skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm glad I'm not the only one who has trouble when I hit this.

I really, really wish the STL had a mode you could compile it in which boiled down to, "Double check everything no matter how slow it makes things." Maybe it has it and I don't know it. But that was my top irritation with the little bit of C++ I've done.

I have no idea how a non-strict comparator can lead to memory corruption rather than just indeterminate sort order, but it is no fun tracking that down.
Yes, quote the guy who brought in caste-based reservation in India. Quote the guy who wanted a separate electorate for Dalits and other religious communities. Quote the guy who did not understand Gandhi !

Now there is 49.5% reservation now in educational institutions in India, yes 49.5% !!, because that's the highest allowed by the constitution, otherwise they would have gone higher. It's something similar to "affirmative action" in the US, but totally taken over by politicians to play electoral politics, to pump in the votes from the lower sections of society.

Gandhi had the vision to understand that caste-based reservations would lead to caste-based politics and further affirmation of casteism in India, Ambedkar never could fathom that, or maybe he could and ignored it!

Anyway, please don't quote someone who didn't understand the ideas or vision of Gandhi, please don't.

sources - http://books.google.co.in/books?id=RAON5AW4yUEC&pg=PA232...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambedkar
Will hack for food - The New Yorker cover from 1995
citation needed...four steps to the epiphany page 17
Thanks for sharing your rule of thumb. I have observed that inevitably most objects/functions require three 'groups' of variables, more or less I use this pattern and I would appreciate your thoughts.

- Defaults: Must be defined within the object literal
- User Options : part of the function arguments
(user can use an object literal,
anon function etc.)
- Settings : The actual mixin used by the methods

function aProblem(arg1, arg2, options){
// define the necessary defaults
var defaults={} //define defaults
// use a mixin algo to combine options and
// defaults
var settings = mixin(options, defaults);
// main function routines
var myObj={};

return myObj={
property1 : settings.property1,
property2 : settings.property2
}
}
That bar graph (1/2 way down) is from 2006 [http://ajaxian.com/archives/ajaxiancom-2006-survey-results].. shows jQuery=7%.. wonder if that has changed since.
Worst bug monetarily:

I was consulting for a multinational on a commodities trading app. I broke the stuff sending trade data to the Risk Management system that does automatic hedge trades. My manager comes down the hall and tells me I've caused $4 million in exposure in the past two hours. At the end, her comment is: "A million here, a million there, business as usual!"

I told that story to a former coworker, and he pointed out, "Well, your boss was calm about it. I bet those traders were livid!"
Sorry, I probably could've been a bit more clear:

python -c "username = 'callahad'; print(''.join(('dan.', username[:-1], 'n', '@googlewave.com')))"

But that starts bordering on being too verbose for my own amusement. And it requires semi-colons. In Python. Ick.
Great post - who knew about this facebook thing :p
I'm not doing a startup so much as building real estate investing business right now. I am running through the "4 Steps to Epiphany" and Ferris's processes right now. I'm trying to bring in innovations from current day techs (blog, web, etc.) however, I'm finding a number of the customers don't have ready access to the web.
Large-scale, low-latency decision server. Will have some web console tools, but they're ancillary to the core product.
If we're looking to magicians for this stuff, why not go straight to the man himself? James Randi is very critical of hypnosis, and has quite a track record as a skeptic.
Code needs to produce predictable results without bugs. All other qualities are secondary. Good code without bugs is well encapsulated and should work as a black box. Elegance is secondary to reliability. I am not saying that it is not important, just not as important as reliability. As a general rule of thumb less lines of code translates into higher reliability. I know it does not apply to every case but it is a good starting point.
Tell HN: Open Hacker House today at Epicenter Cafe in San Francisco
Hi! I'd like to restart a weekly, no-agenda meetup/co-working thing on Fridays, 3pm-7pm at Epicenter Cafe, 764 Harrison St (Harrison & 4th). No signup, just show up. The space it great, the wifi is strong, the beers are cold and the coffee is hot. Feel free to drop by any time to meet and work where everyone knows your username. I'll be in the back with a Xoopit sticker on my laptop.
You miss the point. It is impressive because it's in pure javascript and everyone knows how hard it was to pull it off using javascript.
So helpful! Thanks!
Our product has both desktop as well as web parts to it. Some of the code needs to be executed on the client machine which in no way we can shift to server.
I clearly struggle to simplify the message. Thanks for encouraging me to focus on this.

