skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. There was a history of heavy-weight, overly verbose frameworks. The early frameworks were over-engineered and hard to use. Lightweight frameworks in dynamic languages (Rails, django) thus took off when you they showed how you could write a blog app in fifteen minutes using only a few dozen lines of code.

2. Using non-Java JVM languages seems to always create as many problems as it solves, in my experience. First, you do not get access to any libraries with C-bindings. So as your project gets going, the probability increases that some library you want to include won't work. Also, there are all sorts of micro-frictions. Debugging support not quite working. Types not matching between Java numbers and python numbers when doing comparisons. Etc. It all adds up. If you use Kotlin, then a lot of code samples you find on stackoverflow will have to be manually converted.

3. If you go pure Java, the type system can be a pain in the neck when you are doing rapid development. Something as simple as getting a row out of the database with date field, publishing it as JSON, then getting posted back an updated version from JSON, requires a bunch of conversions and annotations to make the types all get matched correctly. Writing any sort of time-saving meta code requires a really strong knowledge of how generics, annotations, and reflection works, or else you will be beating your head against the wall.

4. Restart times are longer, and there is no REPL, so rapid iteration is a little slower.

5. I still don't think there is a web framework that is as easy to use as Rails/Django. I don't think this is the fault of the language though, and I have something in the works myself on this front...
Error 522. site's down
Apple’s declining software quality
> Java, Kotlin, Ceylon, Scala, OCaml-Java

Other than java, none of those languages are widely used. It seems business have an adversity to languages that are not "popular". So however much I'd like to write in Scala, our customers are not going to approve that.

> JRuby, Jython

Again, fringe languages. Python and ruby are great because of the large amount of packages available. Are those gonna run on Jython or jruby? It's hard to find out, so writing a project in Jruby or jython is a huge risk for me as a developer. ("Sorry, sqlalchemy contains C code").

> Deployment is simple

Hardly. Java is almost an OS in itself. It basically reinvents everything. Scheduling, memory management, logging, monitoring, init systems, etc. I've found that java apps require constant fiddling with settings. Other languages... just run.

> There is a lot of high-quality open source libraries.

True, but that's just as true for many other languages.

> greater memory usage

The JVM doesn't actually use up all that much more memory than, say, a Python program. Basic "hello world" in Python running on Cherrypy already takes up 800mb. The bigger problem is the JVM's rather static memory allocation.

> What are the technical and the nontechnical reasons behind this?

A little background: my experience with Java / the JVM is purely from a systems adminstration point of view. I don't develop in Java or for the JVM.

The reason for me is the obfuscated nature of java projects. It's all very... enterprisey. Hundreds of XML configuration files, toggles switches and knobs to tweak everywhere. I strongly believe in KISS, and Java/JVM is about as far away from KISS as you can get. I'm pretty sure it's great if you're following old-school waterfall "design upfront, then implement" projects like many big companies do (which I don't think is wrong at all). But when it comes to bootstrapping a project: no thanks.
Sure, just subscribed (sorhed at gmail dot com). Could you send me an invite, then?
In English it is not, but in other languages, such as French, "winnings" is indeed how to say "earnings".
It wasn't going to function well as a TV OS though.

The UI descriptions and mockups were overly complex and seemed like something designed for a computer rather than a smart TV.

I like how open Mozilla was about it. I just disliked the actual OS, and how it was made.
I think the idea is that some people experience them as debt they owe themselves. If you've never felt that way, I can see why this would not make sense to you. (No sarcasm or harshness intended; I mean that straight.) Some of us had to come to this conclusion by a harder route. For myself, I still learned it fairly early, but I do remember learning it. My natural inclination was to finish everything.

As I type that, it occurs to me for the first time that I grew up in an environment where that was explicitly said to me sometimes. Even to this day, my now-retired father can be heard angsting about the projects he has not finished, and he tried his well-meaning best to pass that on to me. Perhaps this stems from the problems of leaving the physical projects he primarily works on half-done; a half-done remodeling is an ugly thing. A half-done car restoration takes up a lot of space and gets worse over time if you don't work on it as it basically rots. But creative projects have different rules. I've got at most a few hundred kilobytes of old programs lying in my sentimental directory... who cares? Who even knows? It's so tiny I tend to even forget it exists.
C# Boxing and Unboxing
Loans are 'non performing' precisely because whoever borrowed the money cannot pay it all back, or even keep up with scheduled repayments. Generally that's businesses, though they may be government owned. The article does discuss this issue and the problems with the different methods of dealing with it.
> the lazy 98.8% who couldn't be bothered disposing of their phone and buying a new one

Or who don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on a new phone every year. My phone (S3) is 3 years old and works fine. Why should I need to buy a new one?
"Deployment is simple."

Not sure what to say. This is highly subjective and irrational anyway. And sad, hence.

