skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been using C++ as my primary language for the last 10 years and know what virtual base classes are. I would never use them, Instead I'd avoid diamond inheritance at all costs.

I'd rate myself as a 9 or 10 for language proficiency but perhaps not for certain niches. For example I know comparably little about Win32 or COM (ugh).

However, there are tons of programmers out there who can't program. Faced with a clean slate they would either choke or create an atrocity. If they rated themselves 5/10 then for me to rate myself only 8/10 would be a disservice to myself. The same is true of perhaps 90% of the programmers on HN.

Of course, I can look back at my former self and know that he thought he was awesome but clearly I have surpassed his ability. It only makes sense that there are far greater programmers out there and I have met a few.
Just an odd little style nit I picked up reading this: it was interesting how the author used the clinical term "anus" but didn't hesitate to use the word "shitting" to describe defecation. I'm not offended by the vulgar word, but I'd advise the author to choose one or the other and stick with it.
Snarky answer: You can easily tell the 9s or 10s because they answer "eight."

Less snarky: They give you evidence, really quick, that they're a 9 or 10. It's not hard to tell.
Having worked doing building renovations I can honestly say it's rather frequent that you look at how the building is laid out and how the wiring/water/gas was run and say "what the heck was this person thinking?" - and that's not even including the times I've seen things completely impractical or wholly illegal.

In my present house we cannot have the central air turned on in the downstairs toilet if we want heating to the smallest bedroom (the 'infant' room) upstairs. Similarly the basement air vent was so distant from the conduits that the main level essentially has a heated floor (hot air can be felt escaping through almost every gap in the basement ceiling except the air vent it's supposed to come out of. Similarly the plumbing is so unbalanced that the shower can essentially be turned off by a good configuration of tap turns and toilet flushes.

Architecture is a joke, and the 'engineers' who design them should really consider building a house themselves, because I've seen every crazy design from doors being hinged to trap people in the corner of a hallway (literally you'd have to step into the far corner to squeeze around the door to exit the bedroom), to lighting layouts that didn't illuminate the room, or switches completely impracticably placed.

You're entirely right, people overlook 'bugs' in architecture, although in my experience it's largely because of ignorance of what it being right is. How do you compare a poor plumbing design in your house? Do you run through your best friend's place screwing around with his sinks and toilets while he's in the shower?

It's easy to compare two software programs to find a less buggy option, however it's hard to compare two houses to find a less buggy option.
A friend in town from London reminded me that his show is actually shown outside the US, and said that British advertisers are quite understandably unhappy with his show. I've never seen it, but I can't imagine it appealing to an international audience.
And a good programmer will raise his eyebrow at you and coolly reply "a little less optimisation"
Seconded. I love my Aeron.

One of my favorite features is rarely mentioned: the part of the chair that contacts your body is a flexible mesh. There are thousands of holes in the mesh that make it incredibly breathable. You can sit in it for hours without any heat or moisture buildup on your back or butt.

Surprisingly, I find that it's this feature that I miss most when sitting in other chairs.
You liar! ;)
I don't mind this suggestion at all. If the recommendation is germane to the topic and helps increase my choices and understanding, better to let someone make some money of Amazon.

On another note. Could the author of the parent (froo) put together a shared Google Doc of all recommended books that didn't get negative total points?
Just a heads up, seeing as you're pretty new. URL shorteners aren't advocated or necessary here on HN.

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/05/boldrin_on_inte.htm...
We run an large ERP system against PostgreSQL with its default settings. It handles the load admirably, even with over 4000 users hitting it concurrently. I've never felt the need to tweak it.
Right. The bit about virtual base classes is to simultaneously find the folks who know what it is, and to get a good feel for their design sense.

"Don't know" is okay, if they're otherwise a strong engineer. "Love them!" is only good if they can justify it. "Yeah, diamond inheritance, avoid that" is pretty much what I'm looking for, though I'm willing to have a serious conversation about their merit.

