skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are situations where the order of evaluation is not guaranteed. The big one that I've seen is evaluation of expressions as arguments in a function call, but there are others. It is easy to create floating point expressions where because of rounding, the results will differ depending on the order of evaluation. I'm not aware of situations where the order of operation differs from one execution to the next. However, I could see a compiler generating different code for the same expression when it appears in more than one place in the source code because of optimization.
"Simpler" depends if you count the troubleshooting time. To rip off an old anecdote:

Change one line of code: $3.00
Find which line of code to change: $3,436.88
Yeah, I'm positive there are better examples...the 'fable' I described is just a recurring theme for us, only because we're often called when things have run off the rails.

Presumably, if we thought more about why we're doing something and whether it's really advancing our position, we might not have to do five whys (or other flavours of RCA) as much.
Well I heard him say, somewhere I can't remember, they got an unlimited bandwidth deal from their hosting provider, which was subsequently removed after YouTube left them. Also they were only 18 months old at the time of acquisition.
What good did she do?
Wilson was the worst president of the 20th century. If it hadn't been for his getting the US involved in the First World War, it is unlikely there would have been a Second.
ExternalInterface hell (Flash-JS bridge)
"Making it a lot more difficult to control security", in this sense, is a good thing. The only way to secure a client-server system is for the server to never trust the client.
> If I were to leave the door of my house open, and came home to find a nut-case in my front room, wouldn't that make me the fool?

It would. It would also make the nut-case a criminal.
I don't think these two issues are contrarian. If there was a way to gauge demand and supply in real time the prices could be improved.

It can be similar to buying an airline ticket - if you buy well in advance or very late you can get cheaper tickets than if you buy a few weeks before the flight.

Not sure why they only do 3 shows, the Met Opera in NYC does a performance over a longer time period but allows multiple operas to occur over that time period. Maybe that's a better solution.
I personally feel that killing is almost never warranted. Gandhi did not kill anyone and Desmond Tutu never advocated for violence.

The problem with violence is that everyone feels that their cause justifies it.
Yahoo isn't dead yet? Don't forget their podcast.com Mark Cuban bs and saying $37 a share was too low for a microsoft aquisition.
NY Times Measures How Reaction Time is Affected by Texting While Driving
Boston Phoenix parent company sues Facebook over patent
Oracle cedes to user gripes about support portal
My kids like 'Abduction: World Attack' (or as they call it 'bouncy cow')
I play FloodFill, Labyrinth Lite, TiltMazes, Orbs Knockoff Lite, TopSETGame, Zilch Free.

I used to play Word Wrench a lot and it was a big competition between my wife and I for high scores. Then one evening, I sat for an hour with a python script cheating the high score up to about 10 times our previous best.
Got tired of it soon after.

EDIT. I told her right away. I just wanted to see the look on her face when she saw the new high score.
Ask HN: Rails App takes 800ms to respond on a VPS. Will dedicated server help?
I get very little traffic, this is purely a Rails performance problem. I am using New Relic and it's reporting the problem in ActionView. I know it's not a query issue because my queries are all properly indexed and no table has more than a couple hundred rows.

Even if I use some fragment caching, I'm still getting about 300-400ms delay. New Relic is reporting that ActionView is taking the most time. I also render a partial (which renders its own sub partial with AJAX forms) for each object displayed on the page (20 objects per page).

I'm using Passenger and Ruby 1.8.7 EE (just came out within past 2 weeks).

I have also tried booting up a new VPS instance to verify it wasn't the box I was on.

Is it worth trying a dedicated machine or will I see very little performance difference?
That's an interesting line if discussion, actually. What are results anyway? What is activity and what is productive activity?

Activity is a given even in the case of the body being paralyzed the mind is still active. So how do you define what meaningful or productive activity is? Results are also just another step in the activity chain, as a result will lead to yet another set of activities &c...

Firstly, death is characterized by in-activity; so you can't say that checking your friend's status on Facebook is in-active; managers would just call it irrelevant result producing activity (unless you were collaborating through FB or something).

