skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't believe that at all. Google doesn't need Skype. Microsoft bought Skype because they have large amounts of cash in Europe that they cannot repatriate without taking a huge tax hit. For some strange reason, Ballmer has that obsession with hyperactively pursuing the same consumers that Google and Apple have. That's why he didn't see anything else to buy in Europe (Actually there isn't a whole lot).

But there is something: SAP. What Microsoft should do is take on Oracle and IBM instead of Apple and Google. They should make an offer to that large number of companies who want one thing more than everything else: Peace of mind based on an integrated stack. They are ready to pay up. Microsoft is the master of integration (some call it lock-in). Together with SAP, Microsoft has the most complete enterprise stack imaginable. All of a sudden even Windows Phone would have a place in this world as a BlackBerry successor.
Wrong argument.

Firstly, rented homes are not only from homeowners. Second and more importantly, for people that already have a home through say inheritance, or ability to pay outright cash, it makes sense for them to use it as a source of income. Not saying those are the only people for whom home-ownership makes sense, but the cases above are the easiest non-subjective examples to cite in favor of home-ownership.

And neither homeowners nor renters need be indebted to each other.
Compiled in native? CLR compile IL before execution.

In the next version of Nemerle we plan to create Interchangeable back-ends:
http://code.google.com/p/nemerle-2/wiki/BackEnds?wl=en-US

As one of the variants we consider to create backend for LLVM.
At least we think about it.
Am I the only one who has had terrible experience with Skype?

I live in New York but my family is from Australia so I use video-calling them to them all the time. I've tried using Skype but basically it's terrible. Poor audio, choppy frame rates and at some point it will start giving messages about "degraded performance" and we'll lose video.

My setup is a 50Mbps cable line using wireless (N) from a Macbook Pro. The other end is ADSL of varying degrees (1.5 to 10Mbps) on wireless (N) from a Windows PC or laptop.

We've basically given up on using Skype.

What works flawlessly and with much higher quality? Facetime.

Am I really the only one who has had terrible experience with Skype?

My point with this is that Skype is not the dominant video medium it once was, especially not from a technical standpoint.

What's more, video calling is becoming a commodity. I think we're near or above 100M Facetime-capable devices (iPhones, iPod Touches and Macs). Google Talk is available to however many millions of GMail users are out there.

Skype isn't even a strong business (IMHO). Most consumers don't pay, which leaves the business type users who use multiway calling I guess. But where p2p video calling is becoming commoditized, who's to say multiway calling won't quickly follow suit?

Basically, $8.5B for Skype is nuts.

It seems the one who really needed to buy Skype was Facebook who have no video calling to speak of. One wonder if Skype was "the last piece of chocolate cake" syndrome, meaning you want something you otherwise wouldn't just because it's the last piece.
I would definitely not be willing to pay my rent directly in bitcoins. It is much more interesting to pay in silly worthless fiat governmental currency.
Right, or remote servers on a different provider.
"C is simplistic and can be considered dead the day C++ compilers catch up with speed and memory allocation"

Those really are not the problems that are most pressing with C++ in the embedded field. Comparable speed is rarely noticeably different provided you avoid certain key things, and you can always just swap in a new allocator if you want.
In our case, using the National Weather Service site or a small handful of private services.
highly opinionanted article. C++ breaks at places, where the compiler is instructed to not optimize (debug builds), and say operator overloading have been used for simple types, which creates function calls, rather than inlining it, while "C" approach (functon calls) would've worked not so slow. Talking from real experience, after coworker rolled heavy templated C++ math library for all consoles and PC, that worked very good in release, but debug builds crawled to 10 times slower.

The problem is that this library forced everyone to use it's types, interfaces, etc. - so the effect was spreading everywhere. Instead you should only do such things isolated, and provie "c" interface (for example zeromq does that).

Also do not propagate exceptions to client, especially if you are some middleware not used for the core of the things (for example social service api, advertisement api, or anything small used just as service).

Better do exceptions internally, and provide error codes or callbacks for client. Exceptions do not work on certain very popular gaming devices for examlple, and the user of your library might want to avoid them for other reasons

so do your best C++ in secret, if you want, provide us C interface
People will absolutely bother to hit and run. Requiring registration makes moderation easier and keeps spam out a bit better.

Also, with voting systems, you run the risk of people using them as a bludgeon against one another. Sites like HN and others mostly work because the group of people commenting are very similar to one another. There's not a whole lot of reason to troll someone you mostly agree with.
You can look at my profile, other comments and submissions to know im not spamming.
I'm actually really against comments, which is ironic, given what I'm doing right now. Most comments either reaffirm the reader's view or make the reader a tiny bit angry. I don't think they're that effective at actually causing people to think.
ye, this guy is wrong there and in about a dozen other places in this article. notice that you can read all of this and not acutally learn anything.

welcome to 90s era tech punditry
Can we just all agree that owning a business is the real American dream and whatever you choose to do (rent or buy) after that has significantly less affect on your situation than owning your own business?

