skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everyone else is mentioning the lack of capitalization, which is a problem, but i'm also going to suggest you follow standard practice for this a bit further and use 1.5 or double line spacing. That will make it a lot easier to read.

Also, if you ever plan on sending something to an editor, standard manuscript format: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mslee/format.html
> What happens when a GPS satellite fails?

The receivers use other satellites. They have to anyway: You can't get a fix with only one satellite.
I've one-offed this sort of thing a dozen times and always thought to myself, "I should stop and make this into a little plugin..." and I never did. Kudos.
Ask HN: Does the following system exist?
I want to have a laptop that runs as a hypervisor. I want to be able to run VMs on the hypervisor and be able to fast-switch desktops between these VMs. Basically hitting CTRL+ALT+F2 to switch to a windows VM - where the screen and KB are available to it, and CTRL+ALT+F3 to get to, say a linux VM.

Obviously - there are some HW changes that need to occur... but is there a machine/method for doing this?

I dont want t run a full OS with KVM/VirtBox where I run a VM in a window.

Suggestions?
pg: I don't know how much you care to get back the data that was lost, but it seems like it's at least partially available in the hnsearch.com API: http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?prett...
It's exacerbated by nil being reused as a value for things that aren't even pointer types, like the slices, channels and especially interface "pairs"[1]

[1] (<NoType> . nil) vs (T . nil) is pretty weird: http://play.golang.org/p/fmk-72OYkO
Go is designed to be a small, simple language, it's not hard to release that. If you want a fully featured type system, go program in Ocaml, Haskell or another 'big' language.
C++ templates are also latently typed. The bad error messages arise from the fact that C++ templates behave more like a duck-typed language than a strongly-typed language. Look at the error messages that arise from C++ template errors and a lot of them are about missing functions, just like you get at runtime when you have a type error is a dynamically-typed language. I think C++ concepts will improve this when they're standardized, because they will allow C++ compilers to type-check template arguments. (See bounded polymorphism.)
I really like the idea of squash scoring on the watch. Is it the version on mypebblefaces?

I started out liking the alerts for using google maps, but ended up finding it intensely annoying when driving in the city since there ended up being far too many notifications when going through roundabouts etc (approaching, turn off roundabout, distance to next turn).

Relatively minor annoyances (including double notifications sometimes when unlocking) compared to the utility I get from it though.

The funny thing is I read all this stuff about people disliking the look of the plastic Pebble, but all I've heard from people who see it has been positive (I don't wear it as a dress watch though).
I think you'll safely get a few years out of the skill set, as even if it starts downhill now IOS has a large footprint. It's also not a bad way to get familiar with objective C, and many of the tools and frameworks can be used for OS X development.
I think the actual paper (linked at the end) is much more informative and interesting than this coverage: http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6082

(I wouldn't call it blogspam, because it looks like they interviewed the researchers, but the summary leaves something to be desired)
There's the VMWare hypervisor. I think the hypervisor by itself is free, and can be used as a base OS, /iff/ it works on your hardware.
https://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/
You probably have to register an account, but afaik that product itself is free.
How to Roll a Perfect Joint
Show HN: My startups security page
When SEO Fails: Single Channel Dependency and the End of Tutorspree
One thing I noticed when contributing to PPSSPP was now familiar the programmers were with bits. Bit shifts, masks, bitwise ands against integers, lots of 'em. I saw more complex bit manipulation in the user input handling than I remember seeing in linux's task struct handling!

I don't think the programmers were showing off, just they've become familiar with bits on a level beyond normal.
Like how the linux guys are familiar with double star pointers.

On that note I would like to encourage you the reader to contribute to an emulator. They are an intertesting problem space similar to a compiler's backend, but with fewer unit tests.
The magic wasn't just the hack-ability, it was the $69 price. In a world dominated by $1000 desktop pcs, having a $69 linux minion as your home router was appealing.

There's just no place for it today at $300! The market is full of $25 TP-Links and Ubiquiti's that can do the same. Even full-on netbooks are cheaper.
Valve Reveals First Gen Steam Machines
That's the first impression I got from it as well.

I think there's another factor that is driving the price up more than anything else - serious hoarding by people who are just now beginning to understand the system and how it works.
Technological progress have spoiled me, I was disappointed it wasn't the size of a micro SD card.
Patrons of Game Criticism
>But without any way of correcting for this silent majority, or any sort of predictable systematic tendency, so what? We don't know everything? There's a lot of things we don't know, and on most topics we hear from only a small fraction of people, both expert and otherwise. Why is this worth pointing out?

Because it tells you that the more vocal people are usually full of BS, and you should take notice of what the silent experts and does-of-stuff practice. Who said there's no way of "correcting for this silent majority"?
That's just the intro price. It's $5/WEEK if you want nytimes.com + tablet apps. That's $260/year instead of $22/year. I would gladly subscribe if the long term rate was $5 for 12 weeks.

