skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're a Photoshop user, would a brand new PSD alternative offer tangible benefits--faster read/write performance, smaller files? That's unlikely. Being easier to code has nothing to do with offering better performance.

This could not be more wrong. Time and brainpower are limited resources. Building a parser for an ugly format takes more time and consumes more brainpower. It pisses off the developer, who then thinks less clearly. And it requires the developer to repeatedly do research, which breaks his focus. The developer needs to write more code for an ugly format, and optimizing and maintaining such code becomes difficult. If the code is organically evolving (alongside the format), then with each iteration, fewer and fewer people understand the entirety of the code and format, and fewer and fewer people are able to bring good ideas to the table. The developer is angry, confused, mired in a bunch of ugly code, and alone. He will never produce his best work.

None of this is to bash Adobe for producing PSD. Every organization of sufficient age has eldritch code. It is arcane and ancient, and if you look at it the wrong way, it will crumble to dust and blow away in a sudden wind. The problem is arguing that it doesn't matter if mere mortal developers cannot understand it, or that there are no concrete benefits to end users from producing clean internals. The detriments of ugly internals may not be directly visible to users, but users definitely see the ripples on the surface.
Yea, as I was reading it, more than once I caught myself saying, "Nate, stick with what you know."

OTOH, a brilliant statistician achieves enough success to be noticed by a mainstream "least common denominator" interviewer. How else could it turn out?
Has anyone read "Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job"? I have only browsed the table of contents and it looks pretty promising in terms of figuring out what areas of software development to review/improve before attempting to interview for a developer position.
(I'd love to use a current and comprehensive version of Haskell SIMD, but its just not ready for prime time.)

Since you're obviously an expert in the area, why aren't you helping make it ready for prime time?
I purposely left out the context around the "who" is writing it. I'm not an internet babillionaire. I've been involved in some good exits, have degrees from well known schools, etc. But I've also made a ton of mistakes, and have seen companies with whom I was working make mistakes, and haven't really seen a book lay out those mistakes, why they happened, and what could have been done better.
The article doesn't mention the costs (at least I didn't see). They could be paying the bills.
I bet this thing gets gamed faster than you could bubble sort all the round man-hole covers in every gas station in your zip code.

What a bunch of B.S. Do you really think you can "game" your way into a 6 figure job by answering a few brain teasers? And if so, how long would you last?

Competent hirers look for "demonstrated performance". Technical questions are sometimes necessary, but hardly sufficient to find that out.
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> You have to check for out-of-memory, and throw an exception if so.

You have to check if there is space for the allocation in the current space. This is two native instructions, a compare and a conditional branch. If the allocation fails, you don't throw an exception, you launch a minor collection.

> You also have to mark the size of the allocated block

Yes and no. When an object is initialized, type information is recorded that contains the size. I don't think that the Java VM explicitly stores the size of the allocation somewhere. It certainly doesn't need to since the same information is available by just looking at the object itself.

> Also, garbage collectors usually allocate from a shared memory pool, so every allocation also involves some mutex operations.

In the Java VM this problem is addressed by dividing the Eden space into chunks where each chunk is private to a single thread.

> Allocation is bumping a pointer in theory only.

An object allocation in Java is around 10 assembly instructions. More than just 'bumping a pointer' but not a lot more.
have you looked into Sequel? Fast + Thread Safe http://sequel.rubyforge.org/
databases are for live queries

No, databases are also commonly used for batch queries. Are you familiar with data warehousing? Teradata, Greenplum, Netezza, and similar products? This sort of stuff, for example:

http://www.dbms2.com/2009/04/30/ebays-two-enormous-data-ware...

Parallel databases have been around since the late 1980s, and can be used for many of the same things MapReduce is often used for (large-scale batch data analysis). Hence the comparison.
In the age of instant syntax error feedback, it's exceedingly lame.
Here's the formula for getting a 6 figure developer job.

