skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It very well could not be, but what's important here isn't what's built, but how it's built. The concepts are important, not the end result. Compared to the vast majority of intro to OS tutorials out there, this is great.

As I said, you can't expect someone to create something original unless they understand the mistakes of the past. I started off implementing toy kernels with no structure, moved on to Unix-like kernels, and eventually ended up in a realm entirely different. Just because someone starts out copying Unix doesn't mean they're going to be blind to other competing designs or completely unique ones.

Expecting someone to build something new without any basis is just foolish.
I am sending my ideas to my own email... My inbox got a bit messy lately....
Africa's "Crisis": Africa in better shape than most experts think
This makes me think of a recent Economist article about the industrial revolution.

The question is why did the industrial revolution happen in the UK? Lots of other places had innovation earlier, had banking earlier, etc. But one theory is that the UK at that point in time uniquely had expensive labor combined with cheap energy. Then and only then did industrialization make sense, because only then was it economical - profitable.

So I'm wondering when will advanced robotics, capable of completing complex tasks in the service industry be more economical then minimum wage humans?

Sadly I don't think this is going to happen soon, human labor is cheap and industrial robots are expensive.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.

I'm quite sure that if there is one set of people that know this by heart then it is the military. Real world experience will bring out the trouble much faster than any amount of simulation.

Use simulations to help you design, validate your design in the real world. Then update your simulation to reflect the lessons you learned during your real world tests and iterate.

Have a look at armadillo aerospace, John Carmack is as versed as anybody in that field with simulations and STILL they find out almost every trial they do that the real world is not as clean as the simulated one.
As the comments on the original article mention, Google seems to be answering two different questions with geolocation. The first is which of their localized web sites to display. The second is which language to display that site in. Defaulting to the localized site almost certainly helps them comply with local censorship laws, as well as offering culturally and geographically relevant content. Once you've made that choice, displaying, say, Google Japan in English might not make very much sense, so I can see why Google has merged them.

As a frequent international traveler, I would definitely appreciate a setting that permanently locks my Google to the US site in English.
Then use a better text editor.

You're doing a bad job of distinguishing between a feature you personally want in an application, and the actual problems associated with storing times. As has been pointed out, there's no such thing as a time without a timezone. '12:30', the thing you want to write, is just a string. Acting like it's more than a string in your application is fine - strings are very flexible - but that's a completely different topic than the one at hand. You don't seem to be grasping this.
I believe the feature request link at the bottom goes to an appropriate place to have such conversations.
Sure, but that is a very small minority.
Can't view all the details from this browser - don't the handle bars project outside the wheel cicumference, or can they be folded further?

Personally I think the emphasis on folding bikes which seems to there appears to be at the moment is wrong. We should be looking at properly connecting the bike with mass transit - trains and buses that are easily accessible for bikes/cyclists.
The issue is that

- success on a simulator does not mean being able to "scale up" to real life

- success IRL would does not imply success on some simulator

The link is particularly weak for crude simulations of multi-agent, dynamical, stochastic, partially observable, real-time worlds.
Startup 129: Term Sheet – Board of Directors
If you're serious about getting into OS development and doing something different, you have to study everything available. Plan 9 (and the closely related Inferno), L4 (my personal favorite microkernel), NT, BeOS, Singularity, etc. If you're going to build something unique, you have to sample everything.
This post about a startup Board of Directors is a continuation of the series about venture capital term sheets. When thinking about the board there are lots of things to consider and this post will cover the Board's role, who should be on it, and how to best work with the board.
Absolutely. Here's the government press release: http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/pns/DisplayPN.cgi?pn_id=2009_0138
I have been in search of a solution to this problem for many years. (The quest is chronicled in this blog entry: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=8)

