skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Should I learn C or continue C++
The first programming language I was introduced to was directly Java (Not including web languages). Java was taught in our school so I had to learn it. Because it was my first introduction to programming I took a great deal of interest in Java and went beyond our school syllabus. After I left school (i.e passed 10th grade in my country)I stopped continuing with Java. I became inclined towards web development more.

But soon, the next year in the 11th grade, my syllabus included C++ instead of Java. But the syllabus of C++ was very weak and barely included anything. Plus they were teaching a form of C++ that was only compatible with turbo-c++ and thus very old. I surely stopped learning from them and took it upon myself to learn C++ from the internet tutorials. But the interest aspect wasn't that high because of the lack of encouragement from the institution. I was soon deviating more towards python as it seemed to be one of the good programming languages used to create applications on Ubuntu and I wanted to make my own applications. Python attracted me. It really charmed me in no way other programming languages that I had seen or learnt had. After that I thoroughly started learning python and did only that much of C++ that I needed and a little more.

But these few days, I have been reading a lot of articles regarding the awesome speed of C. I had never in my life even took as much as a glance towards C. I really want to do mainstream programming. What should I do about it? Should I continue to learn C++ and take it to a more advanced level or should I try and learn C also as it is so much in demand. C or C++?
Are you spying on me ? :D
Don't like Yelp? Give Them a Nasty Review...On Yelp
Switching to a Zsh Shell
One strategy is to get a routine. I can't confirm though, I'm also a procrastinator :/.
Chrome crosses 5% market share threshhold, IE and FF drop
You're making a distinction without a difference.

If not paid as a dividend, where else would that profit go but to cash in the bank at time T+1? (Technically, it's free cash flow that goes to cash in the bank, but the difference isn't meaningful here.)
It seems like, to have associativity in the sense of
"(a+b)+c = a+(b+c)", you'd have to extend << to also become the string concatenation operator in C++. There are quite a few rules that need to hold to make it work...
By fooling A players into thinking they're As? Hard, but I'm sure it happens.

However most of it might be convincing Bs they are Cs ... and what happens after that is not pretty for the hiring B, I suspect.

One likely characteristic of Bs is less than total honesty, with self and others.
Go work in them.

Most of us could probably spend a single day in the office of a company in a different industry and pick out a handful of ideas on ways they could improve their processes, or speedup tasks, or cutout waste. Not all of those ideas will require a technology-based solution, but surely a few of them will.

If you really want to find good problems to solve, try working as a temp for a few weeks. Ask lots of questions and make notes, I'm sure you'll find plenty of work to do.

Maybe that's a good startup idea right there; build a site where businesses can post their problems, procedures, workflows, painpoints, etc, and professionals can comment on them, offer suggestions, either using existing solutions (technical or not), or try to make business connections ("we can build that for you").
The End of Traditional Software Licensing? Not So Fast
Well at least number 3 can be fixed...
I have been using Chrome more and more since they added extensions.
Forex Online
There is an abundance of platforms for online forex trading. Choosing one may be difficult for someone who is new to this market. Here is the online forex trading software that displays forex trades visually, enabling forex traders of all levels to take part in the forex trading.
Agreed, and I think it happens much more often than most people realize...

It's the disagreement on what something's worth that makes the market.
Ask HN:  Where are all the Python jobs?
Alright, I hate to post another "Who's hiring?" thread, but it seems as though Python jobs are suddenly getting a bit hard to come by lately. Am I just not looking in the right places, or is Python not a very hot skill right now?
New York City defaulted on its debts 25 years ago, despite having a huge tax base and some very desirable assets.

California has been teetering on the edge of default -- not always making payments on time -- despite having the ability to raise taxes. CA also owns vast assets it too can sell off.