1) learn your craft
2) get experience
3) be pleasant and productive

Answering crappy interview questions doesn't really come into it. It's as if the author thinks the thing that separates success from failure is knowing the answer to gimmicky questions.
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Key point here: When you sell physical goods, unless you manufacture the goods yourself, you are a commodity, therefore, margins will always be low.
This article suggests that adobe offer the PSD docs to solve the problem of reverse engineering, but to get the docs you have to sign an NDA, which means you can't publicly release the source code. If they had a more sane licensing policy, the comments in that code wouldn't have ever needed to be written in the first place.
The dark matter of a startup: mysteriously absorbs money without emitting product.
The text-based interface there is probably most immediately accessible in terms of Wily (http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~oz/wily/), a Unix port of Acme (http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/acme/acme.html) from Plan9, which was in turn inspired by Oberon. (I spent a couple days trying wily out. Interesting system. I never really acclimated to its mouse-centric UI, but I think it integrates even better without other programs than Emacs does.)
...and the recycling disassembly is unspeakably painful, but that's OK, because the destination you is a copy from before the pain.
RIP: A Remix Manifesto
Semispace (and generational) collectors do decouple the cost of allocation from the cost of collection by only considering the set of live objects. They also compact (defragment) as a side effect of collection.
"I've been coding for fun for over 12 years (e.g., BASIC, C++, perl, PHP), one of my projects even successfully scaled and got acquired, but it's hard to find employment."

You're looking in the wrong places.

You're already ahead of 90% of the programmers I've ever met. You obviously have aptitude, competence, and most importantly, passion. All you need is to take your Positive Mental Attitude and get more real work experience, either with your employer's customers or your own.

Many here would disagree with me, but credentials are highly overrated. They're everywhere. What's most scarce is demonstrated performance developing and deploying successful applications for real world customers. Why waste your time padding paperwork with "titles" when you can pad yourself (and the rest of the world) with good software.

Get creative and find some customers (your own or through employment). Talk to anyone you know. Try something different and get your software written and out there.

Good luck and keep us posted!
I agree with your sentiment regarding halfhearted graduates 100%. I've been a professional developer for about 4 years now and have been on the interviewer side of the table for about the past 18 months. The sheer number of crappy engineers that end up with CS degrees is astounding. I'm talking about freshly minted CS grads that can't even get past your run of the mill fizzbuzz test, much less get into anything really challenging.

For zackattack, hobby programming doesn't really count on resumes so it won't get you past the HR drones. Whatever time you spent on your project that was eventually acquired certainly counts as professional experience though, so you should include that prominently on whatever you are sending out to people. That being said, if you really know what you're doing it will be immediately obvious and appreciated during any technical interviews. Smart developers know when they are talking to other smart developers. Good luck!
true, consumers don't always know that they need something because they lack the imagination to think there's a solution to a problem they have. In the early days of a product family you're experimenting with differentiation and you have to deal with the fact that some customers will buy the "wrong" one (for their needs) and have a less than ideal experience through no fault of your own.
Great. Give us access to a sample chapter. Good luck.
The point of that code example is not the calculations, but accessing memory in a cache-friendly way.
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Ear Plugs to Lasers: The Science of Concentration
I said this and I will say it again. Oberon, the language, is the most delightful little thing to write a compiler for. Even more so in s-exp syntax. The canonical implementation is described in a 40 page tutorial by the MASTER himself, Wirth :-)

People interested in alternative desktop and GUI environments should also look at all the biproduct research that came out of Plan9 (NB: there is a programming language called "Squeak" somewhere in there, it's not the smalltalk, but something C-ish invented by Rob Pike hacked on by the usual Bell Labs suspects :-)
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That's really not fair. I know of many things in and outside of my area of research that need improvement, as does any researcher. But we can only work on one thing at a time.
Actually firefox is a large hll program. It's a javascript / xul engine in a large part. The frontend of firefox is actually javascript AFAIK. Maybe someone has more precise information?

1 and 2 were already commented on, so I'll just add that, there was a proof that a copying gc with enough memory can be faster than manual allocation. http://www.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/04-17.pdf
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e.g. middle management
Hence my use of "likely". It's entirely SMS based, so the SMS use must be massive... 100s of millions. Multiply that even by a good bulk discount and the total is significantly more than $150k.

But even if they are making 100% profit--an impossible amount--they are only making $2m a year. They'd be better off selling sandwiches.
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The world map of social networks - Which one is dominant in which country
One major benefit of selling a physical product is you don’t have to build anything; the work is all in finding a supplier and putting up a site. This is great because you avoid the 200-400 hours to build something.

I don't know where to start.
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No, it just proves that indeed this thing has legs. Once that's possible so is monetization.
Hmmmm, i dont actually agree with this very much. In the early days its quite important that you know what everyone is doing. Maybe when things are 1-2 years along there is the position for the guy that does the job that everyone else kinda doesnt want to do (setup vanilla os's on machines so the unix admins can get to the real configuration, do different types of data entry for things that cant be automated basically mechanical tasks) that yes contributes to the success of the company.

