skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You build a NaCl program with a special GCC toolchain Google provides, which creates ELF binaries with a base address of 0 and text starting at 0x10000.

When NaCl loads your program (which, remember, it wants to do without asking you), it forks a "secure ELF loader" program, which populates the first 64k bytes with a runtime (think crt0, on steroids), which we call the "trusted code base". The TCB isn't verified the same way the NaCl binary is, because it's code that Google wrote that never changes.

That code implements or trampolines to a common set of systemy things NaCl wants to let NaCl programs do. We made the comparison in that post between the NaCl runtime/TCB and the JVM applet sandbox, and I think it's apt. In both cases, you have a wad of code that is trusted by the system and needs to be bug free, and in both cases that's the first place a security researcher is going to look for flaws once the system is mature.
I haven't read Knuth but I recommend http://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Manual-Steve-Skiena/d...

From what I understand Knuth uses MIX assembly language to imlpement his algorithms. Contrast this to the Skiena book which uses C++. I found this to make it very practical.

Though to be fair, I don't think it offers near the depth of the Art of Computer Programming:)
I started a company with a friend of mine in 1998 to do this... we're still not quite there, and it turns out we could only sell it to really rich people through high end custom dealers.

The 'dream' of a wired + automated house is oddly far away for people outside of the 'wealthy' and 'do it yourself' categories. In many ways the entire consumer electronics industry is so _not_ focused on the 'end customer experience' to the point of just being downright insulting to their customer base.

What does it mean to treat your customers badly? Try not trusting them at all. Treat them like thieves. Put in artificial rules for using your products that make it confusing for even us geeky folks. Refuse to agree on anything except methods for screwing over your customers.

The last straw for me was HDMI. It is crippling the high end of the industry as it is impossible to distribute throughout a home. It is fraught with basic incompatibilities from one manufacturer to another. It's entire existence is to phase out analog output of high definition audio and video. The 'marketing' approach to the public is 'see, we put everything on one cable' but in all reality, it's just DVI with digital audio that's encrypted so you can't make legal, analog recordings for your personal use.

So the good news is there is a lot of room, even beyond the Apple effect, for small companies to make an impact. The existing state of the old school Consumer Electronics industry is pathetic and will likely not be able to churn out anything but louder amplifiers and better resolution displays.
The iPhone as the universal remote is an obvious and bloody brilliant idea. I hope my future TV, stereo, etc. come with Bluetooth and an iPhone app to control them.
"Run as the root user from the root directory, type in rm -r f * , and, at the stroke of the ENTER key, gone are all the files and directories. Recursively, each directory deleting itself once its files have been deleted, right down to the very directory from which you entered the command: the snake swallowing its tail."

Actually that would be rm -rf * and it wouldn't delete /, the directory from which you entered the command, since with * you've selected all the directories in /, not itself. To do that you'd have to invoke rm -rf . or /, I believe. Though I'm not sure if after deleting all files the system will let you delete / itself? (moot point though)

Sorry if that was obvious to everyone...
> smarta$$

What's with the dollar signs?
It's a sandbox implemented with a verifier.

Some other notes:

I'm not sure I'd call X86 segmentation "elaborate", at least in the context of X86 programming (sure, it's very elaborate compared to MIPS).

I don't think I've heard the word "call gate" used with the definite article before, as if there was just one of them... but I'm an X86 autodidact and that could be my mistake. My understanding is that a call gate is anything that vectors a program from one context to another. In most X86 operating systems, there are 2-3 basic call gates that will get you from userland to kernel: the INT instruction (the interrupt handler will check your program state and dispatch the right system call) and the SYSCALL instruction (which does the same thing without the interrupt overhead).

NaCl disallows both of these instructions, along with the FAR CALL opcode that would let you jump between segments and the segment override prefix that does the same (note this was the epic fail Dowd found in the contest).

The trampoline mechanism that NaCl uses is not at all dissimilar from how Win32 and BSD libc issue system calls; the library exports a stub interface and hides the mechanics of actually issuing a system call.

Note: not trying to be pedantic here. Just love geeking out on this stuff.
Is it any kind of picture into my current state of mind that when I read "Space Shuttle Atlantis caught in..." that I thought I was about read a news article about another space tragedy?
I don't get this either...I seems like the most they send you is 3 pairs of socks every 14 days? Something seems a bit off there.

This is why this sort of thing would never work for me...My routine when I get home is:

Come in the door, pet the dog. Set the laptop down on the table, grab a beer from the refrigerator, walk out to the back yard, sit on the patio, kick my socks off, and start playing fetch with the dog. My socks end up in a pile on the patio and end up getting thrown away. If this place was 7 socks for 7 dollars delivered weekly I would sign up today.

It is tough to justify the cost for this, especially when i can go to walmart and get ~10 pairs of black socks for $4.

