skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's one of a thousand "lance" sites just like it, where Indian high school students fight over the chance to build you the next Facebook for $150. The quality of the work you'll get from one of those sites is terrible. If you're going to consider using it, I'd suggest hiring 3 separate developers in parallel, in the hopes that one of them may actually deliver something usable.

If you're a developer, you probably shouldn't waste your time looking for work there, unless you're prepared to compete on price with the $7/hour crowd.
At the top of your post you forgot the getter for the foo field so the Java version is even longer...
>> "But almost everything in Java is more verbose"

Sure, that's the common misconception. You're correct. However, if you actually look at the language and write stuff in it, you'll find it's not actually true.

The issue is when people look at some existing insane Java code and cite it as proof Java is verbose.

I'd absolutely agree - most open source / freely available Java code is verbose. Several of the libraries (enterprise etc) are verbose and insane. But that's not Java.

Higher level languages are not always better. Use what is suited to the job at hand. I'm far more comfortable working at lower level than high level.

Which is better.... talking high level and relying on a compiler/runtime to figure out what you want? or just talking a bit lower level in the first place.
BulletProof Backups For MySQL
so true, they take up a good amount of space and there's not a heck of a lot of air accumulating in that space, just paper and a lot of it.

When I moved from home to college, I really only had 2 or 3 medium boxes of things i wanted/could take with me. Then from college to my first apartment I also had really accumulated nothing of value, and threw away a lot. When I moved from my first apartment to my second, an unbelievable thing happened. My first job brought with it a mountain of stuff. I really didn't realize it as I always kept that place spotlessly tidy (When I start to think through a piece of code I tend to walk around cleaning, its like a mindless activity that helps my mind work) The big mistake I made was using server boxes i swiped from work to move. Next time (which should be in a few months) I plan on using more smaller boxes.
getters != java.

Just because some frameworks choose to use getters/setters, it doesn't make them any part whatsoever of the language.

Once again, people getting confused about what Java the language is.
Lovers, retailers embrace Valentine's Day
This was my first time reading it, and it is a great essay.
Yeah, I just noticed that. Too late to edit, unfortunately.
This is part of the Anti-Google hate. Ignore it. It'll pass.
How to to find, keep and ditch your Valentine
Whereas the BBC displays no bias whatsoever with respect to AGW. Do you seriously think that the article you linked to doesn't have its own (pretty obvious) agenda?
For the English the delimiters are the start and end of conversation.
Any programmer who just blindly accepts the default usage of a programming language, really has a lot to learn about programming.

all languages suck for some value of 'task'.
Why the extremes of 'the past' or 'the future'? Can't it just be 'a part' of the internet?
Replacing eval with alert/echo is a nice technique, one I hadn't thought of.

Thankfully I haven't had to think of it in years; their conclusions (basically, more logging and keeping up-to-date) would be valid if it weren't Wordpress itself which is usually the attack vector. It's better to use something else entirely.
Yeah, he (as well as me) is a developer looking to score a few bucks here and there. He lives in China, doesn't get much work locally.
NBA_NIKE新浪竞技风暴_新浪网
I've recently started to reduce my spending on "stuff" so I can start saving for the things I've decided actually matter (a startup, a trip to Europe with my girlfriend, as well as a ring for her for whenever that moment is right) One of the key concepts of the essay is happiness will not be reduced, and possibly increased with this change in living. To this I will attest is very true, I haven't gone on the trip yet, but I already get more pleasure out of knowing I actually WILL be going on it, then if I bought a faster laptop etc.
9 Love Lessons Literature Has Taught Us
I like the idea, but the execution can definitely be improved. It lacks too many features to be interesting for me. Such as being able to login and edit my profile, international support (why not do this from the start??), ability to provide some links and stuff.

but its a good start! Iterate your way to the top ;)

Oh: looks like I can edit my profile!
Primary sources are always better than secondary sources.
No programming language will solve the problem of bad programmers. If you can edit the code, private methods provide no protection -- the programmer that wants to get at that functionality will just change it to public and recompile, or worse, cut-n-paste the code into his own module. The enforced privacy, therefore, adds no safety. Not enforcing privacy at least allows you to write a subclass that carefully changes the behavior of the original, at the risk of coupling the subclass to the superclass (but this is better than cut-n-pasting).

In an ideal world, you could rewrite every library that was designed incorrectly, but there is not always time for this. Intentionally limiting flexibility ("private") is worse for code reuse than allowing someone to intentionally change internal details. (Which is what privacy prevents.)

A good programmer will use his judgment to determine whether to cut-n-paste, subclass, or rewrite. The programming language should not remove options from his toolbox.

