skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I never thought about that effect of answering emails promptly, but you're absolutely right. The more emails I send, the more I receive, which creates a vicious circle.

Unfortunately for me right now, many people know I respond rapidly to email, so they email me for urgent issues that need immediate attention since they know I'm generally available. That said, I probably just need to start giving out our support email address and telling them it'll be dealt with by the team as a whole, since there's no guarantee I'm not in a meeting or out for the day (or, as the case may be, not answering emails any more because I read this comment!)
I think what he means is that most people from the other countries will go back to their countries once their studies are done, hence most of his peers will be white, and few of them will have benefited from higher education in CS/engineering.

His comment does reference race, but it doesn't sound racist to me.
You won't be stucked in traffic again by using this app
It doesn't look too hard, if you have an Altera FPGA. Just follow the "Getting Started" link, and it will show you how to download and build the source.
Java, a popular programming language on desktop system, is seldom used in embedded systems.

What? Perhaps the introduction is just not aging well...
Nice.

I see another problem. The bright are bored, school is tedious, and they go unrecognized. Then the less intelligent "excel."

Good thing AI research will need more and more intelligent people.
Some ARM's have support for JVM bytecode - so what?
Anybody heard about them?
Jealous of everyone who doesn't live hundreds/thousands of miles away.
I used prepaid sims from MTN and SafariCom when I visited Kenya and east Africa this summer. 50 cent activation fee and $5.00 for all the minutes I needed (including to the US) for 3 weeks on a network that seemed as reliable as my at&t service. Humiliates American carriers in terms of value.

People from literally all walks of life use cell phones like this. From the Masai herdsmen in Tanzania to the dirt dwelling inhabitants of the Kibera slum in Nairobi. Here's a mobile shop in the heart of that slum: http://www.flickr.com/photos/petermarks/4017875315/in/set-72...
Since I use jQuery, I can work around most CSS and Javascript compatibility problems IE6 and IE7 throw at me, so long as the user has javascript enabled. My biggest problem is that among my userbase, 25% of sessions on the application my company runs have javascript turned off, and that number is 30% among the IE6 sessions. (We've got a lot of conservative corporate customers who lock down their user's workstations.) This jQuery plugin doesn't help me at all; the users who pose the biggest problem would never even run the browser detection.
See now, you just equated peer group with status group. If you believe that "white" can be a peer group, then that seems to imply that you also believe that "white" can be a status group, which is a far more troubling scenario.

Racism is not about making disparaging remarks about someone of another race. It's about prejudging, i.e. assuming that certain things are true, just because of that person's race.
A question that everyone saying "this is so cool, why don't they do that here" should be asking is why so many people find this option necessary? The core reason is that the banks in Kenya suck. Period. (Okay, I was only there for two weeks but three trips to banks in that time period were more than I would wish on just about anyone...) They make US cable companies and telcos look like paragons of good service and low friction transactions.

In a country where there are not ATMs on every corner, credit card swipers in even the most insignificant bodega, and where you stand in line for an hour to get the cash you will need for a week or month's worth of purchases any system that reduces transaction friction (especially for small-scale purchases) is going to be a win. In places where the economic transaction infrastructure has already pushed down the cost of doing business the appeal of such a system becomes one of convenience rather than necessity.
College provides a general sense of accomplishment over a long period of time- a relaxed mental state conducive to growth and figuring out what you would like to do in the future.
Why would you assume that someone is going to "go back" simply because of their skin color? How do you know that he wasn't writing about American citizens of various ethnic origins?
Alone, not worth the price.
I think one key is to have a solid understand of the fundamentals - I think programming is like martial arts that way. As usual, it doesn't have to be exact, just a useful abstraction. What is a computer program, anyway? A set of instructions for manipulating data and devices attached to the computer. The CPU can only manipulate data in RAM, so you have to load data from storage, network and other devices. If you want it to live on past the program running, it needs to be sent out of ram. At the low level, all computer programs boil down to machine codes - sequences of simple operations. There's no need to learn them. Higher level languages stand between human language and instruction primitives. A compiler does the translation. Higher level languages all share certain fundamental concepts : functions, loops, variables and in some cases, classes and objects. An object is a bunch of data grouped together with a name and classes define common characteristics of objects. Once they understand these basics, they should explore them in some safe environment. There's plenty of ways to do that. I really think you need to get this kind of basic literacy down first and it doesn't matter what language it happens in. Once they get over this hurdle, focus on data and use cases. What is your application about? What are people trying to do with it, why did someone build this thing in the first place? What are the fundamental types of data involved and how are they transformed? I think all programs tend to be broken down into input, processing and output. Where can you see these things in your application? That gives the lowest level building blocks and the highest level overview. From there, it depends on their interests but however you slice it, a good place to start is to explain version control and give them a bug to fix. Once they get frustrated, do pair programming.
Your peers are developers; the distinguishing criterion is not race. By using one criterion as shorthand for another, as you seem to be doing, is prejudging. The way you write makes it sound like your non-white co-workers are not your peers.
I make it a habit to visit the MIT Press whenever in Boston. Granted, they don't have a loading dock sale every day, but they may well have a few racks of similarly-discounted clearance books.
assembly more closely models how the computer works than anything...
> doesn't matter how many players there are. suppose there's one ice cream guy. where is he going to put his ice cream hut? in the center. let's say another one shows up. where is he going to put his hut? in the center. the logic repeats.

