skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used ellipses because none of the quoted argument was correct, and there was no point making a long quote, when a short one would suffice.

First, the premise was false: you can tell the type of a pointer to a dynamic object -- you use RTTI. You don't have to "guess" that the object is a Point, because you can use dynamic_cast<>() or typeid() to tell for sure.

Second, the conclusion was false: it is possible to write a garbage collector for C++. You cited a very popular one in your response.

So what do we have? You can tell the type of an object at runtime, and you can write a garbage collector for C++. When both the premise and the conclusion of an argument are incorrect, well...let's just say that it's hard to be less correct than that. It's Not Even Wrong.

As for your defense, let's be clear: you're not suggesting that it's impossible to "automatically collect the garbage of C++ programs" -- you're arguing that it's impossible to do it efficiently. I dispute that argument, too, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the comment that I quoted. It's a straw-man.

The bottom line is that the quoted statement was absurd, and you're only setting up a straw-man (about the efficiency of C++ GCs, and about the ability to drop them into large codebases.) We could perhaps have an interesting discussion about those topics, but our discussion wouldn't make the original article any less of a flame-bait.
Technology forum on Hardware
Discuss Hardware related problem on techfuels forum. Share your problem with world wide online people. Best place to find tech information and hardware solution.
Interview: the men who made Twitter tweet
> But don't these problems exist regardless of your approach?

Yes, of course. That was exactly the point I was trying to make: it's a fundamentally hard problem.

> Git and it's way of handling trees of old commits is a decent place to start. It clearly isn't a final solution, but building on top of it seems like a worthwhile direction, at least to me.

That depends on what problem you want to solve. If you want to solve the general data-storage-in-the-cloud problem, then Git is fundamentally flawed because 1) one of the inescapable aspects of the problem is that the solution depends on the semantics of the data and 2) Git by design knows nothing about the semantics of the data.
Ask HN: Which versioning system to learn on?
I'm jumping in on the deep side after completing my bachelors in CompSci... I haven't coded in a long time. I'm going to jump into django and try to pull off a project.

I need versioning (understand it, have never used it). Where do I start?
Actually humanity is not really part anymore of the "survival of the fittest" or evolutionary cycle. We are actively changing ourselves and starting, in laboratories at least, to modify genetics. Won't take long before parents can "modify" their children to be smarter, healthier, etc.
That may be true for rational thought but belief isn't rational thought. If the Government of the United States decided tomorrow to make believing in Alien Abductions and Crop Circles a law I'd simply be forced to break the law.

That's where the flaw is. The governments of these other countries think they can suppress belief simply by suppressing speech and they can't.
Social anthropologist my arse. Mark's inspiration was Ryze, Friendster and Myspace (the initial feature lists are near identical). The brilliant insight was making each network 'private' by email domain and maintaining that ability to remain mostly walled off when they opened up the network to outsiders. The author seems to be confusing the origin of the name with the origin of the feature set.
BMW unleashes all the details on S 1000 RR superbike 
BMW has finally pulled the wraps off its new S 1000 RR superbike, and let’s just say we’re anything but disappointed. First, the most important bits: 193 horsepower at 13,000 RPM, 82.5 lb-ft of torque at 9,750 RPM, 455.3 pounds with a full tank of gas.
I wouldn't worry too much about this. Scientific/technological progress is one of the fastest things out there; evolution is one of the slowest. In other words, our ability to treat disease is greatly outstripping any theoretical effects of these treatments on human evolution.
In reading the Kottke thread for about 30 mins (it rules), I just had this thought: What if Michaelangelo (or some other prolific inventors) weren't that special. What if they were simply average Joe's like you and me that were transported back in time. They used their basic knowledge of stuff around them to "invent" things.
And another point - how much would remain of an original nature-made human after that. So far, every optimization/fix we made to our body's protective system led to a more serious illness that would avoid the invented cure. I'm afraid fixes on gene level would open the door to the new kind of threat, it's a race we can't win.

BTW, site shows http 403.
silentOpen - The only class in which the language has been changed due to the lack of Scheme in 6.001 is 6.034. As students branch out and take electives, there are plenty of opportunities to learn other programming languages - the UI class this year, 6.813/6.831 (undergrad/grad), had problem sets using Adobe Flex. My current Distributed Systems class (6.824), the Graphics class (6.837 - an undergrad elective), and the Operating Systems class (6.828) all use C++. All have the mentality, "don't know C++? Here are some links, go learn it."

There are constant opportunities within the MIT curriculum to learn other languages, and while I had the pleasure of taking 6.001, frankly - if an undergrad doesn't take advantage of any of those opportunities and leaves college only having used Python and Java, that's their flaw - not the Institute's.

