skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A quote from the article: "Mr. Draper received permission from the sheriff's office to attend a computer fair in 1979 in San Francisco, where the program, named after the cult film "Easy Rider," was a hit. It became Apple's first word-processing program. When IBM launched its first PC, it also chose EasyWriter, over competition from other programmers, including a young Bill Gates."

I have the real story, and the author should have talked to me. After my program Apple Writer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Writer) replaced Easy Writer and became Apple's default word processor, someone from IBM called me up and asked me to write a word processor for their PC.

I asked "What business terms?" The IBM guy, taken aback that a programmer would switch into business mode so quickly, said, "Okay, you get $100K in royalties, after which we own the program."

I thought for a minute, then said, "100K, okay, umm, that's 15 days of Apple Writer royalties right now. I think you'll need to do better than that." But IBM wouldn't budge, and that ended the negotiation.

Later I heard they offered Draper the same deal and he accepted. Rumor has it that the PC version of Easy Writer was really terrible and didn't last long. Later, Draper supposedly remarked, "They asked for a hundred thousand dollar word processor, and I gave them one."
You mean those people paying $2,000 for a bottle of champagne in Vegas are just getting regular ol' $50 bottles of the stuff? I'm shocked! =)
"I'm blacklisted, man, a permanent menace to society, I guess,"

No dude, you're just old, in an industry with entrenched ageism. Just like the other accomplished engineers in the story living in mobile homes, couchsurfing, and living in a bus. Not a lack of skill or relevance, so much as an excess of gray hair.

Imagine the same story if he went for management instead of engineering, he'd be a CEO somewhere, greatly loved for his eccentricity, etc.
The deeper it is, the longer it takes to appear (I think at depth 7 or 8 it starts counting in hours, and at some point it just won't appear at all).

Just like too many nested if(x) { if (y) { if (z) ... }} constructs, too deep a discussion nesting is also unreadable.
It's odd that my two replies above were both downvoted, even though I was just trying to be helpful to the OP. If this is the kind of response you can expect on the new HN for trying to help, it's no wonder this community continues to decline in quality.
Actually, UC Santa Cruz and the NHGRI/NIH embarrassed Celera by publishing the human genome and setting the whole thing public domain several days before Celera could publish then patent their mappings. And, anyway, the only reason Venter went private was to draw a line in the sand about shotgun sequencing, for which he was having trouble finding public funding/support.

Besides, no one got into space faster than governments, no one has managed to develop cures and vaccines for large-scale and deadly diseases than labs directly funded by the NIH and other governmental agencies, and no one has had the infrastructure to build large-scale networks like the Internet like governments.

I won't even mention interstate/intercontinental highways, sewer systems, healthcare outside of the US, etc. There are simply some things that cannot be done by anyone but the uppercase-P People.
Dealing with distractions
Good catch. I never thought it might have been a deputy director from that long ago. In that case, it makes a lot more sense that he wouldn't know.

However, don't you think that someone who is involved in intelligence gathering would have some inkling of the important of the internet in intelligence?
The largest climate rally in US history tells Obama not to be a fossil fool.
Stan Fischer for Fed Chairman?
Yeah, there was nothing devious there. I hope.

The line about my son was partly to annoy him since he, unlike my wife, reads my blog. And we punk each other like that all the time.
Why poor people pay more bribes than rich people
Actually the firebug add-on for Firefox does allow you to disable the 'debugger' statement at runtime, making it safe to insert anywhere in your code.

Other than that, good tip.
I wonder what exactly did distract you :) When I do surgery on a production server, I triple-check making sure everything works properly.

I have two assumptions: 1. HN has a low priority in the overall scheme of things, 2. Self-confidence overflow :)
"Personally, I think that a hard working entrepreneur, particularly those working on immensely challenging problems, must always be given a benefit of doubt in early reviews."

Products should be reviewed based on there merit, "given a benefit of a doubt" is left up to the consumer.

A reviewer should review every product the same, else the reviews are worthless because there is no continuity to compare the reviews.

Do you want your reviews from some person you have never heard of or from someone well established? The answer is obvious.
This sort of post should be a "pro-tip" on coderwall.com
I was blown away by that as well. She might as well have written, "I have come to my conclusion, which is that we are fine, but since you people on the internet are meanies who are just going to argue your preconceived conclusions, I'm not going to tell you how I got there."

