skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Was converting an avionics subsystem from Ada to C. It was a client application that had to talk to an Ada server, sending and receiving rather huge chunks of data, large, deeply nested, intricate structure types. The C structure type had to match the Ada type exactly, or else it wouldn't work.

I got it working fine on our desktop simulation, but running on the actual hardware it was consistently off. After extensive testing, I realized that it was a bug in the compiler for the target hardware, such that a very particular type of structure (something like, {int, char, float}) was being packed incorrectly, resulting in a 2-byte pad that shouldn't be there. If I reordered the structure elements, it was fine, but that particular grouping and order refused to work correctly.

It was GCC, so we could fix the compiler ourselves, right? Not really, as, for avionics systems the compiler has to be thoroughly qualified for avionics use, and changes equal requalification. I "fixed" it by storing the float as an array of characters, converting it to and from a real float type as we needed to use the data value.

Trivial, perhaps, but I was very excited to resolve the problem, after spending days barking up wrong trees. One usually expects that the problem is not in the compiler... :-)
> So, basically you think the Nobel Peace Prize gives Obama the right to achieve his entire political agenda without any form of opposition? Right....

No, but it gives him a certain authority. When the right is going batshit insane like it is now, I'd like anything to help counter that we can get.

> Oh, I understand now. Thanks for sharing.

If you don't think the Republican Party needs to dissolve and make way for a newer concept of conservatism, you haven't been paying attention to the last decade.
Yes, the GNU FDL was what Wikipedia was (and mostly is) licenced under.

They've shifted to a Creative Commons licence that achieves much the same thing because the GNU FDL has some awkward requirements from it's history as a software documentation licence from the pre-web era.
I'm pretty sure the dalai lama said:

For many reasons, I have decided that I will not be the head of, or play any role in the government when Tibet becomes independent. The future head of the Tibetan Government must be someone popularly elected by the people. There are many advantages to such a step and it will enable us to become a true and complete democracy. I hope that these moves will allow the people of Tibet to have a clear say in determining the future of their country.
A while back, I developed a program to generate invoices for about a dozen busy warehouses. During testing, for convenience sake, I hard-coded in my local printer.

Unfortunately, I forgot to return the printer name to a variable when promoting into production. Hilarity ensued.
Roosevelt won in 1906, while in office.
My thought exactly. He should reject it.

The two people who ever declined to accept the award where both socialist revolutionaries; Sartre and Le Duc Tho. He is not prepared to be in their league.
Great demo, It even loads on my Android, I just can't start it without a keyboard. Wonder how well it would run.
Leaner Times at Harvard: No Cookies
Google "Earth Liberation Front"; the "eco terrorists" are very high on the fed's shit-list.
The worst bug I encountered was due to IBM MVS (or COBOL--I was never sure which was at fault) losing addressability of part of a variable length record. Now you see it, now you don't. The solution at our shop was to move the whole record to itself before attempting to look into the record. I was a newbie. If the old guard hadn't told me that workaround, I NEVER would have thought of it. This problem eventually went away, but 25 years later we still occasionally ask each other "did you try moving it to itself" when dealing with new problems. We chuckle, while today's newbies shake their heads at our Old Fart humor.

The worst one I ever caused was when Visa started carrying two amount fields in their credit card records. One was the amount in original currency, the other was converted to the receiving system's local currency. I used the original amount. Our hand-made test data used the same currency for both amounts, so no problem in test. Imagine my surprise when we went live and our system started posting original currency amounts to cardholder accounts, which at the time only supported US dollars. Luckily, we caught it early and senior management and cardholders were all good sports about it. I think those credit card statements with massive amounts became collector's items.
> No, but it gives him a certain authority. When the right is going batshit insane like it is now, I'd like anything to help counter that we can get.

Unfortunately, it only grants the premonition of authority, to be used as a tool by his supporters to push his agenda. Rightly so, but don't confuse this anything more than a political tool.

