skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The CPU is so much faster than memory that the time needed for checking if malloc succeeded is basically unmeasurable.

I assume that after you malloc that you'll put something in it. Copying that data to memory takes so much longer than checking if the return value == NULL that it's a joke to care.

BTW The info was interesting, but I don't care for the style of writing.
Justin.tv is looking for Fall Programming Interns (We're heavy on job perks)
If you think extra branches don't affect the performance of heavily pipelined architectures, I have some Pentium 4s I'd like to sell you. :)

Right idea, wrong proof.
The china study book is just "some dude's book." It is not peer reviewed. Some of the underlying study is, but most of the conclusions expressed in the book are not a product of peer review.
Allow me to suggest Glims. I've been using it for a while now. I can't understand why Safari doesn't come with Glim's extras by default (e.g. full screen mode and better tab handling). Anyhow, here's the link: http://www.machangout.com/

Hope it helps.
99 Cents Finds Someone’s Name and Address From a Cell Phone Number
I have personally been laid off three times. Once two months before my first child was born from a company I had worked for for 8 years. None of them give any kind of notice. My current employer fires people on Fridays just before quitting time. Again, no notice.

I'm of the opinion that what you give is what you get. The employer will let you go on Friday at 17:00, but then they expect 2 weeks notice? Yeah, right.

Edit: spelling.
I guess you never looked?

There plenty of examples.

It's not usually needed but it often helps.
In the case of a browser plugin, I'd be quite annoyed if an out of memory condition in the plugin caused my whole browser to quit. I'd experience something beyond annoyance if printing caused my word processor to quit without saving. The never fail malloc wrapper makes sense for some programs, but not for others where better, context sensitive recovery is possible.
Carbohydrate acts as tumor suppressor
Apple iDataCenter Will Be 500,000 Square Feet
Am I on Reddit? Seriously, what's with the headline?
The world needs more people saying foolhardy things like "I could do that in a weekend", not less.

As long as you're the one working for them and not me.
It is not "wrong" to put Google Analytics at the start of the page - in fact, Google _requires_ it for some GA features to work (like Event Tracking).
From my understanding, his problem was that the malloc wrapper being used not only checked but also returned -1 if it was null (I assume some other arbitrary number otherwise) which would add extra computation time.

Out of curiosity, I have always used assert to do malloc null checks. I realize it is just a macro which gives a conditional to exit but is at all hindering in terms of performance?

eg:

void *Malloc(size_t size) {

void *r = malloc(size);
assert(r != null);

return r;
}
If you follow Google's instructions and put the Control Script within the <head> tag on page A, the JavaScript will get executed and the user will get redirected to page B before page A and its assets load. Also, if the user gets put into group A, then all of page A is allowed to load and the user is not redirected at all.
I think Gladwell is concerned that another writer is intruding on his niche of content-free pablum predicated upon the mistaken assumption that the plural of anecdote is data. The only thing more amusing than watching two writers who seem to operate within their own reality-distortion fields argue past each other is seeing members of the blogosphere who share a similar unfamiliarity with the concept of debate grounded in facts and data weigh in on either side.
I have no problem with your content (with the exception that you failed to mention which technologies COULD be commercialized rather easily). I believe you gave all accurate information. I just didn't like your presentation.

So some critiques, if I may:

1) Slide 2 - Why? I know you're trying to demonstrate your credibility, but this just seems like bragging. Who cares if you achieved highest honors.

2) Slides 2,6,9,13,14,15,19,22,28,29,37 - waaaaay too verbose. If you came to give a seminar at my school, I would have been drawing stick figures by now. Brevity is key.

3) I still stand by my criticism of your quotes. They add absolutely nothing to your presentation. What are they supposed to accomplish? And I assumed you were giving this talk in front of a group of people...so which toolbar are you referring to...the one on my iphone?
Original paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2009.05.017
A lot of people here are very good at learning things on their own, and very quickly at that. This is most definitely not true of a lot of the population. Having a talent for picking up new things helps a ton in giving you the confidence to pursue "non-generic" career paths, and I don't know that teaching kids that they can pursue these kinds of paths will make much difference if they don't have a talent for it.
You can do those with a hybrid system. The JS loads a special url with those values are url parameters, and the log analyzer knows to look for that url.
Friendfeed's Paul Buchheit discusses Real Time Search and More
I met this guy in 2004.

He talked about himself for 20 or 30 minutes before I got a word in.

He had a couple of ideas at the time, some about charitable giving, and others were about fighting spam with the technique of charging strangers to receive their email. (This is such an oft-repeated idea it's listed in the "You Might Be An Anti-Spam Kook" page). I told him that there were a few things wrong with his approach, and he clapped his hand on my shoulder and said that he could just get someone else to do this.

