skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article is a product of a culture so narcissistically in love with our own perceived greatness that we cannot conceive of anything of value being created outside that which we've built ourselves in the last five minutes.

Have we really allowed out existences to become so abstracted from the reality of what we need as humans to survive and thrive that we really believe technology is the only sort of skill worth having?

This article smacks of someone raised on MTV and happy meals.

Also:

Give me your average 30-something desk jockey and I'll send him out to work the farm with my 73 year old grandfather who's never spend a day of his life behind a desk. If the desk jockey can keep up, then we can talk.
I echoed this on the blog but this was my response:

I agree with Gary. Not only relationships, but emotional maturity, and even more so now than ever HUMILITY… will only be learned with time.

I don’t think the value of old people has declined, as much as our appreciation for them.
The question is, is D better enough than C++ to make us switch?

When taking over you must not just be better, you must be a hell better to justify the cost of the switch.
Using your 3G connection abroad

I have an HTC Touch Pro 2 on Sprint, and with CDMA/GSM and a $40/mo add-on for worldwide unlimited data, I can surf at 3G speeds in over 110 countries. With wifi/usb/bluetooth tethering, I can use my laptop abroad for a lot more than email subject lines!
Better link: http://scale.cc/2009/10/30/ask-startups-is-employee-retentio...
I would step back and think about the problem this is solving for people and why your early users are getting value from it. Opening/closing times are helpful, but what about the fastest times in an out of the DMV over the course of a day/week/month? If you are visiting Disney World, when are the best times to hit the popular rides? If you could figure out a way to save people a few minutes a week you could charge for your app, it would likely be popular enough to get good ad sales (GTD Books/Workshops for sure!). As it stands I would agree that it probably wouldn't be a good standalone company, but you are onto something smart.
Logo Design from Start to Finish
There isn't proper quoting on HN, but three popular conventions are:

1. italics - to this with asterisks ( * ). To operate, they must be adjacent to the text that is being quoted, and end up looking like this. If not adjacent, you get * this *

2. Use ">" and indentation, like in email.

3. use quotes - like you did.

nb: there is help page available for the above syntax: http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
It used to be available as a link next to the textarea when you comment,
but I just checked and it appears to be gone.

You might want to check out the FAQ in general if you're new (read: I strongly suggest you check out the FAQ): http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html (there's a link to it at the bottom of the frontpage; I'm being extra helpful by repeating it here)
Perhaps I'm missing this, but what about the "return failure" policy (for libraries)? If malloc fails, log an error and return a failure to the calling application. It isn't recovery, since it doesn't attempt to continue working, but it doesn't abort() the whole program (including calling application) either.

The calling application can then close the current handle to our library if it chooses (thus freeing up all of the memory again).

(This is what our library, x264, does, and IMO makes the most sense when dealing with situations where it would be insane to try to recovery, but in which one doesn't want to kill the calling app as well. We added malloc checking when it became possible to set options that would hit 2GB allocation on a 32-bit system.)
Twitter Lists roll out to the rest of us
Presumably Microsoft won't allow it. To make Windows competitive they have a discount for OEMs to install Windows on machines with low spec, and presumably this SSD is too large to be able to take advantage of that.
Dealing With Credit Card Debt
I've said this before, but it's an argument that needs to be stated again: As long as humans are in control of technology then a deep and experiential understanding of human nature and behavior will always be more valuable than technological skill in certain fields. Finances, management, government, business strategy, psychology, diplomacy. Wisdom is more valuable than technological skill in these and many other arenas.
I wonder why the "reply" after your correction comment (the one which just said "best") is in italics?

(I'm replying to this comment instead of that one so I don't destroy the thing I'm commenting about)
The "segfault policy" is an extremely bad idea.

Over the past couple years, several major security vulnerabilities have been caused by programs that took the "segfault" path making attacker-controlled array references to NULL pointers. It's not hard to see that if you index something with a standard native integer, 0 + index can mean any word in memory. If you write to that, that's game over.

It's for a similar reason that I don't recommend developers explicitly check malloc, or use xmalloc wrappers. Both are opportunities to make an error that shouldn't be possible in properly deployed code. Adobe Flash had explicit error checking with a convoluted O-O-M policy, forgot a check, and Mark Dowd was able to use a Flash header field to create a 32 bit offset to a NULL pointer, and:

http://chargen.matasano.com/chargen/2007/7/3/this-new-vulner...

xmalloc addresses this, except if you forget to use xmalloc, or if you forget that "strdup" needs an "x" too, or if you use a library that calls malloc.

The safest approach is just to configure malloc to abort (or invoke your O-O-M handler via longjmp or signal). Most C libraries have explicit support for this, but every development platform will allow you to preload a malloc wrapper if they don't.

