skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I once wrote some blogposts [1] titled "Why do Startups still use Java? ". I would have thought people who wanted the Java libraries/JVM would have used Scala or Clojure. I understand why people would choose Java over say Python (the need for specific libraries like say Hadoop which have no direct equivalent in Python/C land), but I've not yet understood why they won't use Clojure or Scala once they choose the JVM.

I wasn't (and am not) running a startup so I asked some friends who were (and were using Java). I never got a satisfactory answer (but I got some surprising answers including "If I were 5 years younger I would be using Scala or Clojure but I am very productive in Java and don't have the energy to learn new languages"(!!)). Another interesting answer I got was that their startup focused on business value but needed only average programmers (I am just reporting what people said) and could very well work in Java. All answers tended to "Sure Java is inferior but there are mitigating factors."

Fwiw, If I were to ever start a business where software was a differentiator I would use (a) Scala (if JVM/libraries were important) (b) Haskell + C or (c) use a custom Scheme variant I've been hacking on for many years + C.

I personally think the fears of not getting good programmers if you build in unusual languages is overblown. Even in Bangalore, good programmers would jump at an opportunity to work on interesting systems and interesting languages. I am not looking for work but I would still consider a job offer from a startup using interesting languages very seriously.

[1] I was trying to figure out stuff by writing and so these posts are not polished, but if anyone wants to read, here they are

http://pindancing.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-do-startups-still...

http://pindancing.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-do-startups-still...

http://pindancing.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-do-startups-still...

http://pindancing.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-do-startups-still...
(void)x does not work on all compilers to silence the warning. gcc + cl != C.
I killed Thrudb for the love of Cassandra
(and for more than one platform?)
Buying Romantic Dinner Candles
I agree with what a number of others have said here: Java isn't ideal for front-end web stuff, but it still has a lot of uses for low level data processing and back-end work. Also, the JVM is a great platform, and you can target it with any number of languages: Groovy, Clojure, Scala, Nice, JRuby, Jython, etc.

Personally I'm using Groovy on Grails for the web front-end part(s) of my current project, and even using Groovy for some of the "backend'ish" parts just to get through the initial prototype. Grails and Groovy are amazing in terms of developer speed - compared to Java anyway. But since it's all still on the JVM, I can just drop in existing Java libraries and - if, or when - I need to, it'll be fairly easy to transition bits to Java. For my money, it's the best of both worlds at the moment.

Then again, the stuff I'm doing is somewhat "enterprisey" so being on the JVM will probably actually be a selling point down the road.
Simple Document Versioning with CouchDB
The proportions of this sample fit my expectations given the "referal" traffic show by analytics when I have blog posts.
There seems to be a work-life balance difference also. Depending on the large company, it's at least possible to get a job that, most weeks, takes about 40 hours, mostly during the day, and leaves time for friends/family/hiking/reading/whatever outside of that time. Many startups seem to want someone for whom their job will be their life--- some of the job postings come close to saying so pretty explicitly! That can be unappealing if you want to maintain a non-work-related life. I'd personally only be willing to make my job my life if it were my company.
Game reviews on Metacritic: why we avoid inclusion
My sites were down for 20 min, I bet MT gives me 3 mos for free if I call up. That's why I love them
A/B Testing Framework Design by patio11
Is it? How would one know?
Obsessively.
Bug Labs primarily uses Java for their product and Ruby on Rails for their web stuff.

If you are assuming startup == web app, then sure Java is probably dead, in other contexts not so much. Using Java was advantageous for Bug Labs for a number or reasons - among them available open source libraries, widest adoption among customers (their business almost requires customers to touch source code and while Python would have brought in more enthusiasts, Java brings in more enterprise customers and thats where the money is), performance of the JVM, and portability across both the ARM platform and x86 stuff.

