skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
...and yet, a child with no prior experience of human language can pick it up without much fuss. So what advantages does a child have over a stereotypical adult learner? I'd say these are the key points:

1. Lack of assumptions. Words often have multiple meanings, don't assume you know all ways a word is applied, instead pay attention to how context alters the meaning(s) you are already aware of.
2. Immersion, a.k.a. throwing yourself in at the deep end.
3. Openness to new information. Could also be highlighted with the word 'playfulness'. Enjoy your progress.
The flow does not prevent you from doing things that upset people. It prevents you from doing things that harm others. Rouse all the rabble you want, as long as you believe it will improve someone's / everyone's life.
Fair point. At this point, it's a very leaky abstraction because not all levels of "random access" (e.g. L1 cache vs. main memory) are created equal.
Premise 2 is flawed IMO. An MVP built by a lone, but talented techie for $5000 / number_of_hours, isn't likely to turn into something 'successful' at all because 1) someone who values their time so little is probably not that talented, and 2) an idea whose perceived valuation is essentially $8K probably isn't that good to begin with.
It's not the Louvre, it's the Frankfurt Archaeological Museum
http://www.ecb.int/euro/banknotes/europa/html/index.en.html
There's been a fair bit of research that even when you control for income, affluent people living in societies with high levels of inequality fare more poorly than affluent people in societies with lower levels of inequality.
That's what you get for thinking Barry Manilow should be a gag gift. Barry is the Man....ilow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_irregular_verbs
Is possibly a better indication. Many other languages also has irregular verbs, but I think the number of extra rules and variations that English employs there are a bit more dramatic.
quoted from Fortune/CNN article: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/01/07/ibm-watson-slang/ [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5020386]
No, C does not define a single contiguous block of memory with consecutive addresses. It _does_ qualify that pointers are scalar types, but that does not imply contiguity or consecutive addresses (with the exception of arrays)

There is no requirement in C that you be able to execute data.

You certainly could have a C implementation that bounds-checks strings and arrays. (See e.g. http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~phjk/BoundsChecking.html for a very old paper on how you might do that)

The "abstract machine" of C explicitly does _not_ make reference to the memory layout. (cf 5.1.2.3 of the spec)

It also makes no reference to the number of cores, and order of execution is not one at a time, but limited by sequence points.

That's the whole point of C - it is very loosely tied to actual hardware, and can accomodate a wide range of it, while still staying very close to actual realities.

Edit: Please don't take this as a "rah, rah, C is great" comment. I'm well aware of its shortcomings. I've spent the last 20+ years with it :)
The fact that some are offended by the deal you made the anonymous internet tells me you are on to something. Thank you for experimenting and being creative.

A couple thoughts:

* If you have a month to work on a project, consider taking this offer. Nothing helps motivate people (myself included) like a deadline and a partner. Don't get hung up on the equity split or other boring details -- just go do it. And be thankful you have the free month to work as you will; not all of us are so fortunate!

* I am skeptical using 50-50 as a basis for a partnership in general, much less with someone on the internet I've never met. You are probably a chill dude, but I had similar optimism for too many girls I met online... :) Everyone claims to be funny and open to new things. If I had goals to work on this project fulltime, I'd be very concerned that the two of us might not work well together (I have no reason to believe this, but this is a risk based on past experience). I'd prefer some way to break ties. Either 49/51 split or something. If I had goals to work on this as an anonymous internet side project like my github work that happens to generate income, then rock on with 50/50 because it's simpler and anything else gets in the way of the product.

* Would you mind documenting the outcome of this experiment? PG often cites YC's internal data as influencing their decisions. Not having access to that data and believing I see a large number of survival biases on HN, I'd be curious to see someone as honest as you document what actually happens. If anything, I imagine the outcome from the experiment will better inform you of improvements than any comment from HN.

* Best of luck! I love creative experiments. No one here knows how this will turn out, but I know we all are interested to follow along.
Not sure this is correct. I just skimmed the article.

http://www.insinuator.net/2013/01/rails-yaml/

From the comments:

"From what i’ve see here is that versions below 2.0 should not be affected by this issue as they do not support xml parameters and don’t have any XMLMini implementations."
wow has NOBODY considered the idea that this guy is just harvesting your ideas?

who knows how sincere the offer is.

phishing 101
EXo Add-ons: Edit your eXo Documents in Google Docs
It's tough getting dyslexic fonts to render happily across all platforms. Mind providing a bit more insight? I know that Chrome/Windows has problems when font-smoothing: antialiased; is not set.

