skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>What strawman?

You say that I reject survey results. I don't. I say that the survey isn't enough evidence to prove that Apple's customer support is better. So I don't need to give data to disprove something that hasn't been sufficiently proved. In fact, I'm not trying to prove anything at all. Someone else is and I'm simply not convinced. You asked how could the data be interpreted otherwise and I answered. But that doesn't put me in the obligation of demonstrating anything.

Moreover, you're using a fallacious argument: since the survey establishes that Apple offers better customer support, I have to bring data to disprove it. The problem is that the survey falls short to demonstrate what you want. The fact of the better support is not established so there's no need to disprove it.

That doesn't mean that the survey is incorrect or its results false. Just that the conclusion DF extracts from it is not what the survey says.

One survey of "satisfaction" measures a subjetive factor. To say "it's better" is an absolute affirmation. What's really "better"? Who is it better for? Have those customer experience with other customer support services? Or is the support comparing... Apple with oranges? Excuse the bad joke.

I wouldn't have any problem with a wording like "of course there will be cases of bad support, but current data suggests that it's actually pretty good in average", But the post in DF said bluntly that "the survey demonstrate that Apple's support is better". Period. I try to imagine what a customer that had had a bad experience with Apple would think about such a reasoning.
That JustHackit was mentioned on TechCrunch _is_ the notable news.
I've been told that Hacker News is "Anything of interest to hackers." This is on the front page, therefore it must a posteriori be of interest to hackers, musn't it?
It'd be nice to move away from obsessive hour counting. It's like measuring a programmers worth in terms of lines of code produced.
Give people the freedom to work when they like, and have good measurements in place to ensure they are achieving what they should be.
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Wait, I thought we were already on the 4 hour work week. Get with the program Forbes.
It was an interesting exercise. (It gratified my intellectual curiosity, you might say...)

How do you suppose memory management works in high-level languages? Magic?
I've used about 5 different tools and Camtasia works best on Windows for me.
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The C++ version will absolutely not be more secure; we find just as many vulnerabilities in "modern" template-y C++ code as we do in straight up C. We know how to secure C code, even if we are bad at it. Nobody knows anything about C++ security.

http://www.matasano.com/log/914/c-a-cautionary-tale-or-1-hou...
I had this up over my desk for quite a while:

http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~mjuric/universe/

People always asked what it was; my standard response was "The universe. All of it."
The solution to complexity is to eliminate it, not to hide it. You've nailed the big problem with C++ right there.
Pass a shared pointer to a library that doesn't know how to handle it (read: almost any third-party library). Now you've got two pointers to the same block of memory under two different memory management regimes. What could possibly go wrong?
"'We think it's an unfortunate situation,' she told ABCNews.com."

Are weasel words really necessary here? They think it's unfortunate that 40 flights were delayed? They think correctly
I don't know, but when I want nice memory management in C code (and usually, if I'm writing something in C, it's at least partly because I care a lot about how memory is managed), I just use Boehm GC.
Any good programmer can write good abstraction in any language--including C.

If your functions are huge, you should rethink your design, regardless of the language.
A map of the world. It reminds me that one of the reasons I'm trying to do the things I'm doing is to be able to travel more often.
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When you say "C++ is still one of the most widely-used languages in the world", you're implicitly lumping C in with it. C/C++ is certainly one of the most widely-used languages, but there are whole huge categories of products that are almost never written in C++.

Some of us appreciate bare-metal systems programming, but loathe C++.
here is the original paper: http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/p63-alfares.pdf
Wow. Philosophy really has added so much to the world that you people seem to have blinded yourself towards: Scientific method, traced back to Aristotle, or Charles Peirce. Both well known and respected philosophers. B.F. Skinner's behaviorism research which was pivotal within psychology; also a respected philosopher. I really can keep going on and on, but it doesn't seem necessary.
Philosophers have been responsible for turning heads in new directions, as opposed to just those logically connected to an idea. Those arguments which call philosophy not well thought out or baseless are looking at these novel ideas as baseless without some body of evidence to back them up. Treating the philosopher's ideas a hypothesis rather than their declaration of fact should satisfy some comments based around how they can be worthwhile. Try writing a 200 page book describing a large-scale system in exact detail which covers all loose ends, and I think you'll run into the same issues with vague-ness and seeming leaps in logic.
Half of the interest in philosophy is the argument, the debate and defending and fleshing out one's ideas. To turn out something that's perfect really detracts from the evolution of ideas. At the very least, this training your mind how to overcome arguments and refining your ideas leads to people of stronger characters, sharper minds, and a more diverse set of interests than just the issue in front of them.