But in early days there are 2-3 people and none of them can be dark matter otherwise this person evolves into a vortex or blackhole for your capital/profits.
It's unclear from such a small snippet whether "p" is a local or global variable. Either way, have a little consideration for the next programmer and give it a meaningful name of at least 3 characters. Make it easier to read and search for. And dust the "foo" and give it a meaningful name, too.
I really like the design and clean interface. One minor comment: you may want to change that green button to read: "Register for free" instead of "Registration for free"
foo() might throw an exception, leaking "p". Stack allocation should probably be used instead of heap allocation here, anyway.
Coolest "related work" section in any computer science research paper.
Google Chrome says "Aw Snap" when it crashes
The checks are mostly for the fascicles and not the original volumes (at least up to the 2nd edition.)

Knuth switched "language" and machines "architectures" after the second edition, plus he is back to hacking on the fourth and fifth volumes.

(I personally gave up on finding fault in Knuth's work after a brief and misguided youthful effort sent me down the mathematical rabbit hole for 4.5 years .. on my own.)
summary: predictable failure is better than unpredictable failure. engineer accordingly.
What this article describes is mostly Boydian martial philosophy. Though clausewitz, sun tzu and Genghis Kahn comes
into play also.

John Boyd was a US air force colonel who essentially reinvented
modern warfare. Instead of attacks based on massive force,
his philosophy was based on controlling the flow and tempo of
battle. Controlling your adversaries ability to understand
and react to the ever changing world - eventually folding
himself inside out as the basketball coach did.

Similarly the wargame scenario is classic boyd too. Change
the game, keep adversary off balance, you win.

Everyone should absolutely read "A discourse on winning and
losing.". Everything the current dotcom wunderkids/bloggers are saying
on blogs is covered in more detail and more clearly in boyd's
writings.
Yep, and my point stands. No amount of effort allows you to start, say, github.com if you don't also have skill. Now, you can say that you can acquire skill from effort, and that's certainly true, but someone else who puts in the same effort as you but who has more talent will still do better.
Especially when if you criticised someone you knew nothing about you would be criticised too.
This is incredibly relevant to Davids who want to disrupt their way to victory against a Goliath.

Key quotes:

* "David can beat Goliath by substituting effort for ability-and substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life."

* "The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths [who have 10x more "power" than Davids], he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. ... [W]hen the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy ... David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, "even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t."

* "Insurgents, though, operate in real time [they don't batch-process]. Lawrence [of Arabia] hit the Turks, in that stretch in the spring of 1917, nearly every day, because he knew that the more he accelerated the pace of combat the more the war became a battle of endurance-and endurance battles favor the insurgent."

* "Insurgents work harder than Goliath. But their other advantage is that they will do what is "socially horrifying"-they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought. All the things that distinguish the ideal basketball player are acts of skill and coordination. When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable-a shocking mixture of broken plays and flailing limbs and usually competent players panicking and throwing the ball out of bounds. You have to be outside the establishment-a foreigner new to the game or a skinny kid from New York at the end of the bench-to have the audacity to play it that way."
I wouldn't call any journalist associated with the Economist a "least common denominator".
um...that progression of life expectancy isn't exponential.
I think so, and I think the passphrase included dictionary words which is why the anonymous person said as much.
Thanks for reminding me why I'm never going anywhere near C++ ever again in my life.

Good answer though, I was stumped.
dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=593140 (2 points), http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=592043 (86 points)
Because something is popular doesn't mean it can be monetized. If you give me a tasty free lunch every day I'll keep coming back. I might even bring friends. When it gets to 20m free lunches every day that just means free shit's popular, not that it's a good business.
I could be way off here, but I thought that once you get above a certain level of SMS traffic, you can actually negotiate a rev-share deal with the networks. After all, they're making a LOT of money from their subscribers off all that SMS traffic.
Wouldn't you need to know the system programming language to make full use of your platform? It's hard to be write good Unix software without knowing C, for example. I don't know about others, but I need to visualize the cost of each language construct and be aware of more things than exposed by the language itself.
I thought they wanted to program set-top boxes but weren't sure of the final hardware implementation so they abstracted away the VM and runtime, initially with an eye towards an smalltalk implementation but ended up greenspuning something new called Oak?
What this article describes is mostly Boydian martial philosophy. Though clausewitz, sun tzu and Genghis Kahn comes
into play also.

John Boyd was a US air force colonel who essentially reinvented
modern warfare. Instead of attacks based on massive force,
his philosophy was based on controlling the flow and tempo of
battle. Controlling your adversaries ability to understand
and react to the ever changing world - eventually folding
himself inside out as the basketball coach did.