Admittedly we'll probably see places like Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal default first, but it can happen here too.
The $10 usability testing using Feedback Army
Absolutely. Most people just go about their lives without continuously looking for new ways to do things. Find these people and extract their domain knowledge.
Finally, A JooJoo Update: VentureBeat Interview
Interesting tidbits:

- When asked about how many pre-orders they got, Chandra refused to release numbers, which is fine. I, along with many others, have a feeling it’s not much, even if it apparently “exceeded [FusionGarage's] expectations”

- The article’s title seems a bit deceptive. Or perhaps I missed something. The title, “JooJoo CEO pledges to ship this month, claims deal with leading phone maker”, really seemed to suggest they were in talks with a major phone maker for some 3G connection. In the interview, however, all Chandra does is “not rule out” the possibility of 3G.

- On having an App Store, Chandra strongly said No, citing his belief that with the Internet, no one needs Apps. Moreover, he also suggested that iPhone Apps are merely copies of what’s available online. I will not criticize that, because honestly I wouldn’t know where to start but it sure does sound like a cop-out to me especially with the amount of success behind the iPhone that can be directly attributed to the 140,000+ applications available on the device.

If the JooJoo did offer an App Store clone anyways, would developers really jump on? Probably not. So, even though this is a clear cop-out, even if he had major plans for an JooJoo Apps, it’s highly unlikely he could get that off the ground. I suppose it’s easier to just bash the iPhone App Store and claim the Internet as your savior.

- Lastly, when asked about perhaps the most interesting question – what differentiates the JooJoo from the iPad or why the JooJoo is better – Chandra cited two things: bigger size and flash.

Two things. First, it’s tough seeing an educated critic asking for an unstable, albeit very popular, web application known for causing a horrendous amount of system crashes. I still don’t understand why no Flash on the iPhone is a problem. Adobe has to wake up and fix things; otherwise, HTML5 will very soon replace it. Good riddance. Now, regarding the bigger size. Besides the fact that it seems very immature to use ‘bigger size’ as your top feature, it’s also interesting to me just how dismal it makes their situation look. “What’s your top feature over the iPad?” “Well, we’re, like, an inch bigger.”
Which would be interesting to see them try, but I don't think they'd find many takers among popular authors right now. Most of the anti-Amazon press this weekend was generated by authors angry over the stealth delisting of their physical books. It's a community response, too: many of the angry authors did not even publish through MacMillan.
Facebook COO: 175 Million People Log Into Facebook Every Day
I am bilingual (french/english), but one thing really bothers me: I never get to speak in English. I read books in English, I watch movies in English, I read/write in English, etc. but I never get the chance to practice my spoken English. The end result is that although I understand/write English very well, I lack confidence when talking. I wish I could _talk_ on the net so that I "get" the accent and intonation. The best scenario would be to be able to discuss about things I'm interested in at the same time (startups, programming, etc.). I could actually host a Ventrilo server (anyone interested?) until someone builds an app for that :D
The futureNYCSubway: The IND Second System
I know it's cheating, but someone should write a script that does that. Would be cool just to see the link between Donald Duck and the LHC.
Certain large, critical organizations that I work with have a paperwork process that goes:

1) Receive information through web form or email

2) Print it out

3) Scan it in to document management system.

There are whole offices of people whose job it is to do this.
Yahoo's benchmarks: http://www.brianfrankcooper.net/pubs/ycsb-v4.pdf
Students failing because of Twitter, texting
Washington State Revisits Data Center Tax Break
A cover in the shape of a reuleaux triangle still wouldn't fall into the shaft, but also wouldn't roll away--it would have constant width, but its center of mass would move up and down while rolling. Apparently the UK has superior civil engineers.
Incentives and Legends
"Go work in them" can be a time consuming process. I wish it was possible to just work a couple of days in a given industry but it's much easier said then done. An alternative could be consulting but that can also involve a lot of commitment when all you really want is identifying opportunities - not build a consultancy biz from scratch.