Until my own system is complete, I will continue using a standard "moleskin" notebook (expensive, but I fill it up very slowly and I doubt that a cheap one would stand up to several years of sharing a pocket with a set of keys.)
TechCrunch: summarizing corporate press releases since 2005
After working with computers through the internet maturation, I believed that society as a whole needed to improve their humanity in order to use the technology the right ways. Later I decided we should use technology to improve our humanity. Now I just need to figure out how exactly to make it happen.
That thread looks quite dead to me.
that presumes an unreasonable amount of homogeneity in both the programming languages of the entrants and the sensor platforms of their vehicles. The entrants may very well do that inhouse for testing purposes, but since Darpa is merely responsible running the competition and determining if the prize award is merited, why on earth would they do something that would unduly constrain the entrants?
Not only does it not have a chain, it only has one pedal.
I probably use the plugin 'tComment' more than any other plugin. It toggles code comments, based on filetype. I often try to toggle comments by hitting 'gc' on machines that don't have that ability. Very simple, but has quickly become indispensable.

I keep a list of links to things related to Vim, and the list of plugins I use is at the very bottom, if you're interested: http://mileszs.github.com/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/951
> Decorator is Python’s implementation to visitor pattern...

huh?
The comparison is slightly tendentious in that the info on ruby isn't always up to date (eg "Modules" and "HTTP and other Internet stuff").
Best technique for reducing complexity: don't use Perl.
patrick farley is a genius - both in terms of story telling and animation technique. i'm one of those who's been waiting for electric sheep to return. good to see it back!

Please go to the home page and check out his other stories - especially Shapeshifter (which is not back online yet, but you can find some fan-uploaded versions online - http://e-sheep.sansara.net.ua/www.e-sheep.com/shapeshifter/i...).

See http://webcomicsreview.com/examiner/issue041213/farley.html for a good critique of farley's work.

That said, I dont see why this is HN-worthy.
Tell them it's a reality TV show and there would be 1000s queueing up for the chance?
One very useful way to get around this, specially when you use both a local and the global version, is to setup a keyword search for each in your browser (in Chrome and Firefox it's pretty easy).

So for example, if I want the english Google (hl=en), I have a keyword "g", and when I want local MX content (.com.mx, hl=es), I use gmx.

Of course it's still no excuse for Google (and other companies) to offer such bad user experience.
Congrats to you all, its a very cool app.

Bump is one of the only apps I've had non-computer people excitedly tell me about. It really seems to resonate with people. Nice work.
"What is the meaning of the name 'RuntimeException' ? Why is the class so named? Think about this for a minute ... ALL exceptions are thrown at runtime right?"

That has been bothering me subconsciously for years!
It is very nice to have the explanation for the name:

"Recall that Java has a class called as the “Runtime” class – an abstracted representation of the underlying Java Virtual Machine that allows us to add hooks and get information. So the simple answer to “What is the meaning of the name RuntimeException” is “It is an exception thrown by the Runtime itself” rather than any particular piece of code."
I'm sure it never occurred to anyone on these teams to try out their code in a simulated environment. I'm 100% positive their development model was to crash car after car after car until they got it working. I can only imagine how expensive some of those bug hunts got.

Come on, seriously?
The "Daily Express" is not an unreliable tabloid. It's very reliable - I can guarantee every edition will contain an editorial about illegal immigrants and a Princess Di conspiracy. Reliable as clockwork
Plenty of people use the 'up' as "I agree" and 'down' as "I disagree". I know that's not the way they are intended to be used

Darn, I wish I would have bookmarked the comment in which pg said it was okay to vote to indicate agreement or disagreement. SearchYC is my friend:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

(And gojomo was my friend too, as I first found his comment linking to pg's comment when I did my SearchYC search.)
Like this guy? http://girlvinyl.com/lj2009/Recent_Graduate_Programmer_Neede...
The "Holy Grail of Software" is an illusion. Sorry to burst your bubble.

How are you distinguishing "coding" from "assembly"? What is code, if not a series of instructions assmbled together in a sequence? What is the assembly of components, if not writing code using designated primitives?