Similarly the wargame scenario is classic boyd too. Change
the game, keep adversary off balance, you win.

Everyone should absolutely read "A discourse on winning and
losing.". Everything the current dotcom wunderkids/bloggers are saying
on blogs is covered in more detail and more clearly in boyd's
writings.

Probably the best book on the subject currently. Not an easy
read though.
http://www.amazon.com/Science-Strategy-War-Strategic-History...
It is difficult to "feel" large numbers if one is not used to playing them without calculator. It seems that accuracy beyond three digits is an interesting phenomenon, e.g. 5.2 million is easier to comprehend than 5,263,921. Consequently, more effort is needed to imagine bigger magnitudes from million, billion, trillion and so on.

I'm curious to know if there is a correlation between eidetic memory and ability to visualize huge numbers.
Your tone almost makes it sound like you disagree with me, even though my comment agrees with yours.

I'm well aware of the research that shows that people who believe effort is more important than talent are more successful than those who think the opposite. People like to pretend the research show that the effort-believers are right. That hasn't been shown.

If you control for IQ, the hard workers win. This is not controversial. The recent research was carefully presented to give the impression that it said more than it did.

Despite what effort-believer think, IQ is highly correlated with success.

However, we can apprehend the world rationally and still believe in hard work. I work extremely hard. My IQ isn't going up, but I can control my effort.
With XML storage, XPath and GUI programming, I very much doubt you will be seeing any much clojure/lisp goodness but will most likely hammer out XML in the same way it's hammered out in every language: slowly and painfully :-P
Mozilla ponders policy change after Firefox extension battle
Well, yeah, but since Fortran stores things in column-major that's not really an issue. My broader point was that all of these details are hidden from programmers, so there's less for the programmer to screw up and more room for the compiler to work within.
And that would be a BIG mistake. Your clojure-using peers will be knowledgeable engineers with things to do and products to ship and very little time to help you. There is also zero academic literature to hold your hand. With a new programming language, you are often forced to reach out to your own past experience for a repertoire of programming techniques. You will learn the syntax of clojure, sure, but you will be writing whatever languages you know now in a fully parenthesized prefix syntax.

A better question to ask would be "what language motivated Rich Hickey to create Clojure"; pick a more stable Lisp, learn the ropes, and come back to kickass on the JVM in a few months.
Actually, I'd written a simple service for the same purpose two years ago, I think some people use it right now:

http://nsfw.in

But this new service seems to have more features, good for them :)
Discussion is here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=592314
I checked the comments first. I was initially bummed that it wasn't about Nikola Tesla after all.
Surely paid adult content sites pay affiliate commissions? Why not forward through to some if the person wants to see something NSFW? It might even be a monetization strategy that actually works.
I've never had a positive experience with a co-worker or employee who "just kinda does stuff." I have had the pleasure to work with a number of people who do many things well, and adapt in rapid succession to the kinds of situations startups find themselves in. These are the people you want to be surrounded by when you're really fighting it out early on. Need a coder to wear a sysadmin hat for a few weeks? Done. Need a designer to crunch a spreadsheet? No problem. Need a technical founder to fix an HR problem? Handled.

Over the course of a day or a month or a year, a key person might do all sorts of tasks, with their variance in role inversely proportional to the age of the startup. But what they do in the short term is clearly identifiable. No dark matter to be found.
Formal Business Plan? 
I am working on startup and at the moment it's at the very early stages (hacking away coding trying to get the product developed).

When (if you ever) did you have formal business plan?

Was it useful to spend a lot of time on? How did you use it? Was it worth it?

What stage if your start-up currently? (this is as a reference point)
Cocoa with Love: Invoking other processes in Cocoa
This is more of a hrair problem. Most people have never knowingly encountered a million of anything at once (though of course everyone unknowingly encounters far more atoms than that all the time), but they can extrapolate that far. Taking a million of a million of something just requires a bit more extrapolation than someone not used to working with numbers can do automatically.

People do usually understand these things when put in terms of things they have encountered. Say that a million seconds is about 11.5 days, that a billion seconds is about 31.7 years, and that a trillion seconds is about 31.7 milennia. Most people will at least see the first distinction, and at least have some notion of the second.
They have blocked my friends @f1 account too. http://veetrag.net/2009/05/04/twitter-suspends-f1/
Also, it is good to use --git-dir to keep the .git directory outside webroot.