For what it's worth, I came by this opinion not because of security, but because as a systems programmer I was tired of dealing with useless conditionals on a function that's called so often; at one job, I shrank my codebase by 30% (!) by losing malloc checks and the associated "this function should return -1 to indicate malloc failed inside of it" detritus it carried. The "just preload a malloc that aborts" rationale I got from a friend (then) at Juno.
Seven actionable ideas to optimize website conversions for the holiday season
IPhone Synchronization with Linux
There are two big problems with D.

1) Everyone treats D2 as being the current stable version of the language, when it isn't.
2) Tango vs Phobos when it comes to D1.

But trust me, the D community is aware of those things. [1] There are a lot of tensions over the developments of D2, how they're going, etc. If and when D2 ever actually comes out, it should address lots of the issues.

But you may see something sooner than that.

[1] : http://www.jfbillingsley.com/blog/?p=53
I currently work on QPX, the air travel search engine. We continue to use SBCL, primarily because it produces faster code for our workload. We and our customers are very sensitive to the performance of the application.

Dan Weinreb, another ITA developer, did a talk at Google a few months ago on ITA's new reservation system (the Polaris project you mention). They do use CCL, but the code also compiles and runs with SBCL. The primary reason he cites in that talk for preferring CCL over SBCL (about 22 minutes in) is that CCL compiles code more quickly than SBCL.

I haven't used CCL much, but I understand SBCL and CCL have different debugging strengths. An SBCL developer tells me that a significant chunk of the compilation time for our application is in constraint propagation for types. That's part of the "generates more efficient code", but it also means that it's smart about telling you when you're doing something that's not going to work. For whatever reason, type propagation or otherwise, CCL won't do as much to help you at compile time. I am told that CCL gives better stack traces, so SLIME can help you more.
As always, it depends on what you want. I personally find D to be way better than C++, or I wouldn't be writing a kernel in it.

Of course, individual tastes may vary.
Are single startups that bad?
Not necessarily.

Single founder startups are inherently riskier than startups with multiple founders. That isn't to say that risks can't be overcome though - there are plenty of of single founder startups doing very well.

Odds are though, if you can't find a cofounder who believes in you and your idea, you are going to have a tough time finding customers to do the same.

The comparison of 3 founders with no product to a single founder with a successful product sounds a lot like comparing Tiger Woods to a team of golfers. Sure the team has some advantages, but winning is what counts and I'd put my money on Tiger in that case.
The proper way to put it would be "technological progress reduces the value of the knowledge of outdated technologies",
which is then reduced to "Doh" at which point one can question the need of blog post about it.
He does have some good points, but they're drowned in nonsense. For example, he suggests that memorization is taught in lieu of problem solving because this is what society thinks is a smart person. Memorization is taught in lieu of problem solving, but it's because we haven't yet figured out a good way to teach problem solving. It's not some vast conspiracy; the outcome we actually want is just a really hard one.
RockBand Robot playing the iPhone
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In a recent interview to CNBC Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, has made a very good point. When asked about the competition (whether too much being made of Microsoft competing with Google on the search front, or with Apple on other fronts), he said that it’s important to understand what creates the real value
Jeannette M. Wing - Computational Thinking
EnterpriseDB, Postgres Plus Maker, Raises $19 Million
We haven't considered making it non-linear. It's an interesting suggestion, though I'd hesitate to go that way only because the user then lacks a clear 1:1 model of how the slider directly affects their rating (without explanation). We haven't received enough ratings yet to prove your assumption. When we do and if it does hold true, our assumption now is that we have _enough_ of a scale to expose meaningful differences.

You've given us good food for thought, thanks. My general feeling now is that I think it's important to leave the negative portion of the slider intact (however less it's used) to maintain a solid mental model. Might be something to test down the road though.
See also Peter J. Denning's reply "Beyond Computational Thinking": http://cs.gmu.edu/cne/pjd/PUBS/CACMcols/cacmJun09.pdf
Facebook Rings
Try this while on Facebook: On your keyboard, press UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, B, A, ENTER and then scroll up OR down. You'll see something amazing.

Later on, whenever you click on the page. You see those rings!

How can this happen?
Correction: EnterpriseDB doesn't make PostgreSQL -- they make a product based on PostgreSQL.

EnterpriseDB:PostgreSQL :: RedHat:Linux
Counter to the linked-comment: maths is not pure problem solving.

There are a lot of facts to be learned in mathematics; it is more like a language, with a huge vocabulary. And, like language, very little of mathematics is actively justified as to whether it is or is not the best way to go about solving problems. People just build on the existing mathematics as a basis... in a similar way to how people write novels in a language.

The attitude of mathematicians is as an imperial, aristocratic attitude to courtly protocol. The true problem-solving mathematician is more like the wild barbarians, who break all the protocols to achieve actual outcomes. One might say: empirical not imperial.

