skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am building a set of cross-platform mobile applications. In order to get the application working on as many devices as possible, I am writing the same programs multiple times: in C++ (Windows Mobile & Symbian flavor), in Java (ME, Android, and Blackberry flavors), in Objective-C (iPhone flavor), and in one case even Flash. These are all different implementations of the exact same program written by the same programmer who has more than 10 years of exposure to Java and C++.

Without a doubt, the #1 biggest waste of time in coding the application is the manual memory management required in C++. Symbian C++ is particularly horrible, but the memory management still sucks even when I get to write "standard" C++. And, it sucks right from the beginning (which kind of smart pointer do I need here?) through the middle (does this API call take over ownership of this pointer or not?) all the way through the end (am I sure I got it all correct before I pay for this $200 signature?). I can take some shortcuts in the C++ versions because they have more memory to work with than the Java versions, but still the memory management is a much bigger hassle in the C++ versions than in the Java versions.
Zimbra Desktop Email Client 1.0 (Get It Free)
pg asked about it a while ago

that'd be here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=294321
Nitpick: these are all countries, not towns.
Sounds like it was awesome! An SO track is an innovation I've not heard of before but hope to see spread to other conferences.
Someone needs a hug.
Used Aeron chair... I love mine, but got it new a few years back, totally worth the $.

I tried all kinds of chairs before and the Aeron is the best. Exercise balls popped, cheap ones broke, and standing got old quickly.

You could also try standing up or using a treadmill but the treadmill I have doesn't have a good enough motor for long sessions at slow speed.
As previously noted, this article was written a while ago, and is somewhat critical of 'bad' GC's: Perl, Python & Java in particular. I think Perl is still using reference counting, which has its own drawbacks, but I think most would agree that Java's GC has grown to be pretty good over the years. And now there's C#, which seems to have a decent GC as well.
"What other alternatives are there?"

Unfortunately, I'm not sure there is one.

The problem is, as far as I can tell, there aren't any, or at least there weren't three years ago when I last looked. None of the knockoffs have the combination of support and breathability that makes the Aeron unusual.

One thing I'll say: if you're looking for Aerons, make sure you get one with lumbar support, which makes a tremendous difference. I've heard good things about Steelcase chairs -- see http://www.steelcase.com -- but they're not cheap either. We talk about them briefly here: http://blog.seliger.com/2008/06/15/tools-of-the-trade—what-a... .
Love the contents, hate the title.

Better would have been, "How to Behave Like a Normal Human Being Who Cares About Others, Likes to Have Fun, and Wants to Remain Receptive to Any Benefits That May Come His Way."

But I guess, "How to Work the Room" is sexier.
Is the backtester "script" executed server side? Why javascript?
Nice money for a month. Game looks interesting, too.

Is it better marketing or better quality, for an app without obvious universal appeal like this? Guess I'm wondering how the average user discovers apps...
I'm not sure what I'm missing, but what's so special about an Aeron chair? It sounds like it's real comfortable, but what does it have that other chairs don't?
I don't see how you're getting this formula, but if it spends 13/27 on GC after a 2x GC speedup, then it was 26/40 before, not 26/27.
Maybe it's just me, but I thought I had been watching the site go downhill in the past month or so. I have rarely found a submission I really wanted to upmod in that time.
My girlfriend's University won't let you use your laptop unless it has been "checked" by their technical staff.

If they say OK you will have the right to use your laptop in the University network.

The University offer technical expertize only for Windows (as a minimum you must have XP Professional).

Check this link for further informations:

http://web.hec.ca/virtuose/index.cfm?page=374

The page has an English version too.
If you end up using vim, here's my vimrc file. It's got soft tabs enabled, a color distinction between soft tabs and hard tabs, and keyboard shortcuts for creating and removing comments for various comment styles.

http://dotfiles.org/~tutwabee/.vimrc
I have to agree. I haven't found anything comparable yet.

