skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wrote my CS thesis in college in LaTeX. I used TeXShop in OSX and it was great. Tried various word processors first (MS Word, Open Office, ThinkFree Office, Neo Office) and with all of them I spent 90% of the time just trying to format block quote code segments, leaving me with little time for actual content. Formatting the code snippets in LaTeX was a breeze. The only think that got a little annoying was tables that spanned over multiple pages, but that's a reasonable price.
I know databases aren't fashionable around here, but this is exactly what they are for. Seriously.
This would be much more interesting if we had a field reader--like a satellite, but updated more often. It would then be a really low-bandwidth channel to communicate via google earth. However, I'm not sure what you'd use it for.
Playing Your Hand With Your Cards Turned Up
Justin.tv: No sex, please, we're skittish
I just noticed that they have a new homepage skin. It's still not as slick as Facebook, but it makes the bulletin board the most prominent item on the page, along with the twittery status update section. The interface is still simpler than Facebook, though in a WYSIAYG sort of way.
You're focusing on the wrong word. The critical word in that definition is "baiting," not "intention."

There is a difference between saying controversial things and baiting people.
What if they changed the old value to the same value as the new value? Then your client side app would do nothing. Right?
That's an interesting point, and certainly true in some areas, but having thought about it, I don't think it's fair.

The point of theexercise is to reduce to the smallest bit of program.. Your version should count the size of the interpeter as well, since it's necessary for execution.

Under that model, I could use a program of

1

I'll run this program with my new SwankyCool intrepreter [tm] which returns 42 if it sees a program comprising only "1"; Otherwise it calls perl to exec the rest of the file.

Now, in both cases, we're accepting that the entire OS is already there, but that was stated in his example. (ELF on Linux)
yea, that's in the nuclear case. in the relevant case of human CO2 emissions, nothing is likely to happen. earth is an immensely stable self-repairing system
That's like saying you should plant a tree where few others are growing.
The spread of pop culture is one of the reasons that many anti-American zealots latch onto as justification. So yes, Schwarzenegger, Michael Jackson, McDonald's and Starbucks, they all have a great deal to do with the perceived American cultural hegemony. As Jet Li, Jackie Chan and, foolish as it may seem, Chinese restaurants, all have a great deal to do with Chinese cultural hegemony.

The question that confuses me is this. Why worry ONLY about American cultural hegemony, when CLEARLY the Chinese cultural hegemony is also an issue? Why worry ONLY about American cultural hegemony, when Japanese cultural hegemony is also an issue?

I maintain that there is something subtle here that we are somehow missing. There HAS to be. Why do the French blow up McDonald's and not the restaurants in the Chinese section of Paris over by Le Marais? There are as many instructors of Chinese martial arts in Munich as there are hip hop clubs. Why single us out? There are MORE girls playing with Tomagotchis than there are listening to Hannah Montana. Why does she need so much more security?

Everything you wrote in your post as touching China is (somewhat) factual. Yet most non-Americans consider the United States and Iran to be the prime threats to global peace. Why?

In short, what I am saying is that none of this makes sense to me. That this situation is very disconcerting.

If there are non-Americans reading this thread, I would REALLY like your opinion on these matters.
The New Advertising Outlet: Your Life
Here's your answer:

http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/I_Think_I_0x27_ll_Call_...
How would you know whether someone is baiting people? Again, this has to do with inferring intent -- reading his/her mind.

And so what if it is baiting anyway?

If a post gets voted up, then presumably the debate is of potential interest irrespective of whether it is baiting.
>> A country that severely limits on what you can and can not see in media, a country that forcibly removes its own citizens [...], a country that has consistent human rights violations, a country with a ruling oligarchy that has time and again shown it's willing to barter political power with the incentives of capitalistic greed.

Wait, I'm confused... are we talking about China or America?

:~)
Just as an example. This reply by ph0rque is just the type of response we invite when we point out the shortcomings of others to prove a point.
First, let's get this clear: as far as I know, we only have two cases of McDonald's restaurants attacks in France. One non-violent, symbolic dismantlement by leftist leader Jose Bove and one bomb attack by right-wing independendists in Brittany (it killed one person).

As far as I'm concerned, I mostly listen to US music, read US authors and watch US movies so basically I can't speak against your culture (well, OUR culture that is). It's so much rich and broad than what we have here. And most french people (secretly) agree; but they're way too proud to admit it.

What europeans and basically the rest of the world really hate is your leaders. Not that ours are better, but at least they don't use massive fire power against other countries (I'm talking about western europe here; Russian leaders are certainly as crazy as the hawks in Washington).

Oh, by the way: french people don't really like China in fact; they blame it for "stealing" our jobs.
AdBrick released.  Block ads in IE7
This is an awesome old classic which is required reading for anybody who wants to understand how ELF object files are loaded and executed.