But the aristicratic attitude makes a lot of sense, because facts and protocols are things that one can learn and advance with, whereas a problem solver is only as good as their last solution. It's a bit magical. While one can practice problem solving, the return on that investment is no where near as reliable as the return on investing in learning established, conventional, standard facts. It's a good investment; it gives you a sustainable competitive advantage.

However, there is something massively cool about being one of the people on the frontier, who germinate and disseminate facts, rather than passively receive them.
This isn't really a feature or a product. It is a data set.
Your best bet might be to develop the process to gather, store, and maintain the data, then sell the set to implementers for their sites.
He didn't say doctors don't solve problems. He said they "don't do much problem solving". He wasn't talking about the result at all. He was talking about the method: mere recalling, or (re)discovery?

Like ahpeeyem said below, this is a lot like mappers and packers. Here is the link he provided: http://the-programmers-stone.com/the-original-talks/day-1-th...
An HN team anyone? I'd be interested to see how far our skills could take us.
That, my friend, is the Konami code.
Yeah . . . uhh . . . That would be why I called them "contrived examples".
"So what?"

If the site doesn't quickly answer that question for me, it fails. All other criteria are simply components of that answer.
I am sorry but I don't see any reasonable facts or explanation of how GFW slows the Internet down. HK is fast because your ISP is fast, it has nothing to do with GFW. I can download from ThePirateBay with the speed of 37MB/s in Chinese CERNET, and I can watch Youtube HD/HQ videos in ChinaTeleCom's 1Mb ADSL smoothly in midnight when the Internet is not busy.

I am a native Chinese living in China. And the tool I am using to visit youtube does not require any 3rd-party servers, it hacks into GFW and establish connections to blocked sites directly. :)
While I agree the "segfault policy" is a bad idea, if you've got dedicated hardware for checking invalid addresses, it seems to me that you should use it.

After all, checking the null pointer is still slow.

Combining a malloc wrapper with the segfault policy is a great way to go, for example:

void*my_malloc(int s){int *x=malloc(s);*x=0;return(void*)x;}
Design is an art, so there won't be rigid rules that apply to every situation. This should come as no surprise. Personally, I know how to scroll, but I like being able to read a lot of the content before scrolling.

On a side note, my pet peeve is a design that requires scrolling immediately but also auto-selects an input field so I can't page-down when the page loads.
Let me address Greenspun's 50-year-old friend, who says:

I have been declared inept by my household! It only gets worse. You are not judged by your intelligence but by how well you do menial tasks. I have been spiritually castrated. I am a walking corpse. The only freedom is when I write.

Look: Google did not cause your midlife crisis. If you can't live your own life, finding happiness in your own work (whatever it is) and not worry about how other people "judge" you, that is too bad, and you're not the only one (they didn't invent the term "midlife crisis" by accident) but don't blame information technology.

Old people, as a class, probably are valued less than they used to be, but the trend is far bigger and older than Google. Part of it is that there just are a lot more old people around than there used to be. Part of it (as others have said here) is that in a literate society books and recordings can substitute for the old person's job of remembering things -- but that trend is a thousand years old and more. Part of it is the change in family size and migration patterns: Let's face it, other people's kids have always been less likely to honor you than your own kids, and it's hard to be respected by your kids if they lead independent lives many miles away. And a lot of it is just the nature of American culture: The American ideal is someone who is always moving, looking forward, and reinventing themselves. We've always been big on the young: They're the ones with the most future, and it's all about the future!

None of which is causing your midlife crisis either. If you think it's miserable to be a healthy middle-class 50-year-old in the 21st-century USA, you need counseling.[1] Because I'll bet you wouldn't actually trade places with a random 50-year-old in, say, the 17th century: Perhaps you'd be more honored and respected for your venerable wisdom, but you'd also probably be a subsistence farmer, honored mainly to the extent that you managed to have a lot of kids and keep them alive.

Before you complain that nobody listens to you anymore, try and think about the 6.5 billion people in the world who have less voice than you do: Less money, less education, less political power, less opportunity. [2]

---

[1] Probably from someone older than you. ;)

[2] Given that we're talking about a friend of Greenspun, 6.5 billion is almost certainly a gross underestimate. Think "the population of the Earth, minus epsilon".
If We Upvote Everything, We're a Dumb Pipe
Isn't the branch in that NULL check pretty much the most predictable branch in your program?
I think this open source movement by federal agent is significant,especially for the power grid re-innovation as part of stimulus package.
I recently spoke at Stack Overflow's Dev Days in Toronto. I started by saying that I am very shy and have difficulty going to networking events and conferences where there are large groups, but that there's something I wanted to share, and it was important enough for me to climb up on stage and stand in front of them.

