skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed, in college I was interviewing for a job, and the interviewer asked how I would determine the length of a null terminated string, and I thought I nailed it by giving a typical "while(*(str++)) c++;" implementation.

The "right" answer was just to use strlen()...
Mine do as well, yes. I'm not knocking GMail's spam filters, but it's absolutely possible to run your own mail server virtually spam free. I've had the same primary e-mail address for 11 years, posted it all over the place, and I almost never see spam in my inbox.
We've been eating these for the last couple weeks, and they're excellent:

http://deesminiorganicdoughnuts.foodoro.com/products/crazy-e...

You have to be in the Bay Area to get them though.
Mail.app on OS X has a very nice threaded view. It's not exactly the same, but it's still very nice:)
Straw man arguments are as detrimental to the community as proposing users shouldn't discuss what's happening in their community openly. Don't tell me my point is invalid by suggesting I spend my time doing something unrelated to writing comments. In any case I do monitor the threads I've responded to because, as I've stated, I believe active discussion is vital to the continuation of the community. If you feel monitoring the discussion around comments is unproductive, than the irony of you "nannying" this thread and responding to my two comments is not lost on me, nor is the fact to you apparently missed the final sentence of my first post, to reiterate: "Still, post on and let the community decide I suppose."
Anyone who's ever bought a Spiderman comic book as a child has been subject to sales tax without any form of representation. Should we therefore conclude that three-year-olds should be able to vote?
In the sense of "create more value than you capture", you can also do pretty well for yourself by giving away your by-products. It lets you get the best of both worlds of the "charge money for value" and "influential people on the Internet think everything should be free". (I would assume that would be the point of the Rails example.)

You'd be absolutely amazed how much value you can extract out of a blog, for example, if you treat it as a friendcatcher.

(I love that word -- when I was younger and not exactly the most social of people, Mom always advised me to learn to cook because it was a "friendcatcher". It gives you a perfect built-in excuse to invite people over, even if you've just met them, and cooking and eating are so inherently social that it gets you over the "I don't really know you" hump a lot of the time.)
You're right. To be honest, I am not too concerned with the state trying to prosecute me for having smoked a couple of joints in college. The state could try to do it, but I don't see what it would gain exactly. I am more concerned about how confessing (hypothetically speaking) to have smoked weed in the past could harm my career in the future.

For example, four friends of mine started a laser company after the dot-com crash in 2001. They needed $25 million of venture funding, and they got it. However, some (if not all) the VC firms hired private investigators to conduct a background check on my friends. The PI's researched and scrutinized their entire lives (both professional and personal). The PIs were so good at the job it was almost nauseating. Make no mistake about it, this kind of info can be used to find your weaknesses, and can be used against you. In fact, they used that info against my friends with devastating effects as soon as the company had some problems. It was not pretty.
I said "evil".

Mostly to try to snap snorkel out of his self-righteous irrational haze, but it doesn't seem to have worked.

Choosing bad priorities means you get sub-optimal results. snorkel, you can strawman and spin all you like, but silencio's statistics don't go away, and the simple and obvious fact that we do not rationally portion out our attention to the things that really kill children while focusing on the Hollywood threats kills hundreds or thousands a year. You keep trying to paint us as wrong, but you're the one standing on the side with the net corpse count. That you happen to be standing there with most of the rest of society is no virtue.

And your examples merely prove that you don't get my point in the slightest. If you think I'm against fire alarms, you need to stop emoting and start reading more carefully, and actually put some rational thought into it.
That looks like a pretty straightforward translation of the basic while (d++ = s++); code. It uses higher-level instructions, but those probably get microcoded to the same thing anyway. (Note: my information on the inner workings of x86 CPUs may be a bit dated.)
I've yet to use OSX extensively, so I cannot really comment on that over the other two.

But having tested Windows side-by-side with Ubuntu 8.10 for the last couple weeks, I can honestly say that I love Ubuntu as an OS more.

Apart from direct access to Photoshop (It's only a matter of time with WINE I guess) theres really little reason for me to go back to Windows.

It's not that I hate Microsoft, but I'm finding the advantage that their OS has (applications wise) is becoming less as time goes on.

If I still played videogames etc, I could see use in the OS - but I don't really do that anymore.
Music can take the pain away, study finds | NowPublic News Coverage
Good talk. I have found that spending a little time meditating certainly slows you down. Furthermore, you tend to start "seeing" more and analyzing less. I have found taking long walks (no ipod, no speed walking), taking a long hot shower, lowering the lights, lighting some candles, and just listening to a great jazz album on my headphones works just as well.

I certainly was the kind of person who was IM'ing while coding, twittering while on the phone, surfing HN while watching TV, a person who always had an agenda while having an agenda.