Maybe this is not aimed at nerds? (I'm thinking not).

Cool idea though. I'm with the person below here that says they get their shirts from woot. So do I. Woot is so amazingly perfect, I wish they did dress clothes as well...there are no choices to make, yes, or no. That is it. You say yes and you have a shirt at your door (or in my case, my office) the next day.
There is very little thanking on HN. I like that compared to sites where the first 10 comments are thanking the poster for posting. I use thanks sparingly, like the time when someone rose to my defense after an ad hominem attack.
You are right. It's unfair (and all too easy) for someone from the outside to point their finger and say, "Bad! They should have done X."

However, the reality is that Google has positioned themselves such that they have quickly become a utility. This goes beyond search, they are a communications network (email, chat) and an ad service among other things. How many websites depend solely on Google AdSense for their revenue?

Just like electricity, telephone service, and other utilities, we have come to depend on them for living our daily lives. Loss of service at a large scale cannot be tolerated.

This may have been a relatively minor event, but the point remains that it still seems much too easy for such events to take place. I feel that Google should be one of the companies pushing technology in this area forward. Hopefully they will release information on how they plan to prevent this sort of event from occurring in the future.
Things like NaCl (hell, browsers in general) would definitely be safer if operating systems had real isolation features. But obviously NaCl itself can't solve that problem. (Note that isolation is a tiny part of Bitfrost, and an idea that is itself older than the hills).
Introduction to Information Retrieval: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0521865719/

Convex Optimization: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0521833787/

Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0262133601/

Read Peter Norvig's review for Foundations of ....http://www.amazon.com/review/R3GSYXSKRU8V17/

I haven't read any of these books, yet, highly recommended by some friends.
I can't stand this nimrod. Don't get me wrong, I don't disagree with most of what he says, and consider myself agnostic - rather, that evolution is the most logical explanation for the origin of our species, and that it is likely that the notion of "god" as defined my Abrahamic religions is pure fantasy.

But Dawkin's is both an asshole, and a worshiper of evolutionary theory. His smug demeanor and equation of belief in god with stupidity is small minded. It smacks of everything he supposedly rails against. It's teenage atheistic angst with a book deal.

40 per cent of people in most Western countries say they still think that God created men and women and that Earth is only 6,000 years old

Sorry, what? Only evangelical Christians of certain persuasion believe that the earth is 6000 years old. Outside of the US, there is nowhere on the planet where that belief system comes close being 40% of a population.

This is the type of conformist single-minded fear-mongering crap they teach in churches and mosques Mr. Dawkins.
You can control Plex app with your iPhone (music/videos). You can also control X10 applicances (lights, blinds, coffee maker) with your iPhone as well.
Side note: I've been able to harness my natural tendency to procrastinate to be more frugal and avoid impulse buys. Whenever I'm at a store and see something that I don't really need but am tempted to buy, I just deflect the intent by thinking "ok, I'll just buy it later." It's fairly easy to put buying stuff off, because it's sort of a pain (standing in line at the register, etc...)

Typically, I generally just forget about whatever it was I wanted and so I avoid the purchase altogether. If I do find myself obsessing over it later (rare) then it's probably something I really wanted and I'll eventually go back and get it. This mainly works with stuff that's in the "I don't really want it but would be tempted to buy it" category.
the developer switched to an SQL database

You do know that the author of this article wrote an object database, KiokuDB, right?
Well, this thing supports GUI/visualization as well, so many of these objects make sense.
Previously:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=421555

http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=498219
I find that hard to swallow. We live in a world where things get cheaper with time. I'm sure the cost in some kind of absolute wealth measure increases very fast. But by this measure, a single one of today's factories would be completely unaffordable to humans a hundred years ago, but today we generate more wealth (in that absolute measure) in one day than we did in a year back then.

I'm sure the cost of these advanced factories is unfathomable to us today, but in X years, in proportion to the wealth available to build them, I believe they will be affordable.

As a final nail in the coffin, this assumes that our manufacturing processes remain more or less the same. What about, for example, nanomanufacturing? The promise of wide-spread nanomanufacturing is that anyone will be able to build cpus in their backyard...
Finding a new partner
We have been running our startup for about a year and are looking to bring a third partner on to compliment our team. What would be the best way to find someone to meet such a unique role. (i.e. equity over pay).
Why Twitter's Engineers Hate the @replies feature
Lisp In Small Pieces (http://pagesperso-systeme.lip6.fr/Christian.Queinnec/WWW/LiS...) is sort of intermediate between SICP and the Peyton-Jones stuff; it still focuses on Lisp dialects that use dynamic typing and applicative-order evaluation, but it shows a whole bunch of different approaches to exploring that design space and implementing stuff in it.