Now I work for a big tech company, and I'm in charge of a framework again except now its JavaScript which has the same problems when people force this classical inheritance pattern and now when some guy doesn't get it he's in another building or another country and did so in a repository I didn't even know existed and his code that breaks my encapsulation is in a production device and when I refactor my code I have the possibility that I break live code on some project or some device I don't know about.

Well, the tests stop passing. The tests are what ensure your code works, not "private" directives. "private" is just documentation that suggests "you probably don't want to call this directly". "Probably."

All I can say is that technical solutions to social problems never work. Rewrite your app in Haskell and I guarantee that dumbass developers will still be able to mess up your code. People are much more clever than programming languages.
I don't have a citation. My understanding is that it is a true story. If you want to look for it, you might check for mudslinging political campaigns in the Deep South of the US prior to, say, 1950 (possibly even 1800's).

EDIT: Found a reference to this:

Reynolds told the backcountry crowds that his opponent had once sunk so low as go up to Harvard (pronounced HAW-vud). What did the man do there? Why, he "matriculated"! And, worse, he became "a thespian"! Imagine.

Naturally, Reynolds won the race.

http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/02/21/morro...
Ha! That means that you made a MISTAKE! All your conclusions are WRONG, and we are actually entering an ICE AGE!! Or something like that. Just as long as I can drive my SUV and I can use my big screen TV and hair dryer, we are good.
Wouldn't get the upvotes/clickthroughs.

Everything has to be revolutionary(git) or disastrous(cuil) or outrageous(buzz) now.
Not All Money Is Created Equal - taxes of the poor, middle, and rich
private and protected are fantastic for narrowing down bugs, and controlling access.

Certainly not a waste of time. In comparison, a looser language like javascript where any code can call any code any time it likes, can be a complete pain to debug.
People like getters and setters because they provide structured and consistent access, and decouple consumers from the internal implementation of your class.

If you have a "get_foo" method in your class, you can change what "foo" is under the hood without consumers knowing. If they touch the field directly, you can never change that -- your implementation becomes the interface. And the idea of OO (and good programming in general) is to avoid that.

You keep talking about "ignore Java's syntax and focus on being a better programmer", but I think if you use fields for your public interface, you are compromising the quality of your code. You should be able to have the protection that getters and setters afford without the cost of typing them into every class that needs them. That would allow the "better programmer" to write a better program.
You can cuss here, if you want.
I have been setting up a lot of Gmail accounts recently for students in computer literacy courses I teach and I have not needed to do SMS validation (last account I set up was last week).

The CAPTCHA's a pain though. Imagine trying to explain to someone who's never used a computer before why we have to keep retyping the blurry words to get to what they want.
That's not true of analysis. You of course go to the primary source for the quotes, but beyond that....
There's been a lot of discussion about this over time. Take Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, for example. It's frankly some of the best prose I have ever read, ever.

The book is written from the perspective of a pedofile lusting after a young girl. Stanley Kubrik's film of the movie in 1962 won an academy award. There was an immense ammount of controversy surround the movie and the book, and they still are. Art or obscenity? We'll be having this discussion for years to come.
I have a 90-day rule. If I have something and I haven't used it in 90 days, I probably don't need it and get rid of it (sell it, give it away, throw it out). This tends to keep my life de-cluttered and "focused". It also keeps me from waisting money on stuff I don't need. "Am I really going to be still excited about, and benefit from, using this widget I want to buy in 90 days or not?" I've lived like this for about a decade and I highly recommend trying it.

There are exceptions of course. Seasonal items like clothing, mountain bike, etc... Books too as mentioned in the essay. Having a library of coding books on-hand is not only reassuring, but has helped me save significant time solving a problem, even if I only rarely use the book. And I don't think it's a good idea throwing out your old money either. ;)
Both of Google's posts on the issue talk about notification and controls for users whose profile is created when they first use Buzz. But from my experiments, if you were in the minority of users who had already set up a Google profile (which I did in 2007 when they were first announced[1]) then Google started broadcasting information about who you were following before you even knew that you were following them.

Adding new privacy controls is not nearly sufficient to protect privacy; you need to notify users about them and let them choose before applying the settings to their account. At least during the first launch (I haven't re-tested with the latest changes), for my test account that already had a profile, this was the experience:

(1) As soon as I logged into GMail and saw the Buzz welcome screen and clicked "no thanks," my account began "following" people chosen by Google. (2) This information was broadcast to a group of people chosen by Google. (3) I was not informed that either of these things had happened. (4) New privacy settings were added to my "Edit Profile" screen, but (5) the least-private setting was activated automatically and I was not told yet that the new settings existed until after information about my email contacts was broadcast to other users.

