skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In what way does C fail to have sane syntax and semantics? You may not like the syntax or semantics, but they are reasonably simple and clean; I would say they are eminently sane. The portion of the C spec that defines the language (chapter 6) is actually quite straightforward compared to most language specifications.

The syntax is especially straightforward. I can find a few complaints about the semantics (mostly that there would ideally be less implementation- and undefined-behavior), but no worse than my complaints about any other language.
Looks like he added www. to the URL, which the original submission didn't have.
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At Coverity (http://coverity.com) we are looking for a security researcher with interest in static analysis. The candidate must be a strong in websec, doesn't be afraid to write code (checker prototypes, etc.), and the best would be to have some prior knowledge in static analysis (which doesn't need to be you wrote your own static analysis tool for brainf*ck or something).
We have a description here on linkedin (http://linkd.in/VxL5bx) and you can apply there or just contact me directly (@rgaucher || rgaucher /at/ coverity.com). To have an idea of what we're doing, some of it is on our blog (https://communities.coverity.com/blogs/security).
Chrome and Firefox would still have about the same numbers, there's not that many Ubuntu PC's out there (Firefox might lose a percent or so).
Let me add more to OP's comment. 200 times definitely is a hyperbole. But at the time of independence India used to produce nothing. We had zero industrial production.

Today, India exports software, financial and knowledge services, heavy machinery, cars and what not. We even stopped taking foreign aid and had been a giver to EU.

I will fully admit and have no doubt that there are tons of problem. From population to poor leadership. But I do agree with OP that India of today is far well off as compared to India at the time of independence and a large part of population is out of poverty. We do have drag of corruption, over population and poor leadership. But their are voices against all these ills and I hope (yes, I am not sure) that we be able to overcome these one day.

Comparisons with China are good. India(ns) had always been a competitor to Pakistan. Country we feel ashamed to be associated with now. On the other hand, we are all too aware of China's success. But it's not the win of communism over democracy but good leadership over poor (and ulterior) leadership.
North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un's Unexpected NY's Message
All good points. It would be interesting to see the different JSON implementations in different languages benchmarked. As far as static vs. dynamic, both have their pros and cons.
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A comparison to the Chinese, without stressing that an Indian is a free citizen and the Chinese give a lot of freedom up in-order to be governed the way that they are, is perhaps unfair. And who is to say how many rapes and other crimes are not reported in China.

I have also noticed that many Indians are, as always, blaming their government. The Indian populace cannot distance itself from these acts by blaming it on the government. The people in governance are elected from the same society as the girl and the rapists.

I am an Indian from Delhi and events such as these happen because we teach our sons not to respect women equally. Parents whose daughters are getting raped are also fueling this inequality by paying dowry, or worse, by killing girls at birth.

As a society we have brought ourselves to this and the only way out is slow, demanding and requires us to change our society so its based less in tradition and more on reason.
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Step-by-Step Guide for Making Your New Year’s Resolutions
It's a problem of perverse incentives. Intelligent single people without heath issues can live vary cheaply most of the US. But, covering your basis when things go wrong is expensive and many people will intelligently avoid that if there is any sort of a safety net. Especially when just heath insurance costs you more than rent or food.

On the other hand, if you want to be self sufficient both now and in retirement you need to make around 50% more. So, where is the break even point?
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Up front: I like Unix and Linux. But I think a big part of why Unix/Linux won is you could acquire them. 90% of life is showing up. In the bad old days you could not buy machines or OS's. Until IBM got investigated for anti-trust you leased them with a huge service contract. You had to sign non-disclosures just to use the things. BSD/Unix was available and then became unavailable during the Unix wars, giving Linux an entry.
You realize how many people in the valley have basically the same personality right? Not that I think this is a good thing, it just explains the love.
> And what shall the gentleman do? "Well I love you but it's probably a mistake because I'm probably a mess myself so let's just walk away from it?"

It is OK to size up a potential relationship and make a practical decision about pursuing it before you actually fall in love with someone.

For most people, starting a relationship with a severe schizophrenic is a bad idea. You're letting yourself in for a lot of suffering and very likely you'll further injure your loved one when you eventually leave because you can't take it any more.

I think part of growing up is recognizing that not every person you feel attracted to is actually a good person for you to be involved with. Letting feelings of attraction trump one's better judgement causes a awful lot of misery in the world (usually in much less dramatic but much more common scenarios).