(Oh and BL is in NYC)
Tried RSS feeds but it sucks. There needs to be an RSS feed that only shows items that make it at least to the front page. Or maybe beyond some configurable vote threshold.
InternetBS seems to be what I want - minimal setup fees - so I'll give it a whirl. Thanks for the tip. As for something better, if I find (or make!) something I'll let you know.
Worldwide Broadband Rankings Compiled from Over 50M Unique IPs
I'm not trying to put YC down. I'm just trying to add a dose of realism here. Yeah, these companies get advice from experienced people. That doesn't make them superhuman though. Everyone makes dumb mistakes when they're new, no matter how intelligent they are or how much good advice they get.
So, the one painful part of Jira, that Atlassian really needs to do something about, (And I say this as a Die-Hard Jira fan with four years of absolute devotion to the product) is the simplification of their field-issuetype-screen-schemes, as well as the myriad other schemes. It took me over a year, and at least five or six sessions of sketching it out onto paper, before I was able to mentally map Custom-Fields, Screens, Issue Types, Priorities, Resolutions, Statuses,workflows and their various schemes in my head. One part that makes it problematic, is Jira is not _consistent_ in how you map schemes to collections of atomic elements like Statuses or Resolutions (Their are no IssueType-Status-Schems, or IssueType-Resolution-Schemes, but there are Field Configuration Schemes, and IssueTypeScreenSchemes)

But, with that one exception, the software is a delight. Fast, even on a tiny platform. Takes 3 minutes to install (The hardest two steps are setting your JAVA_HOME variable and mapping your Server Directory in a config file) - works on WIndows, Linux, Mac with zero issue. Very extensible, great plugin community. The new 4.x JQL makes sophisticated queries against your issue database a dream.

And it scales well - Our three Gigabyte Memory, 12 Gigabyte Disk VMware Machine has added 18,962 issues this year, and continues to feel light (Now totalling 68,495 issues).

I can type a query like "+VPN +Bandwidth" - and get an answer back in about 2 seconds (Thanks Lucene!) - this with a full text search of all the comments, descriptions, and summaries.

I love the product so much that I even enjoy the people who have issues with it - Nothing better than to have someone point out a problem, and then come back with a 15 second solution that also provides the foundation for solving a whole host of other problems.

It has my recommendations with only minor reservations regarding the complexity (and inconsistency) of their schemes.

Remedy, on the other hand, gets no recommendations whatsoever for their out-of-the-box implementation. I'd love to find someone who has anything to say something good about that product.
HN NYC: Hackers & Founders NYC Meetup #12 This Thursday
It's amazing how many problems resolve themselves when given sufficient neglect.

This is my new favorite quote. I've never thought about it that way, but it is quite true.
site + searchyc.com
Don't know, obviously you know a lot more about this than me, but in my experience as a consumer, at least my bank (HSBC UK) has been pretty good at identifying fraudalent transactions on my account. They actually spot them before I do and call me right away.
>even with millions upon millions of years of evolution designing us perfectly to do it.

Birds can walk on two legs in very little time.
another groovy on grails fan here... I wish more people would give it a try.. its surprisingly expressive like ruby or python , scales with the JVM, backing of all currently java libs, and great web framework like rails.
Thomas Sabo Pouchy, the best experience in purchasing Thomas Sabo jewellery
Not sure if it's only that - the static typing is more or less cared for by the IDEs and their refactoring tools.

I would like some Java developer to chime in on this.
| What an eyesore.

It's only an eyesore if you don't acknowledge the benefits that strict warnings can bring to the table.

| Most of the C devs I know make fun of const-correctness.

I for one don't mind putting in a tiny bit of upfront effort so that my compiler can double-check my work. Do the C devs you know also make fun of assert?
It's hard to shell out 10k for something that Twitter might find violates their TOS---even if it doesn't now. I am defintely passionate about the idea/model but that's a big stumbling block.
Just a minor nitpick: you can use Java the runtime without using Java the language. There is plenty reason to go with Clojure (I am personally dying to try it), Jython, JRuby, Scala and so on.
If it was profitable to harvest / clean up the spill, wouldn't BP be doing it already? For that matter, wouldn't all of its competitors such as Exxon be doing the same as well?
I don't acknowledge the benefits of casting things to (void). Therefore: definitely an eyesore.

