skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Given the right circumstances, almost anyone can be made to want and try to commit suicide. Intense, prolonged isolation and other types of torture can cause that, but that does not mean anyone subject to such things has a depressive disorder requiring treatment. Sometimes the situation is the only problem.
As a type one diabetic, I wholeheartedly agree that bloodsugar management is more important than the next social thing. I think what raganwald is saying (IMO) is that the "problems" these "minds" are solving are not really problems at all. Agree or disagree, I think that's what is being said.
The Highs And Lows Of Smartphone Companion Devices
It feels weird when I see people mention the trackpads on thinkpads. I feel totally locked in to thinkpads because I can't see myself ever buying another laptop that didn't have a trackpoint.
The Toyota one is actually pretty obvious when you look at the O's - Helvetica O's are perfect circles, where Arial ones are flattened. As a Toyota fan, to me it makes a big difference. Arial is very unacceptable in this case.
It works, but to get C to expose the same memory model on different platforms you would have to compromise the performance and close-to-the-hardware nature that are the only reason to use C nowadays.
No thank you, Christian Scientists are "experimental" enough. We don't need the Tim Ferrises of the world selling snake oil to parents (as medicine).
Dude, the folks doing websites aren't greatest minds. They aren't even engineers. It's a bunch of ADHD kids rushing for cash.

All this social web bullshit is not really even programming, and programming is not even engineering.
A very small Window manager
Basic window manager written in C in 45 lines of
X-code.
Yeah, I think the invention of synthetic insulin was probably more significant, and difficult, than yet another search engine, or yet another email client or yet another ad platform, even if the latter were improvements.

Also, isn't google pretty much a normal corporation at this point in terms of employee expectations and salary?
> Why the fuck are programers strategizing how to pivot Facebook into being a dating site?

Umm... finding and getting a date with the right person can eventually lead to marriage, incredible happiness, new children in the world... seems like a pretty worthy goal to me.
He can feel confident because Facebook has a history of misleading users or oversharing data and this isn't a court room, rather the internet, and there is little consequence if he's wrong.

I'm not 100% confident that Facebook's intention was to mislead but the simple fact that these posts aren't being shown to the user(s) that they are being linked to is pretty damning.
Yes? I don't see your point though.

I'll take a stab at guessing what you were trying to say though.. For a large number of the US jobs 65 is getting a bit on in years, think manufacturing, service, etc. also known as a large number of the , at 65 a large number of jobs aren't much of an option anymore.
Maybe it's just the fact that I'm a DC native that I react this way, but what exactly are you talking about? The federal government does a fine job at a great many things with low overhead, lest you'd be getting all your mail via FedEx. I recall during the big health care debate, there was the statistic going around that the overhead of medicare was 2%, vs. somewhere around 30% for private insurance. (What those people spend on advertising alone could pay all of that "bureaucracy".)

Readers of this site should be keenly aware of these issues and what they're really about; we work in an industry with rampant age discrimination where people are encouraged to spend their early 20s working all night to make someone else rich, people routinely burn out before 30 ... do you expect to be pulling all-nighters at your Rails startup at 70? No? Then you should pay attention and get pissed off about this stuff.
Why should we care more about the economy than we care about people with diabetes?
My dad had type 1 diabetes. He had all the problems you mention, and died when I was 11.

Yes, died essentially because the equipment wasn't as good back then (he was born in the late 1930s, died in the 1980s) as it is now.

He also taught me to program when I was 7 (by pairing together on a ZX Spectrum!).
Who says web-programmers are programmers?
> It does depress me, daily, that I do not have a career in
> physics or chemistry or biology or medicine where I could
> work on "big problems."

Seconded, though I could never find the words to express this before. How the fuck is anything that I'm doing right now helping to make the world a better place? How could I even begin to make a difference with my life? Making software is the only thing that I'm marginally proficient at--I'll never start a company that sends a man to Mars or discovers the cure to a horrifying disease. Is making the next $BIG_SOCIAL_NETWORK the best that I have to aspire to?
I too am a fan of Verdana.
That makes sense. And I am sure engineers working on cool problems at Facebook and other large companies can say the same. But there has to be someone thinking about how to get people to click on ads at these companies, because selling ad clicks is their bread and butter. Right?
"If you write code in the STL weenie style or the Pretend It's Java style there aren't any idioms I know of that would ever violate the rules he mentions (out-of-range pointers, signed overflow, invalid aliasing)."

What does the STL do about signed overflow? As for out of range pointers, that is an easy one to get with the STL:

vector<int> somevector(100);
somevector[200] = 5;

"These are not problems of a language per se"

Yes they are: the default numeric type is fixed-width, pointers pop up all over the place and pointer dereferences are unchecked by default. Personally, though, I would have chosen (as the article's author did) the more severe deficiencies in the standard, like the lack of any requirement that a function with a non-void return type have a return statement along every control path or the fact that there is no reliable way to signal errors that occur in destructors.

