skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Empirically incorrect. A lot of them have raised quite a bit of money before TC50.

You can't say that statement is incorrect (and be right) as the devil's advocate said "may not have had the drive". The argument wasn't that TC50 companies have no investment, but that DEMO companies must have investment.

In other words, with DEMO you're assured that the companies had, at some point, $20k (and probably more if they can survive with paying a $20k fee). With TechCrunch50, the company only had to impress some judges with sweat and there was no guaranteed monetary bar they had to meet (though many do have money, of course).

So there's a guaranteed filter applied to every single presenter at a DEMO conference that the company had enough money to afford it-- which might be a filter that some larger scale investments/partners would prefer to be assured of to strip out most (if not all) solely bootstrapped companies that might not be companies they prefer in their portfolios.
Plus, you get the N speed and signal strength/distance advantage. That is, if you have N-capable NICs. I believe I paid $100 for the 150N about a year or so ago, so it may be cheaper now..and I remember the price difference between the 54G and the 150N not being very much at all...and that's why I went ahead and got the 150N. I know this question was on linux router distros, but since you said something about buying a new router, the 54G, I thought I might share my experience with mine. You could also use the alternative distros with the 150N. Hope this helps!
Exactly. The post starts with: "Despite our best intentions, it looks like the DEMO v. TechCrunch50 war will continue" but clearly Michael Arrington is fueling the war as much as DEMO is: "if DEMO increases their number, we’ll increase ours to stay at 2x whatever they are at"

Being the peaceful one would be not to react to what the other one is doing...
Yeah, fair call -- if I knew the router would be 100% reliable with the built-in software, great. I'll look into the WRT-150N. However, I'm looking into OpenWrt/etc because I've had such a bad run with the build-in firmware on previous routers. I've never had a Linksys, admittedly.
Seen this N times, but still couldn't resist to upvote this enough...
> because it is useful, not just because it is cool

Seems like Pike's own opinions migrated towards an acceptance of this, from jackchristopher's slashdot link [1]:

"Applications - web browsers, MP3 players, games, all that jazz - and networks are where the action is today, and aside from irritating little incompatibilities, the kernel has become a commodity. Almost all the programs I care about can run above Windows, Unix, Plan 9, and on PCs, Macs, palmtops and more. And that, of course, is why these all have a POSIX interface: so they can support those applications."

[1] - http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/18/11532...
You're doing it wrong: http://groups.google.com/groups/search?q=comp.lang.c&qt_...
> People across the globe are doing something that is and feels truly different and new: they're thinking and arranging their entire stacks in terms of remote virtual machines.

Except that there had been people doing precisely that for ages. Seems that computer science is condemned to eternally reinvent wheels... sigh
Thanks -- good recommendation. Tomato looks good.

I didn't know the Apple AirPort was a "standard" wireless router. Cool. Now bidding on one... :-) http://www.trademe.co.nz/Browse/Listing.aspx?id=226933642
Mostly Technical: Clojure and Compojure
It's good to see some folks on HN who have an interest in Singularity-like concepts. It makes me want to take this opportunity to ask if anybody has noticed the similarities between those projects and things going on over in the LLVM world.

To my eyes, LLVM brings many of the same things to the table as the Bartok compiler, which also uses an SSA IR to provide the safety needed to run everything in ring 0.

Furthermore, if one reads the pubs directory over at llvm.org, one sees research papers where a few instructions were added (LLVA) that give LLVM the ability to host a modified version of linux where everything is managed within LLVM, save a very tiny shim between LLVM and the hardware.

There's also some papers on LLVM-SVA (Secure Virtual Architecture) where the same concept is extended to "enforce fine-grained (object level) memory safety, control-flow integrity, type safety..."

So to my amateur eyes, it looks like these research projects are very similar, with one being less overt about the direction it's headed.

Am I high? Has anybody else noticed this?
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Maybe if Hollywood machine let fans do more mashups, some interesting stuff would come out.
Even that search yields only 14 results. I'm pretty sure there have been more than 14 posts to comp.lang.c.
Cisco has made a truckload of money from buying Linksys. The wireless routers are great for home use, and very cheap. They threw some NV-Ram and a MIPS processor in a box, used a free OS, routing engine and hardware code, and they sell the hell out of them. They are easily the most popular home wireless routers, you can find them at the likes of Best Buy, Office Depot, and hell I think I bought mine at Wal-Mart, lol! And mine has worked like a charm. Nifty admin web interface, with all kinds of features and setting to change and configure. Anything from security to connectivity to proxies. Just remember to change the default set passwords! :-) And as I said, you can use Open wrt and others just the same on the 150N, but have the substantial increase in hardware performance as well.
Kudos if the crunchpad takes off, I'll be buying a kindle, netbook, or iphone if I want a portable tech device.
Don't think of it as starting with the "usability" part. This is starting with the "user" part. What do your users want? What do they need? Choosing the users that you want to support and what features they need will drive what you need the backend to do and thus the underlying data-structures needed.
I was a Netcom guy also. I used them right up until I got cable HSI service (which in my area wasn't until late '01 or early '02). Netcom as a company disappeared somewhere in the late 90s; I don't know exactly what the story was, but I recall getting a letter saying that I was suddenly going to be a MindSpring customer, and then a few months (or so) later, an EarthLink one.

