skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know where to draw the line exactly, but I wouldn't call them completely new languages. Coffeescript is basically another syntax for JavaScript and Objective-J adds a few bits of syntactic sugar. The latter, of course, is pretty equivalent to what Objective-C does to C, Coffeescript reminds me a bit of Ratfor.

Considering the unstructured default nature of JavaScript and its flexibility, I would say that you can get much farther of the trodden path by just using certain libraries. Adapting to a different syntax that just expresses things slightly different/shorter than you'd usually do things isn't as hard as actually doing things a different way. Straightforward jquery written in Coffeescript should be easier to understand than code that heavily uses wu.js, underscore and/or js.class.

Of course, Objective-J has both syntactic additions and a huge Library tacked on. It's more meant to people who already work with Cocoa, so that their adjustments have to be minimal than for people coming from JavaScript.

Coffeescript doesn't really compare to that. It's actually pretty minimal, and you shouldn't have trouble using it with JavaScript libraries, unless they depend too much on certain syntactic stylings (I bet fab.js won't play nice).
Try Google Squared
http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=laptop
http://diybio.org/

http://groups.google.com/group/diybio
I used to think that too - and to some extend, it is certainly true - but the problem is that you can't really derive new things without knowing old things, and you simply can't make mental connections between things unless you know them.
Bigger numbers take much longer to crunch.
Any size. Thanks.
The above comment of mine received a fair number of votes with the majority being negative. The comment was intended to be humorous and in my view if people downvoted because they were offended on behalf of Italians they need to lighten up.
OTOH if they downvoted becaust they thought it was not funny, fair enough. I don't mind because it's not my joke I heard it on The Simpsons
The pattern detects if a number N is not prime by searching for A and B such that N = A*B. The (11+?) searches for A bigger than 1, and the repetition of this group (the \1+ part) repeats A as much as possible, eventually B times. If an exact match isn't possible, it backtracks and advances A. If no such A and B exist, A will keep increasing until it becomes bigger than N, and then the match fails.

An interesting pattern that wasn't immediately obvious, but a very inefficient way to detect primes :)
In short: epoll. Network IO bound servers need only deal with sockets that have some event ready. Unless I'm mistaken, Tornado isn't written to be highly concurrent, it is, rather, quite asynchronous: they make it very simple to deal with IO only when there is data to process. You _can_ block the whole process with a long lived handler.
I don't study nearly as much as I should if I was to follow the official recommendations, but the truth is that it just doesn't take that long to learn the basic ideas, and once you have those, it is pretty easy to build the concepts on top of those.

It would take far more time if I was studying for a degree in the humanities, simply because they don't have a solid foundation on which to build stuff.
It does do it automatically, but the lower amount of free memory in general causes some memory-intensive games to run very poorly until I go through and close out of some apps. Of course, this is all based on anecdotal observation, so it may be some other problem.
Yes. The book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill does exactly this. It's an oldie but goodie.

http://www.amazon.com/Think-Grow-Rich-Napoleon-Hill/dp/04492...

It's how Bruce Lee set his goal:

I, Bruce Lee, will be the first highest paid Oriental Super Star in the United States. In return I will give exciting performances and render the best of quality in the capacity of an actor. Starting 1970 I will achieve world fame and from then onward till the end of 1980 I will have in my possession $10,000,000. I will live the way I please and achieve inner harmony and happiness.

Bruce Lee

January 1969
Considering the unstructured default nature of JavaScript and its flexibility, I would say that you can get much farther of the trodden path by just using certain libraries.

Wu.js (thanks for the link) still looks like Javascript to me and won't cause any problems with Firebug or Emacs. Coffeescript and Objective-J have a completely different syntax. I can believe that Coffeescript is easier to read but it doesn't seem like enough of a win to break tool support and to work in two completely different syntaxes (inevitably there will still be plain js to deal with in most projects).

Objective-J seems even riskier. I can see the appeal for Cocoa people but you're really going all-in with that kind of framework.
I haven't bought either Android or Iphone.

I lean towards Android when I think about how cool it is to modify the OS to make it do cool things.

But when I think about what product I would recommend to family, I have to recommend the iPhone over Android.

They don't care if its open. They care that someone is ultimately responsible for making sure that its going to work now and that it has a future.

The choices they need to make when they buy an Apple product are few and clear. When I've had problems with an Apple product, Apple Care takes care it.

If there were an Android store, it would be on the back of a semi and would move to a different mall parking lot each week.
While this might be true, quite often there is no clear path for how a designer would get involved and help out with design. Perhaps a "Getting involved - Contribute to Design" page with pointers on getting started would be handy on open source project websites.
Google's datasets. All of them. I mean, they exist, but not in completeness for anyone outside google.
I recall from an article in Time a while back, the Southern American accent is the most authentic representative of the pre-revolutionary war accent.

