skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In fact C++ is usually slower than C because parsing and comprehending it is so damned hard that compiler writers are satisfied when they can get that far.
I think the Doom engine was written in C (and assembler), but the level-editing tools were in Objective-C. Again, the right tool for the right job - Objective-C's dynamic dispatch greatly helps user interface programming compared to bare C, whereas the Doom engine probably had no need for it.
Microsoft's secret 'screw Google' meetings in D.C.
This is fascinating.

OTOH, it depresses me - we try to do a fair bit of analysis on surfing patterns, A/B testing features at http://SmartFlix.com, looking at average basket size, etc.

...and now I've got to worry that I've got "confounding variables". Maybe feature X decreases check out rates ... but actually increases check out rates both among male and female customers....

ARGH. My head hurts.
Of Hiring, Motivation, Pay Structures & Rewards in Startup World..It’s all Fuzzy
Commodity Prices & Foods as Social Networks
The Difference Between Lunacy and Conviction
> first-class.

I'm not sure I follow. This looks first-class to me.

def name_printer(name):
def printer():
print(name)
return printer

erlanger_printer = name_printer('erlanger')

Python doesn't support creating anonymous functions, but functions are first-class. Sorry if you already knew this; it seems like you know Python pretty well so I'm sure you do.
Where does this cyclist-fascist 'I'm holier than thou because I have carbon rims' attitude come from, seems it's endemic.
I think that's not the right criteria though. Are most of the people you know capable maintaining other people's C++ code?

The idea that you can write (!) sane code in C++ by using a simple/sane subset is of course true. But the problem is that in a language of this complexity no two people are going to be able to agree on what that sane subset is. One person may love auto_ptr and use it everywhere, confusing her coworkers who don't get reference counting idioms, but love the STL...

By the time you manage to get your project's coding standards hammered out and enforced, and get it rigged up so it can talk to your external libraries that don't adhere to those standards, you might as well have given up and used C to begin with.
Congrats. Can you please give us more details on the acquisition and the relationship between the companies (partnership, distribution etc...) prior to the offer?
Do you mean a wheel-generator attachment for a manpower bike, or an attachment to borrow energy from an electric bike?

For a manpower bike, I think it would be terrifically underpowered or terrifically difficult. As mentioned in a link from Luc, http://www.ski-epic.com/amsterdam_bicycles/, even the little headlights you stick on and power with the tires make cycling _much_ harder and produce very little light.

Charging a laptop/cell off of that would be... a challenge. =P

Borrowing energy from the battery of an electric bike would be a different story, but not all that helpful. Potentially useful if you stop at a coffee shop or something on your commute, but other than that, I can't see what it would do for you.
I would opt for a complete new type of a search engine. One with completely different features to present day search engines.

1) A mashup type of a search engine which would combine results from different locations and combine them into one result

2) An intelligent search engine which give one or few accurate answer to what ever we ask from it.
Yes, this does seem to be a top-down problem and not a result of incompetence.

I'm guessing they won't change until they see their profits effected. As to PayPal, I have chosen other providers. So I only have to deal with them if some vendor only accepts PayPal and I really want to use that vendor.

As for Google, for now, I don't need to serve up ads. If and when I do, I will spend time to see if alternate ad brokers can give me equal or better returns. Google knows that their hold on the ad market stays as long as buyers and publishers do not move in sync. That is, its very hard for a publisher to use a different brokerage when all the buyers feel they need to use Google (and vice verse). This movement is probably best done by market segment. Specialty brokers ("we only do blogs", "we do sports very well", etc) should be the ones to disrupt this space. I guess this is already being done, but it certainly isn't happening fast enough. Ideas?
OCaml does quite well against C++ in the shootout. OCaml's Functors and type inferrence are a big win over C++ templates. Yeah, the syntax takes some getting-used-to, but all in all the language seems to hang together much better than C++ (perhaps not saying much)
Every couple of years the Moller skycar appears on the news as if it was some new advancement in car technology and we seem so much closer to flying cars. I laugh whenever I see it.
PG: "News organisations can learn from start-up culture"
And that's the crux of scientific modeling! There's a pretty famous quote to the effect of scientists don't stay up at night wondering if they're testing the right thing, but instead if they chose the right controls.
It wasn't until too long ago that rape within the marriage 'did not exist' in America.

With 'did not exist' I don't mean to say it didn't happen, just that since you could not call it rape there was no way to do anything about it.

Fortunately that has changed now, but still, in a large number of US states this is considered a 'lesser crime' according to this wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spousal_rape
I'll guess a troll or Matt Mullenweg ;)
I just read through everything on your site with the exception of the wiki -- pretty amazing stuff you guys are doing. There are so many possibilities... just wow. Nice work.
Except for the camel case bit...
I think it's a shame that you feel that way. The SF bike shops vary, but my experience with places like Valencia Cyclery and Mission Bikes has been the opposite.

