skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I send lovely introductory messages. Here's a real response: "First, please allow me to thank you for sending me a message that doesn't suck." Everyone I have messaged, who has responded, says something along those lines.

However, in this particular case, the scathing message was a response to a subsequent exchange, not the introductory. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Everything was going as planned, so I asked for her number. She didn't respond with her number. No big deal. I've wrung numbers out of girls on OkCupid before (read: assuaged their reluctance), with stuff like this:

I understand. You're likely a poor collage student who couldn't pay her phone
bill on time. Look, it's okay, you should've told me. I mean, I have extra
ramen packets and cans of beans.

Most of the time, the response is like this: "haha, how chivalrous. Here's my number...."

This time it was something like: "WOW. Are you trying to be a dick? Blah blah blah. I'm independently wealthy due to my heritage asswipe blah blah blah and something about me having no respect and no personality."

I don't know what her deal was, being "independantly wealthy" must be a touchy topic. My feelers were injured.
Methods of Work: Stop Hammering With a Shovel
There's a 25% discount for Path Finder right now. The discount code is LADRUPAL and it will work until the end of April, 2010. Read more about the deal at http://knurl.us/url/66zpaut
Like I said, I'm the world's worst SQL guy. But the good news is that I haven't invalidated my point by my sloppy syntax.

So this raises two questions...

1) Who doesn't use indexes these days? Even light solutions like SQLite support them.

2) The only real remaining advantage to RDF is that the data resources can sit on the end of URLs if I remember. I think this is mainly because nobody has put much effort into dangling indexed relational tables at the end of a URL. There's nothing that says I couldn't have

SELECT ratings.*, book.name, author.name
FROM http://someplace.com/booklists.ratings AS ratings
JOIN http://someplaceelse.net/booksales.books AS book ON ratings.book_id = book.id
JOIN http://yetsomeotherplace.org/publisherdata.authors AS authors ON books.author_id == author.id
WHERE author.id
IN (
SELECT author_id
FROM books
JOIN ratings ON book.id = book_id
ORDER ratings.score ASC LIMIT 100
)

Or some such...sure it's sloppy and it's slowish, but aren't those the same problems as with RDF? And yet we're still using SQL to do this.
Based on the screen size, the onscreen keyboard should have dimensions similar to a 9-10" netbook. But a netbook keyboard has a lot more keys crammed into that space. Look what's missing on the iPad keyboard: http://images.apple.com/ipad/features/images/mail_type_20100... or http://www.zath.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/apple-ipad-... 0-9,",[],{}, TAB, cursor keys, etc. all have to be accessed from an alternate keyboard screen. I'll admit that the lack of keys adds a benefit of plenty of extra space between keys.
It's true there are plenty of out-of-work geeks, but I believe she is referring to the future. It is my understanding that the number of American students entering 'geeky' degrees is declining rapidly, which is certainly concerning for DARPA in both medium- and long-term P.O.V.'s.
As a strict superset of JavaScript, Objective-J actually lets you have both.
He's 100% correct too.

Personally, the iPad isn't for me. I want less screen time in my life, not more - and the iPad doesn't fill any gaps that warrants me purchasing one for myself.

That being said, I did order one for my grandmother. She's been pestering me about getting the Internet and I felt like it would be a device that was less daunting for her than a mouse/keyboard combination.
Costco and manipulating our cortical setup
You're looking on the wrong job boards most likely. I almost never see any of those languages where I end up seeing jobs.

Try looking at meetups (which allow job posts), job postings advertisements on programming sites, etc instead.
I've wagered that typing on the iPad will not only be tolerable but that people will actually be able to get Real Work done.

Over the past two months I have been involved in a project to develop a typing training application for the iPad. Our hope is that people will use TapTyping to get over the iPad-typing learning curve very quickly.

I just sent this to my posterous about Walt's article:

http://flairify.posterous.com/walt-mossberg-gives-ipad-typin...
I would suggest that the correct thing to do at that point is to move somewhere with a better tech community in the languages you do like.

I moved(without having and commercial experience behind me) to a more technical city just as I was finishing Uni and managed to find a much better job with much better coworkers than I could have had in my starting city quite quickly.
Think about moving after graduation.

If you hate your job it will seep into other aspects of your life. Life is too short for that.

Go out and find your adventure.
Thanks; I'll have to take a look at that
Hmmmm, so if a business moves its headquarters to NZ, then will it protect them from software lawsuits from businesses in other countries???
Review for Techies - The Apple iPad is basically a gigantic iPod Touch.

Review for Everyone Else - The Apple iPad is basically a gigantic iPod Touch.

