2011-09-22 front | Hacker News

Stories from September 22, 2011

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31.		The Go image package (golang.org)
		57 points by enneff on Sept 22, 2011 \| 5 comments
32.		Hacker News London meetup on 29th Sep with Harj (meetup.com)
		55 points by dmitri1981 on Sept 22, 2011 \| 34 comments
33.		HTML5 Canvas Cheat Sheet v1.x (html5.org)
		55 points by mrleinad on Sept 22, 2011 \| 2 comments
34.		URL Object Notation: A better JSON for URLs (vjeux.com)
		54 points by vjeux on Sept 22, 2011 \| 57 comments
35.		Linus Torvalds made Subsurface - a dive tracking tool (plus.google.com)
		50 points by kenny_r on Sept 22, 2011 \| 17 comments
36.		Assange: Statement on the publication of an unauthorized "autobiography" (wikileaks.org)
		48 points by sathishmanohar on Sept 22, 2011 \| 14 comments
37.		Windows 8 Spells Trouble for Linux, Hackintosh Users and Malware Victims (readwriteweb.com)
		49 points by darkduck on Sept 22, 2011 \| 56 comments
38.		The Promise of the Web (alertdebugging.com)
		47 points by kr589213 on Sept 22, 2011 \| 24 comments
39.		CEO: Red Hat potentially first billion dollar OSS company in 2012 (yahoo.com)
		46 points by sthlm on Sept 22, 2011 \| 13 comments
40.		Ask HN: What do people do with the code from failed startups?
		46 points by bobbywilson0 on Sept 22, 2011 \| 26 comments
		plinkplonk on Sept 22, 2011 \| parent \| context \| on: Meg Whitman to be named new HP CEO I am just a dumb developer, so I am probably not quite getting the subtle management logic at play here, but what's with random incompetents being appointed CEOs and paid millions of dollars to make things worse or at least not much better? (Bartz at yahoo, Apotheker at HP)It seems like a systemic inefficiency to me. (btw this is a genuine question, not snark. I'd appreciate anyone versed in how boards etc work enlightening me) On that note aren't the legions of VPs that infest such companies supposed to be a "bench" for selecting a CEO from in an emergency? If you have half a hundred (or more!) VPs and none of them can step up and be CEO in troubled times, why pay them millions of dollars? Also, why exactly Meg Whitman? Just because she happened to be available and doesn't have another job? (Isn't that telling about her desirability as a CEO?) How long before they look far yet another saviour on a white horse?
42.		Your first customer as a co-founder (jacquesmattheij.com)
		44 points by prez on Sept 22, 2011 \| 7 comments
		mechanical_fish on Sept 22, 2011 \| parent \| context \| on: How can C Programs be so Reliable? "C is unreliable" is the wrong way to conceptualize the problem. The argument against C is that it is inefficient. It's not that C programs are broken; it's that if you spend six hours writing C code your code will either do less, or be more broken, than what you would have produced had you spent those six hours writing, e.g., Perl or Javascript or Lisp instead. There's no reason why you can't write correct C code, or correct assembly code for that matter. The challenge is to do so without wasting a lot of time: Any amount of time that you spend consciously thinking about correct memory management or hand-optimizing your opcodes could probably be spent doing something more important, unless you are working on one of the few problems where that kind of optimization is actually the bottleneck. Of course, the flip side of having to think about every layer is that you get to see and potentially tweak every layer. It's nice to work on something transparent. It's nice to know what is going on down there among the sockets and the buffers. I've been thinking about practicing some C for just that reason, and it seems to be why the OP likes C. But I don't anticipate being very efficient when writing my own web server in C. My website will be better if I just install a big pile of other people's C and get on with designing or writing.
44.		A New Gowalla (gowalla.com)
		43 points by creativityhurts on Sept 22, 2011 \| 33 comments
45.		HTML5 Deep Dive - advanced Canvas tricks and resources (joshy.org)
		43 points by wavephorm on Sept 22, 2011 \| 3 comments
46.		Search for your name in pi (dr-mikes-maths.com)
		42 points by tokenadult on Sept 22, 2011 \| 20 comments
47.		Ask HN: Where/How can I learn more about general webapp maintenance?
		41 points by ha470 on Sept 22, 2011 \| 17 comments
48.		Ubuntu Linux and Wayland Display Server: Status Update (thevarguy.com)
		43 points by darkduck on Sept 22, 2011 \| 3 comments
49.		The Logging Mess in Java (dzone.com)
		40 points by gulbrandr on Sept 22, 2011 \| 21 comments
		epistasis on Sept 22, 2011 \| parent \| context \| on: HP Names Meg Whitman President and Chief Executive... So, this board has recently brought in a software guy who doesn't seem a good fit for a company that does a lot of hardware, had him make a bunch of unpopular decisions, then quickly replaced him with somebody that's been on the board for quite some time, without reversing any of the previous "damage" that Apotheker is being blamed for. Apotheker appears to be the fall guy for some unpopular decisions that the board wanted made anyway.
		jxcole on Sept 22, 2011 \| parent \| context \| on: Speed-of-light experiments yield baffling result a... That is such a well known result in physics that the likelihood of it occurring here is almost zero. I remember first reading about it and the scientists basically said "we broke the speed of light" without looking for further explanations. These guys seem like they generally don't believe that they have broken the light barrier, but they need help figuring out what they actually did do from the broader community. Due to their very humble attitude, I bet they examined the literature and ruled this particular possibility out very early on. I bet you there is a systematic error, but I don't think it's this one. My general rule with physics is that if I can think of it, then a real physicist will laugh at it's triviality.
52.		Using HTML5 geolocation API to get the distance of the visitor from me (breakthebit.org)
		41 points by mihar on Sept 22, 2011 \| 9 comments
53.		Demystifying UEFI, the long-overdue BIOS replacement (extremetech.com)
		39 points by mrsebastian on Sept 22, 2011 \| 10 comments
54.		Overflows in SafeInt (regehr.org)
		39 points by wglb on Sept 22, 2011 \| 5 comments
55.		FBI arrests LulzSec member "recursion" for Sony Pictures hack (arstechnica.com)
		39 points by alvivar on Sept 22, 2011 \| 45 comments
56.		The next Hacker News Seattle Meetup is Tuesday, October 4th at 6pm. (meetup.com)
		38 points by zacharycohn on Sept 22, 2011 \| 10 comments
		tybris on Sept 22, 2011 \| parent \| context \| on: Neutrino found traveling faster than speed of ligh... Whatever happened, there is one thing we can be sure about: No laws of nature were violated in this experiment.
		Zak on Sept 22, 2011 \| parent \| context \| on: Be Safe, Break the Law Police departments do have to pay their officers salaries Yes, but it isn't ethical or good for society to do so by making a law just so that people will break it and get fined. Tying police pay to enforcement actions at any level will result in overzealous enforcement instead of the objectivity we should want from our police. You're also implying that raising the speed limit in the case being discussed would lead to a higher rate of crashes or injuries but you haven't provided any evidence for that claim. The author did provide evidence showing the opposite.
		seldo on Sept 22, 2011 \| parent \| context \| on: Meg Whitman to be named new HP CEO What do people think of Meg Whitman's record at eBay? She ran for governor on her record as CEO there, but eBay has always seemed to me like a terribly-led company, sitting on its laurels as first-mover and squandering opportunities to move into new markets while startups chip away at its core business.
60.		Whitman Expected to Get HP CEO Nod After Markets Close (allthingsd.com)
		37 points by charlief on Sept 22, 2011 \| 48 comments
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