About 2 months ago I searched really hard for a cheap used Aeron without luck. I opted for a $150 chair from Staples after trying out every one there and at OfficeMax. That chair is alright, but an Aeron is definitely worth the investment. I'm borrowing a friend's now and it is so much better. The benefits really kick in during long coding sessions.

I look at buying an Aeron as reducing future health bills. If you know you're going to be coding nearly every day for years, the ROI you'll get out of it is extremely good. Sitting in a crappy chair for 40+ hours per week for months on end makes my body feel like $!%@.
tptacek: Warning! Do not read this! Bad for your blood pressure. ;)

To everyone who still wants to read about that whole Ruby conference brouhaha: This is a nicely written apology for something that is almost certainly not this guy's fault. He apologizes anyway. Elegant and gracious.
In terms of cognitive load.
If people just ignored it, it would have gone away all on it's own. Instead they chose to shine the light on it, and countless more people were exposed to it, beyond the original 100 or so people in the room.
How long does the Ikea one last? The aerons are expected to last about 10 years from what I have heard. $40 a year is how I am trying to justify the purchase to myself.
"Briefly?" You're not kidding :-)

"Others prefer the Steelcase Leap Chair"

Was that it?
Nahum Sharfman, Founder Of Shopping.com, Dies In A Plane Crash
Make Money Sharecropping Your Face
Toiling away creating user generated content on the social web 2.0 sites like Youtube can be seen as sharecropping, but at some point you can convert your "attention economy" capital into real capital.
there's no point in anyone redoing it once they find those implementations, so the skills fall out of use

Yes, that's why all general-purpose languages' standard libraries use the same implementation of the same sorting algorithm for the default sort().
The presentation doesn't make the statement that women should be judged by their sexual attractiveness. It makes the statement that porn stars should be.
I'd say the presentation itself didn't do much damage to Ruby, but the pissing match between the bloggers sure did. Thanks to them there's no way I'm going anywhere near Ruby anytime soon.
As a somewhat heavy guy (230 lbs), I've found that some of the knockoff office chairs you can get cheaply ($100 or less) from Staples/Office Max/etc can fail in the pneumatic lift system. In fact many chairs at the above retailers have a tag suggesting a maximum weight limit of 200 lbs.

I bought this one a few years ago and it's still holding up perfectly. It has plenty of adjustments to it:

http://www.ergonomichome.com/zmeofch.html
Having engaged in some flame wars, without wanting it to happen, it did cross my mind that they could be tracked using some sort of detection of the height of the tree and the time between the replies. Also I think that's how pg tracked them before, because he enganged almost instantly to stop one I was involved recently.
Both screener and backtester are executed client side. Its very opensocial style of development. Also since this is private funded I dont have money for servers on server side.

Also for the non programmers...the applications can be made public so non programmers can use the public of applications.. Also the app developers like in opensocial can throw ads on the screeners.
I think the best alternative is the slightly cheaper Herman Miller Mirra.
Reminds me of when Reddit removed the vote count on anything less than an hour old. You could still view the vote by clicking details on the link.
I like the Steelcase Leap chairs (http://steelcase.com/na/leap_products.aspx?f=11852) and the Haworth Zody chairs (flash-based site, so here's a review instead: http://www.geek.com/articles/gadgets/review-haworth-zody-cha...) are really nice, but they're in roughly the same price range as the Aeron. Having more names to search for will help with finding a good deal, though, and while it's a lot of money upfront, it's not so much divided over 10+ years. (In interest of full disclosure: I work with the furniture industry.)

It also helps if you live in Michigan, near where they're produced, 'cos then you can get them off craigslist for cheap. :)

Also: The comfiest chair in the world won't make up for getting up and stretching periodically. The human body isn't really that well-suited to sitting, spending ten hours a day staring at something right in front of you, and typing.
We had Steelcase Think (http://www.steelcase.com/na/think_products.aspx?f=11845) where I used to work. They look fantastic with their mesh back and adjustable armrests, but they're really not that good. The seat cushion isn't adjustable and lots of them broke, they were quite flimsy.