That's not true. Let me explain. In this model (1 dimensional spectrum, be it distance or whatever), if a third player entered the market and the other two players are located at the center then the new players rational choice is to be on either side of the incumbents. He therefore sandwiched the middle player and stole all of his customers, the middle player will then move to the outside and again a player will have been sandwiched. The cycle repeats.

But if you add in costs associated with relocating (time or revenue lost or rebranding or moving costs) then this no longer is an effective strategy. A player might realize that this would happen and purposely not locate in the middle in order to avoid a fight. I don't quite remember the solution to a three player model but that was also based on an assumption that there are only three players.

It gets highly complicated when there is the possibility of new entrants. The lesson could be watch out for new entrants and stay nimble (so it is cheap for you to react when there are new entrants).
So slow it down. Respond five times a day for a week. Then four, three, etc. After a couple of weeks you'll be down to two emails a day.

Of course it's tough if you're on support, but then there should be a separate account for handling support issues. All other email should get the "two respones a day" treatment.
It's reasonable to complain. It's also reasonable, and I'd like to think expected, that if you created something that you can't get people to pay for, and they are stealing it, you'd get out of the business of providing that specific thing that can be stolen, or you invest in copy protection (which is a losing game anyway). Eventually Microsoft did get out of the business of trying to sell to hobbyists.

He acknowledges that it wasn't universally stolen: the income was approximately $2/hr. If it was universally stolen, the income would have been $0/hr. But what he was missing was that it was universally wanted, there was a demand for it. This means he didn't set a price that the market was willing or able to bear, and the market told him the price that it was willing to bear. One way to adjust prices in the face of piracy is to take the total income divided by the total number of users (this is an iterative process, because this might not be immediately measurable). Considering what people had to go through to obtain copies on the Altair (making copies of paper tapes), the price set ($500 for the standalone version according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists ; approx $1900 in 2009 dollars) was way too high considering the effort of copying. At some lower price point, the effort of copying is too much for the price set.

While it's nice to be able set whatever price you want and think you're going to get it, that isn't the case. And banking on being able to sell at some arbitrary price is folly. Because you'd be in the same situation if the people DIDN'T even bother to copy it in the first place, the only difference is that you get to complain that people are using it without paying.

Charging $500 for something that is in high demand and is easily copyable, well, that's a huge mistake. The market is telling you there is interest, but you're not meeting the buyers, so they subvert you. And while it's unfortunate that all this effort and money and time was expended up front and now the bill comes due for, setting the wrong price, which discourages sales and encourages piracy, is bad market research. And Microsoft changed in that regard too, for a long time now Microsoft has been known for its marketing juggernaut.
Indeed, this is the one my University's CS club uses. It has really interesting puzzles, and you can submit code to it.
The Building Block Web
No, that's still not my point. Each user has a different subset of Word. Hence, the only set that contains all of the features that all users use is Word itself. If everyone uses a different subset, it's not accurate to call it bloated, too large, or complain it has unnecessary features. All features are necessary for someone.
Jazelle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazelle
Going Green at Google: Data Center Efficiency Measurements
This is worthy of a 5 hour drive.
Sure, portable assembly language. With, you know, named variables, type abstraction, recursive function decomposition, infix expression grammar, heirarchical flow control constructs... just a bunch of silly tricks. :)

Modern developers have gotten so used to the fact that C is "low level" that they tend to forget how low really low level coding is. There's a ton of "high level" language features in every 3GL, and that includes C. The abstractive distance from machine code to a language like C or Pascal is far, far higher than it is between C and Python.
Bollywood's Hottest Heroines New Wallpapers
Cranky much?

Maybe your board doesn't have a jazelle-capable part, or you lack licensing for it (jazelle isn't publicly documented, sadly). Maybe you do have a bunch of gates left over on your FPGA.

I mean, it looks like a cool hack to me.
If it's not fit for my purpose, then I'm somewhat less than interested in hearing you whine about how I didn't pay for it, or about how I used AdBlock to get what value I could out of it.

