skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm part of the latest cohort (co-founder, www.accredible.com) and I have found the programme to be enormously valuable. If you're starting an edtech company it's definitely worth going for. Really excited about the new format for the next cohort; some awesome changes. Happy to talk at length about my experiences if people request it. Also happy to chat with anyone interested in applying!
> It's in fact very, very difficult to find a platform where that example won't work

No, it isn't. Many ARM processors will bus error on that code if (foo & 3) != 0. I believe PowerPC doesn't do unaligned word reads either...

It quite often has to do with the memory controller and not with the particular processor, though I believe x86 has to support unaligned reads. I've certainly worked first hand with ARMs that did not support it.
MinoMonsters (YC W11) is looking for engineers
We’re looking for skilled and passionate engineers to join us at Minomonsters. Minomonsters is a highly profitable iPhone game hell-bent on becoming the next huge family brand. You’ll get to be part of our journey as we expand from the screen to the offline world with a range of new products, from books, to toys and even TV. We're a tiny, well-funded team backed by some of the best investors including Y Combinator, Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel and others.

========

Technical requirements:

* Experience with iOS (Objective-C + Cocos2D)

* Experience architecting game clients

* Experience creating high performance products on iOS

* Passion for design patterns and high quality, maintainable code

========

Other requirements:

* Ability to thrive in a fast paced startup environment

* A love for the social & mobile games industry

* Meticulous attention to detail in code and user experience

* Able to connect and empathize with our players

* Undying passion for games

========

Responsibilities:

* Frontend game client development on exciting new features

* Contribute to the design and direction of the product

* Bring features to life by paying close attention to user experience

* Work closely with artists and designers

========

Bonus points:

* Multiplayer/networking

* Experience with Ruby/EventMachine

* A history of building games

========

We offer generous equity and a highly competitive compensation package with great perks.

Interested? jobs@minomonsters.com

Make sure you include something you’ve built that you’re proud of.
Market quavers after fake AP tweet says Obama was hurt in White House explosions
That looks cool, but it's solving a different problem.

The app I linked to is basically a clock that shows you your local solar times (day, night, golden hours, and twilight) at a glance, and can set alarms by them. If you want to wake at civil dawn, or at sunrise, for example, it'll do that.
Jacking everybody else's internet subculture for your mainstream, bland and toned down for-profit site is nothing new. I remember ebaumsworld stamping everything on earth with their logo that they didn't create, same with I Can Haz Cheeseburger? blatently ripping off all the caturday user content uploaded to 4chan.

If it exist on the internet and is hilarious somebody will steal it and milk it to the masses for money.
This is great. Building forms and managing email is indeed painful. Sometimes you just want to have a form pop up and a message sent. I personally dislike mailto links because I am always jumping between computers and browsers that are not properly set up to send email via my gmail account. Don't let the negative posts here discourage you. Good luck!
Depends, infinite scrolling can be and has been done right [0], but it's really not the focus of the feature -- it's a product.

[0] http://warpspire.com/experiments/history-api/
I agree. It seems like supporting science through ignorance is missing the point.
> Firefox quirk - When specifying a value for the attribute, Firefox will not automatically give the file the correct file extension like Chrome does.

I think the quirk is the other way around. I always dislike it when Chrome suddenly decices to add a ".txt" extension to the file I've just downloaded. It sometime even does this .js files.
Maybe I just haven't seen it done right - do you have some example links?
For Apple app store, that list seems to correspond more to where App store is available to users. It might not correspond to the same list for developers.
"Most popular science page on Facebook", if true in any meaningful sense, does not describe a "little guy", or gal in this case.
The author makes good points but to me the launch is less about product validation and more about kicking the tires on the infrastructure. It's all noise and is relatively worthless (especially if you are getting feedback from techies on a non-techie product) but you can certainly tighten the screws after your system gets a real honest pounding.
I've been here before I knew anything about web programming. This is a need real site owners have. And, I've watched people stumble on mailto links because an unconfigured mail client opens up and other issues.

However, I think Wufoo, Jotform, Google Forms and CRMs have snapped up a lot of the market. There aren't left many people who know little enough to only have mailto as an option but don't know so little they can't search for solutions.

As for those complaining that they like mailtos: they are appeased by providing a contact email address along with the form. This is the way to maximize retention (and hopefully receive only a little more spam.)
The bottom line is this:

1. Elise Andrew is making money off IFLS. (Whether or not she's giving it out to charities is non-relevant.)

2. IFLS' success rests largely on the high quality content created by artists, scientists, photographers

3. A small part of IFLS' success rests on Andrews' eye for picking out good/funny/clever quotes/cartoons/photographs/artwork

Given (1) and (2), I'd say not only is IFLS largely indebted to the artist/photographer/science community at large, but not attributing work is an incredibly selfish thing to do. Whether she didn't attribute the work out of laziness, negligence or malice is non-relevant. My only point is that IFLS is a very good target for the blog post.