Their domain names and email addresses lived on through all that though, and I still occasionally see an "@ix.netcom.com" floating around.

When I finally canceled my service with them, after getting the cable modem installed, I was pretty bummed that they didn't have some minimal level of service that would have just let me keep my email address. (AOL offered something like this at the time.) I probably would have paid $3-5/mo just to hang onto it because I'd had it for so long.

Ah, well. They were one of the better dialup ISPs I had; I never had trouble getting access numbers in various cities, and they had fairly responsive support. Quality declined precipitously after the Mindspring/EarthLink buyout though; I had no love for them as a company by the end.
Well I guess your definition of "precisely" must be much different than mine.
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On the other hand, in that world at least you only have the broken insanity of one operating system/library stack to worry about instead of three or four.

``Not Linux'' is not the same as 'perfect', no matter what the *BSD people say.
C has no conventions for memory management. You've got malloc, you've got free, and the rest is up to you.

Objective-C has an easy to follow pattern, reference counting, which is used consistently throughout the language and libraries.

Creating a class is no more (or less) typing than Java or C++. The syntax is different, but harder to remember? Not really convinced of that. There are basically six things to remember:

@interface for declaring a class header
@implementation for declaring a class implementation
@end for ending either
-whatever for an instance method
+whatever for a class method
and [object message] for message passing syntax
Something like this already exists for ultimate frisbee: http://pickupultimate.com
alice.com needs to fire their designer...the message is scrambled and lost down the drain.
reall? My understanding was that the paper was initially supportive, but stopped after a while and it was only because he had income from several international bestsellers that he was able continue the legal battle (which i think he ultimately lost?)
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Sure. I think your devil's advocate positions were quite well-reasoned. I'm just returning the favor. A few companies I respect have done DEMO. I don't think they're idiots, just because they wasted $20k on DEMO. Everybody makes mistakes. But, I really don't think I'd be willing to sit through that particular dog and pony show, if I were an investor.
Yes! I've also seen the similarities between all of these things and LLVM.

Part of LLVM is an interest in correctness. I've seen more of an interest in these areas in research as well. For example, there was even a recent research highlight in an ACM magazine about "Formal Verification of a Realistic Compiler": http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/publi/compcert-CACM.pdf

Plus, newer companies like Coverity (http://www.coverity.com/html/research-library.html) bring a sense of credibility to a practice that hasn't had much traction in the industry.

I think all of these ideas can come together to make something quite useful. But I suppose bringing it all together is the hard part :)

Update: I also saw lots of cool associations to the Self Programming Language (http://research.sun.com/self/language.html), which includes some great research, especially in their paper "Self: The Power of Simplicity": http://research.sun.com/self/papers/self-power.html
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And two years earlier had come VMware.

The explosion of interest in virtualization was started by VMware, a commercial entity, which rather makes Pike's point. Xen was started in response to the lack of an academia-friendly platform for virtualization research; "paravirtualization" was not initially a design goal, but rather an expedient choice to avoid the difficulties of correctly virtualizing the x86.

And while I'm biased, VMware's solution to this problem (dynamic binary translation from supervisor x86 to user-level x86) is massively more inventive, interesting and useful than Xen's solution (hack up the kernel). I emphasize "useful", because a lot of VMware's customers were most interested in running Windows, which was not paravirtulization-ready until 2008, a full ten years after VMware's products were available.
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Strongly disagree re streams; streams / data-flow oriented programming is extremely easy to parallelize, and isn't going away in the future for at least that reason.

It's trivial today to write a bash script utilizing fork/join parallelism (& and wait, in bash) with streams and fifos for data transfer, and only a little care with ordering to guarantee no concurrency bugs. I do it all the time.