So at the same time, please bear the experimental nature.
I understand where the name came from, but bookbookgoose just doesn't work for me. Its just too long and unwieldy for me. As for the service itself, I am not sure what type of customer this is servicing. Are there people out there that are trying to find random books to read without any context (i.e. subject matter, recommendations from others, etc.)? Now, I think this would be a lot more useful if you could perhaps do the random thing but filtered by some criteria that makes it relevant to the user. So, for example, I want to read about 'javascript' and I search through random javascript books. It would also help to display the amazon rankings and other stats.
ENERGY MYTHS
> Who cares whether your data structure definition is 1 line or 5?

Why not use assembler and make it 50?
There's a certain human element there that makes this really, really amazing -- a machine with actual personality, molded by what it picks up from its environment. It's like a baby, learning to speak.
I don't see how that follows. Mars would have no net exports to Earth, and no real wealth, so I don't see it approximating anything like a real economy. Most likely Mars will be dependent on wealth transfer from Earth for decades, so there will be no "salaries" per se-only people paying to live on Mars.
I found the following blurb from the article interesting as it tries to make the information relevant the gun control debate:

Gun use emerged as a factor: Americans were seven times more likely to die in a homicide and 20 times more likely to die in a shooting than their peers. In all, two-thirds of the mortality disadvantage for American men was attributable to people under the age of 50 -- and slightly over half of that resulted from injuries...

However, why is this article interesting to the Hacker News crowd?
It still dwarfs all other formats and revenue streams for recorded music.
I up-voted you because I agree with you. And let me tell you that in the "real world" of systems programming (where stuff gets done), C++ is widely used and loved by engineers. It's not hip and popular to say that, but it's true from what I have seen over the last 15 years.
following that logic one should spew out all the thoughts in ones head even if you think they're of no good because they may be of some good to someone. Most people would agree that that's not a good strategy.
The two screen sharing webinar services I use need it. Only for the presenter though, luckily, so I keep it on a separate browser only.
I believe that is totally legit. You should check out Murfie.com
That's very interesting - can you provide a reference?
I have a friend that works at Causes and after catching up with him in San Fran for some drinks I was amazed at the level of impact they have. The Sandy Hook Sympathy card, which harnessed the power of their platform was quick-to-action and has captured 2,536,431 signatures so far.

While Sandy Hook was a tragedy, it proves the reach that Causes has and can definitely help be a launch pad for the tumultuous future in politics in America and around the world.

Turning the capture of attention that Causes has into a source of political candidate data and actionable metrics for their audience seems like a critical step into turning angry online voices into voter turn-out. Using social networking which takes less money and time to spread a message is one of the best utilizations of our technology that I've seen so far, and definitely far nobler (Sorry, FarmVille).

Great job guys, and its great to see startups coming out of San Fran that are a little less frivolous and a little more impactful on what could be a very dim future for democracy. Take the wind out of the SuperPACs!
Vesting means that each owners shares of the company will be given to them over time so right off the bat neither of the people own an outright 50% stake.

for example a common scenario is a Four year vesting with a one year cliff, acceleration up any sale or liquidation event.

What this means in every day terms is that you own more shares each month you work, but if you leave before a year is up you own nothing. So if your half is 5 million shares then after the first year of working you will have earned 1.25 million shares after your first year which are now yours and cannot be taken away.

For each working month after that you will earn an additional 104,167 shares (its actually 166 2/3) until you have completed your 48th month at the company at which point you now own all five million shares, or are "Fully vested" as the term would imply.

It basically just ensures dedication to a project and that an early person who was involved with the company in some way does not come back 10 years later suing for "their half" of a company they may have helped start but had no involvement in product direction, success etc.
Java applets are still in wider use than you seem to realise. For example, in some places, they seem to be the norm for things like on-line banking or interaction with government web sites. As a second example, they are also used for UIs on network-accessible devices. As a third, I’ve seen quite a few used for interactive illustrations on academic/training web sites. People have been doing these things with Java for at least as long as they’ve been doing them with Flash. And there are plenty more cases: tomjen3 already mentioned games, IIRC the conference call/screen sharing service used by one of my clients is Java-based, etc.

The likes of Google and Mozilla might want us all to drop these tried and tested technologies and move to shiny new ones like HTML5 and the latest JS and CSS developments, but realistically, it takes time for users to move on. Most of us don’t have the luxury of controlling our customers’ platforms so we can ensure they run up-to-date builds of Firefox or Chrome with all the latest toys.

It takes time for developers to move on, too. I’m currently working on a project that uses a Java applet for a client. If I were starting the same project today, I’d probably chose different tools, but it wasn’t started today, and not so many years ago when the architectural decisions were being made, those new tools didn’t exist yet.

The main thing holding Java applets back today seems to be the second rate support they now get from the major browsers and/or Oracle, assuming they are supported at all. The number of blatant, show-stopping bugs in browser/Java interactions is getting silly, and code that has worked for years is breaking because someone installed a software “upgrade”. That’s a pity, IMHO, because the JVM is still a decent platform, and there are several interesting modern programming languages other than Java itself that we could be using to develop web apps otherwise.
I would like to point out that the Gimp now has a single window mode that is available under the windows menu. This makes the interface magnitudes better, but there is still a lot of work that needs to be done.

