skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the biggest problems with AOL content sites (other than the crappy content) is the discussion system. It's a step up from using something like Facebook Connect/Chat stuff, but it's still miserable. I never post to their sites (even on the MMO and the Joystiq sites that I even give a slight damn about), because I'm never sure exactly who it is going to say that I am.

A couple years ago, I made a post on one of their sites and was surprised to see it use my real name. I'm not sure how it did that (no, I've never had an AOL account). It disturbed me and I've never touched it, since.

I know the content creators have always despised the forum system, too. It supposedly was completely redone this year, but when I looked at it, it seemed exactly the same to me.
It worked fine for you, me, and the majority of HN. However, something clearly isn't working in the education system for the majority of students today, hence all the talk of "educational reform."

Nobody will disagree that it takes work to learn, and I am by no means proposing that technology is a magic bullet that will make learning easy all of a sudden. All I am suggesting is that technology can help make aspects of learning easier in order to allow students to focus on the more difficult aspects.

Just like athletes wear specialized gear to reduce unnecessary pain, we can use technology to reduce unnecessary work in the education system and focus on the actual learning.
Exactly. It's a scramble for symbolic ownership that obscures the fact that everybody is increasingly reluctant to take real ownership. Accountability doesn't scale well.
Very much agreed. When an organization becomes large it needs to make tough choices. In an organization built around product-centric teams, it may be easier to release products more quickly and the average employee may perceive a smoother course from concept to execution, but the organization will quickly discover that horizontal changes become extremely difficult. The frustrated product developer who can't get products out is replaced by the frustrated operations guy who can't patch unsecure systems fast enough. Which one is worse? For Google, I would say the latter. While it always seems like a tragedy to hear about "great" products getting killed, pre-birth, in the corporate mill, I much prefer my stable, high uptime, browser-performant Google to a Google that releases way more product than it already does.

Not to mention that most products (like most startups) fail. As a product-centric company, do you break teams apart after a product fails? If a product succeeds, do you take that successful team and move it to the other product? That may work if you're lucky enough to have a team with the proper skills balance (not to mention passion) to move across different products. What about career goals? People in a particular field tend to want to work with the best people in that field--a huge draw of working at Google is working with the best people in Field X. In a functional organization, the functions (almost) never go away--so the teams are stable.

Of course, being on the outside I can't speak for the problems that are mentioned, such as in-fighting, lack of executive discipline ("You will not launch your product because I don't like your hair style, FUUUUUUUUU!"), etc., but those problems are bad regardless of organization type.
> having laid claim to much of the best talent from the late '90s-era Atlantic Monthly.

Thank you for answering a question I'd had for some years now, as to how VF became a source of serious long-form journalism.
The traffic isn't all that relevant. It's what you can do with that traffic. GiantBomb is where the content is. Sort of like Digg may have the traffic, but places like HN have the conversation.

For example, GiantBomb has something like 6,000 (at least) members willing to pay $50-$60/yr to subscribe to the site. That's fairly significant for a two year old site.
I think what's more relevant is how well the standard library is designed to stay out of your way. Bloat and size are not always the same thing.
I think Ravi and Ciaran and the other contributors have done a great job with this project, and I thank them for their efforts. If you are interested in AI, and if you program in Java, then probably it will be worth your time to take a look at this project. That is true whether you regard Java as a 60-pound weight or as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Remember, a programming language is just a tool, not a religion.
"I think any solution will require the identification of individuals whose actions are "more trustworthy," and giving them greater weight, or more powers."

Yes, but the greater weight they get need not apply indiscriminately to all users of HN.

The simple act of voting on a comment implicitly indicates which other users a given user trusts and thinks should have greater weight. Namely, they are the other users who voted the same way on that comment.

A system could be developed which takes advantage of that information to give each user a personalized view of HN comments and articles.

I describe a scheme to do just that elsewhere in this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2405266
I have the same question, except the only difference is that I'm in at a community college in Souther California right now and I will be transferring and about a year. Right now I'm on a path to go to some UC and get probably a B.A. in Computer Science. I don't want to go into programming necessarily because my passion is really design, especially web related design, UX, and web development.

I just figured Computer Science would be the best path because I find it interesting and it will open up more opportunities for me in the future. However recently I've been discouraged because of all the math I'm going to have to get through.

I'd love to hear some insight about what would be the best way to get into the field. What school is best? What major? I'd preferably like to stay in California.
Yeah, it happened to me. I did a search for various domain names, but didn't settle on anything until the next or two and by then it was taken by a parking page site. This was several years ago, so I don't recall what the domain name was.