Results are a subjective value based judgement - to the manager, writing a PDF library was a waste of time and didn't produce any usable results. To the programmer (most likely) it produced knowledge, a useful framework for honing skills, and a refinement in the ability to discern between what sounds like fun to work on and what feels like a waste of time.

Since results are based on a subjective value judgement, I could say that the author of the article engaged in yak-shaving when he wrote that article: how many articles are out there that could be linked to or paraphrased that address the same fundamental topic of efficiency and not reinventing the wheel?

However, from the author's point of view, the article was a solid result from the activity of writing and thinking; he gets to rehash a common topic in the context of his own software, thereby capturing the programming audience and feeding indirect and subtle marketing of his software as a byproduct of the article itself.

I think it is a useless personal exercise to attempt at determining whether I am yak-shaving or producing since all that really matters is that:

a) the world doesn't need anything (from humans)

b) the point of life is to enjoy whatever activity it is you are engaged in and,

c) to stop yak-shaving by writing this comment :)
I don't think they are saying that a blog is not news, I think the issue is that (in their opinion) a consumer can reasonably expect that a newspaper or magazine will receive samples from the manufacturer to review, but a consumer would not expect this from a blog.

From section 255.5 of the guidelines linked in the article:

"When there exists a connection between the endorser and the seller of the advertised product that
might materially affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement (i.e., the connection is not
reasonably expected by the audience), such connection must be fully disclosed."

For example, if I read a positive review of a Mac notebook on nytimes.com, I am going to assume they get free products from Apple to review and I won't be surprised if the criticism is less than vicious, even if the product is awful.

On the other hand if I read this pg essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html, I believe that is his actual opinion based on using a computer that he purchased and liked. If it were disclosed that he was receiving anything of value from Apple, I would read the essay differently.
The results after you complete the game are very interesting indeed. I didn't realize how much texting really effected response time and seeing my own personal results in a graph was very enlightening.
Do you often run out of special Keys when defining your keybindings?
"Wilson secured passage of the Federal Reserve system in late 1913."

... that bastard!
The Swedish IRS aren't making any claim. They just can't find any proof that the TPB has anything to do with the accused. And without proof, they don't.

What? That makes no sense what so ever. How does TPB's hypothetical revenue increase the chance that the accused own TPB?
How Zappos Ruined HR ...
This is an example of brilliant marketing on the part of DisplayLink. ~$80 cost to the company and great press to show for it.
There are some issues with the legality of it. Gojomo (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870926) summarized it better than I will, most likely. Although I'm for the process itself, the legal side seems a tad shady to me. I realize it would be a logistical nightmare to attempt to get permission from all authors, but the opt-out clause with such a short time frame didn't seem entirely fair. I'm glad that they gave an extension to it, and that the repercussions of the settlement are being looked at harder. Once again, I'm definitely for such a project, and I'm not a google-fearer, but something of this magnitude deserves some careful examination.
I got it in (yay!) but I was just thinking -- how do they verify that you've been accepted when you show up?
I love the videos from Startup School 2008. I wasn't aware of the application deadline, but I'll make sure to apply early for next year. Do most of you who are going book a round trip flight?
There's a sickening amount of Obama-love on this thread.
there have been recent developments over an alternative, and http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew seems to be a very nice one.

it's still growing, but seems to be a viable alternative to macports
ahahaha, I'm sure she was happy you ruined her fun as well. Good stuff, I'll check out those games, my 5 year old isn't terribly interested in tic tac toe anymore.
IPhone app store is a squatter's delight
Just waved you, I'm jfno67. Happy to help you test the service.
A faster server
Shouldn't that be part of the OS API? Why call me with 1,000 arguments, when I could call an API with the wildcard and get the 1,000 files back? My poor argv can't handle it the other way.
VideoPress: Automattic's HD video sharing service
Holding down space didn't fire continuously, but instead scrolled me down the page.

