skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
PART III

C++? It totally sucks: Syntax is awful; semantics are clear only for the simplest things and otherwise are bizarre and byzantine.

Exceptional condition handling can't do the right things where PL/I did do the right things with what it called 'dynamic descendancy'. Uh, to handle an exceptional condition, commonly have to kill some threads, free some memory, close some communications sessions, release some locks, close some files, otherwise 'free resources', pop the stack of the relevant thread by several layers, and do a non-local GOTO, and a pre-processed language on C has a tough time doing all these, and that's just for the simple cases where don't have to 'roll back' work to resolve concurrency deadlocks. Begin to see the suckage? These are now ANCIENT points, guys.]

The C++ memory management is so primitive and obscure that each programmer has to write their own (suckage), accept what someone else wrote (more suckage), or put up with high risk of difficult to debug 'memory leaks' (total suckage). Net, shouldn't try to use C++ for anything important or now for anything. And that tends to leave the Unix world a bit short on compiled languages.

Google asked me what my favorite programming language was. I guessed that the recruiter-drone had a sheet with the correct answer "C++", but I gave a good answer, "PL/I". Ada would have been good also. No way would I want to say something totally incompetent such as C++ -- I have some pride and don't want to work with total idiots. Oops, I gave the wrong answer! Poor Google!

Visual Basic .NET? It's just 'syntactic sugar' to provide access to the Microsoft 'common language runtime' (CLR) and .NET.

Want a slightly different flavor of syntactic sugar, say, to remind you of the masochism you enjoyed with C++? Sure, then use C#.

Don't like those two? Sure, write your own flavor of syntactic sugar for access to the CLR and .NET. Lexical scan and parsing? Solved problems. E.g., consider DeRemer's LALR tools. Then just walk the parse tree, handle the symbols and semantics, write out the Microsoft 'intermediate language', and let Microsoft software handle the rest. "Look, Ma, my own language!". Go for it!

But the CLR and .NET are serious pieces of computing, and what Microsoft does with these in the future for many cores, etc. also stands to be serious.

Software development environment? Can spend a lot of time learning and doing mud wrestling with that nonsense. Instead, the coveted source code of essentially all software development is just text. So, I just use my favorite (programmable) text editor, the same one I use whenever possible, i.e., for nearly everything. I also use a nice command line scripting language. All REAL programmers hate graphical user interfaces and LOVE command lines!
$250,000 Wave Goodbye WizeHive Giveaway
This is my startup - we're just trying to have a little fun with the demise of Google Wave. If you want a free account just email wavegoodbye@wizehive.com and mention you're from Hacker News and I'll make sure to hook you up.
You might just have a mental disability of some kind, such as dyslexia, or a physical one, such as blindness. I know at least one person who I'm pretty confident would have been able to read by kindergarten (knowing his parents) but for his lack of mental capacity.

For 90% of the population I agree.
Google needs to focus on their core competency which is search. Instead of competing with everyone they should find ways to integrate their search engine into everything. It boggles my mind we don't integrate Google search into everything like we do with the Twitter API. If they continually strive for second place in every category they may one day find themselves second in search as well. Wave is just another lesson in the long string of failures they will continue to produced until they get back to what made them great in the first place.
I don't think Wave as a product failed. I think it failed as a product Google imagined/wanted it to be. They expected Wave to replace the way we use email. I didn't buy it then and I don't buy it now, after the fact. The tech was cool and useful but changing consumers habits and especially on something like communication is very very hard. So I am not really surprised it did not get adoption. I agree with some of the comments below that if it was integrated tightly within Gmail, it would worked better and PERHAPS it would helped more users try it, like it and adopt it ..slowly.
California Labor Law Breaks »
According to California Labor Laws, employers are required to give their workers break periods to eat a meal.The meal breaks are based on the ...
Why aren't you pricing lower to draw in startups? There is still some automation that could be done to make the process easier. For example, why not let users give you keyphrases, and you pull in "relevant" blogs/posts/sites that they can filter through? That helps reduce search time. (not sure what feed2lead does with RSS).

Email templating is nice to have, but IMO most businesses probably won't use more than 3 different kinds of message.

CRM add-ons are also useless IMO, unless your customers are specifically asking for integration for it. I would think most people who use your service wouldn't do enough volume to warrant it.

Ideally in the future, you'd also want to integrate email directly through your app or the client's server. That way, you can send all at once, track responses automatically, and maybe do a few neat things with that. I had the same idea for this app while doing cold email sales to drum up business. The hardest part isn't sending the email, it's finding more and more sources.
If users don't believe their collective market power is strong enough, they should remember they are empowered in other ways too.

