skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand your point and I don't have a clue as to what will end poverty, I really don't think it's possible. I do know this, you say that the current state is a result of doing nothing, I don't find that to be factual. Billions of dollars (probably trillions) from the Western world has been given to poverty stricken areas, technology has been given and shared, schools built, peace keeping forces have been put in place in some areas, hospitals have been built, and so on.
Apple Planning to Sync Video Across Devices
I'm devoting to the next 10 minutes to clicking on all the mesothelioma ads in the Google SERPs. $90 per click? Hah.
The $.99 thing started just to psychologically cause people to think it is cheaper. At first glance, $99.99 looks cheaper than $100.00, when really what difference is a penny?

I've been wishing this would go away but, unfortunately, you're starting to see even $.98 and $.97 sigh
i also like http://codegolf.com
That super capacitor mentioned a few years ago (estor?)

Someone periodically comes up with a new longer lived/more potent battery or a very compact capacitor. The problem is not making such devices. The problem is making them safe and cheap to manufacture.
I think it's a very good article detailing the various flaws of C++; I particularly have problems with the complexity of the languages making it very difficult for compiler writers to generate usable error messages (not only true for gcc as mentioned in the article, but Microsofts C++ compiler generates many unusable error messages, too! [At least it did in 2004, never touched it again...])
I wish Google would make a web interface that pre-cached the street view frames and implemented a better mouselook and keyboard controls so you could 'drive' the streets. It would be a great way to explore and learn the layout of new areas.
Probably, but I already have a decent-sized free user base. Unless they're privy to the naming tests, they'll only be confused when they hear about different names for the same plan.
Well - there are also things like zoning laws that come into play in that case.
I know OP used "flipping burgers" as a metaphor, but for my brother and me, it's very real.

We both worked at McDonald's in high school when it was difficult to get a job there and they ran a very tight ship. It was the hardest job either of us every had. We had to do everything: cook, clean, take care of every customer, make sure everything was in place and everything was properly scheduled. We had to smile the whole time, and when everything was done, we had to come back and do it all over again the next day.

We may have complained how hard it was back then, but now we both realize how valuable those work habits would be in every single job either of us has had since. The lessons easily apply to any start-up.

Now if I could only get a hot Big Mac without making it myself.
> Stroustrup campaigned for years and years and years, way beyond any sort of technical contributions he made to the language, to get it adopted and used. And he sort of ran all the standards committees with a whip and a chair.

> And he said “no” to no one.

And that is the core of the problem.
Nope. As an outsider it seems the Zune group is allowed some autonomy from the typical Microsoft mismanagement process. The Zune HD for example is arguably the most advanced hardware platform for any DAP on the market right now so its development process must have been fast tracked.
I deal with a lot business guys at my day job (20+). In 6 years I've only known 1 that I would actually go into business with myself.

I have a feeling that since there really isnt any pressure to quantify their work (at the lower levels), most of them dont measure their own performance and stay at the same mediocre level.
Scaling OAuth providers
Otherwise known as The Price is Right Asshole Bidding Theory: the same bid plus one.
- Charging money is a whole new learning curve. Our free product was humming along. We launched a premium product and... "What?! It's not taking off?!" There's a lot to learn about where to put the "pay wall" with a freemium offering, how to get users to upgrade, how to optimize a public/brochureware site for paying conversion, etc. With content sites, I imagine there's a lot to learn about selling ads, remnant ad space, ad networks, etc.

- Work on your public facing site a LOT. And measure it. In the early days, it's a constant salesperson for you. We all remark on how bad/confusing sites are, but lots of us treat the brochureware part of our business as a red-headed stepchild. After over a year of having a paid offering, we just redesigned our site and there was a 400%+ increase in conversion rate. Thinking about the revenue ramifications if we'd done that a year ago (or even 6 months ago) makes me wince. We were leaving lots of money on the table.

- Don't pitch big VCs unless you want big money. They take LOTS of meetings to get to a yes/no and make very few investments.

- Focus on relationships when fundraising. Almost every investor we got was through an introduction (social proof wins).

- How fast your site/app is is REALLY important.

- Focus on retention as a metric. The compound interest effect of retention (or return visits if you're a content site) are HUGE. Do the math.

- Keep your burn low and don't underestimate how long it takes to get to profitability. We raised more than we wanted to and it turns out we needed it.

- Marketing/sales wins. Almost always. The quality of your product is a multiplier on the success of your business. It's easier to build a great marketing engine on top of a great product than the inverse. VERY VERY few businesses launch a product and ride word of mouth to greatness.

