skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know it's not going to happen, but I say if IE updates break existing enterprise web sites because they are more standards-compliant, then go for it. Any place that's holding on to IE6 because they're afraid to break IE-only web sites probably isn't going to update anyway.

The timesheet and employee self-services system where I work are IE-only for no good reason. The timesheet site is a Java applet, and the employee self-services system uses XML and Javascript to render content. There's nothing I've seen on either system that cannot be done using simple web standards. I guess people who use Macs here (and there are a number of them) have to have access to a PC to get paid.

As long as we allow enterprises not to be standards-compliant through and through, we, as web developers, will continue to have IE-related headaches.
Hysteria on both sides. I'm pissed at Symantec for amateurish public relations on this, but also embarassed by the conspiracy theorists; there is no way, in 2009, that Symantec could get away with hiding objectionable code in their binaries. Part-time security people will dissect this program for sport; large enterprises already staff teams of people to evaluate the code they're deploying.
What is it the "Linux fanboys" should eat, the large Resource Kit you need to download to get sleep functionality in batch scripts?
Doug Lenat – I was positively impressed with Wolfram Alpha
It is sad to see someone whose business so heavily relies upon understanding copyright laws, licenses and derivative works fail to understand in such a fundamental way. The claim that "the result is what matters" is ludicrous, and should be laughed out of court. While the site design may have been copied, that has no bearing whatsoever on the legality of the script itself.
News flash: virtually all security vendors keep mum on the design and implementation of their products. Many of the host-based security vendors actively compete with reverse engineers in vain attempts to prevent malware from patching around their products. There are even popular data-loss prevention products that hook the scheduler and interrupt handlers to keep the kernel itself from inspecting them.

This is just not a news story.
I'm not sure the several posts a week constitute "saturating the channel." Jeff is hardly prolific as far as bloggers go.
Guy Kawasaki's picks from Razorfish's digital outlook report
I don't understand how this was wrong.

If there were 100 people tweeting about my startup, and I manually went and tweeted a "thanks for checking us out!" to each of them...I'd have my account suspended?

From the title I assumed he was using a robot to send auto replies to anyone who tweeted about new search engines, but he was doing this by hand? How is this bad?
How incredibly childish.
Reia Interview (a new dynamic lang on the Erlang VM)
I agree, but I wonder about the subtle effects of so many old buildings have on the psychology of a place.

Old buildings and a place with a long past (which in North America means hundreds of years) is probably great for the idea industry, as new ideas are built on top of older ideas, recursively. Having architecture around with a long history brings attention to this longer timespan, and provides the necessary perspective.

But for startups, it sometimes seems to me that the "blank slate" aspect of much of Silicon Valley encourages focus on the new and the future, which is pretty much what one wants in the startup space, as opposed to the idea space.
Right. Clearly this isnt some government tracking program like some crazies predict.

But it is a good lesson in forum management, at least.

Definitely not stellar/unique news. However, I do like how quickly this news story is spreading.
My algorithms teacher does research in something similar. IIRC he has a program exactly for showing copy/pasted code. You may want to have a look at his papers on Clone Detection Tools, "A Novel Approach to Optimize Clone Refactoring Activity", etc.

http://www.polymtl.ca/recherche/rc/en/professeurs/details.ph...
A New Kind of Search
Girl wants to work for Twitter. Creates site.
Sorry for asking such a stupid question, but isn't that code horribly broken? It assumes that the next 3 byte after a string are readable. What if I malloc'ed memory for the string in such a way, that the \0 is the last byte of the memory page and the next byte after \0 is on the next page, which is not mapped into my VM space? In such a case the CPU will throw a page-fault and the process will die because of SIGSERV or SIGBUS. Or is the glibc version of malloc padding all memory to have at least 3 byte beyond its last byte?
The AST also makes it easier to use heuristics based on semantic information to shorten the number of subtrees you're concerned with (previously substrings).

