skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used this argument for Java, but it's the same with C++.

If I can deliver a first version 2 months before the C++ version gets ready, I'll have two months to optimize market-tested algorithms before you hit the market. I may even have time to rewrite the sensitive parts in C.

If we are talking gadgets with embedded software, you may use a less powerful hardware and offer a cheaper product, but you'll have to amortize higher development costs and deal with a longer time to market.

For many things the world really moved on. C and C++ are still important, just not as important as they were a decade or two ago.
It's the BBC, so I guess the writer is from the UK. In which case, she is propogating the "I'm an idiot and I can't be bovered to work" attitude that seems prevalent among some of the youth there. Shame really, and from the BBC too.
5 Free Tools to Connect your Offices
Why Monads? -- A better beginner's take on monads
I like this concept and love what you showed using it. I just have no real practical use for it at the moment. Would love to see it being used though.
There are more examples of expensive classes in this followup story on Betabeat: "In fact, there’s plenty of demand for pricey Ruby classes. A ten-session intro class at NYU is $1,295. Ruby classes can run upwards of $2,000 for a three-day course. New Yorkers can get five days of Ruby and Rails training at the for-profit training center Marakana for $2,150. Codeacademy offers 12-week courses for $6,000."

http://www.betabeat.com/2011/12/28/that-2800-ruby-class-that...
Seagate failure rate is ridiculous. Just do a google search for " seagate drive failure rates" for proof. I bought a 256 GB Seagate barracuda back in the day and one morning it just spit read write errors after maybe 3 years of heavy use. I only buy western digital now. ive never seen one fail. If you have a Seagate then keep automated backups or you'll be sorry.
Rebuilding to scale is a bad idea IMHO. The moment your app takes of you have just about everything on your mind, but not a clean slate rewrite in a different language. You'll need to scale and scale fast. So you'll be tacking on hot-fixes for stuff that breaks, features your customers want, ... And the more code you write, the less attractive it sounds to rewrite.

I wouldn't try to convince the coders to use a language that they don't know but I'd really try to convince them to have a look at stuff outside their comfort zone. There's a lot to loose but also a ton of things to gain. Have a look at other storage options (NoSQL, ...), other languages and what benefits they offer. Think of running on environments such as GAE or Heroku that are not available for PHP. They do offer their own share of advantages when it comes to scaling an app. They do have some disadvantages as well. Maybe there's a set of libraries in a given language that helps you a long way, maybe there's not.

However, in the end I'd say that the language you choose is the least of your problems. Cool technology can be built in pretty much any language.
I have watched a few of the online lectures offered by Stanford and I can't help but notice that the audio and video quality of the lectures is terrible. The video will not track the lecturer, and the audio will randomly cut in and out for long periods of time. (If I remember correctly, one lecture was missing half its audio) Also, I am unsure of the class sizes at Stanford but it seems like no one can arrive on time to a lecture.
The trouble I have with the whole warranty idea for hard drives is that the real value in such devices is the data on them, not the mechanics. I'm trying to think of any hard drive that I or any of my businesses have owned in the past decade or more that could reasonably have been returned under warranty other than for being DOA, given the amount of sensitive data that would have been stored on each of them with even a few weeks of use. The only ones I can think of where it would be acceptable (or, indeed, legal) are the company ones that are in a fully encrypted RAID array, which was an experiment we probably won't repeat because of the horrendous performance hit we see on that particular NAS box.

In this sort of context, I wonder how much all these extended warranties were ever really worth. Do some businesses just return failed drives as a matter of procedure, without regard to the possibility of commercially sensitive data leaking because it was still readable with patience and/or the right equipment? Do home users return drives under warranty without realising that all those juicy bank details in their personal accounts spreadsheet might still be accessible to someone who gets hold of the physical drive later, and that such a person might just be buying these things thousands at a time in some foreign country with no goal other than to harvest things like bank details that can be sold?
What Facebook and Google are hiding from the world
Awesome, Groovesalad ! I had forgotten this one since a while, definitely tuning in right now !
"""Every person uses a different subset of C++, but that subset varies from a group to the other. You cannot therefore "remove features of C++""""

Actually you can. You don't remove them from the existing language that is, you make a better language with bs/redundant removed.

While "every person uses a different subset of C++" is true, it's not like everything someone uses is equally beneficial to have in a language. As the parent said, what is useful and what is not is not that controversial:

"I've seen three groups independently come up with essentially the same C++ coding guidelines (the Google C++ guidelines are a great example), all deprecating large swaths of the language"
That's not been true at least since Blair got into power.
ILineup HD launches for iPhone and iPad
It seems ponderousnessly unlikely that the principals of N-Control were not already aware of Paul Christoforo's loose grasp of ethics[1], customer service[2][3], and professionalism[4].