Sure game theory describes a way to get what you want based on the circumstances, but do they go into what virtues are, how ethics apply, or even how life is changed by what you're doing? The ideas may not be set in stone and clear as day, but they make people think about different ideas and offer more insight based on the research that people have done than just "aha, this protein does inhibit viruses." The synthesis of ideas and cross-application nowadays is where science is at. Sure they may get there eventually using cold hard facts and logic, but every once in a while, a baseless argument ties in pretty nicely and can advance a theory more quickly just by making people think a bit harder.
Can you tell a story about how NULL bit you in the ass in real code?
My list:

* an editor, source control, firebug, parallels.

23 is sort of a lot. And as for ftp???!!!?
A list for those just who haven't found Eclipse and it's plugins: SQL Explorer, Subclipse, PHPEclipse,CFEclipse, EPIC. and Firefox and it's plugins: Web developer, Firebug, FireFTP I'm sure there are many more that I have forgotten.
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Can someone actually explain what it means? I'm not a professional programmer, but I haven't seen notation like that.
If you're peppering your code with malloc/free, it has nothing to do with not "writing your own memory management"--your code is just badly designed to begin with.
I've never seen an application impacted by generational GC. I have seen Mark/Sweep slow down an application though.

I have seen Yacc/Lex based C code perform slower than Smalltalk. I also know of instances where block cipher code in C ran 3% slower than equivalent Smalltalk code.

The culprit? Malloc and free.
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I liked the title, but the key points of the post kinda broke down into very boring and obvious practical matters.

I thought a more interesting point to make would have been to say that you need 3 personal blogs, for some reason or another. Now that'd be a nice, juicy, meaty controversial statement to make.
Ask YC: Why can't anyone compete with craigslist?
I can't figure out why no one has become a serious threat to craigslist. No one has even made a dent in the craigslist market share. Why?
Oh, and what's with the legal language? Its very anti-customer. You don't need that there to protect yourself. It just screams "go away."
Should I open-source my old project?
I worked as the sole developer at a small real-estate company a few years ago, 2005-2007. One of the large projects I built at the time was an ajax-driven real-estate oriented CMS that was oriented around us being able to list our available rental vacancies.

The company died about 1.5 years ago, and I still have my backup copies. Copyright ownership isn't an issue, so I'm free to release it if I want.

I've been wondering if I should open-source the codebase and put it out for whoever wants it. One thing I'm worried about is that in the 2+ years since I was working there, I've learned a hell a lot more about PHP, proper database construction, and frontend coding. I'm still very proud of the work I did, but it is a bit dated. There were a few features that were nearly ready for release before I left the company. They're still in the code but were never turned on.

So should I just put it out there? Or should I go through and update the codebase before releasing it? Is there even any interest in an open-source rental property CMS?
I guess some people here have a different bar for 'intellectual curiosity' than others.
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Department of Defense has also done experiments like this.
aka the "how to get 0wned" strategy
Computer games industry threat to downloaders: 'pay up or we'll sue'
The very grassroots way that CL gained popularlity is making it really difficult to dislodge as the dominant figure in their market. Since people were pulled in by word of mouth originally, and (generally) feel comfortable with the site, it is going to take a significant perk to convince them to move.

My thought is that it will happen in time if they don't adapt and modernize, but they have a great hold right now.
British Government Caught Pirating On Prime Minister’s Website
Palm, Once a Leader, Seeks Path in Smartphone Jungle
There is a good market for rental applications. I think open sourcing it would be a good idea, along with cleaning up the code.
No I'm not. C++ is widely used in part because it's backwards-compatible with C, but it's not even remotely a stretch to say that C++ is one of the most widely-used languages in the world, on its own.
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...I think that's more a hope than a definition (though you're probably just being sarcastic.) Anyway, I don't see why this story is prompting the !HN rigmarole. Bumbling government screwing with technology they don't understand in the name of protecting us sounds like HN to me.
I usually put a picture of George W. Bush, sometimes I put David Hasselhof. It's great to be free to do what I want.
a picture of a window looking out on some exotic location
I used to wish the same until I became a C# fan. If you'll ignore for a moment it's platform-specificness, it's a great compromise between Python (w/ regards to ease of use and productivity) and C++ (in terms of performance and some other things).
When I get an office I'm planning on framing the covers of books that have inspired me and putting them on the wall. It would say something about myself, be a good conversation starter, and also make people who use their degrees as a crutch uncomfortable. An all-around win.
What I've been doing with my failed startup is to cut off the pieces that are generally applicable to programmers, then clean them up, document them, and release them as separate open-source projects.