The Gimp definitely doesn't meet the needs of a professional, but it is still very powerful. If you have some reasonable knowledge of how to use it or Photoshop you can do some amazing things. I think it does a very good job of meeting the graphics needs of the opensource community and people who need the power of an editor like Photoshop, but don't need all of the new advanced features of Photoshop and don't want to be a pirate.

Personally I love the Gimp now that I am used to it. Even when I had Photoshop (acquired through my school) I found myself using the gimp instead. I just wish it was more polished, the fact that brushes are still so clumsily implemented is really frustrating. Oh well, if I really want to paint something I will use MyPaint, which is an amazing project that has developed a million times faster than the Gimp.
Perhaps this is why so many people are confused by the multiple uses of "yield" in programming. For example, in a generator context, the metaphor is that the generator yields (produces) an element. In a threading context, a thread yields (concedes) to other threads.
int i;
float f = *(float*)&i;

I'm not saying you should do this, but you can.

Or to use an example the author didn't regret:

struct foo {
int a;
int b;
int c;
}__attribute__((packed));

void print(foo* f) {
int *p = f;
int i;
for (i=0; i<sizeof(foo)/sizeof(int); i++) {
printf("%d,",p[i]);
}
}
Animating the New Parse About Page
Do you need to see the 5 to know is a 5 Euro note? I mean, it's different in color and size from the other Euro notes, which to me makes the difference more than the printed number...
Curious how privacy will be handled; I guess the info on my votizen profile is all technically public record, but I'd really prefer opt-in for all merging.

Also curious how "multiple groups who conflict" will be handled. On Votizen, there was already D vs. R (with a lot more D...), but my experience with causes is that it was mainly pro-things, where no one was really anti that thing, just maybe "don't feel it's the most important thing to do".
There is a startup that does this! www.murfie.com

Disclosure: I work for murfie
I'm now imagining building a marketplace site roughly like eLance/oDesk/whatever else, where the investor can put money in escrow and clients (freelancers) can "bid"--but it's the freelancers who are proposing the jobs in their entirety, not the investor.
I guess it must depend where you live, because there aren't nearly enough programmers to fill job openings where I am, and these jobs already pay more and more every year. It seems like you're in the UK, and outside of London at that--that is a bit rough, but in the US it's a veritable bonanza and the worst that happens is that you'll have to relocate.
No mention of corn and petroleum subsidies.
Why is health interesting to anyone? Viewed in a more hackish light: here's a problem; how can we fix it?
One reason for a vegetarian diet on Mars is solar efficiency: the sun is only 44% as strong, which makes raising meat less practical. Meat takes a lot of energy,

Another reason is the higher ambient radiation levels on Mars, which plants are more resilient to than animals. Animals would likely have a higher cancer rate than here on Earth, and who wants to eat a cancerous steak? Not appetizing.
Seed money plus active involvement in growing the business and creating traction could warrant such a split -- especially for an idea that was sitting on the shelf. Fifty percent of something is better than zero percent of nothing.
Win a free year of video hosting
what do you mean work? which part? Do you mean the disclosure part? or the fix part? or something else?
Is there any way for software, even in assembly, to make intelligent use of on-cpu ram caches? I thought they were completely abstracted by the hardware.
Bulgarian, as they use Cyrillic alphabet.
I guess I got a bit cheeky with the title. I'm a marketer, so I can't help it. :-)
Turing himself would be pleased. (Although also probably pretty disappointed that it has taken so long to get this far.)
Or array_key_exists(), depending on exactly what you're hoping for :(
"C defines a virtual machine consisting of a single, contiguous block of memory with consecutive addresses"

This is 100% false. The C standard makes no mention whatsoever of memory. I don't know much about the burroughs machine, but it sounds like it would map very well to the C virtual machine:

C permits an implementation to provide a reversible mapping from pointers to "sufficiently large integers" but does not require it.

A pointer to an object is only valid in C (i.e. only has defined behavior) if it is never accessed outside the bounds of the object it points to.

Converting between data pointers and function pointers is not required to work in the C standard either.

C does require that you have a NULL pointer that has undefined behavior if you dereference this, but this could be trivially done by the runtime by allocating a single unit of memory for it.
The difficulty of writing static analysis software does depend on the language, though. In Visual Studio, for example, intellisense and autocompletion are vastly superior in C# compared to C++.

As a matter of interest, which C IDEs are you referring to? I'd like to check them out.
The Minimum Viable Kitchen
Just because the Java plugin is rarely used doesn't mean it isn't installed. Most PCs I see have Java installed, whether bundled by the OEM or some third-party piece of software, and Java always installs its plugin.