And heck SF has the excellent bike kitchen (http://bikekitchen.org) which is probably the friendliest place for bike newbies on earth. You can get a working bike for $0 with a little time and effort.
It seems like a language like OCaml could do quite well in the VM implementation space: it has very low-level imperative constructs that can be used to optimize, yet also has very good features that allow for generic programming (modules, functors, type inferrance).
I wasn't sure how to respond to that question. I work 40 hours a week at my day job... but I work another 30+ hours a week on other projects (startup projects, etc).
That day may not be too far off... I hope ;-)
Search technology - perhaps because of the cost in setting up - has stayed behind. I would like to see:

(01)User ability to adjust the 'algo' for ranking results. I may want all the newer websites and news in my ield rather than the websites with the highest page rank.

(02) Ability to distinguish an 'authority website', i.e I search for Topic X, I do not want the wikipedia. I want the website perhaps of a Ph.D. student with no SEO, but with 500 pages on the topic (i.e not only rank pages, but rank websites).

(03) and fast as hell :)
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Why are comments like this sometimes voted to the top, and other times buried with downvotes? Where's the line between good self-promotion and spam? Seriously asking.
There's been similar reactions recently in the UK to the thought of supermarkets selling cheap bikes. The people commenting apparently had no ability to step outside themselves and consider the needs of others.

The uproar actually made me feel better in a way because I was glad to find out that such reactions are not confined to the world of computer technology. In IT I usually notice it in enthusiast reviews, were they basically state: if this product is not targeted directly at me, then it is an abomination.
According to wikipedia, human muscles are only about 20% efficient. Right there meatbags have lost to the electric bike before we even consider the efficiency of digestion, food preparation, and transportation.

(Pardon while I wave hands about electrical transmission line losses, battery energy return rates, and electrical motor efficiency. I'm fairly certain we can even be so silly as to burn food to power the previously coal fired electric plants and the battery/motor combination still wins, but it will be close in that circumstance.)
As a father, I can say that if someone moves in near me and they're a registered sex offender, I hope to know about it. I don't care how minuscule the crime is, the possibility of repeat offenses or misbehavior is too high to risk it.

"Is the punishment too harsh" is purely subjective, sometimes yes, sometimes no, but any inappropriate behavior around children (impressionable, gullible, naive) should be punished. If a person shows that kind of poor judgment they should suffer the consequences of their actions.

EDIT: A lot of this has to do with parenting practices and their responsibility in all of this as well.

Maybe I'm just paranoid, but not trusting people until they've earned it has kept me out of more situations than the hassle it might have caused.

It's depressing we don't value our youth more honestly.

This is also not really related to HN, I expect to find this on digg/reddit/slash., but here?

EDIT: To the reply about the 15 year old giving a blowjob to a classmate, read the subjective part again, sometimes the punishment doesn't fit the crime, especially when you consider two minors, I'm addressing the adult indecent behavior, not the minors with minors, that's a parenting problem in my eyes.
I'm not sure that's entirely true:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ODM4MzkyNzVmMjhhYWM0NWM...

One of the first media sensations ever to impinge upon my consciousness was the visit to Britain by rock star Jerry Lee Lewis in May 1958, four months before Lolita’s American debut. This was supposed to be a concert tour, but 22-year-old Jerry had brought his wife Myra along, and the British press got wind of the fact that Myra was only 13. This wasn’t an unusual thing in the south of that time; Jerry himself had first been wed at 15 (when he already had a drinking problem). Myra was his third wife, and also his second cousin once removed. Back then country people grew up fast and close to their kin. Neither Jerry nor Myra could understand what the fuss was about. He: “I plumb married the girl, didn’t I?” She: “Back home you can marry at 10, if you can find a husband.” (This was not true, even in the south, though Myra likely believed it. She also, according to the British press, believed in Santa Claus.) It didn’t help that Jerry’s new record was titled High School Confidential.
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FWIW, I'm working in C for my day job (and resisting calls to move up to C++), as my day job involves shuffling bytes around rather than particularly complex code; it's ~20KLOC. Then we build the tools to manage it in Python with a bit of shell scripting here and there. However, I code Scheme in my spare time, and would do the lot in that if I didn't then have to justify training new developers in Scheme! C's the right tradeoff for commercially developing a high-performance database kernel, IMHO.

I've done plenty of C++ in past jobs... which is why my day job is in C :-)
Put pot smokers and non-violent offenders into prison, and they turn into hardened criminals.
Apple needs to publish some official sales numbers. The speculation on this topic is rivaling the speculation on how much "everybody" loves to use social media.
Add electric assist to your bicycle (video)
I would aggregate all the knowledge in linkdumps / fora where voting is possible, possibly seed the database by creating a giant repository of links such as a social bookmarking site.

