skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If one could write blogs and ecommerce sites using MyISAM (shrudders) then why wouldn't SQLite work? MyISAM had -- at least in theory, I have not done any benchmarks -- even worse concurrency than SQLite.
Being a software engineer is still a kick-ass job compared to almost anything else out there today.

No, I really don't think so. If I were to do it over again, I would rather be an Alaskan fishing boat operator than a software engineer doing 99% of the stuff that paid programmers have to do.

My body is mediocre. It works, there's nothing wrong with it, and I'm probably in the top 33% for physique, but I'm not Olympic material, so using my body for mediocre physical work does not offend me. It seems about right.

I think I would be happier in medieval times when there was no expectation that a smart person would do high-quality work. You did harsh physical work for 45 years and then died. Seems more fulfilling than this corporate bullshit where a bunch of well-connected high priests don't merely do less work and make more money, but the fuckers think they earned it!

My mind, on the other hand, is Olympic material and any time someone tries to coerce me into using it for the grunt work they don't want to do, it just makes me homicidal.
They won't block until it's full. That's still blocking, and you can still get deadlocks from it.
Stress-Testing Software for Deep Space
The way this article is written really kind of irks me. The stock warrants were there as a guarantee in case Tesla defaulted on the loan, so that if they defaulted the government would have some collateral to collect in order to lower it's financial risk.

Tesla paid off the loan (good for them for doing so). So the loan collateral doesn't get collected.

"Depriving" the government of this stock, after paying off the loan, is folly.

If you take out a loan to buy a car, you put the car itself up as collateral for the loan. You can either pay off the loan, and keep the car, ir you can default on the loan, and lose the car.

Tesla just did the same thing except they used "car company" instead of "car".

Being snarky that Telsa "deprived" the government out of the loan collateral is akin to saying that you think the bank should own your car after you pay off your car loan, because you're depriving the bank of the value of the car, since you paid it off and they won't collect on the collateral.

What planet does this author live on where loan guarantors get both the loan payment and the collateral? Because I'd like to go there and loan the author every penny I can.
Tesla S and the Faux grill
Advertising.

Imagine being being able to go to an advertiser and say "we have every important metric on the behaviours and desires of young people".
Also, the smart phone market isn't a monopoly. And the copy-left nature of Android goes a long way to assuring that it never will be.

This protects Google (and many other companies) from Apple leveraging their market dominance into other markets.
Predation by foxes aided by Earth's magnetic field
Sorry for the confusion. No, I don't intend VC-istan to be pinned on a specific location. There's definitely a New York VC-istan, and probably a VC-istan for every city that has a serious VC scene.

However, people use "Silicon Valley" to mean VC-istan, but Silicon Valley is something much bigger (at least in time, because it goes back about 70 years).
Can't you set the default for uploaded photos to private? That would seem to solve the issue of using it to archive everything, and then let you selectively choose what to share.
Windows zero day vulnerability publicly exposed by Google engineer
Pre-SQLite, I used the Excel OLEDB provider for a simple data store. Basically, each sheet is a table, and once you have a connection, you can run SQL against the workbook. "SELECT * FROM [People]" works mostly as expected, and ranges can be specified like "SELECT [People$A] FROM [People$A2:Y314]"
For a while, inspired by the Django Book, I toyed with the idea of doing something similar for screenplays and building a community where people could offer feedback on those or other creative writing endeavors. It ended up looking like I'd have to implement it myself, but if you're building a web application already then this feature alone shouldn't add too much to your dev time.

My naive plan was just to give each comment-able item (eg. a paragraph) a specific ID, and having a many-to-one relationship with comments to paragraphs. I never followed through, so I'm not sure what pitfalls you'd likely encounter doing it that way.
Seems like a disadvantage to me. It's mostly just confusing and the only thing it affords is the ability to use :keywords as functions (:like so) which is just sugar for property access, so["like"]. This is broken, though.