"These low-level bit banging errors are vastly less common"

Not in my experience, and not judging by the number of bug reports and vulnerabilities I have seen that stem from low-level mechanics.
Ah, I stand corrected. Never used or really been exposed to either service.
IANAP but I'm surprised there's no device which can focus gamma radiation (using some sort of EM field?) onto a detector grid, to give an image of exactly from where radiation is emanating.
A better way to put this would be Sufficiently Smart Compilers vs Insufficiently Defined Languages.
It's funny how many stories here on HN are about a little kid that succeeded in life with his little startup, how someone's will made a difference, etc.

And when some designer actually does some good work, gets noticed and a company actually does the right thing and hires him. And he is very happy about. Even then, the most upvoted comment here is from someone expecting the guy to be "bitter and jaded as the rest of us".

Truly HN can't be biased.
I was thinking 'finance' too. I'll add 'oil industry' to that list as well.
A year or two ago most of the responses to a blog like this were along the lines of "But facebook/google/mystartup is trying to change the world."

Now people don't even bother with that line.

That might be progress, actually.
You'd think that a self-styled "programming junkie" wouldn't confuse strong and static typing, or weak and dynamic typing.
Very well said.

And the hypocrisy cry is just an ad hominem fallacy.
Yep. They don't even know the file names.
It's really not, and there's no evidence of it. There are tight privacy controls which allows you to determine what people can see.

Even as it is, these are items which the user has chosen to 'like', something that is shared with friends (and optionally everyone, depending on your privacy settings). I don't like how users names can be put at the top of sponsored posts, but at no point are users being misrepresented, or is their privacy at risk, unless they have not configured their privacy settings correctly.
Much undefined behaviour can't be statically detected, unfortunately.
I think people are reacting negatively to your post because it comes off as a criticism of the people who work on the problems you described. If this was not the intended effect, perhaps you should clarify on your blog post, because most readers are interpreting it that way.
I bet if you pay them what they expect to get from their own companies, they'll stop fucking around and get right on it.
Not sure just how much you do/don't understand, or how much others will/won't understand, so I'll run through line by line:

PID=$!

grabs the PID of the process you just spawned (in the background, with &) into shell variable PID

CMDLINE="!-2"

grabs the full line you just ran (before the line storing PID) with shell history expansion

CMD=${CMDLINE%% *}

expands the CMDLINE variable, replacing everything after the first space (so CMD now has "cat") with bash trickery

WCHAN=$(cat /proc/${PID}/wchan)

grabs the name of the currently executing syscall for the process (at least, according to http://www.lindevdoc.org/wiki/proc/pid/wchan)

echo "command: ${CMD}, pid: ${PID}, wchan: ${WCHAN}"

prints the info we've grabbed

strace -p ${PID}

connects a trace to the process to see what it's doing

gdb ${CMD} ${PID}

connects to the process (gdb needs program name and can be given a pid to connect to)

(gdb) disassemble

prints the actual (assembler) code being run. In this case, I think all we get from the output is that it's in fact in the middle of some syscall - you'd have to check registers and syscall tables to determine which.

As others have mentioned, much of this is less useful than implied in the face of an actual wedged process.

Tangentially, using gdb to attach to running processes is a very powerful technique - I've been able to get line numbers out of running bash scripts.
America's CEOs can go fuck themselves
Your point about hypocrisy is something I have thought myself- Being a hypocrite doesn't make your argument wrong by default, and it's strange that we instantly act like it does. There must be some reason we act this way, does anyone have a good explanation?
>Yeah, it's like communism for interfaces: all tiles are equally important and get the same amount of real estate. :)

There are actually three different tile sizes. You may be thinking of iOS.
I think there is an important point here, which is that C and C++ compilers have let us get away with a lot of undefined behavior for a long time, and that there hasn't been a lot of tooling to help avoid it nor a culture that stresses the long-term danger of depending on it.

I can speak as someone who has been programming in C and C++ for over ten years, but only in the last few years became aware of this issue and started taking it seriously. Five years ago I would do things like cast function pointers to void-pointer and back, or calculate addresses that were outside the bounds of any allocated object and compare against them, all without really even realizing I was doing something wrong.

I don't think this will spell doom-and-gloom for C and C++ though. I think a few things will happen.

First of all, the compiler people are walking a fine line; yes, they are breaking code that relies on undefined behavior, but they often avoid breaking too much. For example, I've had it explained to me that at least for the time being, gcc's LTO avoids breaking any programs that would work when compiled with a traditional linker. In addition, they often provide switches that preserve traditional semantics for non-compliant code that needs it (like -fno-strict-aliasing and -fwrapv).