I'm not particularly convinced that the principals at N-Control aren't all that dissimilar to Paul Christoforo, or that he's not still somehow involved.

[1] His entire website is plagiarized: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0AnMPztotGCGadE1s...

[2] A previous example from 6 months ago: http://www.natesnetwork.com/Poor-customer-service

[3] They were dropped by a previous marketing firm when they brought Christoforo onboard: http://kotaku.com/5871400/cut-paul-oceanmarketting-christofo...

[4] The man can't even spell, much less formulate a vaguely grammatically correct sentence.
I imagine, that this space warfare as described in article will only be preceding the real war. once this unmanned missiles are exhausted . if invading force has won. it will try to land on the resource that it is fought for, (planet, moon, asteroid, space station). and once they are landed it will be more classical warfare. (so don't worry there will still be blood). so this is very much like trench warfare.

All this is valid for current technology . and same species war (humans vs humans) , but war between aliens and humans will most likely be war between Von Neumann probes. if you lose you got terraformed or planetXformed. all will be very quick and precalculated. so if you are not prepared in advance for all possible situations. you will probably lose. (or not be able to terraform). pretty much all you can do to protect you r self from alien Von Neumann probes is find it first in space or early stages of development and try to reverse engineer it.
You sound like the pointy haired boss in the Dilbert cartoons. You admit that you're not a coder, whereas your friends are "good programmers", but you want to throw away their half decade (each) of experience because you would prefer to go with a buzzword language because it sounds cooler.

If they don't have experience in these other languages, the MVP will take longer to produce and will likely be of lower quality if you just shut up and let them do what they do.

If you're not going to be coding this, or if you are but aren't going to be one of the lead programmers, then the choice of language really doesn't matter to you.

Why are you second guessing people that you admit know more about the subject than you do?
The Axioms of Entrepreneurship
One of the warning signs that you're working for the wrong people is that some guy who writes zero lines of code is making architectural decisions. Don't be that guy.
> We wanted to give Paul a chance. He was rough around the edges, but he had drive and enthusiasm.

He was cheap.
Insights on the writing of Steve Jobs
What's the saying about never attributing something to conspiracy that you can also attribute to incompetence?

Sure, it could all be a very well thought-out P/R routine. All P/R is good, right? Except now you've got hundreds of one-star reviews on Amazon, a league of pissed-off kids, and your company name connected to this guy for all eternity on the Googles. Is that worth it?
For someone who learned this site through my marketing class, I am quite suprised to see AdWeek make it on the front page of HN
The online lectures you are talking about are the ones on youtube. They are not the same as the ones used in ml-class.org. The latter ones are in a completely different format.

It is not just a recording of a "normal" lecture...
How do you assess the "rightness" of the platform before you even know the order of magnitude of, say, traffic or concurrent users?

I would love to rewrite my engine if it means I have a thousand times more customers than when I started. I mean, it's a win-win bet I'm willing to take: win now because I know the tools by heart, win later because I'll be making a ton of money later on and I'll be reingeneering a system I know by heart - which is so much cooler than writing fibonaccis in a language I don't know.

Chances are you're going to rewrite it all anyway for a strategic pivot, so why bother now with problems that you don't even know will ever exist? Just pick your best tool and make the most of it - premature optimization is also a form of procrastination.
Class meetings were optional (which I did attend) and only a fraction of the students actually attended. I don't have a problem with cs229a being easier than 229, but the thing is a lot of other classes have now turned to the online format with no alternative (like 229 to 229a). Selfstudy is great, but sometimes the best way to learn is from a structured class.
His website is entirely plagiarized from various other sites on the internet. He appears to have zero actual customer interaction skills. He is a classic charlatan, one wonders how he managed to worm his way into anyone's employ.
Cara mengecilkan perut
cara mengecilkan perut
cara mengecilkan perut Ntar kalo bagus janji deh saya order lagi buat web saya yang lain oh dijamin langsing
You can do a lot of URI parsing without a library at all -- it's built into the DOM of every browser, even IE6.

var temp = document.createElemenet('a');
temp.href = 'http://www.google.com/search?q=foo#blah;
alert(temp.hostname); // www.google.com
alert(temp.hash); // #blah
alert(temp.protocol); // http:
alert(temp.search); // ?q=foo
temp.search = '?q=baz';
alert(temp.href); // http://www.google.com/search?q=baz#blah

// assuming this is running on http://www.example.com:
temp.href = '/asdf.html';
alert(temp.href); // http://www.example.com/asdf.html
I wonder what would happen if John Battelle made this picture his profile pic: http://regmedia.co.uk/2005/10/06/battelle.jpg

I hope he does it.
Better not tell the embedded systems engineers, electronic engineers, os developers .....
You're a product guy, stick to that, and leave the programmers to what they know.