- PR isn't all that. Great for SEO and social proof, but it's NOT a substitute for a sales/marketing engine.
Summary: First impressions are weighted heavily when we form opinions of people. Once those opinions are formed it takes a lot of evidence to the contrary to cause us to re-evaluate our opinion of that person.
But which subset ?

When I program in C++ (and sometimes you have to) there are features that I'll avoid like the plague, once bitten, twice shy.

In fact, my subset of C++ was usually try to stay as close as you can to C and use C++ when you have to. That seemed to be a pretty safe route.

Most of my C++ stuff was using Borland C++ Builder or Microsoft visual C++, I'm happy to say I no longer have to support software for the windows platform, so no more C++ for me.
Git commits as code review?
Rake start
Being that I am a dual US/Canadian citizen, it would have applied to me regardless. I don't know what most other countries do, but I'm definitely annoyed that the USA will try to tax my non-US earnings because I am a citizen.

As for similar institutions in other countries, the only one I have experience with is Canada, and my experience with them has been orders of magnitude better than my experience with the USA. How do you think I tracked down the right article in the US/Canada income tax treaty to avoid double-taxation?
Not in The Economist.
This is a disappointingly flamey article: roughly 90% of the comments are from people who got a bad impression of C++ during the pre-standardization days (which were admittedly horrible, but long since past). Most of the rest are from people who just skipped straight to Java, or who are so young that they never had to learn C++ at all.

The comments that really drop my jaw are the people who seem to hold up Java as a "better" C++. Java is okay, but from its sketchy real-world performance, to its crappy generic programming support and poor ability to enforce such type-safety basics as const-correctness, I've never been impressed. Take the time to learn C++ for what it is, instead of "C with objects" and you'll find that it's far more elegant than the backlash would suggest.

I think that what most people really hate about C++ stems from the widespread use of legacy compilers that incorrectly implement the spec, or implement older versions of the spec. This problem exists for every programming language in the universe (e.g. Ruby 1.8.6 vs. Ruby 1.8.7 vs. Ruby 1.9), but since C++ is widely implemented by multiple vendors, the problem appears worse. If Python or Java were implemented by Microsoft and GNU and four other smaller companies, you'd see the same horrible compatibility problems with those languages, too.
That's true of a lot of people in every profession though. We all know bad programmers who last read a book in 1992.

I'd be surprised if the ratio of bad:good:great was very different in any field.
It sounds like you learned a lot in hindsite and would do things differently next time. On the other hand, some things don't become apparent till you dive in and try to make them work and there's nothing wrong with that.
I see this claim made frequently, but Stroustrup talks about several features in Design & Evolution that were rejected. The committee requires implementations before accepting new features; they don't say "We like that idea" and include it without evidence that it's both possible and useful.
Well, the 'everyone' he is talking about are some of the most respected people in the computer world, that should count for something.

Also, they make fairly specific criticisms, and they have a track record of being right about such things.

Java seems to be the C++ replacement of the future, with C# pulling the other way.
This is just a perception bias in my opinion. I'll give you an example:

I've dealt with a lot of programmers in the past 10 years. Only a handful would I work with again, and even fewer I would employ to work in a high-paced startup. In my last startup, an expensive over-designed technology stack was our downfall. The business guy turned the company around, secured us two licensing deals, and additional bridge funding.

The point is: there are just as many egocentric, know-nothing programmers as there are douche bag business guys. It really has nothing to do with each others job description, it's just a matter of talent, ambition, persistence, etc. etc.

Attracting the right talent for the team is difficult, select wisely and try not to demonize the opposite party.
C is a portable assembler. Sometimes that's exactly what you want.

C++ is C, except that it doesn't completely suck for higher-level projects.
I do use nginx. This uses a "Simplish HTTP Push Relay Protocol". It's a way for your app (via curl or any other http library) to "connect" to your http clients.

It has a few interesting options. "messages" are passed by a "channel id" and you can have any number of long polling listeners on a channel, or you can error out the first or last connections on a channel so there is only one listener at a time. If you have multiple listeners the message becomes a broadcast.

You also have a configurable amount of memory to buffer messages in the event there is no listener on a channel, or the listener is busy (receiving a message I guess). You can also set limits on number of messages per channel and a timeout.

I can see the advantages of this easily. The connections in nginx are much less resource intensive then a rails or php fast-cgi. You'll end up using much less ram. I know python has twisted and there are few others webservers for other languages, but this would allow me to run a php based chat server and take advantage of long polling.

I like it.
I just use gcc to compile the code. That way I know what subset I am using and the rest of the code is using.
Bjarne was truly correct when he said: "there are languages people complain about, and there are languages nobody uses."

