skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think more that the submission guidelines are a catch-all for obvious stories that the entire community wants to avoid. These are stories that appear on large community sites, regardless of whether the core community has interest in them, and only appear to increase the demographic of the website.

But I don't think Hacker News works the same way. Anyone is allowed to submit a story, and depending on the community interest, the story gets posted to the front page. This ensures that the stories of most interest to the community are most viewable to the community. So the way I understand your criticism, it seems more to be a critique on the entire community (or at least the ones who vote), rather than a critique on the poster not following the rules.

"WhyIsThisOnHN" commented on articles about differing ways to look at literature, a painter who creates photorealistic paintings, a question posed to the HN community (this article), and one on the cause of death in cyclists. None of these articles strike me as something that merely exists to draw in eyeballs, but rather portray the varying interests of a group of highly motivated and intelligent people. Those are the types of articles I come here to read. If I wanted to read about computers and code all day, there are websites for that. If I wanted to read about startups all day, again, there are startup centric sites. I am interested in what people of like mind find interesting, but perhaps do not have the chance to expose myself to due to time constraints, and I think that this is partly responsible for the appeal of HN over other aggregate sites.

note - sorry for the off-topic comment, this is just something that has been on my mind, and possibly exasperated by the WhyIsThisOnHN username
I hate not responding to comments which give me reason to hate the fact that english does not use s-expressions.
Let's just hope that github doesn't remove its online presence too (they are all centralized there now ;)
I dislike self-promotional bloggers too. But I believe Derek Sivers is pretty sincere and is actually doing stuff for love rather than money (if you know anything about his history, you should realize this even more). If you don't get anything out of his posts, obviously don't waste your time but I've noticed after reading his posts I always feel just a little bit more inspired to transcend myself. Doing a startup is as much about being able to stay inspired as it is about understanding the nuts and bolts of technology. Staying motivated and optimistic is key and any little bit of help we can get from each other's experiences will not go to waste as long as it's coming from the right place.
> She seemed kind of flaky but I assumed it was because she was a lot smarter than I was. I pressed on, and an hour later I discovered that she didn't know what a typical size for a C pointer was.

That doesn't mean she's actually flaky or not smart. There's tons of info that smart programmers won't know off the top of their heads, either because they haven't worked in a given domain before, or haven't worked in it for a while.

She may well not have been qualified depending on what level of domain familiarity was expected from the get-go, but this implies nothing about her intelligence or capacity for domain competence.
How is CAS guaranteed to be atomic? Is it actually implemented by a machine instruction, rather than the pseudocode in the article?
no...I deal with this every day, as in I just dealt with this while riding home not 10 minutes before I sat down to write this. traffic was once again massively blocked, bikers were once again changing lanes randomly in front of cars without signaling and riding through intersections in an unsafe manner. maybe it's just my commute route, but it is fucking constant.
Let's face it: in this (capitalist) world, cutthroat assholes get ahead. Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Ballmer, Rupert Murdoch--the same story could have been written about any of them. I'm not saying it's necessary to lie, cheat, and stab one's friends in the back in order to become filthy rich, because there do seem to be some very principled billionaires (I'm thinking of Larry & Sergey, Warren Buffet, Pierre Omidyar). But it certainly seems to help.
Senart - Minimarket Mixtape
Everyone is passing the buck... what's the connection between your investment and a productive enterprise somewhere? A long chain of financial games. Decisions are based on statistics and third-hand information, not on the merits of the end investment. Result: a crapload of bad investments and an unstable economy.

[Edit:] "Capitalism" gets blamed for this mess caused by the dilution of responsibility, which sounds pretty socialistic to me. You might call it "emergent socialism".
The latest TextMate update recently released fixes this. Just update, and you're done.
FYI, Earth Class Mail was featured on MOJO network's "Startup Junkies" mini series.
> ... which can be used only in-process, not between processess.

You can use them between processes if you use shared memory.

This is useful in realtime or any other low latency applications where one reader or writer cannot be blocked for more than a couple of hundred microseconds.

It is basically reimplementing the semaphore but it is controlled by the application. There are no system calls, no threads being suspended. Instead of the busy while loop it might be possible to use a fixed count of iterations or a specific timeout value.

This is useful but in a very narrow context.
"Well, I don't plan in doing any kind of man-in-middle attack. Neither I am planning to selling the domain to a 3rd party."

Well, I still think it's irresponsible to provide or use such a "service". I can't think it's good for security if people get in the habit of relying on potentially unreliable third-parties just for the heck of it.

Why ask people to trust that you have only good intentions when that wouldn't even be necessary if you didn't provide a (IMHO less than worthless) "service"?

I might sound harsh, but the whole matter just reeks of sloppiness to me.
I don't see the social hierarchy as a form of oppression. And I don't see how this says anything about political correctness, either.