Overall I felt a bit sorry for him. He was a pretty interesting guy who had great talents and great ambitions. He wasn't limited by a lack of confidence. Unfortunately he has had a lot of early validation that he was a genius, and such overconfidence can be just as crippling.
> What he did here was the equivalent of say, farting in your face because it is "within the rules" (i.e. not illegal) and then act surprised when this made him socially excluded.

I am pretty sure I could obtain a legally binding restraining order against someone who kept doing this to me.
> However, I wasn’t the youngest. It was Steve Espinosa, who was actually employee number seven at Apple.

I assume the author is thinking of Chris Espinosa, employee number eight, who also joined the company at the age of 14. Chris was one of the early guys on the Macintosh team -- pretty fascinating as well.

http://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&...
Yes, I try to imagine that my SSN has already been spread all around the Internet, and thus remind myself that I can't consider it secure.
In meatspace there are police officers and judges who will interpret the law to stop people from causing trouble. There's also the threat of physical violence.

Prof Myers found an environment where he was safe from punishment, and started griefing. People got mad.

Wow, annoy people and they get mad. Great study. You've really advanced science with this one!
In the context of a browser plugin, "quit" could just mean to stop executing and throw up an error message. It doesn't necessarily mean to end the whole process (browser).
My understanding is that this penalty can be mitigated by telling the compiler which way a branch is likely to go so it can optimize the generated code appropriately. I know the linux kernel uses what I think is a gcc specific extension to do this. For a malloc check, the result is almost always the same.
That's probably the same as the non-assert check EXCEPT that release builds might disable assertions and then you're in trouble.
I'm not sure what your system's malloc looks like, but I assure you it's probably full of branches. One more isn't going to make a difference. If you are worried about branches causing pipeline stalls you aren't allocating memory.
Live a healthy lifestyle, consume less, push your body to function efficiently and you will be more likely to live longer. You might still die in a car accident but it makes sense that changes in day to day behavior affect how your cells regenerate.
The Soft Heap: An Approximate Priority Queue with Optimal Error Rate
I suspect that the airport book market is quite large and thoroughly dominated by "content-free pablum."
The biggest risk is identity theft where the culprit uses your SSN to gain credit in your name to buy stuff. You can protect yourself by placing a "freeze" on your credit report. This is essentially what LifeLock does (simplified). But you can do it for free by calling the rating agencies yourself:

http://www.ehow.com/how_4447446_block-companies-checking-cre...
Ricardo Semler's participative management style
I do feel obligated to remind myself that your impression is limited in the fact that the scope is narrow, just one experience with him seemed to form the impression.

That being said, this makes me even more curious about his story as it is a representation of many similar stories, countless young people (my role models) persisting and working their ass off, being rewarded as a result, but then after they seem to just feed off of the initial success or seem to fall short of the "initial promise". ie: Farrah Gray.

What sets those that persist only early on apart from those that continue to challenge themselves? When I start doing really successful things, I don't want that to spoil me and turn me lazy.
Social Security Numbers Can Be Guessed
Hammering Usernames (the story behind Facebook's one-night deployment)
Hi Sam, glad to correct the article re: OdioWorks if you'd like. Let me know.

-Christa
And this is just inexcusable. Horizontal scrollbar comes up when I resize below 975px wide. In other words, if by some freak chance you aren't using 1024x768 with your browser maximized (because like... everyone does that, right?), you get a less-than-optimal view of their website. Wow. Usability.
Autopager beats either option.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4925

What's really needed is an autopager/readability mashup.
Would be interested to see the stats and numbers on what are the chances of growing a relatively profitable (say, $1m a year) it-business in, say, 5 years among the entrepreneurs who have this kind of aim. And compare that to lottery winning again.
A humorous article that makes some valid points, specifically the last one. The name won't necessarily restrict it from succeeding as a search engine, but it does nothing to help either.
Object Orientation (and other poorly understood idioms)
Social Security Numbers Deduced From Public Data
Fast Exponential Algorithms
The evidence is not just from the epidemiological study, there have been lots of follow-up studies to examine the processes in detail.

I would argue that a broad, epidemiological study is the most persuasive sort of evidence to use when considering whether to make drastic changes. Otherwise you're dealing with information like "omega 3s prevent x, y, and z" so you end up taking an Omega 3 supplement along with the dozen other supplements while eating Wendy's for lunch every day.

Thinking that health can be understood on the basis of "taking supplement x is good" is the root of the current supplement gold rush (people sell tons of snake oil substances that contain "omega 3's" etc.) and a highly irrational way to behave.
I'm going to go against the grain here: yeah, he was griefing them, but the game and the players look worse here. If it's a PvP situation, then game designers need to be aware of creative tactics people come up with. If the game is unbalanced or someone starts using tactics outside of the spirit of the game, the developers should patch the game.