Turing showed that it's possible to write almost anything with a tiny number of primitives. If you have some kind of means of combination and means of abstraction built into your language, you can generate new objects from the primitives, which can then be combined and abstracted, ad infinitum.

In other words: you're doing nothing new.

The problem you are going to run into is that there is no magic set of components which will meet all needs for all purposes, at the appropriate level of abstraction.

If you want to build a Domain Specific Language for creating ERP systems, more power to you. That's a worthwhile project.

But don't go mistaking that for "the Holy Grail of Software".
Your greatest strength is knowing your weaknesses.
I quite hoped to be reading an in-depth comparison, but this article merely scratches the surface. What I would like to see from an in-depth article is actual code implementing stuff, showing the features a language has (and comparing them with each other).

I don't think this is a good article nor a useful one.
I have friend who works at NASA in sim and test. Let me assure you simulations don't have to cost an order of magnitude less when the gov is involved.

All joking aside you are talking about custom designed systems. How would you design a sim that works with whatever wonky sensor setup a team can come up with? Two isn't pre-challenge VandV up to the individual teams? They should have simed it long before it got to the competition if they were going to. The competition is to prove that it works in real life\bragging rights. It isn't nearly as cool to say my simulated robot is faster than your simulated robot.
"Kind Regards" is pretty common in English English, find this often on business missives.

I often use "sincerely", but never "yours sincerely" - I'm sincere but I'm not the chattel of the recipient.
Oxford called about some prior art. They have evidence that Harvard has copies of it's top secret word list codenamed 'OED'
Seems useful
Drooling...

You build a working HTML4 web app, and then sprinkle progressive enhancements with JS and HTML5 (even offline browsing!), and voilá! You've got a web application with an awesome desktop client!
The article makes the important point that Africa has been enjoying improvement in daily life through technological diffusion just like every other continent, but I think the crisis comes from Africa being worse off than other continents in an era when people have intercontinental mobility. The year I was born, Zambia was more prosperous than Taiwan. Many African countries had a reasonably good start as colonialism ended. But during the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s, Taiwan (and Korea, etc.) made far more progress than countries in Africa that had a head start in economic development, and today people with a choice move to the places with the best opportunities. That includes smart Africans with means who leave the countries of their birth to study and work abroad. Emigration isn't zero-sum: often countries gain from citizens who go abroad and learn about new ways of doing things and who send back money to relatives. But investment tends to flow to the areas with the best opportunities, so every country has to be an APPARENT place of opportunity to gain investment.
The future of ICANN, and how US domain names could be in peril.
New Engine Combines Gas and Diesel for Maximum Efficiency
Traction with Steve Barsh (new interview series)
No drive? The reassembly part of the video a reverse of the disassembly? I have an awesome gadget which refuels my car as I drive, or I will, as soon as I locate a black box with some wires and pipes sticking out of it, and splice together some video that shows the rev counter and speedo going the right way, while super-imposing the fuel gauge returning to full. Maybe I'm just a cynic and the video doesn't reveal all the secrets.
Pat Allan had the best follow up, which kicked off some interesting discussion. You can find it here: http://freelancing-gods.com/posts/future_ruby_and_california...
I'd support a Geneva Convention-style ban on robotic warfare.

on second thought, not an outright ban, but there should be some serious limitations set in place before we completely dehumanize the process.
Google and Yahoo have search API's that you can use for these tasks without breaking TOS. Most of the software apps around use the API's if you give them your key, or you may prefer to write your own script to use the API's.

Otherwise I guess you could just use normal search from your script, but keep it slow, the kind of speed you'd go if you were doing it manually, and leave it running until its done? depends how often you need to check the stats.
Seriously. You know, Edge Games also got themselves attached to the Mamet movie The Edge and the Marvel Comic The Edge.
Upgrading to Windows 7: Four Cheers, Four Jeers
>> The year I was born, Zambia was more prosperous than Taiwan.