If someone stole my code and used it without attribution and to make money off of it, I would be pissed. If someone that's received the major media attention IFLS has stole my code and used it without attribution to make money, I'd be even more pissed.

Also note that artwork can have varying licenses, as well - similar to MIT, GPL, etc. licenses we see in source code. Some licenses preclude all non-endorsed distribution. She's had a ton of media coverage in the past 6 months (especially after the whole Twitter thing), so the "small corner of the internet" argument won't fly.

Neither will the "Reddit/9gag/etc. does it" argument. Reddit, for example, is a mass-user-driven aggregate. Reddit can't possibly police all posts and ensure that attribution is given. Conversely, the IFLS page is not an aggregate. Andrews picks the images very carefully and in a conscious manner; in the latter case, there is clearly room for attribution.

However, I think that IFLS has garnered the same type of militant defenders as /r/atheism/ or fans of Carl Sagan (or, more recently, NDGT). Ironically, this type of blind following is exactly what the aforementioned groups are trying to dissolve. Andrews screwed up. Badly. This is not a rookie mistake; it's something she could get sued for. Lets leave it at that.. enough with the apologists.

Edit: I would just like to re-iterate that the burden does NOT lie on the artists to scour the internet looking for mis-attributed pieces of artwork. But rather, on the distributor of the work. Just about every judge in existence would agree with this.
If the files were being served with a text/plain MIME type, it's sensible behavior for Chrome to add .txt, and it's the site's fault for sending the wrong type info.
What about when the technology becomes invisible? Imagine a tiny screen that is in the corner of where the earpiece of glasses meet the lens, or by the nose bridge. Then you won't know if someone is wearing it. Also the video camera can become almost hidden also. At that point, people may become suspicious of anyone wearing thick horn-rimmed glasses.
My recommendation would be to consider adding CS as minor or double major. Then try and get some internship and/or on campus lab experience doing software or robotics work (robotics software is pretty close to flight software). Another great way to get experience is to get involved with extra-curricular group doing some kind of robotic or aerospace challenge. Think DARPA grand challenge, NASA Sample Return Robot challenge, or one of AUVSI's robotics competitions.
No idea why you think I would rather not use my email client that is configured correctly, doesn't require I state my email address, possibly has sig file and ensure that only people with the latest and greatest browsers can contact the business that implements this.

People have been griping about crappy contact forms with no option to use real email forever, this is so retrograde.
Usability checklist - Catch common usability problems before user testing.
I've been working on a problem that this browser extension would solve really well. I've got a photo gallery with a hundred thousand photos in it where I implemented near-infinite scroll by creating a really tall div and then drawing about 2x as many thumbnails as are needed to fit in the current viewport, which is updated when the user scrolls. They are square thumbnails so it is easy to calculate exactly where to position each of them.

The advantage of this over infinite scroll is that the scrollbar is always there and always accurate, so coming back to the page after following a link works properly. Also, I don't have to send the information about all 100k photos on page load (I can load it with AJAX).

A demo of how it works is at http://beta.hypercheese.com/search, and the code is at http://github.com/jewel/hypercheese/.

It sounds like having this in the browser will allow for much more complex layouts.
Some advice to young graduate students
By the sound of it, they didn't convince 6k to convert, they convinced 6k to have a look.

"“Launching” screws with your metrics – and you need clean metrics to evaluate and iterate on your business. If you see 6000 signups on day one and 2000 on day two, you can be mislead about the strength of your vision. It clouds your ability to single out the passionate users and understand their usage patterns."

[...]

"You can demonstrate growth by finding one passionate user, and then ten, and then 100 instead of taking in 6000 sign-ups to find 111 passionate ones."

That was the main thing I got from it anyway. They launched and missed and then... :/

I do feel kinda bad for them.
I almost never spend more than a few seconds considering register allocation/naming when writing assembly (part of this is because x264's abstraction layer lets macros swap their arguments, so you don't have to track "what happens to be in xmm0 right now" mentally). In some rare cases it can get tricky when you start pushing up against the register cap, but that's exactly the case where the compiler tends to do terribly, and you'd want to do it yourself.

The pain of not having a proper macro assembler in C intrinsics is orders of magnitude worse than having to do my own register allocation in yasm, so for now, yasm is the lesser of two evils.
Eh. Even folks in my own social circle don't think twice about "checking in" on Facebook with tags on all of their friends, and then posting photos of the event as it's happening to Instagram. A not insignificant fraction can't be relied upon not to completely check out of reality for extended messaging sessions. And that's a generation (yikes) past where all the real innovative group sharing stuff is happening (high school).

