skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know how old OP is, but I'm 20 and first computing experience was graphical - with Windows NT 4.0. My elementary school had Macintosh OS 7/8 (don't remember exactly). However all I can remember doing on these computers were playing games - AOL Kids, Math Blaster, JumpStart and Zoombinis.

I didn't start programming until I was 13 (out of my own curiosity) and I wasn't offered any sort of programming classes by my junior year in high school.

My point is I think for most of us who grew up in the era of graphical interfaces, computers have always been glorified xboxes. When GUIs were introduced and we had options like Math Blaster I don't think many of us actually considered that we could write our own games. In elementary school I think the bar may be a little too high (not to say it can't be done). That said, it didn't matter to us that the machines were directly programmable. We didn't have the resources to create our own MathBlaster and I don't think any of us would have patience to wrestle with gcc.

I think Codify is a much better tool for teaching programming than a plain text file would be. Its a lot easier to make a "cool app" from a app that hides all hard parts of making a game (like a graphics library) than to try and convince a kid he should mess around in the console.
Per my comment above, Busy Beaver will pass that pretty quickly too, as again, a Busy Beaver contestant will rather early on simulate that entire problem (and BB has ready access to numbers like a mere googol). As large as that number is, I'd guess it's probably under BB(30), and certainly under BB(100) as I'd bet even a mere human could write a 100-state TM to simply simulate that answer.
Interesting read, Brian!
17 useful functions for manipulating arrays in PHP
Question is "Can anyone access mega.co.nz?" I'm tired, sorry.
Which benchmarks are you looking at? And are they actually JSC vs SpiderMonkey or JSC+WebKit vs SpiderMonkey+Gecko? I.e. are they JS benchmarks or DOM benchmarks?
Well, i just formatted my 32GB flash drive UDF, and no hiccups on mac or linux. The WDTV Live seems not to support it. Havent tested on Windows yet
Poor kid. I bet he even believes he can make a difference. He's gonna get eaten up and spit out by the behemoth. In a few years he'll be as bitter and jaded as the rest of us.

http://www.bonkersworld.net/images/2011.06.27_organizational... When this image came out I saw it posted by over a dozen MS friends (in xbox no less) laughing/crying over how true it was.
That really is the big problem. FAT32 won by being there at the right time.
Don't forget the prize of having something flown on a space shuttle mission! No one but NASA can offer that.
We've already reached the maximum volume size. Next!
InstallMonetizer have display:none'd the Microsoft advisor from their About page. What have they got to hide eh?

PG: we never got an update after you said you were "investigating". Can you elaborate at all?
Organizational chart metaphor is priceless.
As someone who knows little about Protocol Buffers, my first question was how does this compare to Protocol Buffers...which they say blogging about is "on their todo list".

The protocol comes from Pantor Engineering, which apparently provides an "advanced trading system" out of Stockholm. Neat.
Unrequited love
Ask HN: What websites does your keyboard map to
in chrome when I hit one key + tab + enter

t > twitter.com
y > youtube.com
p > pivotaltracker.com
a > analytics.google.com
s > stasishq.com (my company)
d > designcodelearn.com (my blog)
f > facebook.com
g > github.com
h > heroku.com
l > linkedin.com
x > xkcd.com
c > calendar.google.com
n > news.ycombinator.com
m > mail.google.com
completely not intelligent comment, but i read the url as Mega CONS. as in mega con-artist. never before had a NZ domain triggered that reaction in my mind.
Make the X button actually close these popups
How many times one has seen "CLOSE X" - Please, please, please - eithe make these popups closeable with "X", or use some other symbol.

Enough with this rant - but just opened a page from the examiner.com - and there were three different pop-up style commercials with CLOSE X on them, and for some reason I really thought of pressing X - I mean if it looks like "X" it begs for pressing it.