Having spent some years in college programming in Java around 2000~2004, I was amazed by the then patterns-obsessed ludicrous verbosity of Java projects. Programming for the sake of writing so much text to accomplish so little.

Switched to Perl & PHP, which were, for Web-based projects we had, much more approachable and efficient (although somewhat ugly). Hopefully, Python & Ruby were growing too. And alternatives to XML happened too, thank God.

In the Web development sphere I worked in, Java projects always have felt to me like too... enterprise, under-specified, freezed, too much developer-focused, not enough thought out, although advertised as "the" technology of choice - so it was deceiving.

Whereas teams working with PHP (!) or Ruby felt like much more concerned about usability and efficiency, globally and were delivering better and faster. Perhaps because those teams were composed of people grasping the whole product stack (hosting, db, code, ui) at the same time, because the tools they had enabled them better to do so? Not sure.

Scala & Clojure look nice. Have to find a use case for these in my daily projects.
Maybe somebody could create an app for that, somehow optimize the radiation for killing sperms...
There's a whole lotta CMS, Wiki, and storefront systems out there. And many of the big names there - WordPress, Drupal, MediaWiki, etc - all run on PHP.

We tend to live in a world of custom-coded dynamic websites, while many needs can be filled adequately by a static page or off-the-shelf package like the above. They're not sexy, but they work.
> And the basic jvm settings will get someone a long ways

But when it all goes tits-up it is a lot harder to work out why.

Also, I'd forgotten just how much i hated annotations. And now I need eye bleach :/

I like spark because it maps very closely to Sinatra in ruby, and doesn't require much additional support.
Firefox OS was dead the moment Mozilla decided that the first-generation developer phones will never get 2.x (or in most cases even 1.3).

Alienating the first wave of developers... Way to go, Mozilla.
Trevor I believe explains in the post, that being often within M&A there's a window of opportunity to engage a party interested in buying a company or its assets. If he declined, it's possible he would have never received an offer as high as the offer he received and would have to hope the app paid out over the next 5+ years, which was 2x the duration the app had been at its current revenue, which had been consistent for 2.5 years.
> a really Free email service

What do you mean, exactly?

Service that's Free as in "Free Software"? We have enough of free MTA, MDA and MRA software, and while they can be always improved further there's need to start a new project. There are also a lot of packaging efforts, where anyone can find what they'll be pleased with (from source tarballs to build to one-click "rent a server and provision everything there, pre-configured" web-based buttons). And Mozilla have finally ditched their MUA (Thunderbird) recently, so I somewhat doubt they'll venture in that field again, even if they'd decide to make a web-based MUA (instead of desktop software) this time.

Service with some nice-to-hear policies? There are enough services that do all sort of pinky promises (and, I must admit, some try to bring some technological measures, but core email protocols don't allow much here, so it's mostly still relies on trust) of privacy, security and all sorts of stuff. Not sure if we need another one.

Something else?
I just buy plain old dumb TVs, no need to worry about anything.

As for FirefoxOS I never understood the point of it.

OpenMoko tried to be an open smartphone platform and failed.

Nokia did it for Symbian OS with web widgets and it failed.

Palm did it with WebOS, with the plus side of allowing C++ bindings for games, and it failed.

Android and iOS allow for web widgets and cordova like apps and there usually have bad feedback from users vs native apps.

Windows Phone allows for first class development with web based tech and few bother to use it, rather CoreCLR and WinRT.

OEM and network providers always have the final word, they learned not to let others follow Apple's footsteps.

That was a very far hard attempt from the begging.

I rather see Mozilla spending their efforts in Firefox, Thunderbird and Rust.
This house is not for you. This house is for poor people who live in rural or urban decaying homes. Their roofs leak and collapse, their insulation in non-existent, their plumbing doesn't work. This is a big issue, and having worked with a number of situations like this, being able to get someone a new house for $20K that functions would be huge.

$20K (or even $30K) for a functional, well-designed, "tornado-resistant" house would be a big help to many in the rural and urban south.
He didn't flee. In fact, before he left Sweden he askes the authorities if they had any objections of him leaving. They did not.
I just went there and saw a fake start download button, but it was with the 'AdChoices' network, not AdSense.

EDIT: I guess AdSense is involved with AdChoices somehow. My mistake.
>Advertisers paying per view do not get charged for a view if crome prevents the user from viewing the page.

The cost isn't in money, it's in views. By not letting you click a fake DL button, the malicious ad doesn't lead you to the site it wants you to end up on, which is usually plastered with other ads and sometimes has malware lying around on it. The end result is that the malicious party can't make money off their own site's ads and can't redirect you to download god-knows-what onto your system.
The 4 Most Essential Questions When Starting a DevOps Initiative
E Comify – online commerce more easier
Imagine the fit the various torrent sites will throw about it.
Like many people, you're starting from assumption of the mechanism (ionization) and ignoring the fact that there are many other known physical mechanisms that are plausible.

