skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's referenced by the kill(2) syscall documentation:

'A value of 0, however, will cause error checking to be performed (with no signal being sent). This can be used to check the validity of pid.'

On Mac OS X, the actual kernel implementation is:
if (uap->signum)
psignal(p, uap->signum);

So if signum == 0, no signal is sent, but this occurs after the destination (and permissions) are checked for validity.
Agreed. If we were to look at the cities' population density the figures are stark.

Los Angeles
pop: 3,849,378
dens: 8,205

New York
pop: 8,274,527
dens: 27,147

Vancouver
pop: 578,041
dens: 13,817.6

London
pop: 7,556,900
dens: 12,331

The kicker is that these figures obscure the fact that the core of LA just 3 million. In other words, only 1/4 of the people live in the core, and the core is still more spread out than these other cities.

By contrast, half of the people in the NY Metro live in NYC proper. In London, greater than half of the people live in it London proper.

LA's profile is most similar to Vancouver's, which is a city with fewer people in its greater metro area than LA has in its core.
Any defined interface is -- by definition -- documented, and any undefined interface (and thus undocumented) can not be relied upon.

Empiric lore is ultimately detrimental to genuine understanding.
Agree. It seems to me that if you dont want to give things a thougth, just adhere to someone elses and call yourself a (insert religion/belief system/school of thougth here) and get on with it.
What does that pattern says about our program? is it a bug? a feature?
> resulting deregulation played a part in the bubble and the collapse.

One small problem - deregulation didn't play a part in the collapse. It's the regulated institutions and the regulated parts of mixed organizations that failed.

Subprime mortages were a creation of regulation and were overvalued as US regulatory policy.

Regulation and tax policy encouraged US banks to hold more Fannie and Freddie stock than they would have otherwise, which guaranteed that they'd all take a hit at the same time.

The only "lack of regulation" was the US Congress protecting Fannie and Freddie. The active players here were almost all Dems. Most Repubs ignored the problem and a few got their teeth kicked in when they suggested that Fannie and Freddie should be regulated.

The Obama adminstration, starting with his Chief of staff, is full of folks who used to be Fannie or Freddie execs or board members.

That's not to let foreign regulators off the hook. Their banks and insurance companies are also failing.

In many cases, such as AIG, both US and foreign regulators were involved.

That's why the US is trying to get the unregulated institutions to bail out the regulated ones - they're the only ones left with significant assets.

Yes, I know what Fed Chief Bernake said about AIG's London operations. He was wrong about that, which shouldn't be much of a surprise given the accuracy of his predictions.
Real time application sharing for virtual meetings
Speaking of which, I had a better look at his post here:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2009/03/27/codinghorror-and-open-...

My conclusion is that he doesn't really have a lot of knowledge of open source business and economics, although to be charitable, it's certainly a more complex field than proprietary software.
Given the timing, it seems far more likely that this is an April Fools gag.
Were it not, I might expect that if they were forced to do so on Apr 1, they would explicitly mention that it was not April Fools gag, and return emails to techcrunch.
'Jaunty Jackalope' Ubuntu 9.04 springs into beta
> So I'd challenge the statement that the US did not fail in a typical fashion.

I'm not claiming that the US failed for a surprising reason. I'm saying that its failures are like what anything the IMF has tried to deal with before.

One might argue that the stimulus packages will cause the sorts of problems that the IMF claims to handle....
How has Google avoided class action law suits?