Back button didn't work; had to click on a bookmark to leave.

Then it prompted me for a score, preventing me from leaving until I either hit escape or typed something in.
Hilarious! This is worthy of a movie. Or a soap opera at the minimum.
Photoshop (at least CS3, anyway) won't even install on a computer with a resolution less than 1024x768. Found that out when I tried to put it on my eee.
Overwhelming a buyer with choice as a negotiating tactic
This seems to be to be a post light on content with a link to the author's product.

In summary, "Be aware of what you're working on, don't shave yaks, and here is a link to buy our stuff!"
Good thing you're pointing that out, because I think that's a huge selling point.

I thought having two external monitors for a MBP was either not possible or pretty expensive. This dongle seems to say it's neither.
You couldn't just turn it off for the duration of the date?
Once upon a time: http://mattmaroon.com/2008/09/25/introducing-nonhackernewsco...
Why bother with another whole website? Why not just have a few categories?
So what? To any developer concerned that you'll be ostracized by a potential employer because you don't have an interest in programming outside of work, let me give you a piece of advice. Employers who think they can define your work ethic on the job based upon what you do as a hobby outside of work, are some of the worst people to work for in this industry. If you want to let your hobby be your work, then more power to you, but you are in the vast minority. To everyone else, take heart in knowing that just because a few managers feel this way, it doesn't make it some industry standard we must all follow like sheep. Programmers -- go home at night, and be home. Enjoy your family, your friends, other hobbies, recreational pursuits, the environment... do what you enjoy in life. More than likely you'll be the group of developers that actually brings new, fresh insights to the table, because you're not living in a box coding 24/7, but you're living in the real world.
I don't have an account. But I understand that there are public waves that you can experiment with.
Google Voice in Trouble Over Blocked Rural Calls
they are focusing on their core-competencies. yahoo can't be the best at everything, so they are going to sell the things that are distracting them from the goods
Spotify Co-Founder "Overnight success takes a long time."
Color Plays Musical Chairs In The Brain
Because categories helped destroy Reddit?
Advanced JavaScript Techniques
I agree. This is what the "flag" button is here for. It should work fine as long as nobody gets offended when their stories get flagged --- and why should they?
Separation of powers in the US was designed by the same people who did not even want a party system. So taken as a whole, the system can be seen to have failed almost instantly.

> So in practice it may seem like an oligarchy

If we look at the actual functioning of government (by which I don't mean just the elected representatives), most officials and bureaucrats are not significantly affected by any one election. There is a de facto permanent government, and there are clear patterns in the selection and activity of these officials.

> freedom of speech and democracy

The problem is that freedom/individualism is at odds with democracy. Most Western democracies do not have freedom of speech, again for democratic reasons. The US is an exception here, probably because of the prominent placement and unambiguous language of the First Amendment and the acceptance of freedom of speech as an American tradition.

> The education system may be going the wrong way, but why is it because of democracy?

Because the education system is run and managed by the permanent govt. mentioned above. They admit to wanting increased schooling and increased control. (Universal govt. schooling was a democratic idea in the first place.) Notice they have also come up with "scientific" justifications for this.

> China on the other hand, has a governing style based on oligarchical manipulation of the population.

So does the US. You can verify this by, for example, looking at the typical state-mandated school curriculum.

> So in essence the Democratic method does not force the bad education system, while the Chinese method fundamentally will oppose freedom of education as it will eventually, if not already, conflict with the interests of the oligarchy.

Your description of China's method applies to the US as well. The democratic method does indeed force the bad education system; as I mentioned earlier, it is a democratic (small d) idea to have the government attempt to school everybody.

China...has a style of government that will definitely not allow the freedom of education you and I both love.

I agree, but again, this applies to the US as well.
From people who went last year: do you think the information and experience justifies flying out from the east coast?
Every time you simplify something, you get rid of something.

