skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The one thing I remember from Professor Rossell's managerial accounting class in Business School: There is only one response to any financial question:

"Who wants to know?"

For example, "How much did you earn?"

To the stockholders: "A lot."

To the employees: "A little."

To the IRS: "Nothing."

I imagine Professor Rossell's response to "Is Facebook overvalued?" would be, "To whom?"
The Republic of the Internet
> Though I haven't tested...

Let's stop there. "I haven't tested" translates to "premature optimization". Stop whatever you're doing and measure your task.

> I have explored ... but none is close to what I have in mind.

It's not surprised that you can't find a perfect solution to your imaginary problem. Find out exactly what your issue is first, then optimize. And don't expect to perfectly engineer a system from the ground up. It's OK to layer in new systems to optimize real bottlenecks in your application.
HN peeps are just the right people to tear this idea apart - go for it, will be interesting to see the thoughts.
Not infinity. More like a negative number.

(Otherwise, I agree.)
What's legal, especially under the DMCA, isn't defined by what you feel is common sense, unfortunately.
Funny comments here. If you're actually curious about why the developer used Flash for the front-end, then his info here:
http://runpee.com/blog/72_why-flash

Basically, the rap is that running one set of HTML/JS/CSS instructions atop varied browser brands, with different implementations and edge-cases of those specs, ends up pushing browser-vendor costs onto the backs of content developers.

(And Flash-enabled mobile phones outnumber recalcitrant Apple iPhones by a factor of 40:1 or so. But we at Adobe would still like to support that popular walled-garden, if permission is granted for us to do so.)

jd/adobe
But this looks like a bug in the program (or the VM): either that copy back to the heap should not be occuring, or there should be some locking here. What if the data was changed? Would the Java thread just be expected to deal with all intermediate states? Alternatively, if the data is read-only, don't write to it!

In the comments to the post you can see that the correct way to prevent a copy back would be to release the memory using JNI_ABORT. As far as I know, there's no way to enforce immutability on array contents in Java, so it's an implicit contract in the system: the contents really never does change.
This is hacker news, hardly the place you expect to find links to wired! Particularly articles that play as hard and fast with the language as this one. The whole article rests on the loose language of the subject line. If the headline had been "communities work together to achieve things online just as they do offline" there wouldn't have been a story. And - indeed - there isn't.
Erlang Driver Walkthrough with Berkeley DB in C
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Thanks for the comments, i lasted about 30 seconds into the story
Its been a long time in development, and is completely dependent on a stable Parrot - something very few people use. Its been almost 10 years, I just don't think it will ship 1.0. DNF.

I think Perl 5 will take the good parts, and use them, and that Perl 6 is a pure R&D platform. Moose being a good example.

I would love to be wrong. But in the meanwhile I can't even work with other people my age in the language of choice because none of them know Perl.

It sucks.
Ask HN: Who's going to Google I/O?
Hoping to meet up with fellow HNers.
Is this true? Should I forget C++ and move on to another language after C?

Why do you need to move on to anything else? As your friend said... "C is more than enough".
So apparently any group anticipating and preparing for an interesting and momentous event is a cult, regardless of how they go about it?
I once listened to a stats professor bemoaning that he had to teach stats to various groups of students in their first year when they didn't know enough about their own subjects for him to use any relevant examples.

Since stats on it's own can be a bit abstract that's a double whammy.
Citation available at the linked site. :)
Off the top of your head, what are some hard ones to look at?
The same reasoning can be applied for Twitter.

However the technological breakthroughs needed for such a system is still not in place. Facebook/Twitter has to put in a log of research into Natural Language Processing Technologies for this scenario to materialize. The cost of that is still unaccounted for.

However the value of correct data is very important here. No doubt the data Facebook has about its users is very valuable. Especially considering the fact that there is a real person on the other end, with a significant amount of real life relationship amongst his/her friends list.