Wiping out hundreds of dollars for who knows how many users, at some point doesn't that become worthwhile for a class action attorney to pursue?
I disagree strongly and I have worked with some pretty good product managers. The customer interaction, usability, and functionality are not something to hand off to someone who is essentially a marketing technician. If the founders are going to produce an outstanding product, they need to be deep into the customer facing issues. If they can get the help of an outstanding designer, go for it, but a manager doesn't add much.
The families with Roomba (vacuuming robot) did more cleaning than families without the robot. I am going to use that as an excuse to my better half so that I can buy the thing...
From what little I know of the subject, I can see this becoming the dominant platform for game servers, especially MMO games within a few years.
About what? I come from a family of architects, and while they work long hours, they certainly don't get odd-hour calls. What type of building architect are you referring to?
Wesnoth is nothing like Settlers, but it's still a good game, especially considering the price. IIRC, ESR wrote a campaign for it.
That's in interesting analogy. Once again, call me an optimist, but human rights aren't something to be patient about.
Where did your friends and boyfriend/girlfriend get in to?

Yes, the mathematical proof of optimality only applies to one snapshot of time. Having exactly one choice of college after a date certain is a feature of any admission system, but there is considerable argument for that date certain being as late as possible.
Hackers Deface Aussie Censorship Board's Website
The students who protested in Tian An Men Square in 1989 (some of whom I know quite well) don't expect China to be so slow. They have been disappointed to see that its change has been slower than they hoped back then, but Americans were disappointed back at the time of the Boston Massacre too.
Ask HN: Applying the wiki-model to reviews
Exploring the idea of a game review site with a few interesting twists. One of them is a wiki-type model for user-generated reviews. We would have exactly two reviews, both editable by anyone:

Review #1 "This game is great because ..."
Review #2 "This game sucks because .."

For the users this would make things much easier as they will not need to read 10+ reviews, but just these two (which should increase in quality over time).

In our own sandbox testing, this has worked out well and produced condensed and useful reviews. Obviously though we have an inherent bias - we "want it to work" and thus stay civil and arent starting edit wars. So wondering, if this is something that would actually work in the real world? Considering that an idea as wacky as Wikipedia actually turned out to be very succesful.

Maybe we need some ground rules to have any chance. Suggestions?
Why am I seeing "7 comments" listed ... but no actual comments?
I find business people confusing myself, because the persona they put on when meeting new people seems plastic and frightening. There is an image of the ideal businessman, infinitely trustworthy, infinitely confident, infinitely congenial, and infinitely gregarious, and every time you get a group of business types together for the first time, everyone does their best impersonation of this ideal. Whenever I wonder why some people are scared of clowns, I think of a gathering of businessmen to help me understand.

Unfortunately, the things you're looking for as a geek are things they might not even recognize and value in themselves. Trustworthiness between businessmen, for example, seems to be very different than trustworthiness between geeks. There's a cultural disconnect. The difference between "lack of integrity" and "reasonable behavior under stress" is very different between businessmen and geeks, with the difference cutting both ways and neither side comprehending the other's definition.
Ask HN: Seeking fellow hackers in India
Hello,

I recall a post here on Hacker News some time ago which I'm not able to find now: some guy

from USA told about a startup he was bootstrapping. He considered his budget and found that

the whole of it would hire him jus one rockstar manager in USA. So instead, I recall, he

decided to hire a team of programmers in Pune, India (whom he happened to know because he

worked with them on some other project) and become a manager himself. He also said something

along the lines of not treating the whole affair as outsourcing, but partnership. He said he

spends one week each month in Pune, the rest in USA.

I'm a hacker from St.-Petersburg, Russia. Currently I have a day job programming embedded

processors, but I'm planning changes in my life soon and I would like to move to India. I

would like to get acquainter with fellow hackers in India who would probably tell me a bit

about how's life in India from their perspective and maybe show me around and help to

accomodate a bit.

If you are one of the people I described, or happen to know them, or can point me to the

mentioned article - please contact me: nleschov@gmail.com

P.S. I'm sorry to dilute the fine Hacker News site with this piece of non-news; I promise I

won't abuse its functionality. I wish there were other means of contact; writing comments or

submitting stub 'news' seems unappropriate.
This was the first tutorial that I used to learn Haskell way back when. If you liked Why's Ruby tutorial then this might be good for you.