I don't think anyone disagrees that there were privacy controls. But it was really a "beware of leopard" situation, at least for accounts in this particular state. The only option for these users to preserve their privacy was for them to (1) magically know that before logging into GMail today, they must edit their profile to be non-public, and (2) magically know that new privacy settings had been activated in their account so they could change them before trying Buzz.

Now, I actually like Buzz and am still using it[2]. I think it's a much-needed challenge to Facebook's closed platform. I can see how the Buzz team didn't forsee just how bad this would be for a very small minority of users. But to pretend that all users were given a chance to protect their privacy and just didn't take it is really not true. Some users' privacy was violated the instant they logged in, and giving them tools to help them clean up later (and not telling them about the tools!) does not even remotely help.

[1]: http://techcrunch.com/2007/12/15/google-starts-rolling-out-c...

[2]: http://google.com/profiles/mbrubeck
It can call any code any time it likes, but it shouldn't. Why do you think you know what the Future User of your class wants to do better than that Future User? In theory, a good library will have a perfect public interface that anticipates every need that the future users will have. "protected" and "private" eliminate many classes of bugs in that case. But in the real world, they just eliminate many classes of features, because they prevent people from using imperfect libraries.
"Levels, Jerry. With cushions ... like ancient Egypt."
Very cool idea of using a low cost camera sensor to provide feedback on how well the robot is moving. I would guess (not having seen the code) that Matt is using the metric of how far the robot can move to tune parameters for controlling the legs (genetic algorithm or genetic programming).
>> "you can never change that"

It's not really rocket science to do a search+replace.

Getters+Setters have their place, where you may need to change things under the hood definitely. But most of the Java I see using them is just complete overuse of them for the sake of it.

FWIW, I only use getters+setters when I need to - eg they do something other than just get/set a variable. I think it makes for clean concise readable code.
Even as a child, I was pretty indifferent to stuff (A 9th grade essay wanted us to write about our most prized possession and I couldn't come up with anything except my computer). But I think the final break for me happened when inadequate backup procedures caused me to lose several years worth of digital photos.

I was initially heartbroken but then I started thinking how many times I had actually looked at any of those photos since I took them and, for the majority of then, the answer was zero. After that, my relationship with stuff shifted radically.

A few years later, I lost a wooden spoon which was pretty much the only thing I held an emotional attachment to anymore. That thing was older than I was and had been the one constant in cooking which is a huge part of my life. I moped for a year, shrugged and got a new one.

I'm starting to seriously consider that, once a year, I will find the thing currently most precious to me and get rid of it.
"If the top 1% of income earners make 27% of all the money, it would be perfectly reasonable for them to pay 27% of all the taxes."

Actually, no. What are they getting in return for that?

Past a certain amount, it doesn't in aggregate cost any more for the government to support the needs of any one person. When you tax people beyond that point, you're explicitly engaging in redistribution and that is a debatable point, not something that is "perfectly reasonable".

To take a real world example, a foreigner can go to a canton in Switzerland and do a private tax treaty with it, where he e.g. pays a fixed amount of tax each year. The cantons that do this are stating that it doesn't cost them any more than that sum to cover his costs to them.
So the original argument is "java is verbose". How did we get to "all languages suck"?
Can you choose how much to pay monthly? Do you always have to pay? What happens if one month you don't "flattr" anything? What if you want to "flattr" one thing more than other things?

I don't think it's very clear at all. Also, I'm not sure I'd want to pay for something every month.
I would say the BBC displays absolutely no bias in quoting the guy's responses verbatim...
I think the perspective of this article is wrong. The author says that if you're not working hard, you're not learning. "Working hard" implies stress. It's hard to learn under stress. When I was young, I used to take piano lessons. The best way to learn a new piece was to take it slow, one step at time, calmly. Whenever I got stressed, I would stop learning and make stupid mistakes. Learning is best done stress-free, at a pace that feels leisurely, but where progress is steady.

"Winning" depends not on one's capacity to endure stress (work hard), but on focusing on the right activities over time. So in classical music, the winner is the one who spends more hours of fruitful practice than one who works harder during the recitals. In school, the winner is the one who thinks about the material more during the course, not the one who crams before the exam.

I think this most true in business. The business winner is the one who steadily improves or who operates in a different way, rather than the one who is most stressed out.

Stress is generally destructive. It should be minimized. The focus needs to be on steady, stress-free or even playful, practice. If you have an idea, just start playing with it. Don't expect to "win" with it in a short session of "hard work." You need to be biased towards action. If action implies something unpleasant, you'll avoid it and stress about it. That's why so many people recommend that you do what you love.
People use services in very different ways, and have very different views on what is acceptable privacy-wise. Personally, I struggle with the "all-in" nature of Facebook (and Buzz, but there's no social pressure to use it yet) - I have various social circles offline and online that simply don't overlap (e.g. family, friends from school, friends from university, friends in the various towns/countries I've lived, customers/business partners, etc.), and the tone, topic and nature of communication with each group is different. I'm not talking about "secrets", I just don't think it's appropriate for them to be forcibly stirred into a pot, and people don't need to know about everything without even trying to dig it up.