The coolest thing about :keywords in Clojure is that they really are functions and you can do things like (map :keywords ontoSomething) to extract the same property out of many things. It don't work in Wisp.
For me it is a very real question of whether "can Go achieve C latency" because if I'm going to deploy a Go application it is going to be to replace very performance critical components that are currently written in C. If they weren't latency sensitive neither C nor Go would be my choice (I'd go higher up the abstraction hierarchy to make it easier to write, easier to maintain etc).

If Go can't do that (or can't do that yet) it's fine by me, I'll just let it bake a few more years and reassess, but there have been tons of articles lately talking about how great Go's performance is. I'm just curious if that is an artifact of the original languages being compared to, or if it has broken through to C levels of latency. If it has, it becomes a lot more interesting to me.
I was just assuming that your numbers were correct.

Just to be clear, these are not my numbers, they are Microsoft's numbers. If the weight is really 1.3476 lbs and Microsoft reports it as 1.3, the number is "correct" and they've told no lie, but it is certainly unfair to print the competing number to an extra digit (1.44). On the other hand, if the weight is really 1.3476 and they reported it as 1.30 that would be a flat-out lie (as in "class action lawsuit for false advertising"). So, did they print it as "1.3" instead of "1.30" because zeros aren't first-class numbers, or because the zero would be a lie? As I said earlier, I'm willing to believe that it is probably really 1.30, but none of us know that for sure -- Microsoft has made no statement about what comes after the 3.

Regarding (B), we have "cents" because we consider two digits after the decimal point to be significant in most contexts (not on your U.S. federal tax forms, if my memory is correct, since you are instructed to supply only whole dollar amounts, and not for stock prices that may have many more significant digits than 2 after the decimal). If you put an item on a digital scale it displays either 1.3 or 1.30 or 1.300 depending on how many digits are considered significant. To do a side-by-side comparison where you are treating the 2nd digit after the decimal as significant in one case but not in another is odd.
Ideal for semester project.

Works great! Made my day.

Thanks Github
Ah, well good that someone likes it! I haven't tried a newer thinkpad machine, I've just heard lots of complaints from friends.
Get users, make sales, and you will succeed.

That's the way I try to look at it. Nobody locally (RTP, NC area) seems to pay much attention to us or give us any credit, where when I look at what we're doing I can't help but think "What? Are you people crazy? Do you realize how fricking awesome this stuff is?" But then I have to acknowledge that I'm (very) biased, and that our focus should be on identifying, connecting with, and having conversations with, our future customers. Getting press mentions, getting invited to events, accepted into accelerators / incubators, etc., all those things ultimately play second fiddle to customers.

IF the day comes when we have paying customers and are growing, then the accolades and attention will come. Or not. In the end, it doesn't really matter. If we build a profitable, growing, successful business, it doesn't really matter if we get any accolades or not. Although it does pain my "inner Tony Stark" to say that, as I really want to have a big "Fogbeam Expo" one day. :-)

Net-net, I just try to remember "we haven't proven anything yet".
After reading that other article about GoogleX, it kind of makes sense when you piece it all together.

Remote power generation running wireless access points on airborne Makani generators and/or balloons. Bringing the net, and therefore Google, to third-world areas that can't get online right now.
Best Sandwich ever
Sunday Shooter - How'd we do?
In a lot of ways, smartphones behave like social software. Their value is largely defined by how many third parties are writing apps for them, which is largely defined by how big the market share is.
Ah, OK. Gotcha.
I think a lot of people get bit by small stdio buffers and switch to mmap, not realizing that read() based solutions can be improved greatly by better buffering strategies.
I just consider what code would be correct. Does it do the right thing? Is it concise and clear? Is it stable, given all expected inputs?

