skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the past in Japan, the carriers subsidized the cost of new phones, so people regularly upgraded their phones. However, recently regulations have been introduced to prevent this, and thus consumers have had to bare the full cost of new handsets. As such, there has been a drop in overall handset sales.
Ray tracing signed distance functions
I'm curious which countries your are thinking of where government corruption is not a problem?

It is less of a problem in some countries than others, by more than an order of magnitude. Transparency International is one organization that publishes studies of corruption in different countries.

http://www.transparency.org/news_room/in_focus/2008/gcr2008
> Ugh, old, old FUD from years back (not you, the article). g++ (the only C++ compiler that's relevant) has been as fast as gcc for years (they use the same back-end).

g++'s generated code is not as fast as gcc's, despite their common infrastructure. For the last month or two, gcc has been compilable with g++ as well (it has been rewritten in the common C/C++ subset), and the reports are of about a 10% decrease in speed when compiling with g++.
Back in my doctorate days (management) I asked my office mate, who was researching leadership - how does one actually become a CEO? His answer - "It's all about the networking."
What's the goal of this ranking? What are you trying to accomplish?
Dabbling with Clojure and Haskell at the moment. Also reading some material relating to clisp and Scheme.

I can never stick to one thing.
Adobe flex. I am doing some data visualization stuff. I thought about using HTML5 drawing syntax first. But because stupid IE still doesn't support it. I give it up. Adobe flex is perfect for the job for the time being.
Think and Grow Rich
Available for free here (it's no longer under copyright)

http://www.4shared.com/file/63815169/6ed4bf95/ThinkandGrowRi...
Vacuum tube. (UK vs. US English)
What bothers me the most when I read this kind of stuff, is that there is no clear reason why the success of Feynman & co. should be attributed to some innate talent rather than to hard work, and yet most people firmly believe in the former explanation. A very plausible reason for the 'genius' of all these physicists is that when faced with challenging problems, they didn't despair like most people, and instead tried experimenting with various approaches, or temporarily switched to different problems. In fact, in many interviews, Feynman himself claimed that 'intelligence' had nothing to do with his success.

It's also interesting to observe how different the comments are on Cosmic Variance and on Hacker News. Maybe the fact that so many physicists share the views expressed in that post has something to do with there being so few Feynmans, Hawkings and Einsteins.
ADSL is also built asymmetrically. You can do symmetric DSL but there is a trade off and you get a lower download speed than ADSL.

I select my domestic links by upload bandwidth since the download is fast enough.
Maybe better would be llvm.
As someone who has done some seriously low-latency projects on C++, there are really many levels that you can do this at. You can turn off exceptions, do constructors very sparingly, handle your own memory management and so on. As was said by its creator, C++ is a multi-paradigm programming language.

There is something to be said for doing a lot of kernel stuff in template metaprogramming.
Ah, but why does it have to be close to the metal?
ARM Assembly.
I want to commune directly with the bare metal.
I want to lose my fear of those hex dumps machines spit out just before they die.
John Mather.
Speaking particularly about hacking on my OS of choice, I've got to hand it to the MacPorts crew for making that kind of thing possible without serious headaches. I've got a custom build of Apache, PHP (yes, I know...) and MySQL alongside my desktop OS tools that I love to use. It's a best of both worlds. Mac OS X from the developer's perspective is basically Linux done right.
I don't really see how this is a bad thing. The government will not use these cards to track you or anything. It's just a universal ID card. Proving that you exist is a big problem back here, mostly because everyone has their own definition of "proof of identity". If one universal proof of identity exists, you can just show the middle finger to anybody who makes you jump through bureaucratic hoops.
I can't even being to guess how you come to this conclusion, and the word "meritocratic" is, quite frankly, offensive.
At first I ignored your post since I wasn't in the mood to read any rants (I parsed the domain name as "no-to-air"). Then I took a look after reading some of the HN comments.