Perhaps, a viable alternative could be to offer free consulting: much easier to land contracts and low commitment.
Just thinking out loud, but the website owner could add a clause to its terms of service that explicitely forbid this - it could become a motive for account suspension.
Sharing Sessions Between PHP and Ejabberd
From http://www.dogoodhq.com/publishers:

"The DoGooder does not block ads from being served on websites. Consequently, any CPM revenue agreements you have with your ad network / servers remains unaffected- yes, you still get paid."

I wonder what that means; they don't get into the technical specifics, but I get the impression that they will simply download the ads, and replace the ads with DoGood ads as soon as they're downloaded. This might be even worse: it messes up statistics for advertisers, and in the end, it will cause your inventory's value to decrease, thus resulting in a lower CPM value. Additionally, it gives advertisers yet another reason to push for performance-based (CPC/CPA) campaigns, instead of the CPM-based campaigns used for premium content nowadays.
This is one other reason why we may move to paid content with no ads...
I have the same problem. I find it difficult to keep up the motivation to do the boring work that makes the difference between cool side project and actual product. I think this in large part is because I do things alone, because I don't have a problem with day-to-day drudgery in my day job.

Of course, I wouldn't be fiddling around with new product ideas if I was satisfied with the day job either.

I'd definitely be into the small group idea - it would have to be quite a bit smaller and non-public than HN though :-)
Adobe Flash vs Apple iPad: RIA in the balance
Millions of people are currently in jail for breaking useless laws, and spreading understanding of that may be the best way to stop it.
Surely the fix for this is called Android?
I just told my dad. He told me my idea was, ahem, crazy and that I should go get a job at Google.

My step-dad is 90 and has done a lot of cool stuff. I admire the heck out of him. He's still sharp and has great advice about everything else.

But I've found with startups and technology consulting? I'm better off doing the exact opposite of whatever he says. It's like the world he grew up in had exactly the opposite paradigms from the world he is in now.

So with friendships and sharing comes a lot of unspoken assumptions. Be sure the people you share with or have the party with have some idea of how technology businesses work (or are willing to listen to you). Otherwise you could either get bad "quit now and do something productive" advice , or worse yet, blanket acceptance without an honest critique. After all, partners are also there to tell you that you're going off the rails.
Good observations, I was mostly thinking along the same lines.

I think that Fusion Garage lacks the whole "graceful execution" part of this equation. There are already various tablets and tablet-like form factors out there, which 99% of the market have not heard of yet. In all truth, a simple bootable web-browser in a small package is not really even that much of a leap anymore, and this is basically what the JooJoo has become.

If the JooJoo offers nothing unique (ie: Apps/Content) over any other small form factor device, it mostly becomes an issue of lowest price. I could market a KooKoo tablet for $10 less and become a serious threat to their business.

Chandra comes across, to me, as a guy who essentially lucked into someone elses product idea, but never really figured out what the Ah-HAH! factor was.

1 year from now, both the JooJoo customers will be wondering why they dropped $500 on a dead-end product.
A couple notes on this horrible idea (yes I run a couple ad networks).

1) Giving up 50% of their revenue to charity isn't that impressive considering if they actually paid the publishers whose content they are running their ads on they would most likely be paying 50% or more. This is like if Robin Hood kept half of the stuff he stole, wouldn't seem so noble.

2) You are essentially opting in to see these ads. Sure you might be a good target market since you wanted to see the ads, but chances are it's going to be a small and quickly saturated audience. Advertisers will most likely see a quick drop-off in results.

A much more interesting implementation would be one that continues to show normal ads (through ad networks, etc) but takes the revenue from them and gives them to charity. You could even hijack affiliate links as well and donate that to charity. I always thought it would be super evil, but interesting, for someone like Bing to sell a toolbar that displayed their own PPC ads on Google's search results and paid some of it back to the user or charity.
DOT calls texting/phoning while driving study "irresponsible"
How would they notice? And aren't we mostly talking about sites that don't have accounts to begin with?
I think the ethics is questionable, because the average DoGood user is someone who'll actually click on ads (otherwise their business-model falls apart), which denies the site-owner revenue. It's basically zero-sum: the only money DoGood will make (for their benefactors), is money that a site-owner would otherwise have made (last I checked, most money were made from clicks, not impressions).