I think this is very true, what it says literally is that popularity and attracting ire are correlated.

However, my interpretation is that the reason why this is true is that (1) all languages involve design trade-offs, (2) every trade-off pisses someone off for at least a moment, and (3) popularity attracts eyeballs, therefore more popular languages have more people pissed off.

I am not suggesting you say this, but I have heard the (strawman?) argument that it is possible to design a nice, pure language that is above reproach but that it can't be popular, and thus his quote expresses the thought that there is an inverse relationship between elegance and popularity. I don't think this is the case.
The in/famous Dyson branding aside, I'd like to measure the fan's volumetric efficiency per watt compared to a conventional inline blade design.

In other words, how much air is moved at what speed given the electrical energy expended to drive the impeller.

I doubt seriously that it's much better than conventional fan designs given that it has 3 distinct regimes of airflow (intake duct, impeller blade, Coanda foil).

Additionally, though inline impellers can be quite efficient, having these 3 distinct vector flow regimes will bleed energy in de/compression inlet/exhaust artifacts (noise and vibration) so it won't be much quieter than a conventional design.
Google home page even simpler
I noticed recently that Google has managed to simplify its home page again, in a neat way. If you don't move the mouse when you first visit, all you see is the logo and a giant search field; as soon as you move the mouse, the rest of the page fades into view.

Maybe not everyone sees this (I'm using a WebKit-based browser) but I thought it was a nice effect.
Features planned for clojure 1.1
Yes this is good thing, but I think the issue is trying to understand how the technologies are maturing. TR doesn't follow through on most of the technologies it features.
I often find it's quicker to write a bit of code than try and work out how a library would work, then deal with installing it and maintaining that installation as it gets updated. Of course, this depends on how much of the library is needed.
Siebel mentions this point, off-handedly, in covering Guy Steele's take, and yeah, I agree.
in an odd reversal from a lot of start ups it was only the technology that could let us down

Happens all the time. At my last startup we added a new product line based on work by this super-smart PhD who had been in the business since he worked at ThinkingMachines. His product worked great -- for one really narrow use case for a single customer. His claims to the contrary, it ended up being so brittle, so poorly coded, and so ungeneralizable we had to pull the whole product. Luckily it wasn't material to our eventual acquisition :)
"with C# pulling the other way"

Care to elaborate (I'm legitimately unsure what you mean, not being snarky)?
Don't see it. Tried it in both FF & Arora (latter is based on Webkit). I get the whole page immediately.
Annoying Things About The Internet
Worldwide Demand for iPhone 3GS Now Outstripping Supply
I think the main thrust of that argument has to do with trying to please too many people that were willing to put their support behind C++ if the language would support their pet construct.
And he said “no” to no one.

I don't really see this. Most of C++'s complexity emerges naturally from three things:

1. Lack of GC.

2. Direct support for user-defined types on the stack.

3. The desire to implement every feature as efficiently as the corresponding C idiom.

There actually aren't very many controversial features in C++: multiple inheritance, operator overloading, templates, and exception handling are the ones that come to mind. With the exception of multiple inheritance, none of these is particularly heinous. Implementing them under the three restrictions above is where things get complicated.
Hm, while reading the article I noticed an interesting aside of this theory, similarly to yours: Assume it is correct, then your need to compete will make all the difference it takes: Have double the amount of helpers so as to reduce waiting times (in the political analogy one could double the supporters to increase "fishing" returns). Differentiating the ice cream lines is in the same league. What this effectively means is that given an existing ecosystem of companies, a new competitor needs to combine both: near spatial placement within the ecosystem w.r.t. to the competitors with the advantage of having superior products/services.

What I am asking myself how this affects the computer science industry, i.e., in our business spatial-nearness is not necessary and for our customers superior technology is usually judgemental; any ideas?
New camera promises to capture your whole life
And probably also their huge soon-to-be datacenter.

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/05/26/apple...
If flipping burgers isn't for you, I received a great piece of advice once, take some time and work for a used car dealership for a few months. Point being everyone should learn how to sell, how to be a salesman, you can be the most technical person in the room but without the ability to "sell" people on your product or articulate what makes it worth while, you are missing a key element. And face it, if you can be successful selling used cars (or cars in general, in this economy) you'll have a very practical skillset.
Start in a single concentrated location, like Central Park or so.
The title should probably be modified to read "Clojure is Two!" since a minority of the article is about future Clojure features.
3 miles or 3 meter?
I think that C# is an attempt at creating an alternative for enterprise level programming to Java, basically .net and C# are an answer to the whole Java ecosystem.

They're competing for the same space, so a business that wants to implement some functionality from scratch basically has these two solutions to choose from.