For example, if in a C-like language, you could decide to only look at subtrees that are at least complete statements, or go to a higher granularity and only look at compound statements. You could also eliminate common idioms, such as

for (i = 0; i < N; i++)

Which will pop up all over the place and give false positives.
"I don't have the time" is more often code for "I don't have the energy."

For those who are moonlighting, how do you avoid burnout?
Is "prepare bacon" necessarily part of "prepare food" itself, though? Rather than hardcoding preparing bacon as a stage of food prep, it's probably more maintainable to have the kinds of food passed in (as a list, a Menu object, whatever) - what you're cooking strongly influences the entire process.

washHands()
for f in val(foods) do
coroutine.init(f)
...
end
waitUntilDone()
if (not aLazyGit) then doDishes() end

Really, cooking usually involves interwoven stages of things like setting water boiling, whisking a roux, kneading dough, chopping peppers, etc. Tacking on "...and make bacon" at the end of all cooking batches doesn't make sense. Instead, break prepareFood() down further into operations such as boilWater(vol), preheatOven(temp), etc.; Those should be reusable, barring unusual circumstances (e.g. boiling water at high altitudes). Without a lot of specialization via arguments, prepareFood() is too coarse an abstraction, about as vague as doTaxes().
Dear entrepreneurs,

Don't be surprised when you get sued for using someone else's data without their permission to jump start your startup.

Sincerely,

Content Creators
Interesting jQuery implementation - OS X Dashboard Widgets
Wow. Checkmate. You got me there. That bit where I advocated $30M bonuses to all failed banking execs was way off base.
I'm really surprised they don't store all sold gift keys in some kind of database and rely solely on an algorithm.
Making Django Apps Run On and Off Google App Engine
Just to be clear: I'm saying they can effectively force you, in the sense that they can fire you if you don't comply.
It will be very interesting if the court rules in favor of the startup.
Suppose you're running the team at Apple that works on the iTunes gift codes. What do you do here to cut your losses?

Obviously change the algorithm used to generate the codes for a start. And even though the codes themselves are indistinguishable from real codes, you can probably detect patterns in their use (ie, someone from a town in China who's never had an iTunes account before suddenly buys $100 of music) and prevent a subset those codes from being redeemed (with some very small amount of false positives).

What else would you do?
I'm not confusing the two. Part of my point was sexual abuse can escalate into more serous abductions. By acting as a deterrent, it may have an effect far greater than the 27 children saved would imply. As evidence in countries without such strict systems, abduction, or at least sex slavery, can run rampant.

My argument, more generally, is that the amber may be a good bang for the buck. I am not against triage. But the very issue being critized, the media attention and cognitive stickiness of child abduction stories, are valuable in that they deter offenses, and that they raise awareness.
How To Monetize A Social Network: MySpace And Facebook Should Follow TenCent
I think you're making a good point, but it's misguided here. We're talking about a 2x speedup for strlen on pretty much every Linux system and probably other systems as well. That's millions of machines. This optimization has probably saved untold amounts of computing time.
> Buying a good quality vaporizer is well worth the money vs making your own, unless you are skilled enough to make your own quality vaporizer (with proper temperature control).

I don't smoke pot (I would try some, but I don't care enough to actually find someone who sells it), but I am sorely tempted to make a vaporizer and put the schematics online. Does it just need to maintain a constant temperature in a small area? That sounds like a pretty fun project. I imagine you could make a control system pretty easily with a few op-amps and a basic temperature sensor.
Wow, Amber Alert is evil. Never thought of it that way. How about lifeguards at the beach? Also evil?
I think Apple is so overwhelmed with App store submissions that they leave accept/reject decisions to under-qualified individuals reading from a list of dos and dont's without any context or understanding.

Whomever rejected Tweetie obviously didn't understand that they were looking at user-generated content.
Ethnic Technology
Doubtful. If there was truly money to be made that way, Apple marketing would have already thought of it and be giving away iTunes gift certificates.
The History of Python: The Problem with Integer Arithmetic
I'd give it 5 also. It's a ridiculously clever fun book.

