skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
About -arch i386, sorry my English is poor, what I mean is, gprof is not working even with binaries compiled with -arch i386.

Thats still wrong:

247:~ Zach$ gcc -pg -arch i386 foo.c -o foo
247:~ Zach$ file foo
foo: Mach-O executable i386
247:~ Zach$ ./foo
hello
247:~ Zach$ gprof foo

call graph profile:
The sum of self and descendents is the major sort
for this listing.

function entries:
[rest of the output snipped, I can pastebin if you want.]

Though, you should really look at Shark (`man shark`, or Developer/Applications/Performance Tools/Shark.app), as an alternative to gprof.

However, you are right about Valgrind not working on Snow Leopard yet. I had thought it was working by now. Whoops, on my part. I edited my first post.
That is a great point & one that has been floating around in my head. What is the qualitative difference between a fan & a patron? It doesn't seem like you would expect the same kinds of people in these categories.
What one random developer writes on his MSDN blog doesn't mean anything more than what any other random developer writes on an MSDN blog. Microsoft is way too big and has way too many developers to draw conclusions like that.

I've done consulting work for Microsoft, and I've never conceptualized them as one company with one voice. Microsoft is more like lots and lots of little companies which run the entire spectrum from total dysfunction to jaw-dropping awesomeness.
In any sort of sane pay for performance system the teacher would be judged based on improvement from when the student entered their class. ( not that I expect any sort of sane pay-for-performance scheme to be implemented)
Yep with -arch i386 it appears to work but the profiling info it returns is all zeroed. There are the functions but mostly 0% everything. Don't know what's the problem. With 64 bit target it's worse than this (some error printed on screen at startup).

Thanks for the hint about Shark, I'm playing with it and it seems cool indeed.
Its amazing how someone so obviously passionate can be completely screwed over by such bureaucracy. Do HR departments ever have humans running them?
Yes I probably didn't meant to say trivial, it just seems that bug trackers are so cliche to talk about (doesn't mean they aren't important).
I injured a great many tendons and ligaments in my dominant hand/arm/upper quadrant of my torso (right upper extremity) while taking tennis in college at age 19. I had crippling pain on and off for many years. I got quite good at mousing left-handed and did that any time my right hand was just not functional. With getting myself generally healthier, my tendon problems have also cleared up.

I did "feed" my tendons for some years by taking gelatin as a supplement. That helped but didn't cure the problem. I have concluded that that there is infection involved and that killing infection is essentially what resolved my problem. I now wipe my key board and mouse down with peroxide every single day at the start of the workday, in part to help keep this problem from coming back.
Are you a programmer presently? That works on a codebase that's at least in the tens of thousands of lines of code?

Tell me what software you write so that I know to never, ever use it.
Keep in mind: this quote is from 10 years ago.
It's pretty difficult to invade another country and win any 'hearts and minds' - I mean, no matter how shitty the previous government was, you are a foreign invader.

I think Iran (and Iran's success against the USSR) is a prime example of how 'hearts and minds' is much more important than guns and bombs in modern warfare.
That was a hell of a story. Long read, but kept me captivated.
I also noticed that (at least in the code I write) bugs are much more prevalent in "boring code" than in "smart code"; that is, if I got some elegant but rather advanced piece of code I had put a lot of thought into (like some smart math stuff or something similar), it almost always works right away without any bugs whatsoever, however, boring and tedious-to-write code (such as wiring up GUI, integration glue code etc) tends to have a lot more bugs in it.

Unfortunately, this first type of code is a lot easier to test automatically than the second type. Smart code usually has clean and simple interfaces, while writing tests for "boring code" is also boring and tedious, like writing a test for each textbox on a form etc.
There's no such thing as public education. Education happens to exactly one person at a time. There are some things that you just have to do by yourself. And there’s no such thing as compulsory education. Education is something that each of us gives to ourselves or allows others to give us. [1]

We need a culture of intrinsic ambition and excellence - among students, among teachers, and among professionals. Focusing on fake heuristics - grades, standardized tests, gold stars - only teaches one to cheat, not to personally excel.

