skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As the others are saying, it very much depends on what you're trying to accomplish. I'll start off by saying that C is a much, much simpler language than C++ and unless you're looking to make a serious investment it might be better to just learn C, even though C++ adds a lot of genuinely useful stuff.

You might consider learning C{,++} if:

If you need to interface with hardware at a very low level, such as when you are programming a microcontroller or writing a device driver.

You have a reasonably small application and you need the best performance possible. Don't use them because "C++ is fast". C++ is fairly fast by default, but so are many other languages where it's harder to shoot your foot off. Use C or C++ because of the greater scope for optimization in memory layout and other sorts of painstaking optimizations.

Learn it because you want to create a library that can be used by many other different languages. Pretty much any language has some method of calling a C function, it's pretty simple. Making calls between languages that have their own garbage collectors is more complicated.

Learn it to teach yourself about how your computer works. you could also use assembly language here, but C works well enough. Getting a sense for how other languages work under the covers can help you understand performance trade offs in other languages better.
My main interest lies in game development. To be a little more precise in game engine development. I'm studying computer science at the moment and I plan to work towards such a job after graduation.

And afaik most game engines are written in C++ because of performance and memory management.
I think we're stuck in a culture of "friend scarcity". When meeting people in meat-space, you don't have the time capacity to be able to make deep, meaningful relationships with a lot of people. Facebook gives the illusion of giving you more time to engage friends on a deep level. You're not socializing in a work setting, you're chewing the fat over goofy cat pictures. You're (ostensibly) keeping up with "how are the wife and kids". And because our brains are wired to expect that to be a scarce resource, we gather as many "friends" as we can on Facebook.

It's also probably a learned response from us having gone through the early days of social networking. There just weren't as many people total on the internet back then. If there was a person you knew and they also had internet access, and they also used Facebook, it was somewhat more of a rare thing than it is today. You friended them because, again, you understood the Facebook friend to be a semi-scarce resource and human brains are hardwired to hoard scarce resources.

So now that we live in an era where sugary, salty, fatty foods and Facebook friends are no longer scarce resources, we gorge ourselves on them and have become obese as a result. "Facebook-friend-fat".

Sounds like it's time to cut out the empty calories and start exercising. Get rid of the people who post vapid shit, regardless of how well you think you know that person (how many times do we hear people make excuses for not eating better because it's uncomfortable?). And start posting better content of your own. One tends to get out what one puts in.
Perhaps, but I haven't missed it. I still think this isolation is a feature, not a bug.
That can be read multiple ways, in that even the worlds dumbest advertising / spyware network should be able to easily figure out I'm into hard sci fi and have been into hard sci fi for a long time and probably be into hard sci fi for quite awhile, such as the financially precious immediate future where I will almost certainly drop some $$$ on sci fi books. I'm an easy sell, I know what I like, it should NOT be hard for advertisers to figure it out, I want to spend money on it, and I've got plenty of money. But nobody cares. You don't get PR by making money, only by getting eyeballs and accounts.

On the other hand, watching my own kids, its star wars today, gone tomorrow. Minecraft today, gone tomorrow. Lego today, gone tomorrow. Even if you could track my son and accurately predict his current interests, knowing that he WAS really into star wars a year ago is pretty much financially useless given that he seems to be into lego branded cartoons right now, although next year both will be forgotten in favor of something else.
> Depends on the kernel. For example a large part of the Windows kernel is written in C++.

Exactly. Still yeah, I agree with you (and Linus Torvalds) on the fact C should be used.
Orange and T-Mobile give you 1Gb of data when you top-up £10. Other carriers do similar things.
Then perhaps you should take a look at a completely different paradigm e.g.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_programming
Just saying: if you know C and Java (as you mentioned), then C++ is just a matter of syntax. It won't introduce any new concept nor will make you a better programmer. I wouldn't really consider learning it unless you have to use it in any specific context or project. There are so many new, different and more innovative languages out there on which i'd focus.
According to this there are around 100 advertised every 3 months in the UK http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/haskell.do which is not a lot but non zero.
Type Your Own Animated Movie With This Crazy Software
Not really. The article mentions this: «"I only use WhatsApp to communicate and send pics these days," said Natalie West, a twentysomething financial sales associate in London.».
Learn C++?

You don't learn C++, you live C++. So for your case, no.
No. Its not. Its usage is declining.
I'd also include Rally Software in that list (I work for Rally). They've won numerous "best place to work" awards: http://www.rallydev.com/awards
Amazing that you would claim such a thing when the majority of economists never bother to publicly make a single macroeconomic prediction.
To directly answer your question then: Yes. C++ is certainly something you should learn.

