skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I sometimes think and feel like the fact that everyone is on there is a weakness of the site. Turning down friend requests from work acquaintances and family members is a bad move socially, but accepting those requests has forced me to censor a lot of my posting to the site in the last year.
Google's reliance on data for everything sounds like they should watch out for overfitting (as in machine learning). Presumably, they're doing so, but it's an interesting thought.
On a quite related note, I like this page as well:

http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/I_did_it_for_you_all

;)
The traditional way of financing print media was to have the advertisers pay for the paper, printing and administration, whereas the purchasing price went to pay for the actual journalism, the researchers, writers, editors. That way, at least the good, investigative journalism was independent of the advertisers, and could even criticize them. The web made the paper/printing costs vanish, but also the purchasing price, so now the news-consuming public does not pay the journalists any more. Web advertising and ambitious news gathering (which is not afraid to investigate the behavior of the advertising companies if there's a good story to be found) are mutually exclusive.

And it's a cheap shot to tell the journalists: "Go find yourself a better business nodel, you old-media turkeys hahaha." People who used to pay for content stop doing so, advertisers will not pay for content that they can't control and that might investigate their own companies, and we're loosing independent journalism that way. There's a bit too much joking about this for my liking.
The Entrepreneurs Handbook – 54 Resources For First Time Entrepreneurs
The Three Biggest Barriers to Cloud Computing
thx i had confusion on their OS, company name and computer name
Plagiarism , is it really that bad?
probably another dozen twitter articles
This is C++. Implement your own deconstructor, and manage your own damn memory.

I would probably use Boost's smart pointers to handle the reference counting though.
I forgot something: My whiteboard and penciles, when I write on my whiteboard (standing up) I have a lot of concentration, I happen that a lot of times i plan and write code (or math) on the whiteboard and then recopy it
Facebook was incredibly popular, and had a lot of buzz even when you could only register if you had an email at a college they'd added by hand. So Facebook isn't popular just because everyone's on there. Of course, that helps. One could argue that its strength in that time was having everyone at your college on Facebook.
Yeah, there was a bit of a kerfuffle over whether that was the sort of thing that we as a community care about. I didn't read that particular article or the discussion (I find Noam Chomsky to be...benign in his absurdity), but it seemed interesting to other folks, so I didn't mind it.

This meta-discussion is actually kinda weird and doesn't really fit the character of the place, either.

Maybe we shouldn't encourage this sort of thing, and just let the votes and editors do their jobs.
New Hero Honda Hunk Special Edition Bike: Reviews, Features, Specifications
The two groups are in no way logically linked, and by conflating the two the author is sensationalizing the issue.
Thanks for the good story!
Air - Elements In Astrology
The element air is a strong influence in people who have the sun sign Gemini, Libra and Aquarius.
You really think that Germans are likely to commit atrocious acts in the future, but are being held back by something like the denial laws?

Additionally, you think Americans 'would never do such a thing'? I don't know how you can argue against denial laws in the US and for them in Germany.

People in general have always had flaws that result in them committing horrible deeds. The holocaust occurred because many individuals committed acts that they were able to rationalize to themselves - which as a whole resulted in a great evil. No law about what people can say in public will prevent such an event.
Samsung M7600 DJ Phone - Samsung Beat DJ on Orange
BTW: IHT is the International Herald Tribune (a newspaper).

(Which is not mentioned until the very end of the article, and then only accidentally.)
Not related to the overall point, but I love this quote:

"Apple products are great because Steve Jobs and much of Apple’s upper staff has exceptionally good taste."

Come on now: dude knows his computer cases and his shiny gadgets, but that doesn't mean he has universal "good taste". Have you seen his wardrobe? Well... unless the author of the article wears jeans with no belt and a tucked-in turtelneck...every day...in which case, he's entitled to his opinion, I suppose. But I'm guessing not.

I don't personally give a crap what Jobs wears, but let's not label him the king of good taste because his company produces purty hardware.
Wow, okay. I hadn't dug into OAuth enough to get to that point. Is there any reason the client token isn't authentication enough for the server to decide to sign the request? If the app (client+server) has control of the authentication flow, it shouldn't need another set of credentials to figure that out.
Rent a webhosting account for $8/mo. Create a git or mercurial repository. Clone.

For bonus points, install ikiwiki, which takes a repository of markdown files and publishes it as a wiki. It's a wiki compiler. And if you edit the wiki, it updates your repository.

For extra bonus points, automatically infer links between these documents and smooth the organizational structure using machine learning and natural language processing.
Twitter conversation made easy
Understanding severe anxiety
Currently there are millions of people in the united states that suffer from severe anxiety. Most people even know that this is a disorder. There are many things that cause this disorder but some common are moving to a new location, divorce from a loved one.
Nethack definitely has more going for it in the comedy department. I like good game humor as well, but balance and interesting gameplay are even more important to me. I would encourage you to give Crawl another try, if only so that you can appreciate the quantum mechanics in Nethack that much more.
As much as people speak of the drug development problem, how many copies of Viagra do we need? How many more statins? The drugs don't even seem to get better, they just are finding ways to extend patents!