1. http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0208f.asp
Doom Classic Development, Quake Classic, and more
"Testing is for sissies! Real Men write correct code."

I seriously laughed when I read this. I'm willing to sacrifice the extra couple of inches of programmer penis size by writing tests.
Also a good argument for never putting someone's email up directly on the Web - you've got to paraphrase if you think anyone might ever object to it.

And, yes, that's depressing.
My mistake, Google isn't doing this (I thought they did?). Facebook does for outbound links, for example http://www.datmansymbol.com/ is actually:

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%253A%252F%252Fwww.datma...

The right approach would be to have the hivemind number say "Connecting you to <phone number>... one moment please", at least being more transparent about the process. I just think there is an ethical way to proxy numbers.

Incidentally, Hotels.com forces you to use their 800 number as well, although they have an established relationship. I often will google the hotel name to get the real number, since you know, I might have questions about the hotel that hotels.com can't actually answer.
I wonder why the apparent point of failure is so far removed from the actual point of failure. With my work that is rarely the case, and I wonder which of us is the anomaly.

Neither of us, it just sounds like we just work on different software with varying levels of complexity.
This is the opinion of a single engineer on a single team. There are tens of thousands other engineers and thousands of other teams.

My team (at Microsoft) is religious about unit tests for some parts of the product (math libraries, content serialization logic, etc) and have a grand total of zero "unit tests" for other components (some UI, etc). We do, however, have a full test team who write numerous automated regression tests as well as conduct significant manual testing and routinely use the product.

Furthermore, have you read it? It's not saying don't write tests. It's saying that TDD is not a silver bullet.
Also a good argument against using company email for personal correspondence.

"AA searched their exchange database for the text I posted, found the guy, and fired Mr. X on the spot."
Maybe I missed it, but how does somebody know how much data they've pulled/pushed in a month? And is CC counting just payload bytes, or do they include packet overhead? What about retransmissions?
Every so often you're right... you certainly should consider the costs of automating the test versus the risk of regressing.

But note that once you you have an organization good at writing tests, the incremental cost of writing a test is very, very small.

We like the term "10x" around here. Design systems for 10x the customers of today. Write code that will survive for a year. (Otherwise it may have been wasted.) Only fix bugs once so you can grow the engineering team without rehashing old issues.
Bug tracking isn't a network-effect business
This seems like someone being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian.

Kevin Kelly never said getting to the level of true fans necessary to earn a living was easy. He also said that 1,000 and $100 were oversimplifications for the sake of making his point (i.e., what people will spend on your work and how many people you'll need to do that each year to live will vary widely from artist to artist).

The point was he was making, as I read it, was that artists can make a comfortable living in the long tail by attracting and catering to (that's the key part) a group of die-hard fans. It's labor intensive, but it can be done.

A friend of mine is a niche musical artist who makes a living playing small shows, selling t-shirts, and putting out one new album per year. He lives comfortably (though by no means lavishly) and has a lot of fun. His MySpace page says he has 12,000 fans, but his shows usually have 20-50 people, and often, the same people will go to every show they can reasonably drive to, will buy every one of his CDs, and purchase any new t-shirts or stickers (or whatever) that he makes.

In other words, he found his group of true fans, and he caters to them by making music and merchandise he knows they'll want. In return, they buy his shit and he makes a living.
Josh Harris: The Warhol of the web
From the point of view of the management - this is someone who wrote an article about the company having big time bureaucracy, lot of teams that don't talk to each other and hinting that the company culture is all messed up. well, what can one expect.
This is nothing but positive, actually. Someone who is passionate, thoughtful, and caring about his trade will have a _much_ greater impact, career, and reward at a different organization than the one described by
http://dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html
Most often you'll find templates for excel and such, there is also a program that comes with one of the microsoft office suites (more than likely a business class one) that can create gantt charts pretty well but I can't remember the name
To be fair, I don't think Joel was going for "become sales-force driven", growing a salesforce is not the same as letting them run the show. As long as they have great engineering which Fogcreek seems to have.