This is pretty far beyond 'optimization'. The executable is 7 bytes smaller than the minimum legal size for the object file header!
Caterpillar: Web 2.0 Giant
Again, nobody's claiming that the planet is going to have trouble with global warming. We humans have invested a lot into current climate patterns though, and the transition will be unpleasant.
I think it has to do with the dominance of american culture that is changing every aspect of their lives.

You mentioned Jet Li, Jackie Chan. They are more known internationally for their American movies than anything they made in HK.

Also Chinese food is American. The food you would have at an American Chinese restaurant has little in common with what you would experience in China. The same American Chinese food was exported to France. So its more American than anything else.

The martial arts instructors you mention exist largely because of Hollywood.

The reason people dislike America is because its the wealthiest, most powerful nation on earth that can do whatever it wants regardless of what other nations think, and it does.
My problem with the article is that it's not really theoretically useful, it's just a case for one particular program.

Writing large programs in C, I rarely see the need to optimise program size - I'm more interested in execution time. Even so, with thousands of lines of code, the executable is typically < 200kb, which would run on an Amiga, never mind a PC.

I think this article is slightly outdated as we don't run 64kb 8-bit machines anymore.

My last comment is that you could use an executable 'packer' which uncompresses at runtime, and that's far easier than his methods.
Correct. I am not concerned about someone deliberately hacking the system in such a way as to do nothing.
How does a database solve this? They provide a way to apply a lock, but it comes down to the programmer to choose the type of locking to use.
Freedom to Tinker: Infinite Storage for Music
"Existing pornography laws mostly govern child pornography, and it is increasingly difficult to fail the ever-loosening standards established by the Miller test."

Surely this has nothing to do with the Miller test, but rather the recent revisions to USC 2257.
Just to dig a little deeper I wanted to ask a few questions.

I assume you are Franco-American. Is this true?

Secondly, I am certain that you are aware that your own leaders are rattling the sabers for war with Iran right now as well. Why is it that the French would elect Sarko, and continue to bash Bush? (I am no friend of Bush by the way, it's just something I have been wondering).

Next, you say that you love our culture, and from what I see in Paris I would have to agree. You also seem a little sino-phillic as well, with martial arts, Chinese medicine, and the Chinese film industry doing as well as it is in France. Would it be fair to say then that CULTURAL hegemony, either American or Chinese, is not what is so galling to the rest of the world. Rather the, military hegemony in the case of the US, and the financial hegemony, in the case of Japan and China? Do you believe it is the military and financial hegemonies that spook others?

Lastly, the wording of my post was probably poor. When I said that the French blow up McDonald's restaurants, I was referring to the incident in Brittany. I only mentioned Paris because I wanted to point out a well known place, in a well known city where another cultural hegemony had a foothold.
it sounds as if you've never encountered a troll. they don't enhance or inspire substantive debate, in fact they hinder one by arguing baseless positions for the sake of raising blood pressure.
45 bytes? Lets see...

wget -O - http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.htm... | wc

result: 41150 bytes
Off the subject but on this site: A list of Martin Gardner Puzzle Books: Martin Gardner's Collections of "Mathematical Games" Columns http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/books/gardner.html
That's what voting is for.
Everyone else's opinion in this matter is wrong. Mine is the only one that is correct. End of discussion.
This reminds me of the proposed "coke spaces" that got some media attention back in 2001. Amazingly the entire term has been mysteriously cleansed from Google, and the only thing I could find to prove I'm not crazy is one cached Slashdot discussion thread:

http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:N03ZKM2QIzMJ:slashdot.o...
That's what motivates some trolls - treating the discussion as a game in which they manage to trick people into voting them up. That's the difference between a "good" and a "bad" troll, isn't it? A bad troll will be exposed right away, a good troll manages to pass for legitimate arguments for a long time.

You can't really say voting is the solution if part of a troll's purpose is to subvert the voting process.
Well, there goes my startup idea. Good thing they're free ;).
I see you moved away from Java. Have you guys tried JBoss Seam (http://www.jboss.com/products/seam)? If not I strongly suggest you give it a try. If you love RoR I'm almost sure you'd appreciate JBoss Seam.
This article make me think about the kind of devices that will be used to store huge amounts of music.

Specifically the kind of search that this devices will allow, for me is a real trouble to deal with 200+ songs. It would be awesome to tell the device to play 8 random Jack Johnson songs, then 6 random songs from Rolling Stones Voodoo Lounge album and finally to play "U Can't Touch This", or to make it play those 15 songs in a random order.

But what happens when you don't remember the artist, album or song name?

When you can have unlimited music, it's time to think in the next ipod :P
...a good troll manages to pass for legitimate arguments for a long time.

You can't really say voting is the solution if part of a troll's purpose is to subvert the voting process.

Who cares what the person's motivations are?!