These are just questions I can get through in a minute or two, to gauge the person quickly.
I stand all day as it is, so I prefer my computer time to be spent with my buttocks in a nice comfy chair.
Raise the monitor until you have to look straight ahead to use it. Bring it closer to you if necessary. Get glasses.
Due to type checking, the compiler verifies that it still works as you refactor. People don't usually re-test everything exhaustively in a REPL after changes.

Type checking is still in effect during long-term maintenance.
It depends on how many HN readers "lurk" - i.e. read but never post or register.
It strikes me as funny that Eric Schmidt "rarely saves anything; after he reads an important message, the CEO sends it straight to the trash."

Since, you know, his company is responsible for preserving many things that people wish they could delete. Well, maybe "If You Have Something That You Don't Want Anyone To Know, Maybe You Shouldn't Be Doing It In The First Place"
Ask HN: Feedback on my site
My eye sight is perfectly fine (well, with the glasses on), so that's not a problem. It's just a habit I've had for as long as I can remember. I would bring it closer to me, but I think that's bad for the eyes. I'd kill for the E-ink technology to come to computer screen monitors, even if it's with a bad refresh rate.
Since I first posted here about 5 or 6 weeks ago I've been mostly focused on other sides of my startup, but I added a blog a few weeks ago, and then this week I finally got back to the homepage and added the new counter, the feature list on the homepage and the shoutouts to hivelocity and fgd.

What do you think?
No, my kind of thinking led to the people power revolution in the Philippines and the mostly peaceful democratic transitions in Taiwan and south Korea.

Oh, I almost forgot the best example of all: the peaceful democratic transitions in Hungary, east Germany, and a few other Warsaw Pact countries.
hence the reason for minimum karma.
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Thanks for the advice guys. I looked through the projects suggested by Drupal and some of the other organizations and found what I was looking for.
Web designers that can't do markup
Everyone measures how expensive transactions are compared to no isolation, but I've never seen anyone switch off isolation and measure how often their code stumbles across a half-baked update from another thread, nor how badly their code screws up their data when it happens.
The Two-Year Lag from Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0
So, AOP is applying a function (CSS styles) to objects in a graph (DOM), all selected by a query (CSS selectors)?
Man Takes Space Photos With Balloon And Home Camera
Wow, I have to do a resumé and I'm depressed about myself. I'm nearly about to write:

Languages: C, Python, Haskell

Will code for food in Java,C++,C#,Whatever.
Um, no. No matter what position Keith takes, the logo is always perfectly horizontal. And in the last image, the logo is more than twice as large as in the other photos. Definitely obviously 'shopped.
A simple example where most people are above the mean is that most people have an above average number of legs.
CERN scientists will begin attempting to cross the beams at LHC tomorrow morning
Asynchronous communication, including IM, is usually more efficient than interruption iff the question of the moment is not urgent (in the truest sense) and the recipient is busily engaged in getting other things done. <insert I/O analogy of your choice here>.
Ruby Classes don't provide a contract either. You can add and remove methods to your heart's desire.

information hiding is the principle of segregation of design decisions in a computer program that are most likely to change, thus protecting other parts of the program from extensive modification if the design decision is changed

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_hiding

How are prototypes inferior to classes with respect to information hiding? They provide the ability to easily change the implementation while maintaining the interface.

How do prototypes inhibit polymorphism? All of the prototype languages that I know of (Javascript, Io, Self, Lua ...) make it easy to take advantage of polymorphism.
Ask HN: Business Model Hall of Fame
I'd like to learn good business strategies by example. Can anyone shore some outstanding historical examples of good business models (Ford? Rockefeller?) What did they do well? Are there any resources for good business model patterns, kind of like software design patterns?
Man I hate when entertainers start getting political. BUZZ KILL!
OK, so I didn't pick the perfect metaphor. For a Christian, unless you choose to have faith in Jesus and accept His sacrifice they you're going to hell. Unlike your account of someone who just likes acting suicidal on ledges hell is not to be mistaken, it is not bognor regis.