This was tried last year by Danish AidOnline, but after an intense PR fallout, they lost almost all of their advertisers and shut down.

The PR fallout was at least partly due to their 20% administration fee, which didn't fit well in their philanthropic guise.
As a former C++ programmer, I would say stick with C++ BUT be aware that its a dificult language with lots of tricky undefined behavior and hidden traps that even professional C++ programmers often forget about. [1]

The reasons for stickling with C++ being that you get such things as classes, RAII, runtime type info, the STL and templates.

C is probably a good bit easier to learn, though.

"the awesome speed of C"

Thats a trap. Don't listen to it. Really, by the time you're good enough of a programmer that speed matters, you'll be good enough to make other, seemingly slower, languages fast enough. Most speed is held back because the program simply isn't compute bound. Writing in super efficient highly-optimized assembly isn't going to make a program which blocks reading files or network sockets go any faster. Also, good data structures and algorithms do a lot more for performance than the inherent speed of the language. For example, in another comment I stated that I managed to get a python program take 20 minutes, down from 1.5 hours, by using a tool to translate it to C - but then rewrote the bottleneck in python, with a better data structure, and it ran in 40 seconds (at which point converting it to C actually made it slightly slower).

Very few programs really need to be so fast that writing in C is worthwhile and by the time you find your language to be the limiting factor, you should be a much more experienced programmer and picking up C then will be a lot easier.

My final advice is to pick a higher level language - Clojure, while fundamentally different from C++ and Java, is a very powerful language with lots of very high level abstractions (and streamlined access to Java code, so your Java skills will translate nicely to Clojure). If you're looking for a more mainstream, easy to learn language, I would suggest Python or Ruby - both of which are great high level languages and will serve you well, even if, in the future, you learn C.

[1] http://scapecode.com/?p=107
It'd be sad to see it come to that. Additionally big sites have a high proportion of readers who are not registered with accounts.
Can business schools teach entrepreneurship?
Prediction: China will go to the moon or perform some other feat of manned space exploration as a way of claiming the mantle of leadership for the 21st century.
"[1] e.g. I don't stop at a stop sign if I can clearly see that I can go without impacting anyone else. For me stop sign means "the other people have the right of way, don't impact them". I find following the letter of the law "all four wheels to a full and complete stop" irritating, insulting and of little or no value."

I _always_ stop and look every way.

Implicitly you assume that your senses are infallible and that you will _always_ detect any other vehicles entering the intersection; you may someday be wrong. Several times: I have stopped at an apparently empty intersection only to, a split second later, observ a vehicle enter and leave at high speed without slowing or stopping. Had I merely driven through the intersection I would have been "T-boned" and would likely not be here today.

Of all laws that one could choose to _not_ obey, the traffic laws are among the poorest choices.
Wow. Just wow. Is this guy stupid or what? He first posts baseless rumors and instead of admitting that he was wrong and his source was not credible he defends them. Because there were some near hits among the many misses. You are bound to get some hits just by chance. Current hardware only allows so many possiblities. But predicting OLED? Solar panel? Verizon? 2 to 3 hrs battery life? Camera? You call that credible?

I'm speechless.
I would have to say yes - effectively you are forcing some advertisers to donate their money to advertise for a product (charity) without their consent. To say nothing of the rest of the money, which goes to some random company.