I'm speaking of the general case here. As you say, sometimes seemingly reckless relationships do work out. Kas clearly doesn't regret falling in love with Sally and I hope that they go on to have long and reasonably happy lives together.
Understanding stovetop cookware
It's kind of convenient that he didn't mention food stamps, section 8 (subsidized housing), and medicaid/medicare. All of which are on top of the $661 a month, and make it definitely livable.
yup, 200 times is hugely inflated even if you don't adjust for inflation. Some quick research points, per capita GDP to be $50 in 1947 and around $1600 now. So, more like 4 times after adjusting for inflation.
That's great advice Dharmesh, I think I can be much more specific there. Thanks for the heads up.

For anyone reading who's interested, I think this might be the best example of how seriously we take self-improvement at Buffer:

Each day we have a daily standup video call (Google Hangout) with the whole team. Each person has 3 minutes to talk. Like most standups, we talk about what we've done and what we're doing next. The thing that we do which I don't know that any other startups do, is that as part of that 3 minutes we also share a daily improvement. Something we're working on to improve ourselves. It can be related to Buffer, but usually it isn't. Some examples of improvements people have worked on: start blogging every 2 weeks, speak at first event, speak to a new person every day, learn japanese, wake up an hour earlier. We all encourage each other with our improvements, and this helps us push forward much faster than otherwise. It's a really positive environment and there is built in accountability.
I was a bit confused by seeing the news about anti-rape protests in India. Who are they protesting against? This makes about as much sense as protest against, say, stupidity.
Seeing calls for stricter punishment (up to death sentence) was also discouraging—it is not the strictness of the punishment it is the inevitability of it that makes the difference.
Build your own Google Glass
The StatCounter measure seems more accurate to me too, if only because their numbers are more in line with Wikimedia's numbers. And I mean, who doesn't use Wikipedia? I imagine few people are in a better position to measure browser usage than they are, possibly not even google (though possibly with their ad network?)
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In a way I too feel Firefox being slower compared to light Webkit browsers, but you must be writing a resource intensive animation if a modern laptop fails to render it fluently.

Perhaps not only in terms of pixels and assets, but full page reflows instead. Can you share some details of your work and requirements?
Data mining has been mentioned before on Reddit. Admins aren't keen.

http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/15kz08/til_re...
I like this author a lot. The original article she cites

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628965.000-app-for-q...

was submitted to HN (no comments) a little while ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4993060

after I saw the author post it to Facebook, where she is my friend. We may as well discuss the report here in this thread.
His use of Kickstarter was pretty interesting in this case. I think he funded the book in 2 hours and now is funded 10X what he was looking for. He proved demand before anything else, minimizing the blind risk for the publisher. Given the state of the book publishing industry, he could have created a new model for future authors/publishers.
Are you talking about a new kernel or a new userspace? It's an important distinction.
Police are civil servants under the direction and policies of ministries within the framework of government. The government is not just the political elite, rather its the civil service as well and that is who the majority of people deal with on a daily basis. If there isn't sufficient ministerial direction or aren't adequate agency policies in place and very importantly those policies are enforced, then the lower ranks of police (and other civil servants) will largely do as they please. This is why corruption, collusion and incompetence are so very tough to remove from much of India's civil service and society.
What did you do? My cash was in a hollow belt, my compact camera tied to my trousers and the pocket it was in was safety pinned closed. Everyone we met had been stolen from, we were tested 3x that we know of (all in crowds, 2 of them on trains) with nothing taken. Naples was just as ad, but with an undertone of violence, and Lima was downright frightening.
The reality is that many small businesses fail. Small businesses like startups are small businesses, regardless of whether they have a mobile app as one of their main products. We can romanticize tech startups like coffee shops[1] but the reality is they both need paying customers or a sustainable source of revenue to survive.

The dream for many of us on HN is to have a profitable, sustainable business. Perhaps, some of the boring ideas that are executed will fail eventually but they will all deliver experience of trying and failing - which you cannot go to school for, blog about without doing.

Giacomo 'Peldi' Guilizzoni started Balsamiq on nights and weekends, and now it's supporting half a dozen families. If that is not a real, tangible definition of a successful business is, I don't know what is.

