skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html

Scroll down to Appendix: Power.

The Perl solution is close to the Lisp solution in terms of brevity. The solution in other languages tend to be longer or the problem can't be solved at all.

Choice quote:

"In the rivalry between Perl and Python, the claim of the Python hackers seems to be that that Python is a more elegant alternative to Perl, but what this case shows is that power is the ultimate elegance: the Perl program is simpler (has fewer elements), even if the syntax is a bit uglier."
There's definitely good C++ code; the MIT PDOS Click router (http://www.read.cs.ucla.edu/click/) is another great example. But there's good Perl too.

I'd definitely use LLVM before I hacked up GCC.
That was my point: Orkut does disproportionately badly in Alexa because the Brazilian and Indian users don't have the toolbar installed.
"Individuals showing more ability in math had greater accomplishments in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, while those showing greatest ability on the verbal portion of the test went on to excel in the humanities, art, history, literature, languages, drama and related fields."

If someone's gifted at X at 13, they will likely continue in X after high school. This finding is obvious, and may or may not apply to kids in general.
Startup uses Paris Hilton to kickstart mobile content marketplace
Small games company MyNumo uses Paris Hilton iPhone game to launch marketplace for publishers.
I'd trust the SAT scores of 13 year olds more than the SAT scores of college applicants. Few if any in this sample would have been taking classes in how to beat the test.
"I'm editing this in the e text editor, a Windows clone of TextMate, which is coming along nicely but could still use some polish before I'm ready to switch to it full time."

Oh snap, he's not using CityDesk anymore! Take that, Visual Basic 6!
Fair enough. Do you have the Alexa toolbar installed? The point is most of here don't.

Anyways, which other global traffic analyzer do you recommend for this comparison?
Or how about just keeping the music on a server like anywhere.fm instead of on some client device?
"...which is a focus of the new $43 billion America Competes Act recently passed by Congress to enhance the United States' ability to compete globally."

I know a simpler way to do that for the same amount of money: pay a million kids $43,000 not to watch TV and spending 5-20 hours a week reading books that interest them.
> Whatever the reason, however, don't put down the kids that got the A's. They didn't get there because of obedience to authority. They got there because they're on the ball. They can process multiple streams of information, and they have trained their mind to think hard, produce subtle, nuanced arguments, and find deep connections between ideas -- all traits, ironically, that most entrepreneurs would say are important.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
But that would mean 24x7x365 Internet (WiFi?) access, besides the costs imposed by the ISP for downstreams. Local storage, or maybe "clanned' style data serving (i.e. group cell networks operating within a few miles) would be better.
Makes a valid point, but it doesn't mean that Microsoft is no longer a pain in the ass. My boss's experiment in upgrading a few machines in our office to Vista has been the bane of my existence recently. Jesus christ.
I wouldn't, because the data point of students taking the SAT's in middle school is just a reflection of how affluent and/or educated the child's family is. I don't think that would reflect on the student's abilities very well, especially at 13.
The key here is to learn from the master.
Let's not get carried away and take a reasonable argument in new directions and also to the extreme.

--> "College is.. a vacation. Please, please, please, don't confuse success in school with success in anything that actually matters."

There are some fields where discipline, jumping through (seemingly arbitrary) hoops, and ability to study/capture knowledge is a reasonable indicator of success, e.g., medicine. I'll bet that a student who can't stick through the pre-med requirements is not going to get through the four years of mind-numbing med school and another four to seven years of residency.

--> "Face it, what people in the isolated world of college call 'work' is what people who pay their bills call 'time off'."

I'm not sure if you'd be studying organic chemistry on your time off, and I'm very sure some college students pay their own bills. (I did. I got classified as a grad student very early and paid my way through Stanford via half-time research & programming jobs.)