Why do you care so much about the pattern of electrical activity in his/her brain?

If his/her posts/comments are voted up a lot, then they are good ones in an objective sense.
It gets easier and easier to tell.

Spend some time on reddit, for example, and you'll gradually differentiate comments that are posted as rational arguments (and inviting discussion) and troll comments which are posted to bait users into a never ending flame war which does nothing but exasperate you.
These range from sensible to utterly useless [1,2,3].

I'd say forget all of this and focus on being a productive developer, building something people want, and ruthlessly avoiding premature optimization. When your application is slow, measure it to find out why, then fix it, and repeat.

1. Let's take #2, "echo is faster than print" - Seriously, is this what we should be worrying about? I can't detect a difference in PHP 5.2.4 across 100,000 echos/prints, so it must not be very big.

2. ++i vs i++ to squeeze out 1 fewer opcode?

3. Using isset($foo{5}) vs a strlen check? I pity the next programmer who has to read and understand the purpose of this code.
I can't quite pin down what it is, but I think this is the most reddit-like thread I've read here in a while. Perhaps it's words like 'hegemony', mentioning of Bush, war, and so on.
I think that is part of it, but Hollywood does not explain all of it. Chow Yun-Fat was big in Europe long before 'Anna and the King'. When we put him into video games, we put him in the roles that he played in his HK films, the roles that he played in his american films were far less memorable. Zhang Ziyi is an amazing actress and the world knows this because of 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon', though 'Rush Hour 2' was really good, as you said. And women the world over LOVE the film '2046'. I take that DVD with me where ever I go, in case I get a date. It is ALWAYS a winner. With a name like 'caligula' you should make sure this movie is in your collection too.

Having been obliged to eat at crappy Chinese restaurants from China Town in Havana, Cuba to Hong Kong, I have to say that it all tastes the same to me. That said, I am sure if I set my sites on the higher end restaurants I would probably find the difference in the 'experience' that you spoke about.

I think maybe you might be right about Hollywood pushing martial arts though. This still leaves open the question of the worldwide fixation with things like Chinese medicines for example.
VC Fundraising Falls 33 Percent
Thanks for posting this! It's the sort of informative topic that probably won't generate a lot of commentary (as opposed to the the controversial type that does). But don't interpret quiet as a lack of interest - this is one of the reasons I scan hacker news.

Actually, I'm looking for a more comprehensive way way to do authentication in Rails (that doesn't require as much manual intervention as I had to do last time), and this article definitely helped out.
Nope, I'm franco-french (and I never went to the US).

The french elected Sarkozy because he's a real expert at marketing communication / propaganda (heck, during the french elections american spin doctors came here to see how he worked) and because the alternative was not that great either (socialists). And the french bash Bush because, well, they bash everything ;)

Regarding the second point, I agree: it's more about military and financial issues than cultural ones. But we're not that attracted by China; most young people are mainly interested by Japan (manga and anime stuff).
I think a lot of people have been thinking about this problem for the last year or two at least, so you're not alone! I think the key is still having a good team (I haven't been able to hookup with cofounders) and adapting the idea to the market. The idea, really, is just a place to start.
Moore's Law seems like it has a limit. Could we fit 10 terrabytes of data into a device the size of a phone? 100 terrabytes? I wonder what the maximum is.
What's wrong with reddit-like, as long as it's not trolling, ad-hominem, three-word messages and stuff?
All the data won't be stored in the phone, it'll surely be streamed from somewhere. As we saw our documents moving to online Office, we'll see in few years all these big files moving away from our hard drive.

Who has the hard drive space keeping an up-to-date divx library today? I personnally prefer to download a movie when needed, p2p has become fast enough to be convenient :)
Another thing that could help are functional -> industrial language translators, such as Kawa. At least in this way the programmers can use FPLs in a normal job setting. If they can show increased productivity, this will move the market towards FP.

Style is probably still a problem in this case. Can style be automated? I.e. can FP code be translated into correctly formatted industrial code?
Moore's Law has a limit but it is not the limit. There's plenty of room at the bottom ( http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html )
a computer practitioners handbook of facts
hey, i'm trying to create a simple site to keep track of the interesting facts in one place. I would appreciate any feedback. Thanks.
A meticulously-crafted post made to look confidently ignorant, written by an intelligent person is no different from a confidently ignorant post written by a confidently ignorant person.

They both spur argumentative (i.e., non-substantive) posts.

One is a troll by any definition; the other most people would also call a troll, even if the author didn't intend for it to be.