I worry about optimization and all of the other details later.
This is true. :) Our definition of "realtime" is slightly different than a CS definition. Sub-1s end to end time usually falls under "realtime" when it comes to the web, but it depends on what the subject is of course. In our case, that's perfectly acceptable. We're obviously shooting for lower, but at this point, we can't do much to improve network latency and other factors involved. So for now... this is good. :)
Acer adds a 16GB variant of its C7 Chromebook with a solid-state drive
Yo dawg, we heard you like Start buttons, so we put one on your mouse
The point that you missed is that you can either play catch up, or you can change the game. MS has the resources to change the game, but they lack the ability to do it.
Of course. I'm not saying that they're 100% async, just defending the fact that they're not 100% blocking.
Without rooting for one or the other. Bigger is not a measurement. Bigger is relative to the method of measurement/definition, and its comparison with a second one. If screen size is measured/defined by its diagonal, than the screen is bigger.
I cannot google that address.Can you provide a link?
The rise? Has anyone not paid attention to history? Entrepreneurs have always directly influenced policy.
I have a daydream
Is it renewable if you're still a student after the year is up?
Simple Background Jobs in Ruby
I know that he didn't receive any scarring externally. My point was that anything that can do things like that externally could have resulted in very bad things internally.
Free storyboard illustrations
No one has mentioned the use of a lightning rod on the roof to provide an alternate path. Does anyone know how effective these are in practice?
Social is different. A computing platform with 50% market share (or even 15% market share, as evidenced by the Mac) will still have tons of apps. A social network with 50% market share is something where half of everyone's friends will be on the competing network.
The AWS price sheet says that the 77TB would be $6570/month delivered from Amazon. So it's not far out of the range that people are accustomed to paying for this kind of data.
dang it, sry for my use of the word "only". However, what you mention here is one of the things i had in mind when i said "antiquated hobby".
yep, as someone who had to go to the ER earlier this year I can attest to the high bills. I spent more time in the billing office than I did being attended by medical staff.

Tip: if you so much as bumped your head (such as falling over when hit by lightening) emphasis this. A head injury will bump you to the top of the queue (most of the people queuing should not be in the ER in any case, but are for a number of reasons)
I really don't get this tax witch hunt. Is anyone actually saying that Apple is illegally sheltering revenue from being taxed?

If so, have the IRS bring them to court and prove their case.

If they're legally using the elephantine tax code to their advantage, and you don't like the advantage they can take of that tax code, then fix the tax code.

You can't just "tell" Apple to pay more in taxes if they're adhering to the laws, and you can't just make up laws that apply to some companies/persons/whatever that don't apply to everybody.
I was an X.org hacker a few years ago. X predates me.

X is (very) roughly the size of GCC. It's massive and it's nearly entirely C, with a few modern Python scripts to generate some of the more onerous tables. There are many old libraries, and they are horrifying. Eldritch, cyclopean, etc.
Why Switching to RackSpace Mail is Worth the $2
It is just the way it is (currently) done - displays are compared by the length of their diagonals, aspect ratio is ignored. Which consumer has an idea what 291 cm² vs 281 cm² of screen area means? Which customer distinguishes between 32" 16:9 and 32" 16:10? No one does that. Everybody has an idea of the size of his 10" tablet - nobody even cares if it is 10", 10.1" or 10.2" let alone the aspect ratio - his 17" notebook and his 42" TV and that is what they use for rough comparisons. As far as consumers are concerned display size is diagonal length.

So by giving the two numbers 9.7" and 10.1" they gave away all information consumers will look at. What are the alternatives? Not giving the numbers? Not good, consumers want to know display sizes. Adding the aspect ratios 4:3 and 16:9? Nobody cares to calculate what that implies. They could have left out the sentence saying that the 10.1" display is larger, but every consumer reading 10.1" and 9.7" already decided on their own that 10.1" is bigger.

So yes, this is not scientifically accurate, but good enough for consumers. And the few percent that care about 10 cm² more or less and resolutions or pixel densities - both not given in the add - are able to figure out the details on their own.
Passive Racist Voice (aka how not to be a dick)
You said you left the Valley. Where'd you go? How do you like it?

