skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have no experience with university education over the pond, but I have to personal observations about the US system: 1) far too many people go to college and 2) the wrong people go to college.

Political pressures have created a huge demand for colleges while supply remains comparatively inelastic. Consequently, the student population has become dominated by people whose parents can afford to send them to college, but whose intellectual credentials and academic interest are far from stellar. College revolves around teaching the mean -- and I don't like it.

I hope graduate school is different.
'''the non-extreme variety has people first, and seeks sustainability for our entire, well fed population.'''

I agree partly - starving now or later - is the problem.

Isn't humanity just a startup?™ - industrial agriculture has "technological debt". We either pay the debt now, or face bigger debt later.

Borlaug, I don't think, was trying to define and deal with debt - and I think sustainability/ecology does.
Game development websites are a good place to look. Try these links:

http://www.gamedev.net/reference/list.asp?categoryid=45#188
http://www.gamasutra.com/search/index.php?search_text=terrai...
Activity Browser Slife v2.x Now Open Source
I think this attests more to the dangers of early tracking in European societies (didn't take the right tests in high school? You're never going to college) than the benefits of education as access to knowledge. In the us, taking classes like this COULD lead to a job, if you were willing to fight really hard for it.
Why not just host the site on a scalable platform (Rackspace Cloud, MediaTemple, etc.) to begin with?
Lecture on Self-Reconfiguring Modular Robots, Claytronics Beyond Audio and Video
Very interesting lecture by Todd C. Mowry professor at Carnegie Mellon University recorded at Stanford University.

The lecture gives you an excellent introduction to the research field Self-Reconfiguring Modular Robot and the current state of art in the field. The main focus is on CMU's Claytronics version and on telepresence that they call Pario.

There is also an excellent introduction to the basic problems and challenges in the area as well as reports on the progress CMU have made.
I'm a little surprised by the fact that they sold now for what seems like a low price compared to what Mint would surely have grown into, given all the momentum they'd built up. It seems like they'd solved the hard problem of getting millions of people to let them into their bank accounts and were fast on their way to becoming a household word. I don't see why they couldn't have become a billion dollar company; the competitive landscape was favorable to them. This seems like a home run that turned into a double. I'd be interested to know the back story behind it.
I had no idea that Mint was a layer on top of another product. Can you explain this in greater detail? What is Yodlee? (I realize I'm proving your point by asking!) And what is the nature of Mint/Yodlee's relationship?
Oh gosh. I searched for it on wikipedia and when it wasn't found I thought: "Yeah, I should have known that it's a joke". I should really get out of this "If it's not on wikipedia, it doesn't exist" mindset. I should at least make a google search next time...
Well, heck, I guess BeOS would be really sorry to hear that they chose C++ for their operating system. (If they were still around, sadly.)
In other words, the only way to do good, efficient, and system-level and
portable C++ ends up to limit yourself to all the things that are
basically available in C.

In amongst the snark, this seems insightful.
it says off air - is this actually going live at some point?
I know that doctors and nurses often do.
September 25- Celebrate Rajeev Motwani's Life.
I'm sure the financial companies offering their products on mint pay more than your average ad or click through

You're right about that...these banks and credit card companies probably pay hundreds per lead, which is a drop in the bucket compared to how much they'll get over the life of the customer.
Nanoparticle gel helps rebuild brain and bone matter in rats
Security could be a great reason to use tarsnap. But you still need to advocate for it in terms that your audience will understand. We still have to convince large financials to get critical, Internet-exposed code audited. What hope do you have that I'll just automatically see how much better this is than Mozy?
But the 20% ROI was only for the last round of investors who hadn't participated before not all the investors.
I'm really tired of the arguments of X language > Y language. Languages have different purposes. There are times when C++ makes sense, times when C makes sense, times when Perl makes sense and times when Python makes sense. It's time to stop evangelizing about our tools. Nobody argues that a hammer is better or worse than a screwdriver.

