skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
C was my first language as well, though this was a while back now. I found it was very valuable. It taught me many things and sparked my interest in computer programming. While my own experience with it was good, I hesitate when recommending it to beginners, especially now in the year of 2014, when machines are much faster and there are so many other exciting languages.

C, however, has a lot of traps and pitfalls that can be confusing or discouraging to a beginner. I think there are lot of people out there who gave up on programming because their first experience was in C. Weird operator precedence, automatic type conversions, the c preprocessor, differences between pointers and arrays (especially in regards to multidimensional arrays), the #include guard dance around header files, the way #include and header files works in general... There's just a lot of cruft and things about C that complicate the language beyond the inherent complexity of the machine itself. It can also be difficult to learn how to get the whole environment set up, learning about the process of compiling, linking, make, libraries, etc.

I don't think that C is the best first choice of a language for a beginner. Instead I would recommend a language that encourages algorithmic problem solving and computational thinking, something that is a further abstraction from the machine. Then after the student is comfortable with abstract problem solving, and "thinking like a programmer", you can introduce her to see what goes on "under the hood", so to speak, and delve into the lower levels. I would recommend C more as a good second language.
The police represent the government, and everything the government does is assumed to be systematic. So it's a human rights violation, unless you can prove that it really was the isolated behavior of a rogue police officer.
Thoughtbot Playbook
Where was the solidarity when the ex-Mozilla CEO was bullied into quitting? If you somehow believe that because of the CEO's political beliefs have anything to do with not being protected from bullying, you are part of the problem. We need to start having honest discussions about bullying online.

I find that even intelligent communities like HN changes the definition of bullying and harassment when it comes to political opposition.

Social media has given mobs power..and nothing good will come of it.
Won’t hget() easily run off the end of the array if it has a few collisions? The function doesn’t save off the original value of t and then does an unbounded number of (t += h) operations.

edit: someone else pointed this out already. How did this make it to the front page of HN?
I don't see the relevance to the point I'm making, which isn't a value judgment on Microsoft.

It's apprehension because Microsoft in the past decade has been full of sudden strategic shifts and abandoned platforms. I'm mildly concerned about HockeyApp for this reason.

For the most part's Microsofts wishy-washy strategy - especially when it comes to support of Apple's platforms - is fairly inconsequential. The sucky version of Office for OSX was, at the end of the day, a minimal pain.

HockeyApp on the other hand is a very deeply integrated part of my development stack. I can't weather the same amount of uncertainty and sudden movement as I can some of my other tools. This makes me mildly nervous about their future.
What's on the other end? What do you have planned?
If may add a 6th reason, the low-level nature of C code gives you a very realistic model of computation---you see how long operations take because you often have to do them manually.

High level languages like python hide this complexity from you (e.g. python dictionaries / arrays / string manipulations). They make life easier, but in a isolated-from-the-machine-in-plastic-wrap kind of way, whereas C makes me feel I'm touching the CPU.
Designroundupblog
A lot of people will find it hard believing how smaller code can be in assembly than in our supposedly higher level languages, e.g, look at this example of quicksort, http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Algorithm_Implementation/Sortin...
go down to the C example below and note that it's longer.
Yeah... it’s easy to write small code that doesn’t work.
Why Sony Keeps Getting Hacked
Eh, how about the pure white? that looks really clean on my phone, but too bright on my Mac.
I call BS. You can learn from C but in the beginning it's far more important to keep forward momentum. If you don't have something forcing you through the frustrating and boring parts (like school), you're probably going to lose interest pretty quickly.

Pick a sane and relatively painless language like python or ruby. Once you've become earnestly proficient in one of those AND some of their tool chains and frameworks then you can get froggy.
Yep! Robert Aumann is a very religious person. I find that particularly ironic given Aumann's Agreement Theorem.
I think rayiner just wanted to express that atheism and absolute moral values is a common combination of believes although they are quite incompatible.
Definitely agree with what you're saying here! Maybe I wouldn't say its for beginner programmers - many might immediately be scared by the idea of a bitwise operator or raw memory access - it should definitely be somewhere in the ladder for learning new languages.

Some people simply don't understand that C is actually everywhere around them. They don't understand that either the language they use is built in C, or the language THAT was built on was built in / on C, etc etc. Simply the importance of the language in history may just be a powerful point on its own. If someone knows quite a few languages and doesn't yet know C, I kind of don't understand why - they do not yet understand the importance of lower level operations, like the functioning of a garbage collector or why their pre-mature optimizations shouldn't even be attempted.

Great article, over all - I really liked it.
Social website (theFacebook) draws heavy traffic (2004)
see why couldn't the code be written this way by default! then they would've been understandable from the beginning!
So great.