The weird thing is, I think she's probably right. But I think the job of the public editor is precisely to address controversies of their reporters in sufficient detail that we don't have to trust her. Ombudsmen have to be seen as scrupulously fair to outsiders or there's no point in having them.
I actually didn't compare gzip and bzip2 before uploading, and I probably should have. I did use `gzip -9`. I'm compressing it with bzip2 -9 now to see if it gets any smaller. I'll post a reply here when I know.
UX Design: What Features Should You Include When Building Your Product?
Different cameras and software will do different kinds of automatic white balance correction but nobody will screw it up so bad that you can't differentiate black from white.
This "shall" is not listed under "Constraints", so violation of it is undefined behavior and does not require a diagnostic. See 4 (Conformance):
If a ‘‘shall’’ or ‘‘shall not’’ requirement that appears outside of a constraint is violated, the behavior is undefined.

This is an area where a compiler can (sometimes) see violations, though, so I think gcc should diagnose when possible, in the same vein as format specifier mismatches in printf().
Yes, please someone tell that to Ballmer. :)
The Obama Administration’s 10-Year Plan to Map the Entire Human Brain
WebSocket proxy support added to nginx trunk
I think we have a new king!

Awesome explanation.
Strange reaction from Musk. He seemed awfully quick to jump fully onboard with a rather pallid response from the NYT's Public Editor[1] (a position somewhat analogous to the head of PR in a corporate).

While there could be many reasons, two more probable IMHO could be:

1) The "out" he was looking for: absolution for a somewhat strong initial overreaction.

2) He's simply being naive, and not reading between the lines.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_editor
After breaking many things myself due to similar, seemingly miniscule edits, I have implemented an ABC routine: Always Be Checking. Even if it was "just" something like moving a piece of code or something equally tiny, I always check after the fix.

So far, it has been working great.
Given that all x86 processors spend non-trivial energy translating the x86 ISA to an internal RISC format, it would be a competitive advantage to expose the "raw" internal ISA, which game developers would target if it could buy them 2% more performance. Standardization does not really work for games in the same way that it works in most industries.
The original options we had weren't restricted. Also, most of them were at a lower strike price since Apple wasn't highly valued then.
I'd love to get the print edition, but the price is a bit steep. Still, a very cool magazine, I'd love to see it at Coffee Shops/Barnes and Noble type places!
>iterate through all it's parents to check if there is a cycle,which seems pretty inefficient to do for something that should never happen

The number of parents is almost always under 3 or 4 and never over 100. Writes occur a few times a second at peak. You are prematurely optimizing.
Burger King’s Twitter account Hamburgled, announces sale to McDonald’s
Bug hunting in a massively multi threaded environment
I, for one, would love to read a serious and rigorous research paper (if one's been done?) on the differences between sites mostly populated by females (Etsy, Pinterest, etc. -- to the tune of 80+%, I've heard) vs. ones populated by males (Slashdot, Digg, etc.) -- and how different monetization methods work out for each.
This is more about regulation, not everyone have good intentions. What you could do is to pay with your own money and charge the user later adding your services, this should be legal without going into financials. But again, you got away with the banking regulations but you could have problems with the IRS, this is why you need legal advice.

You can never have an account where others can keep their money, once you receive money in, it should be yours. So, timing is factor a here.

But again, a 30 minutes talk with an advisor is not very expensive. There are offices specialized in opening such firms.
Just went to check the subscriber area and I got a 500 error https://subscriber.hackermonthly.com/
If there is, I've never met one. :)
Super cool. Small issue: if you swipe one entry, then immediately swipe another, it only cancels the first swipe. You have to swipe a second time to bring up the delete option. Seems like it should both cancel the first swipe and bring up the delete option at once.
This is a reasonable solution. While it will (almost) never provide the correct result (it might print out a cycle of comments until X is reached, or it might cut off a very long but legitimate comment thread), it would provide a reasonable guarantee on this sort of problem not generating infinite pages.
Unless someone sees the exact numbers, or has a comparable web site, they have no idea what they really are. The author is building one assumption on top of the other, meaning each step off makes the end result even further from reality. I haven't touched Amazon's affiliate program in years, but from what I remember the % of sale was category based, and many items would pay out in the low single digits.

Web site owners soliciting donations while making money from affiliate links, not unusual. Owners making money from affiliate links while not disclosing them, even more common. Journalists attacking bias while making money and not disclosing it, unusual and certainly worth investigating.
It is not even a diploma mill. It has absolutely no recognition from any government body for anything related to education.
Yeah unfortunately that one sentence has overridden this whole article because of the nature of Twitter--people keep retweeting and piling on without ever reading the article. It was a really dumb statement though. I don't even understand how to begin with that. Wouldn't you assume audience is more related to content than how positive or how many vaginas someone has? This just seems to focus on the wrong thing...
Storytelling is the great differentiator
Have a great product, solid marketing, and a huge quota? These things won’t just sell themselves, you need to resonate with your clients.
Right - but would my employability be such that I could get a job where I might gain that information? I've been given the impression by a few employers that unless you have a lot of experience then a bachelors degree isn't sufficient for a software engineering position.
Webkit only :(