Stat Owl reports that the Java plugin is installed on 68% of browsers[0] based on data from 28 million monthly uniques[1].

0: http://www.statowl.com/java.php
1: http://www.statowl.com/about_our_data.php
Learn You Some Erlang now out in print
I would argue that C's problem is not that it's too strictly defined, but that it's too poorly defined. An in-depth look into all the cases of undefined behavior in C will show what I mean.

You want to really understand C? Read this[0]. John really understands C.

[0] http://blog.regehr.org/
you're right - this is not right for everyone. I wouldn't do it either - but 10-15 years ago, this would have been great for me.

But this is a killer opportunity, especially for someone younger who can live on the 5k and is not worried about family and mortgages yet.

This could be better than an MBA for many people who want to bring a real product to market.

Note: I have no context at all on the OP, so I'm making the jump that they have a strong business background and would not be flailing around once it was time to execute.
This is a great example of how macro-statistics are inherently useless to predict individual outcomes (or even individual group outcome).

I'd go so far to say irresponsible to publish without disclaimers since these kinds of studies are so easy to regurgitate and buy into about the "state of the USA".

A glaring example - how can you even consider Japan a "peer" nation to the USA when comparing health?

Ethnicity has been shown, again and again, to have a gigantic impact on life expectancy - so a more compelling study may be USA Japanese with Japanese parents vs. Japanese in Japan.

But then again what about RICH Japanese in USA vs. RICH Japanese in Japan?

Or broken out by Japenese that follow different diets?

Or Japanese that smoke?

Or any of the other "studies" that try to identify individualized trends.

If we're trying to glean anything from this data beyond pageviews for newspapers then segment & compare the data along actually comparable lines - class, ethnicity, and regional lines.
This discussion is awesome! I would never have believed such a simple conjecture could provide so much illumination around the myths and realities of startups.

First, its a great deal, both for hmexx and folks who take him up on it. Frankly I think it could be revolutionary. My reasoning is as follows;

Many "products" over the last couple of years have been fairly straight forward web "apps" built on top of existing infrastructure. They provide some basic customer value, they tend to be fashionable (moderate lifetime), and generally take less than a year to produce.

That is almost exactly the same as the book publisher model.

So hmexx sets himself up as an MVP "publisher" and pays "authors" $5000 up front and a 50% interest in the proceeds going forward. Now lots of new book authors would love that deal because they know how to write books but they have no idea how to promote them into bookstores and Amazon's top lists etc. Unlike books though web apps don't pay out a revenue stream on per-unit sales. Instead they tend to either a pay a chunk via a buyout, or they generate income over time with advertising/partnerships. If we're talking about "apps" for mobile then there is a revenue stream very similar to books.

So I reason its a good deal because the content creator has a much better chance to benefit from their creation than previous generations of artists had.

Now as an illumination, the whole 50/50 thing shines a light right into the core of the startup 'dream' mentality. It is the idea that you will start a company that becomes the next Facebook and you become a billionaire over about 10 years of nights. 50% of zero is zero, 50% of a billion dollar company is $500M worth. The closer reality is that if the idea has 'legs' then you can expect a series A round that will reduce both of you to 33% and then a series B which takes you to 20% to 25%. If you get there you're probably making a decent salary and have some small but non-zero shot of a return.

Every year somebody makes over $50M on one of the big lottery games in the US, its only like once in 5 years that people make over $50M from their startup. The good news is that fewer people have the chops to "buy in" to a startup lottery ticket.

So that is the reality. If you want to make some money, buy a house, raise a family. Go work for Oracle or Apple or Microsoft or Google. Don't do startups for the money, do them because you are passionate about what they are trying to create. If you do them for the money you will become bitter and depressed.

But this offer, to be paid $5000 in exchange for a half interest in the lottery ticket you create? Given the 'two, three month' worth of work estimate. There is not a whole lot to complain about.
Please could you expand on that. I'm mystified.
Internal Reprogrammability
Hi, I'm the author and submitted a bunch of chapters here before, which were well received.

You can buy it directly from No Starch Press with 40% off by going to http://nostar.ch/erlang_promo. Just as a reminder, it's 40% off for one week, print books come with free ebook versions (PDF, Mobi, ePub -- all DRM-free).

Thanks!
also vidyard, kytephone and upverter
Question: this only affects Rails Version 2 and higher, right?

I suspect I'm not the only person out there with legacy Rails Version 1 sites, so it would be very good to know the answer to that!
Very interesting way to solve the problem. It works great. Thank you!
Unfortunately, Java applets are the only way to connect a Midi Keyboard to an HTML5 app.
50/50 is dangerous split. We disagree, nothing happens. Developer invested time (sure they got paid), but now their idea is highly-likely landlocked with you.