I also enjoyed reading Pierce's Types and Programming Languages (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/tapl/), although I was kind of nodding my head and going "yeah, whatever" during some of the proofs.
This keeps coming up. It keeps getting posted, anyways.

this article - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=421555

from an HN comment thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32383

CMMI in general - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15029

and a comment from that thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15065

from a GOOG v. MSFT article - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231532

on reddit - http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7nl9r/they_writ...

If you've got something new to add to the discussion, that'd be worth reading. But it always feels a little dried out in this environment (HN, that is).

Is this pointing out a flaw in what I'm working on? Or is it a pointer to a better way I could be working? Or is it a manager directing his coder-droids to read this, then do it, Dilbert style? ("I just read a great article in FastCompany, we should look into this.")

It's like asking your plumber to read the wikipedia page on the Hoover Dam before he gets started on that leaky faucet.
Family-to-Family : Social Network to fight Hunger
>The closest thing on the market is a so-called home media center that will distribute movies, music, and your own content to multiple rooms. It doesn't handle lights, video games, security, heat, AC, or home computing.

Home servers can already do all of that using home automation devices (X10). You can hook them up to your home media center and access your homes lights/security/heat anywhere via a web interface.

I haven't done this in practice but I've read quite a bit on it. It's still not consumer friendly yet though, but it sounds like a great geek project.
Again, it goes back to efficiencies. Google has few employees for the amount of revenue it generates (high revenue per employee) but also has fairly high costs (millions of servers). They could be paying all of these people minimum wage and your formula would still show high expense per employee.

I get what you're trying to show, but calling the employees expensive because there happen to be a lot of expenses is misleading. They are only expensive if the expenses actually related to the employees.
"software hipster" is an inaccurate characterization. Hipsters tend to choose something because it is simple and stylish rather than actually useful. As an example, they like fixed gear bikes.

Unfortunately, simple and stylish doesn't always win. I see lots of people riding fixed gear bikes in Seattle, for example. Actually, I don't see many people riding them, I see them walking them around because they have the wrong gearing for going up and down Seattle's many hills, and they can't actually ride them. In this case, simple and stylish is the wrong tool for the job -- they need a bike that can change gears. That may be inelegant, but it works really well.

CouchDB is the fixed gear bicycle of the database world.
More info on CNN: http://bit.ly/LgGUO
It has been unscathed so far despite the layoffs at Yahoo. The attitude seems to be to double-down on basic research while cutting elsewhere. And it does seem to be a highly regarded research lab (if I do say so myself, being part of it) as evidenced by some of the famous academics it continues to attract.
Seems like they're missing the forest for the trees. The Firefox logo could use a re-branding to be more recognizable, not have an animal showing you its back, and also to overcome negative bias in Asia (Foxes are considered Tricky - not clever).
He should write a lot of code for fun and try to incorporate what he's learned so far. I understand he codes at his day job, but that's not a place to take risks or to code things 5 different ways "just because".
http://www.quantcast.com/mibbit.com#demographics

Young adults mainly, median of 23 seems about right.
You know what's even less valuable than smarta$$ remarks? Dumba$$ responses to them. I disagree with edw519; not all downmods require explanatory comments.
V.C.’s Ignore Business Plans, Study Finds
Without knowing anything about your company, your service/product or what skillset you are looking to fill I think the standard advice is to participate in local hacker meetups and introduce your startup to those potential partners. Another route would be to place a job ad for the position, e.g. Craigs List under "internet engineers."
Reuse is overrated and rewrite is underrated. It's true that typical first rewrite suffers from [second/sophomore system syndrome](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect)

The only way to overcome that is to do more rewrites :)
He's the main developer of stackoverflow, which I think is pretty good compared with many other sites :)
My Personal Credit Crisis
The problem is that the most vocal opponents of abortion frequently favor causes like abstinence-only-education. Of course, the average pro-lifer cares much more about abortion than abstinence education, but the ones we hear on the radio seem to care equally.
Fake photography licenses for when someone says “you can’t take pictures here”
Wolfram Alpha Architecture
It may depend on where you are. In Vancouver, BootupLabs (or the Vancouver Entrepreneur Society) is holding a 'Founder meet-up' night to try to connect start-ups looking for co-founders with people who might be interested.

First I'd make sure you know the skillset that you want.
Then look through your connections to see who might fit the bill.
Equity over pay shouldn't be the first thing you consider as a 'quality' of a co-founder. If it's the right person, and the right concept, go from there.
Erase Hard Drive - Part 1
Beyond the Glory - The Mark Cuban Story [video]
This is a horrible way to search for jobs. Admittedly, when I was at roughly your point in life, I did the same, and it failed.

Every job I've ever gotten has been through connections. Well, except for Fudruckers when I was 16. A lot of times jobs posted publicly are only a facade for hiring someone who is connected because of HR requirements.