Secondly, I believe that tooling will get better, and rather than ignoring the warnings I believe that people's general awareness of this issue will raise, as well as knowledge of standard-compliant ways of working around common patterns of undefined behavior. For example, it's often easy to avoid aliasing problems by using memcpy(), and this can usually be optimized away.

Thirdly, I expect that the standard may begin to define some of this behavior. For example, I think that non-twos-complement systems are exceedingly rare these days; I wouldn't be surprised if a future version of the standard defines unsigned->signed conversions accordingly.
It may be important to remember that flatness is not something that came out of Apples labs. To the contrary, the 'clickable' look on buttons was invented at Apple (Xerox had flat buttons). And the reason, surprise, surprise, was and always has been usability. I don't see them reversing that any time soon.
That skeumorphism has seriously gotten out of hand in iOS 6 is a different debate. Ive will fix this.
When you save those people's lives, health, and sanity, what are they going to do with themselves? "trivial" social interactions. Facebook alone has been brought indescribable joy to thousands of grandmas.
We will never know the truth. The CEO of every financial institution swears up and down about the strength of their company right up until the moment it goes bankrupt. Look at Jon Corzine and MF Global...
Pretty sure Twitter is profitable, just not saying if officially.
> I'll never start a company that sends a man to Mars or discovers the cure to a horrifying disease.

Maybe not, but you can work at one: https://jobs.counsyl.com

I work at counsyl and we're hiring generalist programmers, devops, etc.
But... but... but... Capitalism!
Please don't underestimate #2. We in the software field have massive liberty compared to scientists trying to solve problems relating to human life and disease. And indeed, there are plenty of smart people who avoid this realm just because of that, and go into software instead.
I don't think it does make for an interesting discussion, though. It doesn't even try to investigate the reasons why more people work in social tech than in healthcare, for example.
"Ad Hominem Tu Quoque." But when someone criticizes me, I try to remember that the Ad Hominem Fallacy is any suggestion that someone's words are wrong because they are objectionable. The good side is that I can say my words may still be right. But by the same token, the personal criticism may still be valid even if my words are right.

So maybe I should think about what people are saying even if it doesn't mean that what I am saying is wrong.
The one word answer to your question is MONEY. Thats why the fuck. Also an old proverb from urban dictionary tells you, don't hate the player player hater, hate the game.
What about custom fonts? They work on windows too...
. To launch a medical device you spend years cutting through regulation and red tape, negotiating with and marketing to an industry that is probably threatened by your existence and will do its best to stop you.

I know someone, kind of financially successful, who swears by everything that his team developed a cure for AIDS, but they found out after years of politics that they will never get approval from legal entities to release.
"Consider wearing a good-fitting mask, with no gaps around the nose or mouth, in public."

This can probably be abstracted. Any activity that makes people not want to hang out with you or be near you will reduce your odds of getting the flu.
I've been very happy with i3 for some years now. It's minimalistic, stable, and easy to configure, but with enough features for it to be useful. smem shows it's using about 1.7 MB of dirty private memory on my system right now, and that's small enough for me.

http://i3wm.org
Interesting...where do you recommend starting to learn more about these languages (books, open source languages, etc.)?
When I was a kid, volunteering at a hospital for Community Service, I was assigned a task to transfer pills from bottles to those plastic + foil single serving wrappers using a hot glue machine, and deliver said pills to the wards. I had no training, supervision, or QA/QC in this job.
Even if all it did was grade and attendance. It is not trivial to get that right. My own little pet project http://gradezilla.com took years of refinement before it could handle just those things. Tying in with other aspects of a schools system makes it many multiple more complicated.
I can't speak to the other companies, though I know google want's "all the worlds info at your fingertips" which is a reasonably high ideal... I can speak to what Apple is doing as someone whose followed the company closely for a couple decades.

Apple doesn't care whether you buy the 3.5", 4.0", 7.85", or 9.8" screen.

Apple is bringing the personal computer to the 6 billion other people who weren't able to get in on the PC revolution.

Their slogan in the 1980s used to be "The Computer for the Rest Of Us." While it isn't used for marketing, the mission hasn't really changed.

There were two key issues that prevented those people from participating in the PC revolution.

The first was that you had to be trained how to use a computer. You had to be at least literate, and you had to spend the time to overcome the significant usability hurdle that even Mac OS X presents to the random person. (Eg: your grandmother.)

iOS has revolutionized computer usability such that your grandmother can use it, even if she never made it to high school (bless her heart.)

The second is price/distribution. PCs were for the relatively rich. And while Apple never seemed to compete on the lowest end, that's simply because most people who think Apple makes expensive products think about $300 laptop as "affordable". Instead, Apple put a $50 computer in peoples hands- the iPod shuffle. Sure, it might not be as full featured as a laptop, but you have to walk before you can run.