Every DSA signature requires a random nonce/key k. If k is predictable, DSA falls apart. We demonstrate that here:

http://cryptopals.com/sets/6/challenges/43/

The same problem occurs in elliptic curve DSA, which is just the DSA construction implemented on the elliptic curve discrete log.

What's also true is that if part of the nonce is predictable (or leaked), DSA falls apart --- albeit over more than just a couple signatures. With tens of bits leaked, you might needs hundreds of thousands of signatures.

How would you ever leak part of a nonce over thousands of signatures? One easy way is to generate a nonce that appears cryptographically random, but doesn't fill the modulus. For instance: a 128 bit random number sure seems strong, but if it's filling a cryptographic parameter that's meant to be 256 bits long, fully 128 bits of that parameter are predictably zero.

Here, though, you have a predictable nonce bit leak that can occur purely by accident even given a reasonably sound implementation!
That's not a phase change (despite the solid to gas), that's a chemical reaction.

Fire is oxidation yes, but despite the name oxidation does not require oxygen, it just requires electron transfer, which happens here.
Why? So we can do away with the pretense?
Graphic Showing Script Code Before and After Obfuscation
I agree that adding to an idea or expanding on one is harder. The first thing I think of is a college class, when none of the students will explain an answer or add to discussion.
Fee hydrogen (atomic hydrogen) releases a tremendous amount of energy when it reacts to make molecular hydrogen (H2). Far far more than reacting with oxygen.

So the oxygen part is pretty irrelevant when analyzing this.
To me, human rights is the primary goal of a true democracy. Elections serve mainly as a controlling factor in shaping the institutions necessary to guarantee these rights. The article somewhat neglects that human rights have to be defended not only against the government, but also against individuals and groups of individuals. A right to property is not worth a lot if you have to stop your neighbor from taking your stuff by shooting him.

But there can only ever be a compromise between these rights. Institutions need taxes to work, but taxes mean taking money away from citizens, violating their rights. A justice system needs to be able to punish offenders. Industry must be regulated to avoid unnecessary deaths and suffering. These balance and compromises are more complicated than any moral high ground.
I'm not sure why iPAWiND is terrible. I'm not even sure what it does?!?! Is it an alternative AppStore???
Soft Skills: The Software Developer's Life Manual Is Live
It is virtually impossible get a new SSN number. Even if you can prove your identity is stolen and your SSN is being used frequently, you still can't get an SSN.

I'm a victim of identity theft, and it really sucks. It completely fucks up your credit, and the credit agencies really don't care about trying to correct it. It took me several years (admittedly a few extra years because I gave up until I bought a house) to get it corrected. And even now, the "identify verification" services that the 3 credit companies offer is fucking me because it contains old data from my identity thief, so I can't get some credit even though my credit is outstanding.

So, no, it is not as simple as cancelling your credit cards.
To the developers, a typo heads up. On clicking save, the pop-up says "Please sing in first...".
Also, why do you want to have only FB based login? Not everyone is comfortable in connecting everything with their social accounts. I personally appreciate to have a separate account for different services.
YouTube Testing Feature to Create GIFs Directly from Videos
Human beings are affected by conflicts of interest. Not weak minded people, not immature or stupid or unwise or careless people. People. All of them. It's how the heuristics in our evolved brains work.

I agree, if you have a view of people being rational actors, then Paul Graham seems like the kind of guy who would be able to rise above this kind of thing. We now know that this model of human behaviour is a fantasy. These types of biases affect your thoughts before they rise to conscious awareness.
This is true up to a point. But C is based on an abstract model of a machine, which doesn't really map closely to today's machines. For example, C's memory model basically assumes a contiguous array of bytes, but with modern systems there is a huge difference in speed between main memory and L1,L2,L3 cache. So in order to avoid costly cache misses you have to access your data in cache friendly ways, as all memory accesses are not equal as in C's model. Also consider things like vectorization (SSE, AVX, NEON, etc), memory fences, atomic operations, or threading which are not in C's machine model. Various intrinsics, standards (POSIX), and libraries exist to remedy this, but the fact remains that's C's abstract machine model is getting increasing distant from actual modern hardware.
Somebody finally explained to them that Parrot was actually a joke, and nobody was actually serious about Perl 6 either.
Has anyone installed the bpg encoder bpg-0.9.2-win32 on a windows 7 machine, and if so how did you do it?
"Other students mistrust the social network that The Facebook provides. D* S*, a first-year in the College, has not registered a profile."

Ten years later, still no profile. This guy is stubborn.
If you rewrote this exact logic in Python it would be longer, because then the code would actually be readable.

However, fortunately it's just two chars: {}
First, it's more the system, which cops are a part of, than just cops.

Second, it's not so much about me getting away with breaking the law. Seatbelt violation? Sure, I'll take it. But suspending my license because of a fix-it ticket (which was fixed immediately but not verified)? Forcing someone with a suspended license to somehow get to 4 different places? C'mon.