This might explain some of Microsoft's APIs too.
My impression is that the site is like social bookmarking for real world items.
Cynical thought:

Is it really important to shutter these services to "focus on their core competencies" or is it really important to give Wall Street the appearance of doing something, anything?

IOW, is Geocities really consuming management attention? is it losing buckets of money? Is it diluting Yahoo! brand?

Or is this just a way of showing the world that management is "getting serious" and "making changes?"
It agree with a), but I would expect 'copyright infringement' covers the situation in most countries with IP laws.
As to b), isn't that mainly applicable to common law systems like the US, UK and its ex-colonies? Most of the rest of the world uses the civil law system which gives much less power to precedents.
I'm pretty sure I wasn't trying to pitch anything. I just thought I'd share a (sadly) typical story, one of which happened to prompt me to write the light-on-content post to begin with.
Two immediately jump to mind. One that had a massively bad impact to the company, another that might have..

First, using perl a (later-fired) co-worker added a hardcoded check like the following:

if ($client_id = "specific_id") { #email reports }

Needless to say, we emailed reports for all of our clients to a specific client, didn't go over too well considering that many of them were competitors.. It was particularly bad because he had previously been talked to about flipping the constants to avoid the = vs == bug.

Second, possibly abused but not known for sure, was found a few years after initially being put out. Our webapp created a session ID for each user, MD5 hash.

Except it started like:
StringBuffer md5HashedBuffer = new StringBuffer(userId);

Which, because the userId was an int, simply creates a string buffer of size userId, not a string buffer initially populated with userId.

The rest of the hash was added afterwards, then the one-time created, with the result that everybody's session id was the same. Changing your user id in the GET or POST would allow you to be logged in as a different user.
2008 Videos - http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08
Oh, it has. But Einstein has not.
Experience: yes. I met a ton of awesome people

Information: In terms of the presentation contents, not as much. The actual presentations were all put online. I felt like I got a lot out of talking to the people, though.

(I'm from NYC, so I flew from the east coast, and am again this year)
I guess I just felt that way after reading the anecdote of developers writing their own PDF parser, and then giving up and purchasing yours. Though I'm sure it is evidence directly from your experience, it just feels a little salesman-ish to me :)

I think the article could be stronger with a few more thoughtful paragraphs on your thoughts, and maybe removing the link (though keeping the name) to your product?
I can't resist. I'm a freetard and here is my proposal:

* Artists(haha, really? is Spears and "artist"?) perform live to earn income

I know... it's earth shattering.

If people don't think it's worth the trouble of recording, then they shouldn't do it. See how many people come to your live performance without the free advertising that recordings provide.

Oh, maybe they won't make hundreds of millions of dollars. Should I give up my rights so "recording artists" can be filthy rich? I think not. And also, I don't give two shits about all the administrative ppl in the recording industry. They can all live in the streets for all I care. The current system is worse then welfare.
Nerd Values
I wasn't able to understand really quickly what KartMe is offering. That's my biggest hurdle to either using it or telling people.

What would get me to use it would be something that makes it easier, faster, or cooler than tweeting, blogging, or however else I might let people know about this stuff. (Not that I actually do any of those things while working 12h days at a startup.)

Also: name issues. When I see "Kart" i'm thinking "shopping cart" or "mariokart" -- what's the relationship between that and sharing gadgets or recipes? For me at least, you've got a gap right there. The "K" for "C" substitution also gives me "KMart" associations, which probably isn't want you're going for.

Good luck! Don't give up.
"Update | 12:00 p.m. Changed language to clarify that some figures referred to billions of views, not billions of people."
It was only a matter of time. The same thing happened on Verizon's 'Get It Now' store.
Charging people in courts far away... the defendants not even knowing about it (or even two courts with hearings at the same time!)

Isn't that what the Scientology church do?
Agreed. What problem do I have that this is trying to solve? I poked around a little and did a couple searches, and I still don't know what it's trying to help me with.
I think you wouldn't find many "coders" that give a shit if their code is "pirated". For most of them, it's a day job.
> IOW, is Geocities really consuming management attention? is it losing buckets of money? Is it diluting Yahoo! brand?