As far as your actual service is concerned, I don't know why I would want this. It would be helpful to know what you're providing that I can't already get from other more established services.
The problems then, as now, were more regulatory than technical or economic. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was aghast at the volume of additional air traffic Ford had in mind. The air-traffic control systems of the day would have been overwhelmed. Ford promptly abandoned the idea, even though its flying car would have been cheaper to build and operate than the helicopters that subsequently took over most of their intended roles.

Is this true?
For polyglots it is interesting also to know why C/C++ got so popular in the first place.

JWZ - The worse is better.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
I think you've hit the nail on the head. I think that's precisely why I will never be rich. :)
This is a great story. Ham Radio is a place for prime hackers. I love the resourcefulness of the guy in the article.
The Infrastructurist
The ID in and of itself is not a bad thing. However, there needs to be a full and thorough discussion of the issues such as privacy, duplication, theft etc.
From what I can see, this scheme seems similar to SSN's in the US, and using them as an example, you can easily see how the aforementioned issues can come into play.
IMO, there needs to be a rigorous debate in the media about this scheme and also a detailed explanation from the government on how they plan to address these concerns.
My streetsmarts are mainly the result of a deduction that the cultivation of such smarts is efficient and rational. Happy to go into this further, over email (zackster=gmail).
and the word "meritocratic" is, quite frankly, offensive.

That sort of off-the-hip response leaves nowhere to go with a civil and rational discussion. Bravo.
I'm not so sure about Vista/Win7 but Windows XP's tweakui allows a primitive form of "focus follows mouse." It doesn't work exactly like I'm used to with other managers, but it also doesn't require loading additional software (well, beyond going to MS' site and downloading tweakui).
Actually that's my point. I can't begin to grasp (though I welcome input) how your comment helps. Perhaps I spent too much time in essentially what is an anti-meritocracy that is PR in the valley. Unless of course, by "meritocracy" you mean hot women and open bars.
Interested in what you mean by 'meritocratic'. Do you mean that these gatekeeper super-nodes are usually talking about your work strictly because it's good/cool/useful/exciting? Serious question, that is the only way I could make sense of it.

I'm having trouble understanding how that would mean serious PR is within the reach of more businesses than ever? Or just more good/cool/useful/exciting businesses that deserve it, you are saying?
It's also possible that a lot of the Windows users are not registered here and are therefore not able to vote in the survey
"Don't panic" was actually displayed on launch in the original app, but I forgot to include it in the App Store version.
This interview -- transcribed (very) directly from a Skype conversation -- makes me have so much respect for Obama's eloquence when speaking without notes. I need to improve.
Did you know OmniTI (employers of Shiflett and Welling, former employer of Thomson, and sister company to MessageSystems (Wez Furlong & George Schlossnagle) have an office in Brooklyn? I believe the main contributor to CakePHP works there too. If you're that interested in PHP, it might be something to consider being relatively close by.

I'm bookish in how I approach programming too, and among your list have read "PHP & MySQL Web Development," Shiflett's "Essential PHP Security," and "Advanced PHP Programming" when I was first starting out (I started out as a PHP programmer). If you're anything like me, the books get less exciting as the knowledge they contain gets more familiar, which is inevitable among a certain class of books. I now read more language agnostic books on algorithms, math, and some broader concepts. We'll see how that goes.

Sara Goleman has a book on writing extensions for PHP that you might like if you want to 'cross the threshold.' These sorts of things can be useful to know how it all works internally, even if you aren't writing a ton of extensions yourself. The Schlossnagle book has a chapter on that. I'm not sure how much movement PHP internals have (I'm out of that world now).
Just a random guess, but I bet if you added up all the costs of dolphin engineers in the US, they cost twice as much. They need those giant aquariums to keep them happy!
really tasteless (and unfitting) comparison. and your blog is ugly.
I think there's more than one story in this article. Beyond the surface stories, it's demonstrated that PR professionals are no longer obligatory gatekeepers to the press (this was never strictly the case, but far more so than now). It even says as much:

For publicists, the era of e-mail, blogs and Twitter has the potential to turn the entire idea of P.R. professionals as gatekeepers on its head.