Most projects that are built as for-profit websites aren't viable without the support of an ongoing organization. If they were, some college kid would've cloned them, open-sourced them, and driven you out of business. So chances are, you won't find too much interest in an open-source rental property CMS. Techies will probably like it, but ordinary people want a business they can turn to when things go wrong.

That doesn't mean that there's nothing in the codebase that might be useful to people. Most good software is built in layers - the bottom layers are often generally useful while the top layers are good only for specific purposes. Think of the LiveJournal stack: the open-sourced LJ code seems to be useful only for competing with LiveJournal, but memcached and MogileFS have widespread usage across a variety of projects.
No. Everyone knows that there are little memory gnomes that run around your system, sweeping up bits.
Let the ignorant C++ bashing begin...

Speaking as someone who's spent the last 6 years maintaining large C++ applications, I'd like to think that any C++ bashing I indulged in was at least informed C++ bashing... ;)
More managers than developers, huh? That's actually scarier.
A problem is that there are many of us who work by the billable hour for companies that are legally liable if hours reporting is found not to be accurate.
I agree with Goladus, some people don't have room to manage time poorly. When you work in a factory it is hours that matter because the results don't vary greatly by the amount of time you work. Sure, extremely long hours will make a difference, but if you put 16 doors on 4 cars per hour on a line, working two more hours doesn't really decrease that. You don't have time to goof off and be unproductive. If you just went by results, your whole assembly line would be screwed up, because its, well, a line.
the good news is that it's easy to write extension modules for python when you need performance.
Okay, so you've introduce a third-party dependency. Again, how much work are you willing to do to duplicate a language feature that C++ gives you for free?
Personally, I wish the criteria was more like "anything of interest to hackers in their capacity as hackers". I'm interested in politics, religion, lolcats, and baseball, but I'd prefer not to see these things overrun Hacker News.
How about a widget for the iPhone? Upgrade Craigslist by using the iPhone that pulls listings, receive the classified and call directly.
The value of craigslist is in its community which creates a very useful network for selling things, finding an apartment, etc. It's active community also helps police it by removing spam, thus maintaining a relatively good signal to noise ratio. So, unless you are able to create a critical mass elsewhere, it will be hard to dislodge.
It's not a stretch to say that because you aren't actually saying anything. Leaving the distribution undefined as you did, we could also claim that Haskell is one fo the most widely-used languages in the world: it's certainly used more than CASL, the scripting language I wrote at McAfee in 1998.

I'm not arguing that C++ isn't widely used. I'm taking exception to the "us and them" sentiment I picked up off your comment, that the world is divided between those who appreciate C++ and those who can't hack it outside of Python and Perl. There are plenty of systems programmers who hate C++.
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This is exactly what you really do get in garbage-collected programs.
I really don't know what that means...
I remember one early version of a C++ compiler which had NULL #defined as (( void* )0), which caused all manner of fun trying to compile some legacy C code.

This was in 1999, I think.
Why should I willingly be a sharecropper on Massa Steve's NDA-ridden land when I can maintain much more freedom and control on the web?
Similar story (10 years, many gripes). But I think I'd still be in grad school if I had to rely on the blazing execution speed of Python and Perl to do all of my work. I guess I have a soft spot for the language....
if you only commute 4 times a week instead of 5 you're saving on commute costs, period.

The problem with your reasoning is that you're using regular mathematics and not (as is the case of this article) Journalist Maths.

It's one of those downfalls of us technical types, we only use real mathematics to prove points.

I for one am ashamed of myself.
You mean like this?

#define NULL __DARWIN_NULL

...

#define __DARWIN_NULL ((void *)0)
you're probably just being sarcastic

Why? If you consider yourself part of the HN community, and you find it interesting, then by definition it belongs here. Isn't that the case?

FWIW, I disqualify myself from judging whether things belong on HN or not. Many of the articles I used to think were not HN have been proven by popularity to belong here, leading me to the conclusion that I am not a hacker since I do not find them interesting when I am reading "Hacker News."

p.s. Now I will be sarcastic: ESR has stated that "Hackers do not place double quotation marks outside of punctuation."
Because nobody is willing to compete with a company that doesn't seem to want to make money. What would you do better than Craigslist? It's not clear that there is much (besides better search), and it's not clear that you could monetize it when competing against a behemoth nonprofit.
It's not just about how good the site is, or what features they have. There are huge network effects. If you're a buyer, you want to go where there are a lot of sellers. And vice versa. And Craigslist has that.