I would certainly rather own a business that generates whatever my rent or mortgage would be, than to own a house that costs me that mortgage.
Today Ballmer made a full day visit to the Skype development HQ in Tallinn, Estonia.

He also met with the President of Estonia:
http://www.president.ee/en/media/press-releases/6096-preside...

It's interesting that while Microsoft-related Nokia in Finland is decreasing headcount, the southern neighbor Estonia's Skype is looking to potentially grow.
Rhizome/AOL 7on7 live blog
it's a blog post, not article. the idea is to spur discussion. we've got 80 comments so far on the post. so it achieved its goals.

i don't totally understand why people choose to discuss the posts on AVC here at hacker news when there is a much larger discussion on AVC
So how would a very good C programmer implement this example? I don't think you can No True Scotsman your way around RAII and templates.
Just curious (because I've never honestly looked) - can you really lock in a rate for the entire, say, 25 year length of the mortgage?

When I asked a mortgage broker friend (Canadian) about this not too long ago, it was explained to me that yes you could lock in a rate for the "term" - but the "term" was 5 years, and after 5 years it would be adjusted depending on the prime rate, etc..... so from what I gathered you coudln't actually just get a plain old "25 years, x%" mortgage.
Yeah, healthcare costs have been out of control for a decade. But that's not the teachers' fault. I don't know Alaska but that seems high, Anchorage should get a better deal with their provider.
I'm watching Bitcoin along two axes-

One, how much value is notionally stored in the system. At this moment, it's roughly $51.4 million (6.192M bc at exchange of 8.3 usd), which is starting to be interesting. An order of magnitude higher, and it's definitely interesting.

Two, what can actually be bought with the currency? This is still lagging considerably. It's almost entirely trinkets or not-very-interesting services that have no marginal cost to the producer. No one has put much faith in Bitcoin by putting their livelihood on the line with it, and that makes it less interesting.

There's a fledgling trade in controlled substances via Silk Road, but having that as a primary example makes me considerably less interested. Not only am I not in the market for such, growth in this area virtually guarantees the ultimate failure of Bitcoin due to government action.

The right approach to grow Bitcoin as an actual currency which is truly exchanged for goods and services is to offer something that people really want exclusively through Bitcoin. The extreme example would be the iPad. One producer, very high demand. Dollars (and thus value) would flood into the Bitcoin system with something like that.

But where's the incentive for the producer? If you've got something people want, why would you offer it only via a currency no one uses?

There's your core dilemma, and why it's all t-shirts and domain registrations.
tl;dr: author feeling unhappy, unexcited and trapped, fears becoming boring, blames house ownership.

More and more Americans will be conditioned to the idea that home ownership is a waste of time and money, not to mention the inflexibility that it imposes on a person [..] That would barely pay for property tax, maintenance (winters are harsh), and landscaping (weeds are aggressive). [..] Another advantage for renters is that they can free their minds from the clutter that prevents homeowners from doing or thinking anything interesting. [..] The rest of us go to Home Depot every few days and pull weeds. [..] They withdraw themselves from the market of potential buyers, at least for 10 years or so until they forget what wounds they suffered and how boring they were when they owned.
They were looking to buy a house and some of the houses they were looking at were in such high demand that up to 25 different people had put offers on them.
Here's an interesting alternative perspective on Facebook comments, coming from one of its most prominent users, TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/03/facebook-comments-epitomize...

The flipside to this is that there have been a number of articles from TC praising the new comment system, so it's not entirely negative; but I found this article to be really interesting nonetheless.
Something Awful is also heavily, heavily moderated and it's a group of fairly like-minded people, especially in the subforums outside GBS. If I remember right, I think the $10 charge was more to recoup costs of running the site. Keeping out crazies is a side effect.
Apple, the iPhone Company
often it's the implementation for certain platform that limits you, choices of what the C++ supports decides by the platform vendor - for example exceptions, rtti, or even up to date compiler.

another provblem arises due to the decoration, mangling of c++ symbols (while c externs do not have this problem), and sometimes this is problem even with two different versions of the same line of compiler

another one is the runtime incompabilities (exceptions again) and different compilers.

this problem is so bitchy, that if you have to develop plugin for maya, motion builder in c++, you have to use the same compiler the products were compiled with, which is not the case for a lot of the infrastructure, os out there...
I'm curious if anyone on hn has experimented with their Qubes operating system; it looks interesting.
The importance of git rebase
+1 Use the right tool for the right job is the proper approach. Right tool depends on your project requirements.
Just seconding - being a landlord can REALLY suck, and is full of hidden obstacles. You need to be committed to it, get proper legal advice and do everything by the book. In principle (though I don't know specific state laws in the US) - tennants have a lot of rights. It's their HOME - even though you own the structure. You may not be able to evict them because you want to move back in. You may be liable for all kinds of things.