I even resent the public friends list on Facebook, but at least I get to decide who lands there (unlike the initial Buzz rollout). As a result, I don't use Facebook actively and just add people as friends because it's perceived to be rude if I don't. I've noticed I'm not the only one - there seems to be a pattern: someone discovers Facebook (note that it's only recently become popular in Austria; it was practically unknown outside the web scene in 2008), get excited and add all their friends, post pictures, etc. and after a while remove a lot of personal details, delete photos and only participate actively by replying to others. Maybe this has already played out a few years earlier in the US.

Oddly enough, I really enjoy Twitter. I guess it's because it's very up-front about everything being public, so the temptation to post something you might regret later is reduced.
The decision claims that the it ultimately came down to how the book was marketed. Shaky legal ground.
When you buy an iPod touch, you buy it with the understanding that you cannot use any camera or GPS-based apps from the App Store.

When you buy a phone running a more generic OS, you can't really be sure if any given app will work on your phone, especially if you don't have a popular phone. I'd be wary of buying an Android phone outside of the G1, Droid, or Nexus One for that reason alone.
Does your service support deleting accounts?

This is very relevant to all of us. Privacy concerns and data portability are huge deals. At least to me.
This is a list of people who "belong" on Twitter.
I'm sure a lot of this really is mob-style insanity, but for me this was just a tipping point. I've been bothered for several months has Google's growth has become phenomenally massive. It's made me realize just how much of my personal data they have, and while I think they are one of the most trustworthy companies out there, I still don't think it's safe. This has motivated me to at least start spreading out. I really like Google services, but I think it's time that my banking,etc.. and personal correspondence go with someone who doesn't know everything else about me.
Now you're getting slightly hysterical. They would just claim that they didn't order the books themselves, the evidence would back them up, and they probably wouldn't even be prosecuted.
The Quixote's prose is confusing and repetitive, but it is a great book. Why is style now more important than theme? And why the fuck is Joyce's Ulysses more important than 1984?
careful, go down the rabbit hole of government farce and you may spend the rest of your life spelunking.
Separation of control can't be over-emphasized. When FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook, I decided to go in and manually delete a bunch of information I'd intentionally kept off Facebook, but didn't mind having on FF, and to completely delete my (rarely used, but existent) Facebook account.

To me, it's important to have separation of control between the people that I know IRL (e.g. old high-school friends with whom I have to sometimes "dumb down" my natural style, at the risk of sounding like a haughty intellectual) and the people that I communicate with online, people with whom I'm interested mainly in sharing ideas / the interesting nerd info. The contexts are such that it's sometimes important for me to use proper logic, grammar, and syntax, and sometimes not.
I've never 'programmed the language'. In any language I've used.

I don't understand how people get this mindset. Languages are a moot point. They're all basically the same give or take a few matters of taste (And as I mentioned the probability of typoing and not being caught by compiler/runtime).

>> "It is too low-level to really let you focus on programming."

Sad you feel that there is no place for low-level programming, I personally find it the most rewarding and enjoyable. I certainly come from the Assembly world though, so perhaps why I don't see much wrong with Java. But you can't say enough times "Choose the tool that best fits the task at hand".

>> "I would like to read some of this "concise" Java."

Can't really help you there, I haven't seen much well written Java out there in open source projects etc. A lot of it absolutely stinks.

Just one data point though, The webserver I use for Mibbit (http,https,async,comet,websocket,sessions,etc) comes in at 6289 LOC. Functionally it's quite a bit ahead of tornado (5803 LOC). So concise Java certainly exists and can be written by competent programmers.
Clearly, if comic books depicting child porn are prohibited, any depiction of rape and murder for entertainment purposes must be prohibited as well. That includes mainstream movies, TV programs and video games.

It is interesting how many arbitrary lines this creates. Soldiers killing the enemy would be legal to depict, but the enemy soldiers killing us would be illegal. Depicting someone having sex at 23:59:59 on the day before her 18th (or whatever) birthday would be a crime, whereas at 24:00:00 it would be legal.

Extending this to cartoons is even more arbitrary. How do you know which side is the good guys (where killing is legal) and which side is the bad guys (where killing is a crime)? How do you know the age of someone being depicted? (I've seen 14-year-old girls that could pass as 25, and 25-year-old girls that could pass as 14. If you depict someone who is 25 but looks 14, is that a crime? If you depict someone who is 14 but looks 25, is that a crime?)

All I can come up with is that any fantasy should always be permitted, unconditionally.