Any ideas for what one thing i should ask users to do on the homepage?
That's great (and apt, given the economy). The New Yorker has collections of Baseball Cartoons, Political Cartoons, Art Cartoons, Doctor cartoons (which I got for my dad :). but no books of Tech or Computer cartoons.. wonder why?
It was about 20 seconds before the end of the footage. I was underwhelmed, but... you know... science and all.

They basically have the approach as live, streaming from the vehicle, footage. Then, when it gets close enough, they switch over to infra-red, and finally, they go to the control room.
I agree, but I really look at it in terms of what best suits your customer's needs.

Thats why I can't wait to get my hands on Atlas and give Cappuccino a whirl. Complete flexibility between desktop and the web could create a one-size-fits-all solution.
really well said!
Personally, it seems that we -- as for people appropriately inclined -- have reached the point where you just want _some_ platform to run Debian/Ubuntu: if it's OSX, cool; if it's native Ubuntu, okay then, too, as long as it works well enough with the hardware.

I dumped OSX a couple of years ago and a major part was the package management trouble.

I need all the basic open-source software as well-laid as in Ubuntu/Debian. I want them to be compatible, familiar, hopefully in the nice GNU flavor I'm used to, and preferably as the de facto standard for the system I'm using so that I won't run into conflicts with the system software itself. For me in 2006/2007, DarwinPorts/MacPorts/Fink/whatever didn't cut it. They weren't as up to date nor as extensive as Ubuntu/Debian repositories, and I was always feeling something was lacking in their overall integrity. In Ubuntu, it's the native software stack and everything just clicks together.

I think it would be really great if you could use a Mac with native OSX to run your Debian and GNU stuff as well as Ubuntu does.

I doubt Mr. Jobs would agree, though.
British illusionist Derren Brown does a lot of stuff with hypnosis and subliminal influencing of people ... there are a ton of 5 to 10-minute-long YouTube videos of his sketches. He never goes into what he thinks might be the science behind what he does, but some of the results are fascinating.
What happened to him? And did he try to blame you? In his mind I'm sure all he did was port your code, which must after all have been buggy.
Patch day comes again!
Watch Private Practice TV Show
Seems to be linkjacked from http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/09/02/Ravelry
The problem with creating off topic forums is that it is similar to subreddits. If people come to HN because they followed a political link thats in an "off topic" forum, we've attracted the type of discourse we are trying to avoid.

Consider HN an experiment in "socialism," where it can really only work with one visionary leader (PG?) and a small, controllable community.

Empires based on sound foundations (Roman,Ottoman,British, and soon America) eventually spiral out of control due to their unfocused momentum.

This could cause a lot of people to be unhappy with HN - but then they are complaining about something that HN was never designed to solve.

Manage expectations. The internet is a big place, I love HN but I can't imagine its the only place for logical discourse.
Tarsnap (my online backup service startup) has a web site for signups and accounting; but it definitely falls into the "client/server app" category rather than the "web app" category.
I have a non web start up www.wickwerks.com

bicycle parts manufacturing. Manufacturing has quite a different set of headaches.
Good catch, I'd forgotten where I'd read that story.
LOL -- the new slogan is that there are no slogans!

I see your point, but pragmatism has a lot more depth than simply being an adjective and the opposite of something else. "How to do stuff" is a philosophical exercise (sorry to go long here) and like all philosophical exercises, there are many schools of thought. After looking at all the camps, I'll go with Peirce and Dewey, who, looking at the field, said basically "so what?" "What's it mean to me right now?"