On page 2 there are several paragraphs emphasizing that self-PR is becoming popular and is even encouraged:

Some business people say that because journalists would rather hear stories directly from the entrepreneurs who are genuinely excited about their companies — rather than from publicists’ faking excitement — the role of publicists becomes less crucial.

That screams a more meritocratic environment to me. Less reliance on old-boys' networks and more possibilities to do your own PR.

By "meritocratic" I'm not referring to the optimal situation where the best businesses and ideas get the best coverage; that's impractical. Instead, I mean that if, as a developer/founder/partner/whatever, you knuckle down and learn PR for yourself, your success in getting coverage will correlate roughly to how well you do your PR. Back in the "old days" doing your own PR was almost unheard of and required having a significant number of contacts - lots of "old boys networks" and not meritocratic at all.

Pages 3 and 4 are a bit "dirtier" in the processes they expose and the fact that the publicist clearly leverages her contacts. The thing is, you wouldn't have even seen this info ten years ago - the guts of PR work were well hidden. Now almost anyone can replicate this stuff if they really want to and it's not even that hard.
You can be interested in something yet be bored of it after a certain time(ie. after payday?).

A fat paycheck is a golden cage.

Anything can be turned into golden cage if you will for it to be that.
I learned OOP in Smalltalk. Then I decided to learn C++. The first code snippet I saw used the overloaded shift operator to push strings to stdout. I closed the book.

It took me 8 years to try to learn C++ for a second time. This time I insisted and more or less got through.

C++ is not as bad as my first impression led me to believe, but it's not as good as its enthusiasts insist it is. For instance, and quite predictably for a Smalltalker, I find Objective-C much more elegant.

It seems foolish to implement something like this in C++
Peter Norvig on the future of search (2007)
I think we might have a different benchmark of meritocracy in this situation. I suspect you're thinking along the lines of coverage and interest being based on how good a company and its ideas are?

My idea of PR being more meritocratic than it once was is based on that it's now more easily possible to do your own PR and to get results based on your efforts. The more effort you put into your PR, the better the results. PR being no different to other disciplines (sales, marketing, development) in this case.
Because "the money was a nice side effect of their passion".
- eli_s
It's also possible that linux/OSX users are less likely to be interested in a Microsoft product (bing) or an article about one.
Measuring collaboration: Lessons from Shane Battier and the NBA
emacs or vim? You aren't asking a technical question, you are asking a religious question.
(Could've sworn this was in C++ FAQ Lite, but I can't find it) The language specifies exceptions as a feature, not an option. Turning off a language feature and how that works with other features that may reference it is a heavily compiler-specific endeavor, and isn't C++.
Uzbl browser. First release. Tabbed browsing.
There are two kinds of workers. Those that say Yes - let's do this, yes, let's build it. And the other kind are those that say No.

Why do they say one or the other? It has to do with the perception of risk and reward.

Crazy new Yes guy says, let's do this! And the long-time No thinks, this won't make my stock options go up, and if I fail, I'll be punished by management.

It is unpleasant to be one kind and interact with the other.

Big companies tend to have an outsize appreciation of negative risk. We might look bad in the press, etc. So the general behavior tends towards consensus and risk-mitigation quite naturally, rather than risktaking. You need the right mix of both.
Who here has become rich, you know, by reading these books?
Bendiboard Bends Unlike Most Keyboards
A good point and an excellent reason to quit commenting pre-coffee.

Lesson learned.
I agree, travel. Travel travel travel while you have the opportunity and aren't tied down by job, family, etc. Especially in places like South America or Asia(Thailand for example) you can live very well for $20k a year.