I agree with some of the reviewers though, the title probably means less people manage to find it than if it was called "Bit manipulation bible" or something.
Right again!
We don't want no stinkin' website.
Err ... orkut was not actually strictly a google product because they didn't think up that idea as a product and worked on it. The guy who made orkut - Orkut Buyukkokten - was just working on his 20% free time to build it, and then they liked it and just released it as a product.

reference - http://searchenginewatch.com/3302741

Its kinda interesting that Google has developed only Gmail as an inhouse product till now !
It might've been not the algorithm that got broken, but, say, a private (RSA) signing key was recovered. It all really depends on how exactly the whole thing is designed.
Twitter at one point had a recruiter specializing in finding female CS people. I'm told they made at least one hire from this source. I wouldn't be surprised if she gets an interview, given Twitter's desire to maintain some gender balance.
Yup, I was doing this literally by hand.
I was waiting for something like this to happen after reading Coding Horror this morning.

Everyone is scared of this site turning into to digg. The signal:noise is very good, and everyone appreciates that. I'm not sure banning stories from CH are going to help this matter, because the damage is already done. The cat is out of the bag, and Hacker News will either turn into digg, stay the same, or, most likely, settle at a happy middle-ground.

Hopefully there won't be any lolcats on the front page.
Seems like a potshot -- What would it take for you to flesh out your profile a bit so we can learn more about you?

Also, most won't "invest" in a company without knowing every damn thing -- including current/projected financials, competitors, etc. Good luck and hopefully you'll get what you need :)
Nokia 3610 fold Unlocked Quadband
Nokia 3610 fold unlocked with great features and elegant look has come out to be you forever as it will provide you all the features and basic need of applications. The phone is including many features like 1.3 megapixel with 1280 x 1024 pixels.
The glibc strlen begins by checking the first few bytes, if necessary, so that it can continue with the assumption that the string is 4-byte or 8-byte aligned. So no, it's not horribly broken: all the reads are aligned, and you're not going to get a page boundary in the middle of the word.

(Also, you're not going to be reading off the end of a malloc'ed block, because essentially all malloc implementations, including the one in glibc, return blocks whose start address and size are multiples of the architecture's word size.)
Yes. And "some people" win a shitload of money on the Lottery. Just because you have a really slim chance of winning a whole lot doesn't mean it's the smartest way to go about earning money.
But she's not CS. She's like "breathing girl who wants to play with the boys at the cool company."

That's the irony of the thing.
On the Renaming of Xcode Projects
If you don't like it, go suck on your mothers tit "Grandma's Boy!" There's nothing I hate more than a bunch of egotistical whiners who don't like other people playing in, what they "think" is, their sandbox. Who are these "unwanted people" you scour down your nose at? Are they the ones that, tisk-tisk, don't know as much as you do? Never forget where you came from; remember that you too were an IDIOT that didn't know anything at first. We're all at some level of idiocy, even you CPT. Kirk. Jeff Atwood brings a lot to the table and has a great blog that sparks great discussion. Here's an idea, if you don't like it, don't read it. Now I'll have to make it a point to come over to your sandbox and take a big 'ol dump in it, just because I can.
am i missing where she says what her skills are that would actually make twitter want to hire her?
Nope. For that, you'd have to go to her personal blog..and even there, you don't get much.

Blame Penelope Trunk. She creates these monsters.
Steering wheel - F1
The glibc guys did not heed such advice :P
Time for a more studied response eludes me. But I should first like to say a few things.

Firstly, though I am not an author of that statistical study, I have seen nothing to contradict those numbers. The proportion could be as high as one in three. It has effected my friends and family.

Secondly, I agree that fearmongering is a questionable tactic. However, as. Seterent for crimes, it can be effective.

Third, I am not Mod Flanders. I am a physicist. I rely on quantitative analysis and triage.