Now maybe the pragmatic school of philosophy has been a con job all along -- if so, hey, the money is good -- but I think there's a bit more to it than simply substituting one slogan for another.

But I loved your comment!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey
Phenomenology, Fundamental Physics and Inconsistent Truths
Fink is also a ghetto where the maintainers feel free to modify the upstream packages to their personal preferences.
Nameless BigCo came in for PCI compliance on Struts 1.something they coded the credit card number as a member variable of a struts action (struts 1 used a singleton pattern) the last submitted person got to pay for all of the simultaneous transactions going on in the system. Fortunately my team caught it in acceptance review.
Smart-Phone Market Share Update
In MRI Ruby 1.8, Ruby creates a single native thread and all other threads run in that native thread. In Ruby 1.9, each Ruby thread is a native thread. In JRuby, Ruby uses native threads created via the JVM. Not sure about IronRuby, Rubinus, or Ruby EE. A tangled web of options for sure.
If there was a way for companies to patent the placebo effect, it would have a lot more research behind it!
I thought 'with' was generally frowned upon? Is it guaranteed to work correctly in all situations?

And why is this a better namespacing method?
For-loops like "for (i=0;i<myLinkCollection.length;i++)" should always be written like "for (var i=..."), unless there's an explicit "var i;" declaration somewhere. Otherwise, this creates a global variable "i", which can lead to some very confusing bugs if another function is called that also references the global "i".
I think it would be interesting to hear more discussion on HN regarding these different types of problems. Just as we can all learn about optimal web promotion strategies, or the right development framework to use, so too should we learn from others about how to identify the right manufacturing partners, how to arrange distribution deals, channel strategies, etc.

I am getting involved in a plastics manufacturing business and reading like crazy to prepare myself for it.
Scientist at Large Hadron Collider arrested on suspicion of Al-Qaeda links
My username @ googlewave.com
I like this concept a lot... Makes me wonder how well a 'netflix for clothes' would work. I suppose this is pretty similar.
Lots and lots of books are available used, but the ones at the end of the "long tail" aren't and probably never will be, and that's the most exciting thing about this for me. I have actually done as he described and traveled to Chicago, Minneapolis, and Washington DC just to visit libraries that had books that didn't exist anywhere else, and would have been grateful to be able to pay for scans instead of making the trip.
so, rm -rf / is not dangerous?
Remix of Out of Control
They are all close enough to similar. It's kind of like the difference between Scheme and Common Lisp.

PL/SQL and T-SQL are different, but not so different as to require a new way of thinking, for example.

Of course, I've worked with lots of dialects of SQL fairly extensively, so I may be over-simplifying.
I forgot my password but there isn't a "forgot password" link for me so I couldn't sign in to RSVP. Can anyone help?
"It seems that many believe here that the only form of entrepreneurship worth pursuing is web-based apps, or, failing that, a technology-oriented company."

There are huge margins, opportunities for disruption, potential for capital efficiency, and huge scaling advantages for software/tech businesses (which is why they are popular with VCs and entrepreneurs alike. But there are obviously plenty of examples of offline business that prosper (or even grow like gangbusters).

(Design within Reach is an awesome example, by the way)
I got into the habit a long time ago of writing my where clause first and then generally writing the rest as a select clause. Then converting the select into a update or delete. I don't always do the select thing it depends on what part of the DB I am working on. If it is a pretty complex statement I tend to write the select just to make sure. I have a guy that is better than me at SQL but he still has not taken my advice and every now and then I hear cussing coming from down the hall. He is good at backing things up but his process takes a lot of time when he messes up. I prefer the ounce of prevention path.
The Franklin CDU680 does that. It's dandy until the drivers are out of date.
i'm attempting to build one based on hacker-ish, somewhat collaborative principles. its slow going, though, because it at least partly involves steel manufacture, as well as electronics design.

its an interesting prospect, since the niche isn't huge, but it has potential, and because the margins on some of the things i'm looking to produce will likely be thin, at least to start. definitely different from how something like a web app works.
Hewitt’s ghost frog – latest news from the field
Sys Admins: What your Developers want you to know
That's true for IE, but not for good browsers.
For firefox/safari/chrome it's negligable difference if not sometimes slightly faster to use the DOM methods.

