skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like that Twitter forces you to be honest about who you're following. Then again, I have the same problem with instant messaging's Appear Offline (it erodes the value of the network, and destroys the discoverability of weak connections).
I don't get the analogy. Why do clouds need to be interconnected in some way they aren't now?
I loved it, too. But I doubt the idea with the penalties could work very well. You want high value with low entrance costs. As long as you can sign up anonymously you can't get rid of the jerks.
pstack, my situation is similar to yours.

I think that the difference between us and the people that they are referring to in that article is that we consider a house to be a place to live and not merely a medium-term investment.

I think that the thing that really lead to the housing market bust was that a ton of people started buying houses just to sit on them for a few years and then sell for a profit. The speculation fed on itself until it became unsustainable, then it fell apart. It is just a shame that this had an impact on regular long-term homeowners as well.

So, yeah, if you're dumb enough then so am I.
Microsoft BPOS Cloud Email Outage
I keep saying - it's actually irrelevant.

We need to stop burning oil and coal because there are other uses for them for which we have no reasonable alternatives. We need to start harvesting other energy sources because that will help other, non-renewables, last longer.

This is all true regardless of the global warming arguments.

Stop burning oil anyway.
Some thoughts:

It's a health site where I talk about getting myself well when doctors claim it cannot be done.

Besides your Mom, no one cares about getting you well.

Since I am also working on getting myself well...

Supposing I were sick, I'd care mainly about getting myself well. It sounds like you don't have the answers, so why am I bothering?

It sounds like you aren't selling solutions. So your best bet is to sell sympathy and motivation. My suggestion: make it more of a forum, allow other people to tell their stories as well. Focus on sharing emotions as much as sharing solutions.

Monetization will probably come from ads selling snake oil. Near as I can tell, that's the primary method of monetization in health related sites - selling homeopathy and herbs to desperate people.
Yes, I'm observing the same. The duplicate entries differ by their number of points it seems.
...says year old blog post.
I think if you tried it with light burns (e.g. minor hot water spills), it would lessen somewhat over time.
Wrong, Americans aren't dumb enough to buy houses until prices drop to pre-bubble prices.

Prices are still kinda crazy and unjustified compared to 2005.

Also, the average person can probably not get credit anymore and the wealthy desire only so many 2nd homes.
I know that C++ has some pretty neat features, but I feel comfortable and productive enough in C. I have never really felt that there was anything in C++ that I just had to have.

If I need to something higher level there are plenty of choices of that already, and C is a great language for extending applications done in a higher level language.

I think that the author has some good points. but I think both languages have the places where they excel.

To say that one is "vastly superior" to the other is a mistake. If C++ was really "vastly superior" to C then why are so many people still using C and using it productively?
Really great interview! Thanks for posting this. I love how he seems to care about his employees health. Taking everyone and their family to Hawaii once a year sounds not just great but smart also.

Do they really pay some gamers 20k per week? I haven't played online games in years but my first thought was "This can't work for Valve. How can a gamer produce so much value for the community in a FPS."
But then again, people were making tons of many back in the days of UO and Diablo II by selling virtual items. So, these people already provided a value for hard money, too.
In principle, yes. But that's not what's happening -- at least in my district, where I know the numbers. The per-student expense is also increasingly monotonically.
Smallpox is a weird virus.

A couple years ago I asked Tom Knight about the risk of someone ordering Smallpox oligos and making a viable virus. The problem is that it needs its own proteins to replicate. In other viruses it's sufficient to heat-shock the genome into the host. If we destroyed the viral stocks, it would be really hard to recover.

Nasty freaking virus, but I don't think destroying it is smart. I bet you could bring the risk of an outbreak close to zero just by vaccinating everyone who works with the virus and everyone that they live or work with. I suspect that this is already standard operating procedure.

Also, HIV is really tiny.
a no-shop means that if i agree to give you a deal price you don't go take it to five other players and "shop" it around by asking for a better deal.
You have to pay something to have a place to live. If you rent a little townhome for $1700/month for just 5 years, that's over $100k gone with nothing tangible in return. Even if your house will depreciate $50k between buying and selling it, are you worse off than renting?
Confessions of a red-hot Mac believer
Original Source: http://www.pyramidresearch.com/points/item/110509.htm

Interesting webOS is left off the the chart entirely despite the support of HP while magically the support of Nokia is enough to catapult Windows ahead of everyone.

If webOS and Windows are going to beat Android they're going to have to do something different than they are doing now.

HP just isn't competing with Apple on hardware. It needs to kick up its efforts by an order of magnitude if it wants to actually win with a limited lineup.

HP probably needs to go with more of an Android approach that seems to be winning against Apple anyway. If HP isn't going to license webOS out it needs to pick up the slack itself with a wide variety of form factors.