Unfortunately, it is hard to say if these fears are unfounded or not.
Maybe there's a way to automate the boring code? Write a system that lets you build UI without manually specifying the behavior of every control, etc.
A bit off-topic, but Dustin Curtis' site really hurts my eyes reading on my MacBook pro... I have a really hard time reading his text, and when I look away, I have very pronounced stripe patterns in my vision.
I use Yelp all the time, so I agree with you that there is value in a directory with ratings. But the value of Yelp comes from the carefully crafted community that I feel I can trust, not from some random star rating from faceless people, and I certainly wouldn't get any value if Yelp stepped in as a forced intermediary if I wanted to contact the business (that would make me stop using it immediately, actually).
I have the exact reverse here. I love sites and applications that use a dark background; bright backgrounds are like staring into a lamp. It probably depends on the environment you tend to read in; I usually read in a darker room.
I don't think they're being cry babies at all. They're just picking up a fumbled ball and running with it. Good luck to them I say.
Comparing Parser Construction Techniques
it means my branches in spanish. we were originally going after the latin american market when we bought the domain. we realized, we wouldn't be able to use our product, and didn't beta launch with that focus.
Dialup is available to just about anyone, so comcast always has competition.

What? You don't think dialup and cable are competing, but dialup and DSL are (despite the huge speed differences in both cases)?
Where are you getting this 512kbs for $50 per month from? When I do a quick back of the envelope calculation using relatively recent wholesale bandwith costs and backhaul costs I get much more reasonable numbers.

Wholesale bandwidth pricing isn't anywhere near that high, and back haul costs at most double it.

$10 per mbs per month isn't uncommon for wholesale bandwith pricing from "on-net" buildings (and now days $2 to $4 isn't unheard of). The back haul cost to your local C.O. is probably roughly around $10 per mbs as well (admitedly I'm going of backhaul costs from Toronto to Waterloo up in Canada) and then your down to the local loop. We will assume the cost of the local loop is allready covered in the existing price paid, so if the user wanted N dedicated mbbits it should cost N[margin][12 to 20 dollars] per month more. Now are most users may not be willing to pay for this.

A frequent way of dealing with the "bursty" nature for servers is 95th percentile billing where by you pay for the max of what you use, dropping the top 5%.

Admittedly these numbers are very back of the envelope, but I think its a bit more realistic than $50/month for 512kbs.
AA searched their exchange database for the text I posted, found the guy, and fired Mr. X on the spot.

As upsetting as this is, it's just not that big of a surprise. Some companies take non-disclosure very seriously. Why didn't Mr. X just use gmail? I can't imagine discussing any company's internals on their own email system.

OTOH, maybe Mr. X just committed corporate suicide by email. That's one way to escape the insanity.

Thanks for the update, Dustin. I sure hope Mr. X lands on his feet fairly soon and I applaud your contribution. I like to think that integrity still trumps idiocy.
I'm quite OK with a lot of dark sites, but this one produces an insane "buzzing" feeling. Might have something to do with the gray-ish text. I couldn't get through the entire article even if I wanted to.

I'm reading in a dark-ish room right now. I suspect it may have something to do with the type of monitor used to view the site, because on mine the physical effects are very pronounced.
Offerpal Tries Out A New CEO. Shukla Out. Garrick In.
I agree. It looks bad, though.
No, they can't.

http://officialblog.yelp.com/2009/02/kathleen-richards-east-...
http://officialblog.yelp.com/2009/02/east-bay-express-story-...
I agree that it is worrying. It's not a good law; the current situation is setup so that a risk averse hosting provider is likely to just take shit down when asked.