Apologies for the off-topic.
The percentages are of online sales vs offline sales for that category, not of the whole.
Signing Time Full Collection Dvd Boxset
"Welcome to America, Sucker" - A survey of ponzi schemes in the last 4 years
"At the MIT Media Lab in April 2008..."

Specifically, on April 1st.
For me it's a large screen and big comfy font size. You might find that resistance training helps, especially back and core/abdominal. An expert trainer will likely be able to identify what's needed.
I didn't watch the video, but you can ignore IMs or reply to them later, not unlike emails, but much less so when someone is talking to you face to face.
This is just more proof that politics makes people stupid. Boycotting the whole network does the opposite of what they want because people tend to pull together when they're being jointly attacked. So this move is more likely to make Fox stand behind Beck than it is to get them to fire him

(As has been pointed out Fox News has double the viewers of it's nearest competitor so it isn't going to be lacking for advertisers)

A better move would be to move all their advertising to other shows. Cause all the other ships to rise while Beck's sinks. Then the network won't feel under fire and will instead be asking "Maybe this Beck guy is more trouble than he's worth?"
...I fell for it like a common rube.
YUI doesn't shoehorn JavaScript into a classical model. I'm curious why you think it does. Is it just because the namespacing makes it look like a classical model at a glance?

Well, yes. Not only at a glance. You seem to call them modules and components, but overall it's a plain old Class hierarchy.

Again, that's a completely valid way to use javascript - I just think the jquery-way is the more natural route.

There are very few absolutes in the web performance world. In some cases, using a single monolithic JS file will be beneficial. In other cases, it will not.

Well, having the flexibility to dynamically load js-snippets is a good thing. I'm just saying that 99,9% of sites don't need that and would even harm their performance by implementing it that way.

where we have a single page (the search results page) which has millions of possible feature combinations that depend entirely on the results for a specific query, and which can even vary for different users searching for the same query. [...] many megabytes

As said, how many sites have that?

My most javascript-heavy site makes excessive use of jquery.ui, 65 jquery plugins and ejscharts. The minified js-blob is 410kb + 100kb for ejscharts (ironically: minified using yui compressor).

Yes, that's pretty damn heavy, but we see no performance issues at all and I can only wonder what kind of javascript monster weighs in with multiple megabytes?
With NUMMI closing down any day now, "The Machine that Changed the World" by Womack, et al (1990) is almost as relevant now as it was then. The book describes the management and product development techniques used in the Japanese-owned auto industry and how they contrast(ed) with those employed by US-owned auto companies. Many of the ideas have been employed in healthcare and software development in the intervening two decades.

I can't speak to the relevance of any specific work of fiction to any HN'er but the one writing this comment, but "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison and "Tender is the Night" by F. Scott Fitzgerald are two novels that stand out to me as being particularly good.
I've been sitting on an exercise ball for the last couple years, since I read a local newspaper article about schools in my community that offer those to schoolchildren to sit on. But only last week I discovered that most school exercise balls have knobs on them that keep them in place. Mine is a regular ball, which can roll in any direction. Maintaining my balance provides subtle movement any time I am at the computer, which is a lot of each day for me.

P.S. What do all of you recommend for more ergonomic keyboards and pointing devices? I am not happy with my Dell keyboard nor with any mouse, but the last trackball I tried was even more annoying than my current mouse. (I have liked trackballs very well in the past, but I have to favor my thumb basal joints now that I am older.)
It looks great. But, why does everything have to look mac like? (I don't use a mac.)
Is it this series on youtube?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT2bD0-OqBM
A site which is owned and operated by an (apparently quite successful[1]) early-stage investment firm. Your sentiment is admirable, but I don't think they need a couple thousand dollars extra per year.

But you're right: it's no skin off our backs.

[1] http://blog.awesomezombie.com/2009/12/analyzing-y-combinator...
Rockfeller saw the benefits of consolidation. At the time, he witnessed the oil business (refineries) being terribly unprofitable. They often went bankrupt and failed. But he figured out that by reducing competition through consolidation, he would be able to gain market share and expand margins. One of the ways he did this was by cutting a deal with the railroad companies, that way his oil could be transported at costs lower than the competition.