As for Microsoft it is a tough call. It has a better user experience than Android. And it is a lot more 'open' than webOS or iOS. But is that enough to actually win? Tough to say, especially when Google should make dramatic user experience improvements with Ice Cream Sandwich, the first handheld version of Android developed completely under Matias Duarte.[1]

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Matias_Duarte
There are tons of other types of therapies as well:

http://therapists.psychologytoday.com/rms/content/therapy_me...

Which one is "most effective" (by what measure?) is very debatable.

Here's a Jungian critique of CBT ("Psychology's New God") :

http://hbmag.com/jungian-psychology-series-psychology’s-new-...
May 21 Doomsday | Ver Telenovela Online
And I would guess they have a patent to show for it.
Why Did Microsoft Buy Skype?
Healthcare costs are increasing at a rate of 15% a year, give or take. Historically, teacher contracts lean towards lower pay and an 80/20 split or so on healthcare so the district really eats a lot of that increase. Plus you have contracted cost of living raises.

So, a 2% increase in funding is typically a cut in "real" terms, even if inflation were under 2% (which it isn't), the grab bag of costs for municipalities has a lot of healthcare and very little consumer electronics, so inflation of school district costs of typically much higher than 2%.

So, basically, yeah, this is not unusual, not 1-in-a-million, go to your local school board meetings and you will likely find them struggling with budget cuts and layoffs.
That's been true in my experience. I used to work as a die caster in a foundry.

The first few years there, the die cast machines were only semi automated. We had to scoop out the molten aluminum from the holding furnace with a big ladle. We wore gloves but you could still feel the intense heat of the furnace on your hands. Our work shirts were made of simple cotton and provided zero protection against molten metal.

There wasn't a day that went by when I didn't get burned either on my hands, arms or face. On night shift it happened twice as often.

At first, having a glob of molten aluminum splash on my skin was scary and very painful. But after a few months of it happening every single day, it was nothing. You just brushed it off and carried on.
I might be wrong but you might be splitting hair here. What I read was:

"Is it hard to write a small piece of software and sell it over the web so I can make 1k per month to pay my bills"
++, when I was in local politics we had a single student who cost the district 100k a year, several more at 20-50k, and the average spending per student was around 8k.

Federal and state legislators can pass an unfunded mandate ("I will not stand by while we ignore these kids"), do a photo op, then cut the funding going to local districts and take credit for balancing the state budget.

I'm not advocating eugenics or anything, just pointing out that after all the rhetoric and grandstanding, it's the school districts that wind up eating it.
I thought that was what they were referring to, also, but they keep referring to the rent versus ownership ratio as well as the maintenance work issue. I think they're talking about actual homeowners buying homes to live in, because of the way they keep basing it on that. Though I guess they could be using those to draw a basis for why nobody will buy the houses an investor is stockpiling?
The containers problem is the only one I find really annoying, and is more of a problem with the C standard library than the language. Using C with something like glib is a much nicer experience.
I think this is an incredibly important point. It's perfectly possible for each actor in the system to behave in the way that he believes is right and proper, yet for the overall effect of the system to be evil.

I'm sure that this is the explanation for much of the bad that we see, and as a result, those -- especially in politics -- who base their actions on demagoguery, attacking the individual parts of the system, are really doing nothing to help.
Indeed.

This article is more "why C++ makes this particular program easier to write" and is in no way any proof that C++ is better than C.
Sorry, but that is nonsense. Most people don't even try to think about it. Others, like the poster don't dare to make the step yet and ask.

And of course not everyone can retire at the same time as longs as we don't have a more advanced economy ;-)
Yeah, I think the credit issue is a big part of it. Whether it's a good idea or not, if it were as easy to get a mortgage today as it was in 2005, I'm pretty sure a lot of Americans would be getting huge mortgages. So it may be overstating the case a bit to claim that Americans have in aggregate made a rational decision not to buy houses--- versus simply not being able to buy houses anymore due to a change in the banking situation.
I stopped reading after (1). Nice rant otherwise. You might want to review your numbers though. Those of us who work in Java or C# probably earn a lot more than $35 an hour. And those IDEs really don't need 24 GB or RAM.
Yep, I saw similar trend pushed from top to a new development dept. in major bank during its first years growth. That said, I kept succesfully ignoring it and forcing my rule: I do my work well and I decide how and when - while reflecting the needs of team and project of course. It worked, mostly thanks to most local heads open mind. Yet, it's needed to push this contra-culture actively, things got much worse there for others since I left.
Slipstream is an interesting Chrome extension that also supports this feature. It is more powerful in that you can also hide tweets that contain keywords. I believe that it checks tweets as they are rendered to the page so you never have to see them getting removed from the page.

http://slipstre.am/
He might have a little bit of a point if he had any explanation for cloud cover increasing over the past few decades.