Elections in November, starting a net-neutral provider as competition, etc...
we'll find out when it's too late, meanwhile enjoy the sight of fine grained wood doors with highly polished brass locks:

"The Federal Communications Commission is negotiating behind closed doors with Verizon, Google, AT&T Inc. and other companies on rules...."

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-04/google-verizon-are-...
Despite not having any real big projects, I still use hg for my stuff, I don't think we have a problem there :)
How many people would Assange have to put in harm's way before it stopped being ok?
+1 to that. I think that is the best explanation. Sometimes the best way to get a face-saving exit in the Valley is to be VC funded and by the right guys who make sure all their bets get some sort of an exit. I know of a similar one in the recent past.
Really? I think Google, Microsoft and a couple others like RapLeaf already have a ton of Facebook profile data already.
Modern baby cribs
All about baby's stuff including decorating, preparing, clothing, purchasing, tips and much more.
Seems like basic price discrimination to me, with lower customer acquisition costs, or am I missing something?
There are commercial solutions that can pull data from Oracle and massage it for full testing capabilities.. (As in - replace this users name with a generated name, replace this address with a generated address, replace this CC with a generated/valid-format cc).

That might be an option if you can't get at any decent test data?
As good as Internet Explorer 9 might be it could still fail
Sorry, I don't keep myself posted on his life happenings. With his reputation, I expected him not to be this type of person.
Fair enough. That said, reading through the other responses on this thread indicates to me that there are plenty of employers who don't care who employed you; just that you can get the work done.
Awesome for the "single founder" part. I think its a myth that single founder companies are few and far between, and that its tough to make it happen alone. I don't disagree that being a single founder is tough, but I think there are founders who are at their best when they are running "single founder" startups.
It's not that cut and dry though, the white house had an opportunity to minimize the damage and did nothing about it.
Google also wanted it to be tool for all the enterprise, what will happen to other implementation of Google wave for enterprises, for example say Novel's pulse?
pharma corps without regulation? I might need to stop watching cyberpunk movies.
You are saying that NYC is an incubator for things that only work in super-dense urban areas, and Palo Alto is a very different environment where density-driven things don't work?

I have an impression that most of the rest of the world (that has discretionary spending you might salivate over) lives in cities that resemble NYC density much more than they resemble Silicon Valley endless low-density sprawl. Let's find some numbers.

I compiled the following list of the world's 20 richest cities as of 2005 (1) and next to each I have listed its population density rank and people/sqkm.

Tokyo 50 4750,
New York 114 2050,
Los Angeles 90 2750,
Chicago 126 1500,
Paris 69 3550,
London 43 5100,
Osaka 38 6400,
Mexico City 27 8400,
Philadelphia 155 1100,
DC 250+,
Boston 176 900,
Dallas 148 1150,
Buenos Aires 46 4950,
Hong Kong ~36 (not listed in same data sheet as it is a "country") 6349,
San Francisco/Oakland 104 2350,
Atlanta 203 700,
Houston 149 1150,
Miami 121 1700,
Sao Paulo 25 9000,
Seoul 6 16700,

(edit: couldn't get these lines to break no matter what, so just comma-delimited them)

As of 2000, Mountain View had a density of 2264/sqkm, placing it actually HIGHER than New York. What? You would spend half your life on Caltrans in Mountain View with no car. In NYC you would spend half your life looking for a parking place. I don't get it.

Does anyone have more meaningful numbers?

1: http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/richest-cities-2005.htm...
Couldn't agree more. I think Amazon really had tried to design based on the user experience at the center and not colors/how it looks/cool AJAX etc. A lot of times you see a big letter from Bezos on the homepage and I think its brilliant. Amazon is basically what every ecommerce should to copy - because they have figured out what works.
The price of internet in the United States is already ridiculously high compared to the rest of the world.

Additionally, without net neutrality, monopolies could be easily formed.
Who exactly do you think the "informants" are?

So say I'm a dirt poor farmer in Afghanistan. I spent most of my time being terrorized by the Taliban (say for example, they burned my sister alive after they found out I taught her how to read). Now the NATO forces arrive, kick those assholes out, along the way they shell my barn and accidentally kill my brother.

I'm pissed off, but on the balance, I know the NATO forces feel bad about my brother and they at least tried to get him some medical care (which is pretty different from the Taliban's response to my sister's last gurgling breath which was to drag her behind a truck and hang her burnt body in the middle of the village as a warning to everybody).

So when SGT Smith asks me, "do you know where any Taliban are around here?" I tell him. Because someday NATO will be gone and I can finally get around to growing something in the piss poor soil of my farm and get on with my life. While the Taliban hunted us ragged when they were in charge.