Ok, enough rant for today :)
This lecture http://www.booktv.org/Watch/11315/The+Cleanest+Race+How+Nort... (by the author of The Cleanest Race) suggests otherwise. His evidence may be flawed though. He bases his argument on the number of North Koreans who return. They might be spies, have families held hostage, are unable to adjust, face discrimination from South Koreans, or simply have thought that life would be as glamorous as a South Korean soap opera. Perhaps a few North Korean operatives are posing as defectors, tracking down real defectors, and making threats - I doubt the average defector would want to go the the authorities. Plus, I bet many defectors had an above-average life in North Korea, as they had the resources to escape. If they were promised a promotion at home, they might think it's better than cleaning toilets in South Korea (facing possible violence from North Korean operatives). I'm just guessing, but so is everyone else.

As for what the average North Korean actually thinks, it's hardly relevant. They act like they believe the fascist propaganda.
Go straight to the tutorial http://blinkprotocol.org/s/tutorial.html, easier to understand what it is all about.
Oh, so this is that marketing guy? I wasn't too impressed the first time around. I didn't think his changes would make that much of a difference or actually turn Windows 8 into a big success. When I first read this headline, I thought they hired that guy who remade how their desktop should actually look with the "Metro" design thinking, which was far better than what Microsoft has now. What they have now is basically the Windows 7 Basic theme. They didn't really metrofy anything in it. That's just one of the reasons why Windows 8 looks so incomplete and so disconnected from with its other parts.
I actually got fussed at for my answer to a variant of this question this past semester. I have a professor who talked about when he was in college and his instructor had the challenge: what is the biggest number you can make with three nines?

His answer was 9^(9^9). Of course, I thought this question warranted further discussion and I mentioned that Knuth's up arrow notation allows an even bigger number and demonstrated it on the board. The professor seemed annoyed and I asked him about it later; I believe he mistook my interest in contributing to the discussion as trying to one-up him (which was NOT my intention at all).

I've been much quieter in that class since :(
You incorrectly assume malice on the part of the blog author. Frustration makes it easy to see the world as people who are for your position and others who are against your position. In this situation it seems far more likely that the author is unaware that his site works badly with your setup.

The quote is about making your cause succeed. Here you could have won by sending an email. Instead you shouted at people on HN. Nobody learned anything about making the internet better for you. Maybe your goal is just to let people know that this makes you angry, you succeeded. Well done. But you didn't follow through with why they should care, so no change is effected.

Its good to be hated by those who hate your just cause. Maybe its less good to be hated by those who are simply ignorant of it?

I'd say you missed the point of the quote entirely.
Classifying Types of Tech Blogging
And people call me crazy.
At the very least there should be !s after those 9s.
Seems like a strange choice to have a maximum file size several orders of magnitude larger than your maximum volume size.
Writing computer programs is hard. Doing it for long hours, day in day out, is unnatural. Nevertheless, 'Software Engineer' is nearly always at near the top of those "best" careers listings. I'm not saying it shouldn't be, but don't expect non-programmer family and friends to understand.

It's important to recognize the signs of burnout and acknowledge it before you get to the point where you never want to touch a computer again.
MIT itself hosts this site:

http://hacks.mit.edu/

Unfortunately it only goes back to 1989, so it's missing some good ones, like the DKE Harvard-Yale game hack.
true. however, libstdc++ implements __pool_alloc for a reason.
Feels kinda like a cross between ProtoBuf and MessagePack. We already have so many serialization formats, though. What is the compelling use-case for this one?
Read the last line of his post please. He said he was angry, no me.

>If it's wrapped up in a library and it's distributed by a package manager then it doesn't count towards the total SLOC of your project.

Think about what you are saying. With that logic I can write a library in C++ that evaluates all images in the current working directory for least edge length and returns the name or index of the winning file. My Python program, then, might look something like this:

import magic
print magic.evaluate()

And then I claim that I have written a program that solves a swirly CAPCHA in two lines of Python.

C'mon.

I you want to count true Python lines, download the language from python.org and write a solver without the use of any add-on libraries. Then we can talk about Python lines.
Another binary message format? Another language for describing the format instead of XML or JSON?