Since then I've only searched for names I've been willing to buy right away if it was available.
Talking to one of my professors, his experience is that if you get deep enough into C++ and use the STL, you get around the same performance as Java. I'm not a big C++ or Java programmer, so I have no first-hand experience, but I found that to be interesting.
> I think a government made of computers and algorithms has the same issue as A.I. What costs do you speak of? What sort of satisfaction?

The House acts as a normalization feature to vote indirectly on behalf of it's constituents, but this could be achieved in other way, for example, a simple poll that requires x% of approval. The approval algorithm could even be complex that uses machine learning and advanced math.

Basically, if regulation, safety and security is a service that citizens want, I believe the entrepreneur can best satisfy these demands -- exponentially better than any politician. Voluntary trade should always be a nontaxable offense, and regulation should be a competitive, non-monopolized market. Technology is consistently improving because it's a competitive market, this is not true for regulation.
You need gardeners. Which is work. But you don't ask just anyone to tend your garden. You ask a gardener.

Another way to think of it: a university needs teachers in the classroom. You can't just do research and have an open admissions policy. Someone has got to be providing training and feedback to the newcomers. Which is work. And you can't just have anyone do it. You need someone who's already had some training. A couple of thoughts:

1) You could feed those vested and proven folks with say, 1000 karma, 20% of their stories with top-level comments in non-descending order:

-- in randomized order instead of rank order, or

-- in inverse order, so they presumably have less cognitive burden to those undervoted great comments. Presumably it is less of a burden to skip over crap than decide if the 59 pt comment is really not as good as the 12 pt comment further down.

2) You could also add a more pre-emptive burden to rep: eg, you can't earn more than 10 points a day unless you vote on 10 new stories first. Feed a daily cookie to them with a popup with the policy, and encourage them to do it.

If you want an experimental focus group to pilot on, feel free to include me.
Ginzametrics (YCS10) is looking for a marketing / bizdev intern.
The Matchmaker
Looks fine on 10.0.648.204 on OSX as well.
Likewise, never happened and I've registered close to 300 domains and searched for thousands. I think if this is being done by registrars then they're using people to go through the searches and find ones that meant some sort of "value" quota. I have had domains I wanted registered the next day, but these were things related to "current" things, it was someone else with the same idea as me, that happens sometimes.
Here's a list of some sites that are not available in Belgium.
I assume that a lot of these sites are not available in Canada (and most other parts of the world) either:

UK Services:

BBC Iplayer
ITV
4OnDemand
DemandFive
Sky
TVCatchup
ZATTOO

US Services:

Hulu: www.hulu.com
NBC: www.nbc.com
ABC: www.abc.com
Fox: www.fox.com
The WB: www.thewb.com
The CW: www.cwtv.com
USA Network: www.usanetwork.com

France Services:

M6replay: www.M6replay.fr

Netherlands Services:
RTL: Rtl.nl
The key point, IMO is the fact that C++ compilers are essentially a black box, and you cannot guarantee the code that will be output. When you write C code, you pretty much know exactly what the assembly, and thus machine, code will look like (obviously this will vary based upon the compiler optimizations used). This is not true of C++, which is why it is not the most suitable language to write kernel code in. Kernel software is so critical that it is not wise to cede control to a baroque compiler. Especially when C can do everything C++ can (trivia fact: the original C++ compiler was simply a preprocessor that converted the code into C).
"... because it divided the community into haves and have-nots. ..."

Isn't this is a logical inconsistency? There seems to be no problem dividing the community into haves and have-nots when it comes to post quality.
Everyone ends up being like Microsoft
Everyone ends up being like Microsoft
The thing is, this team at Engadget has a really tight bond with its core fans ... their podcasts were more like listening in on a conversation between best friends rather than formal tech podcasts. It was just their style -- they/Josh wanted to up the game as far as they could, I mean, take a look at The Endgadget Show. Hell, compare their progress with Gizmodo's. I just feel like I have lots of faith in this team and Josh.
How big is something like python?
or just find a bunch of people and refer them to dropbox. I have over 10 gig just from referrals. Mind you then you become so dependent on it that once the free space is in use, you will have to upgrade. However at that point, you will gladly pony up $99.
I once wrote a function which uses MMX to convert a (possibly very large) string to lowercase. That was pretty much faster than the library's strlwr() function. http://codepad.org/BeDqS1Ws
I'm playing by ear, but the one thing that stands out after reading the book is the display of karma (user / comment / post scores). One thing the book emphasizes is that if you display karma prominently, users will feel motivated to perform actions that will improve their numbers. This means perhaps going for a witty one-liner instead of a comment contrary to the community beliefs that could be downvoted into oblivion. More here:

http://buildingreputation.com/writings/reputation_wednesday/
It's amazing how easy it is to avoid singing the IP contract. I've had 4 engineering jobs each with big name companies, and have never actually signed it.