Objects overemphasize a method-full interface. Files force one to use a single pair of methods, read and write, which are the fundamental units of message sending. Objects as implemented in languages like C# are a bastardization of message sending, where the optimization of the message call reduces its composability in the large. When your messages are small packets of data, abstracting over communicating processes gets a whole lot easier.
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I notice whenever an interesting topic gets posted on HN, the authors/websites other work invariably starts to get posted a few hours later. (This is related to the recent systems research is dead posts)

Why is that? Why the need when the links are already there for people who are interested?
Perhaps the design should be "everything is a Resource" (ala REST) rather than "everything is an Object".

The beneficial aspect of "everything is a File" is the uniform interface: you can read a file, write to a file, seek to a particular position in a file (sometimes), and that's about it. It seems limiting, but that's what allows the huge number of interoperable tools to be built.

By going with "everything is an Object", there are no constraints on the interface. Every class of objects has it's own set of methods, and tools need to be designed for specific classes/interface rather than for "everything". Interoperability will be lost.

Resources are like objects, but constrained to uniform interface: their methods are GET, PUT, POST, DELETE, OPTIONS, HEAD. That's all the methods you need to manipulate individual objects and collections of objects. Of course, you'll need uniform identifiers (URLs) for the objects, and a uniform representation (or a set of standard representations.)

This will give you network-transparent resources, assuming you use globally unique URIs. It also turns the OS into a generic Web Service. I'm not sure what the implications are of that, but it seems like it might be interesting to explore.
Yes, so we can all have the sluggishness of Java on mobile devices, as opposed to the sprightly iPhone application style.
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I often find that when a boss is stuck in the dark ages of technology, the best route is to work around them. If they don't expicitly tell you how to do something, do it the way you want, but be prepared to fix it if something goes wrong.

If they do tell you to use some antiquated method and won't budge, then do it that way. When it doesn't work, they'll move on to the next bad idea. Eventually, they'll exhaust all of their options and will choose the best of the worst. Your job is to be out of there by then.
That's pretty clever! The syntactic overhead of using Python for this is pretty minimal. It's not nonexistent, though, especially when you're concerned about readability as well as brevity.
My painful discovery of the day was the sad revelation that in 2009 Microsoft still has not yet moved on from case-insensitive filesystems. I'm sorry, but if your operating system cannot distinguish between ['ass','Ass','ASS'] then it is a toy and not a tool.

Modding me down does not erase this painful truth.
You're talking about packrat parsing of PEGs, not PEGs in general. I'm not yet sure that packrat parsing itself is a win, but I'm pretty sure PEGs are, just for expressiveness.

I did a simple PEG parser generator (66 lines, generates code in JavaScript, http://github.com/kragen/peg-bootstrap/blob/15acbdd6f7108117...) and since then I've been thinking about computing one-character follow-sets to speed up PEG parsing with predictive parsing.

What I think is really interesting is the OMeta work on things like program analysis and code generation using PEGs. I feel like there's a deeper connection between ML-style pattern-matching and PEG-parsing hiding somewhere in there, but I haven't been able to tase it out yet.
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A truly fascinating device. When I first heard about it (as a standalone instrument) I assumed it was simply "dvorak" for piano: With practice it might give you a nominal advantage.

A bit later, I actually saw and played one in a music store. It had never occurred to me before that the piano was, in effect, one dimensional. It was forced to be so by the row of strings behind it. A two dimensional keyboard is a revolution and a half! Relating notes to each other by 2d positioning really starts to mess with your mind.

The first question I had was "how do I move the notes around on the keys?" as thousands of fascinating pattern possibilities sprang to mind. (Janko-like perhaps?) Sadly, on the standalone demo unit that was there, this was not possible. (The "Harmonic Table" layout they have on it is very cool though) With a midi controller version and some clever programming, I'll bet its easy. $500 is a lot for a mere midi controller but its tempting.

I'm half the way to inspired to get a box of buttons and an arduino from sparkfun and see what I can come up with on my own.
My suggestion: plan on adding some kind of real file system. I've worked with OS's that try and de-emphasize (or eliminate) the traditional file system and it just doesn't work. Programmers eventually hack their own "file system" to work with the files that everyone has. When every computer is networked and connected to the Internet, communicating by files, file names, and file extensions, is universal.
You are under estimating the value of high speed internet and time-zone. Travel "vertically" across the map and travel to places with something better than 5mbps and you should be fine.
Well said, pj! Thanks for such an illuminating commentary.
In purely economic terms, a lot of those 3 billion are a lot better off now than they would have been a century ago. The top of the list, Namibia, has US$5500 or so per-capita purchasing-power parity GDP. If your income is US$5500 per year, you're already pretty far up Maslow's hierarchy.

Of course, just because someone isn't starving to death doesn't imply that they aren't miserable; probably most people reading this comment know somebody in a rich country who has committed suicide.
I agree with what you say, but I was trying make an entirely different point, which is that I don't think success is the right word to describe anything related to evolution.