What I liked:
1) The Modules and Typeclasses sections
2) The operator tutorials, there are sections where they introduce all related operators, I like this method of introducing operators.

I did have 2 complaints with it.
1) Thought it's somewhat incomplete, missing the monad tutorial and
2) It's more of a small snippets on how to use the syntax, it doesn't teach by building programs that can solve real world problems. This may not be much of a problem depending on how you learn.

Though back when I read it RWH wasn't out yet so your choices were more limited back then.
I think college admissions matter more to parents than they do to the students. For the parents, it's a huge insult not to have their "pride and joy" accepted to the Ivy League. The vast majority of level-headed 18- to 22-year-olds don't care that much about this issue. It's a rather pointless obsession.
I may as well "Ask HN" while this is on page 1. Do you all do your own designs, or hire out? Who do you hire? A friend and I are both looking to design our layout for our projects and are unimpressed by what we've seen, including 99 Designs. Any suggestions are welcome.
This is true. The 3G (UMTS) networks of AT&T and T-Mobile operate on different frequencies. AT&T uses predominantly 1900 MHz (and 850 MHz), while T-Mobile US uses 1700 and 2100 MHz. In Europe 3G is at 2100 MHz. The 3G T-Mobile US network is one of very few 1700 MHz 3G networks in the world.

Presumably the current iPhone 3G is triband (850/1900/2100) as it is sold in Europe, Australia, South America, and North America. A quadband (850/1700/1900/2100) iPhone would work on T-Mobile in 3G, but there is little reason before 2010 for Apple to include 1700 MHz capability.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UMTS_networks#North_Ame...
What jumped out at me was that his wife and children tolerated it for four years.
A Blacklist for Websites Backfires in Australia
St. Paul, yes, sorry to not give the Minni's twin is due credit ;)

Off topic, but St. Paul and surrounding suburbs are actually much more conservative than Minneapolis and the suburbs on its side. It's like the difference between Boston and Cambridge.
I was never a board game geek, but that might have been a side effect of growing up in the 90's. I had friends who I couldn't hang out with every day, because we lived so far apart. So I ended up being killer at early video games and for the most part I still am although I rarely play the first person shooters or the RTS games anymore due to time (and, for the FPS', interest) constraints.

Yet even I knew what Catan is. Even my wife does, I told her about 3 months ago that the next time we waste money on a board game we're actually going to get one I like, so I pointed it out to her.

So even for me that was a sort of bizarre 'deja vu' experience. Then again, I grew up in the UK so I suppose this game probably hit the market much bigger and much sooner than in the US. I guess an addendum to your second moral is that foreign markets can act in unexpected ways.
I like the material that's been posted so far, but the true test will be how he tries to handle a head-on discussion of Monads.

I've been checking up on it every so often since it was first released, and I just noticed he has a (crappy) feed now.
I don't think you understand -- doors make terrific desks!
Where did the comments go?
Recession product ideas from Bruce Sterling
Also creepy: spending 815 words explaining why you aren't creepy.
Check out the books he co-authored:

Interface

The Cobweb

I actually like these better than all his single-authorships. They do feel lighter.
"cloudware ubiquity apps requiring the mash-up of processing sketches on the Arduino chip."

This was my other idea for a start-up!
There would still be bubbles without the douchebags, but the douchebags made the human costs of this economic cycle far greater. It's douchebags, after all, who have created the collection of trends known as "middle-class squeeze".

The Clinton regime had an expansion and a recession. So did the Bush regime. Neither leader nor political environment was able to alter the underlying business cycle. But, under Clinton, we had an unprecedentedly prosperous expansion and a mild recession; under Bush we had a shitty expansion ("jobless recovery" into 2004) and a devastating recession. Douchebags, enabled by the lax regulatory climate, had much to do with this change. Although there are certainly plenty of douchebags on both sides of the political aisle, the fact is that a Republican political and economic culture is more douchebag-friendly. Douche Czar Erik Prince, for example, thrived in the Bush administration.