But what I'm saying is that while there is a pretty big downside to standing up to bullshit takedown notices, there is also a pretty big upside. Would I personally take the risk? heh. well, it would depend on how strong I thought the case was. But probably; Like many entrepreneurs, I'm something of a glory hound and I have a moderate-to-high risk tolerance. My expectation would be that it wouldn't go to court. see what happened with ralph lauen and bong-boing:

http://boingboing.net/2009/10/06/the-criticism-that-r.html

On the other hand, I do get a whole lot of obviously legitimate takedown notices. I've had several cases of some company selling knock off designer stuff who not only used the trade mark without permission, but who copied the legitimate website wholesale.

I mean, I know jack about designer clothing, and I think knock-off goods are perfectly legitimate, but I think it's pretty important to protect trademarks.
They're not throttling. They're deprioritizing the traffic of their heaviest users. This allows them to provide good service for the majority of their users. The alternative is to drop some percentage of everyone's packets.
IMHO, any employee not on the customer service team that reaches out to customers should be awarded not punished, given that it's done somewhat reasonably. In most cases filing a complaint with the customer service people would get you nothing - you need to talk to the ux designer.
its ironic that he signed the reply off with

Very truly yours (and hoping I don’t get fired for being completely incompetent),

but yeh I hope it turns out positive, the guy seems to have a good attitude and is apparently talented, so will be nice to have people like that at companies where I can actually get the benefits of someone caring about ui
As a speaker of lojban, I have to speak out. Lojban is not Ithkuil. Lojban isn't that complicated to speak, and most of the times on the forums, people are debating better ways to express sentences, not just because they're incorrect. Also, part of the lojbanic culture is to nag people if their grammar is incorrect. In English, most of the time, people may cringe or roll their eyes if they see someone saying something incorrectly, but it's considered polite in Lojban to correct someone's grammar. We also have a lot of beginners and new learners, so don't be too hard on them - they're just learning. There's a common misconception that logical = complicated, which is entirely not true. Lojban is in many places much simpler than English, and makes a lot more sense. I'll admit, there are a couple things which are more complicated, but lojban was built to be spoken by humans, and you don't have to be a genius to speak it. In short, it's logical - but not complicated!
I have had a bone graft on my right wrist from an injury when I was younger and find using a mouse for long periods of time quite awkward.

The best solution I have found is to use a Wacom tablet instead of a mouse. Using a writing implement is far better for my wrist than anything else I have tried (wrist rests, trackball).
Clearly AA prioritizes the wrong things. I'm betting the guy broke some policy, but is it really a firing offense? Are they going to sack the middle-management bonehead who blew this up into a much more embarrassing spectacle?

Like I really needed another reason not to fly AA. These days, its Jet Blue or Virgin America if at all possible.
It's possible Scalzi's being contrarian to be contrarian. He's known as a bit of a grump, among other things.

However, you could make the whole thing more useful to you by reading his article as "you may need a lot more fans if you're in a low-margin industry with a lot of competition." And that's true, as far as it goes. Books aren't, by themselves, a fabulous way to make money.

Similarly, CD sales were only about 4% of the income of the same guy who made 26% of his money off just 40 fans. He'd have had a much harder road to a decent living if he tried to make his money purely off CD sales. Like books, they're low-margin and high-competition.

Presumably the "1000 true fans" folks would argue that Scalzi should diversify what he's selling and how he's selling it. Honestly, that'd probably be a good idea, financially speaking.
OSSEC: Agentless scripts | Making OSSEC supplied scripts do your bidding.
It's amazing to me that despite Word still seeming annoying and bloated to me when I use it, everything else seems utterly inadequate in 2009 (open office, Google Docs, etc). This, despite the fact that in 1984, Word Perfect was clunky but usable.
I am sorry. I was being cruel.

It may not be a silver bullet, but it's the kind of "don't leave home without it" ammo any self-respecting programmer will keep close all the time.

Without them the risk of regressions is immense.
These things don't magically happen, and they take time. Time you could spend on adding features, or in including more browser options for users.