These days, I don't feel (so) guilty sitting at a coffee shop at the brink of dawn with a nice cup of coffee watching the sun rise. Or walking by myself in the woods. Or sitting by my window on a rainy day listening to the pitter-patter of rain.

This talk will certainly give you an insight, and I recommend reading Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now". Its a quick read and will certainly open your eyes to just slowing down.

Update - Edited for grammatical errors
U2 (shareholders in Palm)/Apple Relationship Sours?
You pay rent to your landlord, should you have the right to tell the landlord how to spend it? What is a government but a very big landlord?
From someone who orders lots of food online -- nice work. I've been wishing a site with this purpose existed for years.

I will note that the prices seem quite high for many items compared to similar items available elsewhere, but from a business standpoint I suspect that's OK. To my knowledge, the demand for organic food has always exceeded supply.
wow, this looks good. Will have to try them.

PG, you have to check out gelayo gusto. It's on el camino right after castro st in Mountain View if youre going towards Palo Alto. Best gelato I've ever had and the people that run it are pretty damn cool.
I had the little mini dough nuts: http://deesminiorganicdoughnuts.foodoro.com/products/top-sel...

Their tasty goodness was well received.
Begs the question: How do you know whether an abstraction is too coarse without writing the code?
The problem is that you will still receive the mail. If you run even a semi-popular website, your domain is going to be hit by all kinds of bogus mail. Since I'm a programmer not a server administrator, the CPU and IO was constantly overloaded because of spam. Whenever I switched to Google Apps, the hard drive breathed a sign of relief.

I'm sure if you take the time to properly administrate, you can run email on your own server. In my case it was too confusing, took too much effort, and I wanted to get back to doing real work.
I wonder if there's any value in "solving" the shipping cost problem by having something like Amazon's Prime -- an upfront fee of $80/yr then free 2 day shipping?

It changes shopping psychology. Once Prime is purchased, people want to buy many things to increase the return on their investment. :)
I don't disagree with you on any particular point. I was only stating that to dismiss a PhD in the humanities "as a waste" says a lot more about the position from which one makes that dismissal than about the humanities PhD itself.
This mentality always strikes me as odd; like firing an employee when they make a mistake.

The key factor to consider should be "Have they learnt from this?". The outage has happened. It won't unhappen. The question now is, will Google fix the problems that caused this, or don't they care.
ESCAPE TO… COSTA RICA, a tropical paradise
When someone wants to talk about bloat, the odds of Microsoft Office being trotted out are around 80%.

Yet, here we see that with a modern system that is mostly only special in the I/O department that Microsoft Office as a whole opens in .5 seconds, which, believe me, is radically faster than Office 95 opened back in the day it was still cutting edge.

Yes, it was a powerful system, but the only thing that was radically more powerful that what anybody can buy for cheap was the I/O system.

Maybe it's "bloat" in the abstract if programs are simply "larger" than they used to be, but really, who cares about bloat if hardware is actually outpacing software development... in everything but the I/O hardware.

I'm just a bit tired of people babbling on about software bloat when this pretty conclusively proves its the I/O subsystem that is the problem.
I know how this argument would go if only parents could decide!

Remember that the point is for "universal sufferage". While some youngsters may be responsible enough to vote, I wouldn't trust democracy to most of them.
Apparently someone likes to downvote posts they disagree with without replying, so allow me to elaborate:

The prefrontal cortex is the section of the brain responsible for executive function, impulse control, and long-term decision making. Essentially, a fully-developed prefrontal cortex is what makes an adult an adult. The prefrontal cortex doesn't fully come online until your early to mid-twenties (this is why all of these rights are generally around the same age, 18-21...unless one wants to suggest that we picked those ages out of a hat).

Most children do not have a fully-developed prefrontal cortex. Therefore it is in their and society's best interest to prohibit them from making long-term decisions, since they really don't have the equipment to make lucid choices about the distant future.

So if you're looking for a criterion for voter eligibility, it should be the presence of a developed prefrontal cortex, not age, and certainly not a goddamn civics test (at 17, I would have gotten a hardon at the idea of being legally able to drink if I only had to pass a written exam testing my knowledge of alcohol). Since AFAIK we don't have any real, cost-effective test for whether a person has a prefrontal cortex, chronological age is a passable approximation.

I'm all for classical liberalism, but let's not be naive and throw common sense out the window - anyone who thinks 12-14 year olds should have the right to vote doesn't remember what it was like to be 12-14 years old. Christ, every single person who I respect and consider intelligent and knew when they were 12-14 would have voted for any candidate who promised that we would see boobies during their term in office.
Well dude... this is my thread. I posted it. Is it still ironic?
The prices for many items are high. But all of this food is literally crafted or gathered or produced by hand. For instance, one lady wakes up on weekends at 4AM to harvest seaweed at a beach.

