skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow it is C++ bashing season again it seems.

Yes you have to know what you are doing in C++. But this is not different in other languages. Understanding and optimizing code is a touch discipline. No matter what language.

There is also another side to this story. C++ can absolutely generate highly efficient code. Code that performs much better than C equivalents.

For example, I've looked a lot at generated (iPhone/ARM) code for cases where (function) templates are used and C++ wins most of the time. Doing compile-time configuration of code is usually much more efficient than having runtime-configured code. By using templates and inline functions the compiler can do some seriously cool performance tricks.

Sire, there may be more code (bigger text segment) but that is a small sacrifice for what you gain in speed. Specially these days where a 8MB fart app is easily downloaded over a 3G connection without hesitation.
If one were to summarize the potentially fatal flaw in the current American system, it might come down to public subsidization of private institutions. Bailing out Wall Street. Private hospitals and insurers with much of their income coming through government run health programs. Halliburton mercenaries fighting and profiting from our wars. And taxes heavily subsidizing the cost of education at private universities.

In the article, I think the increase in tuition was pretty close to the increase in federal funds available for college education.

This gives us the worst of both worlds. Private entities freed from market pressures, but with none of the oversight or electoral accountability that comes with the public sector. This, in a nutshell, is what the common citizen is really angry about. This is what they elected Obama to change, but it is looking like he is only willing to address this problem at the margins.
I did try putting the column in the middle, but I didn't like the result.

The about page is borrowed from another project of mine, I didn't want too spend much time on it, it's more of a placeholder than anything.

Fixed those validation errors, thanks.
Has the quality of instruction also increased by 30%?
Don't forget about creative's sound drivers and such.

MS is doing the right thing. They showed Windows 7 to the world for a year. Gave people public testing (to get ppl excited) and now are doing major stability tests before release.

I heard wonderful things about Win7. So honestly its a good thing. About time MS got a kick in the shin about making shitty operating systems. If they bounce back, they are a good company, and I don't doubt they will. Apple can't ride the "cool" wave forever.
It's fairly disappointing that they decided to not include the core i7 in anything as a default processor. Considering they're the "high performance" brand. They only have it on their top model mac pro. And as an upgrade. Core i7s really up the snappiness of a system.
My major concern about the push for higher enrollment is that specifically with universities, the percentage that drop out and don't re-enter higher education, about 1/4 of all initial applicants, will on average earn less than high-school drop outs meaning that a sizeable proportion of these drop outs remain unemployed.

It's disturbing that all statistics appear to be gathered after completion and not after enrolment, because the value of universities would drop drastically if people realised that 1/2 of entrants typically fail or drop out, and that half of those (1/4 of initial enrollers) will earn less than high school drop outs, which means that the average ~$3,000 extra earned for a true university graduation over a typical college graduation would all but vanish. Especially when factoring in that a college drop out earns more than a high school drop out, not less like a university graduate.

Essentially College is always good for your income, however university can be truly devastating for 1-in-4 people.
Full page link: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_waronscience/all/1
...but awesome already has that one...
No, the commenter is saying that at some point in the past the government put lipstick on a pig, so now he will assume that anything he sees wearing lipstick is probably a pig (unless of course it is something of direct benefit to him in which case his selfish rationalization does not need to mask itself behind moronic rhetoric.)
Beautiful! That iMac looks like a fabulous UNIX workstation.

And I soooo want that mouse.

Anyone know of a good creative way to send an old Mighty Mouse with stuck scrollball to mighty-mouse-heaven? I'll document it on video :-)
The server says "I am too stressed out. Try again in a minute or two." I guess they are getting some pretty good results. ;)
Start the REvolution without me...
The features page only specifies that it can be used as a monitor.
Actually, it's not that hard to get a merchant account considering their site is very straight forward. They list their address, the site has a secure cert and numbers to the tech support. It's all the things that companies like Auth.net ask for.