It's really pretty silly the way people assume climatologists are complete idiots. My suggestion: read James Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren. He goes into the actual science in depth.
Amazon's android market has some seriously onerous terms. Here's the IDGA's take on it: http://igdaboard.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/important-advisory...
I posted this in my own comment, but I agree that a lot of people won't buy homes until they drop even more. Unfortunately, I don't know how much more they're going to drop. There is a lot of artificially maintaining the value of homes, because politicians want to keep the voting block happy (people in debt with a family). I bought my home, because rates dropped below 5% and I had a chunk of money on hand, found a home I really liked, and was kind of sick at the thought that I'd just handed over almost $200k in just over ten years by renting apartments.

I make a solid income and owning a home isn't a trivial expense to me, so I can't imagine someone making a go at it if they have a family and an income that is half or a third. Prices should drop to whatever their natural un-aided point would be, so that all those people out there who will either never own a home or only do so by getting into unfathomable debt (all over again) will actually be able to own a piece. Imagine what the long term benefit to the economy would be if prices dropped just long enough for tens of millions of people to lock in rates on their own home? It would transform the economy as well as, perhaps, society. Owning a home would be the rule, instead of exception. Being in debt to own a home would be an exception. High rent would be an exception. There would be much more discretionary income to put back into other industries. Or, better, for people to stick into their savings so that they can retire with a home to live in and finances to support themselves.
Reliability and the Cloud - Redundancy required
Why C is vastly superior to C++:

$ cat > foo.c
#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char**argv){
puts("hello world");
return 0;
}
^D
$ cat > foo.cxx
#include <iostream>
int main(int argc, char**argv){
std::cout << "hello world" << std::endl;
return 0;
}
^D
$ time gcc -o hello-c foo.c

real	0m0.039s
user	0m0.020s
sys	0m0.012s
$ time g++ -o hello-c++ foo.cxx

real	0m0.182s
user	0m0.144s
sys	0m0.028s
Would be nice to have audio.
There are different "macro stages" to allow macro application on both typed and untyped source.
Psychology's New God (a critique of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy)
Overstock & RichRelevance $1M machine learning prize
Well, why are you buying a house just to sell it a few years later?

Your post mentioned at least four different cities where you lived in an apartment. How would owning a house have changed your mobility? What would it have done to your overall cost of housing if you needed to sell one house and buy another?
When the argument is that C++ has too many features that interact in unpredictable ways and are virtually impossible to get right, arguing that C++ is superior because it has more features is perhaps a fine argument in some hypothetical universe in which the primary objection to C++ is that it is missing features, but by failing to grapple with the points raised by the opposition in the real universe, you will fail to convince anybody. Everybody already knows all of these features, they're practically in the canonical Introduction to C++ pitch, and they still don't think C++ is great. Maybe you need to spend a bit more time listening more carefully to why; you certainly need to if you expect to talk anybody out of it.
I think what he is saying is that the agreement with Apple says we can't form legal agreements that include Apple's SDK and APIs, which in app purchase is apart of. This could or could not be covered under those mechanisms.

You might be right. The way Lodsys is going after us is for the button (or something) that connects to the mechanism that performs the in app purchase. Either way, as everyone else here has pointed out, it really is a sticky widget.
It sounds like their problem is solved by comment voting a la HN, StackOverflow, reddit, etc... But the article rejects these as not good enough or not innovative enough. I must be missing something they're shooting for.
Earth could be invaded by aliens, someday, and find ourselves unable to overthrow them. We may find that they are not susceptible to any of our biological options, either. We may start wishing that we had something like small-pox to unleash on their home-world. Not something we'd want to do lightly, but if they assert themselves as our overlords, we may have no other choice.
Great job measuring initialization time, now how about showing real world performance differences in actual large programs.
I don't think this article is about declaring C++ the ruler of all languages.

If you have an example of C being a better fit for a problem than C++, feel free to share it.
The "final straw" is easily overcome with unions.

Also I do not buy the argument that you do not have to follow coding conventions in C++ or that explicitly freeing memory is a bad thing. Also comparing the number of lines of code to determine the "best" language is childish. By that logic the language with the largest std. lib is the best.
> If C++ was really "vastly superior" to C then why are so many people still using C and using it productively?

Why are so many people using Java (perhaps even more than C and C++ combined)? Does it make a good language? Absolutely not. In the case of such simplistic languages as C and Java, it's their simplicity that makes them a popular choice.

Productivity: I am not sure all the C folks are as productive as they could've been if they switched to C++. Same people.

The complexity of C++ is not only in the amount of new concepts compared to C, it is also in greater risks of producing bloated binaries. Too much knowledge and caution is required to keep C++ code maintainable in this regard. That's a drawback, but if you ask me, I'd never give up RAII, implicit destruction and exceptions for C; I'd rather understand them better in order to use them properly.