We think that the gifting will drive a big portion of sales--for the same reason that people by cut flowers to give to people. And food tastes much better, too!
I don't get what you are trying to say. Yes, it was a booming period, that is the point. The question is why it was a booming period.

I don't think rule by corrupt political machines is ideal, I'd prefer if it if cities were run as joint stock corporations. But despite its many shortcomings, Tammany Hall and its ilk were much better at ruling than most of our modern city governments. Compare how the recovery of Chicago after the great fire to that of New Orleans after the flood. Or compare it to the (non-existent) rebuilding of the World Trade Towers. They were building infrastructure at amazing rate, we are letting it decay. If I could trade the current Boston government for Tammany Hall, I'd do so in a second.
I was thinking of buying some of the Marvelous Marinara (http://couplaguysfoods.foodoro.com/products/marvelous-marina...), but I'm reluctant to buy food if I can't read the ingredient list, and I didn't see one. I'd excited to see how this develops though, since I'm often trying to buy food online.
Err.. the apps page shows no message for me atleast !?!
We believe there is huge value solving this shipping issue, especially for perishable foods. I've heard from an insider that Amazon Prime hasn't made money yet... and they have massive economies of scale.

We're definitely thinking about how to take steps to making shipping more palatable for consumers.
Maybe you don't. So then you refactor when you find out.
Dodgeball founder pegs Google in the face with Foursquare
Would you trust any of the answers returned by such a system? Or would you double check them on Google?
Flamethrowers and fire extinguishers - Jacobs on Reddit and Karma
I'm an atheist, no matter what Beliefnet says
Aim high.
This doesn't answer the previous question so much as begs a new question. The current system protects children from politics, but why?

You mention targeted political pressure, but only in a vague sense; it almost seems like foreboding of something unknown, and therefore scary and threatening. It may not be for you, but for people who develop this sense of foreboding about everything unknown, this sort of argument can carry a lot of weight.

Anyway, this pressure already exists. It is how people already have formed political identities when they reach voting age, and are willing to defend them, even irrationally, against people of differing political philosophies. If they don't get it from the parents, or the teachers, or the media, they'll get it from their peers, who will have gotten it from the prior three sources. Protecting them in this sense seems like an almost insurmountable problem.

Or maybe I misunderstood what you mean by political pressure?
The classic counterexample is not using 'i' in for loops, vis -

for(int nInnerLoopCounter; nInnerLoopCounter<nMaxInterations; nInnerLoopCounter++) ...

Seriously, had this in a formal coding standard, you never want to work in those places - so make sure you go straight from university to a {lisp|ruby|python|linux|YC}startup.
Great point... if you email me jay@ then I'll get that info for you directly from the "coupla guys" who make the stuff. We'll post it to the product pg, too
Senate passes $410 billion spending bill
I stopped reading at the Bush comment, not out of offense, but out of disappointment that I was spending my time reading something that lost its dignity (isn't this a perfect example of what he alluded to never doing early in the essay?)
Finding out if person X has property Y without knowing anything about X directly.
Let's say you are thinking about hiring X for your startup but have doubts about his/her programming ability.

You could then use this service to get back advice on X's programming ability.

The idea here is to assume that most people using this service to ask about X's programming ability have doubts about X in that regard.

And so, if many people did ask, then X would receive a poor rating. If not many people asked, the service would not be able to offer any advice.

Essentially, this service would check whether many other people have the same initial impression about this person that you do.
Can you explain where the straw man is here?

It seems self evident that "posting more of what I'd like to see on HN" is more CONstructive than kvetching in the vein of "I hope we don't get more articles like this down the road, it's not what I come here to see."

Still, kvetch on and let the community decide.
I think your argument could go even deeper than that. If you are compelled to do anything by the State, I think you should argue quite effectively that the State should be compelled to take you and your concerns into account. Anything else creeps toward autocracy, at least against a particular group.

This provides you are of sufficiently sophisticated mental function to know what concerns you and why. When such sophistication develops is an incredibly hard question; thus far, we have punted, and have decided to use physical ages. This may be the least oppressive way to handle this dilemma, but the cynic in me wonders if we do this only because it is only optimal in a very short-term and fuzzy cost/benefit analysis.
I've found that enlightenment comes right after clicking "Send".
I don't use it. On the few occasions I have it has made me turned me into a completely unproductive zombie.