It may very well be that Time reported that, as I have read that statement in various places, but I have also read disagreements with that statement.

http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/more/886/

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=380983

http://thelibrary.springfield.missouri.org/lochist/periodica...

http://books.google.com/books?id=ia5tHVtQPn8C&pg=PA126&#...

It's actually rather unlikely that any current dialect of American English has any strict correspondence to the various dialects that were spoken in America at the time of the Revolution.
M-F 8 hours a day at work, 7-7.5 of which are programming. Pair programming exclusively; if my pair isn't there, I'm not doing anything more complex than fixing a broken test, writing a new one, or maybe CSS/layout changes.

This leaves me pretty tired on the weekdays, so I read HN but generally stay away from coding for myself (maybe 30 minutes to an hour). Weekends I don't do much more. Somewhere between one and four hours total between both days.

I'd like to code more in my free time (currently I lurk the internet or play games), but coming from a full day of pairing, after having only ever paired while writing production code, I find attempting to sit by myself and produce quite a bit harder.

edit: Oh, and I'm not at a startup.
You're right in that you need direction. Each subclass of machine learning has some elementary algorithms worth learning:

For unsupervised learning or probabilistic latent models, the EM algorithm, Metropolis-Hastings sampling, variational methods (variation EM, variational Bayes, expectation propagation).

For supervised learning, linear regression, perceptrons, support vector machines.

For reinforcement learning, Q-learning, E^3, Rmax.
Poll: What is your religion?
I'm curious, what are Hacker News' religions? If I'm missing something in the list or if something is offensive, please tell me.

(Please vote for one unless more than one fits)
Nonreligious/Atheist/Agnostic/etc
Hinduism
Sikhism
Judaism
Baha'i
Shinto
Scientology
What other companies did you find fit those attributes?
That is a retarded argument, and I expect better from marco.

It should be obvious that shipping with a broken copy-past is miles better than shipping with none at all.

The iPhone wasn't good, because it only shipped with great features - it was medicore, because it shipped without many of the features (flash, copy-past, the ability to run multiple programs at the same time) that are needed.

It is much like homework - if you give a great title and fantastic abstract, but zero content you should not get an A.
We want to keep the monthly cost below $200 for individual members. Exact location and monthly membership fee haven't been set yet. We're using the kickstarter fundraising platform to cover initial equipment and real estate costs so we can open the doors to a community lab in the bay area.

- Eri Gentry, BioCurious Cofounder
Another good example is Bergamo, a city on the side of the Alps, where people from higher part of the town has a different dialect from the people on the lower one.

On top of developing independently from the Latin, the dialects where heavily influenced by the different dominations each part of Italy had. North-west dialects for example have a strong French influence while in south Italy the influence is more Spanish.
Agreed. Many of us who do speak English as a first language ( or are very fluent in it) are definitely closer to RP but for those who pick it up TV etc have a huge influence and that is getting more American
I don't think he was saying that any physical keyboard is superfluous, so much as that the Droid's keyboard, which is terrible, is superfluous.

Something about the design of the Droid keyboard - the flat keys, the squishy response, odd placements of some keys - makes it much harder to type on accurately than my Nokia E71 whose keyboard is nearly half the size. And the fairly decent predictive / autocorrect functionality of the Droid's virtual keyboard gets deactivated when you're using the physical keyboard, so there's nothing to rescue from typos.

It's actually faster to use the virtual keyboard, so you really do wonder why the physical keyboard is there.

No-one who's used a Blackberry for a while will be in any doubt of the value of a good physical keyboard.
Yes and no. I don't really blame them for disallowing system extensions (Backgrounder, SBSettings, fake carrier, call recorder, etc). They can be useful, and they can also be privacy and security nightmares.

I tolerate having to jailbreak because I'd probably end up carrying an iPod around anyway, and from the outside it seems that using cooked ROMs is the norm in the Android community. Maybe the situation on Android is better if you have a well-supported device. Nexus One users got Froyo quickly enough.

My next device might run Android. We have a Nexus One at the office that I'm going to carry for a week and see how I like it.
Some time ago I put together a survey on programming languages and religious affiliation. http://www.kimsal.com/reldevsurvey/results.php and the filtered data is at http://www.kimsal.com/reldevsurvey/filtereddata.txt if anyone would care to pull it down and play with it.
The main issue with using DNS for failover is that the name servers of many major ISPs don't respect TTL values, particularly those under 3600 seconds.