You're not entitled to my money, and I'm not entitled to your content. The difference is, though, I didn't dangle my wallet on the Internet with the intent of wasting everybody's time.
I am a huge fan of JQuery.

I think the JQuery website provides a great resource for learning and using it.

http://docs.jquery.com/Main_Page
"Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, [...]"

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

edit: the title of this article used to be uppercase. either the submitter or an editor has since changed it.
The way I understand it and correct me if I'm wrong, but as shin_lao pointed out above:
"Full drive encryption is meant to protect against theft or loss, not against trojan horses (be that hardware or software)."

This is a good point with regard to the Maid scenario, so I don't think the developers of TC were running away from the question at all.

And from the article: "After some 1-2 minutes, the target's laptop gets infected with Evil Maid Sniffer that will record the disk encryption passphrase when the user enters it next time." -- so the attacker is depending on the user reentering the system, and they are depending on confiscating the system afterwards. Loss and theft scenarios where an attacker has not utilized EMS, or is just out to steal the laptop, still protects the data.

So in summation, you need encryption to protect against loss or theft, which may be sufficient for your vulnerability level (maybe you don't travel a lot but one day you simply lost your laptop), but you need to go further to protect against what looks to me to be a more advanced version of a keylogger (EMS - frequent traveler with sensitive information).
No, it's not. There is a huge difference between Javascript the language and "Javascript" the browser programming interface (also known as DOM, DHTML, $&^& $&^!#), and childNodes[0].childNodes[1].childNodes[4].nodeValue).

Learning the former is good for you. jQuery will help you do that.

Learning the latter is actively bad for you. You're learning a technology that is already obsolete.
It's funny to see people getting self righteous about evading the intent of content owners. I'm not entitled to your wallet. But if you leave it on the table in my office...
Yes, but there is no way for them to know that their mortgage will be sold, that is strictly up to the financier and the third party. Therefore a borrower cannot know what is happening to their mortgage other than they have to pay it.

However this doesn't remove the irresponsibility of taking a mortgage that you cannot afford to pay, which may be your point. Sorry if I misunderstood.
We have image replacement hooks in our Compass implementation that generate and cache standard box and icon buttons for us, so that the only place graphics for UI controls occur is in our stylesheets.

It's an actively evil thing to do, but it means we never have to fire up Photoshop to make yet another damn rounded-corner gradient fill button with a simple text string in it.
BFS vs. Mainline Scheduler: Discussion
I will recommend the book i'm currently reading: Secrets of the Javascript Ninja: http://jsninja.com/. It is written by Jquery author, and it shows you basically how a framework like JQuery would be written. It is not a book for the faint of hearts, very in depth treatment of various aspects of javascript, such as functions/closures/timers/cross platform javascript development etc. You probably need Wrox Professional Javascript for Web Developer (2009) to brush up on the basics first. Happy coding!
I think we are in violent agreement on the facts. It is the interpretation that differs.

I completely agree that the foundations were laid long before 1998. I'm sure we can both name lots of milestones. You cite 1989 for the GPL v1. I could cite 1985 for the invention of the patch utility and the writing of the GNU manifesto. You could cite 1978 for the first release of BSD. And so it goes. Open source software could not have had the breakout year it did in 1998 without being well along a path to success before then.

However I believe that 1998 was the critical year for the widespread acceptance and adoption of open source technology in the web industry. And a critical enabler for that was the fact that Microsoft got slapped with the anti-trust lawsuit, following which all of the major competitors realized that they had a limited time window to take down Microsoft, and therefore all jumped on the open source bandwagon. Do you remember how much it changed the game to have IBM and Oracle putting their reputation behind Linux and Apache? Obviously Microsoft was fully aware at that point that open source was a huge threat, however they couldn't jump on it because their hands were tied by the lawsuit.

Without the lawsuit the major vendors wouldn't have dared to get behind open source. That would have slowed adoption and acceptance significantly. Furthermore Microsoft would have been free use their control of the client to leverage control of the server. Which they were already starting to do, and which they had done to very good effect against Novell earlier. Could they have succeeded? I sure wouldn't have wanted to bet against them!

Thus I think that Microsoft's blinking at the lawsuit in 1998 was more important for the success of open source on the web than their missing the web before 1995.
Clojure's a very promising language, which I'm very interested in. However, I wish its promotional material would stop marketing O(log n) as O(1).

If it's really fast, fine, say it's really fast. But all logarithmic time complexity is the same, as far as time complexity goes. Having a base of 32 instead of, say, 2 merely means you're (all other things being equal, which they probably aren't) a constant factor of 5 times as fast.
I used to love pmarca's blog post. I think it's great someone dug up his old posts. It's so sad he took a hiatus from blogging. I guess he found more "productive" this to do and writing blog post fell off the to-do list.
Wow, that's some pretty tasty kool aid there...