But here's the real issue IMO: what if I'm a lower-income person living paycheck to paycheck and don't have $800 available? (FYI the storage fees at the impound lot is $50/day). What if I'm a 1-car family? Is it ok if I lose my car or job all because of this?

Maybe my main complaint is that everything seems purposefully inefficient and backwards in order to extract more money and keep more people employed–regardless of the effect it has on people.

And, yeah, some laws should change. I thought HN of all places would understand some of that.
Thanks! The reality is that I probably don't realize how much I already know. I've been programming on and off for a couple years now so I was probably already hooked on coding in general before learning C.

C just opened my eyes to a lot of things. I kept having the feeling of 'how do I not already know this'. And it really clicked when I had to learn PHP and was like 'oh, so this is just a cleaner version of C'.

Anyways, thanks again!
Let's say you get a collision. Would you rather:

a) Find your correct key within the same cache-line. But, you have to check 4 more values to get there;

b) Find your correct key in the next try...But, you have to jump to another part of the array.

Once you've indexed into the array, you want to read forward from there. You don't want to jump around.

http://preshing.com/20130107/this-hash-table-is-faster-than-...
Artificial Intelligence Isn’t a Threat – Yet
Bill gates 1996 interview / charlie rose
An HDFS oriented one (with SQL style queries):

https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~sameerag/blinkdb_eurosys13.pdf

https://github.com/sameeragarwal/blinkdb
Instead of asking a question and then flippantly responding to a well-written answer, I recommend you do some quick googling.

http://www.lifelock.com/education/identity-theft-recovery/ef...

https://www.privacyrights.org/ar/id_theft.htm

Identity theft can have far-reaching consequences and calling it a "pain in the ass," even an "insane pain in the ass," is barely scratching the surface of the experience.

edit: grammar
It's slightly sad that even when one can thrust one's mind to the fringes of a human knowledge, our brain's flaws remain; by which I mean: the human consciousness seems highly inclined to accept one's culture's common behaviours, even if that means accepting fallacies and irrationalities.

Perhaps our consciousnesses being shaped by evolution has essentially betrayed us at scale, by letting us adopt/inherit nearly any behavior or belief, and on a societal level we ought to make up by not letting just any irrational bullshit that gets spread around persist.
No, you pretty much don't know what you're talking about.

When people's identities get stolen, they typically don't know for years, as was the case with me. So someone opens up a line of credit under your name, spends it all, and it goes into collection for years, and then when it comes time for you to apply for a house because you are expecting a child, you can't because all of a sudden you have terrible credit. Or, you get denied jobs because you don't know about it, and when your employer checks your credit score, they reject you based on the fact you have several tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid debt.
That a scientist says something mystical does not validate the mystical approach. Science is a process. Individual's sense of wonder is a precious thing but not science even if a scientist attempted to express it.

I.e. there was nothing extra sciency in Eintein's sneeze, a cobbler does not excrement shoes nor is Usain Bolt practicing sports when he sleeps.
At first I thought this was gonna be some kind of chrome extension you could highlight and drag a quote to and it would store them for you in a nice format. I want that.
Probably 10% of our queries are direct key lookups, the rest easy-to-read yet still non-trivial.
Free apps for android
Good points! I especially agree with the preprocessor argument. Kind of forgot how confusing that was at first. But like everything with C, it does make you think about what's really going on.

I like the title... Why C Should Be The Second Language You Learn.
US Health Dept. Files Patent for Improved Ebola Treatment
I have not done any research, but this does not match my experience in tech companies. Some of the best programmers I have worked with were left-handed and were definitely making more than the average at the company. There also seems to be fairly high percentage of left-handed programmers in general. However, I'm left-handed myself, so I might be noticing patterns, where there are none.
This is creating so much buzz..

I would like to say that just wait and watch. Time will tell whether it is or whether it is not
You can also do "brew install emacs". I think that is the preferred option for Spacemacs.
Thank you for answering and I apologize. But then this is astonishing!

Our right to privacy, even in our homes, and the 4th Amendment of the Constitution have just been written off and nobody here is interested?

My apologies, I simply cannot fathom this situation.
A Node.js relational database mapper without the ORM overhead
So check your "right privilege" at the door, please.
It's interesting that they bring up Colin Powell in this, particularly because the big 'flaw' with this type of advice is lies in something that Donald Rumsfeld is infamous for saying - his so called 'known knowns' (or conversely, unknown unknown) phrase.

You're ability to even judge that you have 40 to 70 percent of the information required isn't even a given. In particular, especially with something like medicine, where there is time pressure, bizarre individual circumstances, confounding issues, it can make it difficult to really compress your current state of knowledge into a single value representing percentage of 'known' information.

That said, hilariously if you look at the reproduced slide in the bottom, the blog post and the slide actually say different things.

