skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Would be the best place to send every zodiac-preacher I know to 'disprove' so much of what they argue

If only. Go back and read some the comments on the last post (on okcupid, not HN). Someone there argues that just using the zodiac chart as shown (which is the sun or moon sign, I forget which) is insufficient. Apparently we need to use more advanced Zodiac sign knowledge to determine compatibility.

In any event, no amount of statistical data will dissuade strong believers.
Managing Enstore
no fork() in windows
NYC Launches Big Apps Competition to Find New Uses for City Data
REST - Theory vs. Practice [pdf]
"fork() allows the ability to do anything before exec()..."

That is not entirely true. See the "CAVEATS" section of "man fork".
Here's where using fork() without an ensuing exec() is very natural ...

A server process that must reply to hundreds of network requests per second but still remain single-threaded pretty much needs fork(). The persistent parent process sets up a common configuration, accepts incoming network requests, and calls fork() (which is very fast) to do the real work for each request in a child process.

That child's work involves looking up relevant data or recording relevant data or doing a transaction that may involve only local memory, the filesystem, a DB, other processes, or other network services. The child must also reply to the network client. Doing this all in the single-threaded parent would preclude it from handling other requests and make it impossible to respond to hundreds of clients (unless the parent uses complicated asynchronous processing and the per-request work is mostly I/O and low on CPU ... but that complicates the server process). Starting a separate process per client instead (as in CreateProcess() or spawn()/fork-exec()) complicates the architecture and is very expensive because all info needed for the client reply can often be housed in the original parent process and inherited by the child (e.g. locally derived/cached DNS results). fork() leads to the simplest and most efficient architecture.
Leaving them out leads to horrible ambiguity and potential issues. Up to you though :)
New Partnership Announced Between Verizon Wireless and Google
<vulcan>Sabotage - where they threw their 'sabo' or wooden clogs, into the machines to stop them working!</vulcan>
Airport Security Concerns: France Warns of New Terror Threat From 'Body Bombs'
(on joining the Pirate Party)

> Heh, no it's not. That'll just get you marked a radical and summarily ignored by anyone with power. Not that I agree with that, but that's how things are.

The Pirate Party already has one MEP. If (probably when) the Lisbon Treaty is passed, they'll have two. The Pirate Party will probably be in power in several countries over the next 10 years (as part of coalitions).

> The _real_ way to get software patents taken care of is, as with any other matter of public policy, to convince large swaths of major, consistent contributors to the campaigns of your incumbent representatives to press the issue.

This might be true in the USA under their current political system. But as you imply from what you say, the USA isn't properly a democracy, it's an oligarchy ruled by corporations. This is in fact a bigger problem than software patents.

It isn't true in Europe, where Pirate Parties have a siginificant chance of getting people elected, due to using more democratic electoral systems.

If Pirate manage to get software patents abolished or neutered in one major jurisdiction, they will probably indirectly win in the rest of the world.

> This will probably be difficult because people with money want to do evil with these patents

I agree.

> But right now, Microsoft is trying to use its patents to neuter its open-source competitors, so they may value that too highly.

That's certainly part of Microsoft's plan for their patents.
This'll be a problem for the sort of games review site that mysteriously gave Master of Orion III a score of 97%.
I'd want to explore something like that. I've got a lot more iPhone apps I could write.
No-contract 3G
I do understand your point of view. Ignoring it was a valid option. However, if he ignored it and the other side actually filed suit, now you have real costs without regard to the suit's merit. These guys made a decision to not let this tie up any further time or potential cost. It does feel like they rolled over too easily, but hey, its their decision.
New web apps are like new words: widespread adoption is difficult
If those numbers are real, that's pretty deflating.
Rumour: Tax / charge on incoming calls
That's actually how fork() is implemented today on Linux, too - the clone() system call can be used to implement either processes or threads (by specifying exactly what is to be copied and what is to be shared), and modern versions of glibc implement fork() by calling clone().
easiest & most flexible is still this:

var myNamespace = {};
myNamespace.foo = function() {
var privateFoo = 1;
this.publicBar = "test";

var privateFn = function() {};
this.publicFn = function() {};
return this;
}

// usage
myFoo = new myNamespace.foo();

as crockford says & in my experience http://javascript.crockford.com/private.html

this also allows you to do prototypal inheritance, which is not possible with other "module patterns" - whatever that is, they are just singletons.
IBM: another big ISV tries their hand at SaaS
>> "38% of users have never sent a single tweet, and over 75% of users have sent fewer than 10 tweets."

That's pretty damning. Are these accounts setup in the hope people will follow them - honey pot style maybe? For spamming later.

>> Source = TXT: <5%

Since less than 5% are using sms to update twitter surely they can abolish the outdated 140 character limit?
Most are only throttled by the bandwidth at either end.
You can even get more thrifty by saving on vars as well :) and conserve some more electrons besides those affected by semicolons.

_obj.publicVariable = 'bar'
_obj.publicMethod = function(){}

Personally I cannot type any statement without an ending semicolon, it is a mannerism that stayed with me since I had to learn Pascal. It makes it difficult for me to do anything useful in Python and I am actually contemplating to see a therapist for this.
I seriously doubt the court would accept a suit straight up like that. At the very least they would have had to send a legal take down letter.

What he got was a personal note from the owner (or whatever); it might have been couched in legalese but there was no legal document :)

People get these letters all the time; best to just ignore them (or send a polite but short response).

Hey yes it's his decision to roll over; I'd never use Gnolia now though. He hasn't exhibited any common sense.
Long long time ago (google@stanford)
Aye. This way, we can control a large number of aspects of the child's environment in which execve() is called, without having to have execve() do all that work for us. We can open files, change the session id, reparent the process to init, alter environment variables, lower process limits, change credentials, change the root directory... the possibilities are legion.

You wouldn't want to have to design a way to pass all of those things to execve(), would you?
Not only is that more thrifty, but it is necessary. Thanks for catching the typo!
So does the widely known OS called linux. man clone
I don't know if it really was about becoming first. I think Pownce just wasn't something that users really wanted. I think this backs up YC's idea of focussing on the product user's feedback.

I think no amount of marketing seen here can fix the problem of a product people don't want.
sorry, but why would carry the extra _obj around? why not simple do it like in my example above?
Miguel de Icaza responds to latest RMS article
1 year ago?
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2008/
I haven't had a single issue in the 6 months of daily Javascriptin' since I've stopped using them.

As I mentioned in another thread, I don't minify my application code so maybe it's not as important as it is for other people.
It gets plenty of attention. IBM runs it on Blue Gene. LANL run it on their cluster. There's about 50 active posters to the 9fans mailing list. Features are regularly poorly copied to Linux (rabbit shaped peg, penguin shaped hole). Plenty of people say "how can usermode be fast" and yet Coriad use it in their AoE enterprise disk products, of which there are over 1000 installations afaik (I'm not a Coriad rep).

I also earn my living plan9 & inferno programming and I know at least 10 other people who are equally blessed (not all at the same place as I).
Having done web development exclusively in Python (Zope,...,Django), I some time feel that I may be missing out on the advances in a large ecosystem like J2EE(Spring etc.,)

I would be eager to read such an article too.
Good advertisement for App Engine :)
Looks like an excuse to add more colors to a chart, to make it look more impressive.
I do that a lot to, I try to call it Test Focused Development opposed to TDD
In my opinion that's exactly why SETI has not detected any signal. There is a very low probability that two civilizations will be using radio waves for few exactly same centuries (even taking into account birthday paradox).

Civilizations just few hundreds years more advanced than us probably routinely use cheap neutrino based communication channels. Sadly even if we can detect them they will be probably multiplexed, compressed and encrypted so much that without proper (impossible to guess) algorithms they will be indistinguishable from background noise.