Other interesting things he did -
Horizontal integration: buying up refineries in every state
Vertical integration: acquiring pipelines, home delivery systems, etc
Free: in some cases Rockefeller gave away things for free or below cost. In China they had never used kerosene lamps, so Rockefeller gave away the lamps for free in order to get the Chinese to start using them and eventually buy Standard Oil's kerosene
-He also would undercut competitors in the refinery biz (sometimes below cost) in order to drive them out of business and force them to sell their refineries to him.

How is any of this useful?

Some people argue that Bill Gates is an iteration of Rockefeller's monopolist approach to business. By creating standards (Windows as the go to OS for PCs) he would be able to get consumers to use MSFT's related products - Office, Internet Explorer, etc.

There is a great book called Titan by Ron Chernow where you can read an excellent account of how Rockefeller rose from being a lowly accountant to founding and operating Standard Oil.
Sông Hàn rực sáng đêm bắn pháo hoa quốc tế 
“ Tour hang ngay “ - Diễn ra trong 2 ngày 27 và 28/3/2010, đúng vào dịp kỷ niệm 35 năm ngày giải phóng thành phố Đà Nẵng và hướng đến Đại lễ kỷ niệm 1.000 năm Thăng Long-Hà Nội, cuộc thi có sự tham gia của các đội đến từ các quốc gia: Mỹ, Nhật Bản, Pháp, Bồ Đào Nha và đội chủ nhà Đà Nẵng (Việt Nam).
"applying a function to objects in a graph" implies something like: bold(element) and center(element) which yields:

<bold><foo /><bar /></bold>
<center><baz /></center>

CSS Selectors can be applied a number of ways (id, class name, parent class name etc) And they can be modified without touching the source HTML.

But yeah, that's what AOP is: You specify a function that can be dynamically applied to various pointcuts.
It's also motivated by a desire to reduce crime rates and help local, taxpaying businesses.
You should question your assumptions. You are assuming you would have to put in longer hours at a new job. This assumption is limiting you analysis of the problem (and is a flawed assumption). Start with what you want and then develop a path to it.

Hope this helps.
I bet a lot of people in marketing disagree with that last statement.
Your computer would have exploded if it had been in Flash then :)
Yes. "Originally" from http://www.apple.com/ipad/guided-tours/.
Hey, I'm programming in C++ right now. It's the worst language there is except for the all others (to paraphrase Churchill on democracy). I'm glad to see someone can say something good about it.

I'd also rather be programming in c++ than rating myself in c++ or any other language. The whole experience of being asked to pick a number for your skill level is truly annoying.
Sure, but:

(1) I can't imagine Steve's a fan of Fox.

(2) I think Apple may get more favor with their key demographics this way than by supporting Fox. There's a pretty liberal bias in Apple's demographics, at least from my anecdotal experience.
Tunnels in Boston or bridges in San Francisco, however...
I rather like what Microsoft has been doing lately with their blogging. It isn't the super stuffy "we are always right and have always been flawless", but is actually worth reading and gives some decent insights.
Rush Limbaugh is a very outspoken (in both senses) Mac user.
I sit at one also, but mostly because it is a mild form of passive exercise.

Moreover, it's a fun break / mental aid sometimes. Bounce while listening to Di.FM and see if a smile doesn't form on your face.
A National First: San Francisco Counts Its Parking Spots
Is each Devkit ~10K, or is that for a site license? It seems that QA costs would be astronomical if they were 10K per system.
wow, longest april fools joke ever and i was totally owned
Not in Mongo, no. I don't really like map reduce as a general query tool, though.
Not in Mongo, no. I don't really like map reduce as a general query tool, though. Not as much as I like a set based query language. :)
Morality Study Narrows Gap Between Mind And Brain
This is fantastic. I'd love to hear more interesting tidbits of information like this.
I noticed you're asking your users to enter a vimeo URL by hand. I know that during signup it's impractical to bounce the user over to vimeo to authenticate, but once the user is signed up do you give them the option of picking the video from their albums instead of entering a URL?
MSI tells 97,000 customers to RTFM
Most NoSQL DBs Are Not Scalable
Maybe when it actually boosts real world benchmarks.