The Leap chair does look a lot more adjustable and maybe more solid too.
But it happens every day, I remember advertisements going both ways. I don't watch much TV, but already a couple of years ago there was the Coke advert with the well trained building worker.
YouTube embeds ads in videos.
The game is actually pretty fun, it's definitely the only game I tend to play at least once a day. It has a good combination of being easy to pick up but still somewhat difficult. Games are also quick, perfect when you're on a bus or taxi and need something to do.
The Pirate Google
The offending image of the presentation was a female torso with underwear, that looked like a typical advertisement for underwear. If you say that is sexism, how can you at the same time say the same picture in a women's magazine is not sexism? I just wanted to point out that women consume that kind of images on a daily basis and never seem to freak out about it.
Could you upload or paste a (complete) example backtest script?
No, the talk portrayed porn stars as sex objects. The comparison was explicitly "bad database" == "ugly porn star", "good database" == "pretty porn star". You can't demand precise communication in one paragraph and then drastically read hidden meanings into things in another paragraph.

Besides, you would never demand the same level of precision in visual aids if he used lolcats rather than porn stars. I think that precise communication is simply a posthoc justification for your gut reaction.
The argument slapped onto this page that a Torrent site and Google are the same thing and TPB's ruling is hypocritical is bull!

With this search engine pirate google it takes you a google page that links to the pages on the torrent site. You click the Google result and then go to the torrent site to click and get your warez.

Im all for copyright change and it's revolution (which we have Hulu now), but this site's argument is weak!
watch it happen: http://twitter.com/linux_log
I actually had something specifically in mind. Google Taiwan had to fight to get special options onto the search page that could limit searches to Taiwanese websites ( http://www.google.com.tw/ ). Otherwise, most Mandarin language searches would be overwhelmed by results from China. The strong resistance they encountered at the time was that Google insisted on products being rolled out worldwide in a single version, minus minor variations like translations.

It's also a question of ethics in this case. This is about data that Google is directly providing, not simply a matter of ranking or showing/not showing websites in their results. It's not serving the user a purple background because they like purple. Think about another possible case--would it be right for Google to draw Israel as occupied Palestine in countries where the majority of people might hold that point of view?
I've used it for maybe six hour intervals with no noticeable problems.
This is just begging to be subverted by 4chan.
When you put it that way, it makes me ask if you _should_ as your parents for money for a better chair. Why not get a pillow to sit on? Or an additional cushion?

In any case, this doesn't answer your question: How do you get a decent paying job?

First off, decent paying is a flexible term. It means different things to different people. In the US a decent paying job has a wide variance even among members of the family based on age etc.

So my first advice is decide what (reasonable) pay rate you're aiming for. You want to be definite and exact. Don't pick a range, pick a minimum. Be reasonable. Finding a job paying you a college graduates wages will be much more difficult than an hourly rate slightly above what your friends are making.

Now, do your homework. Research. What jobs pay in that range? What skills do you have that people are willing to pay you for? Programming? Computer tech support? Etc.

Go, apply, sell yourself. Be confident.
I've had my Aeron for a couple of years now (bought it new for quite a bit more than $400) and I really don't get all the fuss.

It's not that adjustable: control the armrest height, how far you can recline, and the tension of the spring that holds you there. Mine has the newer style lumbar support, which is undeniably a hack. I keep it away from my back; it does nothing but push me further to the front of the chair. My biggest gripe, however, is the comfort of the seat. That damn plastic bar running across the front creates a horrible pressure point and probably increases the likelihood of DVT.

While I'm no advocate of the Aeron, I'm also unaware of any good alternatives. Looking forward to seeing what others suggest.
Futuristic Design Concepts We Wish Were Real
Identity thieves take aim at Facebook users
Do we even have flame wars? I'm a fairly active reader and I don't really remember ever seeing one on here.
I'm glad she doesn't accept the response given by Matt Amionetti. If you are still telling the offended party why they shouldn't be offended, you are not apologizing. Remaining unapologetic for perpetuating stereotypes about a marginalized minority is completely unacceptable.