I am not sure why I feel the need to explain this, and not on this website.
I'm seeing $300-400/month for 1.5 Mbps T1; granted a T1 local loop is more expensive than cable or DSL.

Or if you start with 7 Mbps for $50 at ~20:1 oversubscription and then divide by 20 to get down to 1:1 oversubscription you can get some scary numbers.
If that's how you view the real world you're in the wrong line of work.
Ouch. I have top-tier status on AA, and they will be getting a note from me about this. Not cool.

That said, I am still confused as to why Dustin thinks AA's website is so relevant to its business model. Their website is not very Web 2.0, it's true. But, they make up for that... I can fly non-stop from Chicago (my home airport) to thousands of cities around the world on AA quite cheaply. They have three-class international service, which means I can use frequent flyer miles to get a really nice seat once in a while. They have lounges. They have international partners where my status benefits can be used. I get free domestic upgrades to first class. They have customer service that cares. (I have never been greeted by name on Southwest, but it happens rather frequently on AA.)

So anyway, the legacies are not totally incompetent. I fly at least every month and I would never even consider WN or JetBlue. The fare is about the same, and I have no chance of receiving anything other than a middle-seat on the back of a 737. No thanks. Perhaps the website UX is nice, but the rest of the trip won't be. And when I'm in a metal tube for 18 hours, I don't really give a damn about how much AJAX the website had.

(I am a little defensive here, I know. AA has been really nice to me, so I feel that they deserve some compliments for that.)
That's fair. I wasn't saying that they were wrongly abusing their position. I was merely lamenting the fact that there's no viable competitors in my area.
Spare the boycott for a cause which merits it. AA just lost a competent and passionate employee and announced themselves as a lousy place to work for creative people.
> It's somewhat depressing that FIOS is available in the boonies of Indiana but not in most of the Silicon Valley.

That's because there are government subsidies to bring broadband to rural areas, but none to bring fiber to Silicon Valley. Verizon is just following the money.
At the risk of encouraging Yet Another Warning, would displaying a notice after changing passwords that sites are still authorized be a solution? I'd say that it should have links to more info and to the Connections page, but I despair of users giving up at any sign of warnings.

As looking at the issues with that infamous little "lock" icon to indicate HTTPS shows, security and UX intersections are always difficult.
I have to admit, looking at Dustin's site, I thought "huh, interesting choices from a UX designer." I also found it hard to read now that you mention it...
i am so glad to live in NYC and have my optimum online boost run at the advertised 25/5, 20 hours a day
How is that significantly different from any other method of disposing mostly-clean water? Either it goes through another use cycle downstream (if the sewer system drains into a river), evaporates, and is recovered as precipitation, or it just evaporates and is recovered as precipitation. The water is still part of the water cycle.
"Trump" usually has the meaning of supersede. I think the GP quote makes it clear ratified treaties supersede other provisions of the constitution - "shall be the supreme Law of the Land" seems pretty clear.
Good question. Where did Carol the cheater and Eve the eavesdropper get to?
Microsoft has removed Billions from the economy, even above the Billions they transferred from others to themselves.

I think this is incoherent, and I'm certain it's wrong. A monopoly has no incentive to "remove" money from the economy. A profit maximising monopolist in the practically impossible position of being able to price discriminate perfectly such that every customer willing to buy its product at a price above the marginal cost of selling it to them will capture all value created by its product/service, but that just means there's no consumer surplus. Value is still created, it just accrues to the company, which presumably still distributes it to shareholders, suppliers and employees.

In more prosaic terms, monopolies "make articles scarce, make them dear and make them bad".

I have no idea how many copies of major MSFT products there are but scarce is not true, and quite a lot of people obviously disagree with you on dear and bad. Office utterly dominates its market niche, and it is in large part due to quality and ease of use. Network effects help some but you can't leverage a reputation in one sector too far in another, otherwise Microsoft's accounting software would be the default, and it's not, Quicken is.
Will the Rich Evolve Into Different Species?