That attitude is precisely why a lot of our tools, including programming languages, are crap. It's nice, warm and cozy in the world where no language is better than other, but that world is mostly populated by mediocre programmers.

Yes, there are times when language A makes more sense than language B. Especially because when we talk about languages, we're also including the libraries and runtimes that go with them. Here's a ridiculously exaggerated example: ActionScript makes more sense than Lisp when you're developing Flash applications. That is (mainly) because Flash has no support for Lisp at this moment, although you could write your own Lisp compiler for AIR.

To use a real world example, C is a lot better match than Java when you have to process an input file with a size of several gigabytes (should be crossing the terabyte boundary nowadays), which contains descriptions of polygons that you have to fracture into smaller primitives (rectangles and trapezoids) and write out a resulting file containing those primitives in a format understood by a specific piece of hardware designed to process it; and you have to do it in a very limited amount of time which keeps shrinking with every version you release to your client.

The point I'm making here is that, for most languages, there are circumstances that make a language X the best fit, or at least a better fit than most others. If language Y is the best fit under a set of circumstances that is a lot more narrow than the set of circumstances that makes language X the best fit, then I'll tend to say that "X language > Y language", at least "most of the time". For me, C++ is one of the languages that end up near the bottom of that list, because the circumstances under which I would choose it instead of any other language (such as D, for example) are extremely narrow.
I will respond to you how I respond to everybody that claims Linux runs smoothly: When I do a default install of Ubuntu to VMware on my Macbook, which is possibly the most standards-set computer out there, the sound doesn't work, and I need to tinker around online to fix that.

Until I can get sound and graphics running without any effort, Linux does not "just work". And don't judge fucking ChromeOS until it's out. That's like the people here that were yelling how Android would knock iPhone off the market within a year. You can enjoy an OS without it winning, and it pisses those of us who've had bad experiences off when people claim there aren't problems with their system.
Re-read it, he says that you only discover the inefficiency 2 years in.

Yes, I'm sure that he's for perfect abstraction, as is everybody else. But he seems to be arguing against real-world abstraction which is what we've got. All abstraction introduces inefficiencies. There is no magic bullet.
Well, yes, they could have asked for any number of things, but the end decision still rested with him. Which means, yes, actually, they did have to accept his "no." If he refused to answer any further questions except with "no," they would have to accept that too.

I don't mean accept in the sense of "be at peace with the decision." I mean accept in the sense of "there ain't shit you can do about it, kiddo."
Bad programmers using a language poorly does not a bad language make. He just doesn't like dealing with the result of bad programming so he's saying C++ sucks. His "argument" is stupid.
How Google plans to save newspapers
How To Make the Dietary Changes Necessary For Weight Loss
I don't think it's about not trusting Intuit with financial information. It's about believing Intuit will make a mess of mint.com ruining good and useful about that site.
How My Career in Tech Influenced My Fly Fishing Business
If there are intangible benefits, then by all means, have all the intangible support you want.

We can't afford to put 50% of the population through university, it's as simple as that.
For all its faults, efficient abstraction is one of C++'s strongest suites.

A small subset of the STL written for the kernel would do wonders (e.g. vector and list).
If you're willing to be a little creative with your interpretation of the requirements, here are a few options that haven't been mentioned:

Intercal, one of the first joke programming languages.

MS Excel macros, probably the most widely used programming languages today.

VHDL or Verilog, the hardware description languages

One of the one-instruction-set computers, like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_instruction_set_computer#Re...

TeX or PostScript, both of which are technically Turing complete, but not usually considered to be programming languages
Reuse Flash vector art in your iPhone applications (export SWF shapes to Obj-C)
It's live now - event hasn't started yet though.
Commission Calls for New Economic Yardstick
It sounds to me like you're assuming that everybody who tries to be nice to you is being fake.