And that handyman close by? That's great - until he has a family emergency and isn't available - then it's 100% on you to fix.

I'm not saying the renting-to-pay-other-mortgage is bad idea - it's not, it's a valid strategy - but it's something to be taken really seriously, not something you should try to just pull out of a hat.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/business/economy/11leonhar... has some data on the price-to-rent ratio in various markets.

From a grammar perspective, I think this sentence is interesting. It is literally the first time I've ever seen a URL as the subject and first word of a sentence.

Of course, this violates everything I know about a) link sharing [0] and b) good writing, but it's interesting nonetheless.

[0] http://www.goodusability.co.uk/2009/01/dont-say-click-here-o...
yes, but you are not allowed to use exceptions, and the latter being major feature of the language puts one in strange situation.
Why Twitter should add the Vote Up feature
Generalities aside, the criticism of the post stands. It's pretty vacuous, offering no new information or insight.

Some writers online actually do have knowledge of Google's or Microsoft's position with respect to Skype, so when they say "Google/Microsoft wants X," they mean something more factual than "I can speculate that Google/Microsoft wants X."

In particular, I've heard from more informed sources that Google passed on Skype and has its reasons, contradicting one of the post's few concrete assertions.
Description from amazon:

Start Small, Stay Small is a step-by-step guide to launching a self-funded startup. If you're a desktop, mobile or web developer, this book is your blueprint to getting your startup off the ground with no outside investment. This book intentionally avoids topics restricted to venture-backed startups such as: honing your investment pitch, securing funding, and figuring out how to use the piles of cash investors keep placing in your lap. This book assumes: * You don't have $6M of investor funds sitting in your bank account * You're not going to relocate to the handful of startup hubs in the world * You're not going to work 70 hour weeks for low pay with the hope of someday making millions from stock options There's nothing wrong with pursuing venture funding and attempting to grow fast like Amazon, Google, Twitter, and Facebook. It just so happened that most people are not in a place to do this.

http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers-Launching/...
Australia has small and expensive pipes to the rest of the world, and it shows up as caps and high prices. I'd be surprised if Australian telcos weren't working hard to degrade VoIP generally.

For my own part, I use Skype for almost every outgoing phone call. I spend perhaps 5 GBP/month on threshold auto-credit. The biggest problems with it happen with concurrent upload activity, especially torrents.
Personally, I don't understand the anti-mortgage sentiment at all. I can buy a home at 5%, and then use the money I'm saving to build something else in order to make a higher return. Point being is that it's not always black and white (banks bad, cash good).

Also, though homeowners aren't the only source of rental properties, outside of city life, they are the most prominent. Either way though, the same argument applies. Without someone buying a property and renting it, there would be no place to rent.
The house I'm renting to someone in NC is being paid off because of my renters. It's not income now, but when it's paid off, that's $1k/month free to me.
You could build an infrastructure across multiple clouds. When AWS went down your software would automatically fire up more instances on GAE or Rackspace Cloud to replace it. A complex layer of software that knitted everything together would result in a large increase in reliability.
Looks like Mr De Raadt was correct:

"You've been smoking something really mind altering, and I think you
should share it.

x86 virtualization is about basically placing another nearly full
kernel, full of new bugs, on top of a nasty x86 architecture which
barely has correct page protection. Then running your operating
system on the other side of this brand new pile of shit.

You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a
worldwide collection of software engineers who can't write operating
systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around
and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes.

You've seen something on the shelf, and it has all sorts of pretty
colours, and you've bought it." [1]

[1] http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=119318909016582&w...
Generally agreed, except: let's be careful with the notion of simplicity. I used the word "simplistic" which bears some negative flavor (pointlessly simple?). Lisp is relatively simple and yet powerful, i.e. it is not simplistic. C++ is incredibly complex (dare to write a full blown modern C++ compiler?) and powerful. Not surprisingly though, the simplicity of Lisp doesn't make it easier to grasp.