Douchebags aren't responsible for the fact that a bubble occurred, but they influenced the character of it greatly, and magnified the human cost immensely. Most notably, there is the fact that this bubble was in real estate, a type of investment that appeals greatly to the status-driven douchebag mind. (If you don't consider house flippers and real estate speculators to be vintage douchebags, you're seriously out of touch.) A bubble in real estate has a monstrous human cost, whereas one in gold is relatively irrelevant to most people.
I'm enjoying RWH (available freely at http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/). I'm only about a third of the way through it, but every few chapters the author ostensibly takes a break from the pedagogy to show us how to build a real program (in reality, there is a lot of teaching in those chapters, so don't skip them).
People compulsively and dangerously obsess over many things, I think in our ancient history it was probably beneficial. I mean when you can catch polio from squatting in the woods, I think it probably kept many people alive by them obsessing over staying clean and doing routines and such.

Today, well I think it only hurts people. When no one really has to try to live past 30 obsession is very dangerous. I turned 21 yesterday, I've never had any form of disease or condition (besides psoriasis, which since I moved country the UV light of been more southern has completely removed it) and the only times I've ever been in hospital was once when I visited my dad because he had kidney stones and the other was visiting my mum at work.

My wife caught something, probably the influenza B outbreak that happened, and was sick for almost a week. Me? Not a thing, I've never had the flu I'm completely immune. My brother was bed ridden with the flu one time, my entire family had it except me... worst week ever! If I ever became a doctor I'd probably smother people.
I agree. The only (remotely) interesting thing Atwood said was "wouldn't it be nice if there was a service that would hook up the consultant with the customer?"

However, it would probably be little more than the dozen "find a third-world-or-starving-student-coder" sites that already exist. It would just be branded differently.
Maybe being the best does not necessarily mean to be selective?

I think that Internet slowly begins to remove the constrains you mention.
Lawsuit Forces TheFunded To Shutter Service (or early April Fools joke)
It's shocking that such a naive model produces such good results. I suspect it has to do with the languages they are translating: if they wanted to translate Japanese to German it would take more sophisticated methods.
If you have a training corpus that consists of code with bugs and the same code with the bug fixed, I imagine you can get rather far.

The biggest challenge with any statistical or machine learning techniques is getting a good data set. If all you have is a lot of code but the code with bugs in it is not annotated, then you need unsupervised techniques which require better algorithms and more data (as I understand it).
Or an alternative is too just lock a class up for 3 days in a library while they write their essays (with not internet).

Take home assignments are usually a mess - what I did was to force people to write tests. If there are 3 people in a group and only one is working - it will also come out.
I can't see the coments, so I don't understand why I got upvoted. If someone else can see the comments, I expect I made no sense, else they can't see my comment.
A chimp is still a chimp, even if it's wearing a business suit.

Basically, a moron will still be a moron even if they have all the paper to get into a job. There's no doubt a few people who can get by in a job despite not being the smartest, but once companies start catching on I expect there'll be lots more loop holes to fire people.
You would probably need to worry a lot more about morphology with those languages.
Bug: http://News.YCombinator.com/item?id=533849 (I'm working on it --pg)
5 Myths About Twitter the Media Wants You to Believe
Meatball Wiki is a good general source of wiki advice: http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl

I recall reading on it somewhere the point that there are several possible formats of wiki - namely, the "discussion" format and the "document" format, and that Wikipedia has has made familiar the concept of cleanly dividing the two into separate pages. You might want to reconsider this concept and how it works in the context of a review.

The other main thing to consider is whether you can apply the same template and rules over every page - if you can, it's very straightforward to contribute.
How did this community miss the Cloud Manifesto fight?
New Folding@home super-cruncher?
Facebook "Definitely" Raising Capital This Year; Google Considered Acquisition
Never can tell??