Finally - to play devil's advocate in response to the REPL / compiler argument, of all of the assignments in 6.001, writing the metacircular evaluator gave me the least accurate representation of the power of computer programming as a whole. While it was an interesting exercise, if I had been interested in language design, I could have taken an elective more focused on the topic - as is still an option at the Institute.

I think your claims about the tragic decline of the quality of an MIT CS education are a bit dramatic - few MIT students seriously considering a career in computer science graduate as lopsided as you seem to believe. Your efforts may be better spent railing against why 40% of all undergrads graduate to take jobs in finance and consulting, despite the vast majority of students graduating with engineering degrees. (Source: http://web.mit.edu/career/www/infostats/graduation.html)

ubernostrum - a point of clarification, the "entire CS curriculum" was never built around Scheme. 6.034 was the only class that used Scheme after 6.001. I believe a graduate class existed in the recent past that also focused on Scheme and its interesting properties as a language.
assuming that could be true, we get the paradox of "who actually did invent this things, then?" :)
Human Tamagotchi. Stick 3G webcams on people in poor foreign countries. Throughout the day you open your iphone app and can send them voice commands or use the joystick to move them around. Feed, train, etc. Maybe a $149/mo subscription or something. If you spend a lot of time playing and they make enough gold pieces then eventually your human will be able to afford $149/mo for his own human tamigotchi and poof --- the singularity is near.
Why you'll never see 200Mbps from a 200Mbps 'Net connection
This also has some relevance to this post:

The Internet sky really is falling (networkworld.com)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=597699
Subversion is the lowest common denominator and you'll end up using it sooner or later. You might as well learn it even if you expect to move to a DVCS later on.
Github has emerged as such a great and widely used tool that I would learn Git just for that resource. Besides Git, the next versioning system you will most likely see is Subversion.

After learning Git, Subversion will look and feel very familiar because they share many of the same commands. Subversion also has great GUI tools available. So if you learn one, then the other will come easily. You also don't need to get very far into the guts of either to be effective with working with a team.

Working with a team on a workflow and versioning system is probably the next most important. Probably the easiest way for you to do this without actually landing a paying Gig is to get involved in an open source project.

That all assumes you are referring to a source control management system. Versioning can mean many things. ;)
Apparently you've never tried one of those timeshare vacation deals, huh? I'd rather be waterboarded than fight those sharks.
Lotus Notes has been doing multi-master replication for over 20 years. The very architecture is built on it. Replication can be push-pull, push or just pull. And can be scheduled or user-initiated. It automatically merges changed documents during replication. When the automatic conflict resolution fails, then it saves both copies and requires human intervention. Damien Katz (creator of couchdb) was a programmer for a core part of Notes until about 5 years ago. And Notes was the major influence on CouchDB.

There are a ton of other good features in Notes (and a few bad ones too).
Why there's nothing special about the business of software
Ask yourself this question. When someone starts spreading slanderous lies about you, whoever you are, which threaten your family and your business are you going to resort to the statement that "free speech is free speech."

Anyone with a basic knowledge of how the Holocaust started would be surprised how easy it was to rile up the mobs of people against a segment of people in their society.

Speech is powerful. Things start in the mind, move towards speech, and come to final expression in action. It is no surprise that Ahmadinjehad is one of those who actively denies the Holocaust happening and openly intends to wipe the Jewish state of Israel off of the face of the map. Speech >> Action.
SimplyTweet. A Twitter client. Other than the soundtrack for the screencast, a few stock icons and some available libraries/code, I made the graphics (which explains the quality), with suggestions from the better half and did all the coding.
Your efforts may be better spent railing against why 40% of all undergrads graduate to take jobs in finance and consulting

I was going to make a snide comment wondering why Scheme was necessary for training future investment bankers and lawyers, but I just had anecdotal experience and didn't want to spread false information. Thanks for the numbers.

(Through chance I was a TA at MIT at the turn of the millennium. Pretty much everyone I taught had plans of working on wall street or going to law school.)
There is an assuption here that the only infulential factor on health is genes. Environment could play an even stronger role. A person in the middle ages wouldn't be surrounded by a toxic environment and be consuming the chemical-laden nutrient deprived food that is standard fare today.
I think it is more correct to say that cyberwarfare is part of the future of warfare. I think networked computers are just an additional dimension of space for conflict to take part on. Put another way, I don't think the classic physically hurting one's opponent is likely to disappear.

I think that adding and subtracting information from one's opponent will join the classic adding and subtracting matter from ones opponent. Really, information warfare has been a classic for a long time. I think, as the purely information overlay gets ever more elaborate, that conflict in this space will simply become more disruptive to the other fronts of battle.
Interestingly enough, I'm also an MIT '09 (hi) - and while yes, I loved the old curriculum and I wish they were still on it, you're making all these claims about the new curriculum that are simply not true. The "entire undergrad CS curriculum" has NOT changed to accommodate the shift to Python. 6.034 was the only one that changed at all.