Big Surprise.
Yes but we all know that, as is the case in Objective-C, your primary mode of modeling problems becomes message passing and OOP. In Objective-C's case you drop to C for performance, I have a hard time believing that you'd drop to Javascript in Objective-J to eek out more performance. (If that's the case, truly we live in interesting times.)
Ok, so even if we accept your hypothesis, that doesn't change the root message of the article, which is to remember the other end of the line is a person just like you.

The explicit goal of the user may be different, but shooting someone down for pleasure and tearing someone down to pull yourself up often look to be one and the same, and have many of the same side effects.
I'd have thought google, would have used a combination of the depth maps produced from the laser range finders they use when they take the street view pictures. Then using the depth map offset the image as appropriate.

Even then it doesn't seem very effective, the navigation arrows seemed to stand out more than the actual street.
I generally despise development. I can "program" (make small tools, scripts, etc) but I don't have the "developer mindset"

I learned PHP and MySQL to get a promotion when my boss was considering hiring from outside the company. I generally don't hate PHP -- in fact, these days, I rather like it -- but I did have to do something I was averse to in order to land a job.
Good...the sooner we kill software patents...the better off we will be! Patent trolls have gotten out of hand over very simple concepts.
What would be the licensing model if the product is open source, but is NOT free (i.e., customers are charged for an open-source product in which BDB is used)?
On my CV I have "Languages used: C, sh, perl, awk, Maple, x86 assembly" immediately followed by "Languages NOT used: C++, Java, Erlang, Haskell, Python, Ruby, PHP, C#". I'm sure it has resulted in me not being offered some jobs, but I'm not sure if it has cost me any jobs which I might have considered accepting.

Don't ask what languages are being widely used. Ask first what jobs/companies you're interested in; then find out what languages they require.
That tidbit about the Scrabble app is very interesting. Using an iPhone or iPod Touch as a local, private screen while using the iPad as a shared game board could be used in a lot of cool ways. Only problem of course is it is over $1k worth of gadgets.
Many people don't realize this, but I believe Apple is actually has one of the largest marketing budgets in the tech business - 1/2 a billion in 2008 (http://industry.bnet.com/technology/1000574/apples-advertisi... )
not here (sample size of one). I still get 5-6 hours use from my 1st gen unibody macbook; the one with the removable battery.
You're both right. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-c#History
This could be significant if it leads to a commoditization of mobile bandwidth such that random startups can be cell carriers if they want to.
Programmers these days.

In my day we programmed in Java and liked it. ASP was the GOOD web programming language. We had to code up hill in both directions...

But seriously, there are good and bad points to every language. Sometimes I think the willingness to just love the good and work around the bad is half of being a really good developer.
Ask HN: Rate my startup - Backpedalify
Sorry, we're only in private beta.
I suppose mistaken ancestry is a very "American" fear (if one at all), although I can think of other countries (like Japan) where any "surprises" in ancestry might not be so hot.

Accidental inbreeding would be horrible.
"The Design of Design" by Fred Brooks
Less space than a Nomad.
Sounds like Ashburn. ;)
I have the 2nd gen unibody macbook pro ( the one without the removable battery ) and I still see 5 - 6 hours of battery life. I can usually get more if I'm just watching movies on it. Youtube & Hulu et. al. seem to be the biggest battery killers for me ( 4 - 5 hours )
You would be mistaken. You can be sued for back wages and be fined if you screw up there. Here is the applicable publication from the national department of labor.

From:
http://www.dol.gov/elaws/esa/flsa/scope/er15.asp

--

If all of the following criteria apply, the trainees or students are not employees within the meaning of the Act:

The training, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to that which would be given in a vocational school;

The training is for the benefit of the trainees or students;

The trainees or students do not displace regular employees, but work under close supervision;

The employer that provides the training receives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees or students and, on occasion, his operations may even be impeded;

The trainees or students are not necessarily entitled to a job at the conclusion of the training period; and

The employer and the trainees or students understand that the trainees or students are not entitled to wages for the time spent in training.

--

Very few internships in the US can satisfy all of these.
What 1984 Macintosh marketing reveals about iPad
I very nearly learned C# just so I get could a job in my geographical area. Turns out, if I was a bit flexible there were a lot of jobs out there doing the PHP development that I really enjoy.

Don't make too many compromises though. Learning a language that you don't like is going a bit too far to get a job I think.
That was true for Objective-C, but JavaScript has closures, which can be used seamlessly in Objective-J.

Of course now Objective-C also has closures/"blocks" too.
I never "hated" Perl, but I only learned how to use it because I heard it was pretty useful. It grew on me and I now love it.
Please don't take this question the wrong way, but what kind of programming jobs do you usually take?
Seconded. I wrote an online game as a 16 year old (10 years ago) with all the bugs that a 16 year old might code (though no SQL injections!) and there were tons of angry/concerned players whenever something happens. Most of the players understand (I was young) but also got quite a bit of angry threats, which was a bit much for a young 'un. So I kind of stopped caring about it, and now few people complains because few people care about it. At least it's a growing lesson!
Andy Ihnatko's iPad Review
Jason said that it was really easy to launch Basecamp because they'd already built up an audience with their blog. Tons of instant PR from people who already wanted to hear from them.