Ultimately, this will just be one more push in the direction of more paid content/micropayments (my personal hope) over ad supported content.
A Black Tie and a Clysma
A new sandboxing JavaScript framework: FuseJS
I have a feeling a commercial company will make it first (but I dont really know what the state of the Chinese spaceflight program is)
> In a properly designed system

Proper design of such a system is the subject of the post. If you're a developer who doesn't want to think about the design of such systems, that's fantastic! Just use bcrypt.
Your startup needs help, but when & how do you recruit your First Hire?
Relying on privacy to avoid liability for inadvertently breaking laws does not seem to me to be a good solution to the real problem: that laws can be so numerous and obscure that one can inadvertently become a criminal. Privacy does have a role in helping to avoid prosecution: if the government doesn't know about my lawbreaking, it can't prosecute me for it. But privacy should also limit government's power to legislate and prosecute: Government should not make criminal what is not its business. A citizen ordinarily should not have to live in fear that he could be prosecuted if only the government knew what he was doing.

In this sense, privacy can harm freedom because it allows government to expand its claims without public resistance. Privacy has enabled the government to make most American teenagers potential felons because they share music. If there were less privacy, if the government knew and prosecuted all the file sharers to the full extent of the law, the resulting public backlash would cause the law to be repealed. The best way to change an unjust law is to enforce it.
There’s simply no way that iPad, no matter what the processor, is good for a real 10 hours of continuous use.

If Apple (or anyone else) can pull off the tricks developed for the OLPC, then 10 hours would be doable. (The ability to put the main part of the motherboard to sleep in under 0.1 seconds, while separate systems for the screen and the networking keep going on a trickle of power, combined with the ability to come back just as quickly and invisibly to the user.)
I should move to a country where English is spoken by most people. I was in the same situation one year ago before moving to Netherlands. You will never completely loose your french accent (hey they said it's sexy :) ), but you will improve a lot your vocabulary and your confidence in talking (especially after work and a few beers :)).
It sounds obvious, but go out and talk to people. As a slowly reforming introvert, just sitting down and talking to a random person can do crazy things to the way you think.
Instead of writing code in Objective C, you can try to use something like PhoneGap( http://phonegap.com/ ). Though I'm not sure if it's suitable for making games and other graphic intensive stuff.
What's worse than having a mission you can't accomplish? No mission at all. What's worse than no mission at all? A changing mission every 4 or 8 years as a new administration takes office.

I'm finding it really hard not to say something political -- pretty angry right now. I'll simply note that for whatever reasons manned spaceflight at NASA has lost its luster with large hunks of the American public. And like every other political spending program, if there is not a large group of people pushing for it, it's going to get cut.
Complaints About the iPad’s Lack of Flash Support May Fade
Bill Gates’ New Website The Gates Notes Runs on a Linux Server
Things I've learned at Google so far
You can also get homeopathics diluted with alcohol instead of sugar.
No. From Matt Aimonetti's blog:

"Unfortunately, the current answer is: no. The two issues with the IPhone/iP*d OS are the lack of Garbage Collector and support for BridgeSupport (needed to define CocoaTouch constants available from MacRuby)."

http://merbist.com/2010/01/31/macruby-0-5-final-is-out/
Paging the Past of Tinkering
That list is pretty terrible. 4 runners of the Boston marathon got brain cancer over ten years? Over 20,000 people finished the Boston marathon last year (http://www.bostonmarathon.org/2009/cf/public/statistics.htm). Even if we assume it's the same 20,000 people running every year for ten years (highly unlikely), an incidence of brain cancer of 4/20,000 is the same as the incidence in the general population 15-20 / 100,000. (http://www.oncologychannel.com/braincancer/index.shtml). So, 4 people is about what you would expect. Given that it's not the same people, it's probably a good deal lower than the rest of the population.

It's pretty difficult to take anything on that list seriously if they're going to blatantly misrepresent statistics like that.
Really. What do we expect after gutting the aerospace industry in 1970, and approximately every 8 years after that. Sure, it keeps profits high for (more-or-less hourly) engineering work, as you have beginners doing it, at beginner's rates. But between the Iron Hand of the FAA, the oddities of the Black Space Program and politics, nobody can have a career in aerospace, so it doesn't attract decent people, much less imaginative innovators.
I actually prefer cycling in the winter (I live in southern Ontario). When it gets colder you can always add layers; unlike summer heat waves when you're limited in how much you can strip off.