If you want to find a job, pick some places you'd like to work, and start trying to work your way towards having the appropriate skills and connections to make sure your resume makes it past the first pass.
Is Your Startup Practicing Inward Facing Dog?
That comment makes this whole thread worth while. What a great piece of insight.
I like the idea of hard drive as palimpsest.
Generally an interesting idea. Though I can think of some other areas which have more need for that(_finance_).
The title is misleading.

The article is really about excess spending.

Yes, if you spend excessively you're damned. No, you're not damned if you don't spend excessively.
Procrastination does appear to have evolutionary benefits. If you only hunt when you're hungry, not only are you determined but you're not wasting resources. If I go out every day and kill a deer because I feel like it, and not because I'm hungry (I'd assume a fully grown deer would probably last me more than a week) I'm going to cause myself major problems. Either A) the deer will get wise to me and any deer anywhere will run at the instant sight/smell of a human; or B) I'll kill all the deer and then I'm stuck trying to kill rats for food.

Collecting firewood would likely have a similar problem as option B). When humans get it in their minds to cut down trees for anything other than necessity, historically very bad things have happened to us: the prime example of this is Easter Island. A lesser known example is the Old Kingdom deforestation, which is probably why none of Khufu's descendent's beat his pyramid. The scary thing about both of these incidents, especially Easter Island, is that people would have noticed a rapid increase in wind speeds as the trees disappears, they'd have noticed their crops failing (due to the wind) and yet the island is so small that the person who cut down the very last tree could clearly have seen it was the only tree on the island.

I'd say in your example Og the go-getter would likely have killed off all the major wildlife around him such that he had a multi-mile trek every day to gather food. Instead of Ug the procrastinator, who could probably walk outside and find a deer foraging on the berries he'd been too lazy to pick.
Bad example. Though Skype's founders were from Sweden, the company was based in Luxembourg, largely for tax reasons:

http://www.luxembourgforict.lu/en/success-stories/skype/inde...

And while I agree entirely that equality of opportunity is the right sort to aim for, the article we're commenting on was in fact advocating not merely equality of opportunity, but equality of result.
Same experience for me, but the HN karma system has made me a more thoughtful commenter. Humor within a substantive comment is a whole lot more work than a one-liner, but I'll work at it.
> The second was just a instantly-typed reaction which should have been an edit

Honestly, it's an annoying post, and it would be an annoying edit. "OMG WHY ARE PEOPLE DOWNMODDING ME?!" is just really annoying no matter where you put it.

Think about it. How could it possibly inform anyone of anything? "Oh, I never would have noticed that that comment was being down voted if its poster hadn't pointed it out."
HP recalling 70,000 laptop batteries
Wow - we had once of those at school - 2mhz 8080 w 48k. ISTR it had some interesting bugs in the BASIC interpreter that would trigger a stack overflow. The first clue was the screen RAM filling with the runaway stack - on it's way to overwrite the as yet unsaved program.

It did a very good job of highlighting just how good the newly released BBC micros were that displaced it.
Habitual movement is known to result in greater precision and speed. This has been shown over and over in studies of athletes, musicians, dancers, video game players, etc. The computer usability field has known about predictability and consistency of interface for years (think about "ok/cancel" for a moment, and what happens when apps change it up on you). I'm surprised anyone would think there would be a question about it.
i'll pay you for the site again.
I'm amazed that IBM has 20 times more employees than Google. I thought I was working at a big company, but apparently there's big and then there's BIG.

It was like how in one of the recent news reports, NEC just laid off more than the entire population of Google. We're peanuts compared to them.
It's actually a common misconception that Knuth uses MIX/MMIX to implement his algorithms. The vast majority of the algorithms are described in English, and the MMIX implementation is usually only given when there are relevant implementation details to be discussed. MMIX is just an idealized machine language, and it is trivial for a reader to implement the algorithms described in the programmer's language of choice. (This is assuming that the objective is to learn CS, not to have a cookbook of ready-to-run algorithms to pilfer....)
Google is also vertically integrated. They're famous for their NIH syndrome - they tend not to use anything developed outside the company.
"What have I missed here?"

They don't have to check 1.7 million users to see if they have @replies on, if they maintain a list with "@reply subscribers", there's little overhead as far as I can see. If a something rarely changes but is checked a lot, it's a pretty good idea to have it pre-calculated.

Edited: "No overhead", was a bit to absolute thanks jpwagner.

Re-Edited: Oh look there was a commenting feature on the blog, was pretty hard to find.
Misleading title again, no really interesting details...
If you're still wondering what you'd say to some random internet person if you bumped into them 25 hours later, doesn't that make YOU the pussy?
This is based on net income, which is basically everything that's left over after salaries, CapEx, perks, contractors, etc. It's money that goes to the shareholders, at least in theory. (In practice, it often gets blown on overpriced acquisitions, so it's money that goes to the entrepreneurs. ;-))

This is why you want to be a shareholder and not an employee...