Maybe it just has some good engineers tied up?
Poll: Which programming languages have you mastered, and how many ?
According to http://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net/ there are 1304 different programming languages and variations!

I'm not going to try to find out how many options the poll system allows you to place.

DSLs have been removed, as well as duplicates.

Microcode, VHDL and Verilog are strictly on the boundary between hardware and software, but I still feel they are 'programming'.
- microcode
- machine language
- assembler 8 bits
- assembler 16 bits
- assembler 32 bits
- actionscript
- Ada
- ADL
- Algol
- APL
- Arc
- ASP
- AWK
- BASIC
- BCPL
- C
- C#
- C++
- Clipper
- Clojure
- COBOL
- COCOA
- COMAL
- DBASE (and foxpro)
- Delphi
- (D)HTML
- Dylan
- Eiffel
- Erlang
- Forth
- Fortran
- Haskell
- Java
- JavaScript
- JCL
- JSP
- LISP
- LOGO
- M4
- ML/I
- Modula
- Oberon
- Objective C
- Occam
- Pascal
- Perl
- PHP
- PL/I
- PostScript
- Prolog
- Python
- R
- Ratfor
- RPG
- Ruby
- Scala
- Scheme
- Shell Scripting (bash, cs, sh)
- Simula
- Snobol
- Tcl
- VHDL
- Verilog
Powermat - What the Bleep? -  One of the sweariest commercial ever
Indeed, any bug reports, ways to make it better, and best of all: patches welcome! (I'm the guy who wrote it)
They're hiring rails developers in the Boston Area.

http://twitter.com/chrishomer/status/4684300394
Until I upgraded to Snow Leopard, I was using fink with the unstable binary packages: http://finkers.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/fink-and-binary-dist...

I could use apt and dpkg, it did't build the world whenever I wanted a package (cough Macports), and since it just used binaries, installs were super-fast.

Last I checked, fink wasn't all that usable with Snow Leopard, but it's by far the easiest package management method for Leopard.
For a different definition of worst:

I started a job recently at an ecommerce company. There was a long-standing bug with the cart display in the upper right of the page always saying that the cart was empty. People would report it all the time, and the quite smart lead programmer said it was something really complicated that he hadn't had time to investigate.

But eventually, after I sort of knew my way around the code, and when I finished up all the tasks on my to-do list, he handed me that as a why-not-investigate sort of thing. He didn't really have any idea, just that the previous long-gone coder had said it was complicated and in the depths of the way the front end code interacted with the order system.

So, I reproduce it, and look at the template code. These two lines, right next to each other:

[% cart_summ = ourdb.cart_summary %]
[% IF cart_cumm.qty > 0 %]

Note that the two variables don't match. And this was broken on the site for _FOUR YEARS_. And nobody looked because someone said he had and it was hard, and nobody had time for a hard problem.

facepalm
There is no magic, there is only awesome (Part 3)
I don't have an account yet but if you can invite me I can help you to test this technology: roman.mandeleil [at] gmail
Most of the time I confess that I don't upvote the topics I comment on. I just forget to do it, mea maxima culpa.

Maybe the ranking algorithm could be changed so commenting on a topic is counted as an up-vote. That would have the bonus benefit of riding us of the "this doesn't belong in HN" complaint comments.

(Disclosure: I didn't see the Obama discussion, wouldn't have opened it had I seen it.)
I've found that keeping an eye on iPhone UI design can help out with UI design in other areas if you find yourself in a space-constrained situation wanting more out of your controls or existing UI.
While nobody who's spent more than a couple weeks in jQ is going to learn anything from this, I am at least thrilled to see that this isn't an article about how to create animated dialog boxes and image carousels.
No two "similar" software tools are really similar, it is that one of them better suits your solution and your approach to it.

I recommend you fork your current project and use each in a different fork and see how you like them.

Whoever answers you here will probably tell you how one or the other fit their project better.