I've handed the stack of paperwork back unsigned, I've amended contracts and initialled, I've "lost" that specific page.
This is cool, but even cooler for me was learning that WebGL exists!
Really curious as to what their mission was/is.
Really interesting article. This would make for an excellent movie.
It can't be that much of a public persona. I've never heard of him. Then again, I've never watched Jimmy Fallon (I know it's a late night show, but that's it). How much traction is that going to have with a general public? Not much, I suspect. I don't argue that some sites have a very distinct personality behind the content, but from the little I could tolerate of Engadget's very repetitive and unoriginal content was that the personalities were largely irrelevant. Maybe that's a misread on my part, but that's the impression I've come away with.
I've never done a degree in web design, but in my opinion they're not at all valuable. Design is one of the very few things where your portfolio matters, not your qualifications. I mean sure a degree in design won't hinder you, but I would personally spend the time and money on building up a portfolio, unless you believe you will learn enough to justify the cost.

A degree in web design will not make or break you, web design is a skill that can't be "made" with a degree, unlike some professions.
I remember reading this years ago. It eventually gets into why the Linux kernel isn't written in C++, but the beginning of the discussion starts with an innocent question about how to port a legacy kernel module that was written in C++ for 2.4 and no longer works with 2.6.

The OP is roundly criticized for even considering writing a kernel module in C++. The authors of the module had to patch the Linux kernel heavily to make the headers compile as C++, and of course the patches for 2.4 don't all work for 2.6.

I can agree that if you patch the crap out of an open source project, be it the kernel or just a library, to make it work with your own code, then you get what you deserve when it gets out of sync with the upstream version and no longer is compatible. How could it be otherwise?

But as an experienced C++ hacker I disagree with the argument the C hackers made in the discussion that "you just can't use C++ there, you must use C" (to paraphrase).

The problem isn't that they chose the "wrong" language, it's just that they interfaced the C++ code with the C (kernel) code incorrectly. The Right Way would be to simply write a compatibility layer in C that calls functions in the C++ code. And the C++ code could in turn call back to C functions in the compatibility layer when they need to interface with some kernel data structure. Although performance is listed as an issue, they specifically say that their module gets its performance benefit by not having to copy packet data to user space. They would still get this benefit, even if they had the minuscule extra time it takes to make a call through a C/C++ compatibility layer.
I certainly haven't found that to be the case for my routine uses of the STL. Vector iteration, map lookup, applications of the various STL algorithms etc are all very fast in the code in which I've put them to use. Maybe this doesn't hold for more sophisticated uses.

For example, I see no discernible overhead at all in iterating through an std::vector vs a bare C array.
This couldn't be the 7 year old post about how Linus tried C++ 19 years ago and it sucked, could it?

Personally I think it doesn't even matter. The kernel is stuck with C, they couldn't port it even if they wanted to.
> In my experience language shootouts in general are often terrible by design

My experience is that this is the sort of thing where everyone rags on it, but no one actually attempts to provide something "better".
VICTOR HUGO
Kinspir is finally launched 3 years of work
If you're concerned about frontrunning, use http://instantdomainsearch.com. It was written by YC alum Beau Hartshorne, and I can personally vouch for his trustworthiness. We use it every batch to find new names for startups.
It's broken as described in the article for me.
Chromium 12.0.712.0 (0), Gentoo Linux (~x86).
This was also true in 2003. http://scribblethink.org/Computer/javaCbenchmark.html It wouldn't surprise me if there were many areas that Java outperforms C++ nowadays.
Lord of War is a great movie about arms dealers. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399295/.
There have been claims that Tron: Legacy was produced not as a movie, but as a 2-hour music video for Daft Punk. And I don't really mind that :)
The STL does lead to increased memory consumption and code bloat, however. It is wholly unacceptable to use the STL in any embedded system, or kernel-level OS code.
The question is, did he switch his domain registrations away from them?
Hmm, maybe you're right.
We've listed a bunch of these types of internships on my startup's website. (collegejobconnect.com)

Shoot me an email if you want, my contact info is in my profile.
There are a couple CAD schools you can choose from SCAD and MCAD are the most well known. Other art schools include RISD, Ringling and SVA. I'd also consider MICA simply because of their awesome study abroad program.

Its slightly tricky with private colleges that offer BFAs, because they may label a course as Interactive Media or Multimedia, when it really means New Media Art as opposed to strictly web design. A lot of schools offer a mix of motion graphics and graphic design as well.

Other schools you can consider are the unaccredited Art Institute, and Full Sail. I've heard nothing but bad things about the latter so I would avoid it. If your looking for strictly trade learning and no conceptual new media nonsense Ai might be good to consider. Keep in mind though that you won't be able to transfer credits earned there anywhere else.

If you aren't interested in unaccredited schools you should also check out your local community colleges offerings the credits you earn there will transfer to private art colleges if you change your mind later and find one that you like.

