skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Your Dev Environment
I've been thinking about how much VM's have changed the way I work now, esp. how I setup my dev environment and the kind of hardware I run.

A few years back I switched to running my VisualStudio Windows install on a VM;I originally started on Parallels then switched to VMWare, and then recently switched back to Parallels (it just runs Win7 way way faster on my rig at least). I love the ease of moving to a new machine (just copy the vm), or even backing up my windows dev environment (just copy the 45gig file to my Synology NAS). It's also nice if you need to temporarily move your Dev environment to another machine (again, just dump the vm onto an external drive and you can even run it off that if you need too).

I was wondering how prevalent using VM's in this manner is. I seem to run into a lot of developers that think running a VM is much slower than an actual machine, and I guess it depends on your rig. I run a original Mac Pro tower with dual 2.6 core 2 duo procs + 12 gigs of ram; I can give Win7 4gigs of ram and allocate one of my cores to it and with that setup, Win7 + VS2008 smokes. It's honestly the fasest 'Windows machine' I've ever worked on. An added bonus to running like this is my email, music, IM and torrent clients are all running on the host so when Windows needs to reboot, I can keep working on some emails or updating my project plan, make a skype call, etc.

So how about it guys, do others run a VM type rig now or is it still predominantly just running a dedicated box for your main dev env?
I was taught python in my first programming class. It's a large part of the reason I graduated with Computer Science degree.
It does seems hard to pick someone's brain, or pitch them your idea, while trying to lay them at the same time. Getting an honest opinion out of someone and swooning them seem to be mutually exclusive goals.
Well, I don't expect the "little teaching" to take less than 10 years. Yet what I think of is still relatively little: crude definitions of a computer, a program, a network, a browser and a web site, a search engine, a mail client and a mail server; and then a little feel about what computers can remember, with an emphasis on catastrophic scenarios, like with the browser history. I think it can be done in 10, maybe 20 hours per persons, assuming a competent teacher.

So: am I asking too much? Do we need even more than that (except a 30 buck, very easy to use, low power server)?
I want my TechCrunch

Now look at them yo-yo's that's the way you do it

You get the site on the TechCrunch

That ain't workin' that's the way you do it

Money for nothin' and your conferences for free

(reference, in case you're too young to get it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5ZEzWwKJnY)
Sure, but I like reading comments, linking to earlier posts makes those comments available to new readers, too.
MIT recently switched from Scheme to Python for their intro class
KDE allows this on a per application or per window basis "skip taskbar" and "skip pager". Sadly I don't think you can have alt-tab overlook such skipped pages.
zed's dead baby
Before now, I assumed that teaching programming meant giving exercises where students figure out how to piece together the fundamentals of programming languages, and then try to build them up to harder programs. After reading through Zed's PDF, I realize I may have been wrong! If you let people absorb ideas by typing existing programs, they won't need to be taught how to decompose ideas, they'll try new things themselves. To teach game programming, you don't need to teach every single fundamental and build the user up to making a full fledged game. You just need to get them to install PyGame and draw a rectangle that they can move with the keyboard arrows, and tell them where the documentation is. Anyone who is really interested will do the rest themselves.
UToronto switched from Java to Python a couple years ago.

I wonder what my high school is using, they started us with BASIC, then Java and finally a little C... I was pretty well prepared for first year.
For a long time the free online book to learn Ruby was "Why's Poignant Guide To Ruby."

When you compare that to Dive into Python the choice is easy ;-)
Well reminded. That's the other reason I keep it around, for when I have to force-quit TextMate after attempting to load a big file.
From my experience, the coolest thing to do when beginning is to work with a GUI because you really have the feeling to do something great (contrary to print hello in a terminal which is more than useless (from a novice point of view, of course)).

So, my suggestion is to put a small bundle library with a main.py to modify and learn. For instance, that library could only show a simple dialog which you can draw and fun with it.

And the exercice might be more about:
- Print the current time in this GUI (which might be useful)
- Create a small game (such as guess the number, lower/bigger),
- Generate a close-me button that move when you try to aim on it.

Etc.. you get the point: easy and fun exercises.