Misses CSS rules and a transform (AFAICT) for Gecko, Presto (RIP) and Trident.
Somebody should tell them.
I can understand this and he's just picking his battles wisely. There's a difference between defending your company and being a battleaxe, and he's not crossing that line. Appearing to be unnecessarily combative would backfire.
I'm confused. You started with "No" and then continued with something that is either in agreement or orthogonal to my point.
Chrome Dev Tools also lets you ignore breakpoints, but I hope you're not suggesting to ship code with debugger statements?
So that they can impress girls at the club who they have to pay for afterwords?
"I know I for one always hover over links before I click on them to see if they're affiliate links"

Do you do this because you are curious, or because you don't want to click the link if it is an affiliate link? If the latter is the case, it seems strange you would not want to support the tech blogs you read, at no extra cost to yourself, if you already intend to purchase the item linked.
Building a Raspberry Pi Cluster - part 2
Its a joke. One they are keen to take to the courts. It was clear with their original statement. Using their words against them. /popcorn
He means that PG runs the sight because it makes business sense, not out of charity.
Typically you get a much smaller number of RSUs than options. Though there's no strike price. So RSUs are often worth more if the stock doesn't move much, but worth a lot less if there is a huge run-up.
Feels great on Chrome on Android. My only nitpick might be that the delete button is really close to the edge of the screen; a larger margin would be nice, I think.
Use xz. Debian, Gnome, Archlinux, Gentoo, Fedora have all switched to xz, and for good reason. I expect xz will offer a 20-30% reduction in file size. That will add up quick.
The first mention of "computer" in the New York Times
If you were using some kind of representation for Nested Sets -- left-to-right depth-first numbering, or a human-readable id.id.id chain -- then it's really easy to write a constraint for that: parent left < myleft, right > myright, or dotted_id.split('.').filter{|first, rest| return false if rest.contains first} (yeah, yeah, that second pseudocode would be unrealistically PITA for some DBs).

More generally:

I'm not a big SQL wonk anymore, but I find a lot of people have the intuition that relational databases are ill-suited for trees.

An intuition that is much closer to the truth is that almost all databases can handle trees pretty well, because there's still an unambiguous concept of ordering and containment, and you can usually arrange things so as to do range/ancestor/inclusion queries efficiently.

It's graphs with loops/without unambiguous concept of ordering/containment that are really hard.
>Personally I think that entrepreneurs working on products that solve immensely challenging problems should always be given a benefit of doubt. Or two or three or may be even five times. Clearly this did not happen in Tesla's case.

Do yourself a favour and don't ever startup a company. Because if you think that as an entrepreneur the world should treat your precious self with kiddy gloves then wow you are in for a rude shock.

Because consumers couldn't care less whether you are a startup or not. They care about how great your product is.
Related: Carl Meyer's "Reverse-engineering Ian Bicking's brain" talk from PyCon 2011: http://pyvideo.org/video/389/pycon-2011--reverse-engineering...
That's one of my favorite lines from Futurama, 'Ohh, a lesson in not changing history from Mr. "I'm My Own Grandfather"!'
You're right. Reviewer must always be objective and review every product the same. Or at least be careful about the process used to arrive at the reportable opinion (which NYT seems to confess having missed completely! Strange?).

However, here is a beautiful piece from Anton Ego of Ratatouille:

"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. Last night, I experienced something new, an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau’s famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize that only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius now cooking at Gusteau’s, who is, in this critic’s opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France. I will be returning to Gusteau’s soon, hungry for more."
Another cheap solution is colorizing the prompt red for dangerous consoles and green for dev machines. This makes it very easy to notice when you selected the wrong terminal.
According to section 6.7.5.2p1 of C99: “If the expression is a constant expression, it shall have a value greater than zero.”

The “expression” here refers to an expression in between [] in an array declaration; so the declaration of size 0 is a constraint violation and requires a diagnostic. You can get gcc and clang to issue a relevant diagnostic with “-std=c99 -pedantic”.
"from Amazon after her readers click the ads in her articles and go on to make purchases (she sees, and makes commissions off of, the other items they place in their shopping cart, including books that she didn’t link to)."

How does this work exactly? Is there a cookie with the affiliate's id set when you click on an affiliate's link?
McDonalds responded: https://twitter.com/McDonalds/status/303575465237549056
Pro Tip: ‘debugger’ statements cannot be disabled at runtime

In Chrome, you can just press the "Deactivate Breakpoints" button in the DevTools and `debugger` statements won't do anything anymore. Closing the DevTools also prevents `debugger` statements from breaking execution.
If they are in America, they are certainly at risk of going to prison, and international boarders have provided less safety in recent years than one may hope.
Since ecmascript 5, Date.now() is the standard way of doing this. Generally speaking, I'd prefer to do that (with shims for older browsers) than do the equivalent of creating a new Date object and calling .valueOf on it (which is what +new Date does).
>Just look at the points per hour this thread is getting, if I had posted this about my website on my website people would have said I was stupid.