That being said, my computer raises all sorts of red-flags when I go to the site.

Now, I just wonder how good their customer service is, 'cause if clueless newbies fall for the trap, the least they could do is to support them as they figure out how to turn their computers on, explain what a browser is and what they should click to access the internet...

They do claim to answer every call in 90 seconds (800 978 7657) and I was talking to someone within about 30 seconds.
Meanwhile, if you know what the scary features are, you can:

It's worth adding another point to that list:

* Not implement them.

Some features just aren't worth the added complexity they would bring with them.
couldn't agree more . . . just because something exists in a market doesn't mean it should. Capitalism is a system/strategy, how you apply that depends on your values (or what you value).
Which Major Hypervisor is Cheaper
If Apple takes it upon themselves to write/test drivers VS relying only on the manufactures to do it, then you are sure that since apple has a stake in it, they will test it well. This is a consequence of controlling what hardware goes into your computer. If you want to plug your soundcard into a mac, better get in touch with apple. Since they know about all the sound drivers, video drivers, etc, they can group where necessary. Being *nix based also gives benefits of having open source drivers.

In any case how many different drivers are out there for Windows Sound? How many are out there for Linux? Bash ALSA or OSS all you want, but they support a ton of hardware, port that sort of support to windows or mac and you got yourself ONE driver heavily tested by freaken' everyone which makes debugging easier with a central point of service.
They have an i5 system which is the similar to the i7 but without hyper-threading support and less cache.
Here's one we made recently: Purchasing an array of hard drives (for storage servers) and not making sure that not all of them are from the same batch. Since they were made in the same batch, they had the same defects and when they failed, they failed one after each other in a very short interval. Since all of them failed, RAID didn't help, we had to restore the day-old offline backup.
This was a great article, but I ended it wondering whether they either (a) knew what a system call was (until the end, I thought maybe they meant a system() shell-out) or (b) realize how many system calls a vanilla request/response cycle incurs.
Mathcamp 2009 Qualifying Quiz
I found the passage in Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas on Google Books [1].

Here's an image of it: http://blog.samwarmuth.com/post/218259393/figure-12-1

[1]Metamagical Themas: http://books.google.com/books?id=o8jzWF7rD6oC&lpg=PP1...
I used to say that, and every time I did, people would yell at me, so I've been conditioned not to.

Although I'll stick my neck out and say "crypto; don't even bother".
I can't wait to try this out. I've been hooked on the multi-touch on my MBP and can't stand having to go back to an old mouse when I connect the laptop to to my 24" monitor.
If you fork inside an app server, such as mod_python, you will fork the entire parent process (apache!). This could happen by calling something like os.system("mv foo bar") from a python application.

I nominate this post as the most distressingly important bit of information I've ever received at 2:43 AM in the morning.

Now the question: what can I do in Ruby to avoid the four calls a second or so I'm currently making to system(big_command_to_invoke_imagemagick) ?
Good lesson that RAID != Backup!

RAID5 by chance?
and it costs 25% more than it did a couple of years ago, at least in the U.K.
Good point. I guess the only real solution may be for Mozilla to try to compete against these unethical advertisers by spending dollars on advertising from these same smaller search engines, emphasizing "Free"

> These sites get their custom through advertising. We and the major search engine providers do a reasonable job of keeping these people's adverts away from our trademarked terms and keywords but we can't be everywhere, and they can often be found on smaller search engines.
I wish the 2 drive mac mini had an option for SSD boot drive as well. That'd make a great desktop replacement.
Learning Ruby Metaprogramming
I'm curious if the shape of the Magic Mouse is better at preventing RSI/carpel tunnel. The old Mighty Mouse didn't do it for me in that regard, the shape and feel in my hand was awful.
This is why you can't make a business out of donation-ware.

What about Red Ryder, way back when, or Toady, of Dwarf Fortress, or the relative legions of successful webcomic artists that live on donations?
One is left to wonder whether Goldman was really worth saving last year.