Looking for radio waves in space and sending them is almost as dumb as making big fire to create huge smoke signals for aliens and using looking glass to spot same kind of messages from aliens in the sky.
AcaWiki Launch Press Release
Maemo 5 Final SDK released
This is one of those SIGGRAPH papers that are like magic tricks -- unbelievable until you find out how they're done and what their limitations are.

There are existing projects that pair an image composition function with a tagged image database (like this one: http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/photoclipart/). This project sounds like it adds a fitness function so that it can find an output image that looks good.
See also: Heist, Bus Scheme.

http://github.com/jcoglan/heist

http://github.com/technomancy/bus-scheme
"C++ is like that, a lot of things seem easy until you combine them with other things and then they get hard."

Could've been said, usefully, of Drupal in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=860049, and of many another things as well.
This is actually the perspective of someone who would like you to know about his new company called RJMetrics.
Yah, he was sort of a paranoid dude though. I wish that he hadn't died so young, but also that he hadn't been so politically influential.
A new home in Boston for startup entrepreneurs under 30
Perhaps. But smart people know that this is good analyis: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/10/the-cohort-analysis.html
Actually surprised he didn't get it into the title.

"Twitter Data Analysis: An Investor’s Perspective (From RJMetrics)"

Still, 33 mentions of "RJMetrics" on the page isn't too bad.
CCD inventors awarded Physics Nobel Prize
> I suspect you are talking of using concurrency within the same program.

That's one common use case for 'oldies' :) But there are some others, such as splitting a protocol handler into two layers, all the setup including environment, privileges and so on is the same, then the two layers of the protocol split and start communicating via a pipe. Now it's technically two programs but they happen to live in a single binary image.

> The competing technology would be shared memory threads, of which I am more familiar.

When unix was first developed shared memory was not in the cards, neither were threads. Unix is old, and fork is definitely showing how old. The initial machine that unix was developed on was a PDP-7, here are the specs:

18 bit words

4 K memory standard (magnetic cores, small ferrite beads with a bunch of wires running through them for addressing and a single read/write wire (ok, that's simplified))

16 K words for the machine Unix was written on originally
(max was 64K words)

discrete parts only (no integration, just Q,D & R (and some 'C' ;) )

I'm not 100% sure if they already had 'fork' in place on that machine, but the next step up, the PDP-11 definitely had it (that's also the machine that C was born on, the first version of unix was written in assembler!).

> The only downside of this approach compared to fork seems (to me) to be the requirement to lock and signal when accessing shared resources.

They're completely different beasts I think. Fork is a way to guarantee a whole slew of things about the relationship between two processes, threads are essentially parallel executions within the same memory space (or on a single core machine a simulation of parallel execution).

Threads are both a great thing and a nightmare, depending on whether you've just solved the worst race condition bug in your career or whether you're still busy with it :)

Your 'lock and signal' sounds pretty simple, and in theory it is, in practice efficient multi-threading programs are amongst the hardest things to get right that I know of.

> Is there a downside to using fork within a process?

If you need it, you need it. If not don't use it. Like any other tool. Downsides to system calls are not really interesting, they only appear when you use the system calls in ways that they weren't meant to. What's in the core of a unix system is pretty much what needs to be there.

> don't you also inherit the baggage of managing those resources too?

Yes, absolutely. Any memory that was allocated in the parent is also allocated in the child, any file system handles that you have are present in both and so on.

In the case of file system handles there is usually some kind of convention on who gets to 'own' them but you can do interesting things by letting them be owned by both.
I also implemented for my purposes backup scheme that deletes older backups in order to keep backup density inversely proportional to age of backups.

Does that mean Apple can sue me because they came up with the same scheme and patented it?
That would imply writing n(n-1)/2 "X for Y devs" articles, or an O(n^2) complexity.

