skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do the same thing with the rapid edits.

In your profile, the 'delay' setting prevents your comment from showing to others for N minutes, so you can do this without anyone noticing. Mine is set to 2.
I believe you failed to sense the sarcasm in that post. Get real.
They also identify gOffice, built with ASP.NET. Not sure what this is supposed to mean other than... Microsoft has competition?
It's not a fundamental difference, it's a consequence of the fact that hardware people are at the bottom of a very big stack and have a massive financial incentive to be as solid and predictable as possible. Higher up the stack everyone prefers to use relatively cheap programmers and build stuff quickly.

The problem is not having to deal with software APIs, the problem is the sheer size of the stack and the sheer number of accumulated assumptions that are built into it. Moving more pieces into hardware might improve the stack's overall integrity and reduce bugs, but it won't do much to reduce the size.

The real issue, IMHO, is that no one wants to admit that the general reuse problem is hideously, horrifyingly difficult. The biggest problems it causes are diffuse and long term, and in the short term everyone can do things faster by hacking together their old code with someone else's 95% solution library, so that's what everyone does. Putting enough thought into each new application to really do it right tends to be hard to justify on a business level, and most programmers have neither the inclination nor the skill to do it anyway. It's so ingrained that even people who are frustrated with the way things are think that a different operating system or language would solve the problem. It wouldn't - it would only start the process again, with at best a percentage reduction in stack size and corresponding percentage increase in time to frustration. I think it boils down to the fact that code reuse is basically a 2^n problem, and the bigger and more opaque the stack gets the harder it is to cheat that 2^n.

The only potential solution I've seen is what Chuck Moore is doing with Forth chips. He's now at the point where he can design and manufacture chips that are cheap and simple in design but are very good at running Forth very quickly. Of course the tradeoffs are (perhaps necessarily) as horrifying as the reuse problem in that it demands a lot more from programmers in general, and in particular requires them to learn a radically different way of doing things than they are used to while at the same time strongly discouraging reuse at the binary and source levels. In other words, he's spent decades designing a small core language and hardware to run it, and that's really all you should be reusing (along with data transfer protocols). Needless to say, no desktop or web or server programmer (or said programmer's boss or company) is ever going to go for this unless problems with reuse become far worse than they are now. (Even then the supply of cheap programmers might grow fast enough to keep masking the problem for a long time.) Most programmers are not very good, managers like it that way, and most of the smarter programmers are nibbling around the edges or looking for a silver bullet.

In short, there are no easy solutions. If you don't like the direction software is going, think about becoming an embedded systems programmer.
Why some web-based products are successful and others aren’t
This too should probably go in the feature requests thread.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363

That said, I silently make little edits for typos or expansions with more outlinks to add content to my post. If I think I'm making a new point, or refining a first point, I try to remember to post

AFTER EDIT:

before the new content on my post, especially if people have already voted on the post or already replied to it. But I probably make human-error mistakes and don't always carry out that intention perfectly.

Quoting the post to which you reply can help make clear what you are replying to.
Love the article and like many others here enjoy the simple. I still have the pleasure of coding in C at work and my fun work is currently writting an app for the Nintendo DS. Truly simple system.

While back I was interested in designing/constructing simple 4-bit cpu, here is one that was actually completed:
http://www.vttoth.com/vicproc.htm
I think there may be a few others, but I think the essence of a hacker is based in creativity. The more creative, the better you are at figuring out that problem.
Writers are cheap. There are thousands of english majors out there, looking for work. A few hundred bucks should cover anything short of writing a 300 page novel.

I doubt its a game, if you are not creative enough to come up with a compelling story, you probably aren't creative enough to come up with designs for the game sprites.
How is this being sold to the UK public, or are they just oblivious? I keep reading these articles, and they don't seem to match my foreigner's (Canadian) conception of the UK. It seems very strange and not-British to me. What are your thoughts?
Thats a super cool app, I am forever lending out DVD's and never getting them back because I don't write it down - nice one man!

Josie
@platform45
China’s growth figures fail to add up
I'm glad you mentioned that 'delay' is in minutes. For some reason, I thought it was in seconds and I had set mine to 30 right after I posted.
"Even state-controlled media reports and editorials have in recent days raised questions over their accuracy.

"The Global Times, controlled by the People’s Daily, the Communist party mouthpiece, reported that the public reacted with 'banter and sarcasm' to NBS figures showing average urban wages in China rose 13 per cent in the first half to $2,142.

"It quoted an online poll showing 88 per cent of respondents doubted the official numbers."

When state-controlled media can post stories critical of other state agencies, that's a pretty good indicator of eroding trust.
Makes sense, right? RoR directly competes with ASP.net and 37Signals with Sharepoint, Project, etc.