For what it's worth, I upvoted this thread specifically because we've all done something this stupid (or worse) :)
I can't be the only person who thought it was a PR move when I read the first story? I imagined it as something you would read on one of those copy heavy ads in an old magazine, straight out of Bernays' playbook.
Show HN: My brother built this to get rid of his RubyConf Australia ticket
Very true, finding good products to sell is much much easier IMHO than finding a half-way decent sales person.

The number of resumes I've seen of professional sales-types who've bounced around companies every year is astonishing.

Many companies give new sales people about a year to perform and replace them after that. I've seen entire careers of failed sales people who've lived the no consequence life of this year at a time roaming sales guy. It's a huge red flag. Once they leave a company, they simply flood their sales network with resumes until they land someplace for another year. Rinse and repeat.

Likewise if the sales person is good and they're printing money, they're likely to stay at that place and keep the fat commission checks coming unless they get a killer offer someplace else.

Being a shitty salesperson is ludicrously easy, being a good one is unbelievably hard.
In a later post, Rap Genius quotes Adam Wiggins the CTO of Heroku with this bit:

" There are a lot of reasons, but the two big ones are 1) the "intelligent routing" doesn't scale, since it relies on distribution locking which effectively destroys parallelism, and 2) it's incompatible with the evented and realtime apps which are increasingly common on the modern web. "Intelligent routing" sounds good, but in the end it wasn't good for our customers."

So, in short they ran into Amdahl's law and changed the way they do things.
A minor objection -- the reference is to the old meaning of "computer", i.e. someone who computes, not something that computes.

The first appearance of the modern meaning of "computer" might be interesting, and it almost certainly will appear after about 1945.
Interesting, but the one comment I haven't seen yet on this thread is 'Why is this useful enough to be a compiler feature?'. I think this is especially relevant with a relatively slim language like C.

In the rare cases you need to do this sort of check why not just write a simple sizeof test?
This is awesome. If anyone from whisper sees this, please get ahold of me off site. I've been trying to say hello but haven't found much in the way of contact info :/.
Any purchases made within 24 hours are credited to your account. You can send them to Amazon in buy a $9 book, and if they buy a $2500 TV four hours later, you get your 6%.
This. Even with the best test coverage in the world, you still bump into edge cases that you couldn't have predicted. As a former QA Engineer, I used to say there's still room for QA in a test driven environment. Now I say there's no replacement for a sharp mind with enough knowledge, curiosity, and good judgement.
I use a different background color for the terminal in question; in this case, I use a dark red to signify a production system, and a dark blue to signify a development system. I find it quite useful. You can do this through Xterm profiles (Edit -> Profiles, Terminal -> Change Profile) in Linux and OS X, and I'm sure there's a way to do it in Windows / PuTTY.
That's standard behavior in most affiliate programs, not just Amazons. They just place a sitewide cookie (or less typically, a session variable) with the affiliate's ID in it, as you guessed. It's usually not tied to the purchase of any one particular item, which is what the quote is referring to.
I tend to have a reflex to avoid affiliate links, if only because I feel like they lead to content generated only to contain affiliate links.

(I can recall a few death-of-blog posts where the author didn't say as much, but the content of the post made it clear enough that they had decided they better make some money if they are going to continue writing the blog and apparently the link loaded final post failed to make money)
Yay Hacktivism! Oh wait, this is childish and pointless.
You could contrast achieving generics using C preprocessor gymnastics versus C++ templates.
So which is it ? Does the editor have an opinion or not have an opinion.

Also Musk gave his interpretation of the facts. One person's deliberate deceit is another's innocent mistake.
For traditionalist sticklers, you can purchase Evan Williams 100 proof fairly commonly (white label).

99% of people honestly could not care less and probably shouldn't. I only care for traditionalism's sake that I grew up on the KY border and simply like to do it the "right way" down to the pewter goblets, ya know? (us dirt farmers don't mess with silver)

EW is solid, it's what most higher end bars use as rail whiskey. They make a single barrel small batch also that's really fantastic. I'll have to give credit to John C. Dvorak for the recommendation on that one. $25 a fifth too.
Hola: The Web Acceleration and Unblocking App for Android or PC
Word, thanks! I am really looking for one person though who can see this project through to completion...
MongoDB vs. SQL Server - INSERT comparison part deux
LOL yes, yes yes. I've heard stories of people who met him while staying at the HHH in Brooklyn.
Thanks, i'll run xz too!