> If you don't think the Republican Party needs to dissolve and make way for a newer concept of conservatism, you haven't been paying attention to the last decade.

Are you the person behind those bumper stickers? The ones that say, "If you aren't completely appalled, yada yada"? Please don't assume that your level of disagreement with a particular party must be shared by everyone else.
I worked on a taxi booking and dispatch system, written in c, and running on dos with custom networking via RS232. This system was installed at around 300 locations around the UK, and on one fateful day, every installation crashed.

It came down to me to find and fix the problem, and it was subtle. The clue lay in the fact that all of the sites that crashed did so within about a minute of one another.

Turns out that some of the old, old sections of the software had been written by the MD, who, despite referring to himself as 'the emperor of c', was in fact an atrocious programmer.

The actual trigger was the comms system looking at a byte that determined as to whether a message had been received. This byte was set to the character 'A' if a message was received. It just so happened that the first byte of the current value of the number of seconds since 1970 evaluated to 'A', and had been written into that memory location a negative index into an array that hadn't been initialised.

This negative index into an array that shouldn't have been empty caused a section of memory to be overwritten that made the comms system think that it had received a packet. This snowballed quickly, and took down the system within about five seconds of boot.

Took the best part of two days to track down, and, of course, it was everyone else's fault but the emperors.
VMWare Fusion, the Best Way to stall your mac and turn your 3000 dollar computer into the speed equivalent of a x486.
Exactly. I don't care what went into making my hot dog. I only care that it tastes good!!
Is there MS Windows build of 2.8 GIMP floating somewhere? I only found 2.7 which apparently doesn't have single windows goodness.
Yeah, I was super duper excited when I saw that email this morning. It would be pretty cruel if I couldn't go due to an error.
Pet peeve of mine: Teresa was not necessarily the greatest person to walk the earth. From her Wikipedia entry ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Teresa ):

She has been praised by many individuals, governments and organizations; however, she has also faced a diverse range of criticism. These include objections by various individuals and groups, including Christopher Hitchens, Michael Parenti, Aroup Chatterjee, Vishva Hindu Parishad, against the proselytizing focus of her work including a strong stance against abortion, a belief in the spiritual goodness of poverty and alleged baptisms of the dying. Medical journals also criticised the standard of medical care in her hospices and concerns were raised about the opaque nature in which donated money was spent.
I once worked an issue with a crashing Exchange server.

It had to do with a connection being reset in the space of time between the server checking if the connection was good, and actually using it.

The client could reproduce it at will, and after a little bit of code at home, I could, too. Back at the office, no repro.

It took a lot of back and forth (to put it mildly), but the problem at work was that the network was too slow - the server got the reset with plenty of time to "notice" it, and the crash didn't occur.

Once we set up the repro on its own switch at work, everything failed in the expected manner.
One possible flaw/getout is that "Conferences. Open source. Blogging. Twitter." are happening more and more during work time.

As is this comment for me.
I use a display link adapter on my macbook pro to drive a third screen. Works just great (there was a bad patch with driver installs in one of the later leopard versions but no problems with Snow Leopard).

You can even play video on it
What, voted down!? This actually happened, you fool!

http://imgur.com/RqyXB
Just a few comments (this whole thread is contrary to YCNews policies).

> Nelson Mandela . . . yeah . . . ditto. Oh, did I mention 27 years in a notorious prison for 'enemies of the state'.

Nelson Mandela was convicted of trying to overthrow the state by armed means and sabotage. It was not due to non-violent protests and even if the cause was right, armed insurrection is never right. And if he succeeded in overthrowing the state it would have been a mess at that time.

Mandela was the head of Umkhonto we Sizwe (the armed wing of the ANC). While he does not bear personal responsibility (since he was in prison) Umkhonto we Sizwe did quite a few despicable things during the struggle.