So while I'm probably going to be down-modded for sticking up for the feckless idiots who decide to spend their time learning things in college, particularly the "elite" ones, I figure I should point out when the anti-college viewpoint gets taken too far. While some may view college as a "vacation", others actually use the resources of a top institution. They get access to cutting-edge faculty, computers, lab equipment, and research that's not being done at smaller institutions. Not everybody is hoping to build a business. And for some professions, there's a wide and deep knowledge base that has to be mastered before you can start work. I know one mother who returned to college after raising her kid and slogged through pre-med studies. It was hardly a vacation. Her success in school mattered.
If you keep your images (and CSS, and Javascript) in a /static directory, the built-in webserver will serve them automatically. When you deploy to production you can setup aliases in your HTTP conf to handle it.
Excellent comment. It's true that outside of homework, college is a great place to put off getting a job for about 4 years :)
The potentially scary question for me is: how many kids who get As on their Kant papers think they really understand Kant because of it? The kids I hung out with all acknowledged that they were just bullshitting to get the grade, but I don't know if most kids would admit that even to themselves.
Gotta admit: "Apple is an abusive monopolist because the iPod doesn't have an FM receiver" is an awesome argument. Way to go, PC World!
The employer, like other employers, is taking advantage of pro-corporate government to treat people like shit.
Same here lol but I'm 25.
Apple seeks TV price cut - Apple wants to sell TV shows for 99c!
Actually, I'll have to disagree. Studying organic chemistry beats changing baby diapers any day...
What I don't like about this article is that it doesn't describe the study's definition of success - a part from stupid sound bites that are almost useless.

"Individuals showing more ability in math had greater accomplishments in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, while those showing greatest ability on the verbal portion of the test went on to excel in the humanities"

who was the lead researcher - captain obvious?

"They earned a total of 817 patents and published 93 books."

Quantity does not equal quality.

"Of the 18 participants who later earned tenure-track positions in math/science fields at top-50 U.S. universities"

It's been pretty well known for years that academic tests are good predictors of future academic success (but it's not great for anything else)
You are right, it would've been a poor argument if that's all they said. I'm not sure I agree with the entire article, but your comment had led me to believe that was the basis of their argument, and it isn't.

People love iPods (including me; my family of four has purchased 12 iPods in the past few years). But iPods come bundled with iTunes. Want to buy music from Apple? Guess what? You must install iTunes. Want an Apple cell phone from AT&T? Yep! ITunes is required even if you want only to make phone calls. Want to buy ringtones for your Apple phone? ITunes.

Apple not only "bundles" iTunes with multiple products, it forces you to use it. At least with Internet Explorer, you could always just download a competitor and ignore IE.

Not fair, you might say. Any hardware device that syncs data with a PC as part of its core functionality has software to facilitate that syncing. True enough. But operating systems have browsers as part of core functionality, too. Doesn't Mac OS X come with Safari? Doesn't the iPhone?

And "bundling" works. Steve Jobs bragged this week that Apple has distributed 600 million copies of iTunes to date. The overwhelming majority of those copies were iTunes for Windows. And iTunes for Windows' popularity isn't driven by software product quality. ITunes is the slowest, clunkiest, most nonintuitive application on my system. But I need it because I love my iPods.

At least with Windows, you could reformat your PC and install Linux or any number of other PC-compatible operating systems. Can I reformat my iPod and install something else? Can I uninstall iTunes but keep using the iTunes store and my iPods? Apple strongly discourages all that, claiming that the iPod, the iPod software and iTunes are three components of the same product. But that's what Microsoft said about Windows and IE.
There will be banner ads on the Google homepage and/or web search results pages
Does this study have a control group? I followed the link at the bottom of the article, but I couldn't find anything about a control group.
Here are some benchmarks on sorting:

http://theory.stanford.edu/~amitp/rants/c++-vs-c/

Besides that, custom C vs. STL comparisons would need to be done case-by-case. Admittedly, an all-encompassing statement "STL is always faster than C" is unreasonable. It depends entirely on the situation and what you are trying to do. I'm simply saying that it is very difficult and probably more time consuming than it is worth (for MOST cases) to try to beat STL in C++. When I used to do lots of graphics programming I tried (mostly out of curiosity), but I always ended up just using STL.