It's funny, I'm basically in the same position you are- 1 year of school left,business student, and I have enough money saved up from my Internet marketing business(and some good revenues still coming in) that I don't feel any need or pressure to go look for a corporate job.
I'm going to school in the boring Midwest, and seriously contemplating moving to Silicon Valley or traveling through Asia after finishing school.

By the way, about your business, getting traffic is the eays part, it's getting them to convert that is the issue.
If you can consistently be earning $100 CPM from your visitors, you should have no problem getting that traffic with some precisely targeted advertising campaigns (or maybe even SEO). It's trivial to get a couple thousand uniques a day for almost any niche with a bit of SEO/PPC work, provided you're monetizing them well, so with any luck, you won't need to use that 100K at all- you could live quite well off revenues from your startup as you travel the world.

graduating, send me an email to ilya[-at-]unviral.com I'd love to chat about this further.
Nilekani is the current CEO of Infosys. He has already stated he is going to step down from Infosys before taking up the effort to create an India wide UID. Bidding for this mega project will be an international one, with some Israeli companies already showing interest (in addition to Indian majors like Infosys, TCS, Wipro...).

So the question is not as much as about conflict of interest as it is about the success of the project. This will be the third such attempt - Seshan's voter ID, the PAN card and now the UID.

From anti-corruption point of view, this is really going to be helpful. Any government aid etc can be tracked using the UID (i.e. to see who the beneficiary was). Currently a majority of such funds are eaten up by the politicians and bureaucrats. So perhaps that will get reduced. As a state, India is currently a failure: perhaps the UID will help make some ammends.

The implementation is going to be a challenge - currently there are options that are doing rounds: a smart card approach or using a mobile sim card (a govt reserved security domain in every sim card - the sim ID can act as a proxy for UID).
Didn't know that, thank you. Learn something new every day.
It is not just the basic facilities. Corruption hits in a lot of other ways also.

The traffic sucks because most traffic police are jerking off somewhere. If you want to get something done (e.g. setup a business) you should know someone with influence. A new risk in big cities is if you own a land there is a risk of the property being forcibly occupied by a thug and the police wouldn't do much.
Startup to IPO: Why Few Companies Make the Leap and What We Can Learn from Them
Impressive terrain generation in 4Kb [+DirectX]
"All Linksys routers from the 54G up have Linux already"

Not true. Most Linksys 54G routers run VxWorks. Only versions 1-4 of the WRT54G series ran Linux. There are many Linksys Draft N routers that run chipsets that are not compatible with any Linux firmware, but meny are Broadcom based and are therefore compatible. Not sure what OS Cisco is using for those.

Regardless, countless of us have found that even the Linux-based Linksys firmwares are garbage. Put Tomato or DD-WRT on one of them, however, and they run like a champ.
Not to say you are wrong, but if one has an interest in a new or different language they should not think they shouldn't because they already know enough.

Learning a new language can also be a supplement, say learning haskell in such a way that you improve your math ability and critical thinking at the same time. Or attempting to write a project in a new language would be far more interesting say if you are burned out from a job in a certain programming language. New and different things can be very refreshing!
I find it very difficult to believe an article from a major startup blog about how you shouldn't go around the startup blogs when it's time to launch.

That being said, I personally believe that anyone who wants to talk about you should be given the opportunity to do so, especially if the cost is just sending an email or two.
Why was this downvoted? He has a differing viewpoint, but I think its a compelling argument. Not altogether off-topic either (especially when you consider people talking about implementing OS kernels in things like Java or D).
Think and Grow Rich, old as it is, is still the best book on getting rich I've ever read.
So where's the link to the dataset? I can't find it. No link on the article and no google juice.

Update:
Here it is:
http://www.broadinstitute.org/diabetes/scandinavs/index.html
I'm learning Scheme so I can program Impromptu (http://impromptu.moso.com.au/) to control my MIDI setup live. I'm having a hell of a time with macros and define-syntax; I have not yet found docs that explain those so I can understand them. I have played around with SBCL and Clojure, and can write macros in those languages. Don't know why I'm having problem with Scheme.
Why do the rich keep working?