Very misleading article. A lot of half truths. Not HN material in my opinion.
I would rather study CS at a 4 year uni than at a CS-specific 2 year uni. Why? Because at a 4 year uni, you are surrounded by people different from you. Your get to expand your world view.
"I’ve met a number of people who want to start businesses but have been clawing away at the same idea for many years without progress. I’ve met just as many people who have great ideas but never bring them to fruition. These folks are stuck because they don’t approach idea management the right way."

From this introduction, it appears that he will offer some practical ideas to transform those initial ideas into successful businesses but in fact the article is about organizing ideas in a spreadsheet.
I disagree with 1.3. "Serving static content is the easiest possible task for any web server." Yes, but keeping connections open for slow clients (esp with KeepAlive on) is not a good use of your 500MB Mongrel process' time. On the other hand, KeepAlive is a handy thing to have.

Using a proxy like nginx or varnish to serve static files (and even dynamic data) if you have the proper KeepAlive and Nagle bits flipped can save you a lot of server resources at the application layer.
The solution to use an image processing library such as RMagick, http://rmagick.rubyforge.org/
Use a queue. You should never be doing time consuming method calls inside a controller anyway.
I'm going to go with, "this is the worst piece of advice I have ever read on Hacker News". The #1 rule of sales, all sales, everywhere: ASK FOR THE SALE.

What went wrong for this PR guy was the 1-2 punch he tried. He was clumsy about how he timed his pitch, and he was superficial in how he tried to connect to his prospect. But the blogger's response, "wait until I ask you about your product", is exactly the wrong lesson to take from this.
The memory use is not accurate unless you take shared pages into account. Copy-on-write will make it look like each apache child is using 40MB, when really it's only 10MB private RSS. Use a RSS-calculating script (http://psydev.syw4e.info/new/misc/meminfo.pl) to determine the close-to-real memory use. If you don't calculate your maximum memory use correctly you will run into swap with traffic peaks. Also keep in mind that swap is a good thing. Is your app constantly cycling children? This isn't going to allow it to move unused/shared memory into swap. Don't ignore memory leaks by reducing your max requests per child.

The forking thing is more of the same. Copy-on-write means it's not going to balloon your memory unless some function turns that shared rss into private. It isn't something that you want to do a lot of, though.
Nook, Barnes & Noble eBook Reader Announced
"Guesses based on local code inspection have an order of magnitude less uncertainty attached to them"

...which is why we have profiling tools that make it easy to detect performance hotspots. For the other 95% of our code, the expressiveness of C++ makes it easier to do more work in fewer lines. This is a far more important metric to any working developer (and it's a big reason why languages like Python and Ruby are popular.)

Also, you're exaggerating. I wrote C++ for well over a decade, and I wrote in C before that, and used it again in graduate school for my research. While I can count on one hand the number of times that I was affected by "hidden" C++ costs, I was routinely blindsided by bad C code, where pointer errors, type safety gotchas, and inefficiency due to aliasing are de rigeur. You'd be crazy to write a non-trivial application in C today that wasn't an operating system.
If you could show me that there would a significant increase in people surviving injury or avoiding permanent injury from CPR/First aid certs for all, then I would have no problem with it. Until then, I oppose it.

I suspect you are opposed to drunk driving prohibitions, as lowered reaction times and lowered inhibition do not cause fatal collisions, just fail to prevent them. Or is this some how different? (Disclaimer, this statement can be seen as inflamatory, it is not meant as such, it was just ignored from my previous post, and I see the analogy as related.)
You wouldn't want someone to miss out on clicking that final submit button.

They're scammers, pure and simple, they should have no right to a merchant account. I don't even much care if it is legal or not, legal does not always mean 'right' and in this case 'legal' might be clearly 'wrong'.

VISA et al make lots of value judgments as to which customers can have merchant accounts and which don't.