But maybe your experiences are different? Do you write your own arrays, hash maps, and sorting algorithms each time you use them? There are times when code reuse is A Good Thing. Like when the difference is negligible and it enables you to dedicate time to more valuable things, like building product features that users want. When it comes down to it, everything is always a matter of time.

Please explain what you mean when you say "C++ doesnt enable code reuse, it merely encourages it". Just curious..
Oops, meant to say is not the right terminology.
I don't buy it. My SATs were in the top 1% at age 13, but they were only a couple hundred points higher when I took them again to apply to college. According to this I should be more likely to succeed than someone who would be able to trounce me if we both took the test again today. What sense does that make?
nice...thanks!
A Facebook app that makes money?
The author makes some good points (Jobs is a tool for snubbing the interview, the price cut was well planned, and the reasoning behind the price cut, etc)... But, I think he's off the mark on some things:

"In the mind of Steve Jobs the entire incident had no downside, none at all, which is yet another reason why he is not like you or me."
"So Apple still comes out $75 million ahead, which is important to Steve Jobs."

Jobs is a CEO. Making money for the company and the company's stakeholders is what he does. Its his job, if you will. So yes, coming out ahead is important to Jobs... and every other competent CEO.

And as for the Gates comment, "He has to know he can never win"... Define 'win'. The way I see it, Apple is indeed winning... they're just not playing the same game as Microsoft anymore.
I'd up vote you a hundred times if I could
Here's a question to both pg and rokhayakebe:

How do you each define "working hard"? Is it the difficulty of the problem you're trying to solve or is it more so the time spent thinking about and/or physically solving the problem?

I ask this because I often find that at my job, the work is more frustrating than hard. Yet, at the end of the work day, I still feel drained physically and mentally, although the work is not challenging (or satisfying).
Another example of journalistic sensationalism at its best.

"It's Official?" Says who?
First of all, you should never be down-modded for engaging in good debate. And if so, who cares.

You bring up many good points which are, sadly, exceptions to the rule.

I have a B.S. in mathematics and an MBA, both from supposedly "elite" institutions, and I am convinced that almost nothing from any of my classes has contributed to my career as an IT professional (with the exception of the "mind" exercise). I suspect this is true for most college graduates.

As president of my undergraduate fraternity, I learned 100 times more (things that I would need later) than from all my classes combined. Things like managing a budget, running a project, caring for a facility, interpersonal communication, leading others, achieving in teams, etc., etc., etc. If I knew then what I know now, I would have skipped the classes and just joined the fraternity.

And, yes, I do go to Barnes & Noble and read "Men of Mathematics", "GEB", and the work of Dawkins just for fun. Funny, I didn't appreciate any of it when I was forced to read it.
I'll agree with the iTunes rant but the rest is pretty shallow. You can't call Apple the 'copycat' when their products are superior. And trying to compare MS tabletop UI to the iPhone is like amateur hour. We all know MS stole that UI from the Grad Student who's been showing off his touch interface on YouTube for 3 years. People hate MS because they are successful for making poor products. People hate Apple because they are successful for making great products and they aren't shy about flaunting it.
You have a good point about hard work and passion. You have also just provided one of the best quotes in Fight Club. Good job!
In Wisconsin I took the SAT in seventh grade as part of a state competition, so it's not necessarily daddy cutting a check. Not to brag, but I got a free ice cream sandwich for my amazing score!
Just to nitpick, cats work hard too. Cats tend to be more nocturnal creatures. If you let them out at night, they'll spend that time hunting for food (if they were taught that by their mother) and defending what they view as their property.

