skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If the goal is to write a small RTOS on a small but nicely-featured microcontroller, then the C books and the uC/OS book might be a good shove in the right direction. Things start getting complicated if you need to write such things as a full USB stack, PCIe subsystem, graphics drivers, etc.

I've always wondered if there could be created some way to skip this step in [research] OS prototyping, by creating a shared library (exokernel?) of just drivers, while leaving the "design decisions" of the OS (system calls, memory management, scheduling, filesystems, &c.--you know, the things people get into OS development to play with) to the developer.

People already sort of do this by targeting an emulator like VirtualBox to begin with--by doing so, you only (initially) need one driver for each feature you want to add, and the emulator takes care of portability. But this approach can't be scaled up to a hypervisor (Xen) or KVM, because those expect their guest operating systems to also have relevant drivers for (at least some of) the hardware.

I'm wondering at this point if you could, say, fork Linux to strip it down to "just the drivers" to start such a project (possibly even continuing to merge in driver-related commits from upstream) or if this would be a meaningless proposition--how reliant are various drivers of an OS on OS kernel-level daemons that themselves rely on the particular implementation of OS process management, OS IPC, etc.? Could you code for the Linux driver-base without your project growing strongly isomorphic structures such as init, acpid, etc.?

Because, if you could--if the driver-base could just rely on a clean, standardized, exported C API from the rest of the kernel, then perhaps (and this is the starry-eyed dream of mine) we could move "hardware support development" to a separate project from "kernel development", and projects like HURD and Plan9 could "get off the ground" in terms of driver support.
Also webkit.
Can't they just treat lambdas as types(class/struct) with operator() methods?
I'm caught btw native vs html5 so if you could list a couple of the decent web apps sites you know, I'd be interested to see good examples. Tks
When has Facebook ever advocated to do this?
Ann Romney vs. Michelle Obama - By Social Media Mentions
I think probably your best trajectory is to try to find ways teachers can easily integrate programming as apart of their current curriculum and subjects. Ex. "build a small program that finds all 3 angles of the triangle" for geometry class. It would essentially have to be simple for a non-technical teacher to integrate with low equipment costs.

I dont have all the details on the program in that the TC post is down but I think if you pitch it as "a curriculum to learn programming" you are going to to run into some very tough and potentially unmovable adversaries (ex. state governments).
Space Burial: http://elysiumspaceflights.com/
UK University Warns Computers Could Take Over The World
I am the lead developer for Treesaver (http://treesaver.net) and we have recently been working with a great team in Milan, Italy to try and offer a solution to this problem. http://savory.io

It's not perfect yet but we have a great roadmap and hope to have all the major features publishers need in the near future.
I think if we had actual people on the ground engaging the enemy using traditional warfare, it's pretty much a given there would be more casualties on both sides. From that standpoint drones are preferable --they offer an asymmetrical aspect to the war, so it might seen it as unfair, but that's beside the point as IEDs are seen as unfair as well. With UAVs Fewer friendlies die, and fewer civilians on the enemy side die due to the more precise aspect of the engagement. Even with the misses, drone engagement results in fewer casualties for both sides.

Look at it this way, if the US had had drones during the VN conflict, the US would not have incurred 50,000 casualties and the VC would not have suffered ~2,000,000 casualties. We'd have gone after the Võ Nguyên Giáps of the conflict.
New link that isn't broken: http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/26/codehs-is-on-a-mission-to-b...
Looks like TC is running out of things to write about. About a day late too..
Marketers: Go after iPad users, not Twitter and Facebook
The drone strike that killed the kid was targeting Ibrahim al-Banna (and it succeeded in killing him). They almost certainly did not expect that the kid would be there, considering that he lived over 100 miles away far from where that drone struck.
YC VC funding cut in half (discuss)
How are shares allotted to new employees? Do existing shares get diluted?
I've been waiting ages for Mozilla to get their act together and make a 64 bit browser. I had never heard of this before. I just downloaded it and I'm trying it right now. So far it seems great. All my extensions seem to be working with no problems and it feels like it's faster. Thanks for the link!
My argument is that you have some obligation to the person you are hellbanning, that a decent person can't just probabilistically waste a year of a stranger's life as part of an experiment on community quality.
How would that work? Bitcoin doesn't really provide an identity.
Real estate transactions involving logging rights?

Forestry Service studies too, I'm sure.
Indeed, before clicking the link I assumed it would be an op-ed covering climate change and rising sea levels, which then goes on to argue that in the future, flooded coastal cities would enlist gondolas (the waterborne kind) to replace buses, like Venice.
Long Before H-P Deal, Autonomy's Red Flags
> The infamous microkernel debate?

Yes.

> Did the experience from writing your own OS solidify that belief?