Also, using DOM methods allows you to easier attach listeners, save references to DOM elements for later updates/use etc. That means less getElementById()'s later.

Writing HTML inside js code is just horrible (IMHO). Horrible ugly code. And obviously easier to have security issues if you're including non-sanitized user data.

#6 is a horrible idea.

As far as your JS code is concerned, HTML is a (horrible, ugly) serialization of the DOM. Manipulate the DOM programatically. Don't use HTML.
Is -4 really necessary? Feel free to down vote this too.
Yes, but a positive review about something useful is probably going to get a lot more attention than a negative one. (Marketing departments, take note, and send bloggers more free stuff!)
I'm always getting stuck on the Courier New vs. Helvetica Neue ones.
I do almost the same thing:

I first write out a select that will show me the records I'm about to modify, then replace the select + fields with the update. And I try to keep modifying live databases using interactive SQL to an absolute minimum.

Check three times, then hit enter.
Haskell in the real world: writing a commercial program in Haskell
Instapaper started as a web site, which as far as I know spread by word of mouth. I was following him on Tumblr at the time, and spread his link right away. Remember that Marco's the second employee at Tumblr, which has an audience of nearly 2 million. Not all of them read what Marco's got to say, but a lot of them do. To make a really hasty judgment: I run tumblelogs with fairly high follower counts, and I know that like/reblog conversion is fairly low; judging by how popular his posts get, I'd imagine he's got an audience of a few thousand on Tumblr alone, and then all the people that read his blog via RSS, which isn't as easy to track.

Instapaper had one of the easiest sign-up processes I'd ever seen (when I designed notadouche.com, the goal was to one-up his sign-up), it was really simplistic, and it was free. The iPhone application came a year after Instapaper's site, so he already had a built-in audience. Then Instapaper became one of the top apps on the iPhone, reputation-wise, it introduced tilt scrolling to the design scene, and so Marco's become one of the "in" bloggers that gets quoted by John Gruber and Andy Baio and their enormous crowds. At some point he was picked up by Fusion Ads, but that was way later, after they'd started their strategy of placing advertisements on iPhone apps.

Marco's written multiple times about how he refuses to "network" on his blog, and how he refuses to promote what he writes in any way. http://www.marco.org/166210052
NASA's 'Moon Bombing:' Looking for Ice, But None So Far
What The Associated Press is saying to Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo
I am.

I think there are some things you can do on the desktop that you can't do on the web. Or another way of looking at this -- the OS is simply a vastly complex web browser.

I thought about iPhone and Palm WebOS, but iPhone is saturated and Palm has crippled WebOS from doing anything truly fun.
I always find it ironic that companies choose actions determined to against the public interest instead of solid business practices.

Out competing your smaller opponents is far different than undercutting them. Apple is essentially safe from an antitrust in commercial computers, because essentially every tom, dick and harry can open up a computer store and charge less than Apple for an adequate computer. However people choose to purchase Apple products not because there's no alternative (ironically Apple is commonly seen as the alternative in computing) but because it's regarded as a better choice.

IBM and other computer manufacturers wouldn't get themselves into trouble if they would just make computers and mainframes that people wanted. However, they go the grey route and make sure they're the computer people can afford by undercutting prices and selling in bulk while they have a monopoly of the market.
Also see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870663

(That is the same piece, but from the NYT Op-Ed page. The Google Blog is probably better from the perspective of having a permanent, non-paywalled link, which in itself is an interesting commentary on new/old media...)
Yes, and how you spend your time is personal decision. Just because one person decides to code in their free time doesn't mean they aren't an adult nor that that's a blanket bad decision. The wording in the comment I'm responding to ("Once you grow up", "sitting on your ass in front of a computer") is kind of inflammatory and seems to imply that only non-adults have time to do coding or hacking, that it's a "kids activity", and that coding can not be a hobby (since "hobbies" is called out as another possible thing that "adults" do).