I'm not at the top of the ladder. I'm not particularly funny, and I'm not particularly cool. But social domination, on the part of anyone, doesn't really feel like oppression, to me.

Can you explain your POV a little more?
No.

The order in which the food is eaten is simply a reflection of the hierarchy. One eats first because one is the king. One does not become the king by eating first.
Not really. A Git repo isn't really beholden to any other repo. Some are considered definitive, but truly they can all stand on equal footing.
Seriously? If you're going to take steps to avoid the feature, you could just turn it off. It's not a security feature...it's a polite reminder that you're wasting your day by sticking around too long.
Your answers to questions 1 and 2 contradict each other.
Is this a new image of this weekend FooCamp or of the previously photographed one?
Yes, it is implemented by the hardware. In x86 I believe it is the CMPXCHG assembler instruction.

GCC, for example has __sync_val_compare_and_swap(...) function that give you access to the hardware compare and swap.
Yes, look up cmpxchg and friends.

FreeBSD has atomic.h providing a bunch of different atomic ops, e.g: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/amd64/include/...

I believe FreeBSD also uses this style of buffer for dmesg, which sadly also results in a lot of interlacing if two kernel threads are trying to write to the buffer at once.
somewhat off tangent:

1. it seems that people are more likely to reschedule and not hold to commitments than 20 years ago.

2. has the population changed, or some other external factor, or has the culture changed?

3. why?
The telegraphs summary seems like your standard effort to simplify a complex signaling action into a simpler action.

Real research, on things like game theory, actually has shown how a single signal can have multiple functions that vary depending on the context. This "research" is clearly not aware of these modern advances...

Uh, and the funniest thing is that the only article in the "Journal Of Pragmatics" that I could find said just the opposite: "Humor serves a wide range of functions at work, one of which is to foster collegiality. An analysis of interactions in New Zealand workplaces showed that one of the most important functions of humor was the construction and maintenance of good relations with fellow workers. " ( http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi... )
Mobile Phones. Pre-mobile there was no way of letting someone know you are running late, or changing arrangements last minute.
I will now make a prediction that this will be a flop.

When you need multiple monitors, you're generally in a location where you can have multiple real monitors. Also, the screen real estate provided is still much less than a single 30" monitor.

Finally, when I use a second monitor, I have one "main" monitor which is directly in front of my keyboard and mouse, and the "secondary" off to the side. The centered arrangement here seems just uncomfortable.
/usr/bin/make et. al. will probably reappear once you install XCode 3.2.
There's nothing more tense than a showdown between a stand-up comedian and their heckler. It's like a being in the saloon in one of those Western movies when a some tike speaks out of turn to the local gunslinger.
It already has woken up, even in literary terms, if you know where to look, as Grossman says -- he cites Chabon, Donna Tart, and others. And although I love the way he expresses himself in this manifesto, he's hardly alone: Tom Wolfe wrote Stalking The Billion-Footed Beast in the 1980s, which has some not dissimilar themes, and B.R. Myers' A Reader's Manifesto came out more recently; see more about it here: http://jseliger.com/2007/11/12/a-readers-manifesto/ .
The mainstream adoption of the web has carried some breakthroughs with it, but it's also held others back (witness the problems caused by people still using IE6). It's nothing new, though - a lot of seemingly novel ideas getting attention now date back to the 70s. The software industry has always been about standing on the toes of giants.
Just because this is from Knuth doesn't make it not politics.
> it's a polite reminder that you're wasting your day by sticking around too long.

If that were the case a simple message at the top of the page would suffice, the fact that this site is addictive is why the noprocrast exists in the first place.

If you have a feature it might as well be solid.
Defining abstractions is a form of optimization: it is the optimization of code readability. "Never optimize without profiling." "Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
I don't get it. Why do they need to close on a Friday night? There are a zillion DJs in San Francisco, and people often come to DNA Lounge just because it's DNA Lounge, without knowing what, if anything, special is planned that night.
Tell HN: Last week Scoble interviewed me about AppStoreHQ
There's a big step from "Humor can be a form of aggression" to "humor is a form of aggression - study says". In fact, if the study said only what it was justified in saying, it would read like an Onion headline:

"Nurses Laugh Snarkily While Doctor Away, News At 11:00"
Keyword: Distributed Version Control. People got the stuff also on their disks.
The only place I can realistically see ill-natured joking being accepted is in a school. The social hierarchy in schools is often based on it, in fact.

But in the real world, I agree with you.
(What does that say about our education system? Sigh.)
(Actually, it probably says more about slowing rates of maturity and development in the general population. I still blame the education system, though. =P)
Not to generalize but I lived in SoCal for 2 years and a good percentage of people there do not honor commitments. Either they are very late or just won't show up.