6.006 does Python, but it's new and 6.046 had no practical edge to it at all. As a student who had a little bit of difficulty with the theoretical steps in 046, I can understand why they added the "test this and prove to yourself that this makes sense" exercises in Python.

As lame as it sounds, look into 6.00 - it's an "intro intro" programming class mostly required for Course 20 (Biological Engineering) students, but it's surprisingly robust as an introductory class - covering a lot of the topics you just listed, and well.
We already use a system like that for anonymous message passing between processes running on an internal network.
Three Web Marketing Concepts.
My Stuff
Welcome to clipmarks.com/clipper/myestuff, here have many information about storage. Hope information in here will useful for you.
Groups like the JIDF can have hate groups taken down from Facebook by getting enough people to complain using the site's feedback feature. FB doesn't seem to be prone to taking down the largest hate groups at all, and only when the hate is very acutely expressed in a group's title or charter.

Something like "We hate all F##### Jews and want them dead" would get taken down without much issue, but something like "Jews are bad because of Israel and Hamas are great" could avoid FB censorship, especially if it's very popular.

If breast-feeding is banned upon submission, it shows that there are resources to censor in real time. There aren't really any pure Muslim hate groups too, it seems, like there are Jewish ones.

I'd have to look into this further, but it does interest me.
Blogging Reviews - Ebooks, Guides and Software
Even if this were a piece in a larger debate, the stance the courts have taken is highly counter-intuitive (although granted it's not represented in this post), and completely opaque to me.

I can understand the concern to preserve the water rights of the most senior people (okay, that's a lie, i think it's stupid, but i'll capitulate to the court's desire to preserve the system). But i just don't understand how this is either a slippery slope (oh! a pun!) to loss of water rights/usage, or how this could possibly materially effect other water usage.

So... yeah, i'm skeptical about the court's position.
Because it's selling well, it's hyped, the apps actually (looks like) it will sell better, it's easy (for some people) to get started, and it's actually really one of the better mobile platforms to develop for, despite the complaints.
I disagree. Probably a good idea to get both though. "The Good Parts" is interesting, but doesn't have a complete language reference.
C++ is so not perfect and is definitely not for large scale development. Read this: http://labs.mudynamics.com/2007/07/23/writing-c-within-ruby/
How is this a "slimy PR" piece?
Wrong. It's amazing this myth still gets perpetuated. Setting something to null, or even undefined, does not delete it. That's a swift ticket to leaking memory.
Use delete. It's what it's for.

>>> var test={foo:123}
>>> test.foo = undefined
>>> for (var i in test) { console.log(i); }
foo
>>> delete test.foo
true
>>> for (var i in test) { console.log(i); }
Before 6.01 was introduced, MIT didn't have any required undergrad CS courses that required anything besides Scheme and Java! Is that much better? Frankly - I think if you're starting to argue simply based on language, you'll find few supporters.

The strengths of the old curriculum were the concepts you learned through 6.001 and using Scheme, not the Scheme skills themselves. Do I think 6.034 would be significantly different if I had to use Python versus Scheme? Not at all - and frankly using Scheme added nothing to my experience in that class.
Didn't he steal the idea from someone else anyway?
RIGHT! The place at the Nacional building (old downtown) was Paulisoft. Man, you could smell the scent of those 5 1/4" Nashua floppies as soon as you get out of the elevator!

ME TOO, My friends and I would carefully select the games over the week and then we couldn't wait until Saturday to get them. In fact, one day we almost got pickpocketed in the subway, and our concern was not our money or wallet, but protecting our floppies!! pretty hilarious now that I think about it...

At some point they published a book to hack the games so you'd get infinite lives. My friends and I figured out the assembly hex code for "minus one" (i. e.: one less life) and soon we were able to hack a bunch of games by looking for that byte alone throughout the memory.

Also we would hang-out at DDX. I lived my entire life in Vila Mariana (a Sao Paulo neighborhood), and we would just hang-out there with the guy who designed the mega-ram and the msx2 clone boards. The guy was doing pretty hardcore stuff, pure hacking... He would be considered a hero here in the US, but unfortunately in Brazil we don't recognize such talent...

There are still various MSX fan-clubs alive all over the world, and there are quite a few open source emulators. You can get all those games, and even MSX2 games too.
This is what I kind of think when I have to use a mac (mostly due to my experience with them at school), don't get me wrong some things are really nice about them but the majority of the people who use them really just use them for the cool factor and couldn't even be bothered to know that there is a terminal with functionality underneath.

I don't think I will ever buy a mac unless one day the computer hardware is comparable to what I would get at the same price building it myself or buying a preinstalled windows or linux laptop, but I'm cheap and like my 500 dollar laptop from 2006.
I can buy as much water as I want

Try saying that in... Colorado and see how far you get before you get your lights punched out.