I'm in New York. In 2005-7, it just seemed obvious that if you were young and wanted to have a career, you moved to the Valley or New York. However, I don't think it's that way anymore (if it ever was).

I'm trying to figure out where the future is, because the Bay Area's been parasitized by NIMBY and acq-hires and lost its vitality, and New York VC-istan's pretty damn uninspiring. Austin and Seattle seem like strong candidates.
That's very interesting. I'm making a note of this for inclusion in the book.
It doesn't seem inconceivable that wearing shoes takes you out of the path of least resistance as compared to some other path, say, the metal-framed shelving you are standing next to. I don't think wearing shoes is any kind of practical way to avoid getting hit by lightning but the 'kilometers of air' argument seems sort of wrongheaded. You don't need to become a more resistant path to ground than a kilometer of air - you just have to be more so than other paths. How long the discharge traveled to form that path doesn't really matter.
When this happens, it seems like it tends to be exposing a fault in the design of the program. In a purely asynchronous system you can obviously avoid deadlocking in interprocess communication while still having a system that never correctly converges.
If you want to put your eggs in reliable baskets then why not use Java, or C#, or even C++. Those languages are most definitely not going to go anywhere anytime soon.
Yep. Although, "I just want to" is a fine reason, as long as you know what you're getting yourself into.
Wouldn't this would be irrelevant when you went to a store and saw both side-by-side?

You can fluff your marketing all you want with any kinds of images. As soon as the consumer sees it up close and personal in real life, the jig is up.
My point is that there are actually very few concurrency problems where deadlocks are solved by increasing the buffer size by some fixed amount. If you want your code to be correct, in most cases a buffer size of 100 might as well be a buffer size of 1, except that an increased buffer size can improve performance for some scenarios.

When people talk about asynchronous channels, they usually mean that you can stream messages to another actor and know that you won't block. That is not true for Go channels. You can increase the buffer size, but that just reduces the chance that your program will deadlock: it doesn't make a Go channel work in situations where you need an asynchronous channel for your program to be correct.
I presume Xbox One pricing is still being hotly discussed to figure out how much of a loss they can sell it for and make up the profit in Xbox Live services and software.
Cakewalk Releases Music Creator 6 Touch on Steam
Isn't this exactly what happened to Preston Tucker?
Is Bottle limited to a single file? I have never really played with it. If so, I'd definitely say that it's an advantage for Flask.
That's a good question. In strictly financial terms, it would be hard to quantify, because you wind up talking terms of subjective measures like "user good will" and "brand perception" etc. There might not, in fact, even be a strictly financial argument that favors doing this.

I still think it's the Right Thing To Do though. I know the old saw about "don't be evil" is probably over quoted and that it's just a tagline and not a binding legal agreement, but for a company like Google, given their history and reputation, this feels wrong.
thanks for writing this - i'm about to be a 'work from home' contractor so all the advice I can get helps!
C is fundamentally difficult when it comes to miss-allocation of memory.

intp = malloc(int); looks almost exactly the same as int*p = malloc(int); bit will work on a 32 bit system. Now imagine working with variable sized stucts over a 20,000 line code base you start to see the issue.
Sure, a program that uses a channel with a large buffer size as if it were an asynchronous channel contains a bad bug. The point is that if you need such an asynchronous channel, Go doesn't provide it. There are many possible examples of programs that need truly asynchronous channel functionality in which using a channel with a large buffer size would expose the program to subtle deadlocks that may only manifest in the wild on large data sets.
Two years.
Well ... I think it is much simpler than that - startups are in a buyer's market. We have oversupply of startups concentrated in few relatively narrow classes of problems. So the most connected people win.

Which is paradoxical because the uncharted areas today are bigger than ever - but there are not much ships sailing there. Maybe the "solve problems that you have" mantra is becoming too influential. So we have two tracks - one of people with common problems and the tech skills to solve them and the other - much bigger - people that have real problems but lack the skills to solve the problems.