I'm not saying Google Glass, or something like it, will succeed, or that it won't face social obstacles of the kind the author describes. But I'm not at all convinced those obstacles are insurmountable if it provides value.
Eh. And the iPad was destined to be a failure as "just a big iPhone".

I'm unwilling to predict the success of Glass, but I'm also unwilling to predict its demise. The jury hasn't even yet convened, much less come close to making a verdict.

For one thing, there seems to be a misunderstanding about the product. If the device is recording, a green light illuminates on the device - there's no missing it. Like jvrossb said also, the device doesn't cover your whole eye - if you're reading something on its screen you're very visibly looking up and to the side.

The "this will fail social norms" card has been played many times, and it has come to pass, but it hasn't been the core of a product failure. We went through growing pains when people friended everyone on Facebook and then realized what a bad idea it was to post pictures from their wild night out where their boss can see it.

We've almost entirely solved that problem now, and Facebook continues to see high engagement and picture sharing.

We also suffered through a few years of people staring into their phones at the dinner table. Social etiquette changed and now it's taboo.

In almost all cases social norms have shifted in response to new technology - our sense of what is appropriate socially is not a stationary target. If Glass can offer something people want, we will work around its social problems. The real trick is if Glass will actually offer something substantial people want.
Most people who comment have something critical to say. Most people who up-vote don't have something critical to say and so they don't comment. I up-voted the submission and hate mailto links. You can't really judge the landscape here based on a few comments.
We'll cross that bridge when we get there?

Incidentally, a couple days ago I spoke to someone wearing sunglasses. I did not find myself wondering if he was zoning out even though I couldn't see his eyes because there were other indicators that he was engaged. I did not check to see if the iPhone in his pocket was recording, nor did I really focus on his button up shirt to see if there was a tiny camera recording me.

In an essentially pre-Glass world all the technology needed to zone out in social situations while surreptitiously recording audio and video already exists and is accessible, yet I've never really worried about it. I strongly suspect this is a made-up problem. There may be many issues with Glass, but my hunch is this won't be one of them.
Ask HN: How Do You Deal With Companies That Balk On Guarantees?
Recently booked a trip on Expedia when my wife discovered a lower price on Priceline. She then discovered that Expedia had a "Best Price Guarantee". Supposedly, with this "guarantee" you get the difference back, plus a $50 travel voucher.

After submitting the claim form, we quickly received a canned response from Expedia that stated we'd used a guest checkout to make the purchase, instead of being signed-on to an Expedia account. Supposedly, per their terms, only the latter qualified for the guarantee.

I first pointed out that I actually have an Expedia account under the same e-mail address with which we booked, but just didn't happen to be signed in. No dice.

Then we noticed the real problem: This supposed restriction is actually nowhere to be found on their site, including the very specific Terms & Conditions of the guarantee:

http://www.expedia.com/p/info-other/guarantees.htm (click Terms & Conditions link on that page)

When we pointed this out over a couple subsequent e-mail exchanges, some guy named "Luther" just kept copying and pasting the same reply:

"We apologize for the inconvenience this may cause you. We are unable to process your Best Price Guarantee request, since we are only allowed to process Best Price Guarantee claims for reservations that was booked under regular Expedia.com account. We do sympathize with your situation and wish we were in a position to do more; however, we need to comply with the rules and restrictions of the Best Price Guarantee program."

It seems that this program and their handling of it is specifically designed to enrage customers by offering something then reneging, with exclusions and undefined "gotchas", then repetitive responses, clearly intended to frustrate.

Has anyone else encountered this with Expedia or similar with other companies' "guarantees"? How did you deal with it?
It would be socially unacceptable to be perpetually reachable via phone or email as well.
>"Be here right now" will be a new (renewed) mantra.

I completely agree with this, and am trying to be more mindful and in the present. I don't want Google Glass. That said....

>I am absolutely certain it won't be socially acceptable to >be video or audio recording people around you without their >permission

We've come to accept a LOT in the past few years. Pre-Facebook, people found it very weird to look for people online. A campus directory (it had first and last names, and email addresses) was called 'The Stalker'.

From Surveillance Cameras, to handing over data to corporations, to warrantless wiretapping, we've adapted very quickly to losses of privacy.

The one thing that might make google glass different is that it's very personal, while the other privacy violations are abstract and don't intrude on social interactions.

But all it takes is a few people in a group for recordings to seem 'normal'. Most of us aren't leaders. We look to see what other people find acceptable, and base our opinions on the perception of the group consensus.

To be clear, I don't like the idea of pervasive interpersonal video recording without consent. But I think the idea will gain acceptance more easily than this author admits.
My understanding of types took a big step forward when I read some of Robert Harper's stuff. In particular, the blog post, Dynamic Languages are Static Languages, and his book, Practical Foundations for Programming Languages. (The book is a tome and I've only read parts of it but it's very good).