Someone still needs to figure out how can that data be converted into dollars.
Actually I was a Corporate Finance / M&A guy. Per user multiple is pretty standard for pre-profit companies. Not saying it is the most accurate way to value a company but at this stage of profitability it's a good comparison measure.
(to clarify, I'm the author of the post)
I personally quit when I got too much teeth problems.

You might want to quit carbonated and sugared drinks before you get that incentive...
I also wonder whether they can work in teams. For that matter I wonder if chimpanzees and crows (the other "tool users" mentioned in the article) work in teams.

Interesting stuff.
If foo contains an instance TrimmedString, why can't it just return itself after the first + operation?

If you send a TrimmedString to a String, then all bets are off. This would make the use case: if you start with a TrimmedString, you always have a TrimmedString. (Barring operations that are deliberate conversions.)
The funny part of the social media bubble is that if you looked at the dot-com era, it looks like financial fraud just like the housing boom: VCs going public with a domain name and no product shipped to cash out before the inevitable implosion.

Except now there is no going public, SOX killed IPOs and the M&A market is hurting too and yet... they're still doing it. So they must have been honest the first time! :)
The real question is, do all emulators differ in some consistent way from all "real" machines, and more so than "real" machines differ among themselves? The answer is almost certainly "no", and if it were "yes", the fix ought to be trivial, because there is no fundamental magic which emulators introduce and one might easily detect unspoofably.
Putting this together with the recent banning of Facebook in Iran gives me a reason why someone might be willing to pay $200 Million for access to the ear and the analytics of what is quickly becoming the prime forum for political activism in many demographics. Indeed it doesn't have to be be particularly sinister since much of the world does not share the fastidious illusion of the necessity of separating Politics and Business.
Both really.

This guy is brilliant, and I'd like to work with him, but need to minimize risk based on his past.

Is it a factor in VC funding?

If we want to raise VC funding later, should he be positioned as a non-founder?
As someone who came here from reddit because it was turning into digg, I agree. The quality of the articles and comments on HN is amazing and it's great to be able to come here and actually be interested in every link without having to skip past all the images of cute animals and political trash. I am aware that the number of users and the quality of a site like this is inversely correlated, so I think taking every action to preserve the original idea and intent of HN should be a high priority of the members here. Thanks for bringing me great tech links HN!
C is more than enough to getting work done, but you need to look beyond to expand your mind and play with higher-levels of computing than pointer manipulation and bit flipping.
Revenues are nothing without earnings though. Facebook spends more than it takes in, which can easily be accomplished by anyone (especially as of late!). The valuation is purely on a bet that in the future Facebook will be have more revenue generating capacity. It's a bet, albeit a big one. With so many users it doesn't take a whole lot of profit per user to get to big revenues, but it's far from a sure thing that Facebook will end up worth anything substantial.
Great, great video. Watched this and all the Computer Chronicles I could get my hands on a few years back. Good times.
When I clicked the link, I fully expected to see a scary line-noise-y Perl script implementing a chatbot that persuades people to upgrade to Perl 6 :-)
It depends on what you want to do. If you want to work on the linux kernel, you need to know C. If you want to work on Ableton Live, you need to know C++. If you want to work at Wells Fargo you need to know Java.
What's the best alternative? I've heard much the same things about Prototype.
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Steve Blank - Startup advice, one-size-does-not-fit-all
That's quite accurate. Prestige professions are valued more than creative/speculative/longshot ventures.