In the 'web' domain there are many many more choices, but for places like banks and such that were first dominated by COBOL, then reluctantly moved to C or C++, for the most part they are either looking at Java or C#.
Well, the 'everyone' he is talking about are some of the most respected people in the computer world, that should count for something.

And while they're busy bitching and hating and pontificating, humble unknowns are getting things done and making the world a better place. C++ is to systems programming what PHP is to web programming: the loyal packhorse that the A-list wouldn't be seen dead on.
If you ever plan on doing anything with machine learning, you will need statistics and basic calculus. Well, you do if you want to progress in understanding beyond the "use someone else's library and hope it gives me a magic answer" phase.

Besides, calculus is one of the crown jewels of mankind's intellectual achievement. Not knowing any calculus ought to be considered on par with not knowing anything about the theory of evolution, or that the Earth orbits the Sun.
Sure there is equilibrium. Differentiation on price points, quality, service and length of lines will balance things out.

That said, the difference between a third ice cream cart and a 30th ice cream cart in the area is great. But then, the market should correct itself so that the optimal number of ice cream sellers are available.
It's just that it generally doesn't work this way, the moral hazard would be insane. Lenders are smart enough to have debt personally guaranteed by someone at the corporation when the company has no assets of its own to use as collateral.
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Full_Disk_Encryption_%28FDE%29
Hadn't seen this before. Pretty cool. This tears down a huge barrier to entry in the online video space.
Operator overloading all by itself is a source of plenty of headaches, in combination with multiple inheritance you can spend a good bit of time trying to find out what something should do before you can begin to figure out what it actually does.

In most languages my preferred view in the debugger is the source code of the language, in C++ I almost always just looked at the assembly. It seemed the more 'clear' language :)

Lack of GC never bothered me much by the way, that's no different in C, and that's where I really learned how to code, so keeping an eye on memory leaks and the opposite, double frees is somehow a built-in feature (of the programmer, not the language).
Have you had any problems using this in production? My understanding with using Flash/Java is that all traffic has to be tunneled through port 80 to not interfere with proxy servers. Even then sometimes traffic that doesn't look like HTTP can be blocked. Has this been a problem for you?

http://cometdaily.com/2008/09/30/why-flash-must-adopt-comet/

http://orbited.org/blog/2007/08/juggernaut-is-a-bad-idea/
Math for the Layman (by Kenneth Iverson)
I think C models how the computer works a lot more closely than C++ (and no one would argue that C isn't carrying water out in the engineering world even today). IMO C++'s issue is precisely that it layers all of these leaky abstractions on top of the strict procedural model of C.

For my money, developers are better off knowing two tools (c + some very high level language) rather than the spork which is C++.
> Why can't the language provide those?

It can. But when it does, it stops getting called a language, and starts getting called an OS that only supports one language.

Or it gets called programming the bare metal.
Run a quick adwords campaign. Only show different prices to people coming in from Google on a landing page. You could also block that page from being indexed with robots.txt.
Yes, I agree. I wanted to point out that their initial reporting on technology is superb.
We use git commit reviews as our primary review method, it's much lower overhead than sit down code review meetings. On the other hand, it's not quite as thorough, which works fine with a small team that's already high bandwidth.
I don't know why you are getting down-voted for this comment.

I think very procedurally too, and although I'm generally pretty good at math stuff, I try to build my abstractions in such a way that I don't actually have to deal with a lot of the mathematical theories behind stuff more than once.

(I can look up and understand/implement a math thing, but I have trouble actually knowing and remembering math stuff).

I think the distinction is an interesting one, you don't necessarily need to know a lot of this math stuff, but you do need to be able to understand it or figure it out when it is presented to you.

In the same sort of way, I kind of boggle at job listings that require 'X years of Y programming language experience'. Certainly it makes sense to hire qualified programmers, but if you have the thought process down for writing good code, and have a reference manual to the language, it really shouldn't matter what language you are coding in.

Its more about having the ability to learn things on the fly than about already knowing X, Y or Z.
They've been testing this for the past week. I've seen it a few times, but it appears to be quite random.
What great timing, I'm working on a Sinatra & MongoDB app as well. Quite useful.
It's more general than that. If we form an opinion about X based on feature A, that opinion "leaps" to features B, C, and so on, even if they're unrelated. For example, I've noticed that once people think of a piece of software as fast, they're more likely to regard it as high-quality in other ways that have nothing to do with performance.

Edit: another example is the well-known result that better looking people are rated as smarter, nicer, more competent, etc. IIRC, they're even less likely to get sent to prison and receive lighter sentences if they do.