A few people later thanked me for the candour, but on reflection just because that resonated emotionally with some people, that doesn't mean my talk was actually better. Perhaps the people who responded emotionally to my 'confession' were more attentive to the ideas in the talk, but it could just as easily be that they were distracted and absorbed less of the content.

This post and the commentary from HN folks is giving me something to think about. Thanks everybody.
Justchill with Super M & Miss a Bit of Life with Zakk
Super M is a Super trendy drink in a range of awesome flavours. Enjoy it while chilling with friends
data set is useful.
what if you build an app for this. and also provide this data from API.? I think that would be good!
I tend to agree that low interest in science and engineering is driven by a rational response to market conditions - that talented people can do better in other fields.

However, I am confused about one thing...

"Susan Traiman of the Business Roundtable criticizes the new study, saying that it gives an illusion of a robust supply because it bundles all STEM fields together. There may be an oversupply in the life sciences and social sciences, she argues, but there is no question that there are shortages in engineering and the physical sciences"

I'd need to read more about this study. Are social science majors included in the STEM numbers? Are botany majors included? If so, this would weaken the claim that we are overproducing "STEM" workers.
Interpolating polynomials used to be taught in high schools. I learned it in high school and today almost no high school graduate knows how to do this. Is this a bad thing? I don't think so. With new technology and the advancement of ideas and knowledge the basic skill set that is necessary changes.

The division of labor has rendered many once necessary skills the province of specialists. This is a good thing. Is arithmetic one of those things? I begin to believe so. The expansion of (x+1)^8 does not require the ability to do 7*8. One can do the expansion using Pascal's Triangle.

Besides, the real question is ought one do the expansion of (x+1)^8 by hand? The answer is no. The expansion is a purely mechanical process. A computer does it faster and more accurately. In such a long problem I am likely to make a mistake and this mistake does not mean that I don't know what I am doing.

I do want my doctor to thumb through reference books particularly if my condition is rare. In such a case it is unlikely that the doctor will have encountered my condition and I want her to gain from the shared experience and collective wisdom of experts. That's what a reference book is for and it's a good thing. I want my doctor to be able to read and understand the book. That is what her training is for.

One can get insights into algebra using a computer. It's just that the insights are different than what one could get without a computer. Instead of teaching interpolating polynomials in high schools they are teaching basic statistics and in this present age the latter is much more beneficial than the former.
Props to my buddy Tim who gave a talk on his sequential data DB. Keep it up !
ohk!.. the sequence of key strokes is similar.. what significance on FB homepage?
And Windows doesn't run on them (yet).

Strictly incorrect, as Windows CE does run on ARM CPUs, and I'd wager that most first-gen ARM netbooks ship with Windows CE instead of Linux.
Single founder startups are inherently riskier than startups with multiple founders.

That's stated without proof, but it sounds pretty controversial. What's your argument for why that's true?

In my opinion, it's hard for a startup to die when it consists of one determined founder working without salary and with practically zero startup costs or commitments to payroll. As a matter of fact, it's practically impossible to kill such a business without literally killing the single founder. :)
Nice summary Eivind! Hope you'll do the same for today as well (I'm sitting in it right now). I'm the one snapping pics with a loud DSLR throughout the conference. :D
As the title says, he's talking about technology. Everyone knows technology is a young man's game.

The law is an old man's game. When you read an article about the latest case or legislation, the first thing they talk about is what the law was 200 or 300 years ago, and move forward from there. The law doesn't throw out old case-law; it builds on it. In this way, it remains predictable (so parties don't have to go to court to find out what the law is), it retains basic principles (e.g. fairness doesn't change with technology), and it acts as a drag rather than a kite, so it is a moderating force. While the law is often behind the times, that is far, far less dangerous than the alternative.

IOW Judges are old.
You can talk anonymously to the authorities. They may not be able to do much but at least they can keep an eye on the guy. There is an organization called the Office of Special Investigations. They handle this kind of stuff. Letting them know the activity exists might be enough to get them to open an investigation and watch the guy.
Liskov's list of recommended papers
Harvest FarmVille Crops from Your Phone?
If you have to design your website to encourage users to scroll below the fold, isn't that still accounting for it?
So to broadcast my math ignorance to all:

Why does cos(pi) + i sin(pi) == -1 ??

Why does i disappear in this?

Edit: Thanks to the replies below.
The article didn't have any mention of Euler, but this is typically called Euler's Formula and is considered one of the most beautiful formulas to Mathematicians.

Here's some more info if you want to find out some info, applications and such: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eulers_formula
What happended to the punchcard operators?
Do you know what became of the people punching cards and feeding them to the computer after punchcards died? I imagine most of them were not programmers themselves...