See full prices here: http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp5558.htm...
IPad or iPad mini, get Retina
SAN FRANCISCO OR DENVER.

Sup Hackers,

My name is Cat, and I'm on the search for a talented Android dev seeking opportunities in Denver or SF. We are a start-up based in San Fran working to create a functional and seamless experience for our client's customers. We work with several top 20 QSRs (That's Quick Service Restaurant to you) and are about to release within this year. We expect nothing but growth at this point, and our success has been remarkable so far....

Our management team has been responsible for the successful launch of the Starbucks App as well as Dunkin Donuts. We're pretty flexible in terms of our work schedules, have robust benefits through an amazing HR, and both offices in Denver and in SF are downtown, close to public trans. Top it off, we're kinda, sorta, (Definitely) awesome to work with....

Anyways, shoot me a message here and we can connect further.

Oh yeah, and what we're looking for:
3-5 years of professional development experience
-Minimum of 2 years developing secure multi-threaded mobile apps
-Ideally have submitted 2+ apps to Google Play with good adoption (send me a link?)
-Proven track record of building apps with great UI and experience
-Proficiency with Java, Android SDK and other related technologies

I can go on, but if I caught your eye with what you've seen so far, lets just go ahead and chat :)
PM Me or cabad [at] [cardfree] dot com.

-Cat
Hoare didn't invent 0-valued pointer. It was there since the beginning of time. Or at least the beginning of the CPUs.

People talk about getting rid of nil like it's actually possible.

It's not.

If you have pointers, they sometimes have to start the life uninitialized (i.e. with a value of 0) hence nil pointers.

As you admit yourself, the proposed solutions don't actually get rid of anything. At best they can force you to handle nil value by wrapping it in some wrapper.

Guess what - if you have that kind of discipline, you can do the same in C++.

Why aren't people doing that?

Because it comes at a cost. There's a cost to the wrapper and when it comes down to it, you still have to write the code to handle the nil pointer whether you're using a wrapper or a raw pointer.

It just doesn't buy you much.

Finally, fixing crashes caused by referencing a null pointer is downright trivial. Spend a few weeks chasing a memory corruption caused by multi-threading and you'll come to a conclusion that fixing a null pointer crashes (which can be done just by looking at the crashing callstack most of the time) is not such a big deal after all.
> The videos follow other alarming news last month that starfish were mysteriously disintegrating along the West Coast, a trend that has not been linked yet to any cause. Past computer simulations had indicated that radioactive cesium-137 from the Fukushima reactors could begin appearing on West Coast shores by early 2014.

Peterson admitted he was “befuddled” as to why radiation levels were higher than normal, but he was skeptical that the Fukushima meltdown could be the cause. He noted that many innocuous items could spike the radiation levels in an area, including red-painted disposable eating utensils.

So according to Dean Peterson, the county environmental health director, the radiation is far more likely to be due to people littering the beach and ocean with take-away utensils, rather than one of the world's worst nuclear disasters.

He's having a laugh, right?!
That falls flat on it's face as a cop out when you look at a language like nimrod that manages to be practically as simple as go while including full generics. Oh, it's faster too.

http://nimrod-lang.org/tut2.html#generics
They shut themselves down if they detect you are travelling around Mach 2 or above 18000 metres altitude

The intention was for a GPS device to disable itself if it was traveling faster than 1k knots AND above 60k feet, not traveling faster than 1k knots OR above 60k feet. Unfortunately, many GPS devices improperly implement this as an OR condition, rather than an AND condition. This becomes problematic when using a GPS in a high-altitude weather balloon to determine altitude and location, which a few friends and I did a couple years ago. We had to be very careful when selecting the GPS we used to avoid this pitfall.
Having multiple launch sites is starting to make more sense. I guess they can be integrating and testing several at the same time. It seems like a very quick ramp up. It will be interesting to see if they can keep to that schedule and launch a Falcon Heavy, recover a first stage and do a Dragon launch abort all in the same year.
Ozobot: A tiny robot that uses your mobile devices as a playground
You can't blame C++ generics on compatibility with C, because C doesn't have them. The culprit isn't manual memory management either.

The issue is just that the complexity of the type grows exponentially as you compose more generic types together. The string was templated on three things: the character type (usually char), the traits, and the allocator. Fair enough, but now the map is templated on the key type, the value type, the comparator, and the alocator. So that's 4 x 3 x 3 = 36 different parts in the StringToStringMap. Java has similar "russian doll" types where you have many different layers of generics within generics. You need to read all of them to fully understand the behavior.