Also, if people detect a reliable signal without a plausible physical mechanism, best thing to do is determine what the cause of the signal is- rather than just assuming it's impossible.

In grad school we were taught to do "back of the envelope" calculations to rule out improbably hypotheses, but I often found the physics people convinced (I think they used the term "proved impossible") themselves things wouldn't work, then after 5-7 years of grad school, managed to come up with actual physical data that showed they had made a false assumption.
just tried to get my ruby project running on jruby. It's not a drop in replacement unfortunately, especially with database connectors. I think it makes sense if you're familiar with the Java ecosystem, but a lot of people aren't.
Bayesian Calibration of a Mobile Phone Compass
Every government can deny an extradition for political or human rights reasons.
Raspberry pi/resin.io based dashboard viewer
Java8 has removed permgen, which was the only parameter that was essential as it put a hard cap on the size of the app you can build. With that gone, the JVM running with defaults will run laps around any scripting language, and any additional tuning is just more cake.

A modern rails setup with system/user level isolation usually requires homebrew and rvm or similar which is quite involving. Compare that with install java, hit new play app in IDE (or download template) and just run, and I'd say Java has a pretty good recipe for productivity. Deployment? Just copy a fat jar created automatucally by the build system and java -jar it, no virtualenvs in sight.

So would I pick Java for a business? I don't know - I personally enjoy programming in Python way more than Java and would probably go with it, eventually regretting it...
This was actually a really fascinating article. It was cool to read what it's like when you finally hit it big. I have a lot of respect for your negotiating as well. It's hard enough keeping that up during the interview process for a job, I can't image doing it for six months, for that much cash.

Congrats on your success man.
But that's not as fun..
I tried to build a nice, cheap small house and ran into these exact same regulations. Almost all of the regulations we hit were from the 'International Building Code' which covers a large part of the US. I'd say building a to code house here costs at least $50k - $60k. This is just bare minimum meet the code. To add to your list:

- composting toilets are allowed, but you still need a sewer hookup available, just in case
- heating had to be automatic (thermostat + gas/electric), wood stove/insert only is illegal
- outlets every 6' and even more in the kitchen
- stairs cant be steep, even to lofted areas and so take up more space, more $
- minimum square foot requirements

We had a nice building department that helped us work around some of the codes, but even that took a lot of time (money).

Where we were and what we were trying to do would have cost significantly less if we were allowed to use composting toilets [1] and grey water and avoid sewer. Many states are coming around to grey water laws, but as of now I don't think any allow no sewer/septic, even if you don't have anything draining into them. You have to have them for 'backup'

[1] http://www.sun-mar.com/
A small nitpick, but:

> Hundreds of XML configuration files

is a byproduct of the frameworks, not the JVM itself. Enterprise Java swallowed the XML kool-aid in a big and horrible way.
Well also the documentation for that is really sparse. Years ago I messed around a lot with JRuby and I found this Xmx flag. So every time I had out of memory problems after, tuning Xmx worked just fine. ;) I always wondered why it's such a "hidden" parameter...

Of course Go and Ruby work out of the box. On the other hand, their runtimes are kind of lightweight and less general purpose as the JVM.
When Customers Try to Be Developers
This isn't about the death penalty. The US would probably guarantee that Assange will not be sentenced to death, then they can put him into solitary confinement for the rest of his life.
Stanford develops fast, affordable genetic test for newborns
I would not expect Google to recommend using an ad blocker. They still want you to be able to see the 'good' ads.
That's the default response right? I've thought about that, I just wonder if the current branding is an uphill battle, or was it the right choice? The regular users know what they're using and the day it updates to Mozilla with the new logo would generate some news and probably many people who left for Chrome to try it again. I don't think it's even been considered for the reason you state.

But if it were attempted, the Electrolysis launch would be the time.
> We run Adsense display ads on our site and have to spend significant time every day reviewing and blocking new ads which try to use these deceptive practices.

This may be a very stupid question, but are there no ad networks that are more trustworthy?
I've been playing a bit with G1 and I'm still not 100% convinced that it's better than CMS. That said, it is nice to finally be rid of PermGen etc.
That's a rather incomplete summary of the story, if you are interested in the topic you should make sure to read the various reports about this whole affair.
A quote from the link:

> The treaty with Portugal comes after India accepted its two main conditions that the extradited person would not face either a death sentence or life imprisonment beyond 25 years.
1. I don't consider Java stack as the most agile stack.
2. I think companies which use java are not that friendly with the open-source paradigm. Then, java community is not as huge as ruby, python, js communities.
3. There isn't a powerful framework in constant evolution and supported by thousands of people.
Regarding 5: yes there is, it's called Play Framework.
Hourly Worker Powerhouse Snagajob Secures $100M in Funding
Yeah... the original PC could be scaled way down in terms of hardware. It had a cassette interface and ROM BASIC, so it didn't need floppy disks, the CGA could connect to a TV via an RF modulator, and it was available with as little as 16K of RAM. In other words - home computer level specs. That said, where it differentiated itself was its upgradability and software selection, so there wasn't much point to the most basic PC configurations.