A much better way would be to have an universal standard, possibly abstract framework with which all frameworks are contrasted. This way, only n comparison articles need be written, giving a linear cost.

Sorry, could not abstain. OTOH, this principle is mighty useful when writing conversion software. Just write converters to and from a standard format.
This has been _extremely_ frustrating lately. Especially when you're searching for some terms with a high noise ratio.

Just yesterday, I was trying to find an equation that looked moderately like a normal EKG, so I searched for 'polynomial equation heartbeat' and it left out 'heartbeat' from the search terms.
"Crowdsourcing is a very hot topic in the Gov 2.0 space right now," said Kristy Sundjaja, vice president of media, green, and emerging technology at the New York City Economic Development Corporation, which is co-sponsoring the competition.

When I read that, I did a double take to make sure I wasn't reading an article on The Onion.

Still, it's a neat idea. Makes me wonder what data my local government has available for visualization and analysis.
From Darkroom to Desktop - How Photoshop Came to Light
Maybe clearer than it should be then :) You would still need something like fork, even if unix would have had threads from day 1. It's just that we wouldn't have been using fork+communication to simulate multi-threading in those cases where multi-threading are more appropriate.
Fall update on Google Health
At the UN, the Obama administration backs limits on free speech.
In my post I was concerned with the health of the economy, not the environment. It's true that energy and the environment are linked, but that problem is not the focus here.
I think he makes some great points. I worked at Microsoft as an Intern for a spell, and contrary to popular belief, there really are plenty of smart, hard working people there.
World Bank may run out of money by mid-2010:
I think the list of programmers throughout history who could reliably write something as complex as TeX using nothing but paper and pencil is incredibly short.
it is $5000.00 for the grand prize winner. with the heading I thought 20,000.00 for the grand prize winner. If some body can discuss if one of the applications is picked out as the grand winner, how that person can make money from this. $5000.00 and dinner with mayor seems to be less with the effort you put in.
Can that application can be sold to NYC per user or per CPU/Server basis.
A few interesting points:

the average time between any two tweets from the same user is exactly 24 hours.

i.e. people use Twitter every day.

The rate of new user acquisition has plateaued at around 8 million per month.

Wow, only 8m new users per month. That's gotta hurt.

We know that Twitter has 50 million registered users

OK, small user base then.
So little time, so many interesting languages ...
Earning a living on the sea  Earning a living on the sea
Google, Verizon Wireless in an Android accord
I have to agree with DanielBMarkham, and say a factory movement conspiracy is less likely than real world circumstances. (I'm not saying other conspiracies are as unlikely) I was in a store years ago talking with a guy doing contract work there, changing lighting etc. As the owner he was doing it himself complaining that "no one wants to work."
Short-read genotyping with Hadoop and Amazon EC2
What the hell is going on? I don't understand why any western liberal would give in to this bullshit.
What I find most irritating is that the TDD or other methodology zealots usually cannot point to a success of exactly the sort people like jwz or Joel have been influential in shipping. There also seems to be a tendency among these people to confuse rejection of TDD with rejection of unit testing.
the problem with the user base seems more likely to be that you can ignore almost 75% of all users due to no activity
My book is mine, not Google's
Since less than 5% are using sms to update twitter surely they can abolish the outdated 140 character limit?

Never having used it, I can't actually say, but I had the impression that the 140 character limit was the point of Twitter.
The more of Stallman's writing you read, the more you realize how insane that man is.
I up voted it. I skimmed it in a few minutes (reading your rant and typing this response took longer). I'm rather fluent in JavaScript so I didn't learn much new, but it seemed like a nice short comparison of some of the mechanisms of using JavaScript.

Perfect, and complete, probably not. Useful to someone trying to grasp the basic options available, sure. The "old school" style may be the best way for you, but certainly would cause problems with many developers or while trying to use some large JavaScript libraries (though fortunately most those tend to use some type of encapsulation (except the unfortunately ubiquitous Prototype)).