To be honest, overuse of generics is a code smell in both C++ and Java. One of the early warning signs that your code might have this problem is if you feel the urge to template on bool. I do think that generics may come to Go some day, but I think it will require a lot of thought, and it may not come in quite the same form as it did for Java and C++. No doubt there will be many angry posts about how Go "has" to do it the C++/Java way at that point.
I love it =) Unfortunately, my poor understanding of the specific local problems in... well, anywhere other than the US limits my ability to do that coherently. I also recognize as a major flaw that people in the "west" have a strong tendency to infantilize people in less developed countries.

I feel like the first step to addressing actual problems in these places is always the same step you would use in identifying a market problem -- find people in that market and ask them what they think would be helpful!

So for me, I see the idea of this as to provide a context for engineers to look deeply at what is really going on in these places, by ideally asking people there how they can help.

Imposing ideas never works well, so I think that while this is hopefully useful as a motivation tool to learn and think about where your tech skills might fit in to solve major problems, ultimately it's only going to be useful if people who actually live in these places are involved. I'm hopeful that this lesson will become apparent as people look in more depth at how their ideas might work in practice, but it would be neat if there were a way to incorporate that directly... I just don't have the knowledge to do it.

Certainly Somalia and South Africa have very, very different problems, for an obvious example. I think this game would best be played with ready access to the internet, an open mind, and that just researching the ideas that are developed will improve our overall understanding of just how difficult these problems are.

In any event, I really, really would love it if other people added or modified these templates to expand it to fields I'm not familiar with. For instance, I didn't include "art" or "music" as tools, although I am quite sure they could be.
I scoped it to a YC framing.
So it seems they decided to reinvent Freenet?
Get your hands dirty and don't quit.
Tor Project website needs your help
Tor started more than eleven years ago. The project website has gone through three major revisions in that time. It looks like it’s again time for important changes.
The JS console in your favorite web browser.
The answer isn't environmentally friendly, but it has solid business logic behind it.

From what I understand, upping their print circulation lets them charge more for print advertisers (which pays more than digital advertisers), so NYT has a strong financial incentive to make the prices for digital/print comparable, in order to try to convince people to get the print version as well, instead of just the digital.

Because all print advertisers know are the circulation numbers -- they have no idea if you're actually opening it up or not, or just sending them all straight to the recycling bin while you read them digitally.

Again, not environmentally friendly. At least it's all recycled though.
How To Argue Effectively
CES 2014: Sony shows off life logging app and kit
I wouldn't knock it until you see it. I'll be curious -- and NYT articles generally have curated "Times' Picks" comments that often genuinely add to the articles. Remember, most articles don't even have comments -- only the ones which the NYT deems comment-worthy, and they do put forth editorial efforts at quality control.
yes, the economist does this as well. generalized rule:

in order to promote sales of product X, make it only slightly more expensive than the one it is marginally superior to.
Is this being motivated by "I just want a really efficient way to switch between desktops in different OSes?" If so, VMWare Workstation in full-screen mode is a configurable key chord (Ctrl-Alt, Alt-Tab) away from the host OS. I use Windows 7 as host (on a midline Dell laptop) and Ubuntu something-or-other in the VM. This is my primary dev environment and works great for my purposes.

There's also a Unity option, where they just put (e.g.) Linux apps as first-class windows within Windows, but the UX of it hurts my head.

If, on the other hand, you're e.g. worried about the performance hit to the VM given that the host OS is constantly running, then this won't help you.
"MarkDev"? Assuming its the same thing, I've been calling this "dev-marketing", in the same vein as "dev-ops". Much better than calling it "growth hacking".

(In the future, everything will be prefixed with dev- because software is eating the world (TM), until eventually everything is software and we can drop the prefix again.)
>not be faced with comments that most often reiterate whatever's in the article anyway

The comments are hidden by default it looks like, they won't be in your face unless you want them to be.
It means to use as the key for max 3(number of things this pattern matches) - (number of characters in pattern). The basic idea is that patterns that match more things are good, while patterns that are long are bad; if you select the pattern with the maximal score for the above expression it's matching more things than others or is shorter than others, or both.

Why the "3" bit, good question. Would be interesting to see what happens with other relative weights of number of matches and length.
There are also digital quartz watches. Here's one that is certainly under $20: http://www.amazon.com/Casio-F91W-1-Classic-Resin-Digital/dp/...
> I don't think web development is the hard thing to teach as much as problem solving well.

True, but there's a lot to be said for having first-time programmers (and especially college students) do Web development. It's a familiar environment, which means that they'll know that they're doing something relevant and practical, rather than abstract.
They'll be excited to see that they can create Web sites and applications, just like "real" programmers with more experience.

Part of the fun of programming is the immediate feedback that you get from your work. Nowadays, making that immediate feedback happen in a Web browser strikes me as a smart way to go if you're going to get them hooked.
> If you have pointers, they sometimes have to start the life uninitialized (i.e. with a value of 0) hence nil pointers.