I did meet a random couple who had both worked in Silicon Valley -- but they seemed disappointed that I was doing a startup rather than working for one of the big firms.
Yes. The predictable difference is timing.
If brl is watching, he'll name one that I decided was much too much of a pain in the ass to win a message board bet over. Most of my experience here is NDA'd though.
Eh, you'd be surprised. Bad deals happen all the time and are sometimes quite obvious. eBay's multi-billion dollar mistake in Sykpe for example. Not to say that this will turn out to be bad, but just because billions are on the line doesn't mean they have a bunch of awesome secrets.
Interesting. Perhaps fiddling with JPEG will produce good results, too. For example you could skip most of the headers.
The ACL is dead (Talk at CUSEC by Zed Shaw)
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...a few months old, but packed with info

sorry if it's a re-submission
Indeed. Most people I know stop using facebook after college. That bounds the applicable age group to just those who have lots of spare time to use facebook's servers, but with little money to spend on facebook's advertisers.
widescreen is good for multitasking because you can have more than one window open at an acceptable width, I always notice this as a big advantage when I use a larger/wider screen.
What's confusing? They've made some high-stakes financial plays. Their previous one worked, but this one didn't, and now they're in trouble. Is it really that mind blowing to see someone overplay their hand?
As far as your buddy goes it sounds like he isn't vary familiar with C++ or familiar with it in a environment in which it was poorly used. If anything C++ is much simpler to use than C on anything that is nontrivial.

Anyway whichever way you go know that idiomatic C and C++ are very different(see http://www.research.att.com/~bs/new_learning.pdf for an idea of the differences). If while learning C++ you notice that it looks like C know that your source of info is doing it wrong. In fact I find idiomatic C++ to be much less error prone than idiomatic Java.
How about a feature to disable text alerts? I'd like something that could aggregate my SMS texts with my Twitter and Facebook alerts.
In the short term, the price is determined by the dumbest person with access to a checkbook. In the long term, the price is determined by smart people, because the dumb people are broke.
If the time it took to reverse enough of Spotify to find this trick was worth more than the N months of what Spotify was trying to protect (prior to the disclosure of the problem), then the trick was a net win for Spotify. That's the basis of DRM.

Want to make this a modern scheme?

* Make it much, much harder to reverse enough of Spotify to find tricks like this. Encrypt code with a "white-box" variant of an intentionally obfuscated algorithm. Compile numerous dead-code dead-end encrypted code paths into the binary.

* Make the scheme renewable, so that instead of simply making a binary decision about whether the program can run or not run, it derives a secret that all valid instances of the program need to operate. Now when someone breaks the scheme (as inevitably they will), release an update with different compiler tricks and a different secret.

* Stockpile a lot of these variants (it is easier for you to do this than for attackers to reverse those tricks, which returns the advantage to you). Make update transparent. Trickle out updates until attackers get bored and go away.

This is essentially the BD+ DRM scheme, which has kept Slysoft mostly on their heels (multi-week delays on new titles were typical, last I checked). And BD+ had a much harder problem to solve, since they had to coordinate the scheme amongst lots of consumer electronics vendors. You can do better.
Remove the following iframe from your homepage:

<iframe src="http://bestwebfind.cn:8080/ts/in.cgi?pepsi11" width=2 height=4 style="visibility: hidden"></iframe>
Revenue is much harder to get than profit. As an ex-consultant, you can always cut cost to achieve better profit margin. Revenue is a different story.

You are right that valuation is on a bet that Facebook's revenue will continue to grow. But judging from past performance, and Facebook is still a startup, I think it's a pretty safe bet (comparing to Twitter anyway!).
From the Wiki on cults:

1. People are put in physically or emotionally distressing situations;
2. Their problems are reduced to one simple explanation, which is repeatedly emphasized;
3. They receive unconditional love, acceptance, and attention from a charismatic leader;
4. They get a new identity based on the group;
5. They are subject to entrapment (isolation from friends, relatives, and the mainstream culture) and their access to information is severely controlled.

Cults are serious business involving the isolation and mind control of individuals. Using it as a cheap loaded word to start a flame war is border line obscene.

The strongest thing that an be said of "the singularity" is that it has some religion-like elements. Lets be reasonable here.
I haven't thought about pointer manipulation or bit flipping for years. Once you know a language you stop thinking about the grammar.
The statement "only has meaning if the distribution is presumed to be normal" is wrong. The SD is a summary of the spread of a distribution. In fact, for most centrally concentrated distributions (including a uniform one) +/- 1 sigma corresponds to about 60% of the mass of the distribution. This is an amazingly useful thing to know.