Also, Robben Island (where Mandela spent the majority of his time) isn’t that notorious. Many prisoners of the struggle era were kept there and many of them obtained degrees while in prison (from UNISA). I would much rather be incarcerated in Robben Island than today’s Pollsmoor prison.

Whatever the argument, he still deserved a prize (as did FW de Klerk) for the negotiated settlement that brought about the first multi-racial elections.
Awful, why didn't they do that 10 years earlier? I thought I just didn't understand the power of having dozens of tiny windows. Now I feel scammed.
I agree with the general sentiments that the award is probably premature but I think the general nature of the award lends itself to situations such as these.

An award has to be given out every year and the world does not produce ghandis at that rate so the people who have made profound achievements will have to share the award with those who've done less.

This does diminish the achievements of the greats in a sense but that's just how the system works and the fact that we can't really point to anyone else who obviously deserved the award more than Obama suggests that he may have been the best choice after all.
This has happened to me in the past, pg has had to fix it for me.
The store locator function on a national pizza chain's web site would completely hang their web server whenever an international search was done. Many, many hours and days of testing and debugging led us to conclude, and build a proof that it was a reproducible bug within IBM's Domino platform, only on AIX boxes, only when:
1) A script using LotusScript, their proprietary language was kicked off, and...
2) A Java agent was then kicked off before the original script completed.

At the time, Java was a new feature within that platform, so there weren't many apps that mized both languages.

After getting to this point, IBM joined in the fix effort, and we had daily conference calls, on which we always had IBM execs lurking because their 6.0 release of the platform was imminent, and this bug had the potential to wreak major havoc if not fixed before launch.

So I cannot personally claim to have done the actual bugfix - the IBM programmer did that. But it was a great learning experience to work together with IBM to find and fix it.
That's a clever idea for another reason, too: Photoshop will not allow certain operations on pictures of money, highlighting a disadvantage of closed-source software.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Bank_Counterfeit_Deterr...
This is the same reason I boycott humans in general, at least ones that are the offspring of other humans.
Ask HN: Thoughts and a suggestion concerning off-topic items.
An observation in passing.

Discussions like the one about Barach Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize are valuable, especially when held between intelligent, thinking and rational parties such as are found on Hacker News.

However, I believe it does not belong here. It does not seem to me that it follows the guidelines.

But there's a problem. I strongly believe that the discussion does not belong here, and yet I can provide no alternative fora. Other places more suited to this topic are overrun with the shrieking, thoughtless, knee-jerk reactionaries that I come here to avoid.

I propose a sister site to HN, one where to participate it is required that you have karma earned via the original HN. In that way there is a barrier to entry so that only those with some standing in "the community" (whatever that may be) can join the discussion.

Suggestions, thoughts and ideas welcome.

As a side-note, such "off-topic" discussions often seem to have the number of comments seriously exceed the votes on the submission. Currently http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870921 has 140 comments, but only 67 points. People don't want to up-mod the submission, but they do want to have their say.

I wonder if this is a good predictor. The irony would be if this suggestion garners significantly more comments than votes. It probably will.

ADDED IN EDIT FOR CLARIFICATION:

I'm not proposing any more rules or policies, just that there's somewhere else to go with things like this that are clearly of interest, but not obviously on-topic. There are things I'd like to discuss with HN participants, but don't do so because they're against the guidelines.

Better to have somewhere else to go than to have them summarily killed.
Nobody's perfect, and of people well-known in the West, she's at the top of the list. Those flaws certainly don't outweigh the good, and the flaws certainly aren't on the level of child molestation. So absent an alternative that avoids having to take ten minutes to explain who I'm talking about, I'll continue to use that ol' nun.
From experience, any features requested to facilitate or hamper existing behaviors usually fail and get reverted or go unimplemented. Some examples from the past are marking high-karma users and removing visible karma.

I'd say, just let HN run its course and it'll figure itself out. The more policy and rules you try to add the more soul you take away from it.
Don't think of things in terms of our current timeframe. What he has done in the last 8 months don't count toward this. The nominations for the prize were due roughly two weeks after Pres. Obama assumed office.