And, no. Nobody makes fun of assert. Which rather makes my point for me.
At some level it makes sense probably... It's not a very common operation, so don't load it unless needed. It looks like an arbitrary choice, rather than good/bad design.
Contact the guys at domai.nr
I've talked with them before. They have a integration with godaddy that is able to check availability and earn a comission if the user buys a domain name through the service. They also use 101domain for obscure .nr, .ly., etc TLDs
Don't use shortened URLs here, please. This isn't twitter; post the full URL.
Almost all of the best Java developers that I know (including many who ran Java user groups, podcasts, started well known projects) would choose to use Scala on a new project rather than Java. Given Scala's present state (many performance problems were ironed out in 2.8.0), I simply don't see a single reason not to do so.

It's quite puzzling why the author of the parent article lumps it in with Ruby as the two aren't very similar.

On the other hand, I've seen a friend who's a good (but not great - and he's well aware of it) developer, but is rather entrepreneurial (quit a very well paying job to work on his own project with no external funding) was very surprised after I told him Scala is statically typed. Apparently Java developers almost develop a sort of a Stockholm syndrome that leads them to believe that "if it isn't verbose and limiting, it must be dynamically typed and slow".
Flash proven to ruin Android 2.2 performance
The Onion Covers Foursquare
Re. 3: It seems you haven't worked with LabView. On the other hand -- you're lucky, you haven't worked with LabView.
His daemon solution actually sounds simpler, and much cheaper...
Setting a timer (even for just 3 minutes) works well for this problem.
this is a good example of productivity

probably this is the reason that he is going to release GNU HURD soon!
http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd.html
(this is a joke guys, he is going to release HURD soon since 1990)
It's defintely not an API though. It's just a affiliate link. If you go with Internetbs, you are limited to only the TLDs they use. Hope that helps.
While we all argue, accuse and bemoan, my parents, grandparents, non-technical friends, and the rest of the world continue logging into facebook every day to post baby pictures and invite people to parties. They care not for any of this.
Please take your anti-Reddit vitriol elsewhere.
> Another aspect is that many cool new things are happening

> in languages other than Java - they have more interesting

> tools (eg. Sinatra), and more interesting energy in the

> community, because they attract those crazy, eager,

> young, passionate, enthusiastic early adopters.

Of all the comparisons I've heard, this is one I'd say I'm dubious about. There is still a LOT of activity in the Java space, and lots of cool and interesting tools and libraries continue to be written in Java.

Off the top of my head, I'd mention Lucene, Hadoop, Weka, Mahout, Tika, HornetQ, UIMA, GATE, Camel, Jackrabbit, DERI Pipes, etc., etc. This isn't too say that other languages don't also have lots of activity in tools and libraries and frameworks, but I think Java is still in pretty solid shape in this regard.
Browsers should just display content. Filtering proxies should filter out ads and other unwanted content before it ever gets to the browser.
The JPG is still there: http://www.televisionsky.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/nerd...
I feel the same... but I have a clear area->language mapping now: networking - erlang; random quick tools - bash/python; utilities which should work for a longer time - haskell; anything with gui - c#; stuff that still doesn't quite fit anywhere - c/python; own experiments - ooc.

However, I have clear "hated" languages: perl, ruby and java.
I think there are some lessons startups can learn from this, like planning for worst case scenario.
This has been my experience too. Currently I like Python for quickly banging out web apps, and Java for building the back end stuff.

Sure, Java has some baggage, but it has a lot of benefits too, such as much better tools for deployment, performance profiling, libraries galore, the JVM, and more. I find it's often the best tool for the job when there's heavy lifting to be done.
The best Flash-blocking extension is to just not bother installing Flash in the first place.
I used to have this OCDish behavior with HN & twitter, but then it took too much of my life.

Since I stopped both, I sleep more and consequently code better.