Colin Powell says to act when you have between a 40 to 70 percent chance of being right given your current state of knowledge/information. The slide says acts when you have 40 to 70 percent of the necessary information.
$1.26 - $3.77 per thousand characters... wow.

I think it'd be cheaper to build your own acoustic modem and glue it to a handset.
Oh dear, you're right, but it's too late to edit. Please downvote to hide it.

My point though is that the fact cars would be that fragile at all, that simple mistakes could disable critical systems, is bizarre. The MP3 player system should be totally unable to affect other operations, full stop. The ignition system shouldn't be able to kill power to critical systems.

Airplane passengers shouldn't be able to access flight controls.
just think how amazing and readable it could be in 100 lines
It's not hard to fix, however - one extra modulus, as far as I can see.
please add "google" login account
If there is a solution it almost certainly is to work patiently with other countries

The problem here is that it assumes an "us" and "them" approach, which is clearly invalid. The article does a good job of pointing out the differences in interpretation of the right to free speech, even across "western" countries. Those difference apply to everything.

I was hoping the article would present an alternative way of reasoning societal goals. For example, the Chinese government often emphasises the value of stability and cohesion. I don't think these values (on their own) are necessarily better or worse than those articulated in the declaration of human rights.

Maybe it is possible to unify these under a single framework? For example, the "least harm" model is often used for evaluation of morality. Perhaps that makes sense here too?
[] has higher precedence than *, so without the parens you get "function returning array of two pointer to pointer to int" (which is illegal) instead of the desired "function returning pointer to pointer to array of two int".
Chinese college students told to take time off, start businesses
I know I'm probably going to only understand some tiny fraction of what I read
in this paper, but I'm sure going to have fun trying.

BTW, you might want to add "[pdf]" to the title. It seems the automated
pdf detection and title editing missed this submission for some reason,
so I reported it to hn@ycombinator.
It's a valid point. I think it assumes that there's a time component involved too. The company did seem fairly on it's game on the time, and not one to flaunt controversy. But most hacks never get made public either.
What kind of areas could Streem be used in?
It looks like it is using linear search. I'm surprised no one has made one based on a state machine.
Ask HN: What's your personal progress narrative?
We all tell ourselves a story / progress narrative about our lives. We feel happy when we make progress, and upset when we judge ourselves to fail - indeed, we define 'fail' etc. against this narrative.

What is your progress narrative? Why do you find it meaningful?

For instance - some meta-narratives:

"i am a smart thinker, and will become / am a scientist/mathematician/philosopher that will prove theorems / discover quarks / impact culture"

"i will create a wonderful family, and support my community. Work in the service of home, family, and friends"

etc.

When we think deeply we have embedded beliefs about the value of things (money, influence, office, status, love, friendship, creativity, freedom, loyalty, sacrifice) that we construct stories about.

Few people are truly deeply honest to themselves. Even fewer deeply think why they chose this.. or indeed, if someone else chose this for them. A mid-life crisis might be a refactoring or reckoning.

What's your progress narrative?
It may be a bit different in sports, where handedness matters more directly. At least in fencing, a right-hander going against a left-hander is a very different situation than two people of the same handedness competing, and because right-handers are such a majority, lefties have loads of time to practice exploiting the lefty-v-righty special case. Actually one of the really interesting things is watching lefties against other lefties, because neither tends to be used to what for righties is the 'normal' orientation to the opponent.
Build your iPhone App for $300
Email me at iamabhiee@gmail.com if you'd like me to build your iPhone app idea.

Why I'm doing this: iOS development is my regular job and I am looking to get more practice with side projects / build up my iOS portfolio outside my job.

Why $300? I'd like to work with people who are passionate enough to pay for their idea but might not be able to afford the actual price tag.

I have developed following apps for 300$ (list will be updated as soon as I will make another one): https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/poetry-for-the-soul/id639748399?mt=8

How it works: First in, first out: The sooner you email me, the sooner you get your app. I'll have a queuing system set up, so as soon as I'm done with the first app, I'll move on to the next. Once I'm ready to start working on your app, we'll have a Skype call and keep in contact via email to clarify the requirements and figure out the business logic. Communication is key and I want to make sure you're happy with my work, so please be available to answer questions promptly while I'm building your app.

Payment: $150 up front, $150 on completion.

Design: If you have a design ready to go, I'll implement it. Otherwise I'll be using the native UI components. You'll need to provide the app store icon and loading screens.

Back-end: If you have an API to use, I'll use it. I can also use Parse, but you're responsible for paying for it. I'll use sqlite as databse. If you need a more heavy back-end API component, you'll need to build it yourself. You own the code, but I can blog about how specific features were implemented. I have the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Thanks
Abhishek
And an extra local variable. Which might take up a line of source code!