At that point in time, there was virtually nothing that he could claim to have accomplished, no matter how trivial.
Veganism gets flagged, but "juicy men" does not?
True, however wget seems like a good option. Try

http://www.nowindows.net/wp/?p=94
Cookies at faculty meetings and hot breakfast cut.

But never fear, the essential administrative staff have escaped unscathed.
>> "isn't this a bit too early"
I tend to agree. I really hope (for everyone's sake) that this does not lead to complacency.
Look at the mother of all iteration constructs, the Common Lisp LOOP macro for fancy it could really get. Scroll down here and look at the dense code example in the middle of the screen:

http://gigamonkeys.com/book/loop-for-black-belts.html

for its specification:

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/m_loop...

An alternative, the ITERATE macro:

http://common-lisp.net/project/iterate/doc/index.html
I was a bit underwhelmed by my 'donut' update. More fit and finish than new features.

I really can't wait for Verizon's offerings because I need better network coverage than T-Mobile. My phone doesn't work at my parents house or my in-laws house. :-(
Greg Mankiw's satirical post on the win:
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/10/first-year-grad-stude...
Display Link seems to be a great solution for driving multiple monitors from laptops.

I'm slightly surprised that there's no device class for video output.
They gave it to Arafat, Kissinger and quite a few other warmongers, so it didn't have that much value to lose.

Although it's a tad bit early and it would have been nicer as a reward for peace-making achievements, he also embodies the world's achievements in the struggle against racism and governance of old white men.
This has been around awhile and was done in large part by none other than Dan Ingalls himself. :)
I'm just hoping the glitch is on the side of the site, rather than the email sent.

edit: it was the site. Cool!
Sorry, bug; should work now.
The fact that they gave it to Wilson proves that the whole thing has been a farce since it started.
Indeed, I don't know about JRuby. I know about Scheme. There is no fast Scheme that JIT-compiles, that I know of. All the fast Lisp compilers that I know compile ahead-of-time.

If you know why they did this, pray tell :) As a language implementor yourself, you probably have a good feel for the cost accounting.
Wow.... I was really hoping to see some independent analysis, not a press release.
How is your comment any less platitudinous than the agile manifesto?

You could call it the Pragmatic Manifesto:

* What software development needs, is what it has always needed: pragmatism!

* Where it is pragmatic, it is good!

* Where it is not-pragmatic (dogmatic), it is bad!

Making a stand for pragmatism, and against dogmatism is basically saying nothing because what you define as pragmatic can be called dogmatic by others and vice versa. It's politician speak, using a vague word with inherent positive connotations to describe your own actions, and one with negative connotations for anything you dislike.
You can add INQ to the list of companies producing Android Phones - they produce custom phones designed for social networking/IM and are very popular in Europe. They used to use their own custom OS but announced that they were moving to Android last month:
http://www.gsmarena.com/inq_to_also_use_android_os_soon_do_s...
He could have been a dead fish and still won the peace prize, he's done fuck all he's barely established office.
let its gifs spin forever in our minds.
Flex Vs Ajax Vs Silverlight?

I think he means Flex Vs JavaScript Vs Silverlight
I'd say so. I never ended up building an app but was planning on it and looked around the APIs enough to feel familiar. It's a very sensible development platform and is sufficiently Java-ish that you'll pick up good habits.
Perhaps, but the perception of learning HTML being a barrier to entry was much smaller back then. People were excited to be part of something new, and didn't really balk at having to learn something. Totally different mentality today.
Yep! Worked for me now.
I was just in Europe for the past few weeks and many people asked me about Obama. It seems that in Europe they are still in the honeymoon phase, whereas in the US it's moved on to the fighting through policy phase. None of the Obama supporters I know in the US still have that post election glow because the debates over health care and such are raging so hard. Europe isn't really touched by that so the honeymoon seems to be lasting longer.