If anyone wants to become a serious threat to craigslist, there is a huge chicken-and-egg problem to overcome.
You can't accidentally pass a shared pointer to a library function in C++. You'd get a compiler error. Then you'd pass the pointer within the smart pointer and make sure the case was handled appropriately. It's not hard and it's definitely still worth it to liberally use shared_ptr.
Oh give me a break. Until the new standard hit, practically everything that made C++ bearable was a third-party dep on Boost. And the difference between Boost and Boehm GC is, I don't have to read documentation or even change my code to use Boehm.

"Avoiding third party deps". The dev team that embraced that standard sure sounds like a blast to work on. The wheel I can't wait to reinvent? Zlib.
Dude...seriously: there are garbage collectors for C++. They're not exclusive to C!

Moreover, the C++ garbage collectors are pretty darned easy to use, given that the language builds in support for custom allocators, overriding new/delete, etc.
This article starts off assuming that a four-day workweek entails cramming the usual 40 hour workweek into 4 days instead of 5. I stopped reading right there, because the idea of "Four Tens" or "Power Shifts" aren't new ideas and really only work for certain types of people in certain roles.

People aren't robots. Just because you're getting the same amount of time per week from them doesn't mean you're the getting the same efficiency too. 37S has already expanded on this topic and I fully agree.

I get frustrated with these kinds of articles where the author demonstrates their lack of willingness to think outside the box or attempt to grasp some counter-intuitive ideas on this topic.

A workweek of four, eight-hour workdays with the option to work into your 3-day weekend on occasion is the way to go for a lot of traditional 9-5 office jobs, IMO. Your "Four Tens" and "Power Shifts" are going to burn out a lot of people unnecessarily. What I fear is that some companies will start experimenting with a 4-day workweek by compressing more human time into fewer days and will be unhappy with the results they get, thus returning to the standard 5-day workweek with the claim that their experiment failed and 4-day workweeks "don't actually work". The State of California is experimenting in this exact same manner now (Yes, the State of California - the gold standard in efficiency, right?).

As for those of us who have been bitten by the entrepreneurship bug, I think many of us actually can be more productive in working long hours - maybe even as much as 7 days a week - but that's because we are energized and driven by our vision. And ultimately, it's our choice anyway.

Not to be an ass, but wake me when we're ready to talk some sense here.
I think kijiji is on its way to getting a foothold in the free classifieds market.

In response to your question , I think it's hard because the value of craigslist is in the breadth of it's listings and readers, not in any technical feature. I think a competitor will likely have to take advantage of an already captive audience. I thought facebook marketplace had a great shot, but it didn't seem like they focused on it much.
This is a topic I am thinking about in the recent days. A lot have been written about the platform being closed, approvals to the App Store, about being at mercy of the Apple overlords, etc., etc.

But anyway...it seems to me that iPhone app development is starting to be a golden mine for some time...the possibilities are much broader comparing to the desktop or even web 2.0 app market. Many little apps, which didn't make sense on desktop can become a success on the mobile phone. It's not a bad idea to try the stuff and upload something, what do you guys thinks?
Where did I say such a thing? My whole point was that C++ is just another tool, like a chainsaw.

You seem to be taking this very personally.
I predict that if Obama wins, happiness will increase.

Why? Because the current "things are horrible" news reporting will be replaced by "things are getting better" even if said things don't change at all.

We saw this at the beginning of Clinton's first term. "We're in a recession" became "we're in a recovery" after Clinton took office even though the recovery started well before said election.
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You can't "accidentally" do it; it's just that the only way to actually do it in practice is fundamentally unsafe. "It's not hard"? You know what else isn't hard? Making sure you don't treat an integer as signed in one place and unsigned in another. There's $1.5Bn USD of "not hard", right there.
One possible answer: you can make more money and with lower risk.

edit: and quicker.
Craigslist search is very good, I think.
> Of hundreds tested, in addition to humans, only four apes, bottlenose dolphins and Asian elephants have passed muster.

Asian elephants studied the night before.
Comparing a third party GC library to TR1 stuff supported by many compiler vendors and vetted by the committee is a bit of a stretch.
It's a place holder. The previous standard was C++98. The last C standard was C99. C++0x means "The C++ standard that will be finalized between 2000 and 2009."
This is exactly the point I wanted to communicate to the blog author.