I'm sure a lawyer just went to a programmer and said "List N competitors of Product X" ...
Try adding /somesubdir which will give you a private page. The front page is vandalized but in time communities will form around subdirs
$2.4 Billion in Grants to Make Cars a Bit Greener
oh hi confirmation bias, I didn't see you there!
I did some work with CM in early 1990s. Parallel programming ("fundamental algorithms") was based on using a special version of C language (C*) with a bit of parallel syntax. (Other groups worked on parallel compilers which could support automatic parallelization of Fortran programs.) As usual, the real trick was not to use this or that language, but to develop interesting algorithms, specific for the parallel environment. So the effort was in developing the algorithms first, then mapping them on the underlying software platform. The latter was almost straightforward, partially because we took the platform into consideration when working on the algorithms.

We also used a Cray machines, do not remember the model numbers now, which were physically located on the other side of the country. Our CM-5 was just two floors below us; I looked at it several times, just to get a pleasant feeling.
I don't block ads. I just don't patronize sites with intrusive advertising.
Because you'll still filter out people who can read the listing, but either can't or don't want to write an italian sonnet.
Thanks a million for mentioning the keyboard shortcut for restoring minimized windows on OS X! I looked everywhere for that!
Don’t let Chinese clones beat your business
I can't believe Franklin was tossed into the wardrobe section and mis-quoted, funny, it's almost as if it was done on purpose.
I use a laptop, not a desktop, and it's always with me (almost).
Google makes using Thunderbird for your Gmail possible. If they had a check-off box that said "Show No Ads", there'd be nothing wrong with checking it. However, that's a wholly different thing than going to lengths to disable the very unobtrusive ads shown in exchange for using the web client.
You're not the internet. If nobody clicked on those ads, they certainly wouldn't exist.
I actually owned this for like a year.

It was literally a USB stick with a display on it and a headphone jack.

When you wanted to listen to music, you slid it into a battery pack that wrapped around it and juiced it from a double A batter.
Or BackTrack, for free wifi at the airport! (Ubuntu + Wireshark works too)

*note, this is illegal, and you shouldn't do it, ever. Also, delete your mp3's.
Interesting to see how many on the list are Breweries.
Oh. You misunderstood me. I said your argument was fact-free. If you'd like me to make an argument and do your research for you, then you'll have to make yourself more interesting.
FYI, parent is Rails committer and prolific plugin author.
Startup - ASP.NET MVC, Cloud Scale & Deployment
I think you are including the jQuery load time as part of your example. If you have nothing else on the page (no other jQuery, etc) then don't use a plugin.

On the examples page, I profiled the five InFieldLabel calls at a total of just over 28ms. Firefox 3.5, 2.2 Ghz Core Duo. Its not the field calls that take 500ms, even in Firefox 3.0.
The execs at HP think that you should run a technology company like you would a WalMart.

They'll get some short term profits with their cost cutting but the revenue is dropping with it.
I don't do it, as I occasionally find ads relevant and useful - maybe once a month at most. On the other hand, I avoid sites where there are lots of intrusive ads. The harder it is for me to read the content I came to read, the less likely I am to return. In fact, I wish I had a bookmarklet to produce a form message saying 'the ads on your page at [URL] are so obnoxious that I have auto-blocked myself from your site for a month in protest.'

Most advertising people I have met seem rather dense to me...although I suppose it can be argued that there are more poorly-educated, undiscriminating people out there who are drawn to eye-candy and so forth. Sure, repetition works, you need to create X impressions before people remember your brand. I get that. But overdoing it will cause them to remember your brand in a negative or (worse) unserious way.
I'll bite...When's the last time you've seen crappy open source code with "great documentation"?
It doesn't say /your/ Italian sonnet
I have to say, this is garbage.
Why should the job applicant waste his time reading the job description of every one of the hundreds of jobs he will try to apply to? I think the best thing to do is to just send the resume, and if they'll want you they'll contact you.
Of course Windows 7 is buggy. So is Snow Leopard.
Building the web 2.0 phenomenon that is RoR? No biggie.

Getting X million people to use your web apps? Meh.

Microsoft lists you as competition. Now you've arrived. :)

Edit: tongue firmly planted in cheek, in case you couldn't tell...
If we're counting CPUs shipped, ARM is in the noise compared to 6502 and the like, let alone the 8051s.

The claim was that RISC had certain advantages that would have significant performance or cost consequences. That hasn't happened. ARM wins where it wins for reasons that have nothing to do with RISC/CISC.
Or departed, as the case may be...
Microsoft Basecamp coming soon.
Let's be blunt: Sturgeon's Law applies. Many coders are lazy and half-assed. They take little pride in their work.