My being nice to people when I talk to them is a result of my mid-western upbringing, as well as my working the majority of the jobs I'm talking about here.

It must suck seeing the world through your eyes.
YC Rant: build in a requirement to look up a URL before it is posted. If URL was posted any time previously, either choose to bring the original thread to the front or don't post it. What could having a duplicate thread possibly benefit you over resuming the old one?
This is stupid. The thing that makes python so good is that it has a rock-solid, extensive standard library. I'm all for separating it internally so it's easier for pypy/jython/ironpython to reuse and contribute, but don't make us rely on the cheeseshop (full of abandonware and broken code- try finding a STABLE, production-ready s3 client lib, for example). The standard library exists as a repo of well designed (mostly) and high quality (especially after 3.0) modules, but it's greatest attribute is that it's maintained as much as the core language.

Without the stdlib, python is just JavaScript with some extra syntax. Imagine using java without the stdlib. It's very much part of the language.
Doubtful. Probably static electricity.
A Fixed Income Is a Sucker Bet - You can do better then that
Bamboo soil clock powered by dirt
If a submitted URL exactly matches, the dup is automatically avoided (and the original upvoted).

However, submissions are often slightly different or seem to be redirected from blogs, etc. So it'd still be nice to have a way to add a duplication tag.
Yes, you're correct. Thanks.
It would be wonderful if S3 offered a write-only, no-overwrite mode so you could upload stuff from servers without storing credentials.
HN does that. The problem is if the URLs aren't exact matches, or if (in cases like this), it's from a different archive of the same listserv.
I agree to a small extent.

Mac OS solves all of the hardware compatibility (err..most) issues that linux has, but it does not solve the software availability problems.

Yes, you can dual boot, but that is a pain.
What my mentor taught me (I'm sure it's in there somewhere):

"They see the possibilities."
I like how in the thread, Linus explained the use of using bash and perl as prototyping languages. Git has been a multiple language project for a while.

Both hg and bzr also use multiple languages. Both use C and python. With the C part used for parts that need speed, and the python for the prototyping and also as an implementation language.
Revealed: The ghost fleet of the recession
> Certainly not my place to judge you but if you're so sick and tired of working for someone else — what are you waiting on?

Well, what I (think) I am saying is that I have no time or energy for a startup of my own while I'm working at someone else's, and that something has to change to allow me to work towards my own goals. As it is, there are simply no hours left in the day, and even if there were hours the boss wants to own everything I do at any time. So, yeah. I'll work on it.
Yodlee is the service that took on the painful and expensive problem of actually building an engine that can securely store bank and brokerage passwords and use them to scrape hundreds of different financial sites.

They have a consumer front end. It's quite decent, actually, and it's free. Go to Yodlee.com and sign up. But they apparently make most of their money by (a) licensing their back end to services like Mint, and (b) serving as a kind of OEM for banks, who put up Yodlee's software rebranded as a part of the bank's website.
Not a lot of hard numbers in that article on long-term income for salaried employees vs. consultants
I love #6, about hourly goals. Almost every successful businessperson I've known was obsessed with their dashboard, whatever that was. Quarterly, monthly, and weekly were no good, it's already too late to do anything about it. Daily is good. Hourly is better. You always have your hand on the throttle of the business.

They understand that big successes don't suddenly happen. They are the result of many small successes that we make happen all day long.
AND PRACTICE YOUR RESTORES!
Speaking as a professional C++ developer, one difference is that Microsoft has actually improved some of their products. Even if C++0x comes out this year, how long 'til it gets support? Consider that C99 is still considered to be reasonably cutting edge 10 years later and many parts of C++98 are still avoided due to portability and implementation problems.

Meanwhile, lots of high-level alternatives are getting better and are becoming more and more suitable in more places where C++ once reigned, so as C++ programmers get experience in more languages, the blub paradox is no longer keeping us as happy.