One product didn't fail from using C, so it's a good idea in general? I think the iPhone's success is due to marketing, exploiting developer's existing knowledge, and good libraries... not the use of C.
Ask HN: Secure connection failed with Firefox? Just me?
So, it's ok to steal from someone, so long as you're only stealing the stuff that's of value to you?

If someone builds a website and puts it out there with advertising, they're saying "Hey everyone, feel free to enjoy what I've built without paying me for it, because I've got these other guys paying for it. Just look at the ads and click on them if you find them interesting, ok?" When you come along with AdBlock, you're making use of the website without allowing the author's arrangement with the advertisers to work. Ultimately, the advertisers will stop paying, and the website must either disappear or become paid-subscription only.

Of course, most people don't like ads, and the more obnoxious they are the more we dislike them and want to block them. But I think we'd like Xanadu less, where every website would have micropayments required to view it. I know that I'd rather put up with ads, especially the less obtrusive ones.
(UK's Royal) Navy Nailed By (Windows) Virus
This is probably the one he had in mind: http://paulgraham.com/love.html
I rarely use anything other than O'Reilly's"JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Fifth Edition" (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596101992/). It may be a bit advanced if you haven't done much programming before and is probably more of a reference book, but it covers a ton of topics and has a lot of working examples.
The Song Decoders at Pandora
From my own experience.

- B.Sc. Learn enough to enable you to get on the job training

- M.Sc. Meaningless, just a stamina test to check if you can focus adequately
on a narrow field.

- Ph.D. A sort of a license to do research.

A 'degree' is just a 'key' to your first job. From there onwards its YOU, your capabilities and most important your character. In many instances a Ph.D. will be viewed by prospective Employers as a disadvantage calling you (theoretical) rather than (practical). The greatest benefit of a PhD to me was it developed my analytical and research skills, which I could apply in different settings (i.e. not just Engineering). Its downside being too analytical screwed up quite a few personal relationships :)
It's nice to see a productivity article that admits that most of it is person-specific. Everytime Tim Ferris, David Allen, et al announce to the world what they think precludes success, everyone jumps on the bandwagon and alters the minutia of their lives. The best strategy is to take all advice with a pound of salt, experiment, and develop a system of your own.
Well stated. You loose momentum in becoming a better programmer by getting bogged down in trivia of no real consequence.
Surely there are anxious people that have won the lottery?
Which Technology is Better: GSM or CDMA?
Do you work at Twitter? I wasn't aware that anyone was using Kestrel outside of Twitter - Zing!
I agree that you shouldn't punish users that don't have a choice, but it's not always practical or possible to just send them to a stripped down version.

For read-only sites, fine. But IE6 could cause some serious problems for many web apps that haven't properly been tested for them.
CristoVideos - SHARING Your VIDEOS - COMPARTE VIDEOS
There have been a few runs at this problem. I've wondered for ages why it didn't pick up steam because surely you could get some great performance benefits from it. Any ideas?

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_processor
It's not just you. I think Technorati sort of lost their way a while ago.
A link for those who don't know what it is (I didn't). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Immortality
The one that includes Intel, AMD, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, Google, oh and the NSA.

Taiwan, China, and Japan have great centers of manufacturing and engineering but to say any single one has more "leadership" than the US is preposterous.
Note to the blog's owner: I do not like getting a popup thrown in my face telling me I'm "required" to login via Facebook.
Also, Transmeta used to have a processor with configurable instructions so you could get it to mimic a given machine. Why, why why did they not make a JVM instead of trying to compete with Intel on their home ground?
HN: Strange Loops vs Dualism [of the mind]
I have never had trouble with this before. I am in the middle of writing a book that is ~kind of~ about AI, and I have found myself at a small block. I guess I just need a refresher, but I'm not quite ready to dive back into GEB or I Am a Strange Loop.

I know Douglas doesn't like dualism too much. Shoot, I'm probably going to feel really silly in a couple of minutes....
Paragon Partition Manager Professional 9.5 32-bit/64-bit Free until 10-18-2009
I thought you guys might appreciate this.
Azul systems (http://www.azulsystems.com/) has a special-purpose Java processor, and they do indeed get some impressive speed benefits from it. For example, having single-instruction write barriers in hardware allows them to have nearly-pauseless garbage collection on gigantic heaps.
I use LLBLGen, I had to spend almost no time learning it, and nothing ever goes wrong, basically. My only complaint would be the syntax is a bit verbose, but I don't really know if there's any way around that in a statically typed language. But its nice to be able to put 0 thought or work into persistence code and have everything just magically work.
please stop saying this