Maybe once drives start shipping with it enabled, so you suffer a massive performance degradation without TRIM being called by the OS (since the firmware isn't collecting its own garbage).

Maybe once Intel can ramp up their production enough to take OEM customers for their SSDs and it can really go mainstream.
Flip the stick
because claiming that mac theme is superb is politically correct
I believe that would be 8:30AM CEST which is 11:30PM PST TONIGHT, or in just a few hours from now.

It looks like it will be Webcast here:
http://webcast.cern.ch/lhcfirstphysics/
Amen to that. It's always amazed me how many candidates I've had sputter on something like this. Nothing flips my bozo bit faster than someone claiming a particular language or technology they've supposedly "mastered" is perfect.
I was amused to find this bit of awkwardly worded text in the article:

"...the Higgs boson, a hypothetical particle that scientists theorize gives mass to other particles and thus to other objects and creatures in the universe."
Glad I read the comments first.
OMG didnt see this one
stop spreading that nonsense. flash isnt slow. although the mac version is shit - i'll give you that.
Why would Fox think that Beck was more trouble than he was worth if they didn't lose any money on the deal? By your suggestion he'd actually be no trouble at all.
I know that many Fox News Anchors use Macs on their respective shows (Fox News is on the TVs at work, do not judge me!), I wonder if Fox will react to this by pulling those computers.
Cappuccino was developed by ex-Apple employees.

As far as Sproutcore goes, it was selected as the basis for Apple's MobileMe service. This probably didn't have much to do with their L&F selection, but it's still a useful datapoint.
Someone, somewhere will read this and use it as a basis for upcoming interview question answers. Now my job is more complicated by the fact that I have to separate the gullible from the ignorant. Thanks...
I'll speak about my two main sharp instruments these days: C and Python. IMO, it doesn't take years to get "good" at these languages (C, because it's a smallish language; Python because it tends to obey the principle of least surprise fairly often). With sufficiently deliberate study, I think it'd be fair to call oneself "good" at either C or Python after a single year.

I suppose I probably ought to clarify what I mean by that. I mean that someone "good" at C or Python is someone who's made it over all of the typical newbie hurdles and is able to spot typical newbie mistakes more or less at a glance. This is not someone I'd expect to have total control or mastery over the language or to know the respective standard libraries inside and out.

Now, to become an expert in either of them, then, sure, you're going to need many years of experience (and, if you want to claim to be a Python expert, you need to be at least "good" at C, IMO, because there are times when you're just going to need to suck it up and write a C extension).
Totally reasonable decision. It's one thing when you're talking just political debate and a company explicitly backing one party. But Beck has created an entirely alternate universe that feeds the insane, irrational hatred that the GOP has turned to instead of coming up with good ideas in the last year.

I hope there is a major shift in the political conversation and the Republicans actually have a platform again, but Beck is a whole different ballgame for now than someone like O'Rielly even, and I wouldn't want to associate myself with him either.
This struck me:

> Numbers has a special formula keyboard.

Can any app have a custom keyboard widget (that retains all the standard features)? I'd like to try building an iPad APL IDE...
My focus is to save Cocoon! That's what Serah said!
GHD BLOG
Raymond Chen (the author of this article), Larry Osterman and others have been writing great historical MS stuff for years. There's lots of great stuff if you've got the time to read it.
Hey, given how the price of memory has fallen I would consider that sufficiently backward compatible.

Data doesn't need to be deleted these days. not even in RAM!
Selling a Wordpress Plugin on Flippa
He's not kidding, C precedence rules are weird.
Even D. Ritchie thinks so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_operations#Programming...

Oh, and it isn't strange to grok FP bypassing C altogether.
I know I'm going to get voted down, but I hope the results aren't like this.

http://bornandbreded.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/crossed.jpg
7 years is way to long to wait