Water rights and rationing are serious business.
Nice content free rant :/

I think "Apple fan" is largely a myth. maybe some people call themselves "Apple fans" and buy everything Apple just for the hell of it, but that's a very very small minority.

I bought an iPhone because it's the best phone available. I bought a MacBook because it's the best laptop available. That doesn't make me an "Apple fan" though. It just means I chose to buy a couple of Apple products because they were the best for my usecase.
AFAIK it's reasonably well known as an unintentional troll - there was a stackoverflow question about the FQA (still looking for the link) that basically mooted almost every point.

I was reading it as a neutral party, however some very knowledgeable C++ appeared to convince all comers that the FQA is either based on ignorance or is disingenuous.
>> "the majority of the people who use them really just use them for the cool factor and couldn't even be bothered to know that there is a terminal with functionality underneath."

Where do you get that idea from? I'd bet that everyone on here who uses a mac, uses the terminal on a daily basis. It's linux without the hassle - a paradise for hackers.

If you spend a lot of your life on a laptop, then buying cheap is a bad idea. It's a false economy.
It's funny when people moan that Apple are expensive. All laptops are ridiculously cheap when you consider what they enable you to do. They last 2-3 years, and over that time you could have used one to build an entire company. Might as well buy a good one.
"...best" for me.

Ultimately computers need to suit your needs. I find that I get by just fine with my $1000 pc laptop running SUSE and Vista. I'd consider it the best laptop available because it does everything I need and cost me helluva lot less than a macbook, with comparable specs. I could even hackintosh if I felt like it.

An iPhone is the best phone available? Pretty sound statement I'd say based on the app store and great features (and on ebay, a relatively decent price), though we'll have to see about that...the Palm Pre is coming out ;)
Not at all, the content has always been the core business - without the content, there wouldn't be a market for the merchandise.

Merchandise supported revenue isn't a new business model, I mean, that's how George Lucas made the majority of his money, merchandising from the Star Wars sagas.

Homestar Runner's business model is a version of the one used in classic cinema, the difference being they made the initial price point $0 - instead of the cost of a movie ticket, so that everyone could enjoy their content and they've helped to reduce the barrier to entry for enjoyment of that content.

When you consider marketing and distribution costs are one of the main costs associated with any film project (for example, Disney used to take a 50% cut of Pixar's films) Homestar Runner's costs in this arena have been essentially zero, given they've gotten by on word of mouth advertising.

And it's worked for them, they've even had other people borrow ideas to create new online video projects that have gone on to be big successes too. The Askaninja Ninja was inspired by Strongbad's Emails.
This is excellent advice. I still play sport at a high level at the moment and being 6'6, I was getting back pain. Superman, plank and bird dog are all excellent exercises to help strengthen your back and core. Since I've been doing them, I've alleviated all the back pain which I used to get after training and matches.

The only thing I'd say is that the plank exercises may not be the best exercises for people with a reall weak core. You may want to start at something lower (bird dog and other light core exercises might be better).
Hmm. I have stuff to do so I can't follow up but I'm really dubious. Note this after the chart: General Motors has revenue of $600,000 per employee. GM? OHRLY?

Perhaps the author conflates revenue and profit?

Edit: in fact, the author actually notes this. Which makes the whole exercise stupid: If you don't have the data you need, you don't have the data you need and using the maximum value instead is useless. As should have been trivially obvious at the time the author wrote the blog post by examining one of his or her own examples.
Speak for yourself, the nutrient rich food and especially the variety I eat each day was not available in the middle ages. Remember that people in the those times where much shorter (as proved by the shorter beds), this is the result of malnutrion.

Toxicity is likely to be higher then, open or no sewage systems, very low hygiene (people didn't bathe, lots of animals) and remember they used woodstoves in side the house!
Maybe this is it:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/385297/whats-wrong-with-c...

Summarizing: "C++ is hard but makes some things possible that aren't in other languages."

The FQA dude is a troll: he criticizes without offering better alternatives, ignoring tradeoffs and considerations and overlooking any advantages offered by C++.
Optimistic Sci-Fi
> It's linux without the hassle - a paradise for hackers.

Oh please, just because you enjoy the pain of maintaining a second userland on your system doesn't mean we all suffer from that particular affliction. For me it's OSX that's agony to use whereas linux is totally hassle-free.
after 3 years of javascripting it still good to get a refresh for the language's core elements.
I find myself skimming even novels I'm reading while on public transit

Well, I think this is all very personal and our experiences cannot be generalized into a trend. In direct opposition to your experience, I've recently started to actually read books, instead of just skimming them for the story. The balance was tipped by the first book of the Gormenghast trilogy "Titus Groan" by Mervyn Peake... really wonderful prose.