This is why you see so many little aborted projects where someone lost interest after the first weekend of work. This is why you see defensive coders complaining about how people expect their "active" project to ever update again. For many of them, there's not much interest in offering a useful tool or collaborating to create better software; they just want the egoboo of saying they made a "project" out of some slapped-together code that never really needed to be in a public repository.
I guess it doesn't work in the latest nightly of WebKit?
See Netflix Culture: http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664

It's about doing the right thing. But this article is not about slashing salaries instead of laying people off. It's about the bush league moves of forcing people out through salary reductions than lay offs.

Another reason is a more technical one, mass lay offs are accounted for differently than slashing salaries. You can book the severance and associated costs with mass terminations as "restructuring" which hits your P&L as a below the (profit) line cost.
> RISC won.

Yup, MIPS and SUN are a thriving companies and Intel shut down.

> However, the actual processor implementation is designed with CPU microcode, which is a RISC architecture. Even when you think you are doing something "CISCy" in an Intel proc, it's translated to RISC behind the scene.

Do you really think that RISC machines don't have microcode? (They also have multi-cycle instructions and the like.)

The claim was that RISC ISAs had inherent advantages that would cause CISC ISAs to be uncompetitive. That claiim was wrong.
I've had that done to me on a test in elementary school. After going through a third of the test doing the most menial problems, I read the last question and realized what my problem was. At that point it was just entertaining watching everyone else struggle through with it.
> RISC's parallel processing advantages will matter given the current trend toward multiple processors and multiple cores.

What are these "parallel processing advantages"?
PubSubHubbub support for Reader shared items
Not sure if that rule britania story is applicable, what was being tested? For students to stand up and start yelling U - S- A - U - S - A - U - S - A.
It's a serious usability fault, not a clever hack. This test paper fails to comply with the user's expectations, like a webpage that breaks the Back button.
I'd add a quick section for a basic iptables setup as well, with holes for the appropriate services.
It doesn't work on mainline Safari either.
Strip employees of all decision making and reasoning because that stuff is expensive. Create a protocol that they must follow, how could it possibly fail?
Hah, nice.

The only problem is, you'll get the T-shirt delivered, but it will be worn by your newest set of employees.
yeah, but it should be an attachment for ANY memory stick not an all in one unit.
Exactly - I think this is what they were going for. Another posting asked for a definition of a specific term from Star Trek, which you could find by putting the term into Google and reading any one of the first 20 results.

For the record, I included a sonnet that I found on Wikipedia, cited it, and got a call-back - so they're clearly OK with poetry being outside of my skill set.
"or other small projects"... dhh you going to let them say that??
I'm confused ... so National Government percentage < actual assumed percentage?

If so, what benefit could there be to that? I can understand inflating figures to make oneself sound better, but I don't really get why you would report smaller numbers.
You have no idea how important Netflix is to people's happiness.

As a longtime customer, I do indeed. :-P Pretty damn reliable service, actually.

The last Netflix error I experienced was when you sent me a fourth disc for some reason. An advanced AI would have recognized that He's Just Not That Into You doesn't go well with Park Chan-Wook's Vengeance Trilogy. /grumble
Hungary Raids Illegal Stem Cell Treatment Center - Arrests Four
I think an explicit purpose of this strategy is to avoid people who are resume-bombing to hundreds of jobs.

In all cases that I've seen, the companies are small (5-15 current employees) startups where hiring a candidate with the right personality and attention to detail is just as important as having the right skills on paper. These companies seem to want people who have spent some time looking at the posting to make sure they want to be part of the startup experience, as opposed to people who will take anything.

It's a way to start to filter out people who want a job from people who want this job, which is something the hiring company wants to do.
I'm a 23 year old student, finishing up my B.S. in Computer Science. I've recently started working on my own startup with a friend (I'll be posting it on HN when I have something to show) and trying to find a balance between that and school.

As for my reason for wanting to see a startup office, I've seen a lot of pictures (thanks for posting those), and as enjoyable as they are to look at, I would like to see the environment for myself. For me, it's about taking a closer look into the culture which interests me. I've wanted to travel to SF for years now, and see the tech culture that everyone speaks so highly of.
News Corp to charge for all news websites
Huh, sorry. It's something I threw together in a night, and only was tested in Firefox.
Q2 Takeaways: Search Revenue Down, Display Down, But Goog And Amazn Gained Share
Sun Tzu: Even though you are competent, appear to be incompetent. Though effective, appear to be ineffective. [...] Feign inferiority and encourage his arrogance.

Either that, or provinces tend to over-report growth to make themselves look good so Beijing corrects reported numbers downward.
Ah, you're just not displaying it depending on the user agent? I'd rather not fire up IE6, if I can avoid it :P
> The nicest I think are 68K and mips,

No, the nicest is the ARM.
I've heard good reports about "The elements of computing systems"

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262640686?ie=UTF8&tag=...

Theres a tech talk about the book:

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=765404376202115650...
The fact that a job applicant doesn't read through the entire job posting doesn't mean he doesn't have attention to detail - it can mean he decided that reading it thoroughly is just not worth the time.