I was very surprised that he got this award right now, but knowing how many of the Europeans seem to still feel, I was less surprised.
The nastiest was an interaction between two libraries. If you simultaneously imported xml.dom and matplotlib (both python libraries), and then called functions in one of the libraries (I think matplotlib), the program would segfault.

My incomplete set of unit tests didn't catch it because they were imported by seperate submodules of mine.

I only managed to find it by writing a unit test, going back in version control, searching for the first revision where the problem occurred, and going line by line through the changeset (luckily I commit early and often).
I'm willing to bet 100 euros that Brein will get away with it.
These days the terms are almost synonymous, sadly.
Playdar - P2P music streaming content resolver (from RJ of Last.fm)
Yes, Thanks!
Agreed. Not being able to skip that (and other) crap on DVDs is infuriating! It's really one of my pet peeves.
c) offer nourishing soup and sandwiches to your models

Priceless!

The great thing about their strategy is it reminds ralph lauren about the very real danger of the streisand effect.
Armed insurrection is never warranted? So the Polish resistance during WWII wasn't "right", was George Washington wrong for rebelling against Britain?

"The tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots." - Thomas Jefferson
"In Iran you would be hanged simply because you don't believe in Islam, or think women should have equal rights."

I challenge you to provide a single reference for any of the above alleged "hanging" offenses. (You will be held to your statements of fact regarding "believe" and "think".)
YouTube serves up a million page views every 90 seconds
Ok, I tried to upvote you once, it didn't stick on (a quick) reload but the arrow didn't go away. I tried to upvote and wait some 5, 10 seconds and it didn't stick and the arrow is gone!
I'm experimenting with changes to the code that decides which votes count.
Worked for me and flight is booked!
Please review KartMe
Ah that's a shame, I have pretty good coverage in Texas, but the speeds are a serious drawback. Do you know if Verizon has a "tether" restriction?

If you tether with your G1 and go over a 10gb transfer quota, they will reduce you to edge speed for the rest of the billing cycle.

I mainly stick with T-Mobile because my entire family uses it, so we all get to call each other for free, but I'm not against moving to a new carrier if I can get better speeds and be allowed to tether.

EDIT: I thought the donut release was pretty good overall, I saw huge performance gains and also the UI has been cleaned up a lot. Though not much else seems terribly different.
The Catholic Church doesn't control the actions of its priests and nuns. However, it does protect its priests and as an institution it devalues it. As Teresa was neither protected by the Church, nor acting under direct supervision of the church, it doesn't devalue her actions.

However the Nobel committee has complete oversight and control over where these prizes go, the prizes aren't capable of deciding where they go, so a devaluing of the committee devalues the prize.

If the Nobel committee brought out an award for mathematics everybody would think it's about damn time. However if they brought one out for creationist research, not a single scientist on the planet would ever want a Nobel Prize again.
I've had a lot of frustrating experiences, but the one that made me slap my face the hardest due to the shear simplicity of it was the time I was working on a windows service. I was opening a socket and listening, but for whatever reason I could not get the client to connect! After a half hour or so of playing around i finally minimized the million windows i had open to see Norton sitting there asking me to unblock the application face palm
I think it would more apt if both sides go to jail, neither is the answer to the future of artistic works. On one side a bunch of cartels that IMO should be investigated by the monopolies and mergers commission and on the other freetards that don't provide a realistic revenue model for artists.
Is there actually controversy here? I thought that the anti-piracy boys had more or less entrenched themselves as antagonists in the public mindset.
Well I think calling it the "MyTouch 3G with Google" is the best T-Mobile can do. I bet most of the people who are shopping for a phone don't even know what android is. They know there is iphone, blackberry, (maybe) palm, WinMo, and now there's this phone with Google. Android is not the brand - Google is the brand.

Also, TFA fails to mention that the HTC Hero launches on Sprint on Oct. 11.