A couple of days ago I built a new webpage and as usual tried to validate my HTML 4 strict and CSS 3 . The HTML4 validated just great with CSS2.1, but threw a tantrum when I posted the CSS3 validation code and reran HTML4 Strict.

This is the offending line:

&profile=css3&usermedium=all&warning=1

which is OK on the CSS validation page, but will not pass inspection if ran AFTER posting the WHOLE link to my web page. Everything is the same except for that last line.

Run as CSS2.1 and all is well.

Run as CSS3 and the validator gives 6 errors on this part of the code alone. It seems to hate the " & " and the " = " and even the " W " in warning?? !!

Would like to validate HTML 4.01 Strict with CSS3.

Any help??
Yeah, my statement's only true in certain senses. It might be more accurate, with tabletop games at least, to say that games are a UI to the other players - that is, they channel social interactions in certain ways.
(I can't see any of the 11 comments so forgive me if post is redundant in some way)

Visual Effects production often needs lots of computing resources for rendering. This is a task that can be heavily parallelized. Usually this is done on a frame/per core basis, with memory being the limiting factor. Now I've started using EC2 recently which made me realize a different approach to rendering tasks.

Normally a facility has a fixed number of CPUs available to run jobs. So for example 100 cpus. Let's say the average number of frames to render is usually around 200. So if each frame takes an hour to render and your's is the only job on the queue then it will take 2 hours to see the complete shot. And it's much worse in the real world with many artists working on many shots. Whereas using a resource like EC2 you can always render your entire shot in 1 hour regardless of the number of frames. You're only limited by the time it takes 1 frame to render, and the cost is the same if you use 1 cpu or 200.

In other words one can trade depth for breadth. Now this may seem obvious to anyone familiar with EC2, but for me it means that tools like Tesla which where once in high demand for this type of work are now much less valuable. I would expect that it's price/performance is much better then EC2, but where is the cutoff? How many hours do you have to run that Tesla to come out ahead? And if you're running 1 Tesla for that many hours, might it not be worth a premium to get your answer sooner by running more massively parallel (but for less wall clock time) on an EC2 like service?

I suspect these types of tools becoming only relevant to real time applications (due to reduced latency vs. EC2), and or nonstop computing (assuming there's a big price/performance win).
Flattening the bell curve can help a good deal, but the only way to guarantee that you get a resource each turn is to redraw until you hit a match with one of your settlements... unless I'm misunderstanding you.

edit: NM, I misread your last sentence. I've never seen a territory run dry for the whole game, but this would indeed prevent that.
Excuse the get-off-my-lawn attitude, but judging from the quality of most of those comments, I think that's a feature, not a bug...
...except that many non-gamers are really flummoxed by the way Fluxx's changing goals keep putting different demands on them. They feel like the rug's been pulled out from under them, when really all that's happening is they're playing a game that's all tactics and no strategy.
Facebook Profile Pic Favicon (what's this from?)
Variance is a great concept, thanks for bringing it to my attention!
Intense. What has happened?
That said, though, I wonder why there aren't more "hot seat" style mobile games, designed to be played on one handset that gets passed around. Or on many handsets that share game info wirelessly but depend somehow on co-presence in the real world.
Everyblock  - A news feed for your block
It's also known as the GPL.
Yes! The original WarCraft board game is way underrated - mostly because you have to download a patch (yes, for a board game) and because it doesn't come with fancy molded plastic pieces.

It's much more for the hardcore tabletop gamer, though. (As is the StarCraft board game, which is quite different but also wonderful.)
3rd party integration assumption - other system written by drunken monkey typing with feet
Neither does this bug.
The Art of the Propagator by Sussman/Radul
Ask HN: How to hire sales people
I'm working on a project targeted towards SMB mostly, although it could go the enterprise route. How do you go about hiring sales people? Craigslist?
The labels are so ignorant that it's unbelievable.

The sooner musicians get rid of them the better...
Software Economics - Public Goods
It has been discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=533520