Nothing wrong with PHP. Some pretty big stuff is built on PHP. Don't go around trying to be the trendy guy, you'll just piss off your programmer buddies, then you'll become the product guy with ideas and no programmers to execute those ideas.
OTOH I had never heard of this product and now I'm looking into it.
Department of Defense Makes Move Towards Android
I disagree. Going that way you can use pretty much any device with web browser to log into. Desktop, laptop, iPad or even your fridge, if it has browser built in. Mac/Linux/Windows - it doesn't matter. There is need for any additional software, also no need for built-in webcam.
Social 2.0(12) - where social media is going in 2012
You may want to watch this: http://www.webofstories.com/play/17152?o=SH

Don't use something because it's cool, use it when you're sure why you should.
"If this guy has a booth at Pax east we will cancel it."

This isn't how you run a business.

Nobody sees a problem with this? This guy is an asshole, yes, but one bad email shouldn't mean your booth gets cancelled at a major video game show.

What if I wanted to do the same thing, but for a political opinion? would that be okay?
There's an argument to be made, but I'd still argue against it :) As a user, I'd much rather have a polished, pleasant to use native app that lagged behind a feature or two occasionally than unified junk. As others have pointed out on this thread, FB's gotta have the dev resources to do separate versions (though maybe not the kind of developers happy to be working on such a "boring" problem).

I think code reuse is often a chimerical holy-grail because in and of itself it is not a good thing; what matters is user experience, the amount of development work, how easy it is to fix bugs, &c. But developers still often obsess over code reuse, even at the expense of things that matter.
> Google+ is already more usable for me than Facebook, and they already have far better tools available to deal with an information overload that doesn't really exist there yet. I'm far more confident that as more people I know starters using Google+, I won't drown in updates I don't care about.

Facebook lets you tone down updates and the like as well. Also, have you tried managing a page with Google+ yet? Let me let you in on a secret: they did not make it very intuitive.

> A big part of it is that it is just too much work to clean up what you see to a point where I don't have to wade through massive amounts of pure junk to see anything that's interesting.
> No, I don't care what you had for dinner

That's not a Facebook problem, that's a "people" problem. Whenever there are people involved, you will know what someone had for breakfast, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner, etc.
Do you honestly think I ever thought about my dimwit-no-rocket-science URI.js ending up on hacker news? But, to satisfy hacker news readers, I added the terms "fluent interface" and "method chaining" (while preserving "jQuery-like" for normal folk…)
Ask HN: Would you recommend late application to YC?
Late application deadline for YC winter 2012 batch is approaching.

Does anyone know if getting rejected will lead to any penalty for the re-application to the next round with the same idea, product, and team?
First Facebook, Now Twitter: Social Media Under Legal Siege
I went to the London Transport Museum that chronicles the history of the city's mass transit system. It's chock-full of these types of posters from Transport for London, and also delves deeply into the design strategies throughout the different eras. It's worth a visit if you're ever in the area.
"According to @TheSchwartz173, twitter account of Eli Schwartz and N-Control rep, "[Afternoon Artists Inc.] was going to be a charity LLC as I understand it, it never was officially created. Just the LLC name was bought."" [0]

Paul Christoforo was also pegged a user of anabolic steroids [1] and has been accused of domestic violence [2].

Regular updates at Examiner.com [3].

[0] https://twitter.com/#!/TheSchwartz173/status/151883626227838...

[1] http://kotaku.com/5871400/cut-paul-oceanmarketting-christofo...

[2] http://www.gameranx.com/updates/id/4224/article/ocean-market...

[3] http://www.examiner.com/video-game-industry-in-national/ocea...
That is noted in README.md of URI.js - you can also find a (very simple) performance comparison here: http://jsperf.com/idl-attributes-vs-uri-js

Does the IDL stuff work in non-browser Javascript (like node.js)?
The future is absurdly interesting, I'm so grateful for my love of technology. I actually am sorry for those who does not understand it.

Since I'm just 21, the future is naturally hugely important to me. I've already started to save money for body/brain updates and longevity treatments. I'll gladly admit that it's more important to me than saving for a house/car or my pension. I'll rather live in a crappy apartment/with a crappy car for the next decades and afford to live 150-200 years (when immortality surely will be an option for the rich, which I plan to be) than to spend all my money on a house/car and die a natural death at 80-100 years old.

That being said, it's important to live life to the max now instead of delaying it in the hope of "eternal" life, which some longevity extremists unfortunately do. I'd rather die young with a life truly liven than die 100 years old having spent a life avoiding all potential dangers.

I'm positive and hopeful about the future. We'll experience a lot of hickups like huge societal and environmental changes, but overall it'll work itself out.

I don't understand the "evil AI" issue though. We'll eventually reach a point were it'll become difficult to seperate humans from robots. Humans will become more techological while robots will become more biological and we will eventually converge.