Now only you will truly know if C++ is suitable for the tasks you do but unless you work at a university then chances are C++ will be good to great for whatever you need.
Humans haven't managed it, so why so you assume a computer will?
You can write device drivers for Windows in C++ and for OS X in a subset of C++ (no exceptions or RTTI, from what I recall).
Which is great if you're topping up by £10+ every month (because the data allowance no doubt expires). If you're spending £10/month on credit, you may as well get a rolling contract and get minutes, texts and unlimited data (Giff Gaff -> £12)

I know plenty of people who aren't willing to pay that even though they use a smartphone (mostly on wifi)... and 20p/megabyte for occasional or accidental data use is just outrageous. Data prices are still a huge problem imo.
NGS phage display data here.
Anytime Facebook and Myspace get compared, I tune out immediately.

They have nothing in common, Facebook ate Myspace's lunch when it was 10 million users, this has nothing to do with what may kill a network with the entire US and 1 billion ACTIVE users. We have no idea what, if anything, will kill Facebook.
Sounds like the author wants facebook to improve its popular posts algorithm and gave a great example of where it failed.

Very fair point, but why not just say that?
is COBOL still worth learning ? without context , your question is meaningless. I know engineers that make 6 figures salaries maintaining COBOL systems. So it is worth for them and they dont care about hype.

give some context.

"Is C++ still worth learning for this or that kind of job or field?" is the question you should have asked.

Now i would say most programming languages are still built on either C or C++, and a lot of them allow C or C++ extensions,even hipster's nodejs. You cant be an expert on these solutions/languages without knowing the lower level.
Eventually, but strong AI just means intelligence matching or exceeding human intelligence. We already have billions of entities with human intelligence, and it is taking us a long time to produce something smarter than ourselves. If the first strong AI is just a little smarter than us, and if it chooses to put its energy toward the creation of more AIs, then maybe it will eventually produce something smarter than itself. But it's not so simple that we just get to the singularity straight away.
If the publisher is cool with this (obviously, the authors are), I hope more publishers continue to see this not as a zero-sum game. I guess I can count myself as part of the lucky privileged class that will buy a book if I like it, whether it's free or not, just to pay my respect to the author...and to have a reliable copy of it (downloading a PDF from a url of store.free-college.org/noleech1.php gives me the slight heebie-jeebies...what can I say, I'm old!)

Recently I purchased a Kindle version of Gregory Brown's "Ruby Best Practices"...even though I'm sure I bought it from Oreilly when it was released in 2009 and even as Brown has been offering the book for free on his own site since 2010 (http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/posts/gregory/022-rbp-now-...)

I bought it again because as I've recently been googling for Ruby-specific application methods, I constantly land on the text scraped from the free book...that's worth giving up a few more bucks to the author. Brown also started a paid newsletter for indepth Ruby discussion (practicingruby.com)...it's the first paid newsletter I've ever, well, paid for, and I'm happy to patronize the author. So, at least from people like me, generous authors can always get a few bucks.
C++ is still worth learning. But if you can - try Go instead. Both solve more or less the same problems, but, Go has the advantage of being designed more recently - and so it has lesser cruft, well designed features, and its easier to learn and master.
The first altcoin to utilize and implement M-of-N-signatures will take over. Bitcoin is close but not quite.
Yes if any of the following are true:

1. You do any desktop programming. You will meet c++ along the line somewhere for certain, be it some win32 abstraction, Qt, Wx etc. I'm ignoring apple here for ref.

2. If you're writing high performance software (scientific computing, gaming, trading etc).

I can't really see many other use cases that can't be solved either via C or a high level language easily.

To be honest I really was indifferent about C++ for years but C++11 seems pretty good so far. I can see it creeping in places where JVM/CLR are being pushed a bit hard and in the systems programming space, but on the basis that some people like myself are still maintaining oooold c++ code, I can't see that being that soon.
There is no reason this should be trending as #1 on HN. A quip about Facebook's algorithm not getting a post right on time in front of you - and? What's the takeaway? What are the insights?
I feel that way about LinkedIn. My use of it consists exclusively of clicking "accept" on connection requests. I'm not sure I've ever used it for anything else, though presumably someone must.
May be, but I always liked most of the articles posted because they bring insightful remarks. Obviously this article falls short.

Don’t whine about stupid things with Facebook. Tell us things we don’t know, that we’re not aware of, or bring powerful analysis to things that truly matter.
There is some really weird advice in that article.

Hey Accountname! Thanks for registering on http://site.com ( Site world )

Your account is Accountname and the IP address this was created from was 2.3.4.5 on 11/10/2013 12:35 ETA. The link to your profile is here : http://site.com/profile/accountname

If you did not create this account, you can deactivate it by clicking here

Not all startups are aimed at techies, and my mum would be scared and more than a little put off by that.
I'm still a teenager, and though I have deactivated my account for exams, Facebook has been a large part of the culture among my friends and within my school.