It would get built up slowly but it would be of a higher quality than you could probably reach with crawling. Effectively you'd be crowdsourcing the ratings system of your search engine.

A karma system would keep the spammers out, or at least have them identified fast enough.

Of course there are plenty of things that would need to be fleshed out wrt to abuse potential and 'gaming the system' but I think it would stand a fighting chance.

Crawling the web is just going to get you tons of garbage, comparable with moving the contents of the local trash dump into your house because you know there must be a pair of earrings in there somewhere.

There will come a time when 'pagecount' is not the defining measure of search engine quality. Google seems to be on to that because they've dropped their 'indexing xxx pages' message from the homepage long ago.

I would also allow users to 'hide' certain domains from their future search results, and use that to help identifying sites that contain mostly (or exclusively) trash.
I don't have the articles handy, but The Economist had some statistics on prison populations in the US. That's where my information comes from.

IIRC, even China doesn't have as many people in jail as the US.
D's great for at least two reasons:

1) it set out to be a no-compromise systems programming language

2) it's being designed by people with an deep and intimate knowledge of C++ (Walter Bright wrote a C++ compiler - no mean feat, and Alexander Stepanov was Mr STL)

These guys know the good, the bad and the ugly of C++ much better than most. From the stuff I've seen so far (check out Stepanov's presentations on an iterator-free STL, or adding functional purity, and also look at the work on making floating point more rigorous) this could finally be a worthy successor.
To their credit, 80legs does make crawling the web much easier than starting from scratch so it does answer the question of how to begin.
Society of Sociopaths
so the girl in the article who gave a blowjob when she was 15 to a guy in her class...you think its appropriate now that she is 30 that everywhere she moves she has to announce that she's a sex offender? come on, that's ridiculous.

If we are putting sex offender registries online, lets put all criminal registries online as well. I should know if I live next to people with drug habits, right?
This comes up all the time. Happened to me too, I gave up on AdSense as a result.

How all the crappy parking and spam sites keep their adsense going I'll never understand.
manpower. i agree it would be tough, but if we have devices that allow you to recharge your cellphone with a device that uses walking as a power source (http://www.livescience.com/technology/080207-people-power.ht...), i think we can do something for a bike that could maybe produce a little more juice.
There's room for a search engine that can take more advanced boolean queries and can handle custom ranking. For example, a while ago I was trying to find a section on a blog that mention someone whose last name is "White". The blog mentions politics a lot, so nearly every article also had the phrase "white house". It would be nice to search for mentions on the blog of "white" not including "white house," but not excluding it, either.

The closest you can get on Google is to search for white and NOT "white house," then search for "white house," and search within the results for "white" to see if anything else pops up.
As with many of their headline articles, the economist also did a much more in-depth "Briefing" about this topic in the same issue: http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14164614
One of the things I'm really liking about ruby during my python to ruby conversion is that it handles the visitor pattern for me.

Half the Java code I ever wrote was probably visitor pattern cruft. Ruby largely just handles it all for me.
There is a longer piece here that I encourage you to read:

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14164614

Major points:

-A lot of the people on these registers are not considered dangerous (people who had consensual sex as teenagers)
-There's no evidence that these public registers reduce the risk.
-They ruin the lives of many people.
I've not seen anything like the dynamic-dispatch optimisations the Self team came up with in the 1990s done in C++, nor problem-domain optimisations expressed as macros as is often done in Lisps, nor the aggressive constant-propagation of closures and their eventual inlining that Factor does.

Perhaps some of them could be applied, but a highly complicated base language with extensive mutation semantics (including pointer aliasing) probably mean they'll be so limited in their applicable scope, and so difficult to implement, that it's not an attractive activity for C++ compiler writers...
Or you could do one that takes data like clicks on new stories, and uses it to promote old stuff. For example, take political news: if there's a news story about a politician's sex scandal, older content that mentions the politician and sex scandals could get a bump; if there's a story about a politician demanding a tax cut, older stories about the politician's attitude towards taxes could be promoted, instead.
Decent idea, but sounds like a music site API dilemma waiting to happen. Will they mesh? Dont know. And the manual labor aspect posting to social sites like facebook does not sound fun at all. Tedious and inefficient. Keep it in house. Build the right site, with rich featues and a great name, and compete directly with the musician's own site. Make them begin to leave their own and only deal with you. ie, such as many major label artists have begun to do with using Myspacemusic instead of their own site. Eventhough it lacks usability, and in my opinion is worthless. If they can accomplish it, you can demolish what they've ATTEMPTED to do.
If i was a politician, I could spin it as "Catching Real Sex Offenders Act" where I would refocus the list towards the "scary types" and put the the frivolous ones on a second tier (drunk guy pissing on a wall, kids doing stupid things) or forgiven; and viciously attack politicians who want to distract and waste our police's time & money bothering with a guy who drunkenly pissed on a wall 20 years ago and go after the Real Bad Guys who parents are actually scared of.
OpenCL Programming Guide in Snow Leopard
I don't remember much of the movie - thankfully - but if an army is shooting at me and I can butcher them with my magical sword, I don't care if they're clones, robots, aliens, black, or children.
API changes in Snow Leopard
Interesting.. Today I just got an email that TweetLater is rebranding themselves as SocialOomph: http://www.socialoomphblog.com/