Research has shown that AI needs emotions in order to be truly useful or else it won't have a way to decide what's important or right, leaving it decisionless like people with a damaged amygdala. I don't see a logical reason why artificial emotional "beings" would favor the future of purely technological "beings" over humans/cyborgs - they/it doesn't have the same evolutionary drive to advance it's own species as natural life, including humans, have.

The real issue won't be man versus machine, it'll be superhumans versus poor/technological conservative humans. Some people still won't have access to clean water while others will enhance themselves to degrees barely imaginable today.

I'm not saying this issue shouldn't be worked on, but I don't think it's worth fearing the future over.
You are correct.

This is Ask Me Anything request. Normally done but not always successful.

What you can see is only potential questions to be asked if the request is answered by Mr. Khan.
HelpBrite - Get Help for Anything, you name the Price!
The problem is C is "good enough" and C++ is "complex".

The only serious alternative system programming languages have been offered up by Niklaus Wirth and associates. Not much traction among developers...
I feel like starting a Movement in Defense of Small Languages.
Can an admin please remove the parent comment?

We should not be promoting and posting links to pirated material here.
I am talking about the open courseware offered here http://openclassroom.stanford.edu/MainFolder/HomePage.php I am unsure if these are the same videos offered on youtube, however by taking a glance at the website it looks like they are the exact same classes.
Excellent point, which I've forgot. My mom and her neighbors perform the hatim during religious festivals using exactly the method you describe, without knowing one word of Arabic and without understanding anything. Reading in the native tongue is just not done.

As far as access to the contents of the Koran, Islam truly has some medieval qualities.
What's so privileged about getting a MacBook 7 years ago? Why does it matter that a 9-year-old kid's parents handled the "funding arrangements" (ie. bought their son a laptop)? And clearly he could justify one: video editing and iPhone development starting from when he was 12 years old.
I think you should stay with PHP, but you can introduce other sexy things like utilizing the cloud servces. Swapping Apache and mod_php with Nginx and PHP-FPM. Use NoSQL stores like Redis, and MongoDB. Take advantage of HTML5 and CSS3. Look at websockets and Chrome's Native Client. Think about resposive design, and mobile first approach. Design a REST-API, and allow for easy integration and data fetching with OAuth-authentcation. Think about building native mobile clients. There is so much to understand, and do these days that the language you use to goue things together isn't that important, and btw PHP is one of the best languages to glue things together.
Redesigning the Update UI for Mac Apps
"one wonders how he managed to worm his way into anyone's employ."

Intimidation?

Look at the mug on this guy: http://1.2.3.11/bmi/www.gameranx.com/img/11-Dec/paulchristof...
I usually stream AH.FM. Lots of live progressive/trance sets.
Hmm, a friend of mine from Criterion said that in two of the last games they did, they had to re-write the Lua parts (fairly significant) in C++ to get the framerate high enough as it's memory fragmentation was just too much.

They went from ~34 fps to ~60 fps for 4 developer weeks re-writing the Lua code.
can't access the article for some reason, but i'm not sure if i agree with the title--there are still a shedload of fairly significant applications and software written in c (not c++): linux kernel, nginx, apache, etc.

c is still one of the most efficient languages out there next to assembly languages, you have complete control over memory management, most of the compilers produce highly optimized native code across multiple platforms, and there are a wealth of system level libraries to do some really significant things, i.e. it's as close as you can get to bare metal without having to deal with machine code.

i want to be clear here because i have been on both sides of the fence writing enterprise software in c as well as more recently in java, python, ruby, etc, so i know the advantages (and disadvantages) of OO versus a procedural language like c which i'm guessing is the major argument of the article.
having libraries and frameworks like ruby on rails will significantly increase productivity and time for development, which in itself is a major win, but when you're talking about maximum performance, c is probably your best choice.

in general i think that writing software in the 21st century is still too complicated and error prone. if i want to write a web app, why do i still need to parse strings, perform database queries and such? why can't i have higher level abstractions or frameworks/libraries that give me this functionality. that's why i like django and rails, they seem to be moving in that direction (convention over configuration), though at the end of the day, you're still working with strings, arrays, and such. we should have software systems that provide even higher level abstractions than components and frameworks, for example, i want to create a social networking website that stores billions of 140 byte character messages, these messages should be searchable, this needs to run on iphone, chrome browser for windows, linux, etc. it would be great if the focus was on the features described like above and functionality rather than having to deal with SQL, arrays, strings, templates, css, ajax, etc. maybe the closest thing to this is like packaged software where everything is pretty standard and you customize only the portions that are necessary (maybe like twiki). i should never have to deal with SQL or even ActiveRecord (even though it's a nicer abstraction over SQL), all this logic should be taken care of for me, i should only have to define the high level stuff. when we get to that point, that's when i believe that we'll have achieved 6GL.

7GL would be where the software would have enough intelligence to figure out that it needs what features and have those implemented automatically.