Finally, there are software which abstract the terminal and merge the editing window with the interpreter. I think this might be way better than saying: try to find the terminal, learn to create a directory, etc.. Why not creating the directory directly from the explorer if the user wants to? More particularly, when you start learning something, everything is new. So it's important to separate the concept of what you should know and what you are supposed to learn. So by this respect, creating a directory shouldn't be part of the same as creating a .py file and writing something in edit for instance.

That's my 2 cents. Good luck and have fun with that :-D
I believe MongoDB has a great advantage and will develop more quickly because it is written in C++ and not in Erlang, like CouchDB.

I believe CouchDB has a great advantage and will develop more quickly because it is written in Erlang and not in C++, like MongoDB.
I dont think my setup is quite what you were asking about. But, I'm running Windows 7 with a Windows 2008 VM. The VM hosts a handful of services that I don't want always running or starting up with my computer. Things like SQL Server 2008 and IIS7. But, I do run Visual Studio locally. It all runs very fast on a QuadCore with 8GB of ram.
I'm really wondering what will finally stop the Ruby vs. Python thing. It's getting old.
My naming convention is naming conventions.
My server is named slogan, my tablet is named color, my netbook is named protagonist, my car (a Nissan Quest) is named Tribe, my ad-hoc wireless network's ssid is synonym, my external drive is named planet, and my server's replacement will be named category.
A few weeks ago, I finally gave in and tried to learn Python. It is surprisingly easier to learn. From a guy with mostly C and Perl experience, it takes good parts from both. I was writing code in only a few days. It's also easier with StackOverflow and Google, of course!
I develop on an Arch Linux box, two 22" monitors, XMonad, vim, and an IBM Model M.

But then I got a MacBook Pro, and I've actually been doing all development on it for the last few weeks. Textmate is the only non-vim editor I'd ever use.
I have that one. The concept is interesting, but Fluxx doesn't allow you to change the rules, only some parameters (e.g. take n cards a turn, play m cards).

I felt it failed to live up to the promise of its concept.
Is "dykes" the correct British spelling? In American English it is "dikes"; "dykes" is vulgar slang for lesbians.
Inventing the “Three-Finger Salute” [ctrl-alt-del]
Multiplayer-social gaming platform for iPhone and Android phones
You can use dots (periods) anywhere in your Gmail username
In Firefox, the session isn't destroyed, instead it is saved until you choose "Tools" -> "Stop Private Browsing". But, the chromium implementation might be more convenient.
Welcome to the Likernet… like ‘er or not
Living With a Computer (1982)
As my mathematician partner always say, it's not unlimited, but rather a very very large amount. I've learned to stop saying unlimited or infinite around him, unless I can prove it theoretically, else he'll go into this shpeel about the finite number of atoms in the universe.
Wealthy societies tend to resist military training, though. I can't imagine a proposal to reinstitute the draft would be very popular in the US, and much of Europe is slowly phasing out their mandatory military service.
Tragically, our civilization has lost the capacity to forgive and forget, and the target doesn't qualify for witness protection, so further damaging his career is no longer possible. After Apple, he's going to have to go smith for the Amish or something.
The brief writeup says that any gsm phone will recognize an OpenBTS "tower", does this mean that I could improve at&t reception at my house (for use with my iPhone)?
I've been a .Net developer for years, but because I can't develop for the iPhone on a Windows box, I switched my primary dev machine to a MacBook Pro running my Windows stuff through a VM. The Windows part is 90% of the what I do, but being able to run the iPhone stuff directly against the Windows back-end made this a no-brainer. It's also really nice to have a VM that mirrors my production environment right on my MacBook so I can do more of that sort of testing on the same box.

I'd prefer running OSX in a VM on a Windows box (the Windows stuff is definitely faster that way), but since I can't do that (easily), this is an acceptable trade-off.

I wasn't happy about how much I had to spend for the MacBook Pro setup though. You're definitely not getting the same performance bang for your buck. It's the price you have to pay though. Oh well.
You have to get a license to do that. At the "Hacking at Random" and the last "Chaos Communication Congress" we had "testing" licenses with restrictions about signal strength and height above ground for installing the BTSes.
If you happen to have your BTS talk to the AT&T infrastructure: Yes
This is the way absolutely every book that aims to teach people a language should be written. When Ruby on Rails hit it big, I picked up two books and couldn't get past the first two chapters.