Out of curiosity, what year were you born? I have family connections to pre-war Zambia/Zimbabwe, and that situation immediately came to mind when I started reading this article.
There's this site where you can compare implementations of several patterns in different languages... If only I could remember where... anyone?
EDUSAT: First Indian satellite built exclusively for the educational sector.
This is terrifyingly bad advice, all the more so because no one here seems to understand why or even thinks there is anything to understand.

Learning has a direct cost in creativity. Once you have mired your brain in cached thoughts (http://lesswrong.com/lw/k5/cached_thoughts/) of Unix brokenness, it is very difficult to dislodge them. They won't feel like cached thoughts, or like anything special for that matter - just "the way you write operating systems."

Not one of the systems you mentioned deviates in any fundamental way from the mistakes of the original Unix. Not one. One of the reasons for this is that each was designed by people who have been steeped in Unix internals.
Taking Microsoft's Hyper-V R2 for a Spin
The stat is meaningless anyway without some sort of timeframe.
How Not to Write Code pt. 2
> Expecting someone to build something new without any basis is just foolish

Base it on your mental model of how your CPU's internals ought to be used, as inferred from the latter's manuals - like 1980s microcomputer users did.

Creativity exists.
heh - I've been using visual mode + :s/^/#/ for commenting blocks :) 'gc' is definitely much faster. thanks!
+1, the article is a 10-minute gloss at best and has virtually no content or analysis.

I mean come on, just look at the 'conclusion':
These languages are interchangeable, especially for building web application. Neither are more awesome. They get the job done and they make programmers happy.
Startup ideas whose time has passed
Think a little, code a little...
Yes, learning has an impact (negative and positive) on creativity, but not learning has an impact on your ability to design and implement in general.

In addition, what Unix mistakes do you see in Singularity, for instance? It's drastically different from Unix-like kernels in effectively every way.

What OSes would you recommend that budding OS developers study, if not these? Amoeba is one of the few I can think of off the top of my head that might fit what you're looking for.
If you really believe that the A/B parameter space and the C/D parameter space interact with each other, then yes, you could get stuck in a local minimum. So in that case you should test all combinations simultaneously. However, it will take a lot longer to collect enough data in this case. So if you think it is likely that the parameters are independent, it would be better to change only one set at a time.
ya, srsly. From what I've seen they are hacking together the hardware and then constantly updating the code to get just barely working solutions, oftentimes in the middle of the testing. If some teams are running a fairly complex car physics simulator with simulated input from each of the types of sensors they are using this would be the first I've heard of it.
The band seems to be still alive today :
http://musiclub.web.cern.ch/MusiClub/bands/cernettes/
This is completely untrue and it's rather surprising that Wired perpetuates this nonsense (whether tongue in cheek or not).
Short version: "Map Caps Lock to Control on modern keyboards."

Seriously though, I enjoyed his comparison of vi and its ilk to roguelike games. I'll definitely be using the "video game that gets stuff done on the side" analogy sometime. This article also made me wish that hjkl navigation was required for all programs.
'Teach Naked' Effort Strips Computers From Classrooms
I think some of the stats are skewed.

"Breast-feeding, hand-washing, sugar-salt solutions, vaccines, antibiotics, and bed nets together save millions -- and could save millions more -- and none need cost more than $5 a pop"

Also living of $280 a year $5 is a quarter of your monthly income which is quite a bit for these people. They don't save and all live hand to mouth.

Africa is screwed.That's why I left.
I would love to interview some HN people for this series. If you have any interviewee suggestions (including yourself!) please let me know. As I said in the post, I'm looking to demystify the process of getting traction. So anyone who has had traction on anything before is fair game. I want to get into the gritty details of those stories, i.e. what exactly happened at inflection points.
"Testing
Ruby wins a lot of TDD practitioners. There are plethora
of Ruby modules created for making testing experience
truly wonderful. See: RSpec, Shoulda, Factory Girl,
Selenium."