Some gems don't get upvoted, and that's ok; I'll discover it eventually somehow. In twitter's case, the signal to noise ratio just doesn't cut it for me at this moment.
Most of the projects you just listed are several years old, and some go back more than five years. That's not exactly "new" when it comes to computing.
I agree :-)
For now, it's just a hobby project but if it becomes popular then I might put the energy and time into porting it.
very nice! useful like all hell
280slides is terribly broken on the iPhone, so it proves nothing.
The commentary wasn't contributing to the conversation and doesn't fit the tone the community seeks here. Playful/rude banter is fine, but this isn't the place for it.

Try not to encourage this kind of mindlessness.

P.S. I'm a BSD supporter, so this isn't a matter of 'factions', I just have a vested interest in preserving the culture here.

Thank you for your cooperation.
U.S. Is Said to Scrutinize Apple’s Online Music Tactics
Morgan Stanley says Apple tablet killing netbooks
I agree with many things... especially the editor complaint. I wanted to create a syntax-aware editor one day and it's considerably harder than creating a standard one. It's also almost useless in case of dynamic languages, since you cannot verify that much at the editing stage. But this seems just wrong:

> I hate languages that do now allow me to do something, just because the language "designer" decided so.

In many cases it's not about "designer decided so", but rather about tradeoffs. We cannot do X, because that would make Y considerably more difficult / fragile / slower. It also helps create some coding standards and common constructs. For example it's easier to read someone else's python code where the syntax is pretty much minimal and uses the same concepts over and over again (decorators are just functions in functions, decorators with parameters just call another wrapping function to get the decorator, etc.), rather than reading some haskell code, where someone decided to build own DSL which implements everything. Limits can be good.
With todays CPU, particularly with branch prediction, and cache, loop unrolling is not always better.

In fact I bet the performance would be worse, especially because you have to worry about setting areas of memory that are not a multiple of the loop unroll size. (I guess you could use duff's device.)

I actually tested it while ignoring that, and the unrolled version took 34.551 seconds vs 34.239 for the regular version (but those number are meaningless since the variation in time between runs is greater than the difference in runtime between versions).

And see: http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0008.2/0171.h... - loop unwinding is not worth it anymore.

So I ask you again pkaler: how would you speed this up?
Ask HN: what would you build if you could analyze trillions of rows?
With all the Google I/O news, I failed to notice the BigQuery description that reported it was geared towards "analysis over datasets containing trillions of records" ( http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/05/bigquery-and-prediction-api-get-more.html ).

What interesting things would you do with BigQuery which you could not do before as an independent developer?
He sets an unrealistically high standard that others can fall short of but still be somewhere good. Not everyone can be a superhero (to borrow Steve Yegge's description of RMS), but just knowing that they exist can inspire ordinary people to behave better. Free software is not as important to me as it is to RMS, but it would be even less important if I didn't find him inspiring.
If you follow his lead, you could have your own personal Wayback Machine, as indexed & searchable as you want.

That strikes me as somewhat nifty.
This may sound ignorant, but if you're going to use another JVM language, why not use JRuby (if you want to stick with a Smalltalk/Modula-3 derivative), Clojure (if you like Lisp and want STM) or Scala (if you want the static type checking, speed, built in support in IntelliJ)?

This is a serious question: several people I respect (who are smarter than me and thus well capable of learning new languages) are using Groovy for their projects and I am wondering why?
To each their own, I guess.
Yes, I'll go right back to Rubyland where I never lived.
Oil Spill Fix Idea
Here's the idea...

http://www.4freeimagehost.com/uploads/6e00961aeac9.jpg

1) Create a large cone made of some hard substance. It has a hole in the top, and get lowered over the leak. It's wide enough and heavy so that it seals the bottom to the ocean floor.

2) Oil comes out the top until the bottom is sealed off.

3) Once the bottom is sealed a pipe is attached to the top and oil (and some water) is pumped to the surface. This oil is contained at the surface.