I've seen this repeated in many places but never with any concrete examples. This leads me to wonder just how widespread the practice is — can you substantiate the claim?
lots of why-is-this-here moments (the Droid’s keyboard, the Nexus One’s trackball)

I see this sort of thing from reviews a lot. The Droid's keyboard is there because there are customers who want it. There are plenty of Android phones without them as well. It's perfectly reasonable that some people want a smaller and more sturdy phone, but I won't buy a smartphone without a real keyboard. The trackball is good for positioning the cursor when editing text. It's faster than arrow keys and much more precise than the touch screen. I am disappointed that they are rapidly disappearing, sometimes replaced by an optical trackpad.

Android is about power and choice. The iPhone is about a great implementation of a specific vision. Both are doing very well in the marketplace. The idea that one is wrong and the other right is almost certainly mistaken.
Nice. Drives me crazy when Zuckerberg up-intonates with each declaration.
I want Hulu as well. In Canada our only real choices are iTunes and copyright infringement. I'm not paying $3/show for DRM encumbered video on iTunes, so...
The implementation of a) would be extremely complex from both a web developer and browser development viewpoint.

From the web developer perspective: It's very hard to use JS without putting at least some javascript in the HTML. Loading js files is not very useful if there's no means to actually activate any of the functionality of those files.

In order for your idea to work, you'd have to completely strip all HTML of anything that can reference or activate javascript: not just mouseover, but also href="javascript:xxxx()" as well. That means that the only way you could actually use javascript on a page would be to create a function that would be loaded by body_onload to add event listeners and other attributes through DOM manipulation. It would make web development so convoluted that I doubt that you'd succeed in convincing w3c or anyone else to adopt it.

I think the right approach has to maintain the workflow and functionality of web development. tptacek posted an idea in the other thread that sounds like it would reduce the number of attack vectors without causing too much difficulty to the developer: include a nonce in the header and require script tags to include that nonce.
It might come off wrong in writing, but it's worse in person when you're on the receiving end of banter like that, coming from an Aussie or Irishman or a Geordie with a very straight face.

I too was offended the first time it happened to me, but I dropped all pretense and self-righteousness; learn to give it back, cold, and you might earn yourself that highest label of endearment: the C-word :-) Then you shout the first round and move on.

In my original diatribe I was paying out the poms, as Aussies would say.
10 hour reduction in studying effort sounds about right given the incredible leaps in personal IT.

Lots of time spent studying is just finding the right damn information.
YouTube Hacked - Right Time Right Place?
You can run your own virtual servers on a dedicated server.
Im saying theres not much more we could put on a mobile device that is a game changer [and yes I entertained the tricorder idea with a DNA sampler & diagnosis, but I guess thats out of range for a decade ]

Agreed longer battery life has room for improvement, but would it change usage, given current devices can be used for 4 or 8 hours already?

re decoupling hw / sw : Ill give an explanation, rather than a citation :

We write in high level languages that use logical abstractions, not machine specific ones. These can be ported across various hardware platforms, and thus reused, saving work.

I think everyone prefers to have the same HTML5/javascript api work on all devices.
Nah, students never "cared" about learning. College started in the U.S. as a way for the upper classes to cavort under the ostentation of "learning about the world". It has always been a status signal. This is why the middle classes are willing to pay their left nut for a suitably prestigious degree - status signals to the middle classes are like honey to a bee (or something).

There are perhaps .5% of the population for whom college makes actual productive sense - those intelligent and driven enough to devote their life to producing original research. Colleges now fulfill sort of an odd intermesh in society: stamping the middle classes with seals of 'approval', and housing people who produce actual scholarship. There is really no logical connection between the two, and indeed most professors dislike 'teaching'.

College isn't necessarily 'bad', but is when it saddles people who will be earning 40-60k the rest of their lives with 200k loan debts.
angry poster is angry...

immigration into the south is much less than the east/west coast, populations are still lower, less immigration, less languages, less influence?
You bring up some interesting points. One question worth pondering, though, is "what does it mean for a tool to be powerful"? Since you brought up VIM let's take text editors as an example.

VIM is indeed a powerful editor. It gives you a lot of tools for quickly editing text. The problems I face, usually aren't related to typing. It's in figuring out what to type in the first place, and where to type it. When dealing with a large code base, the things I need most are code navigation capabilities. What is this? Where is it used? What does the call graph look like? Etc. Is VIM the most powerful tool for code navigation? No. It's far from it. One of the best is a tool called source insight. It's simple, fast and easy to use.

No one will ever tell you are cool for learning how to use it, because you don't have to learn how to use it. It just works. There's no sense of mastery involved. It just works. It brings the information to you, when you need it, in the context it's needed in. That makes it VERRY powerful.

You can say the same thing about a phone. Bringing you information in a way that is efortless and enjoyable is powerful.

It may not be "cool" with the same ubergeek street cred you get from learning VI. But that doesn't mean it's not powerful. Far from it.
Nice job on mixtest, I saw it here on HN the other day. It's pretty cool!