So in this case they can make that judgment too. Especially the 'upsell' on the last screen off-center is the mark of the real scammer. There was a time when a company called IBill would facilitate this kind of junk, they crashed because of it (and several other good reasons besides, but that's another story, the $1 fake transactions to dillute the chargebacks had a lot to do with it too), if assholes like this can't get merchant accounts then life will be better for all of us.

Not that long ago we applied for a merchant account to sell 2nd hand CDs and we were turned down, in spite of being a perfectly legit business. These jerks being able to operate their scam seriously pisses me off.
This is precisely why Gladwell's books are dangerous. He may say that he wants to inspire people to learn and think more, but he uses sloppy methods.

In this blog post, the writer uses Gladwell's shaky arguments to support their own ideas.
microsoft created an entirely new stack which it didn't license to other parties, and also deprecated the software its vendor ecosystem was using.

Didn't Microsoft do something similar with MFC? They tell everyone that MFC is the future, and so my last company builds our development environment on top of it. Then we start finding significant bugs in MFC. We later discover that Microsoft is moving on from MFC and using something else.

The more things change...
Agree very much so

"For Goldman employees, it is almost as if the financial crisis never happened. Only months after paying back billions of taxpayer dollars..."

I don't really see the point here, I've tried reading up on wikipedia and such to see if I'm missing something but they have paid back the money (it would seem according to that quote and wikipedia). Therefore, why should people care what they do with their money now? Its their money!
I'd use something like DelayedJob and send_later the call to your image processing stuff, that way the forking happens out of the request path, at least.
"the Macbook looks like less of a wussy addition to the lineup"

The specs match the low end MacBook Pro in most regards, and beat it in others (bigger default disk, for example).
I was wondering more about like regression of customer data, creating recommendation engines, or something along those lines.
Apache disables Nagle by default, which is what you want for small static files, but I'd love to see data showing that Nagle is actually a significant performance issue for a realistic load.
But Mac mini with Snow Leopard server is kind of intriguing. (Maybe not worth $999. But it does come with 2 500GB drives.)
Few things.

1) This has everything to do with pseudo-science. There are no credible studies pointing to ill health effects outside of extremely rare cases in which a person is allergic to some part of the vaccine or has some other pre-existing condition. And there are numerous studies indicating that you're more likely to get struck by lightning than to have any reaction to a vaccine, outside of a sore arm.

2) "The government" is hardly a single entity. You're displaying conspiratorial thinking here, which is pretty tough to take seriously. You're discussing the EPA and NY city government, which is not the same as the NIH and CDC. Additionally, it's not only the U.S. government which is strongly recommending these vaccines. If you'd like to continue that line of argument, you'll have to take it up with probably every single first-world government.

3) Being an intelligent and rational person means evaluating claims individually, regardless of the source. Starting from the position that the government is lying to you is just as stupid as assuming they're always telling the truth. Of course there are fuck-ups and cover-ups, but that doesn't mean everything is.
Since when are they the "high performance" brand? High build quality, very much yes.
I don't understand. Why would something like this "undercut" other players.

Isn't the whole point of Android? Not have a closed platform with a single player?

I frankly think the more devices we get, the better. More competition means better services and lower cost. And on an open platform like the Android, it also gets much better because it allows other uses for the platform(Archos, and netbooks...etc).
Calling into RMagick/ImageMagick from inside the request/response cycle is probably even worse than shelling out, because ImageMagick does grievous damage to your runtime.
(quote It's just downright selfish to put it on everyone else.)

So the argument has been lifted from the individual to society. The next logical step might be the species. There may be a strong argument against immunization for the sake of human kind. Are our immune systems still evolving? Will we need rely on technology to replace the improvements that were previously made by natural selection? If not, is the human race going to lose to a virus we can't defeat with medicine? Short term gains, and all that jazz.
You're right about Nagle; I mention it only because lighty or one of the others does not turn it off by default.