Why?

The first two chapters were filler chapters. The history of ruby, the history of taking application languages and putting them on the web. An entire quarter of the book in pages was full of back-story, it was chapter 4 before I even saw any code, and chapter 6 before the actual instruction even began.

I will certainly buy this book, and if Zed produces any more about other programming languages in this format, I'm buying them too.
I disagree. Isn't a blank piece of paper worth slightly more than one with something useless printed on it?
Yeah, it's pricey to run it this way, but you do gain a lot of flexibility like being able to run an XP VM once in a while to test stuff on IE6 (IETester isn't 100% accurate), or just checking out the latest Ubuntu for fun.

I found running on a macbook pro to be not as fast as I liked (I was setup very similar to this to start but an original 15" macbook pro) so I sold that and managed to get lucky finding a used Mac Pro tower (1500 bucks). A lappy is nice but having the extra room/ram of the tower really helped out, esp. when you are running SQL, IIS, etc. Of course, with the new i5/i7 macbooks and the bump in max RAM, a macbook pro would probably be pretty stellar but of course, very pricy.
Yes. Threads fast. Thank you.
are you absolutely sure? here's an excerpt from their website:

"""
Cappuccino was implemented using a new programming language called Objective-J, which is modelled after Objective-C and built entirely on top of JavaScript. Programs written in Objective-J are interpreted in the client, so no compilation or plugins are required. Objective-J is released alongside Cappuccino in this project and under the LGPL.
"""

http://cappuccino.org/learn/
So you are faster than Redis? Can you back that up?
Paypal To Offer In App Purchases On iPhone and Android
Zed Shaw - How To Backpedal And Boost Like A Pro
I'm in the same boat. I really tried to make use of it to learn Python, but it just spends a lot of time going into detail that an interested reader should be able to infer by doing exercises.

I'm actually a big fan of that kind of writing, and I tend to write in that way myself, but it doesn't work for "intro" or "tutorial" books. Jon Skeet's "C# In Depth" is a good example of a book that spends time making sure you really understand a concept six ways from Sunday, but that's the advertised point of the book. When it comes to learning something like a new language, I think Mr. Shaw's on to something, but to be honest I'd rather see sets of exercises like this become a wikified, edited-for-quality community project. The examples in the sample PDF are geared at beginners, but there's no reason that a larger set of simple examples and drills couldn't be created by topic (here's how to do stuff with databases; here's how to ping a server; here's how to talk to a web service) for more experienced users that grok the language and are more interested in learning the libraries.

Anyways, the thing I like about this idea the most is that it puts you in front of a machine with programming tools and has you make progress by doing things, not by reading prose.
except that they don't have CC transactions for EACH app you download, do they? I believe they make a bulk charge at the end of the day so if you download a $2.99 app and three 99 apps, they don't pay a transaction cost for each app. They pay $.25 + 2.9% of $5.95.
Gizmodo Caught In Copyright Crossfire
Upcoming Android Apps: Kyte, Rummble,......
Thanks for the pointer to jQuery Layout! It looks very similar to extJS' layouts.
I use VM's on a MacBook Pro circa 2006 and they worked fine - a little slow on harddrive intensive operations (e.g. startup, building large applications) but useable.

Then I got an SSD harddrive. It's like I'm using a new (much faster) machine. The VM's seem like they're native.

SSD HD's are still pretty expensive but worth every penny IMO (and way cheaper than a new MBP).
"Dude is a Class-A jerk who's attacked people in the past, and I have yet to run into too many people who think the guy is that great."

Man you can make me laugh out even at 3AM in the morning!
You Convert It
Ask HN: Ever advertised on a banner network like Fusion?
Ever advertised on The Deck or Fusion, or similar premium micro-banner network? (Micro in terms of size + properties, not traffic.)

I just did a run for my product and got, according to the ad guys, "the best click-through rate of the month" - at 0.78%.

Yowz.