This isn't pie in the sky stuff, either. Valve does it all the time with TF2, and that's a big part of what makes it such a good game. By being aware of how people use the game and working hard to maintain balance and stop overt exploits, they've created a controlled environment that still allows people to get extremely creative.

I now actively avoid any games with PvP that are so horribly designed that cultures develop with unwritten rules to overcome shortcomings in the game. And if you are playing a PvP game you should expect people to come up with creative tactics and strategies to win.
This would be more interesting if there was some attempt to filter the ones where there was some deliberate attempt to get views or exposure.

As the author pointed out, "Not everyone uses YouTube to launch their showbiz or political career.". Some amount of these videos are meant only to be shared with friends or family, so it seems flawed to talk about the chances of using social media to strike it big when these sorts of videos are part of the dataset.
For the average user, I totally agree. But for myself (a web developer/designer and power user), I won't be considering a wholesale switch from Firefox until there are viable alternatives for such Firefox add-ons as the Web Developer toolbar, Firebug, All-in-One Gestures, ColorZilla, MeasureIt and Tab Mix Plus to name a few that I find useful.
Other great Semler resources: http://delicious.com/tag/semler
The story behind ww.com
here you go:

http://jacquesmattheij.com/content/story-behind-wwcom-camara...
Get your tickets for the Techcrunch meetup, fast
That makes perfect sense. I love that Firefox is and always will be an option. I just don't think it'll stay the top (or #2) browser for long.
You're right. It would be awesome if there was a translation that mapped rank on any given day to sales rate.
Ask HN: What kind of fresh ideas does advertising need?
Advertising on the web is declining.

I've had previous experience in advertising. Specifically, social advertising. That startup never got far off the ground. I plan on giving it another shot.

What's plaguing advertising? Ignoring advertisements, both in the brain (ignoring ads is second nature to many) and in software (adblock). Untargeted ads. Ads that are annoying, flashy, and loud.

But most of all, it's just that consumers aren't very compelled by advertising anymore.

What kind of fresh ideas does advertising need?
Try to advertise without annoying your users and to stay completely out of the way until the ad is relevant.

Sharpshooting instead of carpetbombing.

And I just might not block you then...
(Taking you seriously) Try keeping a log of your estimations and the actual time taken. Write down both the original two day estimate and the extended 11 day one.

Then after a few months you should have a good set to look at and hopefully convince yourself to believe your modified estimates. Or how to adjust your formula to be more accurate.
Vaguely related problem: say A and B are sets of size n. How fast can you sort A+B = {a+b | a in A ; b in B}?
is that a quote from the MacGyver show or did you mean to say Well done, MacGyver?
If you've never read it, I highly recommend the book that details his company Semco. According to Amazon it is the best-selling nonfiction book in Brazil's history.

http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workpl...
Thank you for saying what the inner cynic in me also thought.

It is ironic that this "cynical" attitude is actually non cynical: a belief in objective data, and an attempt to find meaning based on facts and logic. Yet by many this sort of thing would be viewed as "cynical".
Awesome! Though... what happened to 2.1?
Asynchronous Games
They need to make SSN # assignments more random. Right now it seems like its pretty much a consecutive set. You can just add +x to your social security #, and get a valid number
I was responding to the part at the end where it was implied that heavily pipelined architectures aren't subject to stalls (what else does especially in italics mean?), not the idea that checking for NULL is a performance hit.
Yahoo adds Search Pad feature
Using "whatever codecs the user has installed" is the very non-solution that has already been in place for over a decade by means of the <object>/<embed> tags. The result of that was eleventy hojillion attempts to make the ultimate codec, every single one a failure.

Even when <object> based video worked, the plugin architecture made it slow, unstable, unpredictable and generally a horrible user experience. The only reason we have video at all today is because Flash provides it internally.

Any web video standard that fails to standardize the codec has made zero direct progress. However, it looks like the HTML5 attempt may have resulted in an acceptable defacto standard: a browser must support one or both of H.264 and/or Theora. Since the <video> tag makes it easy to provide both formats, I think this is a compromise that web developers will be able to live with.
That's actually quite closely related to the 'merge' step of quicksort, where both half sets are sorted independently and then merged.
I question some of your underlying assumptions. Are you sure that consumers aren't compelled by advertising?

Is the decline of advertising really a result of declining effectiveness of advertising, or is it a symptom of the broader economic climate?

Ads are not ignored as widely as people like to believe. Many people claim to be immune to advertising, sales, and marketing -- and yet, they must base their purchases on something.