Lets also not forget that there's a big difference between a PC that draws serious amps and thus needs a house wired for electricity... and a mobile that runs on batteries and can be charged with solar power.

Apple is toiling away building the greatest development/ design/ manufacturing/ distribution machine in history. Of course they have some key partners in this- foxconn and their suppliers.

That iPod shuffle has been replaced with the inexpensive iPod touch, which really is a PC. And of course there is the iPad mini, also a new entry on the low end pc market.

Just because they didn't choose to make zero margin crap that nobody can use (Eg: windows running netbooks), doesn't mean they aren't working their tails off to address this under filled market. They are coming in from the high end, which makes sense given that they can't make the devices fast enough. Hence scaling the company across all those axis I mentioned.

I'm sure this sounds like a radical idea, because "everyone knows" that Apple is only interested in selling "shiny things to rich people". Just keep thinking that!

Whether android ultimately beats them to it, or not, their mission is pretty damn noble, as far as I'm concerned.

The post-PC era they created is going to empower a massive number of people.
Do not mount NFS with "soft" unless you really know what you're doing. NFS' behavior to hang is not "stupidity" - it's actually one of the best things about NFS. Applications do not deal well with failed reads/writes. If there's a brief network interruption or the NFS server goes down, it's WAY safer to cause applications to hang until the server comes back. Since NFS is a stateless protocol, when the server comes back, I/O resumes as if nothing ever happened. This helps make using NFS feel more like using a local filesystem. Otherwise it becomes a very leaky abstraction.

Not being able to kill processes stuck on NFS I/O is annoying though, so you can mount with the "intr" option and that makes such processes killable. However, since Linux 2.6.25, you don't even need this and SIGKILL can always kill applications stuck in NFS I/O.
Since you're struggling to find words, you might find the concept of 'alienation' helpful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_alienation
Directly pursuing medical advances without the required stamp of education might be difficult because of the obstacles society puts up for that path (perhaps rightly so). You could certainly educate yourself in the field, but you'd likely have a tough time winning acceptance for your advances.

But you could certainly find a way to help people indirectly. Some of the same talent that targets people for ads is not necessarily all that different from using psychological principles to help them be healthier, for example.

And there's always the path of partnering with someone who does have the required education. Combine that with your own self-directed education in bioinformatics or similar fields and you could definitely make a real difference.

It's riskier, but it also has the potential for a bigger payoff.

The path is there, there is a way.
/proc/{pid}/wchan contains the function name, not its address.

In this example he's just printing the syscall that his example process is running.

The calls to strace and gdb are disjoint, he's cut out a lot of stuff here, probably why its confusing. In the commands he's used strace would dump all the syscall details to the console and GDB would just attach to the process and enter its normal console (presumably hes determined hes stuck in a loop so hes just using disassemble).
HackingHealth.ca might be of interest to some of you who want to help but not necessarly know where to start and/or find the barrier of entry very abrupt. It's an event very similar to a hackaton where developers, designers and health professionals work together during all the weekend on real practical ideas that will be tested in clinical environment shortly after. Two have happened in Montreal and Toronto and where huge success. The next one is in Vancouver, late February. Lots of other cities are coming in the following months (sf, melbourne, london). Anyhow, feel free to email me (phzbox at gmail) if you're interested in sponsoring or organizing one in your city; I'd be more than happy to help a fellow HNer wanting to hack health.
Yes I'm sure there must be some mixture of business people, engineers, and UX people who do focus on this. But I've never met any of them, and have never had a conversation with any other engineer that discussed how to get people to click on ads. My point is that it's a small minority of Google's engineering effort that goes towards this.
System 76. Just Google it. They bare built specifically for Ubuntu and are within your price range. Their laptops are actually Clevo/Sager remade to work perfectly with Ubuntu.
The most likely explanation is that traffic is bi-directional on the fiber line, but a lot of additional latency is introduced by software based (as opposed to hardware accelerated) deep packet inspection.
Thank you for that! Makes it clear, I guess I have to properly learn gdb's output... I work in bioinformatics, we never go that low.
Play With Liftweb’s AJAX Generators using Scala
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This is the first I've seen of MapBox. I'm not sure of how much use I'll get out of these icons, but my mind is percolating with possibilities for creating useful embeddable maps...
Part of the problem with the backtracking analogy is that the graph changes while you're traversing it. It changes due to external factors. The act of moving to different nodes may cause the previous edge to be deleted. And so on.
Same for the cifs.kext (or was is smbfs.kext) in early versions of OSX. Putting your laptop to sleep with a mounted Samba share was enough to slowly grind the system to a halt when you woke it up.
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It's because we treat arguments like battles, looking for that one opening to strike no matter how desperate it may be. It's why you see a lot of people quote a single sentence out of a three paragraph post and reply to that, ignoring the rest of it.

Aside: I would love to see someone study the differences between in-person and online arguments.