Personally, I think these new names are terrible. Are these signs that the honeymoon with Twitter is over?
Actually, even today there are some US states that allow marriage between minors who are under the age of consent, so long as they have parental approval.

See the last paragraph of this interesting article: http://www.faqs.org/childhood/A-Ar/Age-of-Consent.html
How about evidence I can personally vouch for? My brother and his wife bought a new home and started making friends with their neighbors, a week or two pass and my sister-in-law finds out their next door neighbor is on a sex offender list, pretty good idea to keep an even closer eye on her two children wouldn't you think?

I don't care what the crime is, fix the law to judge youth's interaction with each other, but if you even expose yourself to a minor, you have shown horrible judgment and deserve the hassle. Again, this is why it's subjective, you see it as ruining that persons life, I see it as scarring a child or possibly worse for life.

EDIT: Just to clarify, I think the list is too big and has too much pointless things on it (like another poster's example of a drunk person relieving himself on a wall), but that's the judge's fault, not the lists fault, the list serves a very real purpose, though the ones passing judgment could use some common sense.
Ask HN: I can't do YC. What are alternatives?
I've just listened to a great interview with Paul Graham [0] and realized that I don't fit into YC: I am over 30. I've worked as a developer / consultant so my cost of living is high. And I've two kids so I am not as mobile when I was 19.
So I want to startup and an idea, a co-founder and a working prototype are there. We do this currently at night and want to pursue this at daytime.
I would love to do something like YC but I just can't. So what are the alternatives? Just look for some angels? But where?

[0]: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/08/graham_on_start.html
I've found Python/C++ (via boost::python) to be a fantastic combo. There's also luabind which does similar lua/C++ two-step.
The government always tries to extend its power. That does not mean that it is engaging in some grand conspiracy, it's just the natural tendency of government to grow.
As a father, I can say that if someone moves in near me and they're a registered sex offender, I hope to know about it.

Why stop at sex offenders? I want a table-driven foodar that detects individuals who meet my filtering criteria and alerts me of their proximity as soon as possible.
I didn't get it at first, but you're right; it's uncanny.

http://www.paulgraham.com/saynotes.html (footnote 8), and:

http://www.paulgraham.com/vwfront.html
The concept of seeking certainly ties together most every endeavor I participate in. Internet news junkie? Check. Coffee shop reviewer? Check. Comedy talent scout? Check.
The good news is that when you do A/B testing, you can create a properly randomized experiment, where variations of e.g. the number of men/women assigned to the A and B group are accounted for as part of the sampling error.

Where this stuff really gets you is in retrospective data analysis, where with the right choice of would-be confounding variables you can pretty much argue both directions on any question.
So you propose making a smaller list covering all the people who committed actually-serious sex crimes and who might pose a significant risk to the public?

If they really have such a high chance of recidivism, then why would you offload that risk onto parents instead of the system? Why not keep them in prison forever, if they can't be successfully rehabilitated?

I don't understand the place for a grey area of "person X is so dangerous he should be ostracized and branded so that people can steer clear of him, but person X is not dangerous enough to imprison him."

(Also, we must have very different definitions of "evidence." When you cite a sex offender neighbor who hasn't apparently done you or your family any harm, but who you've put on a mental blacklist because of the registry, that does not sound like evidence that the registry is helping anyone.)
It's me or are they trying to reparaphrasing, euphemistically, the Out-of-order execution?
The parents of the youthfully betrothed, in this case.
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It's definitely taken a dive recently. There wasn't even enough momentum to bin the kennedy story the other day, and there were people even defending the post! The signal-to-noise ratio is the most important factor of a system like this, and there is zero value in the site if it degenerates into the same gray goo that has consumed everything else.
Unless you are ready to get your hands dirty with the semantic side of search, I would focus on creating a more enjoyable and emotionally appealing experience for a particular demographic of consumers. Maybe teens, students, mothers, whatever...focus on building a loyal, targeted user base.

Otherwise you run the risk of just being a couple cool features that the big boys can use as inspiration for their own work.