Now I find out that my name and coordinates to my village were released into the wild and the local Taliban commander found out about it. I and my family are running for our lives and all some thoughtless jerk on a message board can say about it is that it serves me right.
May I remind you that the US isn't that nice to non-citizens?

Recent extra-legal actions notwithstanding, the US Constitution applies to everyone in the US equally. Citizen or not.
Sounds like an interesting opportunity to work on matching algorithms and data mining. And thats exactly how I would present it to future employers after you leave.

If someone had a problem with me having a gay dating site on my resume, I wouldn't want to work there anyway.
"A ubiquitous messaging federated service as an alternative to email? Now that's what I was looking forward too and simply never materialized"

Your mom is a ubiquitous messaging federated service.
This is something you end up discussing every so often. But I think its not about the fact they have ugly interfaces or that they are successful inspite of the ugly interface. I think its about the fact that they were a certain way then they gain critical mass of users, who got used to using these sites in a particular way, knew what to find where and the familiarity with the interface - however it was - grew stronger and stronger. When this happens, if you decide to suddenly change the interface to make it better/sexier/etc, you might be shooting yourself in the foot. I think its important to understand this aspect when you consider such case studies.
If a cop ever pulls that on you, lawyer up instantly. If you're not free to leave, you're under arrest, regardless of what state they say you are in, whether they have mirandized you, etc.
I second your Rimuhosting vote: their support is personal, ridiculously timely (I've had several support emails get responses in minutes) and just outright awesome.
I was going to say the same thing. The article seems very sparse on details of what is really being discussed. It's all talk until the details are public.

But my google love bias is probably a little transparent.
all that bad press in the blogosphere for nothing?
Well, they could be the one of the first to be reported as bidding for preferred access. I am sure telco's were talking "what-if" with content providers before this.
What are you afraid of - making enemies? Thats far too into the future. Alyssa Milano is a UNICEF Ambassador now. She used to make porn.

Do you have a moral obligation to working for this company? Does this company's mission fit into your moral outlook as a human being right now?
The Facebook comments Sarah Palin doesn’t want you to see
If you for what ever reason visited presidential hopeful(chuckle when ever i say that) Sarah Palin’s Facebook page, you would assume she is the most loved and admired women on the net. All you have to do is read some of her comments by her “Fans” they go a little something like this, “Tell it LIKE IS MRS. PALIN.” “God Bless you Sarah!! Thanks for all you do!!” “Palin 2012!!!!”. No matter what she says or who she endorses.
The nice thing about working for us now is that you can make your place in the company. We're hoping to find people who can fill more than one role. And of course, there are a lot of things that aren't on that list, like speaking at conferences and helping us review open-source CouchDB / CouchApp patches.
There are those — including some of the authors of the constitution you're talking about — who believe that rights do not come from written constitutions or governments, but rather that it is to defend the rights that we naturally possess that governments are erected by the peoples of the earth, with written constitutions or without them.

Perhaps this is a naïve view of governments and of rights. But it is this view upon which everything you are discussing is contingent. The alternative would seem to be that might makes right.
Total agreement here. I was very interested in checking it out, but I wasn't allowed to, in spite of all the publicity? It didn't make me want to go begging for invites, it just made me ignore it.
Yeah, you pick your employer as much as they pick you. If they are not ok with what you did in the past then they might not see eye to eye with you in the future.

The is always more then one job around. As for the adult stuff being career killer, I would have no problem hiring you if you could describe the hard problems you had to solve at that company. I would make sure the resume is filled with description of things like data mining, stats ...
You can safely say that about every chain that is found in malls and shopping centers.
Seems like a version of this:

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

I don't know why US savers don't invest in Australian dollar accounts either. They pay about 6 times as much as US term deposits.

http://www.infochoice.com.au/banking/savings-account/term-de...
What default security procedure does an electronic strip search replace, that is more invasive?

Removing your shoes?
What sort of nonsense is this? You do a search for tea party, which yields some small local organizations, with relatively no donations. When I refer to tea party, I'm referring to actual candidates. For example, Sharron Angle, Mark Rubio, Rand Paul.

Look at the PAC donations to these people. Look at the sort of people who contribute. You do a poor search and then conclude that I'm wrong based on your poor research ability.
Facebook's security check: Identify photos of friends' dogs, gummi bears
Maybe you were in a public school. Because I was in private schools, I had French in kindergarten and first grade, and then Spanish in fourth and fifth grade. (In between, I was in public schools, you see.) After that, I took French in 7th grade, Spanish in 8th grade, Japanese and French in 9th grade, and then Latin and Classical Greek in what would have been 12th grade, except that I had dropped out in order to go to college.