As the above triva factoid points out, the standard deviation is an important summary statistic. More interestingly by using mean, variance (or sd), skew, and kurtosis, you can describe almost any centrally concentrated distribution. Even distribution with heavy tails.

I think what the OP meant is that most 3+ sigma results are not truly 3+ sigma, because most distributions in this world are not gaussian, but instead have large wings. SD is most useful when you know what the underlying distribution is. Currently it's more in fashion to communicate spread using confidence intervals because they presume less about the underlying distribution.
I do think this is fascinating. However, perhaps we ought to have expected a flying creature to have rather good spatial reasoning skills...
There has to be something said for this. There is barely any noise on Google's pages and pretty much everyone has used Google for the past few years. That means that everyone is used to a search engine with very little noise. Yahoo, MS, and Ask don't exactly have "flashy" search pages but just glancing at their pages, you can see more distractions. I think this just amplifies the thought that Google is better.

Going to another search engine just feels weird.
Shashi Tharoor on twitter
Former UN under-secretary general, current indian politician on twitter.

More:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shashi_Tharoor
This paper may be of interest to you : http://handlers.sans.org/tliston/ThwartingVMDetection_Liston...
There are things you can do with C++ that you simply cannot with java. I would recommend learning enough java to pick up OOP concepts, and maybe even some design patterns. Getting to that point should take no more than 6 months (if you work with it daily).
All in all I agree with you, but I think momentum can be part of objective criteria. Not in the language itself, but as part of a human ressources or marketing strategy. Also, sometimes the language with momentum is the one with the library. Case in point: Cocoa bridge under Leopard exists for Python, Ruby and .. not for Perl.
agreed. on the face of it it seems stupid that if you have to have taxes, the taxer should care where the money comes from or how it was collected from the taxee. But then you realize that it was never about the money. the government can print more money any time it wants. it is about control.
This is more anarchism than socialism.
See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=616639
posted a week ago.
Exactly. I think there's an interesting story here, but calling it "socialism" is just shameless linkbait.
You mean I changed my name to Lisp MacErlang for nothing??

But seriously, the Startup School application is basically just a list of keywords, at least the way I understood it. Are there really people writing essays in there?
Michael has far more tolerance than I, I don't think I would have continued the conversation after:

Sure, I make fun of you guys, because I’m trying to entertain people.
i was considering making myself a charity page like this. i was going to make a bit longer of a case for myself though.
Everyday i must walk 40 miles to the dung factory where I must sort dung balls into heaps based on taste
your buddy sounds misinformed.

however, your best course of action depends on what you're trying to accomplish. he may have produced a good suggestion despite the reasoning being flawed or based on bad information.
When I saw this headline I thought maybe they'd introduced automatic code formatting / syntax highlighting into the IM client. That would be huge.

(I guess someone could write that pretty easily)...
The author redefines the word, 'Socialism', to mean something entirely different than any of the generally accepted meanings.

In the marketplace for ideas, just as in the market for used cars, this is called 'bait and switch'.
same bbc story (maybe one is "printable" format) week ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=616639

My same disappointment with the "journalistic" coverage applies now:

They don't seem to differentiate colas from other sodas. A surprise to me, since I seem to recall hearing the high phosphorous content of colas can compete with some other mineral absorption (calcium, was it?) ...maybe compete with potassium?