What's normal? What should I expect? I wasn't able to find numbers from any other designer/developer-oriented SaaS.

Thanks!
The upgrade price isn't too bad once you've plunked down the initial fee. For mac development, I couldn't take anything else but bbedit -- it had the most hybrid mac/unix feel to any editor.

I could find or assemble a perfect set of snippets for bbedit, with field markers and anything I needed. Atop of that, I could then run it through various filters and their PCRE regex engine. Really, if you grew up on unix, and think in terms of text pipelines and manipulation, bbedit covers your needs really well. Just like unix, it's not the prettiest candidate by far, but it's just damn functional and very easy to tweak to exactly what you want.

These days I'm on unix & win32 (and yes, I do vomit a little in my mouth every morning when I log in), and I stick to a bastard cygwin/emacs setup.
Short answer: No.

Long answer: No but you wouldn't want it to anyway.

Very long answer: You can essentially turn your mobile phone into a cordless phone plugged into your own home phone system (via Asterisk). Caller ID spoofing (or the co-operation of AT&T - no chance) is required to make that invisible to the outside world. This means you pay land-line rates when at home rather than AT&T rates.

Useful answer: If you want better signal at home buy a re-radiating antenna like this one (this is not a brand I have used, just a demonstration of the kind of thing you need): http://www.alternativewireless.com/cellular-antennas/wilson-...
What's most interesting to me is how the security of GSM will hold when GSM stacks in mobile phones can finally be tinkered with. OpenBTS provides the opportunity to program and test your own baseband software.

Think about fuzzing GSM towers.

Right now some enthusiasts here in Berlin are developing their own GSM stack for cheap Motorola phones.
the main advantage on 4G is in the bandwidth so I would put some thoughts in the video streaming area
Our sysadmin insists on using numbers to name systems, in combination with an abbreviation representing the OS. For example, RHL015 is our 15th server running CentOS (Red Hat Linux). It's quite maddening!
I run on a Macbook (not Pro!) with 4GB RAM. For a while, I was doing some IE plugin development and went with separate VMs for IE6, 7, and 8 (used the MSFT distributed VirtualPC ones, actually). That got me used to the idea of switching back and forth being VMs, and now I have separate Ubuntu VMs for each project I work on -- switching back and forth as emails and phone calls come in. Working this way really helps me compartmentalize my projects, especially not worrying with how I muck up the OS installation as I need some crazy tool or other for a particular task. It's also divorced me from excessive customization of my rig, so that I don't mind upgrading when a new Ubuntu is shiny enough to make me go "ooh".
Unlimited means that the system imposes no limit on the number of threads to be displayed -- each page uses a constant amount of resources, so there is no limit to how far back in your history you can go.

That is my reading, anyway.
Adobe abandons iPhone code tools
Acer Aspire 1810TZ, 11.6inch HD LCD, Notebook
If your email address is N characters, there are actually 2^N possible email addresses by just adding dots in different places (due to the binomial series).
Very nice. Slow threads were annoying me due to the proxy at work -- if a page took too long to respond, it would just randomly show some other page from news.yc that happened to be in the cache. (Yes, really. Now I know who else reads HN at work, and what topcolors they have chosen. ;)

This was a problem, because it seems that after I wrote a post, I immediately realized there was some error, and I needed to fix it. The page that loads after you "add commment" was also affected by the cache bug, so I couldn't get an edit link there. I would have to try "threads" a number of times, and eventually, if I was lucky, I would get the edit link. Then I could fix my post. Frustrating. (And not really HN's fault, FWIW.)