Before applying for schools check and see whether or not they require a portfolio, I think a lot of the private art colleges do. Your portfolio is very important in the case that one is required; at the college I attend each prospective student is rated, and accepted, based on a 5 point scale; portfolio is worth 3pts, letter of interest 1pt and SAT/ACT scores are worth 1pt.

Edit:
I'm going to disagree with people who are saying that you should learn design on your own. Good graphic design needs to be taught you need to understand grids, hierarchy and be able to create intelligent systems that accurately convey your information. Unless you're actively involved in these sort of discussions where you're learning from a peer-group you won't get the kind of knowledge a design professor with an MFA can give you.
You also need to think about opportunity cost. While many smart people can do the research and figure out how to maximize returns, often it's worth the lower return to to have to worry about it. The time you would spend micro managing the investment just may not be be worth it to many people. Their time is better spent doing other things.
Congratulations!

Not to be a downer on your release, but what is it? It took me following multiple links to get to http://blog.kinspir.com/what-is-kin-spir/, and I still have no idea what you've spent 3 years building.

You may have a great product, and with 3 years of development, you need to spend some time on marketing. Tell us what it is and why we need it. Your 'What is Kinspire' doesn't 'inspire' me to want to use it. I don't get it.
Technical debt and the making of payments on it
I've never even heard of such a thing as a degree in web-design, so I don't know if that's a real thing or not. I'd probably suggest focusing on design in general rather than "web" design. Maybe even things like product design. Things that you could apply in an artistic and aesthetic context to any career choice.

The technical aspect is something you can probably pick up on your own, though it's a bit more of a chore today than a decade ago when you could truly teach yourself 90% of what was out there in a few months.

Of course, this is all assuming you're talking about being the artistic guy. If you're talking about infrastructure -- from hardware planning to databases to writing the engine for sites on the back-end, I'd go for a more CS-flavored education.

I think the big problem today remains what it was ten years ago, however. And the same problem fields like the video game industry suffer. Everyone wants to get into them. That drops your marketability and power of negotiation. Unless you're a truly top-tier individual who has something to bring that almost nobody else in the industry can and you can really make a niche for yourself.
You have linked to a known poor/very old benchmark. And for the record, there aren't many areas where Java outperforms C++ today.
The WHOIS database operator is the registry, not a registrar. (I believe they're actually required to be separate entities.) So, unless there's a shady back-room deal going on between the registry and one of their registrars, the registry has no incentive to log their queries.
Really interesting read. Funny that evidence against them was their email.
That is incorrect. It is not used (or rather a standard STL is not used) because it depends on exceptions and dynamic memory allocations.

The STL code is highly optimized and there should be no technical reason why it would consume more memory or lead to code bloat.
sadly Flash will try a direct socket connection first and just ignore your system's proxy settings...
How long is long term though? If I'm reading this right, the highest generator of heat is naturally radioactive thorium, which has a half-life of about 14 billion years. The Earth is only about 4.54 billion years old.
This is the most depressing weekend project I've ever seen here.

Keep up the good work, though. :)
I think to call C++ compilers a black box and then turn around and say something like gcc is not is a bit of a stretch, and simply unfair to C++. The largess of the GNU C compiler is the very definition of a black box. If you're going to run off and do loads of systems programming, you're going to have to understand exactly how your black box works. This is still very possible with C++, it's just a lot more complicated given the semantics of the language.

I think this back and forth sort of breaks down because people say things like C and C++ and it's not clear if they're talking about

1) The languages themselves.
2) The compilers
3) Possible runtimes and other overhead that need to be considered in a stereotypical environment (that is, probably not kernel coding). It tweeks me every time we get into a language war, because a lot of the time the language itself isn't the real point of discussion, but rather it's some sideways way of referring to the toolchain that's popular at the given moment. C++ as a language could very well be tooled to write a kernel, given a good compiler and a semantics that coders stick to (just like C). I feel like the C++/HLL camps are crying for something other than C because they're not interested in the super low level details, but still would like to eek some functionality out of the kernel. They're basically saying, "we would prefer tools other than C" (regardless of whether C++ is a worthwhile and better option, I am unconvinced).

I think an even more interesting conversation to have would be: have operating systems kernels become TOO COMPLEX to code in (just) C/ASM? Are we in over our heads? Should we invest in the creation of better tools to handle such large, complex systems or is everything just fine?

DISCLAIMER: I actually don't like programming in C++. I will put up with C, but I usually find myself writing in Ruby or Haskell.
Others have already conveyed much of what I wished to repeat. Just to add to that -

Don't get a degree in web design, this is a thing that evolves and you can learn on your own. If creating illustrations has been a pain for you, go for a degree that adds on the missing slices, like a course in fine arts.