Past that, most of the competition is not in innovation, but rather in marketing.

"The researchers’ estimate is based on the systematic collection of data directly from the industry and doctors during 2004, which shows the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spent 24.4% of the sales dollar on promotion, versus 13.4% for research and development, as a percentage of US domestic sales of US$235.4 billion." -- http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080105140107.ht...

Finally, the NIH is picking up most of the tab for fundamental research, and as such, it isn't the drug company that is leading innovation. As such, I find the drug development argument hollow.
While Gerry Sussman may not have said it, popularity and marketability were absolutely factors in the decision to adopt Python for the new curriculum. Any sane CS department would take these into account. Unfortunately, it has become increasingly apparent that in many cases MIT in general and course 6 in particular make decisions mostly because of popularity, marketability, buzz, or peer pressure. This is not how you innovate.

"Library use is relatively easy" is not true for all cases; you are correct. 6.01 uses libraries which are well-built and relatively friendly. This is the first 6 class students take, after all. Classes later in the curriculum will have students using libraries of their own selection or writing compilers or operating systems for modern processors (should the student choose to take those courses). Between teaching fundamental concepts and teaching how to use a library, concepts should win out in introductory courses. Whatever skill it takes to use a library or documented system will be learned in time.

I don't absolutely know the answer to whether Caltech would do something similar but I would wager a great deal that they wouldn't. Have you looked at Caltech's required courses? Talked to Caltech students? Looked at MIT's required courses? Talked to MIT students? If you do, you will notice a very clear trend. Although MIT and Caltech are ostensibly peer institutions, the last two decades have seen a marked (relative) decline in the intensity and rigor of MIT's undergraduate programs.
Only when it's a paid customer's baby.
How to Protect Your Home Network
We have all heard of hackers, and what they are capable of doing, the simple way to prevent them is not to give them anything to feed off. If you are not familiar with the term “hacker”, an example in the tech industry is the Mikeyy worm (hacker name: Michael Mooney) who breached the popular micro-blogging service, Twitter.

You would be quite amazed at how easily you can be compromised, lots of computer networks tend to be vulnerable and are so easily hacked.

You would have thought that, the way technology is advancing, the networking region would have become more efficient and safe. But you would be mistaken. A few years ago, only people who were advanced and cautious about their computer networking and had sufficient know-how, would set up networks. Therefore, they could keep to keep any hackers at bay, at least from their network.

Nowadays, anyone and everyone set up home networks. There are now, many more “newbie’s” in comparison to advanced networkers. People tend to go through the network installation process ignoring any software/hardware protection; likely to be using a basic set-up which, as we know can be their biggest downfall. Another 10 minutes of a user’s time, exploring how to secure their network, is the defining moment which makes your network hack-proof or not.
Wow, that actually sounds awesome to me!
Just because you disagree with something does not automatically make it a troll.
No, GP's point is that there are garbage collectors for C++. I believe Stroustrup even mentions one in The C++ Programming Kanguage. Furthermore, you CAN tell the type of an object given a pointer to it, assuming it has at least one virtual function, using the typeid operator. As the GP said, the original quote is nonsense.
"Unfortunately, you can't tell the class of a C++ object given a pointer to it at run time....which is why you can't automatically collect the garbage of C++ programs."

That's a somewhat self-serving use of ellipses. Here's the actual text:

"Unfortunately, you can't tell the class of a C++ object given a pointer to it at run time. So if you debug a crashed C++ program and find a pointer somewhere in its guts, and you don't know its type, you'll have to guess that "0000000600000005" is a Point. Which is completely obvious, because that's the way a pair of adjacent integers looks like in hexadecimal memory listings of a little endian 32 bit machine. And two adjacent integers might be a Point. Or some other two-integer structure. Or a part of a three-integer-and-a-float structure. Or they might be two unrelated numbers which just happen to be adjacent.

Which is why you can't automatically collect the garbage of C++ programs."

Which part are you claiming is wrong? (Be careful.) The entire first paragraph even Bjarne Stroustrup would agree with once he was done hemming and hawing. Post-mortem inference of types of dynamic objects in C++ programs is undecidable. In higher-level OO languages, memory is organized as framed objects, not as a bag of bytes. The main thrust of this questioned answer had nothing to do with GC.

And he's right about this being what makes GC and C++ bad fits for one another, too, though he skipped a few steps. Getting out the sock puppets, without the ability to tell the type of an in-memory object, you can't compact the heap. If you want to move an object, you can't just assume anything in memory with the bit pattern of that object's address is a pointer, because it might be two shorts or a double or whatever that happens to have that bit pattern.

