link was useful (I have no affiliation with the law firm, just thought they did a good job describing the details)...

http://www.seethebenefits.com/showarticle.aspx?Show=687
Yep. John Carmack stated that the BFG edition is actually Doom 3 in the Rage "framework". E.g. Rage's network layer and (probably?) all the behind the scenes stuff like input and file management, boilerplate for different GPUs etc.
Thematic mapping with Leaflet (JS/Canvas)
i.e. troll, basically.
static int fuck = 0;
...
I_PrintfE("fuck %d \r", fuck++);

You can feel the pain :-)
Great article. It would be neat to see what the backend for the Magazine looks like and whether Marco Arment (or someone else) will make it easier to produce something like The Magazine.
Overall this seems good. The lack of modules in C/C++ is a huge pain. The "link" section seems like a really leaky abstraction, though.

module ClangAST {
umbrella header “AST/AST.h”
module * { }
link “-lclangAST”
}

This hardcodes an implementation-specific syntax and yet says nothing meaningful. Drop the "-l" and you're just restating the name of the module.
What value is there in baking a command-line flag into the module definition?

P.S. I also find it strange that something intended to blend with C/C++ doesn't use semi-colons. This is just stylistic, though.
This is more dangerous than it sounds. As the blog post points out you can only get account balance and last transactions. Here's what's really dangerous: the last transactions.

Say you have one more piece of information: account # and routing #. This can be obtained from any check the person has written. Now you can link their account to your account from your bank's website. Your bank will make some small deposits into their account that you will have to verify. Now you use the security hole discussed in this post and you can find out what the amount of those small deposits was. You have now successfully linked their account to your account and you can withdraw their entire account balance into your account from your bank's website.

Now go to your local bank branch and withdraw your entire account in cash and walk away. So yes, this security hole is bad.
The four screens: integrating PC, phones, tablets, and TV