To show the other end of the original PC spectrum, my family's first PC was a Compaq portable (a clone of an IBM PC), bought in the late 80's. That machine had 2 5.25" 360K floppy disk drives, 20MB Hard Disk, an 8087 FPU, 1200 baud modem, a mouse, and a higher-than-CGA resolution display for text. It was really a nice machine, and when I last checked a few years ago, it still runs.
It's complicated by the fact that the number and types of power outputs needed in current designs is growing.
Why would someone prefer Node.JS to JVM stack for side projects?

Technical - I like Node's single-threaded, non-blocking model. It is enforced at the platform level, so that libraries from third-party companies are forced to adhere to it (single threaded AWS JS client library vs thread-pooling AWS libraries in JVM)

Non-technical - Java and C# is still lingua franca in most big companies in the industry. If you were to do side projects on your own, might as well pick something that's not part of your routine life, just to get some fresh new perspective.
This.

Java is an excellent battle ready language that stable components in a business can be ported into with excellent test coverage and the power of all the mature libraries and tools.

However in a startup where maybe the end goal isn't completely defined yet; there is prototyping code to see if it will eventually get used and plenty of LoC being thrown away, wrestling with added libraries and even the compile & deploy time of Spring + Tomcat can really slow development and increase complexity breeding frustration.
I thought it was going to be an article about how p2p lending was going to take over everything: car loans, mortgages, payday, equipment finance, small business loans, merchant cash advance, factoring, debt collection, credit cards, pawn shops.
Two hypotheses:

One involves two women who admired Assange and what he stood for becoming concerned at his sexual behaviour and their sexual health after comparing notes with each other, and reporting it to the police (with or without embellishment). Assange was initially confident his excellent legal team could make it all go away, but left the country on the day it became clear he was about to be charged, figuring there were many more legal avenues to continue insisting he was innocent until proven guilty, especially if his supporters were inclined to see his flight as evidence that he was the victim. He doubled down on that by hopping jurisdictions again as the last technicality failed.

The other involves two femme fatales sent to undermine Assange and doing such an unnecessarily bad and overcomplicated job of constructing their allegations against him he nearly didn't face charges. Fortunately, the conspiracy extended to the most powerful people in the Swedish judicial system. Assange, knowing the allegations had no basis whatsoever and convinced it was a CIA fit up job, waited calmly in Sweden until his counsel was advised that the Swedish judicial system had finally agreed to press charges, at which point he boarded the first plane he could to the number one US ally, figuring that his best option of avoiding imminent deportation to Guantanamo was to exploit the technical weaknesses in the false allegation in the British courts. Despite the clear and present threat to his life, he trusted the British courts and police so strongly it wasn't until the very last avenue had been exhausted that he realised they were part of the conspiracy too.

I'd suggest only one of these basic lines of explanations makes much sense.
The phrase "innocent until proven guilty" seems appropriate here.
Very cool indeed. Surprisingly expressive.

My one issue - the diffuse/reflective/transmissive sliders don't seem to cause the image to update?
No, but nor was it a left-wing conspiracy either. People in the US like to throw mud at each other about whose to blame for this shitty situation, but we're all in this together.

Also, I fail to see the difference between special interests and capitalists. They may not be right-wing capitalists, but the folks who run Blue Cross, Anthem and Harvard Pilgrim sure as hell didn't want a public option anywhere close to the finished ADA legislation, and they paid big money to make sure that happened.

But either way, something has to give, because health insurance and for-profit corporations are an oxymoron. When you're for-profit and offer insurance, that makes your primary operating procedure to charge as much as you can for the least amount of service.
It's not a (legislated) law, it is case law; i.e. the question was brought before a judge because there was no existing law, and the judge decided that the existing law should be interpreted to include that proscription. The decision can be overturned by a higher court.
Ah, thanks for that!
Another former academic physicist here, but with very little understanding of biological tissue+radiation interactions.

You state multi-photon ionization is not a possible pathway for biological effects in this case (and I believe that). But are there other pathways?

I googled "protein response at 1000 mhz" and got a book "RF / Microwave Interaction with Biological Tissues" that mentioned effects on ATP production at frequencies in the 1-1000 MHz band.

Do you or anyone know more about potential other pathways?
One patent troll has to pay another patent troll.. Good.