Absolutely. Micro-kernels have many advantages other than a slight overhead due to message passing (and a large chunk o that overhead can be overcome by using the paging mechanism in a clever way). They're easier to secure, much easier to stabilize, support such luxuries as on the fly upgrades without powering down with grace and allow you to develop drivers in userland greatly simplifying debugging and testing as well as allowing you to do hard real-time (and by extension soft real time) much easier than you could ever do it using a macro kernel.

I've built some pretty large systems using QnX in the 80's and 90's that I would have a real problem with re-implementing even today on todays hardware without the benefits brought by a micro kernel with network transparent message passing. If you haven't used a setup like that then it is probably hard to see the advantages, it goes way beyond some theoretical debate.

In practice two systems side-by-side, one running QnX, one running Linux will have the QnX system come out way ahead in terms of responsiveness for interactive tasks and things like latency and real world throughput.

We'll never know what the world would have looked like if Linus hadn't been as pig headed during that whole debate. Likely we wouldn't be stuck with a re-write of a 30 year old kernel.

The bit where Linux got it right and Tanenbaum got it wrong was that GPL'ing an OS was a much better move than to do a deal with Prentice Hall (who published the minix source). And minix wasn't the most elegant micro kernel either, which may have skewed Linus' perception of what it was that Tanenbaum was getting at.

My guess is if he would have used QnX instead of having looked at minix that he would have readily agreed with Tanenbaum, but we'll never know about that and Linux is here to stay for a long time.

If you haven't used QnX give it a shot and see how it works for you, you might be pleasantly surprised.
That's a great idea, and we're definitely pursuing that as well. We'd ideally like it taught as a continuous class, but we're trying to make it possible for teachers to integrate parts of it into subjects they teach.

Math, physics, and chemistry definitely have a lot of potential here.
WOT is giving me a warning. It seems others have rated it very negatively, and pushed it into red.
Business Cards Give Way to Cellphone Apps for Networking
I doubt it is illegal to walk out of a store with stolen merchandise that someone else put in your pocket (without your knowledge).

Of course it might be hard to prove that that was what happened in the store case.
Great idea! Have you guys thought of creating a foundation to make it easy for people to donate to? To e.g. sponsor a school or something?
You should really consider price floors for certain categories (take crowdspring as an example). For example, there's someone on your site offering 1 BTC (~$12 USD) for a logo...I'm not even a designer and I know that's an awful price.

Sites without floors tend towards high-volume, low-quality projects listed. I am not saying you should have market prices, but having some reasonable floors will give the site better quality.
Use Firebird Database (more 100 organizations)
The most surprising statistic on this infographic, IMO, is that Michelle Obama follows only 8 people, while Ann Romney follows 411.

Not that I can extrapolate anything accurate from that, but mass-following really doesn't seem to have helped.
How the kernel manages you memory
Even Linus wasn't out to build the next Linux. He was just about as clueless as this guy when he started out with two processes alternating in cooperative multi-tasking mode. Then pre-emptive mode (using interrupts and stack switching). Then some basic screen IO iirc and so on.

It all grew from there.
That Ekki Caud dude is one shitty troll..
Bogus Twitter and Wikipedia sites fined and booted offline
I haven't looked much into universities, but I'd check the similarities between deans and the managerial class (as well as other corporate bureaucracies, like marketing departments). Maybe books like Bousquet's _How the University Works_. (http://www.amazon.com/How-University-Works-Education-Low-Wag...)

Tech could be used to remove layers of management and empower the actual workers (as you mentioned you'd expect in 1960), or deskill workers and strengthen managerial control over production. David Noble wrote about these things.
Sounds useful. Some non-consumer examples off the top of my head are:
-search and rescue missions. Track the location of each person as they search and figure out what parts of the geography have been covered.
-trucking companies. They spend a lot on GPS navigation systems; perhaps you can offer a cheaper alternative?

Also, it only works on android 4.0+? Is that necessary? I got 2.6 :(
I can't tell how serious you are, but if you're going to call a friend stupid just because he falls for online "scams" from time to time I don't think I would want to be friends with you.

That's pretty damn quick to judge. You have more experience with tech -- get over yourself. I'm sure they know things that you don't.
Some of these seems to be outright lies (like implicitly labeling X axis for different data points) but other techniques are just well crafted data illusions and covered well in books such as How to Lie with Statistics http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/039...
Yes, exactly - that is why the original citation makes sense :) ME & Vista sucked, but the next versions were great. There is no long-term tendency towards suckiness, it's more like a rollercoaster, and that's why waiting for Windows 9 is a solid decision IMHO.
I won't say that programming isn't hard, but I also farm and find the farming to be the more cognitively challenging career of the two. You need the same problem solving skills and you need to be able to apply them to an even wider range of applications.
I had to chuckle when I read this:

"As Fikes points out, Google had to install GPS antennas on the roofs of its data centers and connect them to the hardware below."