If you don't like JavaScript patterns or the subject doesn't interest you read the link head line and move on. If you are interested, I think the article is a nice brief summary of some ways to use JavaScript.
Do you need the

return this;
Is employment essentially a form of slavery?
If so, how can people justify banning slavery but promoting employment?

You might argue that employment is optional, but this is not the case in practice especially if you have a family to support.

You might argue that you can just find a better job. But almost all jobs feel like 9-5 slavery. And the search for a better job may end up in unemployment or a job that's even worse.
Your studies are all observational garbage, as were the two links I posted, more to make a point than anything. And they both did in fact raise questions about damage caused by distance training. They just couched their language with platitudes about how healthy distance training is, presumably to ward off concerted attack.

I don't have an ax to grind. I literally don't want people trying to get in shape to waste large amounts of time and hurt their knees and so on doing long distance running when it is so much inferior for losing weight and maintaining fitness. I want to steer them in the right direction. They will have so much more success training in other ways.

It is common knowledge at this point that interval training, sprints, and properly done strength training produce all the same cardiovascular health benefits as distance training but without the repetitive stress and other physiological stresses of long distance. Also without the huge time investment. Also with much better body fat percentage measurements. You can use google as well as I can.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/for-heart-health-sp...

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/health-news/2008/11/01/sho...
I don't like cults. I don't like the 'cult of closed software' any more than I like the 'cult of open software'.

This is not a war, and anybody that is trying to make it look like one is manipulating people.

There is plenty of room on this planet for both closed and open source solutions, let the market decide. Long term that should skew the table in the direction of open source, you really can't compete with free.

But there will always be closed source, just as there will always be open source.

No need for all this polarizing. Miguel definitely seems to have managed to get to the 'moral high ground' in this whole argument, he comes across as reasonable and nice, but that doesn't mean that that should decide the argument.

Everybody is entitled to his own opinion, nobody is entitled to their own facts, especially not in something as objectively qualifiable(sp?) as software.

This whole 'drama queen' episode has gone on long enough, let both deIcaza and Stallman go back to their respective IDEs (at a guess, Visual Studio and Emacs) and write some code to prove their point instead of all this prose.

It's Peyton Place for programmers.
(<= a b c) doesn't seem to work.
Per Minsky, big brains are a liability until an innovation comes along that allows them to be used properly. IMHO big disks, along with big RAM and big processing cores (now core arrays) are liabilities because we don't know how to use them. Because we don't know how to use them, we fill them with garbage and complexity, like big brains before whatever innovation enabled the human brain, and all that capacity becomes dead weight with a huge amount of inertia. A liability.

Few things depreciate in value faster than source code. Forgetting revisions is useless if the memory is just going to be filled with more code. The prospect of petabytes of bloated, broken, and rotting code in any sort of repository is frankly disgusting to me. We are drowning under the weight of programmers who think the product of their typing (not so much thinking) is so special that it needs to be preserved forever more. I pity the new yosefks, the debuggers of tomorrow, I really do.
That's a reasonable interpretation, it just isn't my recollection of the workloads we used for benchmarking. I remember running the actual httpd server under synthetic loads, and compiling the Linux kernel make -j <bignum>.
Two shoe salesmen were sent to Africa in the early
1900's to scout the territory.

One telegraphed back: "Situation hopeless. Stop. No one wears shoes."

The other telegraphed: "Business opportunity. Stop. They have no shoes."

Nothing makes a larger difference than knowing an opportunity when you see one.
slavery is forced, employment is optional
I like the Linus view: free software is more fun, and better, and so on, so I'll work on that. It concentrates on the positive, rather than saying I want to avoid nasty closed software and telling other people what they should and should not do. Linus also seems like a much happier guy.
I.B.M. Joins Pursuit of $1,000 Personal Genome