"Why?" is the big question which sits there unanswered.
Why would I use this instead of ASN.1?
It might provide a better experience for some people, but what about people who don't want links to open in new tabs?

Opening links in new tabs is trivial (e.g., middle-click). Does every web browser support an equally simple way to force a link to open in the current tab?

(On a related note, a problem I've been having lately is that many JavaScript-heavy sites have links that fail to open when middle-clicked. I wonder whether the people who were previously making unusable Flash sites have moved to JavaScript.)
I'm really surprised anyone would take the risk to release data like this, even with their security protocols in place. It just doesn't seem worth it:

- The potential upside is a few citations in research papers.

- The potential downside is a widescale invasion of privacy of IU students and staff, and a huge PR disaster.
This man speaks truth about the MCA gallery nights. The Friday night events at the Art Institute and the Jazz nights in the summer at the Aquarium are also great date destinations.
Galaxy Note 8.0 Android sub-tablet arriving next month
Show me working code and then we can talk. :)

Oh, BTW, "V = r x g x b/3" is incorrect. This is not you convert a color image to a grayscale image.
Glanced through the spec and the comparison to protocol buffers on their blog. [0] A couple of quick notes:

- The messages are prefixed with the message length; this allows has a variety of advantages (ie. splitting up messages with minimal parsing) but forces you to know your message size in advance. In the general case, this requires processing the full structure before the first byte can be written. (On the other hand, protocol buffers can be written incrementally, with a single pass over the data and using constant memory.)

- Since the blink format contains no metadata, the recipient must have the schema with which the message was written. If schema migrations must be supported, this requires prefixing each batch of messages with the (encoded) schema. This may only be efficient when the batch size is large. (See Apache Avro [1] for another format that makes this tradeoff; since Avro is intended for processing in Hadoop, where the typical dataset has some millions of records, prefixing with the schema is not significant overhead.)

[0] http://blog.blinkprotocol.org/2013/01/blink-compared-to-goog...
[1] http://avro.apache.org/docs/current/spec.html
they actually did take a great deal of precautions in the later American phase, like draining swamps and chemical agents to control mosquito populations. Mosquito born illness was a major factor that sunk the earlier french attempt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_measures_during_the_con...
I disagree completely. That looks like an old and dated website and still has loads of unflat.
It's funny how many people just LOVE Sinofsky, but this is exactly the kind of crap he championed.

You can't create the future if you're afraid of it.
I don't understand if this post was supposed to be negative or positive. IMO it's positive -- if they got a lot of press/hn/etc. attention over some of their advertisers being less than ideal, and a privacy policy that was overly broad, and they're now fixing it, that's great news.

From looking at this, it looks like maybe some of their advertisers did cross the line, but I don't think desktop app install monetization is inherently evil. It's slightly annoying that Oracle/Sun bundles the Ask Jeeves toolbar with Java, for instance, but it's not any more annoying than having to pay $6 to cross the bridge.
Is Kim Dotcom's MEGA Just For Pirates, Or Do We All Need A Privacy Company?
More or less true, but remember that even submitting the winning submission does not carry the same weight of responsibility or liability that it would normally carry at an engineering firm. Your submission doesn't even have to come close to providing an optimal, or even safe solution, and that won't hurt you (beyond not winning) one bit. Validation and testing will no doubt be done by actual fully paid NASA (or whatever space agency) employees, at their usual rates.
Mistakes by Blogger
> Since the blink format contains no metadata, the recipient must have the schema with which the message was written. If schema migrations must be supported, this requires prefixing each batch of messages with the (encoded) schema. This may only be efficient when the batch size is large.

This is essentially a non-starter for me after a couple years of building distributed systems using protocol buffers, for which protocol evolution is the first feature.
still leaning towards a bat to the kneecaps..
Texatar - Texual Avatar
By the "standard" of mutual intelligibility you could cook up a much more compelling case for AAVE as a separate language from English than American English from British English. I get that you're playing devil's advocate, but seriously.
I asked something similar recently on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5039241

That got zero offers.
During my grandfather's funeral, I was literally holding up an iPad (connected to Skype) throughout the proceedings, because some of my cousins couldn't make it to the funeral. It wasn't 'dignified' by a long shot, but it's the thought that counts, right?