Personally, I've felt better about my physical stamina when I surrender to my crave for a "fizzling" drink by going to some diet lemon-lime (no caffeine or sugar) rather than a "cola" (whether caffeinated or sugared). YMMV
What is taking a toll is this fear of change. Texting isn't going to ruin our kids, the same way the Internet didn't ruin our parent's kids. Pure FUD.
C and C++ are two languages that share a base syntax. They are used in different problem domains. To randomly pick one for you to learn now is not a question we can answer. Your friend's reasoning isn't sound.
I live in Phoenix and you're right, some of these cameras are set up to photo every license plate that passes regardless of whether the box detected a traffic violation. It's billed as an Amber Alert mechanism so when authorities identify a suspect they plug in his license plate and every camera sniffs every vehicle. The problem is the organizations involved have been very dodgy about revealing the scope and logging details. So we're left to wonder if in addition to catching bad guys Big Brother is tracking innocent non-suspects. I'm not convinced they are and it's not necessarily bad if they did but given the track record of our government the past 8 years we should probably demand transparency.

Originally we were told all these boxes did was equitably enforce speed and red-light laws efficiently at a great profit over human officers. But now it's turning into "Oh and by the way we'll be photographing the innocent non-violators too." Maybe we need an outside group of hackers to act in an oversight capacity. Or maybe we should just design that license plate switching feature from Knight Rider so if you do speed you're giving someone else a ticket. (Note to Sherriff Joe: I'm just kidding.)

I am reminded of that scene in the movie Brazil when a bug literally falls into a government computer, the suspect's name gets misspelled and an innocent person is punished for what another (innocent) person did. I just hope the two Phoenix based companies working on this camera technology, Redflex and American Traffic Systems, operate on a higher set of principles than GoDaddy headquarters which is just down the street and given its turnover possibly a significant source of traffic company employees.
In order to program productively in C++ without too many segfaults, you need a deep understanding of what's going on, why the wrong one of your three two-argument copy-constructors is being called, when the invisible initialization of superclass vtables takes place, which spurious error symptoms indicate delete[]d non-arrays and so on. It takes quite some time to learn all this. Other languages like Java will also require a mental model of the execution environment, but in most languages that model is smaller and misunderstandings are easier to find.

In short: learn C++ if you expect to program in C++, but prepare to spend a lot of time before you get the good "I'm sitting on top of a seven-wheel motorcycle at 200mph, wheeee!" feeling C++ can give you.
Yup...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=420650

Don't be sorry; people might have missed the original posting (or never heard of it). Sometimes, it is nice to see old posts.
LLCs are simple. Maybe you're thinking of C-corps and the mountain of paperwork involved with that?

I have an LLC for my consulting business, mostly so I don't get qualified as an employee of my clients, have "limited liability", etc. It's simple in terms of paperwork because it's treated by the IRS just like a sole proprietorship as long as the LLC only has one employee. The biggest downside is that I have to pay an $800/year LLC tax to the state of California.
Thanks for the paper, it was a nice read.
I was stunned to see how straightforward it was.

Basically by order of appearance you look for

* well know files, or registry keys

* patterns in a memory dump

* use a great hack called "the red pill" using the SIDT instruction

* vm specific hardwares

* specific instructions/capabilities
Don't forget C++. Even if you stick to other languages you would probably still want to be able to read C++. There a tons of great stuff written in C++ out there already.
Is it "burnout" when you come to realize that your entire field has the intellectual depth of Saturday morning cartoons?
Chimps are very social animals. Ironically, one of their great cooperative activities is similar to that of humans: namely, killing eachother.

From what I've learned about evolution, and "selfish gene" theory, it seems as though cooperation pervades social animal societies. According to this page [1], and the Wikipedia article on rooks, they seems to flock together. I wouldn't be surprised if further study reveals some cooperative behaviour.

[1] http://www.first-nature.com/birds/corvus_frugilegus.htm
This reminded me of the Million Dollar Homepage... and look it's still live! http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/

I wonder how much that kid has made?

Edit: Before someone says it.. I know it was a dollar a pixel with 1 million available and it sold out, but I see an ad for a poster.
c99shell. It's a PHP trojan horse of sorts written by Russian hackers. Beautiful, rare, dangerous and awesome.