While conservative, non-compacting garbage collectors can be built in theory, they're too slow in practice. Check out the source to Hans Boehm's C/C++ collector; it stops all the threads in the process, and analyzes liveness starting from each thread's CPU registers, each thread's entire stack, and the entire static data segment. By the implementors' own admission, this will not scale to large numbers of threads, or large address spaces. Even if this approach is refined significantly, if your garbage-collected program lives long enough, you need compacting garbage collection, or fragmentation will kill you just as surely as exhaustion would have.

And if you are so convinced that performant, general purpose GC can be dropped into large C++ codebases, you have a straightforward way of both shutting me up, and having a very interesting ycombinator startup. A drop-in operator new overload that does compacting, generational, safe GC would have a readymade market, with very deep pockets, from companies stuck maintaining enormous piles of C++ code with intractable memory management bugs.
It's probably more important to have a good set of coding guidelines when writing C++ code than with other languages, but there's no reason not to write new projects in C++ if it's the best language for the task and team.

Voxli is built on C++ and boost. We make liberal use of scoped_ptr and shared_ptr where appropriate and we have yet to experience resource leaks in our client.
my mom has successfully mastered email... (:
We have that too: http://www.bart.gov/
I think this is a technology evolution natural move. This will probably happen every few decades to the most capable new language or platform.

There is a strong religious backing to Scheme being the only way to teach core CS fundamentals at MIT. I think that is an emotional almost fanboy reaction at times probably filled with heavy bias.

Python is a great balance of showing many sides of programming, it can be as eye opening as Lisp. Python is functional and object-oriented. Python is a simplifying tool and culture. All platforms used here should be simplifying.

Python can get you building market ready desktop applications, web applications, building robotics, scientific computing, game development, algorithms and AI and nearly anything out there Python is at the tip of the spear. Python is rapid iterations and prototype friendly.
The frameworks of Python are more capable to wrap nearly anything, that is what software engineering is about now. It is the same evolution software process has taken from the CMM, to CMMI (supporting modular and libraries), to Agile and a more natural iterative process rather than top down design everything from the bottom up approach. You can still do that, it is just not the majority of software engineering today, and it will continue to simplify.

Are Scheme and Lisp programmers who are biased because they had that more hardcore bottom up technique really thinking this degrades the experience or is this more of a bias that is being attacked. Or has software engineering fundamentally changed?

Scheme will not go away. This does not mean that people will stop making compilers or REPL. It simply means the starting place is different. It might even drive some better compilers and multi-platform tools because of the quirkiness of many compiler systems out there will drive good engineeers to simplify that process.

That is what we do, we simplify problems.

I would argue Python makes for more marketable and capable graduates to be successful almost immediately after school, but I don't think it harms the fundamentals much. Good developers and engineers still take time to get better. No one is the best programmer in college, it takes time and experiences after the academics to be highly skilled. Python fits closely with computer science and is very capable of taking the torch.

I do think that there is a benefit to learning from a more difficult and core understanding because it is more downhill from there but Python is hardly the worst case scenario here.

I think that Python is perfect for teaching CS because of the flexibility, libraries, open source but support by Google (they are big on CS and like Python) and many other reasons.

What can you make in Scheme that you can't make in Python, very little.

Would you rather it be Java or C# they are teaching?
I want to see a smart traffic control system.

Currently I'm only aware of the traffic lights which can sense when the car stopped next to the line and switch the lights accordingly.

I would like to see more. I would like the system to identify how dense the traffic is in all directions, including the right/left turn lines.

It would then adjust the duration of the green light according to the number of cars travelling in corresponding directions. It should also identify if all the cars that were waiting for the green light have crossed the intersection, and if there are no more cars it could turn then red light earlier.

So often I see the following: a jam is on a major road. A red line turns on, and a lonely car crosses a major road. The light is still red though for some time, with dozens of cars waiting for nothing ...
'Heritage on Wheels' train may be transformed into a restaurant in Jaipur
This is flawed logic.

You can't stop Holocaust denial with a law. You just drive it underground. Worse yet you give Holocaust deniers a valid recruitment argument in that they can say the government is "trying to silence them" which makes their beliefs seem more plausible than they are.

The best thing to do with Holocaust deniers, or any other foolish movement for that matter, is to let them speak their mind and make fools of themselves.
Similar to kidnap vacations: larger scale version of JeJune Institute. It's in downtown SF, and is a physically immersive alternate reality game. It's based on cults that have committed mass suicide.