As an aside, I wouldn't spend a lot of effort worrying about ad blocking software. Accept that a certain percentage of users will run ad blocking software, and move on.
| There are zero controlled studies showing this...

There are animal studies that looks pretty compelling to me. The China Study refers to some of these.
Yeah well I guess there's always going to be a lot more average users than there are power users.

Completely subjective, but I have always loved the Firefox and Thunderbird logos. I've had them somewhere prominent on my desktops for so long now that I almost don't feel right without them. First app that I install on a new machine is Firefox. Maybe Google or Apple should try and snag Jon Hicks, I read he's working with Opera at the moment.
Throwing up an error message is likely to require allocating some of the memory you just ran out of. There's very little you can reasonably expect to do when you run out of memory. The caller needs to carefully back out, but this isn't something a wrapper can do by itself.
Which animal studies prove that eating meat will decrease longevity in humans? Sure, if you feed meat to rabbits, or other vegetarian animals, but there are just as many animals that are essentially incapable of eating not only grains but even vegetables.
This china study 'dude' is a well respected scientist. That blog author is not.
I like to learn from other people here as well as help with their projects (feedback, testing, etc).

I like HN people.
I thought that the problem with this is that it only freezes it for a certain amount of time and then you have to call again.Maybe that's not true or has changed?
Absolutely, and the observations suggested that hormone treatment was possibly even beneficial. That's why it's completely true that correlation != causation. You can try to "control" for differences in the observed groups, and epidemiologists try this all the time, but unless they already understand everything involved, it's impossible to get this completely right. And sometimes the things they try to control for are themselves based on other epidemiological studies.

This is the main reason we are always hearing in the press about how a "study shows that X is bad for us" then a "study shows that X is good for us". The majority of the time when there are such conflicting studies, it is the result of epidemiology or poorly controlled studies.
The modern history of the Codex beginning with its 1844 "rediscovery" is pretty interesting too. It looks a bit like the Elgin Marbles story, only messier. Even the official website mentions that the Monastery of St. Catherine had "some initial hesitations" about participating in the scanning project.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Sinaiticus#Discovery
http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/codex/history.aspx
Burning camera video to Blu-ray disc
Sothink HD Movie Maker recommended as a power Blu-ray disc Burner, which can burn various video to Blu-ray disc, including camera video. This tutorial is about how to burn camera video with HD Movie Maker.
>follow-up studies to examine the processes in detail.

Examining the processes isn't sufficient to provide proof unless it's a completely thorough examination. Biological science isn't at that point yet, and so what this usually means is that group A performs an observational study, group B finds a process that would explain group A's results, assuming group A's results are true. That's different from showing that group A's results were true.

Human, and animal, physiology is very complicated, and it's just plain wrong to assert that we know that eating meat decreases longevity. We don't. There is some evidence to believe it, and some evidence to not believe it at this point (both epidemiological studies and at the molecular understanding of the processes involved).

Epidemiological may be persuasive, but it's misleading because you take a single variable out of hundreds that may not even be known. So you may get Texans who become vegetarians based on longevity studies in some region of China, but then live an even shorter life because their lifestyles and the particular vegetarian foods that they eat aren't as conducive to longevity. This history of epidemiological studies are full of cases like this.
"The repoze.bfg package contains 11K lines of Python code. 8000 lines of that total line count is unit test code that tests the remaining 3000 lines."

And this is a win?
This is a dupe and over a year old

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=164725
Netbooks offered virtually free with mobile contracts
I'd say I almost always get 70%+ of the benefit just by having an answer. And there's other techniques that help, eg checking one problem against other problems, getting a bound on your error, asking on forums/mailing lists, etc.
His work for Opera's been fun to watch, certainly. The logo's no different (I'm not really a fan of any of the current browsing logos, TBH), but the latest beta has made the first step towards not being entirely painful to look at on the Mac. Not perfect, but leagues better than the bland tripe it was just half a version ago.
Jenna Fischer and Lee Kirk Engaged
I wouldn't quite say that because it implies we must have the ability to test it. A better thing to say is that a theory must provide falsifiable predictions, even if we don't have the ability to actually test it today.
Improved medical knowledge and technology? Better access to hospitals and doctors? Lots of things have changed in the past century. It's just as well to say that lifespans have gone up and heart disease has declined with the spread of telephone service or the emergence of plastic bags.
Unfortunately, the namespace is very small: there are 900 million possible SSNs (100-00-0000 - 999-99-9999) and approximately 300,000,000 Americans.
Tales from the 1st conference on Financial Cryptography in Anguilla (1997)
why not add a 2nd #(like a 4 digit pin) for each social security #. Credit cards have them, why not something as important as your official government id?