Let me rephrase the question:

Why do people who like working end up rich?
According to a well-known psychological research (google for it and I'm sure you'll find some links), a subject is given the following two options. (1) The subject earns 500k per year while all his friends and neighbors earn 1M. (2) Subject earns 100k per year while all his friends and neighbors earn 50k. Majority of subjects choose the second options.

This explains in part why people can't quit. Because if they do, all their friends will be making more money.
Bollocks

- me
Gmail stays the same; the external set-up changes. I saw no advantage to using Outlook over Gmail, whereas Mail.app offers substantially more than the Gmail webapp does, even when used with Fluid.
Linux at home for seven hours a day and Windows at work off and off for 9 hours per day mostly just office stuff.

I prefer Linux for its freedom, I'll put up with the lack of a polished OS and inconveniences for the freedom it provides.
It's certainly possible, but I don't think it can account for the full difference. Hopefully PG will provide some recent server stats.
Here's a good reason why you should get rid of things you don't use.
Systems are more powerful than the people caught up in them.
The person who is escaping the "cast of poop-cleaners-by-bare-hands" is trying to escape the system that casts him thus. If you (America) ensure that only the best and the brightest are granted entry, then you get to both

a) preserve your system, without dilution of it's core principles

b) allow new entrants into the system who are hungry and desperate to succeed and start a new life

What the article correctly identifies is that someone who is desperate to succeed will go much further than others. This kind of inner motivation is extremely valuable and is what fuels the engine of America's growth.
Rendering a Sierpinski Pyramid in Clojure
Dupe, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=686027
"Only boring people get bored."

"I can't think of anything interesting to do" is very different than "there is nothing interesting left to do."

I will grant you "the trappings of wealth" would seem to be boring in short order. How many "exclusive resorts" can you stay in until all the ultra-master-upgrade-penthouse suites look the same? How long can you listen to the "in crowd" go on about their money and faux-philanthropy?

Bill Gates is a perfect example here. Made his money, changed the world, checked out, made a difference. Do you think Bill is bored?
Odd, CPU-wise it does pretty well here:
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=al...

(g++ vs gcc in the language shootout).

I'm gonna guess gcc's been optimized for compilation by gcc (or at least the bootstrap version), and that no such optimization's been done for g++.
You raise reasonable questions. It's a sad fact that some people get very rich by exploiting the commons and depend on zero- or negative-sum strategies to increase their wealth.
There's an enormous cultural difference between Wall Street and the Silicon Valley.

There sure is. In Silicon Valley the 35 year old overweight, alcoholic burnouts aren't rich and don't have trophy wives.
After trying to learn Haskell on and off for a couple of years and miserably failing to be able to write a useful program with it, I'm moving on to Scala which pretty much rules.
Keeping in mind that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics was programmed in PL/1 and assembler, and may have generated more ideas than Linux or Unix.
For example if you have exceptions enabled, there must be some infrastructure for handling them. Certain C++ compilers generate almost no code for handling exceptions, but the handling is expensive. Other compensate that with more generated code (for keeping stack frames), and faster handling.

So you can say - well - disable the exceptions.... But is that C++ anymore?

For example Common Lisp is multi-paradigm, but there is no Common Lisp without CLOS. It can't be disabled, and still call itself Common Lisp.

Same with RTTI in C++ - it's in the language, but again it can be disabled. Or new/delete (and the missing reallocate construct).

So C++ the language, and C++ the runtime being used are quite different things when comes to usage.
Even though I complained about not being able to learn Haskell in another comment, this is the tutorial that got me the furthest. I found RWH pretty much worthless by comparison.
Yes, you are correct. In my high-performance version, I used an extension of the language provided by g++ which allowed turning off of exceptions, which sadly cost time even if you don't use them.