Max (from here, http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=maxklein) said that he was going to be writing a blog about interesting, random stuff, so that when he announces something of importance, he'll have people listening. Thus Cube of M.
This is an awesome shootout! Be careful with BDB, its default tuning is geared more towards an embedded environment then a modern web-app. That's not to say it can't go fast!

I took a look at your BDB demo and saw that you weren't creating the DBs in an environment, which meant every operation was straight to disk, and also meant that you weren't running with write-ahead logs (which will give you durability). I didn't look too closely to see if the other databases had caching enabled or not (or what their defaults were).

On my macbook air, configuring with caching (and no logging) yielded this from your benchmark:

Air:kvtest jamie$ ./bdb-test
Running test ``test test'' PASS
Running test ``write test'' Ran 284669 operations in 5s (56933 ops/s)
PASS

Of course, page caching makes all the difference :-)

BDB has some great sample code, I'd recommend taking a look at: examples_c/ex_env.c (http://www.fiveanddime.net/berkeley-db/db-4.3.28/examples_c/...)

I really wish BDB had more sensible defaults, I think it unfairly gets a black-eye in performance shootouts.
By not broadening your skill set and opening yourself up to opportunities using the languages you've listed, you are seriously limiting the scope of your job search anywhere. Don't let the "big buzz" on the web fool you, the majority of developers are holding jobs in shops that use Java, C, and C++.

That said, take the advice of people here and don't constrain yourself locally. You're at a perfect time in your life to be free and go wherever to find the work you really want. Take advantage of that freedom!
I'm not going to claim to be an expert here, but I think the relationship is a little different between Objective-J and JavaScript than between Objective-C and C. The features of Objective-C pretty much across the board make operations simpler than they are in C. JavaScript already makes a lot of things pretty much as simple as it gets, and in some ways makes it too easy to accidentally do something wrong. So, Objective-J actually serves to impose a bit of structure on your code (and could even impose strict+static typing).

That's basically how I've used it: Objective-J classes define the larger-scale architectural components of a project, but for smaller collections of data that are somehow related, especially for short-lived collections of data, I usually drop down to JavaScript and use the convenient hashes and arrays.

Performance-wise, some operations will be faster in JavaScript than Objective-J, because things like message passing have an extra function call. I haven't found it to be a particularly noticeable difference, but admittedly I haven't been writing a lot of performance-critical code, so others might have better insights on that subject.
But they already have existing PCs to run that existing software. We are, I think, talking about new businesses that have a choice—of course those that have locked themselves into a paradigm will still be locked in when a new one is invented.
"“Aggregation works for consumers,” he said. “It makes it easier to find and discover and enjoy premium content, and it works for advertisers, because with that aggregation you get greater reach.” [...] To get permission to move content onto other platforms “takes a lot of wrangling,” [and is] “like trying to pass the health care bill.”"

I think a driver for consolidation into One Media Service To Rule Them All is that advertisers and content providers would get to see where else their viewers are going. One can imagine targeting different ads to viewers depending on their pattern of viewing -- oh look, they watch "Battlestar Galactica" on one network and they watch "This Old House" on another -- hm, home repair geek? Upsell the fancy cordless drill! Like the data mining credit card companies can do, except for content.

This benefit of cooperation goes beyond the 'greater reaach' argument in the article, and might help counter the pressures causing these companies to want to go it alone.
I'm dating myself, but the example I think of is Volkswagen's famous "Think Lemon" campaign back for the old Volkswagen beetle.
I think you're reading too much into it. Certainly Apple may have offered ABC some amount of money for the product placement but the important question is has this specific example taken away from the entertainment factor of the show? If you follow 'Modern Family' this is certainly is consistent with the portrayal of a father. Would it have made you happier if instead he was obsessing over an unfamiliar technology product that you've never heard of? Would you have been able to relate to it as much?

So I say, "who cares," as long as product placement is not impacting me from being entertained and/or compromising the artistic merit of the show.
Perl was my first language, and my progress suffered as a result. Don't get me wrong, I love Perl and use it for things, and while there are many ways to do things, most of the ways are fairly awful, and I had to go through many iterations of writing the same code to now at least be somewhat confident. Probably as a first language it would've been nice to be forced to be clean initially! Perl allowed me to get away with so much..
(I'm not trying to be a smartass in the following comment, I honestly believe this to be the case)

I think the thing is that women start turning down propositions from horny guys early on in their lives, so that by the time they get into the age where dating sites make sense, they've become proficient at it... almost like second nature.