Still think it should be legalized but not because I like it or want to use it... it just makes economic and legal sense.
Guess what, if you typed faster you'd spend even less time typing... or, you'd spend just as much time typing but would produce more. Or a bit of both.
Done. Thanks very much :-).
What do you look for in a startup CEO?
Let's say there's a startup that has a fantastic product that's not yet public but is well on its way. Today the CEO got hit by a bus on his way to work. You're an investor and member of the board and whatnot and have a say in hiring a replacement CEO. What are you looking for?
I assume you mean "sue" for "sure". They can try, but what we're doing is legal, so they won't succeed any more than they would by suing MAE East for routing packets to some bad site.
Exactly. Interned strings / symbols work out the same, too.
... But yet the headline made it sound like all of Gmail was down when at best it's a small percentage. When the headline says "Gmail down" and I look over and see that Gmail is in fact not down, it's an incorrect headline.
http://www.youshouldhireme.com/
Tor2web: secure anonymous Web publishing
Your assertion hinges on the assumption that the government exists autonomously, apart from the people it represents. If my landlord claimed to represent me and my interests with the money I gave him, I would expect to have a say in how he spent it. This is the charter of any non-totalitarian government, and specifically that of all of the modern democracies.
Anyone else feeling like this could turn out to be another Cuil? I'm afraid it won't live up to the initial hype and then everyone will lose trust/interest in it.

I do hope it's everything it claims to be though.
> My point is that such keys can now be generated independently of the sale.

I'm pretty sure his suggestion is to have the keys generated randomly, so that they cannot be generated independently of the sale. If we are to believe him, this is standard operating procedure for businesses that are not apple.
Interesting piece. It's been pretty clear to me that age doesn't maturity - having unique experiences in life causes maturity. The older you tend to get, the more unique experiences you tend to have. If you ever are fortunate enough to meet anyone who had to become a head of household at a young age, compare them against someone a few years older then them and see the results. When a boy or girl takes responsibility for younger siblings or a parent that can't function well as early as 14-16, they're a hell of a lot more mature at 18 than most people are at 25 when they're starting to get promoted out of entry level jobs. No doubt entrepreneurship, becoming a parent, traveling and/or immigrating, working, leading, managing, and so on add to maturity.

Regardless though, lowering the voting age won't make that much of a difference. The percent of young people that vote is already abysmal. Related note: Why don't we have a polling period that lasts at least a few days? Like Friday/Saturday/Sunday/Monday?
I mean, right now, nobody is intently inquiring about who a 12 year old is voting for. Commercials on TV don't target them for voting. They aren't asked to take positions on extremely complex issues like EFCA or stem cell research. They are spared a lot (not all, but a lot) of the most polarizing political controversies we're exposed to.

I'm not really trying to defend this argument, but if I was going to be a devil's advocate, I'd say that increased exposure to American politics might not be good for juvenile mental health.
What about the cost of not learning it? Like potential neck pain, slower thinking, over-reliance on code completion (it takes your brain some processing time to decide what will be long enough to produce the right completion but not too long to waste keystrokes), less ability to communicate effectively.

And the cost of learning it is laughable. You just have to practice a bit for 3 days to learn to get the right fingers on the right keys from memory. The key to learning quickly is that you try to reproduce some text on the screen while NOT LOOKING at the keyboard, and you go as slowly as you need to avoid looking up (well, down), it doesn't matter if it takes 15 seconds for one keystroke at first. The important thing is to try a recall from memory at all costs before you finally know you've really completely forgotten and then look it up. And you do like this for each letter. You'll reduce your latency and learn the whole layout quite fast. After that it's just a matter of practicing for a few weeks and you'll be up at a reasonable 30wpm in no time.
Wouldn't publicly available information (e.g. the kind you would have found in a phone book 20 years ago) be allowable under the laws of Fair Use?

The only reason I can see a directory being disadvantageous is because it undermines all the money-spent-on-education/ years-spent-ass-kissing to get into "the network" of good-old Washingtonites and the referrals they bring.
Actually I think thinking like: "Do I really need to type all this? There must be another way... I really need a break." is more prevalent.
MIT professor wins Turing Award
Ok, would you trust democracy to those who could pass a civics test?
Apple sells dozens of items with F-Bombs in their titles. Why single out Tweetie?
I'll be quite honest: I'm sure that Wolfram has made something truly, honestly amazing and perhaps even beautiful...to a geek. Much like one artist can appreciate the time and dedication required by another artist in creating a complex work, to the lay person it's still just random splotches of color.

In fact, reading this review I'm reminded of the article about Git and merge algorithms that was on the front page recently. In all likelihood, Alpha will be amazing at what it does, without anyone worrying whether what it does is what people want. Maybe people like Google because it's fast and reasonably accurate, and the human brain is still a really amazing filter once you narrow down the data set sufficiently.
Then just flag it. The reason we explicitly ask people in the guidelines to flag stuff they think offtopic instead of posting comments about it is that they comments generate long, useless discussions, like this one.
I'd like to go with your crowdsourced advertising idea, but I'd like to crowdsource the implementation to see who can build the best prototype.

I'll fund the winner.