Having a lightweight proxy that keeps connections alive on the client end but cuts them off between themselves and the application layer is the bigger win all round for many real-world web loads.
I'm truly excited. Evil or not, Google is today the only big company that instead to have the kind of corporate interests leading to a closed market, has corporate interests breaking the old market and creating a better, free one.
You just described my exact setup. However, my understanding is that Delayed::Job's worker threads have a full Rails environment in them, and if this blog post is correct and I am indeed forking that entire Rails process for every call out to ImageMagick, my vague recollections of what a fork entails suggest to me that the Ghosts of C Programmers Past are going to visit a terrible vengeance upon me.
Much of this Table Oriented Programming was always included in products like Progress. (AFIK Proggress was mature in 1995)
In that platform you have tables as native languaje entities, data dictionary, transaction semantics for every entity in the languaje, a real DBMS in the backend handling persistense, unix/linux/windows real portability ... you name it.
For example you can do in progress the following:

for each customer:
display customer.name.
for each phone of customer:
display phone.number.
/*or can do: delete phone.*/
end.
/*or can do: customer.name = 'xxxx'.*/
end.

It's very easy to read or write that code.
But believe me that the platform, in adition to be propietary (read expensive), has its problems.

But I never knew why the good ideas of the platform weren't ported to newer ones.
Huh, I didn't realize that. I was actually referring to it in terms of visuals: the old plastic Macbooks look very dated.
Four forks per second is basically nothing. This article is blowing it all out of proportion. You can't sustain forking per web request on a really large site but at this scale it's not going to matter.

The author is being stupid: the size of the process that you're forking doesn't really matter (it might start to matter if you didn't call exec() or exit() right after you forked, but that's not the case: you're just execing another program, which replaces the current process in memory). VERY little is copied; fork is defined to have copy-on-write semantics for the process's address space.
> I'm all for capitalism and making money, but this is just wrong.

I think this a problem that people have - they (somehow) equate corruption/taking advantage of people/kickbacks with "capitalism". This is not the case - I've spent some a bit of time in more socialist and communist countries, and these things seem to happen even more there. People trying to take advantage of others happens regardless of economic or political systems.
Well, that sure sounds like a funding deal that fucked up majorly. The entire founding team, board, and most of the company was fired right after doing a funding round and bringing in a new CEO and COO? What kind of fucked up VC did that?

http://www.nbvp.com/, that's who. Now, I don't know if this story is true, but if it is, it should serve as a huge flashing neon warning sign to any other entrepreneurs to stay well away from North Bridge Venture Partners.
Great add jonmc12. This article might not appear relevant to HN, but the financial situation we are currently in will be looked back at like the robber barons of the 19th century.

It is startling that Paulson touts that $800 billion of tax payer dollars were needed to "free up the credit markets" and we find out they went right back to the casino.

Check this video out: http://bit.ly/4laL3d
If the data says the the H1N1 vaccine is safe and effective then I'll get it

Well, the data do say the H1N1 vaccine is safe and effective. Discussing anything else is a red herring.
Only if you run out of memory. But with DJ at least you should be forking only one call at a time, rather than multiple, like you might from the controller itself. So although you'll end up using more memory, it'll only be one extra rails process, not 4.

May not still be ideal... interested to hear other people's ideas.
The Macbook has never been a wussy part of the lineup. Until the unibody MB/MBP was announced, the sanest Apple purchasing advice was always, "buy the cheapest Intel Apple laptop, whatever that might be". Even now, the difference between the MBP and the MB is largely build quality, and the build quality of the plastic Macbook is still so much better than that of the Powerbook that the MBP wins mostly on pure excellence and not utility.
“Usability Testing: It’s not a Myth”, a reply from Lukas Mathis: http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/10/20/usability_testing_n...
Beautiful Coroutines: Cooperative Concurrency in Python using Diesel