I couldn't load it on my iPad or iPhone though. Loads on my notebook right away. I'll bookmark it and try it later.
There was just a HN story asking about non-developer success stories (sorry don't have the link, writing this using the HN iPhone app) this is a perfect story for that discussion.

A large % of companies were started by non-coders, and this is a good example of one. Not to say anyone can solve hard technical problems but just because you can't code doesn't mean you can't start something great.

There is nothing wrong with starting a business in a traditional industry, the most important thing is doing something you love and want to do.
I would much rather rely on my backups than a knowledge of theoretical computer science to prevent me from losing things.

I have to use git/svn/mercurial from time to time, saying the internals of each vcs is essential knowledge is making quite a lot of assumptions about my time and how these tools are used.

people use thousands of tools every day, you can make the same argument "you know know the internals so you can use them properly" for each one, which sounds like a pretty surefire way of never getting anything done.
For example: http://www.mybudget360.com/does-a-college-degree-protect-you...
New technology could replace HDMI with ethernet cables
Not a whole lot.

Sysco (SYY), the food distributor.
Fiserv (FISV), they do a lot of payment processing.

But, those two benefit from having business models which are more resilient to economic downturns than FedEx.
I'm not from the US, and neither are the people we're talking about. These people look like they weigh less than 88 kilograms, which I agree would be obese for 176cm.

Are you obese (by your own standards)?
Communism and the financial crisis
SMART@znmeb - Born on the Fourth of July
I'm guessing this was made by someone who has never been to the ghetto.
Interesting comparison to Rand. When I read ZAMM I found the author's message to be diametrically opposed to that which I had taken from Rand.

Perhaps this just highlights how much of a work is what the observer brings to it, a la http://sivers.org/you-not-them.
looks like microsoft groove? what happened to groove anyway?
He clearly states that he didn't know the economy was in trouble:

Still, its authors laugh when asked about the book’s opportune timing.

“We didn’t start the book thinking that, ‘Oh, in exactly seven years there will be a housing bust leading to a global financial crisis that will be the perfect environment in which to sell this giant book,’ ” says Mr. Rogoff. “But I suppose the way things work, we expected that whenever the book came out there would probably be some crisis or other to peg it to.”

They began the book around 2003, not long after Mr. Rogoff lured Ms. Reinhart back to the I.M.F. to serve as his deputy.
I heard from Joe that the monthly membership cost was going to be higher than 200.
Nah, students never "cared" about learning.

The ones who brought up the averages did. College may have been about prestige, but the system is rarely that honest about itself. Most of the people involved in maintaining the system -- teachers, professors, and students, certainly, and also many parents -- believed in the romantic image of college, and the ones who didn't believe, pretended. William James said that whatever you attend to becomes your reality, and thanks to everybody attending so closely to the myth of college as an educational experience, that's what it turned out to be in reality as well.
In support of that hypothesis, migration to Brazil came mainly from the north of Portugal, where the language was born. Also, Brazil was spared the strong French influence in the XIX century.

Nowadays, the pronunciation of Lisbon (center-south) actually loses information (deemphasizing and even omitting some vowels and losing other distinctions like -om/-am into ão) wrt others, so it's hard to imagine evolution to have happened the other way.
I've always assumed that American (and Australian) accents were some kind of "average accent" that emerged from the mix of British accents that migrated to those particular colonies. (With a bit of natural evolution added in from people emulating influential figures, that kind of thing).

So yeah, I'd have thought that a distinct American accent would have emerged after no more than a generation.
I'm the author & while I think that particular post is one of the more rambling entries, this part indeed summarizes how I generally feel about the whole iOs debacle. While the long-term future probably is in html5 apps, right now ordinary people are voting en masse with their wallets. Lots of nerds are slow to wake up to this reality: the iPad is a device nerds love to hate and normal people love to love.
But as mentioned elsewhere, there was (and is) no one "British" accent - so the immigrants would have had quite a mix of accents.
I don't think people are against changes to the browsers. I think they just realize that there are many different browsers out there that each do things slightly differently. If you've ever tried to get CSS working for all possible browsers, you've probably come across cases where it works in some browsers, but not others (I'm looking at you IE6), and you have to use a hack to get it to work.

Changes to browser standards occur at a much slower rate than changes to your code. Politics, competition, and disagreements on standards often get in the way. Just look at all the controversy over the HTML 5 video codec.

Unless browser makers, by some miracle, agree on a common standard for browser security, there are always going to be little idiosyncrasies that occur from browser version to browser version. Just because it's secure in all the browsers you tested, doesn't mean that it's secure in the browsers you didn't test.

The best solution as of right now is to develop ways of writing more secure code, with less potential for human error.
Frash lets Flash content play on iPad whether Jobs wants it or not
"With them, many people don't bother studying."

Why? Because they are afraid of failing?