When it comes to understanding memory in C, another important aspect is understanding how linkers and loaders work. Also, it's good to know something about calling conventions.
If the client is asking for an implementation as per your example, you already have a major problem (and are in a race to the bottom as a supplier). The spec should be expressed purely in terms of business outcome (e.g. I need a system that can handle more transactions within the next 3 months). (Not to mention that the most interesting and valuable requirements are usually the ones that the client doesn't yet know about.)

Second problem with this scenario is that if you are charging a fixed amount for a complete system, you are assuming all the risk (and essentially selling a form of product). Generally that's a lousy deal for a client on build cost and maintenance of a bespoke system. Few desired business outcomes are so unique that they require a bespoke solution - so this should really be a very niche business, not the norm at all.
I thought this was about GNU Hurd and was disappointed it's just some schlocky rewards fluff. If you want to reward your loyal customers make your punted junk cheaper nobody cares about points
they should charge him with impersonating a federal officer
Out of stock of or out of suck?
It would look like any other encrypted information, but I'm unsure that the traffic patterns themselves wouldn't be distinctive.
Non-Technical Potential Entrepreneurs: Don't Learn How to Program
Clicked your dropbox link, thought "those look familiar", check back, it's velocio!
I like mailto links myself, but I'm not sure I'm representative. I've gotten much better response rates from contact forms than mailto links when I've tried them.

I'd like to see some more solid data on it, but my speculation is that: 1) many users have misconfigurations that result in clicking on a mailto: link not going to the email client they usually use; 2) other users are scared off when clicking on a web link doesn't open a web page like they expect, but instead opens up some other app on their computer; and 3) a final set of users balk at sending an email once they realize it's an email, because it feels too personal and complex (you've got to compose an actual letter, with a "Dear so-and-so").
LulzSec was nothing more than a few script-kiddies trying to act tough by causing mayhem for no reason other than for the "lulz" if they found the leader, great work. Anyone with access to Government information who abuses that power without a noble cause deserves to be jailed.
That is not what memory barriers are for, at all. Memory barriers are a sequencing primitive for shared-memory concurrency (an excellent intro is here: http://lxr.linux.no/linux/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt). They are never required for correctness in valid single-threaded programs.

The memory barrier "fixed" this program similarly to how a cruise missile "fixes" a termite problem. It was just a coincidence and it was the wrong tool for the job.
Unless you were part of Lulzsec, there's no way to know how far reaching they were. The Internet isn't specific to one or two countries after all.

And I'm not really sure if Lulzsec "died" either. There are plenty more able and willing people on IRC. Besides, I doubt any one person is at the helm of this boat to begin with.
Here's my question: surreptitious recording is not a new invention. People are already constantly connected to the internet to the point of distraction. Richard Nixon is a testament to the former. The dinner game where the first person to touch their phone pays is testament to the latter. The only real difference I can see between Glass and current recording devices and smartphones is that Glass is conspicuous.

So, why is Glass scaring so many people? The conspicuous part? The Google factor where a big company is gathering the data? I'd honestly love to know why it causes such a visceral reaction.
How hard is it to move an existing account?
This is probably one of the best advices I've read in recent weeks. It's exactly why for Fork the Cookbook[0] we only ever soft-launched. No Show HNs, no sending out messages to Techcrunch or whatever.

We've learned from our experience with Strangers for Dinner, and agree very much with the author's sentiments that "“Launching” screws with your metrics – and you need clean metrics to evaluate and iterate on your business."

Even for Fork the Cookbook, we're not there yet with Product/Market fit, and our marketing activities have changed a lot since being set live to the public at the end of Jan/beginning of Feb.

[0] http://forkthecookbook.com (can't resist spruiking now, can I?)
I'd agree with you if most comments were critical and some were positive but were zero positive reviews.

Also, often I see people shoot off one liner comments praising a website. So it's easy for people to praise when they like a post.
any C library involving image manipulation is likely going to have code similar to what you've described

...which actually is exactly how I found out first-hand that it doesn't always work. If you only ever test on x86 you'll never catch it. You might not even catch it on ARM if you're lucky.

Which is the point - that compilers can and do make use of almost all undefined behavior of C for optimizations, which one developer might not catch because their current compiler happened to work. Then a new version is released that can find and exploit more undefined behavior. And strict aliasing is one of those rules you can't safely violate.
Yeah, I should've used a different word; I considered making an edit. I feel bad for them as well, but more out of sympathy for the experience of having the wind taken out of your sails.

I don't necessarily agree that it's bad data either, just that it needs to be weighted appropriately. He's right though that it would be better to have gained this knowledge slowly instead of as one big bang. That would give them more chances to course correct without so much external attention.