Likewise, if someone intends to write a troll and instead writes a devil's advocate post which spurs substantive debate, then it's not really a troll, even if the author intended it to be.
More Thoughts on "Enterprise Software's Youth Drain"
Edison's 1000 Plus Patents.
Isn't this quite a big risk? Creating an entire application without knowing the platform requires quite some confidence that it is going to deliver and live up to the hype. I'm glad it worked out for them, but I know my company won't start a new project with Rails because we don't have much knowledge about it. Scaling, especially, seems to be a challenge sometimes (cf Twitter and the related controversy).
In practice, the word "troll" has come to replace "dissenter" and "devil's advocate" and other terms with good connotations. It does encourage groupthink--as soon as someone differs from the party line, bang, that person gets labeled as a troll, end of discussion. This is very common on political sites (viz, sites that have party lines).

A real troll starts out making small, reasonable claims, and then, after getting people to agree with him at first, makes larger and larger claims. The precedent is "A modest proposal".
Why Silicon Valley is Rethinking Cubicles
In this particular case, you could store a version in the record. When Mary submits her edit, your backend will note that Mary submitted an edit to revision "5" but the current revision is "6", and ask Mary to confirm her changes. You'd just use a database transaction to atomically increment the version number when a new revision is created. I think this is analogous to what Wikipedia does.
Does anyone have any ideas for what's happening in the Python example? Could you post the Python code?
This article is definitely not intended to teach you how to optimize your programs. That is, unless your usual programs are small enough to embed inside object file headers with the opcodes overlapping header field values.

It's a clever hack that teaches you about how ELF works by forcing you to think carefully about every single byte in a customized ELF executable.

I work frequently with object file formats (especially ELF) and write tools which manipulate executables and libraries and when I first read this article about 5 years ago I learned more about ELF than from any other source.

Highly recommended!
You're right, it was a risk - but a calculated one. We heard a lot of good things, and decided to try it out for two weeks. At the end of the two week period, we loved it. From the syntactic sugar to the ease of caching, to everything else.

You rarely have to reinvent the wheel with RoR, which is a wonderful experience.
Jester: JavaScript implementation of REST
You're right. And that has interesting implications for future mobile devices. Right now, phones connect to the internet using a connection provided by your phone company. EVDO or EDGE, for example.

But how hard would it be to create a peer-to-peer internet connection? One of your devices would be connected to WiFi, but also connected to every other device in the area. And those would be connected to more devices, and so on. It would form a big chain, possibly extending several miles.

When someone requests a song, that request is passed from one device to another until it gets back to the device that's connected to WiFi. Then the song data is streamed from the internet and passed back to the original requester.

This system seems like it would be extremely slow. But, does it really matter if it takes an hour to download 10 songs? You could have a list of songs that you'd eventually like to listen to, then check back every few hours to see which ones are ready.
2nd the motion. Thank you!
i'm saying there won't be any transition caused by us

i do like the benefits of seeking efficiency. the sorts of technology that will arise when efficiency is economically supported (for example, by artificial markets a la kyoto or california's propositions) ie by necessity, should be impressive. for that reason i like the global warming movement and hope it continues so long as it has as a corollary a drive for efficiency
I recently converted my personal site to Blueprint, and found it quite nice. I did have to hack it a bit, but at least it's hackable.

Blueprint is best for layouts with columns of fixed width. For a layout with a variable-width content area, you might want to take a look at http://alistapart.com/articles/holygrail.
Interesting, but "implementation of REST" isn't a very useful characterization of it. It's a client for Rails' REST-based protocol.

It's like calling an HTTP client an implementation of the request-response pattern. True, but it's much more useful to call it an HTTP client.
MobMov harvests field of screens
hiring 200 good engineers in San Francisco right now is gonna be no small task
The subscription hacking model in the wild: Screenshots from the Gozi control panel
In the rare times when Lisp and other functional languages are used in industry, it's usually to address a difficult or poorly-understood problem, since those languages tend to be associated with research. It's not surprising that it would be hard to get a programmer up to speed on such things.

My employer is looking for someone who would enjoy doing Schemey work in a Java environment, solving not-so-difficult problems. It wasn't hard to find someone last time around, and I don't think it will be hard this time around once we fix the job description, which is poorly-written and factually incorrect.
Intent is 9/10ths of the law, and also of troll identification. You can wax about how it is impossible to infer intent, but we all know that's BS.
Know what? You're right. I tried some new wording. -- the author
Kawa does not translate functional languages into Java; it compiles them directly to JVM bytecodes. There is never any "industrial language" to style.

Incidentally, the political issue with FP is not demonstrating productivity, it's demonstrating a low level of organizational risk, i.e. finding someone to take over when a functional programmer leaves.
Is Scribd a Porn Document Network?
While it's cute to make a witty retort such as that, it's such a cheap shot. When your grandparents are dragged out of their homes in the middle of the night, when your brothers and sisters are jailed for simply showing up at a big crowd, when your family's estate is taken without any questions or answers, when you don't have enough money to buy your way out of a citation and you get lost in the jail system, when all that happens at the whim of a Communist party, you can then come back and draw parallels.