From this point of view, languages that are neither complex nor allow for complexity can be called "simplistic". They are easy to learn, easy to write code in, and as easy to grow to unmaintainable sizes because of their verbosity. Since we have very few readers here at the bottom of the thread, I will admit that every time I see all kinds of dancing around class instantiation, endless method calls etc in Java, where in some other language it would take a single function call, it reminds me of how kids count the steps out loud when they go up or down the stairs. When you grow older, you don't count any more, it's kind of implied :)

And I haven't found a better measure of quality of programming languages than that proposed by Paul Graham here: http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html

Edit: just noticed downvotes for my previous comment, so no, we are not alone :)
I look at it like this -

If you could buy a business that was guaranteed to make you 1k-1500/month every year for the rest of your life, while also having someone pay most or all of the loan required to buy said business, would you do it? I sure as hell would (and did).
That's what I've heard anecdotally from chefs too; not just that, but the body adapts and even stops overreacting.
On the contrary, variable spacing from justification is very distracting.
More likely, and worrying, is that it could happen by accident.

Hashing is not the same as compression - we should all know that by now. Pigeonhole principle and all that.

In a 256 bit hash, there are 2^256 possible hash values.
There are far more than 2^256 possible values that can be hashed. Therefore, hash collisions are inevitable.

There is no way to take a hash and expand it back to a unique original value, or it would be a compression algorithm, not a hash.
> The bitching about bad compile time errors has been mostly fixed in clang.

Yes, IOW, it is a compiler problem, not a language problem. Because one particular compiler is horrible on error presentation doesn't mean that the language is bad.

> declared somewhere with static linkage, it can be hard to pin down exactly _when_ that constructor will be called.

The language doesn't define it on purpose. The language leaves it to be defined by the implementation because it goes a little beyond the purpose of the compiler. The compiler transforms C++ source into object code. You can have multiple objects linked together into a single binary, and this linkage is very platform and operating-system dependent. C++ is already horribly difficult to implement correctly; if the language were to define an order for static initialization, it would be stepping on the operating system domain, and make it even more difficult to implement on some systems.
Manually Turn Off Display on Laptop
Manually Turn Off Display on Laptop
I used AirBnb in Paris and my mobile didn't work. The host was gracious enough to send someone around to find the confused looking foreigners when she couldn't reach me.
I pay 10%/month to a rental company to handle most of that for me. As to the first - this is why you take a deposit, and why you have money in the bank just in case something goes wrong.

The first list is full of what if's...

As a renter:

What if the landlord gets foreclosed on and you are forced out
What if they don't pay to fix anything
What if the building burns down and you lose everything
etc
They Do let you suck down the comments it seems.
I agree with this wholeheartedly -- Microsoft's fatal error was assuming they would continue to be the dominant force in both consumer and enterprise computing. They still own the enterprise. Why they aren't happy with this and focus on taking steps to ensure their dominance there for the next decade is beyond me.
Forget Me Not - How to win the U.S. memory championship.
Not only that, but they (MSFT) have much less of an existing/quality solution in either the small business market or the enterprise *RM markets.
The OS-level stuff I work on is in C. C++ would be a disaster. When you are working in environments that /define/ the run-time of your system: Interrupts, exceptions, memory management, threads and so on, the extra crud is actively harmful.

That said, when I'm working at the application level, C++ is better at a lot of things.

Finally, my cow-orkers and I have an agreement that if any of us start doing template metaprogramming, that that person will be shot.
Interesting point about taxes. Can anyone confirm if this is how it works? What prevents Microsoft Europe from buying an entity in the United States and holding the new company in Europe? It's not like other European entities need to pay tax penalties on top of the purchase price when buying assets abroad, right?
> There was a time before SMTP.

That is why I mentioned common format (headers + message) and 'mostly' SMTP.

But for early email, allowing users to email someone at a different computer wasn't an issue of profit.

'Cloud' companies don't want you to use another company's products. Google doesn't want your docs stored on Dropbox. That issue didn't exist with email, and if you look at something like Facebook messages, you can't send a message from a Facebook account to a Myspace (or whatever else) account.

That, more than anything else, is going to inhibit 'cloud' growth.
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However, how many people stay in a place for the life of the mortgage? This is the flexibility part of the equation. If you lose your job in one area then while renting you can adapt quickly. If you own you have to sell (at a loss) or try to rent, at 3% of your cost. These are not features in times of economic instability. You say, "it isn't for everyone", but really there are very few who benefit from an illiquid housing market with low rents.
By memory allocation I meant memory usage by the compiler itself. Plus libstdc++ which is not easy to get rid of, and if you do dump it, you at least cut off C++ exceptions.

I once switched from C++ to C because g++ just couldn't handle the module even having all optimizations turned off. That was a huge automatically generated C module with thousands of functions. A rather rare situation but showed very clearly that C++ is not almighty.