People other than Peldi have succeeded on their own definition [2] and share this with us and inspire us. That is the beauty of HN, the signal exceeds the noise.

The reality is that it takes an extremely rare individual to start a high-growth enterprise that ends up employing hundreds or thousands of employees. It is a special combination of luck, persistence, experience, risk, social intelligence, force of will, genius, foresight, vision, personality, charisma, luck, possibly connections. The media and community lionize successful startup founders, and I remember hearing once about the guy who invented the little highway reflectors you see embedded in the California roads (his family gets a royalty for every single one...)

[1] "My Coffeehouse Nightmare", http://www.slate.com/id/2132576/

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3029771
Win8 actually does have some great functionality in WinRT and the new application security model which has been sorely needed.

The problem is that these are all tied to the Metro interface. Once Microsoft supports these in the classic desktop and stops pushing users into Metro then it'll be a decent OS again.
> I think the next wave in the 'real' OS wave is going to be something very much different than what we think of today, something where it assumes there is a network behind it and that the rest of itself is out there somewhere as APIs.

I'd be quite interested to hear more about this, if you have more ideas and care to elaborate.
That's a good point. There are more than a few deficiencies of Svbtle - especially for a long established blog.

Any themes you're particularly fond of?
Congrats on shipping, I really think this is a good market.

Any chance that you can personalize a few of the emails sent? I might want to add or remove a few things only for some blogs.
I honestly don't understand much of the fuss regarding the removal of the start menu (replaced by the start screen). For one, I spend 99% of my time on the desktop (which is an app in the metro interface). This comes as no surprise, considering that people didn't spend much time on the start menu. Second, the start screen / metro is easier to use than the start menu. If an app isn't pinned to the dock, I press the windows key and start typing the name of the application. Then I press enter. The application starts.

The Start screen / metro stays out of the way. There are improvements that can be made, sure, but it's not horrible. As a whole, Windows 8 provides better performance. Plus the upgrade was cheap ($15 for me).
It's not about etymology, it's about people adopting silly phrases for common terms that already exist simply to try to appeal to emotion. Rockstar developer? Really? Would a Boy Band Developer count?

If you want to do that, go write fiction. If you're as adept at writing in the English language as Anthony Burgess or James Joyce, you can feel free to even make up words as you go along, not just new uses for existing words.
It seems he is about to realize that things move in waves.
Currently people are learning how to take advantage of all this new mobile technology and once they have done that we will get our new wave of awesome shit.
It's stupid crap like this that will result in a some-what useful tool like the petition system to eventually be completely ignored.
I just downloaded this and went through a few lessons. Very well done!

One feature request: a review mode that pulls from all completed lessons
Well, during the last few weeks i tried to imagine an easy-to-implement but also effective online PR service: i think you definetively realize a great solution! It is simple but really functional. Congratulations!
No-one should be able to claim ownership of minimalism. This pissed me off with the apple rounded rectangle patent; it's pissing me off more here. If Svbtle really wanted to establish a brand identity it would be easy - pick a logo, place it prominently on their blogs - and displaying that logo while not part of the group really would be wrong. But they don't own minimalism; no-one does. Keep using the theme.
Let me illustrate how the game is played. The contract says "Flash will be 128MB", card produced says "I'm 128MB"

Are the contract terms met? Even if the card only has 8 million unique locations? The contract doesn't say that the card has to hold 128M unique things all at the same time, it just says that you can address 128M things in it. So we take our clever software give you 128M addressable locations but if you try to put more than 8M things in the card you'll erase one of the other things you put in there.

You go through a process where you ask a number of vendors for a product that you've specified, perhaps you pick the cheapest one, and it turns out that they have an interpretation of the contract that isn't the same as you. (so they sold you an 8MB flash which pretends to be 128M flash). Your next step is to get them to 'fix' it, and they will, they will say "Oh we didn't realize you wanted to store 128M different things at once, we can do that too! That will by $Y" except that $Y is anywhere from 2% to 15% higher than the second or third lowest bid you got earlier.

So this manufacturer will tell you with a completely straight face about how sorry they were for mistaking what you wanted, and how its perfectly reasonable that some people really only need about 8MB of unique things, but since you have a relationship with these folks now you get to the 'real' product you wanted (128M flash) and you end up paying more for that than you would have with a different vendor at the start. They have 'won' this round, you have lost.