This is actually a pretty good idea.
I think this is a classic example of where there's a meaningful difference between possible and really easy. To use a topical analogy. People in the UK can do a mass-killing, with knives or clubs. People in the US can do it a whole lot easier because they have access to high powered firearms.
Avro as a data serialization format makes sense. As an RPC protocol, I think that dream died a long time ago.

If you don't transmit the schema of the message, you're in the same spot as Thrift or Protocol Buffers. Which, then, leaves you with that eternal question: pourquoi, ets-ce que?
A server that generates images with text to replace default gravatar image.

The problem we face is not everyone has a gravatar image linkes to their email address. When we show images in place of names, they all look the same and there is no way to differentiate between people. Texatar will generate an image based on text for the user. The color scheme is equally important and is based on a hash of the user's email.
I have never once seen app install monetization not be evil. It is one thing if an installer advertised a piece of software like how you see get firefox buttons. It is another thing to try and wedge some app install agreements between a bunch of other TOS agreements to try and trick people into installing invasive software that slows down your applications and is often very difficult to remove.

I don't really understand why YC would get behind such a business. Money isn't everything. I guess they want to disrupt malware with some new even more horrible malwares.
Yes.

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/
It's bit silly (obviously) to talk about this in terms of sorting algorithms, because the scan operation is so lightweight. I sort my socks by pulling one out of the pile and visually scanning all the single socks i have laid out separately on the floor. If there's a match, i pair them and put the pair in the drawer. If there is no match, I lay the sock on the floor by itself. In computational terms, this is incredibly inefficient, but in practical terms the visual scan where i iterate over all the single socks laid out on the floor is quicker than the pick-a-sock-from-the-pile operation, so typical algorithm analysis is really quite useless.
I have a hard time seeing this type of monetization as at all a good thing. Things like Facebook and Google ads can be framed as a good thing for the user and for some users often are useful. I just don't see how this type of monetization is ever in the users interest unless it is bundling mutually useful software to the app being downloaded (which isn't usually the case).

This isn't to say that these installers shouldn't be allowed to exist. Just that in general I hold YC to a higher standard. If they want to go that way, that is fine, just begins to change my opinion on the program.
Why? Perhaps I misunderstand something, but why can't I define a turing machine and the upper bound, and then BB with first order set theory. It is therefore my misunderstanding, that this gives me a lower bound of

BB( googol -n),

whith n the number of symbols I need to define BB.
I think you're fine if you're wearing black shoes, no?

I'd agree khaki pants with brown shoes would be weird with black socks
I wish we all acted like my son
Resources for Learning more on Hadoop
As far as I can tell they're still installing crapware / spyware on people's machines for a living. Fixing some typos is not a positive in my book.
Sounds like a perfect application for BitTorrent.
The Zune software is from 7 years ago, and you can see every element of its design in that blog post (sans-serif typography as UI hierarchy, no title bars, flat minimize/maximize/close buttons, back arrows, neon color bars). It stuck out like a sore thumb against Windows XP and the recently released Windows Vista, yet fits right in with Windows 8 where the exact same elements are used throughout Metro.
It's just a side effect. The maximum volume size is defined by the size of the (in practice, always fixed-size) word used to store a block address.

But generally files are stored as a tree or some other recursive data structure. If these have a limit at all it's either deliberately imposed (e.g. the triple-indirect block in a v7 Unix inode) or arbitrary (maximum depth of a maximally unablanced btree that fills the volume).

Basically, you have to limit your device size if you want sane block ID semantics. Files can be infinite if you want.
Traditional fashion wisdom is that socks should match pants. If you match your pants to your shoes, it makes it look like you're wearing high-tops. It draws attention away from your shoes when you want to be drawing attention toward your shoes.