I work in games, and I don't see C++ going away anytime soon, though other languages are getting more and more use even now. But C++, as a language, is painful to use, especially when it's as restricted as it is for performance and portability reasons.
Investment Banking Houston, Investment Banking In Houston
GulfStar Group Annouces the Acquisition of Equipment & Technical Services Inc. by Triton Group Holdings LLC.
True, I glossed over my previous research; I didn't think it'd interest people, but you're right, it's wise to show some evidence of your previous attempts before asking for tips...

My googling always just found me more and more ways of generating the height-field data - it's the roads and so on that interest me. I tried tinkering with weighted random walks (eg, given the desire to continue a road from a given point, pick an adjoining cell with a weighting that prioritises having the same altitude and being closest to continuing the existing direction), but this fails to capture things like the fact that roads tend to run along valleys and mountain passes - the hard part, it seems, is in choosing initial points. Likewise, a river can be continued by finding the most downhill adjacent cell, until you find a minimum then starting a flood-fill algorithm to create a lake, until you reach a boundary pixel that "goes downhill", whereupon you can start a new river going down from there - but this fails to realistically account for the widths of rivers (you can just make the river wider as you go down, and sum the width of rivers that meet, but that simple model looks wrong: real rivers are deeper when in narrow canyons and the like).
Exactly.

Currently, I have a tree full of putty sessions open to my most-frequently needed servers, and a cmd.exe window open for pscp/ftp.

Windows, for me, has become a thin client. I looked at my netbook the other day and realized that I have pretty much nothing installed on it. Everything that I do happens either in my machine room at work, or in a datacenter.
Switching to Linux: A Windows developer’s view
It just got confirmed at Techcrunch50. They will running Quicken Desktop as well.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/13/intuit-to-acquire-forme...
I'd love to find the book again... I bet it's out of print, though. It had lots of detail on modelling damage to tanks, and creating terrain, and working out things like line-of-sight in complex worlds, and I think some basic AI, but had nothing to say about snazzy graphics whatsoever; I think it made some reference to vector displays or something like that ;-)
Steve Blank: Can You Trust Any VC’s Under 40?
The Garage Principle and How It Affects our Lives
With each passing year, The velocity with which the Garage Principle impacts our lives heats up. What can you build in your garage?
Well - there is the "new" OS (BeOS) that's ALL C++, right?

GUI oriented OS might as well be C++... Alpha released yesterday - so maybe the C++ bashing is good timing. We'll see what happens.

http://www.haiku-os.org/

[edit]
Checking my assumption.
"The BeOS is a C++ application framework, so your source code will be written in C++ and saved in source code files that have an extension of .cpp."
via http://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/programming_the_be_opera...

and
"Haiku is developed in C++ and provides an object-oriented API."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_%28operating_system%29
Mint founder on Silicon Valley
Freakonomics: Football Injuries - The Metric That Matters
Nice, I like this one better already. For one, it has more options for getting bank account information -- including doing it manually if necessary.
First Private Manned Orbital Flight Announced on Monday September 14, @11:33AM
Freakonomics: How the recession has affected New York’s street vendors
too bad that you forgot to mention that this doesn't work on windows :-)

also, didn't see anything about that from documentation either...
I am also C++ professional developer.
Why does Microsoft offers no support for managed C++ on WinCE/WinMobile ? I think same applies to XNA and Xbox360 -> you can develop games in anything but C++.

It does not seem like C++ is on top of the priority list for
Microsoft.
I should follow this up by correcting myself: obviously, the pressures are not only political. If a college education offers the perception of competence, then market pressures increase the demand that the universities are more than willing to accommodate. I think -- somehow in a way that I do not see -- universities have to just start being more selective.
Microsoft, Oracle, and open source's double standard
Nope, but if there is an answer, it may look like the difference between expertsexchange and stackoverflow (the later is a good example of building for the users).