Yes, testing in Ruby is absolutely wonderful. It makes writing tests an enjoyable experience compared to pretty much any other language I've used. Nowadays I strive for 100% C0 testing coverage and near-100% C1 testing coverage whenever I write software. This can be done very easily in Ruby but is hard to very hard in most other languages.
I want to become a musician. If I listen to existing music, my creativity will be limited by what I've learned. Does that mean that listening to music is a bad thing if you want to become a musician?
Your "Holy Grail" is what Fred Brooks called a "Silver Bullet":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet
Nikon Coolpix S1000pj - compact digital camera with built in projector
I remember reading this years ago. Reddit maybe?
> One of the better ways

It is _the_ way to select the default language.
Agreed it is a illusion till date.

When Ford what to separate assembly from manufacture every one critized it but today that is the method used by major industries.

Why is software still not done like that. Why we mix assembly and coding. Why can these two things be separate and distinct steps. Since this is a fundamental problem which has still eluded for so long, which is why i call this as the Holy Grail of Software.

I am not tring to create a magical components as the building blocks for creating any software, if that is the case the binary number 0 and 1 is currently used to build everything in software.

I am just saying that separating assembly from coding cleanly similiar to how assembly of a car is different from the manufacture of components of a car, then we will be able to achieve high productivity/high flexibility and lower cost.

This is a hypothesis, it can be used for doing a ERP type of system or even a single web page. It does not matter.

My question is not whether it is a illusion since i have achieved clean separation, but will there be a benefit if this hypothesis can be implemented.
'ncr' means non country redirect. So you can remember easily.
Out of curiosity, what year were you born?

Near the end of Eisenhower's presidency in the United States. I actually heard that exact statement about the year my wife was born, a few years later. It's very hard for me to imagine now that Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, etc. were once wretchedly poor, but they were within my lifetime.
Worst Part of a Trip May Be Booking It on the Web
China 'trusts prostitutes more' than Politicians
yep. http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...
A bad way to select it for the user by default, yes, but it is a good way to help organize the drop down list by having the geolocated language be the default selection.
The military's job is (essentially) to save some people's lives by killing other people. It is a distasteful job, but (most people agree) a necessary one. Therefore what the military needs to be good at is killing targeted people with minimum loss of life to others. "Others" includes members of the military.

If drone guns result no more loss of civilian life than other methods of attack, but with less risk to the operators' lives, they make the military better at its job.

If there are too many civilian casualties, the solution should not be "make the military less good at its job". It should be "make the military's job less necessary".
thanks, cool.
Having used both professionally, I think that's a pretty good conclusion, actually.
Electronic High-Security Locks Easily Defeated at DefCon
Is there a direct link to the pdf?
He mentions Python's GIL (which makes multi-threading completely useless), but Ruby (even 1.9) has a GIL too [1] that works exactly the same (awful) way. Ruby 2.0 will have it too [2]. A new Python implementation, unladen swallow is developped by Google to adress exactly this issue. Python-stackless avoids this problem, but the paraigm change is huge, 'normal' code has to be largely rewritten for stackless.

Note that, if I correctly understood, python event engine Twisted uses a custom C-implemented event loop to avoid this.

[1] http://www.igvita.com/2008/11/13/concurrency-is-a-myth-in-ru...

[2] http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby/msg/e809a7a720...

Wow, seems like MacRuby uses OS threads and completely abolished the GIL [3].

[3] http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/06/macruby-drops-gil-threadin...
Yea, the advantage of Java over C is the second program.

for (int x = 1; x <= 100; x++){
System.out.println("Hello World! " + x);
}

vs

for (int x = 1; x <= 100; x++){
printf("Hello World! %d! \n", x);

PS: How do you include readable code snippets on HN?
excellent guide!