I haven't tried this through the proxy yet, but it seems massively faster from home, which should make the work proxy happier. Thanks!
Well, I stand corrected then. I thought the article seemed to imply that it wasn't a non-standard extension, just a standard extension that had only been implemented correctly in Mozilla. Looking back, it seems like you are correct though.
Nothing like a greencard application to show such "enthusiasm"!
In this context, "Soviet-era excess" is a jab at the culture of the USA around the time of the cold war. Some of the time periods in US history are named for the war we were fighting around that time. Revolution era, Civil War era, WWI and WWII era, cold-war/Soviet era, Vietnam era.
This brought back fond memories of calvinball http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_and_Hobbes#Calvinball
I remember reading this in high school. It's a really compelling story that makes me think when I read it.
Remo Software exhaustively reviewed by MacFormat
I agree, I'm sure that's how he meant it. However, I was just trying to be humorous, this being hacker news I thought it was applicable. Clearly nobody else appreciated it.
I added RDF/XML and RDF JSON equivalent representations of the most complex example given in the readme. I'll hopefully add some more examples soon.
Plerts - Tap Your Social Safety Net for Medical and Personal Safety
Emacs, Solaris. I'll have to jump back to Linux, and I won''t be happy without dtrace/zfs. That's a desktop machine. I've got a Macbook Pro 17" that I can use for multi-platform testing, with a VM in there if I need it. My work at home isn't web-based, so I don't have to worry about windows compat.
I don't see why that's worth a downvote but I agree, all I see it being useful for is having friends leave notes so that if I'm somewhere new, someone might have left a suggestion as to what I should do/eat/see there
True, I should have typed I didn't use their _referal_ system,
I am indeed a happy dropbox user.

Sorry for the confusion.
MacBook 2Ghz Intel Core Duo, 2GB 667 Mhz DDR2 SDRAM
http://www.virtualbox.org/
I've found a use for Spaces. I put each fullscreen virtual machine in it's own space.
Space 1 - Mac OS X (native)
Space 2 - Windows (virtual machine)
Space 3 - Ubuntu (virtual machine)
I keep networking turned off in Windows. Files are shared locally by VirtualBox between Windows and Mac OS X.
Thank you, much appreciated!
Random note from the paper: anyone else notice how the programmer is assumed to be a man? 1963, sure, it's ok. But I was still a little amazed.
Agora was great---I was involved for about six years in the early days, and it taught me a lot about logic, world modelling, and precision of expression. You know, computer science.
It is not beautiful, but when I throw my LINQ-to-xml magic at it, it will be quite easy to work with.
I think 3.5.8 had an exploitable use-after-free bug, but 3.5.9 fixed it.
Really, does it make that much difference? I've been thinking about getting an SSD for my 2006 MBP, but wasn't sure if it'd be fully utilised.

Though, I still need an upgrade, the 2GB RAM limit is getting pretty annoying now. If only I had an extra £1650 laying around.
Templates are useful when you need to use the standard containers.

When you start doing metaprogramming beyound that, guys like me start to get very nervous.
Culturally I doubt Apple's that mad if their cofounder's joking about it.
Warning: spoilers ahead

I think that there was a certain kind of moral; I think that he was making a statement about how absurd people's valuation of art is. That it doesn't even have to be about whether it is good, or original, or even who created it; a nobody could come out, make some shoddy knockoff artwork, and with enough promotion and buzz, create a market for his artwork and start selling it.

I think it's a reaction to the people buying and selling Banksy's own art; art that he created for free, in public, on the street, possibly on someone else's property or on public property, with no expectation of remuneration. Then, once it gets trendy and popular, people start buying it up just because other people are interested in it; they don't even necessarily care about the art itself, nor the artist, they just care that it's popular. By creating an artist out of thin air, peddling derivative, repetitive art with no particular meaning, and then ensuring that the hype increases the value of his art, Banksy is showing how disconnected the art market is from the art itself.
Awesome :) Looking much better from here. Thanks
Steve Wozniak On Apple Security, Employee Termination, and Gray Powell
Calculated Bets: how a CS prof developed a winning sports gambling system
Crazy lightning fast! Much appreciated.
Have you tried Emacs in viper mode? To me vim shortcuts plus Emacs extensibility is the best of both worlds.

XMonad looks great, I look forward to trying this out.
Recap from Startup Lessons Learned Conference
Facebook | Alain Gil AGphot'
Scientist Finds PageRank-Type Algorithm from the 1940s
I've developed on a VM in the past (VMWare), the experience was great - convenient to test on multiple platforms without rebooting etc. but it was difficult once I needed to do non-trivial graphics stuff with OpenGL - the performance difference was quite extreme. Hopefully this is something that will improve with future versions...