In the context of this discussion, however, if you were to ask during an interview "Talk about a personal programming project you've worked on recently" and you heard back:

Candidate A: "I don't do or think about coding outside of the office, but I did just recently spend $20 purchasing tool to upload images to flickr and I had to read the docs to configure it to work with my firewall."

Candidate B: "Well, I wanted to upload the 2,000 pictures of my son to flickr to share with my family, but doing that with the flickr web UI manually was taking a long time, and there isn't a good flickr uploader for Linux, so I hacked out a shell script that gets invoked when automount mounts my camera or flash drive that uploads the images to flickr with their API"

Is anyone seriously going to consider Candidate A, just based on this question, as more valuable for a coding/hacking/technology position? Obviously, other factors come into play, as techiferous points out elsewhere in this thread, but this is meant to show someone's passion, not if they have good judgement as to if something is worth doing (hopefully, you've got a battery of other interview questions that help determine that).
So I wonder what your opinions would be if we replaced "$20" with "1 hr of video games per night" - do you have the same reactions?

Or, alternatively, what if the kid had a $20 allowance / week, and if he did something "bad" he would lose some amount of it per occurrence? Would you feel better about that situation?
Agreed. After level 1, it's a bit silly to give a serif and sans-serif choice for a letter, unless it's O.
Windows 7 parties kick off
Clever! How do you add your properties and methods? Another clever trick?
This looks good. It's worth noting that on the mac at least, even PS can have a windowless UI. It's actually nice when using multiple monitors and a tablet. A single window won't make full use of 2 screens of differing vertical resolutions.
Ok, I get it: Google is digitizing a lot of books.
Duplicate:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=838512
I think the Google Book initiative is great. I'm no conspiracy theorist but It seems the biggest problem with this type of service is verifiability. If Google has digitally transcribed some very rare work that is later destroyed it will be hard to trust Google's digital copy of the work for real accuracy when we have no other copy to compare against. Someone could create a mirror but that does no good if the mirror is created after the digital copy has been tampered with. I think Google needs to work on adding something to increase the trustworthiness of the works they store. Maybe it is a publicly released checksum of the works that is created when they are scanned and stored by a separate entity or maybe there is some other very clever method. I just know that I would be hesitant to take a single corporate entities word on the veracity of their copy of a public document.
Because you saw fit to mention your company in your submitted title, I gave your page a look. I'd never heard of Eldarion, but Pinax sounds vaguely familiar. I'd like to make a request, though, and that's for you not to highlight text so obnoxiously it looks like links. The only four links you have on eldarion.com look like they're not links. It's pretty, but it's bad design.
tim.inman@googlewave.com
That second one reminds me of this: An ISP called planet internet changed their homepage, only to find that they reliably crashed Explorer (3 at the time).

Took a while before the phone rang if I wanted to have a look.

It turned out they had a little animated gif in there with the inter-frame interval set to 0, causing a divide by 0 in Explorer.

That gif was pretty much the last suspect on the list.

Divide & conquer until you are simply staring at the solution and still you don't see it...
Smart-Phone Market Update: Apple's Eating Everyone Else's Lunch
Ledger: Command-line double-entry accounting
How about authors? How much money have you spent, lifetime, to hear an author read his books to you?
Re: Why startups shouldn't have to pay to pitch angel investors
I read somewhere about realtime applications that do something like this but redundant sensors holding a consensus polling algorithm. Have three sensors reporting the same thing and if they are not all in agreement within some kind of delta then go into some kind of limp mode or have the two sensors in agreement be the ones that the system uses for it's algorithms. I cannot recall where I read it though.