Finally, I did not stumble into anything. My words are deliberate. Fears are powerful, pervasive, human, and in this case, can be a force for good.
Try to read faster than your knee can jerk. quoted from page 2 of the article:

The Client Protection Fund of the Bar of Maryland, the state's legal licensing body, provides Avvo with information for 34,000 lawyers, including the name, address and date of admittance to practice in the state. Avvo pays a standard fee for the agency to produce the list. So far, none of Maryland's members have complained, according to the bar's administrator.

A shiny virtual nickel to someone who shows me how to quote text on this website.

Edit: it's unclear how the directory of DC Bar (as opposed to Maryland bar) was obtained and what specific claim the DC Bar is alleging.

As a general rule within the USA there's no copyright in raw facts (themselves), though there is in any presentation of said facts.

Thus if AVVO got a printed copy of the DC Bar's printed members' directory and then hired some people to type it up, they'd be fine.

Where they might not be fine is if the DC Bar had some kind of terms-of-use on their site that says "you can't use this site except for personal use" and then the DC Bar could show that Avvo obtained the information via the website.

The first point seems to be true: http://www.dcbar.org/copyright.cfm

(for background: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.dcbar.org/copyright.... )

The second point -- whether or not the Avvo obtained their listings via the site or not -- is clearly a point of contention.

Given the previous willingness to legally obtain the listing (even paying actual money) I'd be surprised if the Avvo founders haven't dotted their i's and crossed their t's on this one.
rep scasb is horribly slow.
Check out her resume. She has a degree in social sciences with no less than 5 concentrations, one of which is conflict resolution. Oh my!

But then again, hiring a super excited person can be a benefit, as long as they stay excited, which may be difficult. The manic people of this world are difficult to wrangle.

I think its safe to assume I'm skeptical. Also, just for her benefit, someone should tell her a 1 page resume is the norm for entry-level positions.
Finding the perfect startup office: How YC's Xobni did it
I know that investors want to know everything about what they invest in...

I am just discussing the idea, I want to know if it's possible to do it or not. I am not here to sell the shares, I just want to know the opinion of the people... would they buy in it or not?

Potshot? And why companies really go public and raise funds? Don't they do it for "potshot"?
As I know, that any company goes public and have stocks, they do it to get cash money quickly to invest in their infrastrucutre or implement new plans, just instead of applying for loans from bank. Am I right or wrong?
A mean isn't helpful without standard deviation. The difference could be due to chance.

Also, http://funroll-loops.info/ for those who haven't seen it.

And I used to use Gentoo exclusively. :)
I based my snarky remark on this from the article:

"Avvo.com, the site posting the profiles, says it's simply using public data to help consumers find lawyers and their track records.

"There's no reason why lawyer-licensing records should be treated any differently than records for any other profession," said Joshua King, general counsel for the Seattle start-up. "The bar doesn't like the fact that the information is out of its control." "
Yes, agreed. The play on words was amusing to me (odd sense of humor alert!) It seems there is a lot of ambiguity between the way you and the GP used the word.

Though, this topic got me thinking. Unless you are using speech to text, I think that how you interface with the computer is fundamental to the act of programming. I do not think that abstraction is essential to programming. Much to the chagrin of my abstraction-loving nature, consistent procedural code can be easy to read and follow. For higher-order OOP, an understanding of abstraction and encapsulation is very necessary.
Oh please God, I really, really hope so.
What do you think that Apple should do when it detects someone trying to redeem a "bogus" gift key?

If they reject it, there's now a good chance that they've rejected a redemption request by a legit customer.
Standard deviation is below my chosen two digits.
Just applied for an API key. Any chance you can shepherd my application along through the process?

Also, this is 100x more interesting than the NYTimes API, simply because I can access full stories. And the lack of meta data is fine for the moment, so long as there's some fairly accurate tagging system in place, which appears to be the case.
how do you avoid burnout?