I lived in the East Coast before that and didn't have as many flakers.
This isn't really a bug. Even if a user can't log out using the site, they can still clear cookies. Or just another browser for that matter. No procrast isn't iron proof and there is no way to make it so. ;-)
Ah, but remember he's making hiring decisions based on "pheromone[s] and body language", which don't come through on phone lines.
Women: I'm having an orgasm, WITH MY MIND
nor germany :(
According to our best estimates spam success rates are more like 1 in 12.5 million than 1 in a few thousand.
That may have been true in the past when there was no restriction on downvotes, but now there is a -8 karma limit per statement. I believe it was done so that someone would not get overly penalized for a statement but they would still get the message that the statement was not within the guidelines of the community.
It's in my RSS reader and I follow him on Twitter, too.

The reason it's on HN is so we can discuss it -- it's hard to do that on his blog where the post already has 87 comments and are not threaded.
The point of the factory pattern is that you don't always want a new instance, and you don't always want a specific type. "new Foo()" necessarily does both, while Foo.new() can potentially do neither.
I must vent: my opinion of Knuth went down a few notches after reading this.
Very interesting idea, but there is unfortunately very little actual content. This list of all tags provides a nice overview of the range of the contents.

http://algorithmatic.com/home/tags
Monkey see, monkey shoe: Zappos' brilliant Mappos app
Yes, and a name like 'Twestival' should automatically translate to double deposit, cash only please.
Should note that it probably is only in the cutting edge repository so you need to enable those.
He was code factory. Look at the number of projects he's created single-handedly.
If you're concerned about physical theft of the hard drive, why not encrypt everything that is written to disk?
> Boilerplate - repeated pattern - helps orient a reader. The more familiar it is, the easier it is to understand. Every layer of abstraction increases the difficulty in understanding.

I really, really think that there's something about learning imperative languages that breaks our brains in some way. Because, I've heard people argue that

theSum = 0
theArray.each do |n|
theSum += n
end

is easier to read than

theSum = theArray.sum

which seems utterly crazy.

Even worse, I've had people take correct functional-style code and make it "more readable" by expanding it out into a bunch of boilerplate, and fail to notice the typos and logic errors they introduced in the process. People don't actually read boilerplate code; they do a visual pattern match on it. If the pattern is close enough, they accept the code as correct even if there's a small error that they didn't notice.
Economics is inherently political. Please drop the pretense that there can ever be economic study not deeply interwoven with politics.
I like the fact that the guy's obviously overweight. I'm still giggling, in fact.
Thanks so much for that link and I thought I was stuck with Synfig.
Part of the reason I think people use throwaway accounts here because Paul Graham uses your user name during the YCombinator application process and your comments as criteria.
The connection between my investment and productive enterprise is very simple. Vanguard (the people who manage my money) transfer my investment to an enterprise they believe is productive but undervalued.
I compile from ECMAScript 4 to JS, and what I do is create a separate mapping file, where line/char pos for every token in the generated file is mapped to file/line/char in the source.

When the JS engine throws a runtime error it typically (depending on the engine) includes line/char pos for the point of error. A wrapper then extract line/char from the error message, finds the corresponding position in the original source, and displays that also. This greatly helps debugging runtime errors.

It is not perfect, since some engines (e.g. Rhino) doesn't include position for runtime errors.
SciPy 2009 is over
Why not use mutual recursion and TCO? The function with the program counter is the current state. Problem solved?

Mutable state is your enemy...
He does mention at the start that promoters are mostly like this, so it wasn't the red flag that it sounds like.
While they didn't outright mention oppression or political correctness, those terms often go hand in hand with a term like "aggression".

The author also mentions: "But both sexes use comedy as a means of controlling others".

The authors also imply that men do it to be mean because they make jokes about others, but women are wholly innocent because they only make jokes about themselves.

"Aggression" and "Controlling Others" have negative connotations and to equate them with humor in general is unfortunate. The authors of this study need to lighten up.
It's called traffic. It can make a 10 minute commute turn into a 3-hour commute.

I lived on the East Coast for 5 years, and people there were flakier than their West Coast counterparts -- even though traffic on the East Coast is more predictable and less congested. The difference? People on the West Coast try to make their commitments -- but run in to traffic. People on the East Coast leave late and blame the traffic.
In re (2), not always. For example, the Visitor pattern is one that is specifically eliminated by basic functionality in languages that support multiple-dispatch. No developer extension of compiler or language needed.
How is Derek Sivers' personal blog a "agenda-having promotional blog"? What do you see him promoting on that post? He sold CDBaby for a gazillion million dollars so he doesn't really need to push stuff in your face like Tim Ferriss - you can't put them in the same ball park.
When integrating dogs into a new group, trainers often intentionally create a specific hierarchy. This serves to keep the dogs from creating it themselves via fighting, and can allow for one dog to be a leader, for example if you need them to cooperate in pulling a sled.