And finally, the article would look much nicer without the insults closer to the end.
I don't think it's a blanket article, despite the blanket language. It is addressing a very select group of people, the ones trying to make money rather than meaning.

There are a lot of very talented people doing innovative things, but this might be my ignorance, but I'd say they are minority. That's probably because I just haven't heard about them, a lot of real innovation tends to go unnoticed. I find the smartest people I know don't like talking but prefer working anyway.

But something about the article resonates. My heart broke a little bit when I found out that multiple social networks for knitting enthusiasts, have gotten venture funded.
Flights London to Hong Kong
'Grove giveth and Gates taketh away.'
-Bob Metcalfe

The need for more and better software is insatiable. New platforms, technologies, innovations.
If the potential home buyer wanted to keep their monthly outlay at $1700 whether they rent or own, then I think in 5 years if they lose $50k on their house they are likely out more money with a bigger headache than renting would've cost them.

Without property tax, $1700/mo means taking a 25 year loan of $320k at 4% interest. Obviously whether this is too high or too low depends entirely on where they live, but again I'm assuming that they were getting a similar place for roughly $1700/mo in rent, and are comfortable in that lifestyle. That's also assuming they have the cash for a down payment ($65k if they want to put 20% down).

So, if you run the mortgage numbers, in 5 years, assuming interest rates stay at 4%, they will have paid $61k in interest. Property taxes over 5 years (where I live, anyway) on a $385k home would be $15k-$20k on top of that. If we factor property tax into the $1700/mo, then they can only afford a $265k loan, and only pay $50k in interest over 5 years.

Either way, $50k or more interest + $18k in property tax + $50k in depreciation + $15k in closing and real estate fees costs them a lot more than renting for the same time period, and that's assuming that nothing goes wrong. If their roof starts leaking, the deck collapses, they need to move for work or their growing family in less than five years, they are in an even worse situation. (One might suggest we should amortize the $15k in closing and real estate costs over the 5 years and buy a smaller place accordingly, but at that point your $1700/mo rent becomes more like $1150/mo in mortgage payments, so at that point the question becomes how out of whack the renting and buying markets are, assuming again that you want to maintain a similar living standard, and not be downsizing as you're turning 30.)

The obvious question then is how likely "even if your house will depreciate $50k" ends up being.
Many of these projects can be kept on "life-support" and still bring in a healthy profit if set up correctly.

How do you know this? I'm genuinely curious; is this reasonable speculation (but still speculation) or do you have some concrete evidence of this working for people?

What I've read lately about porn sites suggests that the days of easy money are gone, modulo a few outliers.
The Jargon File version 4.4.7 - Hacker Tutorials
Hey Mike, two questions.

1) SaveMyInbox.com is growing fast, and has now a scalable backend. What would you do with it?

2) I do develop a bit in Ruby, have a BSc in Computer Engineering but don't consider myself a ninja developer. I'm 24, currently working in VC, and moving to the Valley in a month where I'll be looking for a job. Given the current job market, would you suggest looking at Software Engineering or positions or aiming at other positions where I think I could be a better fit? (Product, Developer Evangelist, etc.)

Thanks so much for offering your help :)
is this an inflammatory troll submission?
That's compilation time, not initialization time. Compiling C++ is tremendously slow compared to compiling C programs of equivalent complexity, and is a real issue even on modern hardware.
So what is the cloud protocol? I'm not sure this guy even understands what a cloud is. Email messages all look the same (headers, then message) and they were mostly transferred on SMTP. How would anyone possibly interconnect AWS and Rackspace? Dropbox and Let's Crate? etc.
Embedded systems, 128 bytes of RAM. I really do just want portable assembly.
Yes - it costs far too much in terms of mobility to own a home.

This (and college costs) is why it takes so long to get out of this recession - people can't take a new job because they can't sell their home.
It is not about initialization time or even run-time performance, but about speed of compilation. When any non-trivial program in C++ takes minutes to build even on high end workstation all benefits that might come from it's "high level" features are moot.
Google couldn't choose to not renew a contract--effectively shutting off access to Android

Although the specific issues regarding the Skyhook case seem suspicious there are a lot of half truths talked about Android, and seems to be one of them.

I do not believe there is any technical reason you cannot create an Android device (Honeycomb excepted of course) without having a license from Google. That license covers the branding and the Google applications (closed source).

What's interesting is that far-east asian ODMs aside, no major device manufacturer has chosen not to license Google's brand and technologies.

So while there are handcuffs in the Android ecosystem, they are ones that the manufacturers choose to wear.
> If you have an example of C being a better fit for a problem than C++, feel free to share it.

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/
Process hack: Efficient verbal recital of ID’s