Other commenters raise interesting points as to why this problem is harder than others - events have so many niches, there's a new set of them for each new set of users. And unlike on stackoverflow, in a month all of that data has lost almost all of its value and you need new data.
This is partly just an argument against how people use the tool (C++), though the tool itself does deserve some of the "credit" for any inelegant code.

I can certainly imagine, and have seen, some insane C++. But, there are things in C++ that even a kernel developer could love.

Probably the simplest example is constructors and destructors. They are a useful for writing clean setup/teardown blocks, and allow data structure initialization errors to be completely avoided. Sure, you could put horrible things into constructor code, and use 10 levels of multiple inheritance to create constructor hell; but if you don't do that, it's really not that magical.
TWINKLE ON ENHANCE MAGAZINE
Twinkle Khanna cover the Enhance Magazine cover page. Here is the cover page pic as she cover the Enhance magazine July 2009 edition in India.
Why do you think he knows what he's talking about?

On the evidence of this article, he's a guy who likes to make ad hominem attacks, unjustified generalisations, and unsupported (and demonstrably wrong) accusations based on proof by raw ego. This much is obvious to numerous people who actually use C++ to do the sort of things Torvalds criticises.

C++ has plenty of flaws, to be sure. And yes, it's being steadily overtaken by newer tools for many purposes, too. But Torvalds didn't make a reasoned argument based on those things. He wrote a rant, and not even a very good one.
Looks like we have radically different philosophies on creativity. I like your description Ryan (and admire dedication towards a goal you care about).

But I can't help but feel you can burn yourself out if you're not careful. I find my own work effectiveness to vary. Sometimes I'm a machine, cranking out great code/ideas but at other times my brain really does prefer other input/stimuli. Of course spending time with my fiance is always energizing. Going for long walks is my reset/refresh, checking out a museum or movie helps to. Browsing HN or other social shares is great to.
They are
http://www.haiku-os.org/
Particularly with 3.0, it's not rock-solid at all. There are a ton of libraries whose behavior regarding strings vs. bytes is currently unpredictable and undesirable, and several others that should have been deprecated in 2.X and removed befor 3.

I like the standard library, but there's a lot of room for improvement.
@BrandonWatson Is Listening
* Going to the same event as a perfect stranger is not a strong enough context for socialization*

People who have just moved to a new place do a lot of that, soon they get a new peer group. Finding the right events is easier than it once was with online tools, but still not trivial.
Why did you skip the final step? You were like 90 seconds away from having it deployed on CloudFront, and thus quickly served anywhere in the world on a real Content Delivery Network.

It would have taken something on the order of one right-click in your S3 organizer of choice, followed by a CNAME record.

S3 has about 300-800ms latency on average. CloudFront's latency is 46ms. (exactly, every single time, 46ms. It's spooky).

So close... and yet so far!
More on Bhutan's Gross National Happiness index: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness

If only we could all be as happy as the landlocked Himalayan theocratic monarchy existing in a long-term self-imposed isolationism!

Being politically cynical, and knowing France's reputation for a kind of paternalistic dirigisme, this kind of conclusion seems to be a blanket justification for government intervention.

The article decries government obsession with pumping up GDP metrics. But their solution is not to take a step toward laissez-faire, but simply to substitute another metric in GDP's place. The problem of gaming metrics in order to make it look like politicians are 'doing something' remains unchanged.

The article includes this quote from the report: "developing countries may be encouraged to allow a foreign mining company to develop a mine, even though the country receives low royalties, even though the environment may be degraded, and even though miners may be exposed to health hazards." This isn't about 'societal welfare' so much as it is about economic nationalism. Manifestations of economic nationalism aren't uncommon for periods of global recession. The only new aspect here is the 'social' window dressing it's being given.
You fail to note the obvious irony: Microsoft's support for C++ standards is probably the biggest single contributor to the lack of support for, well, C++ standards. It may be that Microsoft has actually improved some of their products. But their C++ compiler is terribly lagging.