If you don't care about fashion, it doesn't matter, though
Bruce Sterling Says The Singularity Has No Business Model
What about Hover? I've been hearing good things about it.

[1] http://hover.com
I've seen it "upstream" of the actual installation and be ok.

e.g. when you try to download/install Confluence, they cross-promote some other Atlassian products. It's not done too hard (and I can't find an example of it now). I've seen other "first party" examples of upsell where you are going for one product and add another product from the same vendor.

I've also seen lots of horrible malware, trash, etc. That's almost always what you see with PPI.

I think PPI is like banner ads were pre-Google. What we need is the "AdSense of PPI" to deliver really contextually relevant/well targeted PPI to users. The problem is I suspect this is really hard -- offering a $1-2 payout to put a crappy toolbar is nearly the optimum for any mass market piece of software. But, if you had more targeted software (say, an awesome reverse engineering tool), there would probably be related tools you could promote at the same time which would be win/win.

The irony is you're more likely to see this as a third-party service, since individual volumes on tools with niche userbases are really low, unless a publisher has a bunch of complementary products in-house. There's nothing specific enough for a Java JRE downloader to win out over a shitty toolbar. There isn't enough volume for a decompiler to pay someone in-house to go out and negotiate a deal with a fuzzer or something, so you either do nothing, or run shitty toolbars, or hope for a company who could provide really targeted PPI for smaller niche publishers.

I'm not saying InstallMonetizer is that now or ever, but if someone did that, I'd be really happy with them. It may or may not be a good business model, though.
Presbyterian. Well no, but see http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.x... for some rationale in that direction. Generally speaking you might note that in Java and C#, if you want to copy a data structure, you have to do so explicitly.
This, but dark brown instead, as more universal color. Buy in bulk 20 pairs (I use http://www.blacksocks.com/ since they seem to keep same model in stock, other producers seem to rename their socks - never can find the same socks later). Once they show signs of too much wear, order new batch and throw all old ones away.

Of course I also own few other colors for special occasions and sport socks, they go to separate drawer.
What is the Antikythera Mechanism?
Livestream of Aaron Swartz Public Memorial Service at Cooper Union
Like switching to wearing sandals?
Sure, but are the other players completely disinterested?

Some of them might have pure motives: take Mozilla, for instance, which seems to see WebRTC as a trojan horse to force the market to adopt non-MPEG codecs. They have the users' best interests in mind, but it's not obvious that their focus on that aspect necessarily yields the best web RTC standard.
This submission is absolutely first-rate. Must-see for serious javascript developers. Note http://media.tojicode.com/sfjs-vectors/#35 in particular and remember that TypedArrays are not a silver bullet. It's a shame I'm (apparently) the only one who saw it.
>> And in the meantime there has been very little commentary over the major (not only, but major) cause of this (untreated depression), presumably because that doesn't play into the agenda. Likewise there is little discussion on ways to amend CFAA to make it better-aligned with what we intuitively feel would be appropriate (because in the hacktivist mold the only good change would be to repeal CFAA entirely). Feel free to say I'm seeing it wrong, but I don't think I am.

Actually it has been discussed. As per his father:

"""
Bob Swartz also dismissed the notion that his son had a depressive personality.

"He had never been diagnosed as having depression; he was never on medication for having depression," Swartz said.

Aaron Swartz's mother had been hospitalized in December 2011 after having a bowel obstruction and going into septic shock, Bob Swartz said. She spent several weeks in a coma, four months in intensive care, and two more months in the hospital.

"So the notion, the narrative that people are going to say -- is that he’s somebody who just has depression -- is just wrong. You’d be depressed too if you were under a 13-count federal indictment and you go see your mother, who’s in a coma."
Dealspl.us Logo Redesign
Thanks for the warning; I chose only to read the last few paragraphs, but even that provided enough to extrapolate. While we twiddle about in Silicon Valley building SoLoMo apps, this depraved grinding of humanity continues.