This is usually one of the first things an enterprising sysadmin does at companies when they first start thinking about time - drop a GPS receiver on the roof (and they usually come up with a bunch of cool graphs showing where all the satellites are over time).

Soon thereafter, and a bit of reading about the NTP protocol, they realize that just adding:

server 0.pool.ntp.org
server 1.pool.ntp.org
server 2.pool.ntp.org
server 3.pool.ntp.org

to their ntp.conf is sufficient for 99.99% of all endeavors which require accurate time, outside of big physics, and, apparently Google's Spanner Database.

This part was a bit incomplete:

"Typically, data-center operators keep their servers in sync using what’s called the Network Time Protocol, or NTP. This is essentially an online service that connects machines to the official atomic clocks that keep time for organizations across the world. But because it takes time to move information across a network, this method is never completely accurate,"

Much of the purpose (and math) behind the NTP protocol is to deal with network lag. And it does a pretty good job doing so.

Reading about the True Time Api at: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...

"This implementation keeps uncertainty small (generally less than 10ms) by using multiple modern clock references (GPS and atomic clocks)"

So - apparently 10ms is their breakpoint - 10ms is about the limit of what you can expect out of NTP, so I guess it makes sense that if Google needs to do 10ms or better, something of their own invention would be required. Cool graph on the paper showing that 99.9% of variance across data centers thousands of kilometers apart are < 10ms deviation.
The Vernam cipher is actually quite strong when used correctly - the key needs to be as long as the input; it's never repeated :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Vernam#The_Vernam_ciphe...
I had heard a while ago that Einstein was a womanizer.

You'll need sufficient proof for that. Not just "heard".

Looks like he was a demanding jerk as well.

Really? Asking for 3 meals a day and laundry? Maybe he's the one responsible for paying all the bills. Don't read half the story.

Also, I think their relationship is broken already, they were just keeping an "MVP" for the children.

You will undertake not to belittle me in front of our children, either through words or behavior.

That could also tell that the wife is not that innocent too.
If you implement naïve Aho-Corasick text search over one-byte characters, it works without modification on UTF-8 text. It does not ignore combining characters, but UCS-2 also features combining characters (c.f. other comments in this same thread), so no matter what encoding you use, you must first normalize the Unicode text and the search string before you compare for equivalence (or compatibility, which is a looser notion than equality for Unicode code point sequences.)
Managing config variables inside a Node.js application | Chovy's Blog
La série Les Revenants débarque sur Canal+
La série Les Revenants débarque sur la chaîne câblée Canal+. En attendant, retrouvez Anne Consigny en téléchargeant le film Vous n’avez encore rien vu.
I'm surprised by the opposite: I have come to expect this kind of negativity here at HN, but about half the comments are like yours.
I noticed that too. I think on certain platforms mass-following gets you a lot of followers but I think the quality of those followers drops drastically. I think it might be better to have less followers but have a more engaged audience.
> Yes, that's absolutely what it is. As a society, we seem to believe that information can be owned

Two wrongs (information cannot be "owned" in the same sense of a physical thing, regardless of how much one wants to be believe it; and that DRM can be effective) do not make one right. Note that I'm not discussing values here - just pure technical issues.

Here's the two problems of DRM in a nutshell, that make it into snake oil.

1. The "owner" of the content wants to make said content available to person X, but not to person X's recording device, which is indistinguishable from X.

2. It is enough for said content to be freed from DRM once, to become universally free of DRM.

No matter how smart your protocols, cryptography etc is, because (1) if you can display it on a screen, and take a picture of said screen, with a high resolution capture device, you've defeated DRM. And then because of (2) the DRM scheme, regardless of its other merits, becomes ineffective.

That's why DRM cannot be done right, even if you assume it's the right thing to do. (which I don't)
I am all for making good programming instruction available to anyone who wants it. I hate to think lack of access to knowledge and mentors is holding potentially brilliant programmers back. But I'm also sure this isn't going to turn programming into unskilled labor.

"… most people can’t learn to program: between 30% and 60% of every university computer science department’s intake fail the ﬁrst programming course."

And that's just to pass a class, and these are people who chose to go to school and major in computer science. And that says little about future success writing real-world code, which some people can't seem to pull off even after getting a degree.

As far as I can tell, programming is part aptitude and part learned skill, and not everyone has any real aptitude for it. This doesn't mean they're stupid: they may be absolutely brilliant at something else. That thing just happens not to be programming.

But I see no harm in letting anyone who wants to learn to program try, and in giving them as much support as possible. At worst it's another failed experiment, but if the upside is inspiring a few more people to become great at this I'm all for it.
I wrote a micro kernel based OS. Then I wrote a graphics driver to get bit mapped graphics. Then a window manager using that bit mapped graphics driver. Then a bunch of applications using that window manager.