I maintain that the best thing about it was text posts. People had a go at being witty or relevant or informative, and it seems everywhere you go on the site these qualities are suppressed. Text posts are truncated and offer a See More button, and images and other easily digestible content are prioritised.

This has two important effects:

=> News feeds are much quicker to skim, and are much less substantial, which leaves you unsatisfied even when you've seen everything new, so you stick around. I admit this is pretty good monetising strategy on Facebook's behalf.

=> People start moving to services which imitate the fast flash of attention model promoted by the news feed. That's Snapchat, for example. I feel similarly dissatisfied finding out that Alice and Sally got fake-Facebook-married-but-really-just-BFFLs-still for the sixth time as I do seeing some guy who's not really my friend doing a random snapchat of his mock-surprised face.

It strikes me that so few of my daily interactions online make me feel in any way connected. The best ones are still just talking to people via text or chat, and frankly I feel more connected to @ryanpequin, the comic artist who tweets with brutal honesty from the other side of the world, than most of the friends I see a few times a week.

I think Facebook almost hit the nail on the head regarding what teenagers wanted. They live in highly structured communities (schools) and Facebook made it easy to keep thoughts vaguely within communities simply by showing them to people via algorithms. Unfortunately now it doesn't have the same charm, and many of the people I know feel the same. But all our friends are on it, so we stay.
Social pressure. I dropped my facebook account because my wife's entire extended family expected to be able to friend me. That's 30+ accounts full of duck faces, child updates, and Farmville pings.
IRC is not simple for the average Joe. WhatsApp is.
Not quite sure how blogs come into this. Have they had their time? They seem to be more popular (and simpler) than ever.
It won't introduce any new concept nor will make you a better programmer.

Only someone who never used templates or did template metaprogramming would state such a thing ;). C and Java -> C++ is not just a matter of syntax.
That means there is Haskell in the keyword search but its not necessarily a Haskell job. A lot of companies, mine included, have problems with agents stuffing all sorts of shit in job ads just to get candidates to sign up.
The goals of the new research center seem close to what Douglas Hofstadter (author of GEB) has been working on for all these years.

A related HN post from a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6605015
You don’t have to use Facebook like a daily newspaper. There’s nothing wrong with just using Facebook like the Yellow Pages. It’s there when you need it — if you need it.
> Or why they don't ignore them. [...] maybe that's not an option?

It is; you can click the [V] in the corner of a post in your feed, and choose "Hide all from [username]". I'm not sure how widely known that is, though.
Many HNers are socialist. Libertarianism is common among the younger ones.
Aye.

(Ai?)

But I forgot the exact reference (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_Conferences) so I will now edit my original post to include the right numbers...
With regards to "Mexican", I think he meant referring to anyone of hispanic/latino descent as "Mexican". Its offensive in the same way as referring to any Asian nationality as "Chinese".
The carefully reported article here reports a number of start facts, among them how the new town profiled here began: "The local government used intense pressure to force farmers out of their villages. It tore up roads and cut electricity and water. Even so, thousands stayed on. As a final measure, the schoolhouses — one in each village — were demolished. With no utilities and no way to educate their children, most farmers capitulated and moved to town."

These housing developments promoted by corrupt local government officials are the leading indicator of a coming collapse of the real-estate market in China.[1][2]

As the article kindly submitted here points out, most of the "investment" in new housing in China is destructive malinvestment that reduces wealth. "Some residents wonder why they went through these travails when so little development is visible. Outside the town, most of the former township lies empty. Some hotels and office blocks have been built next to the airport logistics center. But mostly, one is confronted by mile after mile of empty lots — once farmland, now lying fallow, sometimes blocked from view by endless sheet-metal fences painted with propaganda about prosperity and development."

Yes, China has an increasing population, just as the United States had before its housing market bubble burst, but just like the case of the United States a few years ago, the current residential housing market in China is based mostly on speculation. The speculation occurs because middle-class investors cannot find a better investment vehicle, and because they are making unrealistic assumptions about future demand. What's unrealistic about the demand is that migrant workers moving legally to Chinese cities (as they already move illegally) will not possibly be able to afford current market prices for new housing units in China. Many tens of thousands of newly built apartment flats in China will not be occupied by paying renters or owners before they crumble because of their poor construction. The unknown is whether or not the current political system in China will crumble with them.

[1] http://finance.yahoo.com/news/uncomfortable-truth-chinas-pro...

[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2013/10/28/in-china-the...
New York Times’ Obama cheerleading harms the nation
C++? Yes if you want to work in the games industry or at Google.