This was in Texas and then in New Mexico, which has one of the two or three worst public school systems in the US.

This might sound like a "nyah nyah my family is so rich" except that in fourth and fifth grade I was living with my dad in a converted school bus parked on a friend's lawn, while he was fixing cars at the garage on the outskirts of a small town, and then later we upgraded to a trailer in a trailer park. Obviously we weren't the poorest of the poor, since we did have enough money for housing and to send me to a private school, but we were far from rich in US terms.
http://www.jeopardytickets.tv/
Yes, judging from this and also a recent interview, he still has a very active mind.

http://www.hughhewitt.com/blog/g/3979a77d-720a-4853-8890-1fc...
My mistake. I swear I read that twice; apparently I should have gone for a third pass.
"That's not a conspiracy theory, that's completely making shit up."

Aren't they usually the same thing?
LinkedIn's Data Infrastructure
A little bit less so though, as planes fall quite easily (and quite quickly) from what would be relatively minor disturbances at those other locations.

It's kind of like saying walking on a wood-bottomed rope bridge is the same as walking on a suspension bridge. Except the rope bridge is a couple miles in the air. Essentially perfectly safe, but if one person cuts the ropes, you all go down. If someone decides to take out a chunk of a road's bridge, there's more danger to the people nearby than to the bridge as a whole; it's much closer to the same risk you run by simply standing near someone else.

Then, there's always those pesky squirrels deciding the rope looks tasty (ie, geese + engine). That's a different problem entirely, though.
Who’s Calling? Android App Promises True Caller ID
Too bad they'll never let something last 2-years.
The matte screen is only $50 more. The high rez matte screen is $150 more and worth every damn penny.

You can get the 15 inch i7 with high rez matte screen refurb for the same price as the i5 with standard screen.
The bottom line is what the money actually does in the end. It is much more difficult than most people assume to help people or solve problems with money.

Pulling that much money from where it is invested now means less money for startups, etc. It could easily be a net loss to society to have that funding diverted to charities unless they were some pretty awesome / above average charities.
Active Interview Case Study
Can't speak for HN but chat, like video comments, seems to prove difficult for many communities. Such features can be added but whether people use them or they fall into non-stop trollery is anyone's guess.

#startups on irc.freenode.net is reasonably active though and would usually appreciate a discussion on topics coming up on HN :-)
Ubuntu now has a StackExchange
This is really a key point. Outside of a few wave template buttons, has any of the core interface problems with the Wave client been addressed since the initial semi-private-invite-only release? Wave seems fundamentally the same to me as a user as it did a year ago when I first saw it. Yet users in general have complained about the same problems the entire time, none of which appear to have been addressed.
I think this is a good test for a (future) prospective employer. If they can't look at the experience objectively would you be happy working for them?
On the hearts of the million or two idiots that fuel tech blogs.
Interview with BlockChalk Founders
Could go either way. Apple would have to move away from their high margins on hardware or license their operating systems and services to become the Microsoft of the Future. They just can't compete on pure volume. Google has made the choice to put their operating system(s) and services onto as many devices as possible to reap the benefits of a massive user base. On the surface that's more compatible with Gate's vision of a Windows PC on every desktop.

I always look at it like this: If the iPhone disappeared tomorrow what would happen? We'd all get Android phones, BlackBerries, maybe WM7 phones. The mobile app market would be hurt but it wouldn't collapse because there are alternatives. iTunes? We'd just use NetFlix or Amazon MP3, Zune. If Google Search/Advertising disappeared tomorrow what would happen? Panic. Chaos. The whole Internet economy would collapse. Based on that I feel like Google clearly has its boot on people's necks in a way Apple doesn't. That makes the parallel between Google/Microsoft stronger for me.
>3) Anarchy is not the same as openness. Openness says I demand full insight into what my government is doing. If not me personally, then somebody I elected or appointed.

So you're OK with the status-quo? And what if it gets worse? Say, significantly worse. They're still the people you elected.

Without someone doing something like this, can you know what's really happening? I for one don't trust all the however-many-thousands/millions working for governments to behave responsibly, so there must be some kind of oversight. And without the oversight being managed by people outside such a chain (ie, the public), there's always the recursive "who's watching the watchmen" question.

At some point, the only people who can determine if their government is acting in their best interests are the people who the government is supposed to be working for. I'd rather have some way of knowing what they're up to than to "take their word for it". Their word has failed rather spectacularly many times.