One of the key ways of creating the hierarchy is to feed the alpha dog first, and only feed the other dogs when the alpha dog is done. This is of course not the only way to create a hierarchy, and as you point out one would exist even if food was so abundant that it wasn't an issue.
DNA Lounge isn't a regular bar. It's a facility. They do a variety of events ranging from concerts to wrestling. So it takes a while for them to setup for an event and properly promote it to get a decent turnout.

The other big factor is that burning man is happening around the same time which sucks a lot of the promotional people around SF out.
So I try to look around and take in my surroundings and appreciate them, eat a meal slowly that day, and call someone I love that I haven't talked in a while. Then I work on something meaningful and important to me.

Nice sentiments but the problem with sharing this stuff is that the mere act of sharing causes you not to be following your own story.
Fix came through automatically. Avoid the bundle
Gambling, sex, Asperger's and my twin con-man brother
I recently used a FSM approach to simultaneously match multiple patterns against a tree in one walk, to know what rules match at each node and with what pattern variable values (dictionary). Specifically, to associate the ordered list of suitable error renderers for each specific validation error that can occur.

The way I normally do pattern-matching is simply to walk the pattern and the tree to match against simultaneously, but of course this approach breaks down if you want to match multiple patterns against one tree in one pass. So I compiled each pattern into a list of closures, each closure representing one step of pattern-matching, a state. Then I walk the input tree normally and at each node, I call "push" on each of the patterns. If the current state of the pattern matches, I push the next state and the new dictionary variable values that were matched at this step. If the match is invalid, I push :invalid on the stack. After visiting the node I call pop on all the patterns.

Sorry if this is confusing. That's just to illustrate that learning the concept of a FSM let me implement something I wouldn't have known how to do otherwise.

Anyway, understanding the concept of a FSM is valuable in itself even if you never were to implement one because thinking about all possible states, inputs (symbols) and transitions helps you think more formally about some problems.

And even if the CPU itself is a state-machine, what if you want to make an emulator for that CPU?
While this provides perfect ordering information, it does so at the cost of bouncing a cacheline (the head of the queue) around the entire machine. That's fine if perfect ordering information is really, really important, but if a lack of probe effect is more important, try the DTrace approach: each thread writes into a private buffer, with a best-effort timestamp (say, the CPU's TSC). Drains merge-sort all the thread's buffers by timestamp.
Your making the claim that the above implies _nothing_ about her capacity for domain competence is a bit much. I thought it was a near-perfect diagnostic of her incompetence, and I'd be curious if anyone can sketch the profile of a very competent programmer, alive today, that doesn't have an inkling of the above fact. I don't think you can.
You've never worked with a subcontractor on a home remodelling project, have you? =)

These guys carry three cellphones AND a pager, but will never show up on time for an appointment or call to tell you they're not going to be at your house on the day you took off of work. But when that bill is due lookout: they're magically available and on the phone with you constantly.
You can certainly signal your intent to assume the position by eating ahead of your position. And if you do get away with it, chances are you will be the next king.

Same with humor. Review the material on the use of pornography and humor in the French Revolution.

[edit grammar]
$19.97/MB - Megabyte of Unusual Cost
Why..!?
Thanks, I completely forgot about using shared memory between processes. Lately I used exclusively sockets, as it provides a portable solution between languages and platforms. But you are right, it is not suitable for realtime or low latency applications.

Still I think the implementation in the article is bad, and you should avoid using it in production, because it uses too much busy waits and there is no error handling.

And if one don't use shared memory, just threads (as in the example code) you gain nothing from this solution. You'd better use a simple lock-based implementation, or if you need low latency a correct lock-free or even better, a wait-free queue.
We don't even hire our marketing people this way. They still get technical interviews, just toned down a bit. LRC circuits are all but a given for the marketing interviews I do. I don't want to work with someone who has absolutely no idea how the things he's selling works.

As for technical positions, well, we all know this is absolute bullshit. In particular, regarding Seth's question whether a junior guy can veto an interviewee: yes! If the senior guys happen to ask things that the candidate does well on, but the junior guy exposes a serious hole, we don't hire. In fact, our argument is precisely the inverse of the one Seth makes here: if we didn't think it was important to listen to everone's opinion, they wouldn't be on the interview schedule.

In my mind, nothing is likely to replace 6-8 hours of difficult technical interviews, not because this is a perfect strategy, but because there seemingly isn't a better one. I'd love to be proved wrong, though.
Natural language datetime parsing web API