In general, I'd say no. The niche it fills (high-level features bolted on to a low-level language) is not that useful and it doesn't fill it well.

C, on the other hand, is worth learning.
Mozilla's HTML5 parser is written in Java. One of the reasons java was chosen was the unicode support [1]
The Java code is converted to C++ in build time I think [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6204760

[2] http://ejohn.org/blog/html-5-parsing/
Dear OP: you sound like a spoiled teenager. i'm not even going to read your blogpost.
Why was this thread deleted?
The point is, C is worth learning because of what it teaches you. Likewise Haskell and OCaml are worth learning because they'll make you a better programmer. C++ is only worth learning if you're looking for a career in the gaming industry and therefore need to know it to get a job. C++ is a terrible language that does pretty much everything wrong. The fact that it's only with C++11 that the language starts to become bearable should tell you something. Learning C++ will not make you a better programmer, it will make you a more employable programmer, although even there something like Java or PHP will make you a even more employable programmer.

If you're doing any embedded programming you're going to be using C. C++ is pretty much exclusively used in the gaming industry, and there mostly because of historical reasons more than anything else (all the popular frameworks are written in C++).
I wouldn't say that like it's that easy. Not a good time to talk politics, but I think that the long history of corruption in the government has a lot to do with the unpreparedness for the disasters (including the preceding earthquake). In fact, there's an ongoing senate hearing on a pretty high-profile scam involving congressmen and, well, the senators themselves (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priority_Development_Assistance...).

How this could have been avoided is likely a touchy subject at the moment. Even the president walked out of his meeting with the local officials to cool his head off from great dismay.
Anyways, the point of this is that in almost all uses, mobile site versions are god-awful.

I think you're right, unless the site commits the abonimable sin of redirecting from a specific desktop-targeted page to the homepage of the mobile site when it detects a certain user agent.

STOP DOING THAT.

It is absolutely the worst thing I have seen happen to site usability now that mobile sites are becoming more popular. And it's compounded in several cases by broken "view desktop version" links that still prevent me from actually seeing the page I requested in the first place.

Poor implementation that literally prevents users from viewing your content on popular devices is appalling UX, and it's one of the few things that will make me leave your site forever and never return.
>> "I scroll my feed and see posts from Monday, but not something 3 days ago with THAT much activity?"

I agree with you. I think though that Facebook probably takes into account how often most people visit the site. In Facebook time 3 days is probably quite long ago - probably over 100 posts ago for a lot of people.
Is Latin still worth learning?
Here OP is not "debating". He's being aggressive and condescending.
Humans are built out of neural structures, which are black-box learners. Any AI built out of a white-box learner would at least hypothetically be able to self-improve up to some fundamental physical-mathematical limit imposed by its supply of raw compute-power.

The interesting question is: where is that upper limit on intelligence-per-FLOPS?

EDIT: Fixed it to "FLOPS". We already have AI algorithms that Solve The Problem if given unlimited "thinking time" between steps of interaction with their environment (up to the point of needing a Halting Oracle), and we have extensions of those that are asymptotically speed-optimal modulo some additive or multiplicative constants (which are larger than our current universe). I strongly suspect that scaling down these Idealized AI Agents to real, useful programs isn't going to just involve feeding raw instances of the Ideal Agents small enough environments to be tractable, but actually finding or deriving some algorithm that can scale continuously up and down with available computing power per unit of real time, where the time units are the actual real-time length of an interaction cycle.
Top most pirated movies of the week
From the evidence of how fast new botnets spread, and the current prices of 0-day vulnerabilities we can assume that any strong-AI can easily get access to immense computing power (percentage points of globally installed CPU's).

The difference is that it can use them not for sending low-return spam, but for multiplying its power - even if it doesn't give a qualitative difference, there should be a quantitative difference (how many different tasks it can do at once) when a strong AI gains many orders of magnitude more computing power than any laboratory/datacenter where it was initially created.
Oops. That makes things even more ridiculous, if there have been 3 battery incidents in all this time. Put 505 days into my calculation instead of 140...

As to the point about them all being new cars, well, new cars are safer. If safety is what we're after then yes, a modern car is a good thing. If you're saying that the safety will decay as they age, well, that's reasonable but only time will allow us to correct our calculations there.

That might mean that we need more time to make a full determinations, but that's not a bad thing. This tells us about their current safety which is what's relevant now.
> Books aren't like software where you can release often and iterate.

That's not true at all. Check out https://leanpub.com/, Manning's MEAPs, The Pragmatic Programmers' Beta books, Apress' Alpha books, Oreilly's Early Release books, etc, etc. Of course these are all digital (mostly PDFs), but they are still very much books.