Just because someone sends his resume without reading the ad doesn't mean he'll take the job. He may just want to know whether the company finds him interesting before he will think whether this job is what he wants.
In general tech entrepreneurs feel as if raising venture capital will validate their idea, which is true up to a certain level.

The ultimate way to prove your idea is good, is to get traction. The ultimate way to prove it is sustainable is to become ramen profitable and the best way to prove it needs VC money is to show that your current staff just cannot handle the amount of customers that keep coming day in/day out.
I think you need to list an item to get the 500 credits.
This just in...NewsCorp reports massive decreases in web traffic. Film at 11.
It was a Creative Muvo. A friend had one, was pretty neat for the time.
As I read the article with my background in sinology, what appears to be reported here is that China has some actual level of economic growth, which I will call X. The central government, desiring to look good to the common people, reports a level of economic growth X+N. One clue that the central government statistics are dubious is that provincial governments report figures that would imply a level of X+N+M (all numbers are positive numbers), yet the central government doesn't aggregate the provincial figures, implying that the provincial governments desire to look good to the central government. Another clue that the central government statistics are dubious is that online discussion of those statistics expresses open doubt, even in a country with much state control of all mass media.

Does this look like a fair summary of the article's claims? They seem plausible to me.
Reddit is -> that way.

The reality in the UK is far more boring. The cameras are pretty much around just to make money off motorists. Nothing else.
He's using Shorewall for that.
They claim that the freely-available news sources are cannibalizing their ability to provide good journalism, but I find the free sources to be better than the sources considering charging online traffic. News aggregators, blogs, etc... I use them all the time. New York Times? Maybe once in a while, but they're often biased and overdramatic.
Everything? I can't see them charging for The Sun and the News of the World in the UK.
So this is what, FoxNews.com? Nobody that knows how to read or use a computer cares what Fox thinks, so this is not really a major loss.
As an Englishman, it actually pisses me off a little to see the persistent stories on Reddit etc ranting about how many cameras there are in the UK and how we're all being monitored etc etc etc.

Look at this 'story' - It's basically "There's some vans around with cameras on, I don't know what they are". That's seriously not newsworthy, or worrying in the least. Who cares? really...

It's just FUD. Shop owners all bought CCTV systems in the 80s to protect against theft. They're usually hooked up to a video tape cycling through. Additionally, we have tons of speed cameras for cars, and now the congestion charge cameras in London.

The reality is pretty boring. Pretty much everyone in the UK is against speed cameras, but they make a lot of money :/

Why would the government monitor civilians, when they can monitor cars and make money out of people speeding/parking wrongly/etc etc
"Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content, is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting," Mr Murdoch said.

I quite agree - but what does that have to do with News Corp?

Boom boom!
Confessions of a Coder [pdf]
To be clear, he hasn't sold his stake yet, so this is still a paper "profit".
When posting on RentACoder I once required that the reply has to contain a certain sentence, so I can easily ignore the plentiful form replies.
valid point if 'use the right tool for the job' is a valid point? very misguided examples for anyone that's used Rails extensively
Apple Releases Mac OS X 10.5.8
"The court in no way found that TechCrunch’s statements about you were false, but simply that no-one from the company turned up to defend them."

While a default judgment is not the same as a victory, they seem reasonably similar. I'm as upset as anyone that it's so easy to win a libel suit in Britain, but this story has a "winner" in the popular sense (which is what I imagine is important to this Sethi fellow).
Move to Europe! Most countries have ~ 20-25 (paid) vacation days a year..

More on topic: I like how netflix seems to threat it's employees as grown-ups, instead of little children that have to be watched every second.
Ditto.

"_______ VCs suck" is a meme I could go without.
I think one thing that you'll have to establish to bring on any technical person is a strong case for what you bring to the table. "I had the idea" isn't enough.

Being 30 isn't a problem, but starting a startup will put stress on your family life. Make sure that they and you are prepared to not see each other a lot of days and for you to be very one-tracked for a long while, probably combined with little or no income for the first many months.
This all depends on where the onus lies. If you're developing a consumer-focused web application and your instructions are extremely complicated the onus is on the app creator to simplify. There are plenty of situations, however, where the relationship is really a partnership, and both sides need to fully get up to speed with each other. The Van Halen Case appears to be the latter.
Oh right. I feel stupid now, I assumed the provincial figures were accurate, but it makes much more sense that those numbers are doctored to try and please the central governement. Thanks for the explanation.
They are taking a larger and larger portion of overall GDP, while performing a function of dubious value to the society in which they operate (many would say they have negative value). Banks provide a utility to society, or I should so, they should provide a utility, that of liquidity. Their speculation does no good for society, and should not be funded by society, which it is.
FWIW, the max effective value is 10.

More info here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231024
Speculation provides liquidity.