Right, and those pointers must then be declared as potentially null. Or more generally, potentially non-present values of any type need a type like Maybe T.

> As you admit yourself, the proposed solutions don't actually get rid of anything. At best they can force you to handle nil value by wrapping it in some wrapper.

That's exactly the point: you can tell from a glance at any type whether it can be null or not, and you can only look at the value of something that's guaranteed to not be null; otherwise, you have to handle the null case first. Forcing that to happen at compile time via the type system is far better than dereferencing a null pointer at runtime.
The market isn't small enough for these tactics to work.

It's much more likely that this was a response to the very real and well documented problem of illegal exports. Another Japanese company, Mitutoyo, was caught several times illegally exporting these machines to embargoed countries, including North Korea and Iran. Some of Mitutoyo's executives were jailed for this.[1] Adding tamper-proofing and tracking is a great way to make sure that regain confidence and avoid prison.

Edit:
I'm not sure why this was downvoted. A representative from Mori said something similar on the board linked to by the original article:

"Regarding the device, Weapons of Mass Destruction. Worst case for a negligent violation would be Dr. Mori himself spending time in the slammer. That along is enough motivation for DMG MORI to follow the regulation very carefully. Other reasons include all of those stated above!

btw, no need to waste time on bypassing it. It is pretty solid. We have to make it so Iran, N. Korea, etc's best can't bypass it." [2]

I think that this is a perfectly plausible explanation and don't think that the real ulterior motive is controlling resale, especially when other foreign competitors do not have the same restrictions.

[1] http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2006/09/02/news/mitutoyo-ti...

[2] http://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/dmg-mori-gildemeister-m...
> If you have pointers, they sometimes have to start the life uninitialized (i.e. with a value of 0) hence nil pointers.

Why do your variables have to start life uninitialized?

> Why aren't people doing that? Because it comes at a cost. [...]

Not a runtime cost, though. This can be handled purely by the typesystem at compile time.
Among the grim litany of revelations was a blackmail letter
F.B.I. agents had sent anonymously to the Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr., threatening to expose his extramarital
affairs if he did not commit suicide.

Hoooooly shit. Wow. They actually did that.
And here I was wondering what I was being downvoted for. Turns out: nothing, a post just disappeared :)
Stats
* 60 messages per second
...
* 26 front end proxy serves. Double that in backend app servers.

78 servers for 60 messages per second?

We have one MSSQL box at work here that is regularly doing 2,500 queries/sec and that's an OLTP workload so easily more than 60 writes/sec.

serves makes me think that someone didn't proof-read the article...
You never ran reiserfs I see...

Back in ~2004 I watched IT spend a whole day recovering our 60-person startup's main Linux NFS server, due to a software bug in the storage driver. Had to rebuild the whole system from backups.
> The issue is just that the complexity of the type grows exponentially as you compose more generic types together.

Haskell handles this just fine. So we can blame it on C++. (I don't know whether it has anything to do with memory management, or C compatibility.)
So long as the unrelated arbitrary program is of finite length, and the regex golfer / arbitrary program composite is running on a machine with a finite amount of state, the halting problem can be solved by running each program for 2^(bits of state) steps or until a state is repeated.

So as long as you can show that a program that is not finite in length will not halt in a finite amount of time (I think this is the case, but am not actually positive), I think that a rexex-finding-program-finding-regex should be possible to write, at least in principle (though not in practice).
I've been thinking that for a few months now. When reCAPTCHA was revised last year and turned into numbers, I immediately figured it was for Google to read the house numbers on street view images.

Brilliant, really.
Ask HN: Amex Files Patent for "Transferring Value via a Social Network"
It sounds like Amex is trying to file a patent for our service (and many others). What should we do?

US Patent 20140006297 filed on July 2, 2013:

An integrated, end-to-end, automated system that
enables a first social networking user to seamlessly
transfer value to a second social networking user, even if
the second user is not registered with the money transfer
service from which the first user initiates the transfer...

Our service:

PikaPay.com
https://www.PikaPay.com/

Send Bitcoins to anyone on Twitter, as easy as a Tweet!

PikaPay is a Bitcoin wallet integrated with the Twitter API and is one of the fastest and easiest ways to use Bitcoin. Just like in the Amex patent, with PikaPay the recipient doesn't need to have a PikaPay account to receive bitcoins.

We were the first to start sending bitcoins on Twitter back in 2011. But we're sure that scores of other companies have been doing "value transfer via social networks" even earlier.

Do we have to take that Amex patent application seriously in any way, and is there anything specific we should do?

We Tweeted AmEx about it recently:
https://twitter.com/PikaPay/status/420231417117683713
For anyone interested in HTTP statuses this is a great resource:

http://httpstatus.es/
Active Seed VCs in 2013 Matches Record High. Here’s Who Did the Most Deals.
"Sorry

Because of its privacy settings, this video cannot be played here."