This is all making me pretty ashamed of my peers, I would have hoped we were all past this. We all saw Anchorman, right? We all realize that was funny because that sort of treatment of women is archaic and obviously wrong, right? This is stuff that is behind us and below us and is being used by Hollywood to provide entertainment, there's no way such a new field should be struggling with anything close to it.

Disgusting.
I encountered this one in the wild today. I thought I could trust links mentioned by my friends on Facebook, but I guess not. My trust for Facebook is diminishing rapidly.

No, I didn't supply my log-in to the page phishing for that, but that app never should have been on Facebook's network to begin with.

See links at

http://news.google.com/news?q=%22Facebook+phishing%22

for more press on this event.
Hmmm...I just realized I am a pretty old-fashioned programmer. But I guess that comes with working in C++ (as a better C).

- One of my recent tasks was to implement a B-Tree and a Binary Tree. Also, I implemented merge-sort for another project.

- Our company does create it's GUI from scratch. No drag-and-drop magic there either.

- We use GOTO (sparingly). Mostly for error handling.

- We have our own memory managers and do malloc/free (+new/delete). So manual memory management as well.

- We have our own date conversion routines as well.

- We use NULL terminated C-strings everywhere!

- We do lots of things to make our code run faster. Some of these are probably strange!

I don't know if the article is poor or I am out of date! Anyone else out there feel the same?

In any case I would miss most of the above if I didn't have to do them.
Flight Control is a simple but great game! I'm only playing Flight Control and PocketGod when I'm have time for gaming on my IPhone.

As an IPhone game developer myself, I really appreciate their openess with their sales figure and that certainly is a motivating factor for us. I've also been collecting a list of sales numbers that other Iphone developers have released. Probably will write out a blog post with those resources when we launch our first game.

Will be interesting to see what PocketGod does.
Am I the only one that things memory is the last human attribute we want our computers to exhibit (selective, inaccurate, temporary, etc.)?

Seriously though it is an interesting concept, the idea of applying contextual memory to software, I just wish the article would have had more references, examples, etc. (in other words, "meat").

There is definitely creative power in the human mind's ability to create "memories" when it associates things based on context rather than the way they actually happened.
Just 2 days ago i watched a TED Talk by Niels Diffrient: Rethinking the way we sit down.
"Design legend Niels Diffrient talks about his life in industrial design (and the reason he became a designer instead of a jet pilot). He details his quest to completely rethink the office chair starting from one fundamental data set: the human body."

Its the Freedom Task Chair by Humanscale. http://www.humanscale.com/products/freedom_index.cfm

I think they are better than Aerons; not sure about the price though.
Spend the money and get your Aeron, or something of equal quality. I use the Steelcase Think. Your chair is one of the biggest factors in how many hours you are able to work, how well or poorly your back is aligned, and how comfortable you feel. Do -not- skimp on your chair; trim down spending on building your computer or on that second display if you need to.

If you're serious about your work, spending as much on a good chair as you do on your computer (usually less; a quarter as much for me) isn't begging too much. you can make the money back with the longer hours it lets you sit comfortably for and in the hospital bills you'll avoid from having a properly aligned back. It's also important to lift weights daily if you're going to be sitting in a chair all day working. It'll fix any adverse effects sitting from extended periods has and give you energy.

If you have trouble finding the money to afford the necessities for your work, I am always asked by clients to refer them to coders, and there are many freelance gigs floating around out there if you look.
They're started selling a lot at $0.99 so I would guess probably at least 70% of the total sales but still that is a great achievement having launched 2 months ago.
I'd like to sue Apple as well, because it makes people associate mac users with smug hipsters like Justin Long.
Miami Limo Services offer unprecedented Choices for All Occasions
Double meaning is the guy who picks up the litter in his nightclub.
WebKit gets a new JavaScript profiler courtesy of 280 North (YC W08)
I've had my $139 IKEA chair for 7 years and never had a problem with it.

http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/00074840
I discovered this game about 3 weeks ago when my boss said, "hey check out this new game." I played it for about 5 minutes. I bought it later on that night.
CompletionService - Under-appreciated Java Classes Part I
As a representative of kids and kid-ettes, that stuff is actually still taught. In addition to writing malloc and a proxy, we (I'm a TA) have labs that are designed to force students to disassemble and reverse engineer compiled code. Further, this is actually a required course for Computer Science majors and Electrical and Computer Engineers at my school.