So, along those lines, rent a large building and turn it into a hub of some wild new ARG, with scavenger hunt aspects, physical world puzzles, and community activities.
"Reverently made for universal free distribution"

The first known instance of a creative commons license?
Dead By Zombie is a Rogue-like set in a zombie apocalypse world. And with mad scientists. Survival horror aspect. A little comedy. And written in Python. Without ever looking at any Rogue-like source. The demo is free at:
http://deadbyzombie.com
It's Cool to Break Stuff
The author, Yossi Kreinin, is also one of the most underrated bloggers about software implementation on the planet. Before dismissing him as a one-trick pony language bigot, please sample http://www.yosefk.com/blog/ a bit. http://www.yosefk.com/blog/extreme-programming-explained.htm.... is just waiting to be dusted off and resubmitted by some enterprising young news.yc karma junky.
Thanks for all the feedback folks! Please install the extension and try it out with your team/co-workers. Will love to get feedback on the extension.

Thanks,
-Umar
This was my favorite kottke.org post from last year,

"I wanted to ask for survival tips in case I am unexpectedly transported to a random location in Europe (say for instance current France/Benelux/Germany) in the year 1000 AD (plus or minus 200 years). I assume that such transportation would leave me with what I am wearing, what I know, and nothing else. Any advice would help."

http://kottke.org/08/06/survival-tips-for-the-middle-ages

Jason even opened it up for comments.
I'd vote for the irony because I can't opt out of signing in, I can't sign in with fbconnect, I can't use OAuth, I can only enter the walled garden that is NYT for no apparent benefit.

I guess it could be worse - all the NYT content could be paid subscription.
This.

Actually to add to your comment, it's not just good, but a MUST to have a set of good coding guidelines. The language is complex for a reason, you tell the Compiler EXACTLY what you want it to do, and this takes away overhead from the compiler trying to guess. It's a trade off between the convenience to the programmer to the performance of the application.

C++ isn't perfect, it's not meant for everything. But for fast, large, and complex systems, C++ is one of the best ways to go about it.
Great post. It was also discussed here. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418516
Brings up the point of our continued evolution towards weaker bodies - the more cures we have for asthma, children's diabetes, etc., the more the people that have those ailments reproduce, and the more people there are with those ailments.
I should be a Apple fan but I'm so not
Tipjoy!
Wedding Shoes: How To Choose?
Alternatively, very very useful. (I had this idea years ago, in a simpler form.) Imagine it more as a storyboarding utility.
I get too many text messages and I only open a few of them. Maybe predict which text messages I will open based upon the sender and the content, and then bubble those to the top.
We do too

http://www.tartanracing.org/

And for the serious enthusiast: http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/projects/crusher/
And the contrary point: we are likely to find fixes for genetic diseases, halting the deterioration there.
That makes sense. But it reminds me of search engines cluttering up their portals with ads, and having pay-for-ranking search results - which also made sense. That was the market before google. I don't know if an analogous change of market exists for diets.
There are multiple definitions of funny, including "Strangely or suspiciously odd; curious."
Web 2.0 leaders struggle to maintain their top spots
Inside Demand Media's "Content Factory"
Bonus: auction (a la adwords).

With video, you might not need to physically prevent park-theft - a hefty fine might be sufficient.
BenQ-Siemens EF71 Silver
The benq Siemens EF71 is a combination of a music phone and designer phone with great looks. The metallic silver clamshell looks elegant and its upper panel has a bright external display, this phone falls in the category of designer phones with its slim and silver metal design.
I wrote up a suggestion 2 weeks ago.
http://akkartik.name/blog/2009-04-23-21-23-27-soc
I think that’s assuring the quality (not that it is very high). People start to realize that you shouldn’t do/say something on the web that shouldn’t be public.

If every public forum was with real names we wouldn’t read so much rubbish.
It matters what the authority of Government says about an issue. Government opposition makes it illegitimate. Many people care about that and avoid illegitimate things.

Some things should have to be underground, which many will see as a mark of shame for it. Most people don't want to be underground. You seem to take "opposed by the Government" as a badge of honor, which is understandable, but it is not how a majority of people think, especially outside the US.
Yes I really think what I wrote. Do you really think questioning my genuineness is a serious or valid way of arguing?
Is lack of a double standard for pro and anti jewish hate speech and violence advocacy strange? Suspiciously odd? Curious? I don't see how any of those fit.
Sounds like good ol' Hotline!
The Dark Side of Security by Obscurity: Cloning MiFare Passes Anywhere, Anytime
Car Net.

A information network between vehicles that share information about what their destinations and routes are. Specially for congested areas, they would all work together to find the optimal route with the least congestion.

Instead of everyone trying to take the shortest path, all the vehicles will work together to figure out the shortest-time-path based by distributing the road load levels evenly.
Know what you're doing, why you're doing it and for whom you're doing it. Have long term goals in mind, and better understand purpose.

I think younger people have adapted to incessant overflowing information by adopting such measures.
Yes, and a 100% chargeback rate because apparently "Moot" is not the real cardholders name.