During the day they mostly sleep, which is why people think they're lazy. Actually, their schedule is more aligned with that of startup hackers: work during the night, sleep during the day.
The argument is that apple is an abusive monopolist because songs you buy with iTunes can only be played on the iPod. The FM reciever has nothing to do with it.
By FM receiver, do you mean the physical hardware components or the ability to play radio stations through your iPod? Because if it's the latter, Apple makes a radio tuner for the iPod.
I experienced a 230 point increase just by learning how to pace myself to answer all the questions. I guess I'm not a good data point anyway since I didn't know English very well when I took the test, and even less so at 13.

Do many states have SAT's in middle school?
Domain registration
I'm just about to register a domain however I though I'd pause and ask you guys if you have any opinions on which domain registrar to use.
Many do. CTY (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Talented_Youth) serves 20 states; TIP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talent_Identification_Program) serves 17.
doesn't that count as ad hominem?
Undo-able votes, or an are-you-sure on votes-- accidentally downmodding random comments is unhappy.
Squash the Bug, Then Close the Window
When I think of the things that made Stanford special, I think of the exposure to world-class researchers. Some classes were simply not available at other institutions. For example, I took "Medical Artificial Intelligence" from the guy who was the pioneer in expert systems for medicine. I remember a two-quarter sophomore seminar with class size limited to six undergrads. We were taught plate tectonics by the Dean of Earth Sciences and worked with a grad student to develop a simulation in C. Then there were all the opportunities to join research labs because there is so much world-class research going on at Stanford. (This was back in the 80s.) I am convinced that (1) you get out of college what you put into it, and (2) the main advantages of big research universities, aside from the diploma, is tapping into what makes them unique.

When I think of "success in school," I don't immediately think of GPA. It's not all about the courses, and in the debate of name-brand schools, I think it's rarely about the standard classes.
On a semi-related aside, Microsoft has had that multitouch interface in the works for more than three years. I saw (touched) a productized version of it two years ago.
Facebook eases freshmen fears, fosters friendship
> At least with Windows, you could reformat your PC and install Linux or any number of other PC-compatible operating systems. Can I reformat my iPod and install something else?

Yes: http://www.rockbox.org/
Trust for what? For entrepreneurship, I'd almost think that the kid who took classes to boost his score has an advantage. He took pro-active steps to improve how he did, rather than just winning the genetic lottery.

When I took the SATs in 7th grade, I blitzed through the math section, having enough time for a full double-check and a spot triple-check. Elsewhere in this thread, Vlad mentions that he did very poorly until he learned how to pace himself and answer all the questions. Am I at an advantage because I have a knack for this stuff, or is Vlad because he actually learned techniques that work consistently?
Google Putting The Squeeze On VCs
Apple product is superior only from the outside. It's like this analogy: "Dumb hot blonde".
Everyone deserves a break once in a while to "reset" the brain. If I had to code without any breaks, I wouldn't last more than a week without the brain melting
"Can I reformat my iPod and install something else?"

Erm yes, of course you can. There's a thriving open source community for iPods replacement O/S and software.
Come on, Google is the new Microsoft. How can you compare Apple to Microsoft -- one's hardware, one's software.
They are arguments of similar caliber. You want an FM radio on an iPod? Visit the Apple store. You want to use Media Player instead of iTunes? Get yourself a copy of XPlay. Want to run Linux on your iPod? Go download the iPod-Linux installer.

You don't see Microsoft advocating the end of DRM.
And it is a poor argument.

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/
About fifty people will downmod you for criticizing Apple. I, however, downmodded you for criticizing blondes.
Interesting conclusion.

He seems to be arguing that Microsoft was brought to heel by the marketplace, and that the court proceedings against it were redundant and counter productive. And now the same is true for Apple. You can't beat them with lawsuits, only by making better products.