Don't stop to think "omg I am working so hard".

... and get enough sleep.
I get where you're coming from, but that's quite a leap. Newer development doesn't imply sterile wasteland. A lot of suburbs are sterile, for sure. But a lot of urban development integrates quite nicely with the surrounding area, often adding to the appeal of the neighborhood. eg: Church Corner in Cambridge. Then there's the full-on live/work/play development like Atlantic Station in midtown Atlanta. Both areas are quite vibrant.
R.I.P. Hacker News
Without getting in to what those preferences are, that being a different can of worms, I think it's likely that there are trends in the language preferences of great hackers. The existence of these trends means that tools that work well with the languages great hackers prefer will be more popular with great hackers.

The static analysis done by heavy IDEs isn't the only way to have large amounts of information about code available in the editor. Using Emacs with Slime, the editor has a huge amount of information about your code because it's communicating with the Lisp runtime that's evaluating it.
Funny you should say this. As I was pasting this link, I thought to myself: "This is a nice memorable number... I should just memorize this URL. It's not as if it will never come in handy again."
I "type" most words when I'm programming by hitting two or three initial letters, and then pressing M-/ to complete (emacs does that by scanning all open buffers for something that matches, usually quicker than anyone could type the whole word).

I don't choose terse identifiers, I choose long ones that I know emacs will be able to find completions for easily.

I don't see how typing faster would help me.
We actually have very similar tastes. I guess I just need a garage. :)
Almost immediately after hearing that they were hiring, when Evan Williams was on Charlie Rose, I did something similarly creative (though not so public) for my application. The thousands-of-dollars bounty they put on the heads of finders of potential employees is so off-putting. Still crossing my fingers. :)
Ask HN: Please review my app:  RightSignature.com - Easy Online Document Signing
Empirical observations about your own performance are inherently flawed while not on a mind-altering drug, barring measurement/metrics. If you're measuring, I can't imagine how your state of mind could affect those.

If you want good separation, find a metric that can be recorded/played back.

I thought we were hackers? There are obvious solutions here...
I'd really like to retire this argument, but I don't exactly agree.

My point is basically as follows:

1) Yes, it probably makes sense for GNU libc to use the optimized implementation.

2) Yes, it's really interesting to dissect when you're looking for clever implementations and hacks.

3) These "2x" speed-up numbers I feel are all nice metrics, but in the end, don't amount to much. Outside of this argument, I feel people misunderstand how long something takes in a computer. The relative time a network or hard drive read takes, a memory read takes, a CPU instruction cache miss takes, and a dumb comparing of bytes via a single instruction are all a magnitude of difference apart.

So let's say you're writing your http caching server and you're using the new strlen algorithm. The amount of time your code will spend fetching the item from memory and putting it on the wire will completely eclipse the speedup you get from this fancy strlen. Not to mention if you're writing this in a high-level language, the nanoseconds you save on a linear algorithm will simply not matter.

So you can make the argument that over the last few years, the total time and energy spent by all Linux machines saved by using the new algorithm is worth it. I don't exactly buy it because most of modern computers' lives are dictated by waiting for input, processing it in burst and then more waiting. Most CPUs are sitting around the world with single-digit utilization. If we all loaded up a bunch of work to do in 1990 and the world's CPU power spent time crunching it, we might arrive at an answer a few hours or days sooner. But all it means in realistic terms, is that your Linux box will arrive at answer a few nanoseconds sooner and get to finally start waiting for its next batch sooner (whether this entails serving http requests or waiting for your next key stroke)

I'm all for optimization, but I think it has to be appropriate and measured. It probably makes sense to spend time on nano-optimizations for maintainers of one of the most-used libraries in the world, but all I'm trying to say, that for most readers of HN, it's better to spend time working on algorithm run-time optimization or caching policies than looking for getting side-tracked with strlen implementations.
> Nobody expects you to sustain 120 wpm typing for eight hours a day.

Obviously you've never worked for my boss! :)