And I never read any one of those books you're listing there other than K&R and the 486 reference manuals. Sure enough I had a fair grasp of the x86 processor architecture before starting this and I'd done a lot of low level 8 bit work. But on the whole I spent more time waiting for it to reboot than I did writing code or reading books and I still managed to do all this in about two years.

This is doable. It's hard, but it is doable, and it is a lot easier now than when I did it. For one you have VMs now which make it a thousand times easier to debug a kernel. No more need to use a dos-extender to bootstrap your fledgling kernel code and so on.

This guy is way out of his depth, that's for sure. But what is also for sure is that he's going to learn quickly and seems on the right road for that (acknowledging what he doesn't know yet).

Don't tell other people what they can't do. Just wait and see, they just might surprise you. You'd have been talking to Linus like that just the same. And you would have been right about him being out of his depth, and you would have been wrong about him not being able to achieve his goal in the longer term.

Maybe this guy will get discouraged, maybe he won't. But no need to kill his enthusiasm with a negative attitude. If you're so smart, why not give him a hand, point him in the right direction on the concrete questions he's asking rather than to literally throw the book (or in this case a whole library) at him and tell him he's clueless.

He probably already knows that anyway, but at least he's willing to learn.
Just because a program does not help the bottom 75% does not make helping the top 25% a bad thing. Of course we need to help those on the edge of flunking, but that is a mutually exclusive argument for how and why we help those in the top 25% harness and use their talents.

This is what is called a "False Dilemma"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
At this point, the only story I need to read is about whether anybody is going to prison for this prank.
Thumbs up! My SEO/SMO service marketplace http://marketplace.rankgrow.com will accept BTC soon also!
I'm not sure it won't stick around. People said that about Aqua (OS X) and the Gnome 3 shell.
Related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights_(copyright_law)
My sudoku solver http://dancing-links.herokuapp.com/ in javascript takes roughly a tenth of the time to solve a particular puzzle when running in node/V8 than in Rhino.
Nice, will some of them be on the weekend?

6pm is a bit too early for me to make it on a work night (plus the commute time for those of us outside SF).
I am suggesting that people read about unicode before designing supposedly cross-platform applications or programming languages. It's not that hard, just different than ASCII.
Too bad telcos have a 60% profit margin not 100,000%. How is this plausible? The article doesn't explain.
It's really wonderful to start to see this wave of Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and other super inexpensive but plenty powerful enough for a range of applications type devices.

More and more are popping up on Reddit and HN every day and it looks to be ushering a little hobbyist "golden age". I can't wait to see where it takes us.
Ask HN: Potential employer is asking about 'education', I'm a college drop-out
I thought this was a bit strange, but I've applied for a position with a large and amazing software company. I don't normally put anything on my resume for education, as I dropped out of University after two years, and I don't think anybody has ever asked. My work experience has always spoken for itself.<p>Any suggestions on how to handle this? I'm thinking about adding a section that says I've been continuously learning through my work experiences and other opportunities.<p>what has worked for you in the past? or what would you think would work?
IIRC, he cheated on his wife with his cousin. I don't have web reference. I went to an Einstein exhibit (at the OMSI) that had a bunch of hand-written letters and such by him (in addition to attempting to make his theories more accessible). Though 'cheated' might be a little relative. I think that he may have just been spending a lot of time with her and writing her love-letters rather than just sleeping with her.

Here are some quick links I turned up on the exhibit:

http://eastpdxnews.com/general-news-features/explore-space-a...

http://www.flickr.com/groups/alberteinstein/pool/tags/omsi/

The Flickr link has a bunch of photos of the documents, but I don't none of them are labelled, so it may be a bit time-consuming to search for anything specific.
"It turned out the actual player, launched from their compiled app, was a Python wrapper around some VLC libraries"

Isn't VLC licensed under the GPL? Or at least was until very recently? http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relice...

Is/was Leaping Brain violating the license?

EDIT: the wrapper script is apparently released under the GPL too: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4834834
Unified Inbox - A web email client that supports multiple email accounts
Use visa waivers. They let you stay in the US for 3 months at a time and spending $1k on a ticket at the end of each 3 months is cheaper than paying $5-10k upfront for a visa plus additional flights.

If you are worried about the number of times you can enter on a visa waiver, don't - I have entered the USA 50+ times on a waiver and the guys at immigration ask me how I am going and wave me on each time.

This was even more fun before they closed 'The Mexican Loophole', where you could drop out to Mexico for the weekend and get a new visa on the way in. I had a lot of fun weekends in Mexico before they shut that down. You now need to leave the North American continent (they included Central America when people started flying to Belize to get new US entry visa's)
His hair. Seriously.