If you know this is how the game is played you write your contracts differently, you write : "128M Flash, which can hold 128M unique pieces of information at the same time that can be read back at a minimum of x bits per second and written at a minimum of Y bits per second, and can be re-written at least Z times at all temperatures between 0 and 50 degrees C and in the presense or absence of any magnetic field up to x Gauss, to be measured using the following tests on the following equipment that will be supplied by me and cannot be changed by the manufacturer, and will be inspected every 30 days by an agent I appoint who does not work for the vendor."

And then they know you've played the game before.
I'll be using this for my app launch in February. Just so I'm clear, your app has to already be approved on the app store? So you could time your app launch date and Ping at the same time, or nearly the same time?
yep, that's why I stopped looking for jobs here. The average buyer is willing to pay oDesk rates.
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Surely the ambiguity is likely to matter in actual programs?
Inexpensive unique gifts.
I've decided to take the time to learn a new language thoroughly for the new year to open my eyes to new programming techniques. Lua has really peaked my interest lately, along with Haskell and Clojure.

I figure I may as well ask, is Lua a good language for this (coming from a background in Ruby and Java)? If so, this book seems like the place to start.
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I was surprised to see its only two years old. When it discussed the Baen Free Library as if it were a new experiment, I had to check the article date as the "new" Baen experiment is over a decade old now.

I like the Baen library, its resulted in my spending lots of money on Baen products. This is not new, public libraries have been providing the same free marketing service to print books for centuries now.

I thought the article claim that $10 would be a fair price to be ridiculous because there needs to be a market between "I wouldn't read it at the public library for free" and "$10 minimum". There's a lot of people making a dollar here or there on the kindle marketplace by either cleanly and correctly reformatting Project Gutenberg books into kindle format, or ripping people off who think they're getting cleaned up kindle format PG files but its just a junk file or poorly done. Maybe I'd buy 100 different $1 books on the off chance I'll want to read them, or a half dozen for $10 if I feel its a sure bet by a favored author, or $50 if I am obligated by school or work. It would seem profits favor the $1 book.
S.F. scientist resigns after faking data
I'm very much not in the valley but, yes, I do like the look of the theme. Have no strong opinion of Mr Curtis.
Zynga Euthanizes PetVille and 10 Other Games
When was the hit part of the CrunchPad?
Whenever these discussions come up people tend to blur kernel and userspace. It's happening here, and it's not unforgivable since most operating systems package both together. That's actually half the reason Richard Stallman wants you to say GNU/Linux, the technical correctness of the name (the other half is what makes that annoying).

What adventures like Debian on FreeBSD (kFreeBSD) and even Android teach us, though, is that you can take a great kernel with its sweeping hardware support and build something better on top of it. The hardware work has been done for you. Apple could have easily built OS X and Darwin on top of Linux-the-kernel instead of Mach (what an interesting world that would be), but they had a limited range of hardware to target and the resources at their disposal to tailor Mach to their known hardware targets.

The kernel for the Intel architecture is, I think, at this point mostly figured out. Microkernel had its shot and on Intel we have seen that it's too slow (even though it makes more sense on paper). Linux is pretty darned good, and I think any attempt to be better will, after a few years, end up looking like Linux from several years ago. The Intel architecture has been stable for a long time, and a lot of clever minds have come up with ways to squeeze every drop out of the machine in Linux.

When people say "I want a new operating system!" I'm not hearing them desire a complete kernel rewrite; that's doomed to fail for a plethora of reasons including hardware drivers. I'm hearing them desire a new userspace and GUI. Make something like OS X based on Linux and I'd spend $500+ to buy it and fund its development.
Things I learnt as a CEO in 2012
No, they are Z-expressions.

No-one has a problem with the S programming language co-existing with S-expressions.
inspiring for people who may not be ready to commit full time yet, but who need that kick start to work on a side project.
Or you undervalue the potential of people who are capable of giving back in some manner and don't want to remain, unproductive, on the dole for the rest of their lives? I understand why this occurs, but it'd be nice if the moments of brilliance were better harnessed.

In the larger tech companies, the people I've known who have these sorts of problems seem to take hiatuses and come back when whatever episode is complete and they're ready to begin work again. I don't really know how it works on the HR back-end, though.
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