We're keepin' it real

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~213/assignments.html
A Perfectionist Defines Tesla’s Design Language
Right, but last I heard it's still bleeding cash.
Hopleaf sounds great. I'll break out my skinny jeans for the occasion.
tried to sign up twice and got a "change you wanted was rejected" message
I still don't understand how this is being interpreted as a reflection on the community itself and not just seen as bush-league presentation skills by the company in question. (Not a Ruby developer. I thought the presentation was lame, but I've seen a lot of lame Powerpoints.)
They are ignored by most of the most active users here, which keeps them small and contained, because they never gain much karma, in most cases.
Just coming out of college in this economy, I don’t think an Aeron chair is a good choice. I will advice to just get something comfortable; I kea will be a good place to look.
They do have suggested weight limits, but as someone who's been over 300 lbs for years, I've found that these chairs are quite serviceable for about a year, on average. I've had my current $49 chair (from Office Depot) for about 10 months now, and it's doing fine so far.
Raynor chairs (quality) are sold under an Office Depot brand.

I own this chair. I believe it is the rebranded version of the Raynor Enjoy (once sold in Europe):

http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/277968/Realspace-PRO-M...

I looked hard at this chair. It is a rebranded Raynor Ergohuman:

http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/690690/Realspace-PRO-9...
Is it just me or does every GC is faster argument boil down to: "All working real world examples are noticeably slower, but trust me, I know of this amazing GC that's actually faster it's just not in production use anywhere yet."
I also wouldn't hear about it if everyone involved would simply shut the fuck up about it. I agree everyone's being defensive. But I don't need the fucking Magna Carta from these people. I'd just like to stop having to weed these stories out of the real Ruby news.
"Not so obvious pitfalls"? Don't put porn in professional presentations. Lesson learned. Can we move on?

Data point: I'm married to a female Rails developer. She thinks the presentation is retarded. But I'm pretty sure this one guy and his frat-boy-flavored social autism hasn't convinced her one way or the other on gender bias.
I'm glad to see an opinion like this. I think the Aeron's are mostly hype. They may be 5% or 10% better than something costing half as much, but mostly they just look really cool.
Nice 10 year old rant :-)
After sitting in a $800 Steelcase chair for over a year, I switched to a medicine ball and I'm never going back. It's impossible to slouch, and the constant subtle movements keep the blood in my legs and feet flowing. It's unbelievably fantastic.

Here's the one I bought from Amazon. It's absurdly durable (gym quality) and comes with a small pump to inflate it. For less than $20, it completely changed my desk posture. Even IKEA can't beat that.

http://bit.ly/n3hQb

It also fits easily in my backpack when deflated, which is good when one decides abruptly to move across the country.
Providing Dynamically Changeable Physical Buttons on a Visual Display
Did you read that post or just glance over it? By not so obvious pitfalls I was talking about the conscious vs. subconscious effects things like this has on us, which was the entire point of the article.
In what way are Manchester, Glasgow, Paris, Stockholm, Ballarat and Phillip Island, "countries" ?? Perhaps I've completely mis-understood your nitpick.

Besides, the originals are things near population centers. Technically some of the population centers are cities and not towns, but the term is sufficiently generic that I thought it was suitable.

And the things I've suggested are intended to be specific to hackers. The Flakirk wheel, for example, is technologically fantastic, and a tourist attraction, and a brilliant demonstration of Archimedes principle.

Similarly the others are, to my thinking, of interest to hackers.

Hence the question.