Success implies goals and evolution has no goals. A particular species surviving or not is just like rolling a die and observing that the 3 has come up and the other numbers didn't. It's useless to say that 4 wasn't successful. Nobody would say that, but when it comes to evolution people start to talk about success as if nature had intentions.
Are you going for something like a simpler to use evernote?
I'm still not getting exactly what it is that is supposed to be shared.
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Ask HN: How willing are you to alpha/beta test a product (before release)
I'm thinking about a few subjects and a question came up: how willing are people to alpha/beta test a product before it's release to the general public?

I thought I'd ask Hacker News first.
I like testing.
I don't like testing.
Maybe someone should inform SOSP. By the way guys virtualization is hardly the only thing going on in systems research. As far as the Web replacing the OS... Honestly if HTTP/HTML is the sole future of innovation in computing then that is a bit sad. As for Cloud Computing, well, let's say the reports of the demise of systems research have been greatly, greatly exagerrated. Actually, looking at my dept this just seems to be a pitifully naive view.there are plenty of projects and not the time nor enough grad students to do them all.
The Precambrian fossil record is pretty thin, even though DNA-based Precambrian life existed for about six times as long as we've had multicellular organisms. There's a discussion at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_life#From_organic_mol...
It totally depends on the situation. If I know the product is from someone who is good at what they do, I will be fine doing testing if it is benefiting me. Otherwise, no way.
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Preaching to choir. Hacker News is like the nerdiest of nerds.

Seriously, I came from Ukraine when I was 12 and being an out-of-shape immigrant and a nerd made my life in American school a living hell.

The problem I remember having the most was isolation. It's interesting because people did make fun of me in Ukraine all the time, but we made fun of everyone and were pretty much all friends, we conversed a lot, even when we were fighting.

In U.S. it's just different, people ignore you. Spending 8 hours in a place where no one talks to you except for teacher (and several accidental buddies) is pretty miserable. I often thought it'd be easier if I was bullied, at least someone would fucking notice me. Took me a around 4-5 years before I became a misantrophist and just started hating everyone by default and that's sort of how I managed living here.
This is one impressive hack.
I think the thing people miss about objects in this scenario is that they don't have to be used directly by everything. That is, if I have an object that contains a list of names, `grep' doesn't have to support grepping over my object, it just has to support grepping over a list. You can just call `grep myObject.names Phil'.

I don't think making objects less generic is a good idea, but rather we need to interact with them differently.
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An interesting link, if you have organic chemistry interests but haven't read that much on pre-RNA.

Thanks, should have checked that myself.
I would say the software fulfilled its requirement 100%.

It's requirement was to make a boatload of cash for Accenture.
If you launch a product on HN, the link is publicly viewable, and archived by Google shortly thereafter.

You have, by definition, launched publicly.

No one wants to debug someone else's broken crap. So deliver something worth an educated stranger's time with the caveat that it might be unpolished. People expect sites to get better with time.
He tells bigots what they want to hear. That's a true success formula.

(disclaimer: I use Windows, Linux and OS X and I'm not enthusiastic about any of them)
A case insensitive filesystem needs to convert everything into a single case before doing any string comparisons. The only reason Unix doesn't do this is because they couldn't spare the CPU to do it in the original implementation. So not only are you offtopic, but you have your chronology backwards.
this is the reason we need IM federation, and NOW.
As long as you have so little actual data put it all right on the front page! You have way too many steps to get to the real meat. I would use an application like this in general, but it's the network effect that you need to create, which is difficult as we all know all too well.
Sorry, but a filesystem that doesn't preserve exactly what I put into it is broken.

And the only chronology I mentioned was my surprise that Windows is still broken, even in it's latest iteration (Vista).

I am glad that I only have to deal with Microsoft product on an extremely occasional basis. I feel sorry for people who are so emotionally invested in their operating system that they can't see that OpenBSD is the answer... ;-)
while you are correct, the upfront amount is what most people think about when buying most things (not everyone). housing bubble? (we can debate about who is to blame all day, but people simply looked at their monthly payment and down payment when they signed their deeds.)
I honestly am brimming with excitement about getting my hands on one of these.

If they're decent, I've got plans to buy at least 2 more, one going to my mother and grandmother to get them connected to the web with a cheap & simple device.
It probably is the researching/browsing king of people. Sometimes when i find a good article via HN and i go exploring for more good stuff from the same author/website. This leads to more interesting things, which i could submit to HN.
Another interesting talk on django idoms: http://www.slideshare.net/jacobian/django-in-the-real-world

By Jacobian and ubernostrum.