I'm not so sure, though, that the lawsuits MSFT faced had no effect on the marketplace outcomes we're now seeing. Would PC vendors be so quick to put Linux on PCs if MSFT wasn't being monitored by the US DOJ and probed non-stop by the EU?
I got a free course in Pascal!
Pacing was very important for me too, especially coming from an educational background which did not emphasize test-taking (homeschooling).
The author, of course. We're each kings of our own ego-islands.
As an audiophile, who might have actually been happy in an alternate universe where HDCD and DVD-Audio were successful and low-bitrate MP3 was a market failure... I've always thought that both HD video formats were screwed from day one, format war or no format war. They are niche products, at best. People (except for a few hundred thousand obsessives like myself) don't pay for audio quality, and I doubt they'll pay for video quality either. Especially when the "low quality" alternative is DVD, which doesn't really look that shabby if you focus on watching the movie instead of conducting A-to-B comparisons of black levels.

Give me a $35 DVD player and Bose's marketing team, and I'll outsell any HD player on the market. We'll mark the price up to $250, put it in a nice sleek brushed-aluminum case, hold special Demo Events in all the Best Buy stores, and you'll swear that my player has the crispest video in the world - because, as the quality differences become smaller, the psychological factors become more and more significant.

The only problem with this business plan is that Steve Jobs had it figured out years ago, and he's way ahead. While the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray folks fight it out, Steve is going to crush them by selling lower-quality video in higher-quality boxes.
Commenting out the exception throwing code would likely lead to even more difficult-to-understand bugs (something after the now-commented-out throw would probably fail, possibly corrupting data). It's better to fail early.
The value and values of libraries (PDF)
The guy is kind of stodgy and a little overly conservative, but overall a pretty good speech.
I wrote two papers on Kant in uni, neither of which received an A.

My take is that intelligence follows a distribution curve for which graders at any decent college are only able to effectively evaluate the upper quartile, minus the top 1 or 2 percent. If you happen to be pushing the top 1 or 2 percent, you either have to lower yourself to the level of your graders or write your best thoughts and expect to receive less than the best grades for them.

If you follow the first track, you can expect the usual laurels for 'achievement.' If you follow the second, you can expect to increase your intelligence at a higher rate, which may (or may not) have some payback later on.
Video of robot that balances an inverted pendulum (runs on Java)
An even scarier thought: Not everyone bullshits to get the grade. Some people actually care.
You are just changing what you are working hard on.

Instead of working hard on programming, you are now working hard to get a team of people to create your idea the way you want it.

If you think that is easy, not a chance. Managing people is a lot more work then programming. With programming it is you and the computer. You tell the computer what to do and most of the time the computer complies.

With people, when you tell them what to do they are way less cooperative then a computer and if you think people are just going to be "on the same page" as you are and just come up with stuff that matches what you wanted.. well I have tried that and it doesn't work.
> The best thing to do is to find some suckers and
convince them you have a secret magical system that
helps their hard work translate > into success. But first they have to subscribe for $199/month.

Been there, done that.
http://www.SystemsCanBeDuplicated.com
"Pro-corporate"? What does that mean? Anyone can form a corporation. It's like being "Pro-people-who-know-addition." Even if it's true, it's not sinister.
Crap article from crap site of crap magazine.
Perhaps you could give me a brief summary (a few sentences) about what you mean regarding Perl's similarly to Lisp. I may simply be paying attention to different things.
Smells like a Microsoft PR plant.
Dept. of Justice Comes Down on Net Neutrality
To demonstrate how hard I'm not working right now, I'd like to point out that the phrase "YOU working hard" is grammatically incorrect. I think it should be "YOUR working hard" because "working" is a gerund. I could be wrong. I should get back to work now.
Massive List of Rails Development Tips
Totally a joke -- sorry for confusion!
Holy crap... Exactly how badly am I supposed to feel for people who had no issue shelling out $500 or $600 on a version one product? The way the tech press is pissing and moaning, you'd think Steve Jobs had just robbed money from UNICEF.

Of my friends who own iPhones, I haven't heard any of them complaining. They just had to go out and spend top dollar for the latest shiny gadget as soon as it became available. They've done it before, and they'll do it again. As such, none of them were surprised to see a big price drop.
It's a target that Western governments want to fall and it has an enormous amount of oil for its small population,