If us guys are looking for someone to blame, we first have to look at ourselves.
Humans have a perverse faculty for learning to love nearly anything, given enough time.

You think we're built to drink beer?
For those interested, the traditional names for the directions in 4 dimensions (equivalent to "up" and "down", etc.) are "ana" and "kata".
Tweet: Scientists decode songbird's genome
Mistaken ancestry? That's a very American thing to have (not fear). For example, the admixture is such that the African-American population has 20% 'white' ancestry. We're an admixed people. I always thought that was the great part about being American...

Mistaken paternity? That would be pretty lifechanging. But how exactly would a 23andMe style test let you know if you father "wasn't your father?" I suppose he would need to submit DNA as well? (Obviously if your true father is from Asia or Africa but you always thought he was European, you could easily discover this with principal components... but I'm sure that's not what this blog post's author is talking about.)

In my opinion, there is little to be gained, currently, from commercial genetic testing. Groups like 23andMe egregiously oversell their offerings: https://www.23andme.com/store/ "Learn your genetic risk for type 2 diabetes, Parkinson's disease, and other conditions." Please - at present day, your genetic profile tells you no more about your risk for T2D than does your family history.
Slashing Prices (at Colleges and Universities)
Thesis- hating a language is a mark of a good but not great developer.

Hating the sort of work a language is usually used for is something different, however.

Perl is the one exception, of course. All right-thinking humans hate perl.
So you don't want to work with .NET or Java or ColdFusion or ASP (classic ASP 3.0?). What do you want to work with?
A couple of years ago I had a Macbook Pro (not certain of the generation), and I don't think I ever got more than 3 hours of battery life out of it even when it was new. By the end of its life it was usually running for about 90 minutes before needing a recharge. Maybe I just got a crummy battery; dunno.
His talk from the 2007 OOPSLA (http://www.oopsla.org/oopsla2007/index.php?page=podcasts/ ) is also excellent.
I think that dialog box is from his personal, private build that he mentions in the footnotes. Therefore, he probably doesn't really care how user friendly it is. I'm actually surprised its as well written as it is.
Finding the perfect hyperbola
I don't know if I would go so far as to disagree with TorKlingberg, but I do see the trend you mention. Technically expert users will do whatever it takes to get a product they want to work, even if it really isn't worth the effort.

This is why we can't have nice things. It amazes me the number of projects that require that I build from source, in a specific directory, with these options and these dependencies installed. If I can, I avoid such projects on principle.

What's worse is, I've been accused of being lazy or too dumb to run such projects. It's not that I can't or won't install these products: I don't want to waste my time doing so if it can be helped. I'm just expecting the same thing of other developers as I expect from myself. If my product is versioned 1.0 or higher, I expect that it a) has an installer (Windows-style) b) comes in a package (.deb et al) c) comes via a manager (apt-get), or d) runs in-place (WinSCP/PUTTY/uTorrent).
The difference is that fixing an iPad won't require a repair shop; it'll require plugging it into your computer, which will go through its normal syncing cycle of backing it up, then upgrading apps—but it'll notice the invalid app checksums on infected apps and overwrite them with App-Store-canonical versions. If kernel-level viruses become prevalent, it'll simply start checksumming that too, and offering to restore from an IPSW with all your data (but nome of your config) intact (but that won't be a problem, since part of Apple's aesthetic is "low configuration.")

Interestingly, it'll mean that only jailbreakers—and those with no access to a computer to sync with—will ever have viruses for more than one sync cycle.
If you could make a potential customer in a shoe store understand that the rubber compound in a particular shoe would make it perform 30% better, it would likely have an impact on the sale.

No. I say this because I'm the kind of customer the article is about.

When I'm buying I'm looking for a shoe I am walking around in all day. I'm never going to race. I'm probably not going to play any sports in that shoe. (When I play sports it is usually barefoot at the beach.) I simply don't care about performance. As soon as you try to sell me on performance, I'm ignoring you because it is utterly irrelevant to my life.

I care about comfort, durability, price and aesthetics. Were I single I'd move aesthetics up the list because women do seem to care about how your shoes look. Were my feet easier to fit I might move comfort down the list. I won't believe anything the sales person says about durability, and my decisions on that are the repeat buys where I walk up, name the model, try on a couple of shoes, and walk out. The sales person will have no idea that durability was a factor for me in that decision because I relied on past experience, and not anything that was visible in the store.

The article is exactly right. I simply don't care about any of what the manufacturer is trying to get people to care about. And there is no way of delivering that message that will make me care. I only care about solving my problem, which is keeping my feet protected at relatively low cost per unit time without looking ridiculous.
Chrome to Have 3D Apps This Summer
The mirror: It's about you, not them.
I've learned a bunch of languages while working at justin.tv, and have disliked each of them to some degree. Think of it as the price of admission to being able to do interesting things.