4) Now that the oil is contained, the cone can be reinforced and made more permanent.
It's the trend now in the NoSQL world, so I figured I'd try it on for size. Considering I'm really the only person I'm writing it for it's the perfect license.
To compete with Google, Apple has to make MobileMe free
The mach3 is great. Other things I've noticed about cheap disposable razors is the blade spacing. When they put the blades too close together it's a PITA to rince the razor after each stroke. The Mach3 seems to be the perfect balance between the number of blades and the spacing.
I have not read where Scala is the same speed, citation?
I like monkey patching NilClass to STFU. Bonus: the code fits in a tweet! http://mobile.twitter.com/qwzybug/status/9033799293

Message-eating nils are one of my favorite features of Objective-C.
Gotta love a page that has a tutorial on "realistic shading" for drawings of 4-D objects.
What's with all the unused function parameters? Shouldn't that be an edge case?
Look into the details of WIFI and/or cell technology sometime if you want to see something that's best not to know and just be glad it works ;)
I use http://www.hackurls.com
6 inch YSL Yves Saint Laurent Pumps in purple
That's amazing. Beta software that's buggy?

Unheard of.
Windows Server 2003 Network Planning MCSE 70-293
Download MCSE 70-293 Cert Flash Cards App to try out all the features of the app and sample a featured card pack. If you like it, you can buy the entire application and unlock all remaining packs through the convenient in-app purchase option.
I mentioned Java to a high level googler friend and his instant response was: Java == Slow.
For this case, the required x86 opcode could be "rep stosX" (just write), and not "rep movsX" (copy). Anyway, on x86 processors, "rep movsX" was faster from 8086 to 80386, but since the 80486, it is faster to do assembly unrolling for reducing the jump penalty (as the "rep movsX" doesn't do unrolling, being its conditional jump a penalty). On CPUs with prefetch hardware support -e.g. SSE2-, you could still speed it up a bit more, by fetching/ordering future cache line before needed, avoiding pipeline stalls.

The shown example, that just writes to RAM, is probably just fast enough (it is harder to optimize read cases), although a bit of unrolling could reduce jump penalty impact (specially on non superscalar or in in-order superscalar CPUs -typical ARM included on handheld devices-).
I think it comes from a too-literal understanding of design patterns. E.g., for the factory pattern the common practice (outside of some well designed APIs e.g., google collections) the common practice is:

public class Image {
public Image(byte[] data) {
// create the image from byte array
}
}

public class ImageFactory {
public Image createImage(File file) throws IOException {
// read data then create an image
}
}

vs.

public Image {
// the same constructor, but then ...
public static Image open(File file) throws IOException {
// Do the same thing as factory would do
}
}

What's the advantage of the first approach, provided there's no per-instance state (and thus reason not to just use a static factory method) within the ImageFactory class?
Or, alternatively, people will live close to where they work and just walk there.
Yeah, but they're all being actively developed, so I'm not sure how much it matters when the project was originated. And that was just "off the cuff" of stuff I use or am interested in. There's other stuff out there as well.

Anyway, I'm not arguing that Java is the most active in this regard, just that this particular criticism - of all the ones one could level - is, in my humble opinion, relatively weak.
Look closely on our site for the format for a term paper 
A term paper is an important document which is submitted at the end of a semester. Although the advances in technology have made writing a term paper easy, when it comes to a format for a term paper, it is vital that you know all its main elements and follow it in the exact manner.
I use the RSS feed. If you use Safari there is a way to drag a feed to your address bar and have it automatically update. This can also aggregate all your feeds into a single bookmark bar item, but I don't know how many people know/use this feature in Safari. I tried using the RSS read in mail, but I get enough stuff in my mailbox.
If that is true, at the rate my site has been down with them, I should have got 2 years free.
Cocoa with Love: Handling unhandled exceptions and signals
My thoughts are revolving around server log analysis. Google Storage (where the data needs to be) could be where I choose to warehouse every server event for my projects because of the BigQuery feature.
Man, I wish I could write like him.
Seaside hoopla scam's 2,600 to 1 odds
guarantee it's not that easy...
I frown upon your drive-by self promotion
Then you get a "statement with no effect" warning, which is usually more serious. I'll take a bogus warning in real code over a bogus warning in contrived code any day.