But we got success stories like Raspberry Pi - when people tried to solve a problem they didn't have but created something awesome in the process.

And just today Google bought a flying wind turbine startup - and it does not look like aqui-hire.
I wouldn't call that canonical. You can take a further step, as in the Linux version that someone posted below:

http://kernelnewbies.org/FAQ/LinkedLists
This looks really interesting - but I had couple questions I couldn't find answers to.

The FAQ mentions that the annual operating cost is about $12,000/yr, including "growing supplies, electricity, water, and labor." What's the breakdown? I'm kind of surprised, I'd expect electricity costs (for fully artificial light and heating the container through the winter) to be much higher.

Also - is there a reason this is better than a greenhouse - where at most you'd need to supplement light during the winter months, as opposed to providing year-round artificial light for all the plant's needs?

And finally - the sentence: "LEDs don't put off heat" isn't true. Might want to get that taken out.
"Openness ... is part of the culture"

It seems that there are any of a number of non-open parts to the Google culture. How many server machines do you all have? How are dirty SEO methods detected and thwarted? What are the details on the influence made by the $18M spent in lobbying D.C. in 2012?

That's not to say they shouldn't be private. It's me asking you what it means to be "open" as part of the culture.
I once saw a very detailed article on what to do if under threat of lightning. Here is what I recall:

(1) Get away from high ground. (Duh.)
(2) Get away from trees. (Duh.)
(3) Do not go for low, low ground or any ditch. A very small local high piece of ground in a general lowish ground is good.
(4) Do not lie down.
(5) Squat down.
(6) Put your heels together and spread the balls of your feet apart.

The latter non-obvious, points is because a strike will cause enormous local current near the ground in the immediate vicinity. Yes, the discharge wants to neutralize against ground, but the ground itself is not a good enough conductor to necessarily dissipate the full charge quickly. The discharge will therefore fly along the ground"as best it can.

What you want to do is avoid letting the powerful surface currents run right through your heart or head. Lying down is therefore bad. Putting your heels together might short circuit a current flow along the ground, while away from your torso. Being on a very smallish hill increases the chance that you can ride above the worst of near strike. A ditch or other low point puts your head and torso exactly where you do not want to be.

And, yes, your shoes are irrelevant.
I had the great opportunity of interning at HP Labs during my Junior year summer, and it was (in its own way) the kind of R&D haven that you describe. My team was comprised purely of PhD scientists, many of them former Xerox Parc exiles from down the road. Brilliant, wonderful people who could spend decades as engineers and researchers and be appreciated for their technical contributions.

It definitely had to deal with the corporate mandates, but (at least in my team) the team manager was a player/manager (MIT PhD who could do EE, ME, and CS) who was quite deft at managing the politics.

I imagine the place is being slowly eroded, especially given how poorly the company has been doing as of late, which is really a shame and I wish I were in a position to do something about it.
I've had a bit of a revelation recently.

I absolutely need some kind of human voice in the background for at least a few hours per day. If I don't get it then my mind just shuts down and refuses to work on anything.

My favourite radio presenter went off the air about 8 months ago and I've not really found anything I really liked since. But since then my ability to actually get anything done has gone down drastically.

Anyway on a whim I re-listened to one of his old episodes for a few hours while working, suddenly I'm tearing through my work again.

I can't explain it but it makes all the difference in the world.
I like ClojureScript and use it a lot lately. Sometimes however it feels a little distant from JavaScript at times. This can be frustrating at times. Wisp is somewhere between ClojureScript and JavaScript.

Of course this means that some of Clojure's features (protocols and lazy sequences, atoms, etc.) are not available. On the other hand there are not so many opaque layers between your code and the target code.

Granted feature-wise it might be more similar to a scheme, but Clojure Syntax is so much more readable and I do not see a point why it would not be a valid approach.
You might be surprised, I have talked with people that say 'free' and I say 'you mean paid for collectively' and they say 'no, free' :)